'A Hapless Race': Supernatural Social Satire in May Kendall's Poetry
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View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by University of Birmingham Research Archive, E-theses Repository ‘A HAPLESS RACE’: SUPERNATURAL SOCIAL SATIRE IN MAY KENDALL’S POETRY by GEMMA KING A thesis submitted to the University of Birmingham for the degree of MASTER OF PHILOSOPHY English Department School of English, Drama, American and Canadian Studies College of Arts and Law University of Birmingham September 2013 University of Birmingham Research Archive e-theses repository This unpublished thesis/dissertation is copyright of the author and/or third parties. The intellectual property rights of the author or third parties in respect of this work are as defined by The Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 or as modified by any successor legislation. Any use made of information contained in this thesis/dissertation must be in accordance with that legislation and must be properly acknowledged. Further distribution or reproduction in any format is prohibited without the permission of the copyright holder. ABSTRACT The decades around the fin de siècle are widely regarded as a period of rapid transition and development to which the Victorians reacted with excitement and anxiety. It was also a period permeated by interest in supernatural phenomena such as ghosts, fairies, and telepathic demonstrations, spurred by the challenges of modernity to pre-existing forms of knowledge, belief, and social organisation. This thesis examines the response of the late- Victorian writer and social activist, May Kendall, to such developments, arguing that she utilised the supernatural as a vehicle for social satire and is a significant contributor to the history of a literature of social critique. Largely overlooked in modern academia, there exists only limited criticism of Kendall’s work, and no sustained examination of her supernatural poetry. To address this deficiency, I balance close reading of key poems with reference to a wider selection of her work, considered in the context of their original publications, such as Victorian periodicals. I further argue that her distinct sense of humour distinguishes Kendall amongst fin de siècle poets, stimulating the popular reception of her work and contributing to the increasing scholarly interest in Kendall as part of the recovery of women writers from the period. To Glynne William Shilton CONTENTS Introduction 1 Chapter 1: Ghosts 16 Chapter 2: Pygmalion Myth 30 Chapter 3: Fairy Tale 46 Chapter 4: Altered Consciousness 65 Conclusion 78 Appendix A: ‘The Conscientious Ghost’ 83 Appendix B: ‘A Ballad of Boding’ 86 Appendix C: ‘An Incident in Real Life, Related by an Eye-Witness in Marble’ 91 Appendix D: ‘The Legend of J. J. Jackson, the Self-Made Man’ 94 Appendix E: ‘The Fatal Lift’ 98 Appendix F: ‘A Pure Hypothesis’ 104 Appendix G: ‘A Hypnotic Suggestion’ 107 Bibliography 111 1 INTRODUCTION Kendall As John Holmes notes, a contributing factor in the lack of existing scholarly criticism upon Kendall’s work, is the fact that relatively little is known about her life.1 There are passing comments in scholarship relating to her contemporaries and collaborators, such as Seebohm Rowntree2 and Andrew Lang;3 multiple short summaries in anthologies of Victorian women poets;4 and, most extensive, an entry on Kendall in the Dictionary of Literary Biography.5 Born Emma Goldworth Kendall in Bridlington, Yorkshire, to parents James Kendall, a Weslyan minister, and Eliza Goldworth Level Kendall, May Kendall spent most of her life in the North of England. Previous sources of biographical information deduce from the quality and content of Kendall’s work, as well as her ability 1 John Robert Holmes, ‘“The Lay of the Trilobite”: Rereading May Kendall’, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 11 (2010), 1–15 <http://www.19.bbk.ac.uk/index.php/19/article/viewFile/575/658> [accessed 8 November 2011] (p. 2). 2 Asa Briggs, Social Though and Social Action: A Study of the Work of Seebohm Rowntree, 1871–1954 (London: Longmans, 1961). 3 Roger Lancelyn Green, Andrew Lang: A Critical Biography; with a Short–Title Bibliography of the Works of Andrew Lang (Leicester: Edmund Ward, 1946). 4Victorian Women Poets 1830–1900: An Anthology, ed. by Jennifer Breen (London: Everyman, 1994), pp. xix–xx; Margaret Reynolds, ‘May Kendall’, in Victorian Women Poets: An Anthology, ed. by Angela Leighton and Margaret Reynolds (Oxford and Cambridge: Blackwell, 1995), pp. 627–8; Nineteenth Century Women Poets, ed. by Isobel Armstrong, Joseph Bristow, and Catch Sharrock (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p. 760; Victorian Women Poets: An Annotated Anthology, ed. by Virginia Blain, rev. edn (Harlow: Pearson, 2009), pp. 308–10. 5 Marion Thain, ‘May Kendall’, in Dictionary of Literary Biography, ed. by Matthew J. Bruccoli and others, 366 vols (Detroit: Gale, 1978–2012), CCXL: Late Nineteenth– and Early Twentieth–Century British Women Poets, ed. by William B. Thesing (2001), pp. 118–23. 2 to live independently (she never married), that Kendall was a member of the ‘well– educated middle classes’.6 Archival research has revealed further evidence in support of this claim: an interview between Frederick Dolman and Miss Maitland, principal of Somerville women’s college at Oxford University in 1897, reveals that ‘Miss May Kendall, the writer, was […] a Somerville girl’.7 However, after a varied and prolific career, she died in poverty, with the Joseph Rowntree trust providing a grant to pay for her funeral.8 Best known and most often studied for her poetry, Kendall published two anthologies of verse during her lifetime: Dreams to Sell and Songs from Dreamland.9 She also published in a range of journals, such as Punch, The Magazine of Art, Longman’s Magazine, The Weslyan-Methodist Magazine and The Cornhill Magazine. However, her writing was not confined to poetry, as her periodical publications also extended to short stories, literary criticism and essays on religion, society, and theosophy. Other notable publications include the early prose fantasy satire That Very Mab, produced in collaboration with Andrew Lang, and three novels: From a Garret; Such is Life; and White Poppies; as well as Turkish Bonds, a collection of tales based around the Armenian 6 Blain, p. 308. 7 Frederick Dolman, ‘Women’s Colleges at Oxford’, English Illustrated Magazine, January 1897, pp. 459–65 (p. 460). 8 Armstrong, Bristow, and Sharrock, p. 760. 9 May Kendall, Dreams to Sell (London: Longmans and Green, 1887a; repr. [MT]: Kessinger Legacy Reprints, [2010]); —— Songs from Dreamland (London: Longmans and Green, 1894; repr. [MT]: Kessinger Legacy Reprints, [2010]). 3 massacres by the Turks in the 1890s.10 Later in her career, Kendall moved significantly away from poetry and fiction, conducting philanthropic work and producing, in collaboration with Seebohm Rowntree, How the Labourer Lives: A Study of the Rural Labour Problem, and, although her name does not appear on the title page, The Human Needs of Labour.11 She did not, however, abandon verse completely in order to make this transition, as she continued to publish in journals, though less frequently, alongside such work. Reception Kendall’s prose fiction has generally proven less popular than her poetry, both during her lifetime and to the present day. Originally published anonymously, That Very Mab is a satire upon many aspects of Kendall’s contemporary society, which will be discussed in Chapter 3 of this thesis. H. C. Beeching’s comments upon this early text during a review of Dreams to Sell in The Academy demonstrates its mixed reception, as he notes how it highlights both Kendall’s ‘wits’ and ‘wit’, but ‘[t]o read it required effort […] and it was not given to everyone to reach the end’.12 More severely, in his biography of Lang, Roger Lancelyn Green declares that ‘[a]s a whole That Very Mab is a dull and disappointing 10 [May Kendall and Andrew Lang], That Very Mab (London: Longmans and Green, 1885; repr. [MT]: Kessinger Legacy Reprints, [2010]); May Kendall, From a Garret (London: Longmans and Green, 1887b); —— Such is Life (London: Longmans and Green, 1889; repr. [London]: British Library, [2011]); —— White Poppies (London: Ward, Lock, and Bowden, 1893; repr. [London]: British Library, [2011]); —— Turkish Bonds (London: Pearson, 1898). 11 B. Seebohm Rowntree and May Kendall, How the Labourer Lives: A Study of the Rural Labour Problem (London: Nelson, 1913); B. Seebohm Rowntree [and May Kendall], The Human Needs of Labour (London: Nelson, 1918). 12 H. C. Beeching, ‘Literature’, The Academy, 12 November 1887, pp. 311–2 (p. 311). 4 book, the better sparks of humour very occasional, and the topical illusions tedious and unilluminating, even to the student of the period’.13 Modern scholars concur, as Margaret Reynolds’s description of That Very Mab as possessing a ‘dry and brittle tone which is both amusing and painful’, captures the essence of reviews such as Beeching’s published over a century earlier.14 Despite the shared subject matter of satirical content, That Very Mab appears in stark contrast to the more easily comical satire of poems such as Kendall’s ‘Lay of the Trilobite’ and ‘Ballad of the Ichthyosaurus’, which appeared, also unsigned, in the infamously funny Punch in the same year. 15 Comparing Dreams to Sell and That Very Mab, Beeching writes that in the former ‘the cleverness and the wit have more justice done them, owing to the restraints of verse’.16 This principle for the prose shortcomings can be extended to Kendall’s novels, in which the humour is diluted within the greater volume of text. Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century critics appeared predominantly concerned with the realism of plot and characterisation in the novels, which took precedence over the texts’ humour. A review of From a Garret in The Saturday Review, for instance, praises what is deemed ‘probable’ and realistic in the novel and criticises that which seems ‘exaggerated’ and unlikely, including Kendall’s characterisation of the curate and alderman.17 Similarly, the reviewer of Such is Life in the Scots Observer, commends the plausibility of Kendall’s depictions of 13 Green, p.