There are times in life when the question of knowing if one can think differently than one thinks, and perceive differently than one sees, is absolutely necessary if one is to go on looking and reflecting at all.

— Foucault, The Use of Pleasure

I AM NOT NOW, nor have I ever been, a Victorianist. Nor will I ever be one. This is not to say that I do not teach courses focusing on nineteenth-century texts and contexts, that I have not recurrently written on topics and events that took place between 1799–1899, or that despite my best intentions my scholarly projects do not continue to keep pulling me back through this historical domain. Nevertheless, whatever I do intellectually, I do not do it as “a Victorianist,” whatever that might mean.

BENJAMIN LEOPOLD FARJEON (1838–1903) was a novelist of, at best, middling abilities who achieved a modicum of popular success working in the sentimental realist tradition. He was also Jewish, a fact that he neither avoided nor obsessed over. It is just Farjeon’s laissez-faire approach towards ethnic identity that spurs our interest today. He assumed an attitude that was only beginning to be possible in the British Empire in the middle to late Victorian period. Over the years, Farjeon has made perfunctory appearances in such familiar survey and reference materials as Richard Altick’s The English Common Reader (1957), John Sutherland’s The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction (1989), and Linda Gertner Zatlin’s Nineteenth Century Anglo-Jewish Novel (1981), but the only substantial piece of scholarship devoted solely to his work is Lillian Faderman’s dissertation “B. L. Farjeon: Victorian Novelist” (1967). Where Faderman provides a broad-based chronicle of Farjeon’s publications, I focus here on one aspect of his legacy — i.e., how he partook of an incipient opportunity to construct a position for Jews as Englishmen in economic terms.

AT THE END of the Victorian era and in the first decades of the twentieth century, Israel Zangwill was a well-known name in Europe, America, and even the Middle East. The enormous success of his 1892 novel Children of the Ghetto had made Zangwill the spokesperson for English Jewry throughout the world, as he revealed and explained an alien community to its non-Jewish neighbors and made the universe of the Jewish immigrants more intelligible to their acculturated coreligionists. An early Zionist, Zangwill met with Theodore Herzl in London and attended the first Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897; he continued to participate in the movement until 1905, when he formed his own nationalist group, the Jewish Territorial Organization (ITO). He became active in the pacifist and feminist movements of the early 1900s, and his literary output of that period for the most part reflects those interests, although he still explored issues of Jewish identity in numerous short stories and the highly popular play The Melting Pot (1908). In all, Zangwill published eight novels, nine collections of short fiction, eleven plays, and a volume of poetry, writing on both Jewish and more general themes; and (with the exception of some of his later thesis drama) his work was for the most part both popular and acclaimed. During the later 1880s and 1890s Zangwill was a prolific journalist, publishing columns on literature and current topics not only in the Jewish Standard, but also in the comic paper Puck (later Ariel, which he also edited), the Critic, and the Pall Mall Magazine. In short, he was very much a turn-of-the-century literary personality, esteemed as one of their own by his Jewish readers, but also prominent in the more general transatlantic literary milieu.

VICTORIAN STUDIES has always been, for me, a form of cultural studies. As early as my sophomore year in college, while reading Raymond Williams’s Culture and Society for a modern humanities course, I was fascinated to learn that a case could be made for the nineteenth century as the period during which notions of culture were constructed. Williams’s work was presented without much contextualization and it was only much later that I came to associate it with either British cultural studies or Marxism. My somewhat unconscious interest in forging connections between culture and politics, which I would argue is the founding mission of cultural studies, was matched by another unconscious interest in Victorian studies, and more specifically, studies of the novel, as a field in which to pursue feminism. By the time I reached graduate school in the 1980s, feminism had become a field and a methodology, and within English departments, Victorian studies produced a rich range of scholars, including Elaine Showalter, Ellen Moers, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, and Nina Auerbach, who dominated the interdisciplinary field of women studies, which, like cultural studies, also sought to explain the relations between culture and politics. Their work on women authors and revising the canon was followed by that of an equally powerful group of feminist Victorianists, including Nancy Armstrong, Mary Poovey, Catherine Gallagher, and Eve Sedgwick, who explored not only how categories of gender and sexuality were integral to nineteenth-century social formations, but how they were invented in the modern period.

IN ONE OF HIS LAST CANVASES — worked on for some six years and unfinished at his death — the distinguished genre and landscape painter, William Mulready (1786–1863), famous for his depiction of children and childhood, produced one of the most resonant and complex images of race and Empire of the mid-nineteenth century.1 Titled The Toy Seller and set in an emblematic rural landscape, it displays a mother holding a child of between one and two years old, while a kneeling pedlar respectfully proffers a rattle from a basket of similarly humble toys (Figure 19). The infant, however, perversely refuses to be tempted. Its body and gaze are turned awkwardly away from the toy seller, its shrugged shoulders and unhappy expression graphically suggest the unease provoked by the stranger’s importunities, or perhaps merely his presence. Meanwhile the mother’s look is turned with gentle concern on the distressed child. The pedlar too looks towards the baby with a still amd practiced watchfulness, as if waiting for the mother to coax the child into a more receptive mood. The toy seller is black; the mother and child are white.

IN THE JEW IN THE TEXT:Modernity and the Construction of Identity (1995) Linda Nochlin and Tamar Garb noted that although questions of race, colonialism, and Eurocentrism were now prominent in cultural studies, the ways in which the “Jew” had been represented in modern culture remained relatively unexplored (6). Over the last few years, however, exploration of this kind has burgeoned, bringing with it important challenges both for Jewish studies and for English literary history. The nineteenth century has proved a particularly rich resource for such research, and the importance of this period for considering the relationship between modernity and the “Jew” is underlined by Nochlin:

ON FEBRUARY 18, 1845, Robert Browning sent a poem entitled “The Tomb at Saint Praxed’s” to the acting editor of Hood’s Magazine. He writes: “I pick it out as being a pet of mine, and just the thing for the time — what with the Oxford business, and Camden society and other embroilments” (DeVane and Knickerbocker 35–36). Because of this letter, the immediate historical context for the poem has commonly been taken as the Oxford (Tractarian) movement and Newman’s retraction in 1843. The Cambridge Camden Society (not the London antiquarian society of the same name, which is sometimes thought to be Browning’s reference) was also associated with Romanism, being accused of popery in 1844 and subsequently dissolved by the Cambridge authorities in February 1845, the same month Browning submitted his poem. (It continued as the Ecclesiological Society.) Through its journal, The Ecclesiologist (1841–), the Cambridge Camden Society aimed to study ecclesiastical architecture, following Pugin’s Contrasts (2nd edition, 1841) in complaining about the moral corruption of church architecture and promoting an ethical-spiritual basis for reform.1 Journal items focussed on a range of issues from the symbolic function of church layout to the details of epitaphs and tombs, generally mixing visual values with ecclesiology. Kenneth Clark in The Gothic Revival: An Essay in the History of Taste (139–44) and John Morley in Death, Heaven, and the Victorians (52–62) detail these issues. Browning’s “other embroilments” may well refer therefore to the growing controversy in the 1840s about sepulture and sepulchral style, about the appropriateness or otherwise of ornate tombs and canopies. Hence this poem about a deathbed scene and a Bishop’s tomb may be clearly located within the broadly enveloping mid- Victorian network of cultural practices related to death: distinctively encoded rituals of mourning, debate about gravestones and epitaphs, depictions of deathbed scenes (in painting as well as literature), and widespread discussion of what came to be known as the four last things — death, judgement, heaven, and hell.

LATE IN 1839, George Catlin arrived in London from New York with a collection of Native American artifacts, costumes, and some six hundred portraits and other paintings. Executed during the previous eight years in the Prairies and the Rockies, they showed the appearance, habitat and customs of various tribes. Catlin rented the Egyptian Hall, in Piccadilly, set up a wigwam made of twenty or more ornamented buffalo skins in the center, and proceeded to mount his exhibition. Initially attracting a good deal of favorable attention, it ran for two years before touring England, Scotland, Ireland, and finally France.

I WOULD RATHER not think of Victorian studies and cultural studies in antithesis because both terms are misleading and obstruct research. We should not be choosing between either, but trying to think of a way of working that dissolves this antithesis. The first point I would like to make is that Victorian studies came into being as an interdisciplinary project just after the second world war — the journal of that name started up in the fifties. So, paradoxically, Victorian studies emerged conceptually after modernism was over and the study of modernism was well under way. I think that one of the reasons why Victorian studies appeared post-war was slightly suspect — the seeming comfort of a period not torn by the anguish of war (wrong — there were colonial wars going on all the time, they just were forgotten). A little while ago I looked to see if Victorian Studies contained any kind of statement about its project when it began. The first issue of Victorian Studies in September 1957 contained a cautious statement about its project, describing the Victorian “era” in terms of “events and personalities” and speaking of the “coordination” of disciplines rather than their transformation (3). This was innovative for its time, but imposed conceptual limits on research. If one looks back at the early issues, they are impressively scholarly and seem to be doing bits of history so-called official historians do not do.

“I unreservedly confess, for myself, that I cannot leave my natural perception of what is natural and true, at a palace door, in Italy or elsewhere, as I would leave my shoes if I were traveling in the East. I cannot forget that there are certain expressions of face, natural to certain passions, and as unchangeable in their nature as the gait of a lion, or the flight of an eagle. I cannot dismiss from my certain knowledge such common-place facts as the ordinary proportions of men’s arms, and legs, and heads; and when I meet with performances that do violence to these experiences and recollections, no matter where they may be, I cannot admire them.”

— Charles Dickens, Pictures from Italy (1846)

IN HIS ACCOUNT of his 1844 trip to Rome, Charles Dickens expressed bewilderment that the martyrdom of St. Sebastian should have been so commonly exploited as a subject by Italian artists. The novelist took the opportunity to disparage the “indiscriminate and determined raptures” of certain critics of Renaissance painting as “incompatible with the true appreciation of the really great and transcendent works of art . . . Neither am I partial to libelous Angels, who play on fiddles and bassoons, for the edification of sprawling monks apparently in liquor.” Dickens concluded that representations of St. Sebastian did not “have very uncommon and rare merits, as works of art, to justify their compound multiplication by Italian painters” (195).1

By what criteria is one to isolate the unities with which one is dealing . . . What is the legitimate level of formalization?

—Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge

BOTH “DISCOURSE” AND “GENRE,” like all constructed and generalizing categories, have a purely formalizing aspect as well as a historical, effective (or political) aspect. They name and group things abstractly, but those names themselves are shaped and precipitated in history and, in turn, they exert a powerful shaping force on historical life.

TWO OF THE BEST accounts of the relations between Thackeray and Carlyle are those by Gordon N. Ray in his great life and letters of the novelist, and the well-informed essay by C. R. Sanders “The Carlyles and Thackeray” in his Carlyle’s Friendships and Other Studies. Yet both of them are crucially and entirely wrong in attributing a review of a work by Carlyle in the Times to Thackeray when we now find it was obviously by a regular reviewer Samuel Phillips.1 So they are mistaken in several conclusions that go well beyond biographical detail and bear on the way both writers represent mid-Victorian opinion in matters affecting fiction and belief. The Times, the two writers, and the work in question, which was Carlyle’s Life of John Sterling (1851), were all opinion-formers, going to the centre of what we think of as Victorianism. But it seemed curiously clear to the otherwise perceptive Sanders and Gordon Ray that, since Carlyle and Thackeray differed on a number of questions such as the place of the great man in history, it was acceptable that the savage and stupid Times review of 1 November 1851 was his. After all, Thackeray’s daughter Lady Ritchie declared that she had talked to Carlyle about The Life of Sterling in 1871, when she “spoke of her father’s review in the Times” (Ritchie 160), with the result that it was included in the standard Centenary edition of his Works.

WHERE IS “Victorian autobiography” in the late 1990s? Everywhere and nowhere. Always contested as a genre, autobiography has stretched its fragile boundaries and diffused itself among the many forms of self-representation that interest contemporary critics: travel narratives, letters, journals, fiction, poetry, essays, biography. This diffusion is in many ways a fruitful development, although it raises the question of whether “Victorian autobiography” is still a meaningful category to use in describing critical work. Although I concentrate here on a number of recent books that flourish the word “autobiography” in their titles, I come to this review with a sense that some of the most vital work on Victorian self-representation may be flying under different banners.

THE VICTORIAN POETESS has become as important a figure in the late twentieth century as she was in the late nineteenth — perhaps because she seems now, as then, to have lapsed into the obscurity of literary history. In recent years feminist critics have been interested in reclaiming a tradition of nineteenth-century popular poetesses whose verse circulated broadly on both sides of the Atlantic. A spate of new anthologies, annotated editions, and critical collections (as well as texts now available on-line) has reintroduced supposedly lost women poets into the canon of Victorian poetry. Indeed, this recovery is often predicated on a rhetoric of loss, as if only by losing women poets we can rediscover and read them anew. Thus in recent advertisements for such anthologies, we read that Victorian Women Poets (edited by Angela Leighton and Margaret Reynolds in 1995) “aims to recover the lost map of Victorian women’s poetry,” and British Women Poets of the 19th Century (edited by Margaret Higonnet in 1996) “restores the voices and reputations of these ‘lost’ artists”; likewise, the compendious Nineteenth-Century Women Poets (edited by Isobel Armstrong and Joseph Bristow with Cath Sharrock in 1996) “rediscovers rich and diverse female traditions.”

IN THE POST-THEORETICAL (re)turn to history there is now, in literary and cultural studies, an increasing preoccupation with material relations, manifest in the growing number of interdisciplinary approaches foregrounding the importance of the production, circulation, and reception of texts. It has become increasingly evident that, despite internal claims for praxis, a much-vaunted cultural materialism has found itself at times imaginatively and practically restrained as a consequence of extreme textualist legacies. The familiar and too easy dichotomy between the so-called empiricism and the so-called critical theory is now beginning to recede as empiricist methodologies, much maligned in the post-humanist critiques of the 1980s, are beginning to make their presences felt again, though in revitalized and theoretically informed ways.

Charlottesville Fin de siècle XX

O thou that after toil and storm Mayst seem to have reached a purer air, Whose faith has centre everywhere, Nor cares to fix itself to form, or — as the undersigned trusts to find you still —

Dear Reader,

THERE WAS A TIME when the New Criticism taught you to pay attention to literary form as the embodied elaboration of meaning. You knew that authors had a design on you, but you learned to bracket questions of intention and affect so as to concentrate on the design itself, where creative purpose got built out in verbal deed. You dealt, by and large, with the concrete particular, anatomizing complexities for the sake of an analytically earned appreciation of distinct instances of formal unity. While every instance was unique, what you found to say about the unity of this poem or that novel did evince a family resemblance among literary works, and among critical interpretations, that linked them to each other and, presumably, to a family of wholesome universals. Or did it just seem to? If you couldn’t be sure then, and can’t be sure now either, that’s because these larger issues were somehow off in the background and beside the point, which was to practice criticism as a cognition of integral form.

VICTORIAN STUDIES, in its longstanding resistance to the formalist study of Victorian literature, has to an extent been re-enacting the anxiety of mid-Victorian poets and novelists about being entrapped in a world of art. That anxiety notoriously defined the Victorian resistance to their Romantic forebears (think of Tennyson’s and Arnold’s well-documented, ambiguous attitudes toward Wordsworth and Keats or even Dickens’s satire of Leigh Hunt as Skimpole in Bleak House). And, predictably enough, it led to the backlash of the late-century aestheticism. If one positions the anti-formalism of the various genres of historicism and cultural studies now current in the study of Victorian literature as current versions of that Victorian anxiety at being hermetically enclosed in beautiful but empty forms, then surely an aestheticist and formalist backlash is more than overdue. And, rather than taking an analytical or neutrally critical response to this flux and reflux, I intend to espouse just such a backlash. If backlash implies partialness, the potential partiality of formalism is, I think, one of its less recognized values. Indeed, I will argue, a return to a consideration of aesthetic form may, in its recognition of its own limits, return a genuine interdisciplinarity to Victorian studies, if one intends by interdisciplinary studies not the work of literary scholars treating non-literary texts, but the participation of scholars from different disciplines with different and possibly conflicting grounding questions, concerns and modes of analysis in the study of the same subject matter.

AS I WAS FINISHING this essay — taking yet another procrastination break for tea and idling through the mail — there it was, in the middle of the September Lands’ End catalog, between the luggage and the imported cotton shirts, William Least Heat-Moon’s journey to the western isles of Scotland. In a few hundred words, beginning with Dr. Johnson’s complaint of the barrenness and “sterility” of these rocky shores, and sketching the latest economic, geographical, and demographic changes in the Shetlands, the author described a complex reconfiguration. Big petroleum had arrived some time back, along with Indian and Chinese restaurants and new houses redolent of Levittown. All this has provoked a “local fervor for things Nordic” and a “vigor of nostalgia.” The eye-catching photos accompanying the story of course contain nary an oil rig, not a single plate of stir-fry. Indeed, no inhabitants are pictured at all. Only archaeological sites and derelict crofters’ cottages.

THE TRIALS OF OSCAR WILDE for acts of “gross indecency” not only confirmed him as “the sexual deviant for the late nineteenth century” but also made him “the paradigmatic example for an emerging public definition of a new ‘type’ of male sexual actor: ‘the homosexual’” (Cohen 1–2). Given that De Profundis is the only major prose work that Wilde wrote on the other side of the scandals prompted by his 1895 trials,1 it is surprising that this text has received little serious consideration from scholars in gay male studies. To be sure, Wilde’s nonfiction prose and critical dialogues generally have not received the critical attention they deserve. But the neglect of De Profundis by gay male scholarship specifically is probably due less to the text’s marginal generic status than to the feeling that De Profundis betrays the iconoclastic image of Wilde dear to the hearts of twentieth-century gay men. In his letter to Lord Alfred Douglas, Wilde seems so — one almost hesitates to say it — sincere. Indeed, for critics such as Jonathan Dollimore, Wilde’s semblance of sincerity signifies a capitulation to the middle-class morality he otherwise resisted. De Profundis thus comes to mark a decisive break in Wilde’s oeuvre and to signal the end of his self-fashioning activities (95–98). However, the view that De Profundis represents Wilde’s sincere contrition does not originate with gay male studies but was, in fact, a popular response to the text upon its initial publication in 1905.

IN OCTOBER 1856, the wife of the Governor General of India noted her satisfaction with recent changes at Government House in Calcutta: “I believe it would look rather nice even as an English country-house, so marvelously is it improved by 450 yards of rose-chintz, a great many arm-chairs, small round tables, drawings etc., and flowerpots in number” (Allen 34). Having arrived in Calcutta in February of that year, Lady Charlotte Canning wasted no time in transporting Victorian upper-class domestic style to a key spot on Britain’s nineteenth-century imperial map. As several recent examinations of the role of Victorian women in the work of empire have shown us, although Lady Canning’s lavish transformation of colonized space into something resembling a Derbyshire drawing-room could not be matched by lower-ranked Englishwomen who accompanied their military and civilian husbands to outposts of empire — 450 yards is a lot of chintz and the Queen had personally despatched some Royal family portraits to Calcutta to assist Lady Canning in her interior decoration — they too did their English domesticating bit. Among other things, these women grew pansies in Simla, served afternoon tea in Ceylon, and arranged croquet parties in Jamaica. They were also faced with less pleasant tasks, as one learns from the memoirs of Harriet Tytler, who accompanied her husband on various military postings in India during the 1840s and 50s. Tytler buried several children, dead of non-treatable illnesses, endured the killing climate of Dacca, and survived the siege of Delhi in 1857.