Table Of ContentVICTORIAN PERSPECTIVES
Victorian
Perspectives
SIX ESSAYS
Edited by
JOHNCLUBBE
Professor of English
University of Kentucky
and
JEROME MECKlER
Professor of English
University of Kentucky
M
MACMILLAN
PRESS
©John Oubbe and Jerome Meckier 1989
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First published 1989
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Victorian perspectives
1. English fiction-19th century
History and criticism
I. Oubbe, John ll. Meckier, Jerome
823' .8'09 PR871
ISBN 978-1-349-09555-1 ISBN 978-1-349-09553-7 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-09553-7
Contents
Notes on the Contributors vi
Introduction ix
1 'Hieroglyphical Truth' in Sartor Resartus: Carlyle and the
Language of Parable
J. Hillis Miller 1
2 Elegant Jeremiahs: The Genre of the Victorian Sage
George P. Landow 21
3 Prodigals and Prodigies: Trollope's Notes as a Son and
Father
Donald D. Stone 42
4 Ruskin, Arnold and Browning's Grammarian:
'Crowded with Culture'
David J. DeLaura 68
5 The Comedy of Culture and Anarchy
Richard D. Altick 120
6 The View from John Street: Richard Whiteing' s Social
Realism
Jerome Hamilton Buckley 145
v
Notes on the Contributors
Richard D. Altick, Regents Professor Emeritus of English at Ohio
State University, is the author or editor of numerous works covering
the range of Victorian literature and society. His most recent books
are The Shows of London (1978) and Paintings from Books: Art and
Literature in Great Britain, 1760-1900 (1985).
Jerome Hamilton Buckley is Gurney Professor of English at
Harvard University. His many books include The Victorian Temper
(1951), Tennyson: The Growth of a Poet (1960), The Triumph of Time
(1966), Season of Youth: The Bildungsroman from Dickens to Golding
(1974) and The Turning Point: Autobiography and the Subjective Impulse
since 1800 (1984).
David J. DeLaura, Avalon Foundation Professor of the Humanities
at the University of Pennsylvania, is the author of a number of major
articles on the Victorians and of Hebrew and Hellene in Victorian
England: Newman, Arnold, and Pater (1969). He has edited, among
other volumes, the Norton Critical Edition of Newman's Apologia
Pro Vita Sua.
George P. Landow, Professor of English at Brown University, has
written The Aesthetic and Critical Theories off ohn Ruskin (1971), William
Holman Hunt and Typological Symbolism (1979) and Victorian Shadows:
Biblical Typology in Victorian Literature, Art, and Thought (1980). He
has also edited Approaches to Victorian Autobiography (1979).
J. Hillis Miller, Professor of English at the University of California,
Irvine, published his pathb reaking Charles Dickens: The World of His
Novels in 1958. Among his subsequent books on the Victorians are
The Disappearance of God: Five Nineteenth-Century Writers (1963),
Thomas Hardy: Distance and Desire (1971) and Fiction and Repetition:
Seven English Novels (1982).
Donald D. Stone, Professor of English at Queen's College, CUNY,
is the author of Novelists in a Changing World: Meredith, James, and the
Transformation of English Fiction in the 1880s (1972) and The Romantic
Impulse in Victorian Fiction (1980).
vi
Notes on the Contributors vii
The editors, John Clubbe and Jerome Meckier, are Professors of
English at the University of Kentucky. Both have made significant
contributions to scholarship on nineteenth-and twentieth-century
English literature. Clubbe has published books on Hood and
Carlyle, has written extensively on Byron, and co-authored English
Romanticism: The Grounds of Belief (London: Macmillan, 1983).
Meckier inaugurated the modem study of Huxley with his Aldous
Huxley: Satire and Structure (1969), has written widely on Victorian
and modem authors - Dickens, Huxley and Waugh, most
particularly - and recently published Hidden Rivalries in Victorian
Fiction, a study of the literary interactions among the major Victorian
novelists.
Introduction
Over the past decade, more than a dozen eminent Victorians have
delivered lectures or enlivened graduate seminars at the University
of Kentucky.* The idea for this volume originated during a
semester-long symposium on 'Victorian Literature and Society' held
in the spring of 1982. The six essays that make up Victorian
Perspectives are not in all cases the papers their authors presented in
Lexington, then or at other times, but they commemorate those fine
occasions and exemplify the new avenues of thought that the
visiting scholars opened up. The essays in this volume not only
testify to a resurgence of interest in Victorian studies at one
American university; they also make major contributions to the
ongoing revaluation of the Victorians that has been one of the most
interesting phenomena of recent literary scholarship.
J. Hillis Miller's ' "Hieroglyphical Truth" in Sartor Resartus:
Carlyle and the Language of Parable' examines 'a fundamental
paradox' underlying Carlyle's art: why does someone who believes
a writer should 'keep silent or say the truth that is in him directly and
plainly' write Sartor Resartus, a fiction that rivals in complexity of
diction and presentation works such as Faulkner's Absalom!
Absalom! or Conrad's Nostromo? Or as Miller puts the matter
subsequently: 'The question is why being sincere, speaking and
writing sincerely, in Carlyle's case, requires such indirection, such
recourse to figures, to ironies and to rhetorical extravagancies of all
kinds.' To present his argument Miller juxtaposes obiter dicta on
Carlyle by Emerson and Nietzsche. Emerson reports Carlyle's
repudiation of 'high art' and his belief that 'a sincere man will see
something and say nothing'; Nietzsche 'sees Carlyle's propriety as
the impropriety of a constant passionate dishonesty against
himself'. Which is the real Carlyle? How to resolve the paradox?
Miller's lucidly argued study has Carlyle 'both, or neither'. His focus
on Sartor Resartus leads him to a wide-ranging reconsideration of the
nature of Carlyle's art and of contemporary narrative theory.
• A partial listing includes, aside from the contributors to this volume, William F.
Axton, Duane DeVries, Robert Giddings, James Gindin, Karl Kroeber, Jerome J.
McGann, David Paroissien, David Perkins, Andrew Sanders, Mark Spilka and, on
two separate occasions, Michael Slater.
ix
X Victorian Perspectives
George P. Landow's 'Elegant Jeremiahs: The Genre of the
Victorian Sage' contends that the great Victorian prose writers
borrowed extensively from classical and biblical traditions to create a
genre of sagistic writing. Defining the sage as the Victorians
conceived him, Landow takes up Carlyle, Arnold, Ruskin (and
Thoreau) as writers who owe their tone and a willingness to
castigate their contemporaries to Old Testament prophecy. Such
prophecy, Landow explains, was just as interested in diagnosing
the age's spiritual condition as in predicting the future. The former
activity is, in fact, the basis for the latter. Landow examines the way
sagistic writings draw on related genres, such as the novel,
neoclassical satire and Victorian sermons. He identifies traits and
techniques that make interpreting the discursive prose of the
Victorian sages a valuable literary exercise as well as a study in the
history of ideas.
Donald D. Stone singles Trollope out as the only great Victorian
novelist to treat the father-son theme with the fulness and fairness
it deserves. In 'Prodigals and Prodigies: Trollope's Notes as a Son
and Father', Stone measures Trollope's handling of the father-son
relationship against less successful examinations in, among others,
Dickens, Butler and Joyce. According to Stone, Trollope's
advantage lay not merely in knowing both sides of the struggle
between the generations but in being able to sympathise with the
demands of each station, which explains the unprecedented
number of fully realised fathers and sons his fictional world
contains. Beginning with Trollope's remarks about his own father,
Stone progresses to partial portraits of that father in Trollope's
novels, then explores the novelist's feelings for his own sons. In the
process, Stone accounts for the legion of prodigals, both pere et fils,
that Trollope created. For modems such as Waugh and Huxley,
splits between fathers and sons signify the gulf separating the
post-war world from the value systems of its Edwardian
predecessor. Stone's valuable addition to the study of a pervasive
concern in nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction shows that
Trollope was able to view the father-son theme in a kindlier light: it
was his means of studying society's transition from one generation
to the next. A son's love of his father, he argues, stands for
acceptance of the past, while a father's decision to yield to his son's
wishes connotes acceptance of the future.
Throughout his career David J. DeLaura has honed our awareness
of the Victorian cultural context: religious, political, social, artistic
Introduction xi
no less than literary. His 'Ruskin, Arnold and Browning's
Grammarian: "Crowded with Culture"' supplies 'a more complex
matrix' for 'A Grammarian's Funeral'. The context out of which the
poem emerged includes Browning's other poems of the early 1850s,
particularly 'Cleon' and 'Fra Lippo Lippi'; his reading of Carlyle,
Arnold and Ruskin (particularly of The Stones ofVe n ice 11 and m); and
his personal interactions with these writers. The ramifications that
DeLaura analyses are of considerable complexity, yet he threads his
way through them with surety of touch. Even short excursuses into
Browning's language-for example, his use of the words 'world' and
'culture' - have relevance to the larger picture. DeLaura's essay
illuminates not only 'A Grammarian's Funeral' but other works
before and after. In the process he increases our knowledge of the
mid-Victorian cultural scene. Three appendices-on 'Browning and
Arnold's "Empedocles on Etna" ',on 'Browning and Culture' and
on 'Cleon versus Empedocles' - complement and complete his
argument.
Matthew Arnold is not the first author who will come to mind
when broaching the subject of Victorian comedy. Like Hillis Miller
on Sartor Resartus, Richard D. Altick in 'The Comedy of Culture and
Anarchy' reconsiders a seminal work: like Miller and occasionally
DeLaura, he focuses on his author's handling of language. Where
Miller questions Carlyle's purpose in his chosen artistic method,
AI tick examines Arnold's language for its comic and ironic effect. In
so doing he gives the language of Culture and Anarchy the most
thorough analysis it has yet received. The resultant perspective on
Arnold's literary art-and on Arnold himself-offers a few surprises.
By making a number of subtle rhetorical discriminations, Altick
specifies the humour that contemporaries would have caught but
that eludes most modern readers. He forces us to confront Arnold as
a writer whose comedy is but moderately successful and whose tone
can be uncertain. 'It is probably just as well that the comic touches
are brief', AI tick concludes. No one who ponders this essay will read
Culture and Anarchy-or other prose works by Arnold-in quite the
same way again.
In 'The View from John Street: Richard Whiteing' s Social
Realism', Jerome Hamilton Buckley resurrects a late-Victorian
political satirist remarkable for 'intelligence, originality, and wit'.
No. 5 John Street impresses Buckley as a good example of the nature
of realism in the 1890s. Indeed, writes Buckley, Whiteing compares
well with the best London realists of that decade. Like Maugham in
