Critical Survey

In October 1860, the New York-based magazine, Harper’s New Monthly, offered its readers this scathing commentary on the apparently morbid tendency among their British cousins to delve into the private lives of famous men and women. The magazine’s onslaught was both topical and contentious. The pleasures and punishments of fame experienced by such victimised ‘lions’ as Charles Dickens and Edward Bulwer Lytton, together with the public’s apparent right to ‘know’ everything, struck the writer as not only ‘vulgar’ but as clear evidence (if any were needed) of a degenerate culture. The situation was bad in America but much worse in Britain for there, as Harper’s noted, ‘John Bull is very fond of . . . talking about the private history of public men – prying into their bathing-tubs and counting the moles upon their necks.’ In the name of both art and decency, Harper’s made the following plea: ‘For the honour of the guild – for the fair name of literature – let us have done with peeping through keyholes and listening at cracks.’

Princess Victoria acceded to the British throne on 20 June 1837, less than a month after her eighteenth birthday and the attainment of her legal majority. Circumstances contrived to maximise the promise of the new reign. With the end of the seven-year rule of William IV and with the reactionary Duke of Cumberland succeeding to the throne of Hanover – Victoria being debarred by Salic law – her accession ended the long and uninspiring affiliation with the throne by the sons of George III. Young, female, attractive, politically innocent yet with decidedly Whiggish sympathies, the new Queen seemed far removed from the excesses of her aged Hanoverian uncles. Laetitia Landon described it as the advent of a ‘spring-like reign’. Scores of poems, prints and street ballads were produced, all effusively idealising Victoria. The popular magazine Figaro in London claimed that John Bull was so pleased at the idea of being governed by a girl, he would cut off his ears if her little Majesty required them. Victoria basked in the tangible freshness of a revivified royal populism.

In her justly influential work on nineteenth-century strategies of self representation, Subjectivities (1990), Reginia Gagnier describes the dominant characteristics of the ‘high’ literary tradition of nineteenth-century auto/biography as consisting of a meditative and self-reflective sensibility; faith in writing as a tool of self-exploration; an attempt to make sense of life as a narrative progressing in time, with a narrative typically structured upon parent/child relationships and familial development; and a belief in personal creativity, autonomy and freedom for the future.

‘How ought women to be treated in controversy?’ asked John Robertson in the London and Westminster Review of April 1839.2 It was a good moment to be asking. The 1830s – in many ways a peculiar decade of the nineteenth century, marking the decline of Romanticism and only a gradual emergence of something not yet definable as ‘Victorianism’ (if such a complex cultural phenomenon can be defined) – saw the intensification of an interest in personalities, not unlike that which we see in today’s gossip columns and Sunday supplements. This was the decade of what came to be known as ‘Crokerism’, after John Wilson Croker (1780- 1857) who boasted of ‘tomahawking Miss Martineau in the Quarterly’.

The chronology of events leading to the publication of The Germ in 1850 is familiar to most scholars of nineteenth-century literature. In 1849, soon after the formation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB), Dante Gabriel Rossetti persuaded the group to found a journal that would promote their aesthetic principles and establish their literary reputation. After much discussion, the brethren decided to title their periodical The Germ and appointed William Michael Rossetti its editor. In addition to involving members of the PRB, other like-minded writers were invited to contribute, including Coventry Patmore, William Bell Scott and Christina Rossetti.

On 1 February 1859 literary history was made with the publication of a novel called Adam Bede. Achorus of critical acclaim followed in periodicals across the political spectrum as, moving from left to right, the Westminster Review, the Athenaeum and the Saturday Review all trumpeted their approval. E.S. Dallas’s review in The Times is representative of the predominant tone with its opening declaration that ‘there can be no mistake about Adam Bede. It is a first-rate novel, and its author takes rank at once among the masters of the art’. Charles Dickens wrote a letter of praise, as did Jane Welsh Carlyle, while Queen Victoria’s admiration was such that she commissioned paintings of two scenes from the novel.

On 18 July 1867, Charles Dickens’s weekly journal All the Year Round went back into history and told the story of a young woman who met her death on the gallows in London in 1815. ‘Old Stories Re-Told’, sub-titled ‘Eliza Fenning (The Danger of Condemning to Death on Circumstantial Evidence Alone)’, reminded its readers of a mis-carriage of justice. Speaking through one of his journalists, Walter Thornbury, Dickens performed an act of chivalry directed at the person and memory of a wronged woman. Eliza Fenning, a servant in a wealthy London household, worked for a Mr Turner, a law-stationer.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton, one of the greatest innovators in literature and an important political figure of the nineteenth century, was the apotheosis of the great man.3 In view of this, it is surprising that he is all but forgotten today. When he is remembered, it is most likely to be as an object of buffoonery perpetuated by the competition at San Jose State University in California for the worst opening of a novel, inspired by the beginning of Paul Clifford (1830): ‘It was a dark and stormy night’.4 Unfairly, he is not commemorated for its humanitarian ending, which declares: ‘THE VERY WORST USE TO WHICH YOU CAN PUT A MAN IS TO HANG HIM’.

Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science by Ronald R. Thomas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. £45.00 ISBN: 0521653037.

Women and Playwriting in Nineteenth-Century Britain edited by Tracy C. Davis and Ellen Donkin, Cambridge University Press, 1999. Hardback £42.50 ISBN: 0521574137

Idol of Suburbia: Marie Corelli and Late-Victorian Culture by Annette R. Federico. Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 2000. Paperback $30 ISBN 0-8139-1915-0.

Losing Grip The Real World PHIL KIRBY

On Parade PETER DE VILLE

Adultery-On-Sea MICHAEL BARTHOLOMEW-BIGGS

Two Transumtations GAEL TURNBULL

Ghosts From An Enchanter Fleeing The Trench Experience BARRY COLE

A Game of Snooker DERRICK BUTTRESS

Plucked From Time GERRY CAMBRIDGE

Notes on contributors