THE IDEA FOR THIS CLUSTER of work had its origins in a session of the 1996 Modern Language Association Convention in Washington, D. C., where the editors of Victorian Literature and Culture organized a panel devoted to the topic at hand: “Victorian Studies and Cultural Studies.” The panel presentations and the post-panel discussion were extremely stimulating, and it was clear that the rich topic wanted further consideration. The following selection of essays, gathered together under this journal’s special feature, the “Editors’ Topic,” is the result. Here, then, are four articles representing a range of practice — though not, by any means, the entire range of practice — in the intersecting fields of Victorian studies and cultural studies. The articles are followed by fourteen forum essays presenting an array of pressing issues, arguments, and sharp opinions centering in the relations — past, present, and potential — between Victorian studies and cultural studies. Three of the following eighteen pieces were presented (and those in shorter, nascent form) at the MLA: Mary Ellis Gibson’s article on Henry Martyn, Jane Eyre, and Missionary Biography, Kristen Leaver’s consideration of Victorian melodrama, and my brief ruminations on the concepts of “discourse” and “genre.” All the rest were commissioned for this issue of Victorian Literature and Culture.

So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory.

I Cor. 15.54

IN MID-CENTURY LONDON there occurred a spectacle of massive proportions, featuring always at its center a corpse. The funeral of the Duke of Wellington, an event that has occasioned surprisingly little critical attention, took place in 1852 and was recognized as one of the greatest public displays of the Victorian period.1 Indeed, many felt it to be one of the most significant public events in the history of Britain, and if Britain, then of course the globe: as the Illustrated London News put it, “[this event] may be said to have surpassed in significant grandeur any similar tribute to greatness ever offered in the world” (Nov. 20, 1852, 430).2 St. Paul’s Cathedral was specially illuminated with six thousand new gas lights in preparation for the ceremony of interment, while the funeral procession, comprised of more than ten thousand marchers, encompassed central London, enjoying an audience numbering more than one and a half million people. Queen Victoria and virtually every major and minor national figure in politics or the arts viewed either the procession or the ceremony at St. Paul’s. The interment was quite literally a multi-media event: the spectacle drew for its effects on numerous disciplines, from literature, music, and journalism to painting, drawing, and architectural design, and spawned in turn editorials, songs, poems, paintings, prints, and engravings.

TO SPEAK ABOUT JOHN RUSKIN’S anxious figures for engraved reproduction is to speak about his troubled relationship to a modernity in which excess and impermanence present complex and interrelated challenges. The ruined cathedral in my title occurs in lectures Ruskin delivered in 1857, and published the same year as The Political Economy of Art. Invited to speak at Manchester on the occasion of the Art-Treasures Exhibition, at the height of his fame as a critic, Ruskin responded to the moment with two lectures challenging much that the exhibition stood for. He offered the following apocalyptic description of the situation of art away from the self-congratulating festival. It is worth considering this passage — at once about art and about the responsibility for its blighting — in relation to the immense temporary structure built to house the Art-Treasures Exhibition (Figure 9):

IN 1814 THE YOUNG Thomas Babington Macaulay tried his hand at the couplet to memorialize one of his Evangelical family’s heroes. Henry Martyn, chaplain to the British East India Company, had died in 1812 on his way home from duties in the east. With an adolescent’s enthusiasm for battle Macaulay engaged the tropes of spiritual quest and violent conquest that accompanied the evangelical spirit. To Martyn’s efforts he attributed, “Eternal trophies! Not with carnage red, / Not stained with tears by hapless captives shed, / But trophies of the Cross!” (281). Military violence gives way to conquest in a higher sphere, the world of the mission field. Nearly a half century later George Eliot evoked Martyn’s spiritual heroism at the outset of her career as a fiction writer. In Scenes of Clerical Life, Janet Dempster finds the inspiration to reform her life by reading the Memoir of Henry Martyn. Martyn’s example nerves her to engage in self-sacrifice and is the catalyst for her return to the scene of domestic violence; in an act of self-conquest Janet assumes the role of model wife and forgiving Christian.

QUESTIONSABOUT THE PERFORMATIVE NATURE of Victorian culture have received extended attention in the past decade or so as critics have begun to examine the relationship between representation and subjectivity.1 By and large, such studies have fruitfully problematized our received assumptions about the private character of the Victorians. At the same time, however, they have also implicitly privileged the middle-class frames of reference that shape the distinction, for even as they complicate our understanding of performance by calling into question the distinction between public and private modes, critics who take up such issues tend not to question the stability of the categories of experience under scrutiny. As a result, while we gain important new insights into the cultural formation of identity or genre underwritten by the separation of public and private spheres, we also risk reading all Victorians as if their relationships to such ideological formations were identical with those of the emerging middle class.

IT SHOULD COME AS NO SURPRISE, and probably doesn’t, that cultural studies and Victorian studies have much in common. As George Levine observes in his overview of the earlier field over the past quarter century, “the founding of [the journal] Victorian Studies, in 1957 . . . was almost exactly contemporary with the publication of Raymond Williams’s Culture and Society, one of the most influential books of the last half century” (136).1 Williams’s book was equally influential, indeed something of a founding text, both for Victorian studies and for cultural studies. And this makes sense. Williams’s tough-minded but generous salvaging of the romantic anti-capitalist tradition from Burke through Arnold and all the way to Orwell, which did so much to reinvent Victorian studies for the left, might also be seen as an argument for the necessity of cultural studies, which went on to integrate the tradition of romantic anti-capitalism into its pluralized, anthropological view of culture and to extend it into the present.

This is an adaptation of a talk first presented to the Council for College and University English (CCUE) conference on English for the Millennium, Sept. 1996. CCUE is the British professional body that represents the discipline and departments of English in England, Scotland, and Wales. The talk was meant to provide a transatlantic perspective on the future of the discipline. Originally it was published in CCUE News (June 1997) and later adapted to presentations throughout the U.K. The excerpts here focus on issues of multiculturalism, interdisciplinarity, and cultural studies.

WHEN I DRAW ON MY EXPERIENCE in the United States it is not because I am unaware that the centrality of English literary history is less controversial in England than in its former colony, but because the areas that I see as fundamental to the future of English — a diverse Anglophone population and the demands of the marketplace — are fundamental to both. Twenty years ago, American and British academics were different worlds. The formal democratization of the university and official ideologies of neoliberalism, or market orientation, have brought them closer together. My argument is that the future of English depends less on theories or ideas than on human geographies, institutional conditions, and our embeddedness in market society.

ALTHOUGH IT IS NOW COMMONPLACE to find cultural studies invoked as one of the tributaries of Victorian studies — and the rubric for this journal is no exception — the precise relationship between these two interdiciplinary fields is still unsettled and seems likely to remain so. This is not, as is sometimes claimed, because cultural studies has felt able to dispense with the past, preferring to dwell in and upon the postmodernized present: to the contrary, some of the finest work currently linked to cultural studies has shown a keen awareness of the bankruptcy of contemporary posthistoire, insisting instead upon the continuing need to interrogate the historical record, to reexamine what was at stake both in the longues durées of culturally sedimented time and in the flashpoints and crises of yesteryear. Catherine Hall’s engagement with the changing configuration of “race” in the debates about the British empire between 1830 and 1870 has been exemplary in this regard, but she is far from being the only relevant exception that one might cite — Carolyn Steedman and Richard Johnson are among the many other names that immediately come to mind.

LIKE MANY OTHER PEOPLE these days, I’m concerned about the speed-up in graduate education. The chief cause of our students’ premature professionalization is, of course, the terrible job market — which John Guillory has faulted for propagating intellectual shallowness among our students, by forcing them to become active scholars too soon. Guillory remarks, incidentally, that the social marginalization of literary studies reflected in the job crisis coincides with its strident politicization, which he reads as symptomatic of — and by no means a solution to — the decreased relevance of the discipline itself in contemporary society. What Guillory doesn’t mention, however, is the obvious role that cultural studies plays in the speed-up of graduate studies, and the way its simplistic political imperatives contribute to that speed-up. But it seems to me that the vast new territories cultural studies opens up to scholarship, along with the pressures it creates in all of us to find a hot new cultural topic (in Don DeLillo’s White Noise, one cultural studies professor to another: “I want to do with Elvis what you did with Hitler”), require a reductive politics to enable the quick consumption of knowledge that makes rapid professionalization possible. Our students are no longer surprised by our “commodify or die” ethos.

VICTORIAN STUDIES PRACTITIONERS have often applauded themselves on their openness to views, topics, and approaches not immediately recognizable as already part of the field. I put the formulation this way because Victorian studies scholars and critics also prize the field for its capaciousness; they tend to think of the field as large and already all-inclusive. It houses many genres and sub-disciplines and it first welcomed certain kinds of critical theory when other historical fields moved more slowly to accept them.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.