Table Of ContentART AND SOCIETY IN THE VICTORIAN NOVEL
Art and Society in
the Victorian Novel
Essays on Dickens and his
Contemporaries
Edited by
COLIN GIBSON
Donald Collie Professor of English
University of Otago, New Zealand
Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN 978-1-349-19674-6 ISBN 978-1-349-19672-2 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-19672-2
© Colin Gibson 1989
Chapter 11 © D. W. Harding 1989
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1989 978-0-333-44745-1
All rights reserved. For information, write:
Scholarly and Reference Division,
St. Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010
First published in the United States of America in 1989
ISBN 978-0-312-02064-4
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To Alan Horsman
Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgements xi
Notes on the Contributors xii
1 Laughter, Imagination and the Cruelty of Life: a
View of Oliver Twist 1
John Watson
2 Bleak House: Another Look at Jo 16
Kathleen Tillotson
3 Form and Fable in Hard Times 29
John Holloway
4 The Choir-master and the Single Buffer: an Essay on
The Mystery of Edwin Drood 43
W. W. Robson
5 'I must keep in good health, and not die': the
Conception of the Self in an Unorthodox Victorian
Novel 63
Miriam Allott
6 Love and the Aspiring Mind in Villette 82
Jocelyn Harris
7 The Historic Imagination in George Eliot 97
Ian Milner
vii
viii Contents
8 Physicians in Victorian Fiction 111
Philip Collins
9 Trollope's Love-stories: From Framley Parsonage to The
Belton Estate 131
Juliet McMaster
10 Under the Greenwood Tree and the Victorian Pastoral 149
Lawrence Jones
11 The Complex Simplicity of The Ambassadors 168
D. W. Harding
12 'When 'Orner smote 'is bloomin' lyre' 185
Sydney Musgrove
13 Ernest Alan Horsman: a Checklist of Publications
and Reviews, 1948-88 205
Index 208
Preface
The essays gathered in this volume have as their central theme
the interface of personal vision and social address in the work of
the greatest of the Victorian novelists. The art of writers such as
Dickens, Eliot, Hardy and James had a Janus-like quality,
displaying on the one side an idiosyncratic and sometimes highly
unorthodox personal sensibility, and on the other exhibiting a
shrewdly analytic and frequently reforming interest in the elab
orate social structure and complex morality of Victorian society.
Craftsmanship, the struggle to bring into being a form that
adequately expresses the writer's artistic conception and yet satis
fies the requirements of the reading public, becomes an issue here,
and several essays explore different facets of it, from Dickens's
creation and development of Jo's prominent role in Bleak House to
Hardy's attempts to match the expectations of his readers and
critics in his depiction of rural life 'under the greenwood tree' and
Henry James's working out of his theme of lost youth in the
complexities of The Ambassadors.
Dickens offers a crucial example of a major novelist whose rich
and complex art both reflected the writer's active engagement with
his society and his own distinctive temperament; four essays are
devoted to important works spanning his triumphant career, from
Oliver Twist to the unfinished Mystery of Edwin Drood. Charlotte
Bronte and (perhaps surprisingly) Trollope figure as novelists who
express highly individual attitudes in their fictions dealing with
female personality and sexual relationships, and there are studies
of George Eliot's quest for a valid historical awareness and under
standing, Kipling's assimilation of his many borrowings from
earlier writers, and the portrait of the physician, that respected
member of Victorian society, that emerges from a wide range of
Victorian novels.
The essays collected here are the work of colleagues and friends
ix
X Preface
of Professor Alan Horsman, former Donald Collie Professor of
English in the Department of English, University of Otago, who
is currently engaged in writing a volume of the Oxford History of
English Literature dealing with the Victorian period and whose
distinguished career as an editor, literary critic, teacher and univer
sity administrator is only partly recorded in the list of his publi
cations printed at the end of this volume. It is the editor's agreeable
duty to thank the authors both for their contributions and their
patience during the process of publication. Thanks must also go
to Lindsay Francis and Mary Sullivan, who typed successive drafts
of the manuscript accurately and with unfailing cheerfulness, and
to Valery Rose and Frances Arnold for their editor.ial work.
COLIN GIBSON
Acknowledgements
The editor and publishers wish to thank the following who have
kindly granted permission for the use of copyright material:
The Bodley Head, for the extracts from The Ambassadors, in The
Bodley Head Henry James, edited by Leon Edel, vol. 8 (1970);
The British Council, for John Holloway's 'Form and Fable in Hard
Times';
Oxford University Press, for the extracts from the World Classics
edition of Jane Eyre, edited by Margaret Smith (1980).
xi
