Catacomb, n., a subterranean place for the burial of the dead, consisting of galleries or passageways with recesses excavated in their sides for tombs.

The Oxford English Dictionary

Silence itself — the things one declines to say, or is forbidden to name, the discretion that is required between different speakers — is less the absolute limit of discourse, the other side from which it is separated by a strict boundary, than an element that functions alongside the things said, with them and in relation to them within over-all strategies.

Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality

We often assume (rightly) that homosexuality must be hidden, that it has to be found.

Neil Bartlett, Who Was That Man?

I. Ruining the Religious Novel

BY TITLING THIS ESSAY “Love Among the Ruins,” I mean at once to be literal, figurative, and allusive in the framing of my topic: literal, in that I will be examining the place of love — specifically, erotic love — within the Roman catacombs or equivalent sites of Christian sanctuary; figurative, in that the representations of love that I will be discussing occur within the context of “literary ruins” — that is, within a relatively obscure nineteenth-century English narrative sub-genre, the Victorian “Early Christian” novel1; and, finally, allusive, in that I deliberately invoke the first poem of Robert Browning’s 1855 collection of dramatic monologues, Men and Women, for more than mere rhetorical effect. In fact, “Love Among the Ruins” condenses a number of the key concerns that I want to address in this essay, for the poem offers an important critique of classical culture not only as a site of pagan aesthetic production and human vainglory, but, relatedly, of homosocial and, perhaps, homoerotic bonds and the sterility presumed to inhere therein — a critique highly visible in Victorian Early Christian fiction. Indeed, I would argue, Browning’s text implicitly participates in the discursive construction of an important, if ultimately unstable, dichotomy that Victorian novels set in the catacombs and written roughly around the same time as “Love Among the Ruins” powerfully reinforce: namely, the traditional opposition between classicism and Christianity, an opposition at least one facet of which is rooted in competing attitudes toward the erotic.

“TO RAISE A REAL SPECTRE of the antique is a craving of our own century” (104) writes “Vernon Lee” in her early collection of essays on aesthetics, Belcaro. The nineteenth century is indeed, as Julia Briggs has pointed out, an age which craves ghost stories of all kinds. Sceptical of the supernatural yet nostalgic for it (Briggs 19), the age turns to ghost stories to assuage its lost faith. Ghosts, if nothing else, might still glimmer in the empty spaces of a universe vacated by the gods but not yet filled with the space journeys of science and science fiction. Their questionable shapes thus continue to shape the questions of an age seeking reassurance, even if that reassurance comes in a spasm of terror. And terror, however subtly or ingeniously aroused, whether by the self-induced fantasies of James’s governess or the calculated self-hauntings of Stevenson’s Jekyll, remains the primary motivation and aim of the ghost story. Fear of the unknown, whether within or without, provides the last bastion of a supernaturalism under threat from the encroaching “materialism” (Briggs 24) of the modern world. The ghost story not only indulges the unstable, if sometimes deeply conventional order of fantasy at the expense of “naturalistic art” (Cavaliero 7); it also indulges the wish to believe in another, more fearful world, beyond the material order of things. The specter focuses this trouble of belief. It is there and not there. It outlines emptiness but also fills it up, embodying and disembodying its own reality at the same time.

To say that this common [criminal] fate was described in the popular press and commented on simply as a piece of police news is, indeed, to fall short of the facts. To say that it was sung and balladed would be more correct; it was expressed in a form quite other than that of the modern press, in a language which one could certainly describe as that of fiction rather than reality, once we have discovered that there is such a thing as a reality of fiction.

—Louis Chevalier, Laboring Classes and Dangerous Classes

SPEAKING OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY FRANCE, Louis Chevalier traces the bourgeoisie’s elision of the working classes with the criminal classes, in which crime becomes either the representation of working class “failure” or “revenge” (396). Chevalier argues that working- class texts “recorded” their acquiescence to and acceptance of “a genuine fraternity of [criminal] fate” when they “described and celebrated [it] in verse” (397). Though a community of fate might inspire collective resistance, popular poetry and ballads, he confirms, reproduced metonymic connections between criminal and worker when “their pity went out to embrace dangerous classes and laboring classes alike. . . . One might almost say [they proclaimed these characteristics] in an identical poetic strain, so strongly was this community of feeling brought out in the relationship between the favorite subjects of working-class songs and the criminal themes of the street ballads, in almost the same words, meters, and tunes” (396) Acquiescence to or reiteration of worker/criminal equations established itself in workers’ views of themselves as “a different, alien and hostile society” (398) in literature that served as an “involuntary and ‘passive’ recording and communication of them” (395). Though I am investigating Victorian England, not nineteenth-century France, and though I regard the street ballads as popular texts which record resistance, not acquiescence, Chevalier’s work usefully articulates the predicament of class-based ideologies about worker and criminal which functioned similarly in Victorian England. More importantly, Chevalier acknowledges the complexity of street ballads as cultural texts..

“[I]T IS TIME THE OBSCURITY . . . WAS done away,” writes Charlotte Brontë in 1850. “The little mystery, which formerly yielded some harmless pleasure, has lost its interest. Circumstances have changed” (“Biographical Notice” 134). The “little mystery” she coyly invokes here was not so trivial in the eyes of the literary world. From the moment that Jane Eyre appeared, reviewers speculated wildly about the identity of the authors of Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. “[T]he whole reading-world of London was in a ferment to discover the unknown author,” writes Elizabeth Gaskell (271). When the identities of the three sisters emerged, it was something of a shock to most of the London literati to discover that the writers of these “coarse” and “repulsive” novels were young, sheltered Yorkshire women, daughters of a curate, who had seen little of the world.1 Although the secret had been slowly coming out, bit by bit, it was in 1850 that Charlotte Brontë put the speculations to rest with her “Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell,” written for a new edition of Wuthering Heights.

ONE OF THE BEST selling volumes of Victorian verse, as Donald Gray has shown, was Thomas Babington Macaulay’s The Lays of Ancient Rome first published in 1842 (Complete Writings 19: 167–279). For a generation after its publication, the Lays also generally enjoyed the praise of critics and poets.1 But in 1860, just months after Macaulay had been interred in Poets’ Corner, Matthew Arnold offered up the Lays as a touchstone of the grandly bad. In his lectures On Translating Homer, Arnold said that “a man’s power to detect the ring of false metal in those Lays is a good measure of his fitness to give an opinion about poetical matters at all” (1: 211). Arnold’s put-down was echoed in later works such as Thomas Humphry Ward’s multi-volume anthology The English Poets (1880), which opened with Arnold’s essay “The Study of Poetry.” Ward cited the continuing popularity of the Lays, but he pointed out that “the higher critical authorities have pronounced against them, and are even teaching us to wonder whether they can be called poetry at all. They find in the Lays the same faults which mar the author’s prose — commonplaceness of ideas, cheapness of sentiment and imagery, made to prevail by dint of the writer’s irresistible command of a new rhetorical force; in a word, eloquent Philistinism” (4: 540).

“Strange, that a pair of silk stockings should so upset a nation.”

— Oscar Wilde, quoted in Richard Ellmann’s Oscar Wilde

TODAY, WE TEND TO ENVISION the male Aesthete as a lanky, long-haired swain outfitted in velveteen pantaloons and clutching an outsize sunflower, an image straight from George du Maurier’s Punch cartoons or Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience. Serious scholars of Aestheticism often prefer to resist this parodic image, insisting on the movement’s significant philosophical development in Ruskin’s and Pater’s work.1 Yet Aesthetic fashion was not just a frivolous side effect of the movement. In fact, Aesthetic fashion was the focus of late-Victorian attention because it so clearly displayed the anxieties, stresses, and formulations of the movement. It was a battlefield for competing voices within Aestheticism; it was a stage whereon the various gender notions of the movement could be displayed; and it functioned as both a critique and a form of art. This article examines the theoretical rationales for Aesthetic fashion, focusing on the paradigmatic figures of Oscar Wilde, Max Beerbohm, and George du Maurier. They demonstrate how Aesthetic men developed new visual codes to reconfigure their fear of feminization, creating a new kind of body which could be read as an essential, unchanging, scholarly, and artistic icon.

A YOUNG MAN living on a meager tutor’s salary skimps on his expenses to attend an 1882 commemorative exhibit of D. G. Rossetti’s work at the Royal Academy; he then purchases a volume of Rossetti’s sonnets, and makes a pilgrimage to Cheyne Walk where Rossetti had lived. He adopts Aesthetic style more concretely when he moves into a new flat and furnishes it with a dado and a cabinet papered in a Japanese print. In 1886, he subscribes to the library of the Grosvenor Gallery, the institutional center of British Aestheticism. He is tickled by Oscar Wilde’s public performances as an aesthete in 1887, regretting only that Wilde has cut his hair and exchanged velvet breeches for more conventional trousers. Having copied Pater’s famous passage on La Gioconda into his Commonplace Book in 1880, he responds to a trip to Greece years later through a Paterian reverie, trying to recapture the lost, classical Greece he had learned as a child.

I refer to the health of millions who spend their lives in manufactories. . . I ask if these millions enjoy that vigour of body which is ever a direct good, and without which all other advantages are comparatively worthless? (The Effects of Arts, Trades, and Professions, and of civic states and habits of living, on health andlongevity, C. Turner Thackrah)

[Factory reformers] wrote in the newspapers, and circulated pamphlets - they petitioned Parliament - exhibited diseased and crippled objects in London - and made such an impression on the public mind, that their measures were carried in the House of Commons almost by acclamation, notwithstanding the testimony of facts of a directly contrary nature. (Exposition of the Factory Question)

THIS ARTICLE SEEKS to explore the significance of the injured working-class body in debates about the nature and meaning of industrial capitalism in the first half of the nineteenth century.1 It will argue that a growing awareness that the comforts of middle-class existence depended on processes that maimed working-class lives was profoundly unsettling to the bourgeois conscience as it threatened one of its most important narratives of legitimation. Finally, it will trace the emergence of the “accident” (as both concept and fictional trope) as a response to and resolution of this ideological crisis.

CRITICS HAVE BEEN COMPLAINING about Ruskin’s inconsistencies since the 1840s. In 1856, Elizabeth Rigby wrote contemptuously of Ruskin’s “crochety contradictions and peevish paradoxes” (187). Marshall Mather lamented in 1897 that the critic’s “so-called inconsistencies roused the laughter and sneer of superficial readers” (xi). By 1933, R. H. Wilenski simply affirmed that “Ruskin’s art criticism . . . is an appalling muddle” (192). And in our own time, scholars as various as John Rosenberg, Elizabeth Helsinger, and Gary Wihl have pointed not so much to the connections as to the shifts, gaps, and breaks that interrupt the succession of Ruskin’s first nine major volumes — Modern Painters, The Seven Lamps of Architecture, and The Stones of Venice.1

IN CONSIDERING THE SUBJECT of masculinity in Mary Barton (1848), it is perhaps well to remember that Elizabeth Gaskell conceived the novel as being about a man. “‘John Barton’ was the original title of the book,” she wrote to Mrs. W. R. Greg early in 1849. “Round the character of John Barton all the others formed themselves; he was my hero, the person with whom all my sympathies went . . .” (Letters 42: 74). Gaskell’s letter of 5 January 1849 to Miss Lamont reaffirms this: “‘John Barton’ was the original name, as being the central figure to my mind . . . in writing he was [?] my ‘hero’; and it was a London thought coming through the publisher that it must be called Mary B” (Letters 39: 70). While the “London” title of Mary Barton focuses on the romance elements of the plot (and, by extension, on the female gender role), Gaskell’s original title of John Barton focused on working-class protest (and, by extension, on the male gender role). Indeed, there is much to suggest that the novel is as much concerned with masculinity as it is with industrialization and class strife.

IN ITS VERY TITLE, Charles Kingsley’s 1850 novel Alton Locke, Tailor and Poet: An Autobiography hints at a set of questions that the novel itself never manages to answer in a very clear or convincing way: what is the relationship between manual and intellectual labor, between industrial and poetic production, between making a coat and writing a poem? How might the early Victorian imagination conceive of a working tailor who is also a working poet — especially in light of the various actual working-class poets who appeared on the literary scene in the first half of the nineteenth-century, complete with occupational epithets, such as Thomas Cooper, the “shoe-maker poet” (a figure who in many ways provided a model for Kingsley’s fictional protagonist)? And what if, like a fair number of urban artisans, including Cooper himself, the tailor-poet is also a Chartist — as Alton Locke indeed turns out to be? What is the relationship between the Chartist call for reform and for representation of disenfranchised men in the political realm, and the attempts of a fictional working-class man (since the novel’s treatment of gender, as I will argue, is crucial to its treatment of politics and culture) to enter the early Victorian field of literary production? Or why, in the first place, should a novel that treats the “social problem” of class in the hungry forties and the appalling working conditions of the clothes trade do so by way of the literary aspirations of its title character, that is, through a fictional construction of working-class authorship?

ASSESSMENTS OF ELIZABETH GASKELL’S two novels of social purpose typically conclude that North and South, published in 1855, is a more mature work stylistically and ideologically than Mary Barton, published in 1848. North and South is said to integrate the narrative modes of romance and realism more effectively than Mary Barton (Felber 63, Horsman 284), and to provide a more complicated narrative structure (Schor, Scheherezade 122–23), a more complex depiction of social conflicts (Easson 59 and 93) and a more satisfactory resolution of them (Duthie 84, Kestner 170). North and South is also said to deal with “more complex intellectual issues” (Craik 31). And the novel’s heroine, Margaret Hale, has been seen as Gaskell’s most mature creation — a woman who grows in self-awareness as she adapts to an alien environment (Kestner 164–166) and, unlike Mary Barton, becomes an active mediator of class conflicts (Stoneman 120), the central consciousness that brings together “the lessons of social change and romance” (Schor, Scheherezade 127).1 The reconciliation of these conflicts she inspires through her influence over both mill owner and worker has been praised as a more effective and credible narrative resolution to the social problems depicted in the novel than the reconciliation between mill owner and worker in Mary Barton (David 36).

I. Privileged Spies

TOWARD THE END of Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), the most infamous femme fatale of the Victorian novel retires to her dressing room after a long day of committing arson and attempting murder. Shamming a headache, Lady Audley sends her maid from the room. The narrator explains her motive:

@FP = CHARLES DICKENS ADAMANTLY DECLARES he will not indulge in “any grave examination into the government or misgovernment of any portion” of Italy, because “that beautiful land” requires only aesthetic reflections that “have ever a fanciful and idle air” (1); and John Ruskin relentlessly insists on turning attention away from the action in the Italian streets and inward toward the motionless stones of buildings, because Venice, “Queen of Marble and of Mud,” has no political dimension (“Stones of Venice” 9: xxix). Elizabeth Barrett Browning, by contrast, masterfully tackles the problem of the emerging nation’s political image in Victorian England. These comments by prominent Victorian men of letters reflect the conventional British formulation of Italy through the nineteenth century “as the locus of the feminine and silent properties of space, painting, nature, and the body — a place outside of history where temporal motion had ceased” (Bailey 94).1 Indeed, a commonplace implicit in the British definition of pre-national Italy is the idea of la bella Italia as apolitical and even ahistorical. But from 1815 onwards, as Italians became increasingly dissatisfied under their new Austrian rulers, the British equation between Italy and art, Italy and beauty, became increasingly out of touch with the Italian republican movement.2

EARLY IN Frances Trollope’s 1839 novel The Life and Adventures of Michael Armstrong, the Factory Boy, the title character is introduced into the kitchen of Sir Matthew Dowling’s home. The assembled servants, rigidly organized into their own hierarchy of status and position, react with horror and derision at the very idea of a factory boy joining the household on any terms. The only way in which they can explain such a preposterous idea is to speculate that the boy is Sir Matthew’s illegitimate son; only by inventing a hidden genealogy can they imagine a place for a factory worker in the genteel British home (Figure 2).

The true greatness of this great century consists . . . not in its vain wars, and formal stage, and stilted eloquence, and pompous palaces, and grandiose art, but in the formation and working out of the political and social system of which these things were the first fruits. It is idle to indulge in academical discussions as to the merits of this system. We have inherited it, it has penetrated our lives in every direction, we act, we think under its invisible pressure, and its study is pregnant with teaching.

— Emilia Dilke, Art in the Modern State

FUSING AESTHETIC INQUIRY WITH POLITICAL THEORY, Emilia Dilke’s Art in the Modern State heralds a shift in the evolving discipline of art history. Published in 1888, the book succeeds her well-received The Renaissance of Art in France (1879) and anticipates by a decade her multi-volume study of the arts of eighteenth-century France. Methodologically, however, Art in the Modern State stands apart from her other books. Predicated upon the supposition that art — indeed all cultural production — derives from and serves the “invisible pressure” of ideology, the book points to a new direction in Victorian aesthetic theory. Specifically, the book offers the first direct application of Marxist philosophy in an art historical text. That this innovation met and continues to meet with critical as well as popular indifference appears, at first, extraordinary. Considered within the context of Victorian art writing and materialist art history, however, the sources of this critical neglect begin to emerge.

[Hardy] is too fond — and the practice has been growing on him through all his later books — of writing like a man “who has been at a great feast of languages and stole the scraps,” or, in plain English, of making experiments in a form of language which he does not seem clearly to understand, and in a style for which he was assuredly not born. (Mowbray Morris)

No reader can fail to notice — and few critics have failed to deplore — the ponderous allusions to literature and art which strew with their initial capitals the pages of Hardy’s early novels. . . . The mark of the autodidact is perhaps to be found not so much in what he knows as in how he regards the world of knowledge. . . . Hardy may have known more than many a man with a university education, but he lacked the kind of intellectual as well as social assurance that such an education might have given him. (Thomas Hardy: His Career as a Novelist, Michael Millgate)

DESPITE A GAP OF ONE HUNDRED YEARS between these two statements, they exhibit little difference with regard to an issue that has drawn critical comment since first publication of Thomas Hardy’s novels: the language of the texts. Morris and Millgate both disapprove of Hardy’s style because of its overt use of quotation, but behind this lies the view that good style depends upon correct language, and that the ability to use language correctly is the preserve of a select few by virtue of their class or education. In the one hundred years and more since Hardy wrote the novels, there are many instances of critics sharing this opinion. And yet, of course, from the early 1970s onwards, new theoretical approaches to language have increasingly dominated critical practice, changing rapidly the premises of literary interpretation. More specifically, the relationship between literature, language, and education has been theorized as an ideological matrix requiring precise historical and political analysis. The late nineteenth century in England, with its dramatic changes in State Education and the cultural crisis leading to fin-de-siècle decadence has proved fertile ground for investigations of these issues, which have indeed cited Hardy’s texts in the process.1 This article invokes that research in its focus upon Jude the Obscure — the novel by Hardy that most explicitly explores the links between education, literature, and language in the context of class.

Who cares whether Mr. Ruskin’s views on Turner are sound or not? What does it matter? That mighty and majestic prose of his, so fervid and fiery-coloured in its noble eloquence, so rich in its elaborate, symphonic music, so sure and certain, at its best, in subtle choice of word and epithet, is at least as great a work of art as any of those wonderful sunsets that bleach or rot on their corrupted canvases in England’s Gallery; greater, indeed, one is apt to think at times, not merely because its equal beauty is more enduring, but on account of the fuller variety of its appeal, soul speaking to soul in those long cadenced lines, not through form and colour alone, though through these, indeed, completely and without loss, but with intellectual and emotional utterance, with lofty passion and with loftier thought, with imaginative insight, and with poetic aim; greater, I always think, even as Literature is the greater art.

—Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist

WHILE MUCH ATTENTION has been lavished upon the positive and ultimately profitable relationship between Ruskin and Turner, the closeness of their association has served to obscure a more subtle dynamic between the author and the painter in their respective quests for expression. Both Turner, who considered himself a poet as well as a painter, and Ruskin, an accomplished draughtsman who illustrated his own writings, were actively involved in forging new connections between word and image, and in breaking down the barriers between genres embraced by earlier generations. Turner and Ruskin each turned to the sister art both for inspiration, and importantly, for a means of supplementing what each perceived to be the insufficiencies of his own medium. For Turner, painting’s concrete, mimetic nature was at odds with his desire to communicate abstract ideas, while for Ruskin, language’s abstract and conventional nature fell short of our visual experience of the world and failed adequately to address our visual powers of thought, memory, and imagination. Yet as Turner tried to infuse his painting with poetry and Ruskin tried to render his prose visual, they nonetheless remained acutely aware of the gap between words and images. And if Turner and Ruskin readily acknowledged their intergeneric borrowings from the sister arts, implicit within their formulations of “poetic painting” and “painterly prose” is the subtext of the paragone, an age old rivalry between painters and poets for representational or expressive superiority.

IT WAS FORMANY YEARS conventional in Hardy studies to treat his rustics — those minor working-class characters who flesh out rural communities, especially in the early novels — in terms that effectively muted their ideological significance: to consider them as literary conventions like the chorus of Greek tragedy or Shakespeare’s clowns, for instance, or at best nostalgic details of local color (for examples, see Wotton 189–91). More recently, some Marxist critics have exposed the biases of such approaches, although at times oversimplifying in other ways the ideological functions of these characters.1 My objective in this essay is to argue for what I see as the more complicated and more dialogic ways in which these minor characters function to focus issues of social mobility that are at the heart of Hardy’s fiction. I am interested in the ways rustic characters function as agents of class rivalry, but more specifically in the ways their characteristic behaviors help to define by contrast the kinds of subjectivity that justify the higher social positions of the more central characters. Hardy’s characteristic combination of this strategy with the more conventional one for advancing bourgeois values in the Victorian novel — by exposing the unworthiness of gentry and aristocrats — can be linked to his insecurities about his own class identity and the repressions involved in maintaining it. He sympathized with the resentments of the lower classes, yet was also invested in positioning them as different from those who, like himself,

BY THE CLOSE OF THE PREVIOUS CENTURY, English music-hall or variety, an entertainment form that incorporated comic acts, sketch comedy, dance, even animal acts, was drawing a broad base of middle-class patrons, and losing its exclusive character as working-class entertainment. “Variety” halls like the Alhambra or the Empire now claimed the attention and lucre of a new mass audience. Music-hall was also, I would argue, a proving ground where enterprising intellectuals could flex their evaluative muscle. Perhaps more than any other Late Victorian man of letters, critic and poet Arthur Symons frequented the music-hall with an eye toward representing it, a service that he regularly performed for The Star newspaper and elite cultural venues such as The Fortnightly Review.