Table Of ContentPalgrave Studies
in Nineteenth-Century Writing
and Culture
Series Editor
Joseph Bristow
Department of English
University of California – Los Angeles
Los Angeles
California
USA
Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture is a new
monograph series that aims to represent the most innovative research on
literaryworksthatwereproducedintheEnglish-speakingworldfromthe
timeoftheNapoleonicWarstothefindesiècle.Attentivetothehistorical
continuities between ‘Romantic’ and ‘Victorian’, the series will feature
studiesthathelpscholarshiptoreassessthemeaningofthesetermsduring
a century marked by diverse cultural, literary, and political movements.
Themainaimoftheseriesistolookattheincreasinginfluenceoftypesof
historicism on our understanding of literary forms and genres. It reflects
the shift from critical theory to cultural history that has affected not only
theperiod1800–1900butalsoeveryfieldwithinthedisciplineofEnglish
literature.Alltitlesintheseriesseektoofferfreshcriticalperspectivesand
challenging readings of both canonical and non-canonical writings of
this era. Editorial Board: Hilary Fraser, Birkbeck College, University of
London,UK;JosephineMcDonagh,Kings College,London,UK;Yopie
Prins,UniversityofMichigan,USA;LindsaySmith,UniversityofSussex,
UK;MargaretStetz,UniversityofDelaware,USA;JennyBourneTaylor,
University of Sussex,UK.
More information aboutthisseries at
http://www.springer.com/series/14607
DanielBrown
Representing
Realists in Victorian
Literature
and Criticism
DanielBrown
OaklandCommunityCollege
Farmington,Michigan
USA
PalgraveStudiesinNineteenth-CenturyWritingandCulture
ISBN978-3-319-40678-7 ISBN978-3-319-40679-4(eBook)
DOI10.1007/978-3-319-40679-4
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A
CKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I first want to thank the faculty and graduate students at the University
of Florida who provided useful feedback and support for my initial
research. Particular thanks go to Dr. Pamela Gilbert, a source of
professional support well beyond my time at the University of
Florida, Dr. Judy Page, Dr. Leah Rosenberg, and Dr. Melissa Hyde.
I also want to thank the many people who helped to refine my
thinking and discover new avenues for exploration as I continued this
book. Of particular help were the people involved in the NEH Summer
Seminar, ‘Performing Dickens,’ led by Dr. Sharon Weltman of Louisiana
State University. Further thanks go to Dr. Daniel Novak, then also at
Louisiana State University, who graciously sat on my MLA panel, The
Victorian Visual Artist and the Ideal of Realism, and provided valuable
feedback on my proposals. The people I met through NAVSA’s 2015
Professionalization Workshop in Honolulu, HI also helped to renew an
enthusiasm for a career that many now find too discouraging to pursue.
With that in mind, I must thank the people who provided emotional
and occasional financial support as I struggled to finish this book while
living as an adjunct. These include long-term friends Derek Hanson,
Georgia Herold, Matthew Hudson, Matthew Woods, and, of course, my
parents, Ernest and Jean. United States academia does not do enough to
sustain the scholars it produces, and I could not have finished my work
withoutthe support offriends andfamily.
Finally, I thank the publishers at Palgrave for providing the chance to
bringthiswork ofover eight years’ intellectual laborto press.
v
C
ONTENTS
1 Introduction 1
2 Pre-Raphaelitism asRealism 17
3 Realistic Poetry 51
4 RealistPropaganda 79
5 Realismand the Religionof Doubt 115
6 RealistConArtists 147
7 Coda 175
Bibliography 181
Index 189
vii
CHAPTER1
Introduction
There appears a common and growing tendency...distinctly towards
Realism – as the thing, less easily defined than apprehended, is now
calledinFrance.[...]InEngland,thePraeraphaelitemovementneed
butbenamed.
–WilliamMichaelRossetti,atTheInternationalExhibitionsofArt,
Paris,1855
The title ‘realist’ has been imposed on me in the same way as the title
‘romantic’wasimposedonthemenof1830.Titleshavenevergiventhe
rightideaofthings;iftheydid,workswouldbeunnecessary.
–GustaveCourbet,‘StatementonRealism’(1855)
The terms Real and Ideal have been so run upon of late, that their
repetition begins to nauseate; but they must be kept, for all that, till
betterequivalentsareprovided.
–DavidMasson,BritishNovelistsandTheirStyles(1859)
Whatdoesitmeanforsomethingtobe‘realistic’ortorepresent‘thereal’?
The question is more than just a scholarly one, as the act of referring to
a person or thing as ‘realistic’ or a ‘realist’ has worked its way into the
commonvernacularwithaneasyreadiness.Generally,itsimplicationsare
meant to be self-apparent, implying a lack of illusions or pretenses –
perhaps in terms of religious beliefs, or just simply social or political
©TheAuthor(s)2016 1
D.Brown,RepresentingRealistsinVictorianLiterature
andCriticism,PalgraveStudiesinNineteenth-CenturyWriting
andCulture,DOI10.1007/978-3-319-40679-4_1
2 REPRESENTINGREALISTSINVICTORIANLITERATUREANDCRITICISM
niceties. It suggests a direct adherence to some sort of bottom line, an
irreducibletruthabovewhichallelseisfancifulmake-believe.Itsapparent
obviousness is part of its appeal – to refer to ‘the real’ is to refer to some-
thing that one need not define or understand any further. To do so risks
over-complicatingorevencontaminatingsomethingsimpleandbasic.The
termitselfisasincontrovertibleasthethingstowhichitrefers.Itsimplyis.
Of course, scholars have long sought to unravel the authority that
realism seems to claim. They have repeatedly praised and maligned it,
deconstructed and redeemed it, splintered and multiplied it, and offered
countlessdefinitionsofwhatitisandhowitworks.1Myaim,however,is
notsomuchtotrytoofferanotherunderstanding,variation,orjudgment
of the term. Rather, this work attempts to understand the process by
which writers and critics first tried to understand the term as it applied
toliteraryandpainterlypractice,andwhatwasatstakeindoingso.What
I have found is that those who first tried to understand realism did so
primarilythroughanalogyandexemplification,byreferencingnewmove-
ments in the visual arts. As the epigraph by the French painter Gustave
Courbet suggests, realism seems to have emerged first in painterly, visual
practice,afterwhichwritersusedtheterminanattempttodescribewhat
they saw. Nonetheless, as several of the epigraphs also attest, those
who first applied the term did so with an awareness of its limitations,
skeptical that it signified anything relevant, reluctant even to apply it or
haveitappliedtotheirownworks.Atitsinception,realism’smeaningwas
thus debatable and uncertain, as – we will see – were the parameters of
what it could represent, who could claim to practice it, and where its
practitioners fit in society. In other words, realism’s formulators used its
contested meanings to lay claim to social and epistemological truths that
were alsouncertain andopen to new understandings.
For, just as nineteenth-century critics attempted to understand this
seemingly new form of representation, society was changing to an extent
thatitsinstitutionsandmembersalsosoughtnewtypesofrepresentation.
AsW.J.T.MitchellsaysinPictureTheory(1994),‘issueslike“gender,race,
andclass,”...andtheproductionof“truth,beauty,andexcellence”’–all
things that writers and critics contested alongside definitions of realism –
‘converge on questions of representation’ (p. 3). Furthermore, Mitchell
defines ‘representation’ as a ‘master-term’ that ‘activates a set of linkages
between political, semiotic/aesthetic, and even economic notions of
“standing or acting for”’ (1994, p. 6). Such use, ‘has the virtue of
simultaneously linking the visual and the verbal...and connecting them
1 INTRODUCTION 3
withissuesofknowledge(truerepresentations),ethics(responsiblerepre-
sentations), and power (effective representation)’ (Mitchell, 1994, p. 6).
We can see these linkages in what Antonia Losano calls ‘the scene of
painting, which includes not just descriptions of fictional artwork but
representations of the act and process of painting...’ and ‘offer[s] fully
formed and often radical aesthetic, literary and social critiques’ (2008,
p. 3). Although Losano uses scenes of painting to examine the plight of
thewomanartist,thisbookusesscenesofpaintingtoinvestigatetherealist
artist. As we will see, this figure, as a subject of representation that also
represented subjects, became a particularly rich point around which to
articulate the continual interplay – as is the central thrust of Mitchell’s
book – between not only verbal and visual, but between inner and outer,
activeandpassive,seeingandbeingseen,speakingandbeingspokenfor.
DEFINING REALISM
Fundamentals
Despite the vast scholarly disagreements on just what realism might
entail, the consensus tends to affirm that it developed from – and
answered to the needs of – an increasingly secular, empiricist, and indi-
vidualistsociety.Althoughnotundisputed,IanWatt’sseminalRiseofthe
Novel(1957)hassetthisbaselinedefinition,arguingthatthemovements
we associate with realism had their philosophical underpinnings in
Enlightenment philosophies such as those of René Descartes and John
Locke, and literary origins back to eighteenth-century authors such as
Daniel Defoe.2 As Watt says, Enlightenment understanding that indivi-
duals formed their identities by taking in sensory information without
the influence of innate attributes had led to an increased concern with
particular, sensory details in literature. Literature thus came to focus
increasingly on the details of the everyday lives of ordinary people, as
opposed to epic heroes or historical figures, situated in highly specific
times and places, rather than in universal or mythical circumstances.
Literature also started to move away from the idea that human nature
was constant and unchanging, and towards a belief that consciousness
varied with each individual. Finally, literature came to concern itself
mainly with the appearances and actions of material objects and less
with metaphysical systems that might underlie those objects, as in a
Platonic or Christian view of the world.
