Making Regions in the Victorian Novel by Heather Miner a THESIS

RICE UNIVERSITY Communities of Place: Making Regions in the Victorian Novel by Heather Miner A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE Doctor of Philosophy APPROVED , THESIS COMMITTEE : HOUSTON , TEXAS MAY 2013 Copyright Heather Miner 2013 ABSTRACT Communities of Place: Making Regions in the Victorian Novel Heather Miner Mid-way through George Eliot’s Middlemarch , the heroine of the novel develops a plan to move from her country estate in England’s Midlands to the northern industrial county of Yorkshire, where she intends to found a model factory town. Dorothea Brooke’s utopian fantasy of class relations, ultimately abandoned, hints at the broader regional and geospatial discourse at work in this canonical Victorian novel, but is equally ignored by critics and by other characters in Eliot’s realist masterpiece. In Communities of Place , I explore a new current of scholarship in Victorian studies by examining the role that England’s historic and geographic regions played in the development of the novel. Scholars of British literature and history have long argued that Victorian national and cultural identity was largely forged and promulgated from England’s urban centers. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the center became synonymous with London and, in the national metropolitan imagination, counties outside of London seemingly became homogenized into peripheral, anti-modern spaces. The critical tradition reinforces this historical narrative by arguing that the rise of nationalism precludes the development of regionalism. Thus, theorists of British nationalism have glossed over England’s intranational identity and have directed attention beyond England’s borders, toward France or Scotland, to analyze national identity within Great Britain as a whole. Scholars of intra-English culture, meanwhile, have often narrowly focused on county histories and the working classes in isolation. Both types of studies effectively argued that the English middle class, and the middle-class Victorian novel, lack regional affiliation; as Raymond Williams argues, middle-class Victorians were “external” to regional life. With Communities of Place, I join a scholarly conversation that offers an alternative to these scholarly cul-de-sacs: a critically engaged and historically responsive account of English regionalism. My project demonstrates how the development of distinctive English regional cultures paralleled, and occasionally destabilized, the formation of English national identity in the Victorian period. Central to this project is my assertion that the English upper and middle classes, like the working classes, were in part defined by their regional affiliations. Communities of Place , then, offers a historically specific understanding of regionalism as an important structuring framework for the social, geographic, and environmental relations in post-Romantic English literature by drawing attention to four formulations of English regionalism: the early-Victorian defenses of industrial Northern Englishness, mid-Victorian regional conceptions of mixed rural and factory spaces, the repurposing of non-industrial landscapes for leisure, and the late-century return to the materiality of countryside, now emptied of Romantic naturalism. In each chapter I study one geographically-specific cultural region, from Elizabeth Gaskell’s industrial Lancashire to Thomas Hardy’s rural Wessex, in order to explore more generally how local class relations, topography, and recreational activities helped to shape discrete notions of Englishness outside of London. This methodology offers a productive alternative to center/peripheral models for understanding relations within England. By focusing on the depiction of regional responses to topics of national discussion, ranging from industrialism to the rise of consumer culture, I show how these issues were negotiated by the middle classes Victorian literature. These responses influence contemporary discussions about regional authority over landscape policy, the cultural status of the vernacular, and the preservation of green spaces in the urban nation. I argue that scholars can find the history of these concerns not only within the physical grounds of regional landscapes but also in the literary texts that helped to produce such places. Acknowledgments It seems particularly fitting to me that my graduate studies should culminate in a dissertation on regional relationships and communities. As I have travelled from Charlottesville to Houston and from Eugene to Liverpool for my education and for this project, I have been incredibly fortunate to have the support and feedback from a far- flung group of faculty members and friends. Helena Michie and Robert L. Patten, co- chairs of this project, have been unfailingly generous with their advice, commentary, and encouragement. Their guidance and meticulous reading have been enormously helpful to my development not only as a scholar, but also as a teacher and colleague. This project emerged from a course taught by Thad Logan, who has been a kind interlocutor and detailed reader of my work throughout my time at Rice. I would also like to thank Martin Wiener, Lynn Voskuil, Steve Arata, and Karen Chase, all of whom have been tremendously generous with their time and interest. Additionally, I am grateful to the Dickens Universe, the Attingham Trust, and the English Department at Rice for intellectual and financial support. I am indebted to the community of friends who have sustained me through graduate school. I could not imagine completing my degree at Rice without Adriane Bezusko, whose friendship has been indispensible and whose perseverance is an inspiration; Victoria Ford Smith, who is proof that kindness and a good heart will always be rewarded; and Elizabeth Coggin Womack, whose voice of empathy and reason has been essential to keeping anxiety in check. Thanks also go to friends near and far, including Michael D. Lewis, Jane Ford, Helen Kuo, and Kattie Basnett. It would require a companion volume to this dissertation for me to have the space to fully express my gratitude to my family. Having a sister, Jennifer Miner Weaver, who understands and appreciates the highs and lows of graduate school, has been a gift; having a brother-in-law, David Weaver, who understands this, too, has been a double blessing. Thank goodness for Jack Weaver, who knows nothing about academics (yet). This dissertation is dedicated to my parents, Barbara Williams Miner and John Burnham Miner. My father’s commitment to his work, his family, and to children’s education, has been an inspiration both professionally and personally. My mother, whose support, patience, and encouragement have been constant, continues to be the sort of person I want to be when I grow up. My family has shown me that the community that matters the most is the one where they are. Table of Contents Introduction 1 Chapter One Narrativizing the North: The Literary Topography of Greater Manchester 23 Chapter Two Reforming Spaces: Architectural Imagination in the Midlands 71 Chapter Three Trollope and the Hunt for West Country Identity 106 Chapter Four Wessex Relics: Thomas Hardy and the National Preservation Movement 176 Bibliography 222 1 INTRODUCTION COMMUNITIES OF PLACE : MAKING REGIONS IN THE VICTORIAN NOVEL In 1983 Raymond Williams published a short chapter on “Region and Class in the Novel” in Writing in Society . The majority of the book explores the historical and cultural sources of particular aspects of writing—such as Shakespearean dialogue and Dickensian characterization—but this chapter is different. Rather than concentrating on the stuff of literature, Williams’s focus in this essay is on what is missing: a long tradition of regional writing in England. Williams argues that the label “regional novel” is applicable mainly to certain novels written at the end of the nineteenth century and more fully to writing in the post-World War I era. He claims that regional novels are distinctive in certain ways: they are confined to certain regions with recognized local characters; they tell us solely or primarily about life in the region; and they are “about” or “set in” a specific, working- class community (Williams 229). Though many Victorian novels and most realist literature share these characteristics, for Williams, nineteenth-century bourgeois authors used the regional setting not to explore individuals but types. Regional novels before the twentieth century, according to Williams, then, reductively limited their representation of the region to narrating relationships in them rather than the reality of life in these spaces, and therefore could not develop fully as a genre until the novel had been decoupled from middle-class authorship. If regionalism can only be expressed by working-class authors living in the region and by authors who confined their writing to an almost 2 anthropological fictionalization of the region, it follows that this genre could not develop until literacy rates increased at the end of the nineteenth century. Williams’s essay seems to mark a point of agreement on the subject of English regionalism among literary critics. While work in the tradition of Williams has demonstrated the extent to which the English landscape is an artificial construction of literary and visual culture and has identified a gap between the social reality of the English countryside’s aesthetic and nationalist purpose, 1 considerably less critical attention has been paid to revising his

Load more