Literature and History in the Victorian Novel

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The Plot of Attentional Transformation: Literature and History in the Victorian Novel

Aaron James Donachuk

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English University of Toronto

The Plot of Attentional Transformation: Literature and History in the Victorian Novel

Aaron James Donachuk

Doctor of Philosophy

Department of English University of Toronto

2018

Abstract

This dissertation tracks the history of a formal phenomenon that is prevalent across nineteenth-century British novels, but which has gone largely overlooked by previous scholars. This is what I call the plot of attentional transformation, and it comprises two chief elements: a narrative agon that arises when the protagonist adopts an abject mode of attention such as inattention, distractibility, or absorption; and a denouement that takes place when the protagonist shakes off this abject condition to assume an antithetical, idealized attentional state. I argue that if nineteenth-century novelists as diverse as Walter

Scott, W.M. Thackeray, George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, Robert Louis Stevenson, and

William Morris all invoked this plot form, it is because it served a valuable organizing and coordinating function. At the same time as the attentional plot allowed these novelists to organize the fates of their differently classed and gendered characters into single teleological history, it also enabled them coordinate their otherwise independent and unrelated narrative interventions into social and literary politics into one coherent historical narrative. In analyzing how concepts of attention structure the Victorian novel, my project contributes to the area of attentional formalism—a body of research that

studies connections between forms of human attention and the form of Victorian literature. But whereas previous scholars have analyzed the Victorian novel’s attentional form primarily in relation to contemporary psychological and technological discourses, and largely by drawing on physiological and temporal models of attention, I take a different tack here. I study how authors such as Scott, Thackeray, Eliot, Collins,

Stevenson, and Morris used representations of everyday objects, and engaged with discourses around aesthetics, linguistics, and typography, to imagine attention chiefly as a spatial and object-oriented—as opposed to a psychological, somatic, and temporal— concept. I also intervene in this established research by extending our understanding of what attention is. My dissertation asks us to think of attention not only as a psychological faculty or as a construct of technological modernity but also as a narrative function that has the power to organize and give structure to large and complex master narratives of social and cultural change.

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Acknowledgments

First and foremost, I would like to thank my supervisor, Cannon Schmitt, for his care and attention in reading, re-reading, and responding to the numerous and sometimes wayward iterations of this thesis. I am also grateful for his judicious guidance on matters related to the profession and professionalization. If I have experienced anything like professional success up to this point, it has been due to his expert and considered influence. I would also like to extend abundant thanks to my two other dissertation committee members, Christine Bolus-Reichert and Thomas Keymer, whose immense expertise on topics central to this project has served as a distant and lofty horizon for my own scholarly ambitions. Overall, this dissertation bears the record of the insightful questioning and sagacious input of all three of these committee members, and whatever it has of breadth, complexity, and coherence is largely a function of their trust and patience.

I am also very much indebted to fellow Victorianists Elissa Gurman, Katherine Magyarody, and Noa Reich, and to my co-convener in the Novel Theory Reading Group, Zubin Meer, who have all acted as brilliant and ardent interlocutors over the years and have helped me develop many of my best ideas about Victorian literature and the novel. Expertly run programs and organizations like the Collaborative Program in Book History and Print Culture at the University of Toronto, the Victorian Studies Association of Ontario, the North American Victorian Studies Association, and the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English have given me precious opportunities to present my research and discuss aspects of this project with intelligent and distinguished scholars. The Ontario Graduate Scholarship Program and the University of Toronto have facilitated this project’s successful and timely completion by providing valuable and needed funding. And, of course, one of my most treasured, consistent, and unwavering sources of support has been my family in Manitoba—and particularly my parents, Margaret and Darwin Donachuk, who have never failed to send their love and encouragement from afar.

Finally, this dissertation is dedicated to Laura—my best friend, my greatest advocate, and my most faithful and unremitting supporter and helper.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments...... iv

Table of Contents...... v

List of Figures...... vi

Introduction: The Meeting of Two Histories: Toward a New Understanding of the Attentional Form of the Victorian Novel...... 1

Chapter 1: The Realist Novel and the Plotted Thing...... 28

Chapter 2: The Post-Spatial Object: Syntax and Flow in Collins's Major Novels...... 60

Chapter 3: “To obey the ideal laws of the day-dream”: Stevenson and Kaleidoscopic Reverie....91

Chapter 4: After the Letter: Dazzle, Distraction, and Morris’s Late Prose Romances...... 125

Afterword: The Organizational Potency of Attention in the Face of “Big History”...... 164

Works Consulted...... 167

List of Figures

Fig. 1. The opening spread of Morris’s The Wood Beyond the World...... 158

Fig. 2. An illustration of dazzle...... 158

Fig. 3. A sample of Monotype Bodoni...... 159

Fig. 4a. A sample of Morris’s Golden Type...... 159

Fig. 4b. A Sample of Morris’s Troy Type...... 159

Fig. 5. From Morris’s The Story of the Glittering Plain: The 1894 Kelmscott Edition...... 160

Fig. 6a. From Historia naturalis by Pliny, the Elder...... 161

Fig. 6b. From the Kelmscott edition of Child Christopher and Goldilind the Fair...... 162

Fig. 7a. From the 1891 edition of The Story of the Glittering Plain...... 163

Fig. 7b. From The Story of the Glittering Plain: The 1894 Kelmscott Edition...... 163

Introduction The Meeting of Two Histories: Toward a New Understanding of the Attentional Form of the Victorian Novel

Everyone knows what attention is. Or so thought William James, who took it as common knowledge that attention is simply “the taking of possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought” (403-04). Thomas Carlyle viewed attention as a similarly self-evident psychological concept. Finding the nature of attention registered clearly and plainly in the Latin root of the term (tendere, or to stretch), Carlyle defined this faculty as “a Stretching-to”—a willed effort to encompass and grasp ideas and sensory stimuli (Sartor Resartus 57). But attention can also be something more, something other, than this self-apparent psychological mechanism through which individuals select, grasp, and keep hold of thoughts and perceptions. It can also serve as a paradigm for modeling the literary text. N. Katherine Hayles evokes this idea in developing a typology of attentional forms in “Hyper and Deep Attention: The Generational Divide in Cognitive Modes” (2007). Of note is how Hayles illustrates her types of attention not through reference to a purely subjective experience but rather by conjuring a scene of subject-object relations. For example, she explains the concept of deep attention by painting the mental picture of “a college sophomore, deep in Pride and Prejudice, with her legs draped over an easy chair, oblivious to her ten-year-old brother” (187-88). This scene does well in exemplifying a mode of attention that involves “concentrating on a single object for long periods, […] ignoring outside stimuli while so engaged, [and] preferring a single information stream” (187). But where does deep attention reside? One might say it resides in the reading subject, who bestows a depth and breadth of attention onto Austen's novel while at the same time shutting out the disturbing influence of her younger brother. But it also seems to be located in the textual and bibliographic features of the Austenian text—a thick (or deep) book of around five-hundred pages with a story that gives sustained attention to a deferred and drawn-out love affair (would Hayles’s picture of deep attention be as convincing if her reader were contemplating the four-page owner’s manual of a food processor, for example?). Deep attention might also be traced to the novel’s Regency author—for if Austen had not dedicated so much time and attention to developing and crafting her plot, would she still have been able to demand such a depth of attention from her readers? (Would we be just as apt to attribute the quality of deep attention to a reader scanning a derivative, predictable, and hastily constructed love story?) It is perhaps most accurate to say that Hayles’s deep attention resides not in any one of these sites alone but in all at once. Less a property confined within the psychological subject, it is better described as a constellation of properties that stretches beyond the confines of the subject to include aspects of the book, text, and author. As this decentred

1 2 phenomenon, deep attention shows the potential to give form to a particular instantiation of what Jerome McGann calls the textual condition—the notion that the literary text is not simply a string of words, sentences, and paragraphs, but also a constellation of bibliographic and linguistic codes as well as productive and receptive practices.1 In Hayles’s example, because deep attention exemplifies Pride and Prejudice at a number of different textual levels—including those of reading, writing, text, and book—it has the ability to organize this diverse set of textual features and practices into a unified, harmonious textual space. This is a space that borrows its formal coherence not from the form of the text, book, or narrative but from the form of attention itself. Hayles’s mental picture thus hints that attention in general can be something more than a universally recognized psychological faculty with which human subjects engage a messy and overwhelming intellectual and perceptual landscape; it can also mark out a sort of conceptual meeting place where aspects of reading, writing, text, and book all congregate to make up a single, coherent textual form.

The literary text as a form of attention: scholars have done much to develop this idea in recent years, with this tendency to model the literary text using attentional concepts cropping up in works by a number of prominent critics, including Stephen Arata (“On Not Paying Attention"), Nicholas Dames (The Physiology of the Novel), and Nicholas Daly (Literature, Technology, and Modernity, and Sensation and Modernity in the 1860s). No doubt one reason for the increasing popularity of this method is that it allows the critic to redraw the boundaries of textual form, to conceive of this form as a space that stretches beyond the delimited confines of the literary text and book to embrace aspects of production and reception. Exemplifying the ways in which recent critics have employed this method is Arata’s work on William Morris’s poetry. Arata imagines Morris’s poetic text less as a linguistic object than as a communication chain whose every link is exemplified by what Arata calls “diffused attention”—a type of unfocused attention conducive to multitasking (“On Not Paying Attention” 203). According to Arata, because Morris composed his poetry while experiencing diffused attention, his poetic texts demonstrate a loose, unfocused style that is consistent with such attention; and this poetic style, in turn, also encourages the reader to receive Morris's poetry in a similar state of diffused attention (“On Not Paying Attention” 203). This example well illustrates the attentional method, which imagines the literary text as a diverse constellation of writing and reading practices and linguistic and bibliographic codes, and then gives form and consistency to this multiform textual complex by colouring every aspect of it with the same form of attention. This example also does well in illustrating the value of this attentional method, which should not be understated. On the one hand, literary critics who employ this method are afforded a new way of theorizing the literary text as a coherent aesthetic object. This

1 McGann describes the notion of the textual condition here: “[T]exts are produced and reproduced under specific social and institutional conditions […]. This view entails a corollary understanding, that a ‘text’ is not a ‘material thing’ but a material event or set of events, a point in time (or moment in space) where certain communicative interchanges are being practiced” (The Textual Condition 21). 2 My reference to icons of historical transformation is intended to evoke Hayden White's

3 method permits the critic to imagine the literary text as a form with unparalleled consistency and aesthetic purity. According to Arata, for example, because Morris’s poetry was produced in a thoroughgoing state of diffused attention, every syllable and every inch of his poetic surface comes to be saturated by this particular attentional quality. At the same time, this highly coherent textual form that never deviates from this singular productive principle is by no means an autonomous aesthetic object that is simply to be contemplated and admired by the reader as a triumph of artistic execution. Because reception is a fundamental aspect of attentional form— insofar as the space of the attentional text also encompasses the level of reception—this space has an immanent functional quality as well. Thus, for Arata, Morris’s diffusely attentive poetry is by no means autonomous or disinterested; it has a clear social purpose, insofar as it influences the reader to adopt a mode of diffused attention that stands in defiant opposition to those inhumane forms of sustained focus encouraged by industrial labour (“On Not Paying Attention” 202). By redrawing the boundaries of the text along attentional lines, past scholars like Arata have thus unearthed a textual form that is both highly consistent in its aesthetic makeup and also highly efficient in its ability to influence a readership—a form that engages and influences not the readers’ politics, opinions, or outlook on life but rather something more fundamental, more precognitive, and thus less prone to errors of miscommunication: the reader’s mode of paying attention.

I began to study the relationship between attention and nineteenth-century literature because I wanted to advance our understanding of the nature and history of this aesthetically coherent and socially and politically efficient textual form. When I began researching this dissertation, I was particularly interested in uncovering how fin-de-siècle novelists addressed the changing nature of literary production and distribution at the end of the nineteenth century—those changes brought on by the demise of the three-decker format, the explosion of new readerships in the wake of the Forster Act, and the passing of international copyright laws—by manipulating the novel’s attentional form in a way that was sensitive to the era’s new publication formats, audiences, and modes of distribution. But as I proceeded with my research, I began to notice how canonical examples of the Victorian novel often revealed an attentional form that was in many ways different from, and in some cases entirely antithetical to, the one past scholars had so often turned their eye to. This other attentional form was located more properly within the fictional text itself—specifically at the level of plot—instead of at some superficial, liminal interface between reader, author, text, and book. And this other attentional form was agonistic and dialectical in nature—structured as a clash and contradiction between competing modes of paying attention (or not paying attention)—rather than one of aesthetic coherence, consistency, and harmony. In simplest terms, it was a comic plot where characters experience the novel’s agon as an adverse form of attention, and where these same characters experience denouement when they adopt an antithetical attentional mode. So, although I set out to study the novel as a textual form that expresses and encodes productive and receptive modes of attention in the manner suggested by past scholars of Victorian textuality, what I kept finding, repeatedly, was this other, more properly

4 plotted attentional form. This other phenomenon did in one sense evoke those models of attentional form developed by previous scholars; in both cases, attention marked out a conceptual meeting place where otherwise incommensurable entities could mingle and blur. However, in the case of this plotted form that I was beginning to see everywhere, the concept of attention did not (or did not only) elide distinctions between author, reader, book, and text; it also elided differences between the transformational processes of literary plotting and those of historical and literary-historical change. After noting how frequently and regularly Victorian novelists seemed to invoke this other, previously unstudied form of literary attention, the aim of my dissertation shifted. It became one of exposing the pervasiveness and uncovering the significance of what I came to call this plot of attentional transformation.

In bodying forth a host of examples of this attentional plot from novels across the nineteenth century, this dissertation will shed light on an unstudied form of attention that courses through the centre of the Victorian novel like a major artery. It will focus on two of the period’s most significant literary-generic movements (particularly mid-century realism and the late-Victorian revival of romance) to expose how this previously unappreciated plot formation structures some of the most representative works of these two movements. In analyzing works on both sides of the realism/romance divide—by realists such as William Makepeace Thackeray and George Eliot, as well as romantic authors like Wilkie Collins, Robert Louis Stevenson, and William Morris—this project will engage the following questions: What motivated these authors to invoke the attentional plot so frequently? How and why do so-called realist and romantic authors use this plot form differently? What are the literary-historical and cultural-historical reasons for, and implications of, these differences? And why did Victorian novelists so consistently use linked, plotted representations of attentional states as icons for processes of social, cultural, and historical transformation?2

I. Mary Barton: The Object of Analysis Exemplified Offering a particularly illustrative expression of this dissertation's object of analysis is Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848). Gaskell’s novel has long been viewed as a paradigm example of the social problem novel. It exemplifies this genre at the level of representation, of course, particularly by focusing on the fraught relations between industrialists and workers in northern England in the 1840s. But it also exemplifies the social problem novel through the shape and nature of its plot, which runs across the boundary dividing national-political and personal- subjective narratives. This plot originates with a conflict that is very much germane to the former world. Thus, when a coalition of Manchester mill owners who are mired in a bearish cotton

2 My reference to icons of historical transformation is intended to evoke Hayden White's inestimably astute observation in Metahistory: “I will consider the historical work as what it most manifestly is—that is to say, a verbal structure in the form of a narrative prose discourse that purports to be a model, or icon, of past structures and processes in the interest of explaining what they were by representing them” (2, emphasis in the original).

5 market collude to lay off, and thereby further impoverish, a large part of their workforce, a fraught labour dispute between the city’s working and industrial classes ensues. This largely economic and political conflict is eventually attenuated; but this occurs not through processes of economic and political change but rather through a fictionalized, and more properly intersubjective, mechanism—particularly when the novel’s two class representatives, John Barton and John Carson, whose personal quarrel serves as a synecdoche for this larger class dispute, learn to recognize one another’s humanity and develop a bond of mutual sympathy. When summarized in this way, the plot of Mary Barton comprises two chief elements: a political-economic conflict that fuels a bout of labour unrest dividing England’s “Two Nations”; and an inter-personal denouement where a form of non-economic social intervention serves to quell this broader dispute.3

In other words, Gaskell transposes issues in the areas of politics and economics into subjective and relatively small-scale interpersonal issues so that she can, in turn, present an inter-personal solution to what was originally a large-scale structural problem. Kathleen Tillotson, who reads the text in this way, identifies the inter-personal mechanism that precipitates social change in Mary Barton as a form of fellow feeling. Thus, Tillotson explains how in Mary Barton “the hope of betterment lies not in this or that reform, but in the persistence, against all odds, of humanheartedness” (212). In opening this dissertation, I offer a different interpretation of the novel’s mechanisms of transposition and resolution. From my perspective, this novel transposes economic and political problems not only into the terms of everyday morality but also into issues around human attention. In reading Mary Barton as this drama of attentional transformation, I wish to hold it up as exemplary of both the Condition-of-England novel and a broader (or at least a longer) class of fiction that stretches across the British nineteenth century, cutting a swath through both the mid-century realist novel and the late-century romance and adventure novels. From my perspective, Mary Barton provides an example of a comic structure that is prevalent throughout the period: that of the plot of attentional transformation.

Understanding how Mary Barton exemplifies the attentional plot involves looking at how Gaskell reinscribes the novel’s labour conflict as a psychological conflict between the text’s principal class representatives—the industrialist John Carson and the murderer of Carson’s son and heir, the labour leader John Barton. While there are no doubt a number of political and personal reasons for the two men to sustain a personal opposition to one another, Gaskell suggests that two men remain divided because each is too focused on a single preoccupation and never lets his attention drift toward an idea or object of common interest. To convey this dynamics, Gaskell represents the dispute using the metaphor of two acutely focused pools of light that fail to intersect. She thus describes the political preoccupations of the labourer Barton as a restricted

3 My mention of England’s “Two Nations” is, of course, a reference to the title of another representative example of the Condition-of-England novel: Benjamin Disraeli’s Sybil, or the Two Nations (1845).

6 field of “light” within which Barton “viewed” the “deed” of murdering the younger Carson as that of “intimidat[ing] a class of men, known only to those below them as desirous to obtain the greatest quantity of work for the lowest wages” (353). Carson is said to maintain a similarly restricted attention span, with his dogged ignorance of the workers’ suffering expressing itself through his intense preoccupation with the plan of avenging the death of his murdered son. Of course one can already infer from the two characters’ nearly homonymous names that this strict opposition dividing them is not intended to last. And what finally stimulates Carson to grant forgiveness to his son’s murderer, quite naturally, is his renewed acquaintance with the Bible. But this is not the Bible imagined as a textual record of Christian values—not the Bible as Logos, that is. Instead, Gaskell represents the Bible as a sort of physical prop for stimulating what she describes as a curative bout of “reverie” (357). When Carson picks up the little-used family Bible, and peruses it less as a text than as a collocation of biblio-semiotic idiosyncrasies, he is launched into an “[u]naccustomed” state of “wonder,” as “[t]hought upon thought, recollection upon recollection came crowding in from the remembrance of the proud day when he had first purchased the book” (356-57). These thoughts range from a remembrance of “the birth of his little babe,” to the “days of” his own youth when he “had been accustomed to” relative “poverty,” to a reflection on the more “grinding and squalid” scene of “John Barton’s house” (356). Before Carson has even had a chance to peruse the Biblical text proper, then, vagrant thoughts that have been stimulated by its physical appearance cause “something of pity” to “steal in,” dissolving that spatially figured psychological barrier dividing him and Barton (356). The Bible in effect influences Carson to make peace with his class adversary not by communicating a moral lesson; indeed, his antagonism has already been assuaged before he even directs his attention to the word of God; influencing him to develop a sympathetic connection with Barton is the book’s paratextual details and not the moral text proper. The Bible exerts an influence by encouraging a spatialized expansion of his previously delimited attention span, which is made to stretch to a point where it can encompass sympathetic details about John Barton’s life. In a parallel development, Barton’s antipathy is assuaged through a similar mechanism of spatial expansion. This occurs when the labourer’s self-imposed exile is said to leave him “thinking and thinking” (351)—intellectually wandering, in a sense, in that large and vertiginous field of moral questioning. Evoking the form of a Venn diagram, denouement in Mary Barton takes place when Barton’s and Carson’s respective fields of delimited focus are made to expand and overlap at points of sympathetic intersection.

One might argue that reading Mary Barton as a text structured by instances of attentional transformation involves overlooking the novel’s marriage plot, which includes those events surrounding Jem Wilson’s wrongful arrest for the murder of Harry Carson, and those sensationalistic scenes where Mary pursues Jem’s alibi through the wilds of the Liverpool dockyards. The problem with overlooking this plot is that it eventually comes to hold pride of place in Gaskell’s text, eventually overshadowing the novel’s political plot and its naturalistic representations of Manchester’s labouring poor. What does it mean—the novel invites us to ask—

7 for a novel about the gritty reality of working-class struggle to reach an apotheosis with this romantic and sentimental drama? A number of critics have addressed this issue, which has become one of the novel’s most oft-noted critical cruxes.4 Raymond Williams takes something of an extreme position in this debate in insinuating that Gaskell’s decision to highlight Mary’s sensational, but otherwise politically insignificant, adventures was a result of coercion by her meddling publisher, Chapman and Hall (88-89). Williams suggests that if the marriage plot held any appeal to the novel’s author, it was insofar as it acted as a welcome diversion from all those undesirable narrative repercussions that resulted from her decision to cast a political assassin as her hero (90). Williams thus interprets the marriage plot as a disharmonious mutation of the author’s original vision for the novel. For Williams, the sentimental plot’s only—or at least principal—value lies in its ability to distract Gaskell from the folly of beginning an unpublishable story about a political assassin.

But Williams’s tortuous rationale begs a simpler way of explaining the relationship between these two seemingly antithetical elements within Gaskell’s novel. One way of doing this involves viewing the novel's two seemingly discordant plots as structural homologues. It involves acknowledging, in particular, that it is perhaps no coincidence that the scenes leading up to the denouement of the novel’s sentimental plot echo Gaskell’s description of Barton’s and Carson’s attentional transformations. These echoes are present in the sentimental plot’s climactic scene, which occurs when Mary Barton is drawn from her familiar home in Manchester to the busy scene of the Liverpool dockyards. After her lover, Jem, is falsely accused of murdering the younger Carson, Mary makes a desperate trip to Liverpool to locate his alibi, William, who is preparing to embark on a merchant vessel that will bear him across the Atlantic Ocean. Mary is able to locate William at the final possible moment, just as he is sailing out of the Liverpool port. And by convincing William to return to Britain to testify in court on Jem’s behalf, she helps effect Jem’s release, which ultimately precipitates the denouement of a marriage plot that culminates with the marriage of Jem and Mary. But none of this can occur before Mary is confronted with a particularly stiff challenge that takes the form of an astonishing maritime prospect: Mary […] saw down an opening made in the forest of masts belonging to the vessels in dock, the glorious river, along which white-sailed ships were gliding with the ensigns of all nations, not "braving the battle," but telling of the distant lands, spicy or frozen, that sent to that mighty mart for their comforts or their luxuries; she saw small boats passing to and fro on that glittering highway, but she also saw such puffs and clouds of smoke from the countless steamers […]. Across the swing-bridge, along the pier,—and they stood breathless by a magnificent dock, were hundreds of ships lay motionless during the process of loading and unloading. The cries of sailors, the variety of languages used by the passers-by, and the entire novelty of the sight compared with anything which Mary had ever seen, made her feel lmost helpless and forlorn. (280-81, emphasis added)

4 See, for instance, Birdwell; Elliott; and Felber.

The passage figures Mary’s trial in Liverpool as more than a challenge of locating Jem’s alibi among numerous unfamiliar individuals and foreign objects. With its cacophony of sensory stimuli—its perplexing and countless signifiers redolent of distant lands, its “glittering highway,” its “puffs” and “cries,” its tremendous “novelty,” and its confusing and abortive syntax—the passage represents the dockyard as an expansive canvas of spectacular stimuli. In doing so, it also represents the climactic point of Mary’s search as a contest with the spectacle per se. In order to locate William, Mary is first forced to confront the spectacle of the Liverpool dockyards, and in the process must force her attention to expand to take in its multivalent sensations and signifiers. While Jill Matus has traced Mary’s psychological breakdown in Liverpool to the heroine’s pathologically emotional nature (32), this scene at the dockyards suggests a different reason. It suggests that if Mary eventually experiences catatonic collapse in Liverpool, it is because her attention has been forced to stretch to an unnatural degree through the course of her heroic quest through a city full of spectacular challenges and pitfalls. It hints, in other words, that Mary’s breakdown is not an expression of working-class weakness and hysteria but rather the result of her being forced to stretch her attention to a heroic extent in her quest to liberate Jem.

There are thus distinct parallels to be drawn between the climactic scene of the marriage plot and the denouement of the novel’s political plot. The scene of Carson’s Biblical reverie, which serves to assuage the intensity of the labour dispute, exists as a sort of narrative homologue to the scene at the Liverpool dockyards, insofar as Carson’s sympathetically stretching and expanding attention evokes Mary’s heroic attentional flexibility in the face of an overwhelming spectacle. This expanding dynamics is also evoked by that mechanism that works to assuage John Barton’s antipathy toward his political adversary Carson: that vagrant trip through the wilderness that functions as a metaphor for the spatial expansion of thought and attention that Barton experiences in the process. In all three cases, the course toward denouement is paved by the spatialized expansion of the character’s attention. By harnessing this spatialized conception of attention to narrative purpose, Gaskell is able to coordinate the text’s seemingly conflicting plots and individual histories into a structural whole. She does this by figuring each as an expression of the same spatialized shift from a condition of acute or delimited focus to one of wide-ranging and vagrant reverie and perception. As a multi-plotted novel, then, Mary Barton proceeds according to a common logic of attentional transformation. In coordinating her plots in this way, Gaskell suggests that although British industrialists and workers, men and women, are ostensibly guided by interests and motives that often fail to intersect—or that intersect only at painfully and often violently acute angles—these competing interests can be harmonized in narrative form not so much through the elision of class and gender categories but by transcoding these collective differences into a harmonized teleology of attentional becoming.

As a novel that is structured by such scenes of attentional change, Mary Barton does a good job of exemplifying the plot of attentional transformation—this dissertation’s chief object of study. This attentional plot is a form that consistently expresses three distinct traits. First, it is a plot that is

9 fueled by a lack or failure of attention, and where denouement takes place when the protagonist (or a host of affiliated characters) finally adopts a more desirable attentional mode. Illustrating this first quality is Mary Barton’s social-problem plot, where Gaskell transcodes the class dispute between Carson and Barton into a conflict between the characters’ mutually delimited foci, and then represents the spatial expansion of the two characters’ attention spans as a mechanism that precipitates the novel’s resolution. It is this plotted shift from one form of attention to another that is the telltale mark of the plot of attentional transformation. It is important to note at this point that the incidental features of this plot form vary throughout the novels that will be analyzed in the following chapters. Sometimes this plot moves not from focused to expansive attention but instead in the opposite direction. Sometimes it moves from an overweening attention to the particular toward an all-encompassing attentiveness adjusted to the scale and scope of the natural world. And sometimes it works to marry seemingly antithetical forms of attention such as reverie and acute attentiveness. Each of the novelists I study in this dissertation uses this plot form in a unique way, insofar as each associates a different form of attention with the novel’s denouement. But each also follows the same general pattern. When this plot form is considered in the simplest and most abstract terms—as a deep structure—it is a narrative phenomenon that occurs whenever a novel’s agon is expressed, at the subjective level, as an adverse form of attention, and whenever the novel’s denouement takes place when a character transitions from an adverse to a valorized form of attention.

Mary Barton also illustrates the attentional plot’s second abiding feature: that plots of attentional transformation are imaginary representations of social transformation that move toward a social ideal that the novelist is reluctant to represent in idealized or a priori terms. Mary Barton’s social- problem denouement, for instance, which evolves alongside Barton’s and Carson’s expanding focus, is not symbolic of some social ideal, nor does it function to revolutionize class relations in industrial Britain. It is relatively hedging and qualified in its attempts to represent social change. The novels that I analyze in the following pages engage in ongoing debates on topics such as labour, reading, and professionalism through the mechanism of similarly hedging transformational plots. It might even be said that the plot of attentional becoming—and not the symbolic achievement of some moral or social ideal—is the most tangible forms that social resolution takes in the Victorian novel, for the reason that the novelist, somewhat shy or unwilling to speculate on the economic form or political structure of a wished-for social ideal, often speaks with confidence about the types of transformations in popular forms of attention that might put society on the road toward that only half-imagined and half-articulated social goal.

The structure’s third distinguishing feature pertains to the logic governing its representations, and specifically to the conceptual field in which we might situate these representations. This is a somewhat vexing and problematic issue—for how is one to draw conceptual bounds around a narrative phenomenon that is effective precisely on the basis of its vagueness? Indeed, the example of Mary Barton does a good job of illustrating how such representations often fail to

10 reflect precise scientific definitions of attention, even to the point of betraying a willful evasion of such precision. As the following analyses will attest, however, the nineteenth-century novel’s representations of attention do take concrete and logically consistent form in the sense that they often appear as a series of linked representations of, and allusions to, objects of attention. The critical object of the current study will thus be, in other words, objective. It will be the forms of attention inscribed in objects more so than the attention expressed by psychological or physiological subjects. For example, I will analyze forms of attention that are objectified in everyday objects, in furniture and architectural settings, in typographical and bibliographic spaces, and in linguistic and textual formations (to name just a few of these). And I will explicate these narrative objects by invoking discourses that consider attention as objective as opposed to psychological, physiological, or otherwise contained within the subject. These will include discourses around the book, literary style, labour, and even professionalization—discourses that think attention in and through objects and spaces.

Considering attention less in terms of psychological specificity, and more in terms of its expression in everyday objects and spaces, is not to play fast and loose with the concept to the point of moving beyond the threshold of precision and usefulness. This is because the concept is just as often appreciated as a metonymic relationship between subject and object as it is a scientifically theorized and experimentally validated psychological state. To use a crude but nonetheless apt example, let us conjure the simple image of a young person gazing at a cell phone in a public place. When evaluated within the context of current discourses around Millennials and their relationship to technology, this individual is apt to be characterized as a distracted subject. However, if we were to amend this imaginary scene just slightly, by replacing the object of the cell phone with a novel by George Meredith or a book on advanced calculus, this same individual, with the same gaze and posture, would be transformed magically into an attentive subject— particularly in the absence of anything like clinical data that would prove otherwise. Victorian plots of attentional transformation operate according to a similar substitutional logic: they are often structured through linked representations of, and allusions to, attentional objects, where the book on calculus comes to replace the cell phone (metaphorically speaking). The Victorian novel’s attentional objects can either be metonyms within the storyworld: objects with which a character becomes associated through habituation. Or they can be figurative objects that exist on the metaphoric plane. And attentional plots often take form when an object connoting one type of attention is substituted with an object connoting a different type, and specifically when this substitution takes place at the point of denouement. Effectively illustrating this third and final characteristic is the process of Carson’s conversion, which takes place when the reverie-inducing Bible comes to replace the circumscribed point of light that signifies Carson’s delimited focus. And if the plot of attentional transformation develops and evolves over the course of the nineteenth century, it is primarily insofar as novelists learn to develop their attentional plots on the basis of richer—that is, a more complex, technical, and historicized—understandings of the

11 object of attention, which in turn offers these authors new ways of composing and structuring the attentional plot.

II. The Meeting of Two Histories; or, Why Did Victorian Novelists So Often Invoke the Plot of Attentional Transformation? Why did Victorian novelists so frequently invoke this narrative form that is structured as a series of linked, and often object-oriented, representations of and metaphors for attention? It is tempting to suppose that they did this in order to work through contemporary social or cultural issues directly related to, and directly impinging upon, human attention. It is perhaps natural to conjecture, for instance, that the plot of attentional transformation arose as a way of representing and working through the problem of paying attention in a modernizing world marked by rapidly changing transportation and communications technologies that distract and puzzle the modern subject. It might also be tempting to imagine the attentional plot as a mechanism through which the novelist echoes, enacts, revises, or refines contemporary scientific work and writing in the areas of physiology and psychology. Indeed, these two ways of understanding the novel’s engagement with concepts of attention—what we might call the techno-cultural and scientific approaches—have largely dominated scholarship that focuses on the attention-novel nexus.5 But such approaches cannot quite explain the existence, structure, and ubiquity of this narrative phenomenon; nor can they explain why Victorian novelists used this plot form as a way of engaging with, and offering a fictional resolution to, issues that are not specifically technological or attentional in nature (as in the example of Mary Barton). My dissertation will thus address the following (among other) questions: How might we analyze attention in the novel outside the context of contemporary psychological and technological discourses on attention? Why is it important to bracket these contexts? And what are the alternative contexts that illuminate how and why nineteenth-century British novelists invoked concepts of attention, specifically at the level of plot.

One way to address these questions is to think of the novel not as a discourse that engages with preexisting problems and issues around attention but instead as a machine that manufactures such problems. Providing insight into how we might start thinking of the nineteenth-century British novel as a sort of machine that tends to transcode non-attentional issues into attentional ones is Matthew Crawford’s recent book The World Beyond Your Head (2015). In his prefatory comments, Crawford claims that the impetus behind his book is a contemporary problem related to human attention: “We are living,” he writes, “through a crisis of attention that is now widely remarked upon […] As our mental lives become more fragmented, what is at stake often seems to be nothing less than the question of whether one can maintain a coherent self” (ix). But although Crawford is writing in our age of ubiquitous information and communication technologies, he

5 This will become clear in the next section, where I address established criticism in this area.

12 does not attribute this “crisis of attention” to an overabundance of sources of information and digital stimuli; instead, he posits that our “distractibility seems to indicate that we are agnostic on the question of what is worth paying attention to—that is, what to value” (5, emphasis in the original). According to Crawford, because the modern subject lacks a guiding philosophy, religion, or equivalent system of transcendent values or ideals, her attention is left largely ungoverned, left to flit hither and thither between what are at once equally attractive and equally debased sources of information and perceptual stimulation.

Although Crawford’s book never addresses the subject of nineteenth-century literature, it has two features that make it interesting and valuable for an academic study of the nineteenth-century plot of attentional transformation. The first is how Crawford characterizes the origin of this modern crisis of attention. According to Crawford, this crisis begins not with the failure of human attention per se, nor with a glut of sensory stimuli and sources of information; these problems are merely symptoms of a larger (or more elementary problem). The more fundamental problem is the lack or failure of a common social ethics. The second notable feature of his argument is his proposed method for addressing this decidedly degraded subjective condition. Although he identifies the absence of a collective system of values as the problem at the root of the “crisis of attention,” the solution he puts forth is not a return to, or a reconsideration of, a collective set of philosophical first principles. Having abandoned the hope for such a top-down resolution, he proposes a proxy: a bottom-up approach that would address the problem of distraction by mining existing “ecologies of attention” in order to effect a return to a general condition of attentiveness, as if distraction and not a lack of collective values were the original problem (23). He writes, “I wish to arrive at something like an ethics of attention for our time, grounded in a realistic account of the mind and a critical gaze at modern culture. […] I want […] to tunnel beneath the intellectual cul-de-sac and trace the subterranean strata—the historically sedimented geological structures—of our age of distraction, the better to map a way out of it” (7-8, emphasis in the original). Crawford’s project is thus premised on a subtle slippage or sleight of hand. Whereas the problem he identifies is primarily based in a lack of philosophical or theological ideals, his proposed solution involves ameliorating the psychological symptom that results from this lack of ideals as if it were the original problem. At the heart of his work, then, is an asymmetrically dialectic narrative of modern subjectivity that consists of three main functions: a fall from an original ideal state (from an organic community with a coherent set of shared values, for example); a subsequent condition of collective distraction that is symptomatic of, and functions to epitomize, this fragmentary societal condition; and a return to an ideal condition by way of the broad dissemination, throughout society, of a mode of attention antithetical to that which epitomizes the fallen condition.6 Crawford’s work is thus not simply another expression of those

6 Georg Lukács gives the novel a similar formal pattern when he states that the “fundamental form-determining intention of the novel is objectivized as the psychology of the novel’s heroes”—a feature acutely apparent in the “nineteenth-century novel with its tendencies towards psychological dynamism and psychologistic solutions” (61, 110). Whether or not we agree with

13 contemporary works on the crisis of attention that trace mass distraction to a glut of information and media.7 Informing his argument is an entirely different paradigm: one where the problem of attention, while demanding what we might call an attentional resolution, is rooted in epistemological issues that exist outside the realm of psychology, media, technology, and human physiology.

In framing his project as this ethics of attention, Crawford unknowingly articulates a model for the Victorian attentional novel. Many of the novels I will analyze in this dissertation reflect the same sleight of hand and the same dialectical dynamics that Crawford evokes in his book. Like Crawford’s dialectical narrative, these novels often manufacture a crisis of distracted subjectivity out of issues that are largely social, political, cultural, philosophical, or epistemological in nature. And, like this narrative, they often progress toward a social goal that is epitomized by, or that necessarily progresses through, a mechanism of attentional transformation similar to the one implicit in Crawford’s ethics of attention. Mary Barton offers a good illustration of how this slippage structures the form of the Victorian attentional plot. In translating a social problem of political and economic character into a problem of overly circumscribed attention, Gaskell is then able to pose a relatively simple attentional solution to what was originally a much more vexed problem of class, politics, and economics. Gaskell’s novel also illustrates another important point about the plot of attentional transformation: that in the Victorian novel, the crisis of attention does not always manifest itself in the form of that distracted state that Crawford associates with the abject modern condition. Sometimes this abject state (or what Crawford would call the distracted position) is exemplified not by a condition of distractibility per se, but instead by a form of overly acute, circumscribed, and unremitting focus. This is all to say that Crawford’s asymmetrical dialectic merely represents what I have called the deep structure of the Victorian attentional novel, that his terms attention and distraction merely index positions in this dialectical structure, and that Victorian novelists populated these positions with a variety of attentional forms. The essential, and largely stable, features of this deep structure are a social, cultural, or political problem that is transcoded into an agon where the characters’ show a problematic tendency to adopt a particularly pernicious mode of attention (whether it be distractibility, overly acute focus, or some other form of attention); and a denouement that takes place when these same characters come to adopt an attentional mode that is antithetical to this problematic one.

Lukács’s epigram that the “novel is the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God” (88), we must credit his observation that the genre has a tendency to transmute social, theological, epistemological, and literary-generic problems (particularly the sense that modernity is marked by theological doubt and epistemological fragmentation) into dramas of individual psychology ultimately toward the end of proposing psychologized solutions to these problems. 7 I am thinking here of recent writing on the attention economy. This work includes Tom H. Davenport and John C. Beck’s The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business (2001); Michael H. Goldhaber’s “The Attention Economy and the Net” (1997); and Richard A. Lanham’s The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information (2006).

So, one way to explain the prevalence of the attentional plot within the nineteenth-century British novel is to say that it offered novelists a valuable affordance: it allowed them to transpose intractable social problems into problems of attention, which in turn allowed them to propose attentional solutions to what had become, by the way, much more manageable issues in their guise as attentional issues.8 The attentional plot also offered another valuable affordance, which is related to issues of scale. Large-scale structures and processes of historical and political change are generally outside the purview of the Victorian novel’s normal scope of representation, which is conventionally limited to individuals and small social groups, and to events that transpire over a matter of years as opposed to decades and centuries. In order to represent large-scale historical and social processes within the confines of the novel, the novelist must transcode these processes into ones that are commensurate with the novel’s smaller scale. Victorian novelists met this challenge by showing how individuals (and small groups of individuals) manifest large-scale historical trends as particular modes of paying (or not paying) attention. This act of transposition then permitted novelists to use the plot of attentional transformation to represent historical change as and through mechanisms that are more germane to the natural content and scope of the novel (as Gaskell does so effectively in Mary Barton when she links socio-economic progress to changes in how her subjects pay attention).

Victorian novelists also invoked the attentional plot frequently because it offered a third important affordance. This third affordance is rooted in the functionally ambiguous nature of concepts of attention. With their functional ambiguity, such concepts can give order to fictional and historical narratives that attempt to grasp and manage social multiplicity. Something that has gone largely unappreciated by scholars is the degree to which historians and social critics of the nineteenth century invoked concepts of attention as a means of organizing and plotting historical and social master narratives. Providing a conspicuous example of this is one of the most ambitious of such narratives: Max Nordau’s Degeneration (1893). Evoking Crawford’s “crisis of attention,” Nordau structures the story of fin-de-siècle degeneration as a descent into an abject condition of social and cultural distraction. Thus, he describes Wagnerian opera as a thoroughly distracting spectacle—a “vigorous polyphony” that “summon[s] the attention in several directions at once” (12-13). At the same time, he diagnoses the impressionist painter as a subject afflicted with “nystagmus”—or a pathological “trembling of the eyeball”—which prevents this artist from focusing his attention on the object of representation (27). And, somewhat paradoxically, he codifies the Pre-Raphaelites’ “uniformly clear representation of all phenomena in the field of vision” as an “incapacity for attention” for the reason that, in the comparatively healthy individual, attention is characterized by the tendency and ability to “suppres[s] a portion of that [visual field] which is presented to consciousness” (84). Degeneration in this way offers an example of how a relatively vague and flexible conceptual category such as distraction is able to

8 I borrow the term affordance from Caroline Levine, who writes, “Affordance is a term used to describe the potential uses or actions latent in [artistic] materials and designs”—as well as in literary and discursive forms (6).

15 conflate such diverse phenomena as Wagnerian opera, French impressionism, and Pre-Raphaelite painting.9 This is a flexibility that also serves a narrative function, since it permits Nordau to organize such diverse phenomena as part of a single collective social trend toward a degenerative, pathological epoch of mass distraction. Concepts of attention function in a similar fashion in the nineteenth-century-British novel: they permit the novelist to represent a multitude of social agents, with diverse and often conflicting aims and interests, as part of a coherent social master narrative with a single agon and a single telos. Attention's narrative-organizing function is on prominent display in Mary Barton, where Gaskell places such diverse social subjects as John Carson, John Barton, and Mary Barton—who represent the discrete social realms of industry, labour, and sentimental domesticity, respectively—on a common historical course toward a telos of unfocused subjectivity. As a narrative form that is able to organize divergent social groups into such a structured historical narrative, the attentional plot should be placed more within the context of contemporary social and historical narratives that do the same, and less within the context of contemporary psychological discourses that contemplate, using precise scientific terms, the nature and dynamics of human attention.

To review, then, British novelists were inclined to invoke concepts of attention, and to structure their plots using linked representations of attention, because this functionally ambiguous concept offered them three valuable affordances: it allowed them to transpose intractable political and social issues into problems of attention, which enabled them, in turn, to propose attentional solutions to the former, largely intractable social problems; it allowed them to absorb large-scale social problems and long historical processes into the more limited confines of the novel; and it permitted them to organize a multiplicity of social subjects who each represent a distinct set of interests and objectives into a coherent socio-historical narrative with a single telos. But why would the Victorian novelist be inclined to invoke attention specifically to perform this transpositional role? That is, why would she select attention over other functionally ambiguous subjective phenomena and processes, such as those related to vision, consciousness, emotions, or feelings (Tillotson’s “humanheartedness,” for example)? The reason is that using attention as a transposing medium permits the novelist to do two things at the same time: to represent and intervene in processes of social and historical change; but also to make a cultural-political intervention into the ongoing history of literary forms. The attentional plot is able to perform both these functions because, much like those historical and political trends and problems that Gaskell confronts in her work, genres of literature can also be transposed into forms of attention (as Nordau’s survey of late-nineteenth-century art begins to suggest).

9 It is therefore not surprising that, for Nordau, attentiveness, in contrast, has the power to “brin[g] order into [this] chaos of representations awakened by the association of ideas, and mak[e] them serve the purposes of cognition and judgment” (52). What Nordau evokes in this instance is the possibility of an attentional denouement to his social master narrative.

Appreciating this idea involves turning, briefly, to two prominent works of genre theory: Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel (1957) and Northrop Frye’s Secular Scripture (1976). Both provide paradigmatic examples of how modes of attention can be used to exemplify generic forms. Watt, for example, in the process of outlining the concept of “formal realism,” describes the novel as “surely distinguished from other genres and from previous forms of fiction by the amount of attention it habitually accords both to the individualisation of its characters and to the detailed presentation of their environment” (18). For Watt, then, it is primarily the novel’s characteristically attentive narrative mode that distinguishes it from classical genres such as tragedy, comedy, and romance, which eschew attention to such particulars in favouring general, unlocalizable, and thus more universal truths. While Frye’s work is less explicit in its use of attentional diction, it nonetheless evokes a similar distinction between an attentive realism and a less attentive (or differently attentional) generic other. At one point, Frye articulates the difference between romance and realism (and by extension the difference between the realistic and romantic novels of the nineteenth century) as a difference between two modes of narrative attention. On one side of this generic dichotomy Frye places the realistic “hence” narrative. This is a form that, because it advances as a logically continuous and tightly stretched causal series of narrative events, implies both a reader and a narrator who are constantly attentive to a continuous narrative logic (47-48). In opposition to this form, Frye pits the more romantic “and then” narrative, which develops as a series of loosely connected archetypal building blocks that elicit a state of “spellbound” absorption from a reader who is unable to predict—and therefore always on the point of breathless anticipation of—“what happens next” in the erratic sequence of narrative events (47-48). Here, Frye transposes the difference between realism and romance into a difference between two attentional modes in setting an attentive realist mode against an absorbing romance narrative. Like Watt before him, Frye illustrates how in the work of genre theorists there appear moments of slippage where generic forms are theorized as attentional forms, where genres come to borrow some of their most distinguishing formal features from modes of attention. These are moments when theorists understand literary genres either as modes of focalization that recall attentional states (as in the case of Watt) or as styles and structures of narrative discourse that reflect readerly and writerly modes of attending to the narrative text (as in the case of Frye).

But what compels these theorists—whose works are not otherwise framed as investigations into the linkages between literature and psychology—to reach outside the semantic and conceptual fields of narrative and the novel and into the realm of attentional concepts and terms? The simplest way to explain this slippage is to describe it as an expression of the need for a poetics of the novel within a post-Aristotelian literary-theoretical context: a need that results from the ill fit between the novel and an Aristotelian paradigm that imagines the literary genre as a definite set of formal and mimetic conventions.10 The novel has an uneasy relationship with the Aristotelian

10 This tendency to invoke attention as a sort of meta-theoretical category is a general phenomenon that extends beyond the theorists considered here. Alex Woloch provides a

17 paradigm because this distinctively modern literary form generally lacks a generic core or generic boundaries. In many respects, the novel is a radically tensile medium; in stretching to meet the representational demands of an ever-evolving modern present, it exceeds the bounds of the Aristotelian classificatory schema. Henry James articulates this idea in his influential work of Anglo-American novel theory “The Art of Fiction” (1884). Indexing the novel’s contemporaneity to its ability to “compete with life,” James rejects any a priori limitations that might be placed on the novelist’s freedom to experiment with form, exclaiming, “the good health of an art which undertakes so immediately to reproduce life must demand that it be perfectly free” (858). Mikhail Bakhtin would later make a similar claim in describing the novel not as a set of consistent conventions but instead as a space of “plastic possibilities” whose “generic skeleton is still far from having hardened” as it continues to develop “in the full light of historical day” (“Epic and Novel” 3). James and Bakhtin both suggest that if literary genre is understood as an organic relationship between form and content, the novel is a thoroughly plastic entity, insofar as it is forever open to new and previously unimagined representational contingencies, and has the ability to stretch and metamorphose to accommodate new representational possibilities. While this flexibility represents the possibility of innovation for an artist such as James, and while it presents Bakhtin with an opportunity to theorize the novel in something like post-Aristotelian terms, it of course presents a problem to the individual who wishes to theorize the genre as a definite set of formal and representational conventions using anything like stable and positive terms.

But flashing forth in those evanescent instances when theorists such as Watt and Frye stray into the attentional field is a theoretical possibility: the prospect that an attentional paradigm might take the place of that obsolete and incompatible Aristotelian framework and enable the theorist to conceptualize novelistic genres as coherent generic entities. Attention can do this primarily because it is so tightly and metonymically bound up with the practices of novel reading and writing. The novel theorist invokes the attentional faculty of the novel’s producer and consumer as a proxy for textual coherence—to paint the seemingly heterogeneous novel with the homogenizing brush of attentional consistency. Thus, Watt’s novel might seem to be unsystematic, what with its tendency to eschew “formal conventions,” and insofar as it represents

particularly representative example of this tendency when he describes the nineteenth-century novel as a character space that expresses a dialectical tension between referential and structural modes of characterization. Woloch contains this tension by “interpreting the character-space as a distributed field of attention [in which] we make the tension between structure and reference generative of, and integral to, narrative signification. The opposition between the character as an individual and the character as a subject dissolves in this framework” (17, emphasis added). Jerome McGann expresses a similar tendency when characterizing what he describes as that multiverse that is the socially produced text: “The universe of poiesis no more has an absolute center than does the stellar universe we have revealed through our astronomy. What it has are many relative centers which are brought to our attention by our own acts of observation” (The Textual Condition 75). In both cases, the text per se is figured as somehow disorganized or divided; and this ambiguous and ambivalent text is contained and made logical through the superimposition, onto this equivocal textual space, of a more organized and logical field of attention.

18 a motley assemblage of scenes and characters from modern life (13); and yet it at the same time gains formal unity from the figure of its implied producer, who unflinchingly attends to the details of environmental and individual particularity from the beginning to the end of the text. And Frye’s modern romantic text might seem to be illogical and fragmentary due to the haphazard way in which it strings together a series of archetypal scenes and moments; but it nonetheless acquires organic unity through the metonym of its implied reader, who consistently receives the narrative in breathless anticipation, through the mode of absorbed attention. In each of these examples, a solution to the post-Aristotelian theoretical problematic is dramatized anew, as the theorist demonstrates how the concept of readerly or writerly attention might come to fill the void left by the obsolescence of classical generic categories and grant the novel a degree of logical coherence. Indeed, attention promises to perform this work better than many similar psychological, epistemological, and aesthetic categories. It is more effective than human memory, for example, which fails to encapsulate the contents of the capacious and information-rich novel—as Percy Lubbock stresses in the opening pages of The Craft of Fiction (1921).11 It is also more capable than style or consciousness, which exist in the novel in what Bakhtin describes as a state of polyphonic and heteroglossic dissonance (“Discourse” 263). And it is perhaps only challenged in this respect by the “well-wrought urn” that is New-Critical text, or possibly by the Foucauldian “author function,” whose “name”—like those modes of attention referred to above—“seems always to be present” within the discourse, “marking off the edge of the text” while “revealing, or at least characterizing, its mode of being” (Foucault 211).

I claim that Nineteenth-century British novelists showed this same tendency to understand genres of the novel as forms of attention. However—and this is the important point—rarely did they pattern their own works on such forms in an attempt to achieve some ideal of generic coherence. Their novels rather internalize this way of thinking about novelistic genres, representing conflicts between competing forms of the novel through the medium of the attentional plot. And they did this, ultimately, in order to perform an intervention into literary history and politics. As I will further illustrate in Chapter 3, Robert Louis Stevenson, for instance, figured late-nineteenth- century realism much in the same way that Watt represents formal realism, that is, as a mode of attention that is unremittingly trained on small social and natural details. And Stevenson did this in order to denigrate late-century realism—which, in his view, was tending too much toward the naturalistic end of the literary spectrum—as a form that neglects those things that are not necessarily evoked by, or inscribed in, local details (such as moral ideals and global truths). For

11 Lubbock imagines formal theory as a sort of prosthetic intended to supplement the critic’s inability to grasp in memory the novel in its entirety: “The form of the novel—and how often a critic uses that expression too—is something that none of us, perhaps, has ever really contemplated. It is revealed little by little, page by page, and it is withdrawn as fast as it is revealed; as a whole, complete and perfect, it could only exist in a more tenacious memory than most of us have to rely on. Our critical faculty may be admirable; we may be thoroughly capable of judging a book justly, if only we could watch it at ease. But fine taste are of no use to us if we cannot retain the image of the book; and the image escapes and evades us like a cloud” (3).

Stevenson, whose own chosen genre was the literary romance, composing the romance also meant using his narratives to perform an opposition to this overly attentive realist mode with its tendency to give too much attention to minutiae. But Stevenson performs this opposition not (or not only) by cultivating modes of narration and focalization that pay little or no attention to such details. He does this instead by representing, within his own texts, a contest between competing attentional-aesthetic modes. Like a number of Victorian novelists, Stevenson constructs an agon where the novel’s principal character (or characters) is afflicted by the same pernicious form of attention that he attributes to the work of his generic adversaries. And he performs an opposition to these adversaries by having his character aspire to adopt an antithetical mode of attention at the point of denouement. This example is in many ways typical of how nineteenth-century novelists exploited the equivalencies, the strong metonymic connections, between forms of attention and forms of the novel. They absorbed this manner of exemplifying literary works and genres into their texts, where these forms of attention serve as structural positions in plots of attentional transformation that perform a contest between competing generic forms that are each imagined as different, and often opposing, attentional forms. The protagonist of the attentional plot in this sense experiences (or lives through) the dynamics of this literary history imagined as a contest between such competing, genre-specific forms of attention. And this protagonist—as a figure who dispels the form of attention associated with the novelist’s generic adversary while in the process adopting the novelist’s own privileged mode of generic attention at the point of denouement— becomes a fictional vehicle through which the novelist narrates the supersession of one literary genre by another. The attentional plot thus affords the novelist a way of using the resources of narrative to perform an intervention into literary history—to perform the advent of a literary- historical future through the mechanisms of plotting.

The plot of attentional transformation thus marks the meeting of two histories.12 On the one hand, it is a plot form with which the novelist, having transposed pressing social and cultural problems into problems of attention, is able to represent historical progress using the synecdoche of the protagonist’s attentional development (thus evoking Crawford’s asymmetrical dialectic). As such, it enables the novelist to represent processes of historical transformation through the medium of narrative form. On the other hand, as a mechanism through which the novelist performs an intervention into an ongoing literary history and politics, it gives the novelist the ability to represent processes of literary-historical development using the conventional tools of literary narrative and novelistic representation. But it is more than simply a site where the novelist’s literary politics and social politics converge; it also functions as a rhetorical mechanism through which the novelist performs a simultaneous intervention into these two otherwise distinct political

12 I borrow the expression “the meeting of two histories” from Pierre Bourdieu’s “The Field of Cultural Production” (1993). Bourdieu claims that “understand[ing] the practices of writers and artists, and not least their products, entails understanding that they are the result of the meeting of two histories: the history of the positions they occupy [in the literary field] and the history of their dispositions” (61). While I echo Bourdieu's expression, these two histories take a somewhat different form in my dissertation.

20 contexts, with their distinct histories, agents, and terms of engagement. The form in this way allows novelists both to justify their relevance and importance as socio-political agents and to highlight their uniqueness and value within the overcrowded annals of literary forms at the same time and with the same discursive gesture. It is no doubt the attentional plot's immense flexibility—its ability to coordinate a novelist’s interventions into both literary and social histories simultaneously—that made it so popular among Victorian novelists. It is the attentional plot in its fole as this immensely flexible, this at-once socio-political and literary-political, discursive form that will be the object of the remaining chapters of this dissertation.

III. Past Methods for Studying the Attentional Form of the Victorian Novel: The Scientific and “Problematic” Approaches Described and Addressed There is already a rich body of scholarship that explores the role and significance of attention in Victorian literature and culture. Some of this work uncovers patterned representations of attentional states in Victorian novels and attempts to explain how novelists mobilized such representations to develop new insights about the nature and value of attention. John Plotz, for example, has unearthed numerous depictions of a hybrid, semi-detached form of attention— moments when a Victorian novel's character is both absorbed in a work of fiction, say, but also aware of the world around her—on his way to arguing that the idea of semi-detached subjectivity was something that preoccupied Victorian authors (405-06). Elisha Cohn has conducted similar work; in drawing our attention to numerous moments of reverie and trance in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853), Cohn shows how Brontë was pushing back against contemporary—and particularly Ruskinian—discourses that rooted moral improvement in the cultivation of heightened vigilance (846). In addition to this scholarship that focuses on representations of attentional states in Victorian fiction, there has also been work that uncovers homologies between forms of attention and formal features of poetry to develop a new way of mapping the poetic text. In addition to the previously mentioned essay by Arata, which discloses how Morris’s poetic texts encode a form of unfocused attention conducive to multitasking (“On Not Paying Attention” 197- 98), McGann works to designate the biblio-poetic surface of the Kelmscott editions of Morris’s poetry as a space defined by textual attentiveness (“Thing to Mind” 49).13 A third body of criticism on the relationship between attention and Victorian culture attempts to disclose how and why late-nineteenth-century pedagogues advised members of a burgeoning mass readership to cultivate heightened powers of readerly attentiveness. Whereas Arata claims that such advice “was being driven by the need to produce a […] kind of worker” that could meet the heightened attentional demands of the modern professional workplace (“On Not Paying Attention” 199),

13 Margaret Koehler conducts similar work, but on eighteenth-century poetry, in her book Poetry of Attention in the Eighteenth Century (2012).

Jesse Cordes Selbin reads these pedagogical dictates as part of a long history of close reading, and in the process troubles the conventional tendency to trace the rise of attentive and fine-grained reading practices to the advent of New Criticism in the middle of the twentieth century (493). My dissertation will at many points engage with each of these diverse approaches to studying attention’s place in Victorian literature and culture. But because I have chosen to train my own critical attention on the link between forms of attention and the form of the Victorian novel, my work will be responding, primarily, the two predominating methods of studying and theorizing this relationship: the scientific-physiological approach (exemplified by the work of Dames), and the “problematic” approach (illustrated by that of Daly).

Perhaps no work has studied how mid-nineteenth-century science influenced the production of the Victorian novel’s attentional form more closely than Dames’s The Physiology of the Novel (2007). As his title suggests, Dames attempts to uncover the origins of the Victorian novel’s attentional form by drawing on models from the realm of mid-nineteenth-century physiological psychology. Overturning the presiding assumption that Victorian novelists held no formal aspirations to speak of, he highlights similarities between the form of the mid-Victorian novel and certain models of embodied subjectivity developed by mid-nineteenth-century physiologists. One such model represented human attention as a process that vacillates between states of focus and drift, according to a dynamics akin to the rhythms of respiration and the cardiac cycle. Dames argues that Victorian novelists, in an attempt to address their works to embodied reading subjects who naturally attended in such a vacillating manner, composed their works to be conducive to this wavering mode of reading. Thus, for Dames, those numerous instances when the intrusive Thackerayan narrator interrupts the flow of the story represent Thackeray’s attempt to pattern his novels upon the interrupted and discontinuous attention span of his embodied reading subjects (119). In Dames’s discussion of the imbricated relationship between forms of the novel and forms of attention, a two-dimensional line graph that plots the intensity of the reader’s attention against time serves as a privileged theoretical figure. His radical investment in this figure can be inferred from his strong claim that, for physiological novelists and critics, “there is no such thing as subplot. There is only one level of plot, a kind of alternative between relaxation and nervous discharge, a form of temporality that is not unidirectional but possible, like all musical rhythms, to play in reverse, or at least to play without a necessary reference to a tonic conclusion” (55-56).

According to Dames, in other words, when a form like the Thackerayan novel and mid- nineteenth-century scientific forms of embodied attention are both charted across time, both reflect the pattern of the sine wave. By basing his theory in this temporal paradigm, Dames is able to package his work as a persuasive refutation of those theories of the novel that have tended to

22 understand novelistic form in predominantly synchronic and spatial terms.14 And yet his decision to employ this model is also premised on a false choice. In positioning his physiological model in simple opposition to the spatialized models of other novel theorists, he overlooks a third option. That is, he forecloses on the possibility that the Victorian attentional novel adopts its structure not (or not only) from the temporal dynamics of embodied reading but primarily from the syntax of attentional plotting. If, for Dames, the “only […] level of plot” is that of the physiological sine wave, it is because he views the Victorian novel largely as a formless genre that only borrows its form from contemporary physiological models of embodied reading. As a result, he discounts the possibility that an attentional form is already present within or on the surface of the Victorian novel, independent of physiological discourses and structures. To better understand the nature of Dames’s elision, it will pay to consider it within the context of recent critical debates around surface reading. Since the publication of Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus’s frequently cited 2009 special issue of Representations, there has been a growing effort among literary critics to eschew methodologies that attempt to recover what is “hiding” beneath the surface of the text—its latent or unconscious content (be this political, psychoanalytic, or a combination of the two)—in favour of methods that focus on “what is evident, perceptible,” and “apprehensible in texts” (9). “A surface,” they write, “is what insists on being looked at rather than what we must train ourselves to see through” (9, emphasis in the original). Like Marcus and Best’s suspicious readers, who overlook details inscribed plainly on the textual surface because they are absorbed in deeper, hidden meanings, Dames overlooks the possibility that there is an attentional structure already inscribed on the surface of the Victorian novel. But he does this not by looking through the text to some latent or unconscious level of structuration, but rather by focusing on what we might call the hyper-manifest structural level. In conducting his analysis in reference to an extra-textual physiological model, he consistently under-reads those allusions to attention that appear in the pages of the novel, at the level of representation, and elides the possibility that the Victorian novel’s representations of, and allusions to, attention already have a form independent of physiological models. In developing my own model of the Victorian novel’s attentional form, I will take a lesson from recent proponents of surface reading by conducting an investigation into the Victorian novel’s attentional form that is more attuned to those structures that are “evident, perceptible” and “apprehensible” in the texts themselves. Returning to the textual surface means exploring how representations of attention on this surface express a formal logic independent of scientific theories of embodied subjectivity.

Another rich and compelling method for theorizing the advent of the Victorian novel’s attentional form is what I will refer to as the “problematic” approach. I call it “problematic” because it traces the Victorian novel’s attentional form to what Jonathan Crary identifies in Suspensions of Perception (2000) as the late-nineteenth-century “problem of attention” (13). While Crary’s book

14 These include writers like F.O. Matthiessen and Percy Lubbock—authors who tend to see the principally spatial concept of Jamesian point of view as the epitome of novelistic form (Dames, The Physiology of the Novel 33-34).

23 is, by and large, a study of French impressionist and post-impressionist painting, its introductory section that offers a survey of late-nineteenth-century scientific and technological discourses around attention has had a sizeable influence on research on the nineteenth-century culture of attention. In this introductory section, Crary attempts to trace the period’s heightened concern with questions and issues of attention to a problem endemic to technological modernity, the advent of which he traces to the 1850s and 60s. He identifies this problem as one whose centrality was directly related to the emergence of a social, urban, psychic, and industrial field increasingly saturated with sensory input. It is possible to see one crucial aspect of modernity as an ongoing crisis of attentiveness, in which the changing configurations of capitalism continually push attention and distraction to new limits and thresholds, with an endless sequence of new products, sources of stimulation, and streams of information, and then respond with new methods of managing and regulating perception. (13-14) Crary thus describes the period of technological modernity that arises in the 1850s and 60s as a “social, urban, psychic, and industrial field” governed by something like a law of ever-increasing attentional entropy. This is a space that naturally tends toward a state of greater distraction through the ever-proliferating variety of things and technologies that attempt to catch and hold the subject's attention. As institutions, innovators, and entrepreneurs attempt to address the crisis by inventing new ways of capturing attention, they only further exacerbate this problem, to the extent that they only add to this ever-growing field of distracting stimuli, as Crary implies. Crary also claims that a general misunderstanding about the nature and limitations of attention further contributed to the insatiable dynamics of this problem. He states that the late-nineteenth-century scientists, pedagogues, and cultural critics who wished to bring about the longed-for state of absolute attentiveness, particularly by eliminating or suppressing distraction, largely failed to perceive the intimate connection between attention and distraction. That is, they failed to recognize that because a subject’s attention to particular stimuli necessarily involves filtering out, or distracting oneself from, other stimuli—and because prolonged bouts of attentiveness can often lead to a type of fatigue that is experienced as a state of distraction—no tidy distinctions can be drawn between these two seemingly antithetical psycho-perceptual states. Crary shows how these two trends—one techno-informational and the other scientific—fueled a sort of attention- management industry that was self-perpetuating. This industry, in its many attempts to tackle a problem of distractibility, produced new stimuli, technologies, theories, and experiments that, more often than not, only exacerbated this problem and therefore only generated a greater demand for its own technologies (Crary 50).

Daly’s work on sensation and technological modernity in the 1860s draws on Crary’s insights in an attempt to disclose the origin of the Victorian novel’s attentional plot. In his Sensation and Modernity in the 1860s (2009), he suggests that the problem of attention, with its cyclical and insatiable dynamics, helps us to understand the sensation novel’s origins and also provides us with a valuable model for interpreting the genre’s overriding concern with questions of attention.

According to Daly, appreciating this connection requires appreciating the two principal ways in which the sensation novel can be read as a “machine of attention.” It is a machine of attention, for Daly, in the first place, insofar as it invokes the problem of attention to stimulate narrative movement. “In sensation fiction,” he writes, “the dyad of attention and distraction is not only thematized, but is made the animating principle of the entertainment […]. If these novels […] are machines of attention, they also regularly seem to despair of the possibilities of control of either the self or others” (10). Daly argues, in other words, that because the problem of attention is impossible and insoluble, it offered the sensation novelists an insatiable fund of conflicts with which to fuel their narratives. The sensation novel is also a machine of attention, for Daly, in the sense that it uses its eventful and hyper-plotted narrative to train the reader to cultivate a hyper- vigilant form of attention that might keep up with the pace of industrial modernity. Daly claims that the sensation novel’s litany of frissons—which take the form of shocking episodes and revelations—prepare the reader to receive those innumerable and incessant shocks that punctuate modern urban existence (37).

Daly’s “problematic” study is therefore much like Dames’s physiological study in the sense that both trace the attentional form of the Victorian novel to contemporary discourses and theories of attention. In Daly’s work, the sensation novel’s interest in attention is generated by a pressing and thorny contemporary problem of attention; and its hyper-plotted form is motivated by the novelist’s desire to intercede in this contemporary problem by acclimating the reader’s attention to this new psycho-perceptual epoch. But Daly’s work is more comprehensive than Dames’s physiological study in one important sense: because it invites us to recognize how representations of problematic forms of attention fuel and give structure to the narrative, it is not forced to overlook those structured representations of attention that appear on the textual surface of the novel, and is even able to include them as a productive component of its analytical framework.

But there are two issues with Daly’s method that I want to address in this dissertation, and these pertain to his implicit assumptions. First, implied by his “problematic” approach is the assumption that the provenance of the novel’s attentional plot should be traced to that period running from the early 1850s to the early 1870s—that period that, for Crary, marks the advent and rise of modern spectacular culture. The issue with this assumption is that there is clear evidence that the novel’s concern with attention in general, and its use of the attentional plot in particular, predates this mid-nineteenth-century period. Indeed, as I contend, the attentional plot dates at least as far back as Walter Scott’s Waverley (1814), and might even be said to be immanent in the novel’s Quixotic origins. Tracing the advent of the novel’s attentional form to a mid-nineteenth-century cultural phenomenon thus involves overlooking this longer history of the form. The second assumption underpinning Daly’s work is that the problem of attention originates in some contemporary world outside the text. But as I have already stated—and as I will continue to argue throughout this dissertation—the problem of attention represented in the Victorian novel is not a pre-existing contemporary problem that the novel takes up and intervenes in, as if it were similar

25 to other particularly nineteenth-century problems such as the expansion of the franchise or married women’s property rights. Attention, I claim, is more often an issue manufactured by and within the Victorian novel itself. Thus, Daly’s “problematic” approach—while more comprehensive than Dames’s insofar as it is better able to account for structured representations of attentional states within the novel—fails to take account of how and why novels such as Mary Barton function as machines that manufacture the problem of attention out of non-psychological issues. My work addresses these two gaps in past scholarship; and it does this by beginning the process of reconstructing the long nineteenth-century history of novelists who, through the mechanism of the attentional plot, transpose social, cultural, and political problems into attentional ones.

IV. Looking Forward: Recovering the Long History of the Attentional Plot My survey of the long history of the attentional plot is structured as two integrated investigations into the historical-formal character of literary genre: a shorter preliminary analysis that offers new insight on how the mid-Victorian realist novel takes up and reworks the historical form of Walter Scott’s Waverley; and a more extended analysis of how a series of later-nineteenth-century authors who skew toward the romantic end of realism-romance continuum (including Collins, Stevenson, and Morris) express their inclination toward romance by rewriting these established forms of the attentional plot. My first chapter traces the origins of the attentional plot back to Scott’s Waverley (1814) and then forward through mid-Victorian realism. This chapter comes to view historical novels by Scott, Thackeray, and Eliot as works that use attention to structure processes of historical change. I open this chapter by reading Waverley as a novel that coordinates its narratives of national history and literary history using a developmental model that characterizes historical epochs through reference to forms of attention. And I argue that if Scott conceives of attention in spatialized terms to associate past epochs with forms of acute, focused, and absorbed attention that evoke spatial constriction, confinement, and withdrawal, he at the same time indexes subjective modernity to a spatially dispersed and decentred form of inattention that signifies an intellectual liberation from these circumscribed forms of the past. I further argue in this chapter that historical novels by Thackeray and Eliot invoke both Scott’s spatial method of modeling attention and his attentional method of modeling processes of historical change. But whereas Scott’s historical model is attuned to the scale of the longue durée, the mid-Victorian realists would collapse Scott’s paradigm, using it to represent processes of historical transformation that are adjusted to the scale of everyday life. My aim in this chapter is to consider the real of realism as something other, or something more, than a reference to a narrative mode that reflects or attends to the detail of the social and natural worlds. This involves considering realism as, in part, an inclination to absorb what are, in Scott, large-scale attentional processes of historical change into the more limited confines of the diegesis of the novel, to attune them to the scope and nature of the everyday, and thereby realize these processes. Chapter 1 thus works to

26 imagine the historically specific, mid-nineteenth-century expression of literary realism less as mode of representation and more as a specific way of doing the plot of attentional transformation.

If Chapter 1 attempts to imagine Victorian realism as a particular way of composing the attentional plot, Chapters 2 through 4 study how later-Victorian romantic authors rework and rewrite—in both a deliberate and an accidental manner—the distinctively realist expression of this plot form. Chapter 2 reads Collins’s sensation novels in reference both to his own comments on attention in his non-fiction writing and to Herbert Spencer’s attentional theory of style. This chapter claims that Collins remodels the realist plot of attentional transformation in two principal ways: he replaces realism’s spatial models of attention with more dynamic models rooted in linguistic and mesmeric processes; and he comes to idealize not that spatially dispersed form of attention that realism so prized but instead a form of intense and unbroken attentiveness that twentieth-century psychologists would come to refer to as flow. While my second chapter studies how Collins revises realism’s attentional form, my third chapter moves to the fin de siècle to examine how Stevenson used the attentional plot to navigate a more complex cultural politics, and specifically to oppose himself, simultaneously, to both his past and present cultural influences. These influences included contemporary cultural producers such as naturalist novelists who were promoting a culture of attentiveness, as well as his literary forebear Walter Scott, whose writing, as I have stated, extolled the virtues of inattentive states. Trapped in the middle of these two cultural positions epitomized by antithetical forms of attention, Stevenson attempted to carve out a third position in this cultural politics by drawing on a type of attention called kaleidoscopic reverie. This chapter argues that Stevenson performs this act of positioning—this simultaneous opposition to two antithetical cultural positions—by composing attentional plots that drive toward a denouement where the protagonist comes to assume and embody this idealized mode of kaleidoscopic reverie. This dissertation then concludes with my analysis in Chapter 4 of Morris’s deceptively simple and strangely medieval-esque late prose romances. Critics have often interpreted Morris’s decision to begin writing these romances at the end of his career as something of a retrograde move: as a degenerative return to a decadent, medieval-esque, and childish form of storytelling. My final chapter writes against this trend by reading Morris’s late prose romances in light of his writing on typographic design in order to disclose an innovative feature at the heart of these texts. It argues that in these late-life, medieval-esque texts, Morris was not simply reverting to a primitive, innocent, and facile narrative form; he was invoking the form of distraction that typographers called “dazzle” to develop a new way of structuring the plot of attentional transformation. As I demonstrate in this chapter, typographic theories not only gave Morris new attentional concepts with which to populate the positions of that deep structure that is the attentional plot; they also provided him with the means to give the dialectical plot of attentional plot a new structure, which in turn allowed him to develop ways of structuring the relationship between labour, politics, and aesthetics through a form of textual praxis.

Overall, then, in the course of reimagining mid-Victorian realism and late-Victorian romance as competing ways of doing the plot of attentional transformation, this dissertation will push back against that body of scholarship that considers nineteenth-century cultural and psychological discourses on attention as the most suitable contexts in which to situate the nineteenth-century British novel’s evocations of, and allusions to, forms of attention. As I hope to make clear at many points in this dissertation, the novel has its own history and methods of mobilizing concepts of attention that are largely independent of the terms and concepts developed in these discourses. This is not to say that viewing the novel in this way requires that we overlook how nineteenth- century authors engaged with contemporary psychological writing and thought. (Indeed, a large part of this dissertation that aims to trace the attentional plot's persistence and migration across the later Victorian period will also involve marking those points where this plot form intersects with contemporary discourses on attention.) Instead, it involves considering the plot of attentional transformation as the conceptual horizon within which novelists executed such engagements. I appreciate the novel as such a horizon in part because what I call the attentional novel predates the various physiological and cultural discourses that are often said to be at root of the Victorian novel’s interests in questions around psychology. As a project that turns primarily not to contemporary scientific discourses but to the novel itself as the source of the novelist's interest in attention, my approach might be grasped as an example of what Margaret Cohen calls “returning to the archive of literature” (59). This is a method that, according to Cohen, analyzes literary texts not in reference to contemporary historical archives and non-literary discourses but instead within the context of a sort of historical expanse of literary texts that can be imagined as an untapped archive of forgotten and overlooked poetics (59). This way of modeling the attentional novel can also be visualized with the aid of Caroline Levine’s notion of literary forms, which she understands as time-travelling survivals that are distinctly not of their time and are better defined by their ability to endure and migrate across social contexts and historical periods (4-6). My dissertation will evoke Levine’s notion of portable forms by imagining the attentional plot as a hoary prismatic structure that, being internal to the form and history of the novel, mediated how Victorian novelists incorporated representations of psychological states and engaged with contemporary psychological discourses within their works. The attentional plot, I claim, is a glacial structure that cuts across such contemporary discourses, at some points engaging with their terms and concepts as if they were so much glacial debris, but at others not heeding their presence.

Chapter 1 The Realist Novel and the Plotted Thing

As the foregoing introduction declares, this dissertation considers attention less as a psychological or physiological concept and more as a narrative function that nineteenth-century novelists used to perform both literary-political and more properly political (or extra-literary) interventions at the same time. The current chapter, which focuses its analysis on how realist novelists engaged with concepts of attention, proposes a new way of modelling the form of the mid-Victorian realist novel by indexing this form to a particular expression of the attentional plot. This chapter considers realism not (or not simply) as a mimetic mode of representation or as a delimited set of generic conventions but instead as a particular way of doing the plot of attentional transformation. By investigating how mid-Victorian realism expresses this formal phenomenon, this chapter also pursues a second objective, which is to prepare the ground for later chapters, in which the later- Victorian romantic novel will be read as something more (or something other) than a textual strategy to revive past modes of storytelling, or to elicit primitive modes of subjectivity; it will be read as a genre that strives for generic distinction and social relevance by innovating on past examples of the attentional plot, such as that expressed by mid-Victorian realism.

Of course, making generalizations about the Victorian realist novel—even contingent or qualified ones—is an intractably difficult exercise. Attempts to winnow down the genre to its essential features can be frustrated due to the realist novel’s exceedingly capacious and inclusive form; and the more focused method of simply equating Victorian realism with a mimetic or verisimilar mode of representation tends to occlude the genre’s seemingly essential but otherwise non- mimetic characteristics. As a literary genre, Victorian realism is multiplex and adulterated: it is mimesis plus something else. And the problem of theorizing the genre is very much bound up with the problem of determining and delineating what these other qualities are. The following are among the features that risk being occluded when we simply equate Victorian realism with mimesis: the genre’s tendency to engage with contemporary or historically recent social problems of varying degrees of urgency and specificity (Claybaugh 41); its dialogic engagement with, and often explicit attempts to distinguish itself from, other prominent forms of prose fiction, such as sensational, sentimental, and downright silly novels on the one hand, and too-starkly realistic works that “threate[n] the reader with drowning in an aggressively unpleasant morass of the ugly, mean, and the reprehensible” on the other (Dames, “Realism” 299); and (perhaps most importantly for my purposes) the realist novel’s historical dimension—that is, its tendency not only to reflect the present as if the genre were simply a mirror held up to contemporary reality but also to contemplate the historical past and dramatize processes of historical change (Bodenheimer

28 29

3, Shaw 6).15 Realism, in other words, is a diffuse and multitasking genre that performs a number of functions at the same time. In addition to passively directing a mirror to society, it is also quite active in engaging with contemporary social problems, taking up a position in a literary politics, and representing processes of historical transformation.16

I propose to show how a particular manifestation of the plot of attentional transformation enables realist novelist to execute these diverse functions at the same time, and through the same formal mechanism. What I identify as this distinctively realist expression of the multi-tasking attentional plot has two principal features. It has a simple syntagmatic structure that moves from a state of attentiveness or absorption (agon) to one of relative inattentiveness and distractibility (denouement). In the realist plot of attentional transformation, the protagonist reaches denouement when she learns how not to pay attention as closely as she was wont to do in the past. This is also a plot in which objects play a key role. Because realist authors express an understanding of attention that is spatial in its conceptualization, a character’s attention in the realist novel is often represented metonymically, through the medium of those objects she normally attends to. This is a method of conceptualizing attention that is neither psychological nor taxonomical in nature. It is a method that makes use of a sliding scale that stretches from spatially delimited focus to spatially dispersed inattention; and the intensity of a character’s attention is determined by the size of the object she normally attends to (the smaller the object, the more focused the attention, and vice versa). Such mimetic objects not only serve to represent the characters’ attention as a spatialized faculty; they also function as a repository for the novel’s attentional agon. They carry the problem of attention through the discursive space of the text, eventually demanding a denouement that would occur with the attentional object’s displacement, or with its replacement by another, less “focused” object. It is this object-oriented plot that gives the novelist the ability to coordinate the novel’s multiple tasks into one coherent narrative form. For example, it provides the realist novelist with a method of depicting social problems at the level of personal experience (an affordance that was demonstrated through the example of Mary Barton); and it also represents processes of historical change through the synecdoche of processes of attentional change. For a character in a realist novel, overcoming the social dilemmas presented by a modern industrial and economic society does not mean addressing these structural issues directly. It more often involves dispensing with the adverse forms of attention such phenomena promote—particularly a pernicious tendency to focus—and adopting a spatially diffuse mode of attention that is conducive to sympathetic attachment in an industrializing modern world.

15 My reference to “silly novels” is of course an allusion to the title of George Eliot’s essay “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists” (1856). 16 Another critic who troubles the notion that Victorian realism and mimesis are simply synonymous is George Levine. In The Realistic Imagination, Levine argues that while mid- Victorian realist novelists actually demonstrate a profound awareness of the ways in which their chosen narrative mode fails to capture a reality that exists outside the text, they nevertheless “proceed to take the risk of believing in the possibility of fictions that bring us at least a little closer to what is not ourselves and not merely language” (4).

This chapter develops this idea by highlighting examples of the attentional narrative in novels by Thackeray and Eliot. But it will begin with an illustrative look at Scott’s Waverley. I begin this chapter in the Regency period because I consider Waverley to be a proto-realist novel that anticipates the form and function of realism’s attentional plot. Like the mid-Victorian realist novels that came in its wake, Waverley develops a spatialized understanding of human attention by representing attention through the medium of mimetic objects. Like the realists who followed him, moreover, Scott also transposes issues of national and social scale and import into subjective problems around how individuals pay attention. But perhaps more significant than these two homologies is the way in which Waverley illustrates how the mid-Victorian realists use the attentional plot to iconize processes of historical change. One reason for reading the realist novel through the lens of Scott’s much more overtly historical novel is that this method is able to highlight the historiographic role that the attentional plot plays in the realist novel. Waverley’s value in this respect can be grasped through reference to a developmental metaphor: that of the infant human skull. It is often observed that the infant skull, with its soft spots (or fontanelles), encodes a developmental history by showing that the human skull comprises not one large bone but rather a series of smaller bones that eventually fuse together as the child matures. Waverley evokes the infant skull because, in dividing literary-political and national-political uses of the attentional plot across two different narratives, it provides a clear and transparent illustration of how mid-Victorian realists mobilize concepts of attention to coordinate divergent plots and represent historical change in their own narratives. So, in order to develop this new understanding Victorian realism—this view of realism as a plotted process of attentional transformation—I will begin by studying this form in its nascent, pre-Victorian state: that infant skull that is Scott’s Waverley.

I. Waverley’s Two Attentional Plots: The Meeting of National and Literary Histories The notion that Waverley provided something of a formal template for the realist novel is not entirely original. Ian Duncan claims, for example, that if Waverley is to be recognized as the “pattern for countless subsequent novels” it is because it employs a type of “double representation” whereby it intertwines Edward Waverley’s personal “romance of sexual and moral development” with the national crisis of the Jacobite rising, thus representing the two as mutually dependent processes (Modern Romance 51-52). Of course, Duncan was anticipated by Georg Lukács, who described how “Scott endeavours to portray the struggles and antagonisms of history by means of characters who, in their psychology and destiny, always represent social trends and historical forces” (The Historical Novel 34). And if canonical works of Victorian realism reflect the pattern of Waverley, it is insofar as they reprise Scott’s attempt to interlace a not-too-distant history of national crisis and progress with a narrative of personal development in order to figure the two as a single developmental process. In Dickens’s Bleak House (1853), for example, because we see Esther Summerson cultivating her moral character and maternal acumen while also helping the Jarndyces navigate a malevolently inefficient Chancery Court, her moral

31 development becomes inextricably entwined with the historical process of legal reform, even to the point of suggesting a moral-domestic solution to a national-historical legal problem. Gaskell’s North and South (1855) evokes a similar knitting together of historical and subjective processes of development, with Margaret Hale attaining a degree of sexual and moral self-awareness at the same time as she acts to assuage a violent confrontation between industrialists and workers in the recent past of Britain’s industrial north. And in Eliot’s Middlemarch (1872), Dorothea Brooke is presented as an emblem of a recent period of national historical transition, what with her existential dis-ease and want of a clear vocation that subjectivizes the larger political and social uncertainties in the period of the first Reform bill and the building of a transnational railway. In all these novels, a bildungsroman is set against the backdrop of a historical national crisis, and the protagonist’s moral development comes to suggest a small-scale solution to a problem that is pitched at a national scale. When these novels are looked at as such hybrid historical narratives, they recapitulate the Mobius strip that is Waverley’s narrative form, insofar as both Scott and these Victorian realists represent the moral development of the individual subject and the history of the modernization of national and social institutions as two coextensive—and sometimes even indistinguishable—processes.

However, I want to revise this understanding of how Waverley offers a pattern for the Victorian realist novel by highlighting another facet of Scott’s textual attempt to yoke together personal- subjective and political-historical narratives. For me, Waverley does more than simply combine personal and national histories on the site of the novel’s hero using the synthetic medium of narrative discourse; it also sets alongside this hybrid diegetic narrative an extra-diegetic literary- historical narrative that appears in the novel’s introductory chapter, where Scott pits himself against present and past exemplars of prose fiction. This narrative of literary-historical development never intersects with the novel’s narrative proper, as these two are separated by that boundary dividing diegetic and extra-diegetic levels, as well as by a considerable quantity of historical time. And yet they deserve to be considered in tandem for the reason that they function as a unit by representing historical transformation not simply as intertwined processes of personal and national development but also (and primarily) through a longer history imagined as a process of attentional development. If we recognize the attentional rhetoric of the literary-historical narrative that opens Scott’s text, we can develop a better appreciation of the all-encompassing narrative of attentional development that structures this novel, as well as a better understanding of how the Victorian realist novel reflects and transforms the pattern of Waverley in its capacity as such an attentional structure.

To develop this comprehensive view of Waverley’s bipartite attentional form, let us begin by looking at how the novel’s narrative proper is structured using concepts of attention. Anyone familiar with Waverley will likely have a sense of how its agon is at once literary-generic and attentional in its evocations. Scott prepares the ground for this plot through his description of Waverley’s early development, where he explains how Waverley, as a result of his haphazard and

32 unsupervised education, was given liberty to cruise “through the sea of books” housed in the library at Waverley-Honour, reading widely and indiscriminately “like a vessel without a pilot or a rudder” (48). As a result of his desultory early reading practices, Waverley ends up cultivating a taste for a corpus of unedifying literature that included “memoirs” that were “scarcely more faithful than romances” and “romances so well written as hardly to be distinguished from memoirs” (49). Scott’s description here—which highlights Waverley’s taste for a style of literature that blurs distinctions between romance and history—might be thought to anticipate two things: Waverley’s development into a quixotic figure inclined to confuse romance and reality; and a denouement that would take place when Waverley disburdens himself of this tendency in a moment of disillusionment. However, as Scott's narrative advances, the actual psychological deficiency that Waverley comes to develop as a result of his desultory early reading is not quixotism per se; Scott even states that he will not be treating the reader to “an imitation of the romance of Cervantes” (56). He writes that Waverley, as a result of this penchant for romance reading, was never inclined to project his romantic fantasies onto the world (as Quixote does), but was instead simply satisfied to dwell in the world of his absorbing daydreams and to develop worrying “habits of abstraction” as well as a worrying love of withdrawal from the world of social intercourse (56, 50). Disinclined to diagnose Edward with the pathology of quixotic projection, Scott instead draws on figures of internalization and retirement to represent Waverley’s psychological fault as an inordinate tendency toward absorbed attention. He can even be said to represent his “insipid” hero’s miseducation as a doubly absorbing process: having absorbed the contents of the library at an alarming rate, Edward in turn develops an unhealthy tendency to absorb himself in those abundant romantic tales that have come to populate his imagination.17

If Scott is intent on characterizing Waverley’s early development as this pseudo-quixotic process, he seems to do so in order to give an air of naturalness to the following plot and its national- political agon. In preceding the novel’s national-political plot with this description of Waverley’s early development, he suggests that it is only natural that this hero, whose upbringing taught him how to become absorbed in the world of romantic fiction, would also become absorbed in the political plot of the Jacobite Rising—a plot that takes the form of an “allegory of genre,” having all the trappings of “Ariostian romance” (Duncan, Modern Romance 75). What Scott is doing in the early part of the novel, in other words, is developing an attentional agon that can be summarized in the following manner: a young Englishman, whose youthful penchant for romance reading predisposes him toward habits of absorbed attention, naturally becomes absorbed into a political plot that evokes the characters and conventions of an absorbing romance text; and the conflict produced through the meeting of these two histories—that of the hero’s absorbing early education and that of an absorbing political movement—eventually climaxes when Waverley

17 Duncan (Modern Romance 63) and Gamer (517) also interpret Waverley as a more passive version of the quixotic subject. However, I am qualifying these other readings by underlining the attentional aspect of Waverley’s quixotism and particularly Scott’s extended use of the trope of absorption.

33 risks being charged with desertion, and risks ending up on the wrong side of history. Waverley’s plot is thus overdetermined by absorption. It evokes a number of different senses of the term, what with Waverley’s unwilled incorporation (or absorption) into the ill-fated Jacobite rising occurring as a result of his having absorbed the contents of the library at Waverley-Honour and his subsequent tendency to become absorbed in romance reading. We might then say that absorbed attention operates as a kind of transcendental signifier in the world of Waverley, organizing issues of education, national politics, and literary genre into a single narrative problematic.

That attention performs this structuring function is further evidenced by the novel’s denouement. If the concept of absorbed attention coordinates the novel’s national, subjective, and literary crises into a single narrative problematic, it is perhaps not surprising that the novel reaches denouement when Waverley’s habituated mode of attention suddenly shifts. This abrupt shift occurs in the moments leading up to the Battle of Prestonpans. Ready to strike his first treasonous blow on behalf of the Jacobites—an act that would complete his baptism into the Jacobite faction and precipitate his fall into the dustbin of history—Waverley is brought so close to the English forces led by John Cope that [he] could plainly recognise the standard of the troop he had formerly commanded, and hear the trumpets and kettle-drums sound the signal of advance, which he had so often obeyed. […] It was at that instant, that, looking around him, he saw the wild dress and appearance of his Highland associates, heard their whispers in an uncouth and unknown language, looked upon his own dress, so unlike that which he had worn from his infancy, and wished to awake from what seemed at the moment a dream, strange, horrible, and unnatural. (349, emphasis added) What happens to Waverley at this “instant” could be characterized in a number of different ways: as an awakening of national sympathy, say, or as a natural revulsion to the signs of Highland primitivism. But, of course, this is not a text whose meanings are structured along rigid nationalistic or geographical lines (indeed, what Waverley gains from this moment is not a strong and lasting sense of national pride or a sustained repugnance to Highland culture). When we read this passage in reference to the novel’s agon, and its overdetermination as a problem of absorption, Waverley’s sudden transformation in this instance suggests that it is something else, something more properly psycho-perceptual that ejects him out of the Jacobite plot. It is simply that Waverley is suddenly made to pay attention to the details of the dress and manner of his Highland compatriots. Scott’s hero, who had previously engaged with the furniture of the Jacobite plot as the contents of a familiar and engrossing romance narrative, at this point comes to perceive these things with a keenly attentive gaze that serves to disrobe them of their absorbing romantic significations. Waverley has something like a Bill-Brown moment here; when Highland accouterments no longer work to facilitate Edward’s romantic absorption, he is all of a sudden

34 brought to pay attention to their thingness.18 It is not insignificant that it is this instant of attentional transformation—this instant where Waverley transforms from a primarily absorbing to a primarily attentive subject—that ultimately announces the novel’s denouement. For it is this transformational experience that compels Waverley to defend the Englishman Colonel Talbot from an attack by Highland soldiers: a humanitarian decision that leads to Waverley being pardoned for desertion and ultimately reintegrated into English society and history. It is thus not quite accurate to read this passage as one that signals Waverley’s rejection of his adopted primitive identity in favour of the nationality of his homeland. What Waverley discovers in the instant of denouement is an ability that had been denied him as a result of his early education: an ability to pay attention.

My decision to diminish the moral- and national-developmental connotations of Waverley’s denouement in order to read the novel as one that culminates with an example of attentional transformation might be viewed as a de-historicizing move. But the exact opposite is true, in fact; and this becomes apparent when we recall the large-scale structuring function that attention plays in this novel. With this plot that shifts from what we might call an “absorbing” agon to an “attentive” denouement, Scott locates in the concept of attention not only a method for structuring his historical novel but also a system for categorizing historical epochs. This is a system that mobilizes the functional vagueness of attentional concepts toward the end of coordinating political, anthropological, and literary narratives of historical development into a single coherent structure. After Scott draws on the ambiguities around absorbed attention in order to characterize the premature stage of development that is at once politically radical, anthropologically primitive, and generically romantic, he invokes attentiveness to announce the advent of a subsequent stage that is relatively quietist, civilized, and novelistic. It is helpful to note at this point that Waverley’s setting of 1745 is roughly coincident with the advent of the great eighteenth-century English novels of Richardson and Fielding. This historical coincidence invites us to read the novel’s denouement—that moment when Waverley is all of a sudden hailed as an attentive subject—as a dramatization of Waverley’s sudden adoption of what, for Watt, is that characteristically novelistic and middle-class mode of attending: that mode of formal realism, which is expressed, for Watt, as a focus on the details of natural and social surfaces.19 But whereas Watt views the

18 Brown’s popular distinction between objects and things (which, for Brown, denote different types of subject-object relations) engages with concepts of attention in significant ways. Brown uses a window metaphor to define objects as things we look through, that we fail to appreciate as things, because we are too absorbed in their meanings or functionality to notice their thingness. A “thing,” on the other hand, writes Brown, “can hardly function as window.” When an object stops working as a tool, as a signifier, or as a mechanism within a chain of production, consumption, and exchange, we are forced to pay attention to it, to notice its thingness. Thus, a thing, according to Brown, is, in one sense, a sort of momentary fixing or pooling of attention in space. See Brown 4. 19 The novel, for Watt, is to be distinguished from “other genres and previous forms of fiction by the amount of attention it habitually accords both to the individualization of its characters and to the detailed representation of their environment” (18).

35 novelist’s inclination toward the attentive mode only as one expression of the bourgeois epoch— as one of a host of expressions marking the rise of bourgeois subjectivity—Scott rather seems intent on employing the concept of attentiveness as an encompassing historical category, of which the rise of the novel and the rise of a bourgeois class are simply expressions, in the same way that he presents absorbed attention as a category that embraces the primitive, radical, and literary- romantic historical epochs.

Yet what Scott represents as the attentive stage of social development—that stage that Waverley is suddenly born into at the point of denouement—by no means marks the apex of the attentional history that he develops in his novel. The Author of Waverley indexes the novel’s historical horizon to a different form of attention using another narrative of transformation that sits on the diegetic borders of this text. This other attentional narrative is implicit in the opening chapter of the novel, which is situated in a liminal position in the text’s organizational structure—insofar as it takes the tone of a paratextual prologue but is nonetheless part of the text proper—and provides a cursory map of the literary field as Scott appreciated it at the time when he was writing the novel. This is the portion of the text that includes Scott’s justification of his choice of title and the rationale behind his decision to set the action “sixty years since.” As a structured and coherent piece of discourse in its own right, this introductory chapter is organized as a typological description of the most prominent literary-prose genres of the age (including the Gothic and sentimental novels, the German romance, and the novel of fashionable life). This piece of discourse is notable for characterizing each of these genres using a laundry list of motifs, mannerisms, locales, and—most significantly—objects. In a particularly evocative and representative example of Scott's method of generic typology here, the Author of Waverley writes, “had my title borne ‘Waverley, a Romance from the German,’ what head so obtuse as not to image forth a profligate abbot, an oppressive duke, a secret and mysterious association of Rosycrucians and Illuminati, with all the properties of black cowls, caverns, daggers, electrical machines, trap-doors, and dark-lanterns” (32). It is important to observe how Scott uses syntax to characterize each of the literary field’s extant genres not only as a collection of discrete conventions and objects but also as a sort of literary-historical descent into a condition of objecthood. Each of his generic descriptions follows the same bathetic trajectory that marks Scott’s description of German romance, insofar as each moves from the genre’s less material to its more material components. In this portion of his introductory chapter, we see Scott mapping the literary field in such a way that each of its member genres—from the antiquated tale of romantic intrigue to the contemporary tale of fashionable life—expresses the form of such an objectifying and bathetic list of conventions, places, persons, and ultimately things.

As we read through this portion of the text, it becomes apparent that Scott is undertaking this systematic characterization of established literary forms in order to condense a complex literary field into a simple set of political oppositions in order to highlight the value and distinctiveness of

36 his own intervention into this field, in an act of “position-taking.”20 Mary Poovey observes (in a comment that is no doubt informed by Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological paradigm) that literary- political rhetoric can often reflect an attempt to transform a manifold field or continuum of diverse literary genres into a simple binary opposition between two symbolic literary qualities (321-22). For the literary producer, this rhetorical approach simplifies the process of intervening in the field, since it transforms the unruly and crowded space of literary forms into a clear-cut hierarchized binary between cultural self and cultural other. Scott appears to be employing this same strategy in this introductory chapter of Waverley; in reducing each of the variety of prominent literary genres to only a handful of objectified conventions, and thus representing each as a syntactical process of descent into the object world, he is making preparations to distinguish his own work as a set of opposite qualities and as an opposing movement.

But Scott employs this rhetorical strategy not simply as a way of promoting his own work as uniquely spiritual or immaterial in contradistinction to these objectified or reified forms of his adversaries. At the culminating point of his chapter—where he outlines the virtues of his decision to set his own story “Sixty Years before the present”—he gives the sense that he is doing this in order to characterize his own intervention as an intervention into a literary field comprising a host of attentional forms and a literary history structured as a process of attentional development. He states at this point that the reader will meet in the following pages neither a romance of chivalry nor a tale of modern manners; […] my hero will neither have irons on his shoulders, as of yore, nor on the heels of his boots, as is the present fashion of Bond Street, and […] my damsels will neither be clothed “in purple and in pall,” like the Lady Alice of an old ballad, nor reduced to the primitive nakedness of a modern fashionable at a rout. From this my choice of an era the understanding critic may farther presage, that the object of my tale is more a description of men than manners. A tale of manners, to be interesting, must either refer to antiquity so great as to have become venerable, or it must bear a vivid reflection of those scenes which pass daily before our eyes, and are interesting from their novelty. Thus the coat-of-mail of our ancestors, and the triple-furred pelisse of our modern beaux, may, though for very different reasons, be equally fit for the array of a fictitious

20 Bourdieu describes the dynamics of position-taking in the following way: “The history of the field arises from the struggle between the established figures and the young challengers. The ageing of authors, schools, and works is far from being the product of a mechanical, chronological, slide into the past; it results from the struggle between those who have made their mark […] and those who cannot make their own mark without pushing into the past those who have an interest in stopping the clock […]. ‘Making one’s mark,’ initiating a new epoch, means winning recognition, in both senses, of one’s difference from other producers, especially the most consecrated of them; it means, by the same token, creating a new position, ahead of the positions already occupied, in the vanguard. (Hence the importance, in this struggle for survival, of all distinctive marks, such as the names of social groups—words which make things, distinctive signs which produce existence.) […] Each author, school or work which ‘makes its mark’ displaces the whole series of earlier authors, schools or works” (“The Field of Cultural Production” 60).

character; but who, meaning the costume of his hero to be impressive, would willingly attire him [as Scott suggests he himself does in Waverley] in the court dress of George the Second’s reign, with its no collar, large sleeves, and low pocket-holes? (33, emphasis added) It is not coincidental that immediately after Scott has just exemplified each of the most prominent fictional forms within the literary field as a mode of representation that pays close attention to objects and the details of manners and dress, he decides to characterize his own mode of representation as a mode that is distinguished by its reluctance to focus on such objects and details. Scott’s strategy here is clear. Having grouped all other genres together as forms of attentiveness to physical objects, and to literary conventions that have become so reified that they hold the status of physical objects, he is now ready to describe the unique and distinctive feature of his own work in antithetical terms, that is, as a general inattention to details, which in turn will permit him access to truths about “men” as opposed simply to “manners.” Scott suggests, in short, that his own discursive mode is unique and exemplary precisely because it is disinclined to pay attention to things—because it is inattentive, in short.

This interpretation of the introductory chapter invites a handful of objections. For example, one might object that Scott seems to be basing his novel’s distinctiveness on an opposition between men and manners, and not on one between attentiveness and inattention. While this is no doubt true to an extent, it is also important to recognize that Scott fails to define the category “men” in anything resembling substantive or positive terms. Instead, he invites the reader to view his work as a negative mode of discourse—that is, not as a mode that accurately selects and represents aspects of the universal, but instead as one that actively avoids fixing its narrative attention on what is decidedly ephemeral, fashionable, and non-universal. By representing the work of his literary adversaries as forms that encourage their readers to be attentive to mimetic objects—to objects that have no significatory value save that of their thingness—Scott figures his inattentive novel as a process of becoming: as a means through which this reader might pull herself out of that abject world of mere objects that much contemporary literature represents, and back into the world of universal human values. In thus framing a problem of literary representation as a problem of attention, and in proposing an attentional solution to that problem, Scott evokes the asymmetrical dialectic of Crawford, who proposes a return to the prelapsarian world of universal values not by identifying and disseminating such values but instead by fostering a particular form of attention (or, in this case, inattention). One might also object that Scott’s description of his own work in the introductory chapter—his characterization of his discourse as universalizing in its inattention to manners and details—cannot be taken seriously, since it by no means describes what Scott actually does in the novel itself. Notwithstanding Scott’s claim to the contrary, the principal content of his narrative is not the unremarkable fashions of George the Second’s court but instead the relatively remarkable details of dress, manners, and habits exhibited by his Highland subjects. But if Scott is willing to risk mischaracterizing his own work in this manner, it is because the vision of literary-political difference he develops in this introductory chapter is

38 such an alluring and compelling fantasy of literary innovation for the reason that it is able to draw such clear distinctions between the literary past and that literary future that Scott claims to be bringing into existence through Waverley.

But there is another dissonance between Waverley’s introductory chapter and its national narrative proper that is even more effective in helping us understand the nature and function of Scott’s attentional plots. Scott seems to be at odds with himself in these two narratives, for the type of attention he appears to espouse in the novel’s denouement (that attentiveness to the details of manner and dress) is antithetical to the type he espouses through the introductory chapter’s literary-political narrative (that distinctive inattention to such details). In these two separate narratives, Scott would seem to be espousing two different ways of paying, or not paying, attention. But this inconsistency becomes less problematic when one considers the historical gap dividing Waverley’s denouement from Scott's literary-political act of position-taking in the introductory chapter, which are of two separate historical periods. In these two separate narratives, Scott is not so much espousing contrasting forms of attention as he is using forms of attention to exemplify epochs in a narrative of historical development. This is a historical narrative divided into three distinct stages, each of which is typified by a different form of attention.21 While the first stage is exemplified by the type of absorption common to both romance reading and political rebellion, and which is dramatized through Waverley’s descent into the Jacobite plot, the second stage is distinguished by a transition to what we might call a civilized, middle-class, and novelistic epoch characterized by attentiveness to the details of manners and dress. This transformation, of course, is what structures Waverley’s national-political narrative, with its denouement that takes place when Waverley suddenly adopts a novelistic mode of attending. But while the advent of this stage is coeval with the text’s denouement, and in this sense marks a developmental highpoint for the novel’s characters, it is also on the verge of being superannuated by the time that the novel’s Regency author is penning Waverley. From the historical perspective of the Author of Waverley—positioned, historically, in the early nineteenth- century—the attentive epoch of the mid-eighteenth-century middle-class and novelistic period has already run its course, and has ossified into the objectifying generic conventions of Scott’s literary adversaries and forebears. It is not insignificant, then, that that same attentiveness to manners and

21 Similarly, Ian Duncan views Waverley as a novel that coordinates a complex of developmental narratives into a dialectical or tripartite system: “Waverley coordinates different developmental narratives into a complex whole: the Humean national history of emergence from a violent factional past to the liberal horizon of civil society; the bildungsroman of a personal progress from adolescent illusion through sentimental and moral crisis to mature settlement; and the literary allegory of the rise of the novel. This developmental complex rehearses the Humean dialectic between reason and imagination, skeptical alienation and sympathetic absorption, that governs an enlightened relation to common life. Like Hume’s philosophy, young Waverley must move from a ‘vulgar’ confusion of reality with the figures of the imagination, through disorientation and disenchantment, to a reconnection with common life—set at the horizon of civil society and our own act of reading, at the end of the story” (Scott’s Shadow 137). What Duncan overlooks, however, is how Scott’s act of literary-political positioning in the introductory chapter fits into the text’s complex of developmental narratives.

39 dress which is able to pull Waverley out of his absorption in the Jacobite plot is the same mode of attention that Scott uses to organize his diverse literary competitors into a unified body of opponents. With that act of positioning that Scott conducts in the introductory chapter, where he distinguishes his own narrative discourse as uniquely inattentive, the Author of Waverley thus positions himself as developmentally superior not only to his literary opponents but also to the novel’s insipid hero and thus announces the advent of a third and final stage in his history that is at once both literary-historical and national-historical in character. This is a modern epoch distinguished by a form of inattentiveness that strives to return to the ideal, to the universal. Because this historical narrative’s third epoch is both nascent and inchoate—a condition that the author is on the verge of bringing into being through that act of literary-political rhetoric that takes place on the margins of the text—Scott can only characterize it in terms of its difference from the previous two stages: as a condition that is marked by neither romantic absorption nor novelistic attentiveness but rather by a vague form of inattentiveness with which he chooses to associate his mode of narrative discourse (even if this mode fails to express this form of attention in practice). Scott, in his position on the margins of this text, in effect sits on the brink of this attentional-historical horizon: a modern inattentive subject on the verge of being born.

If the Victorian novel follows the pattern of Waverley, it is insofar as it dramatizes the advent of the inchoate modern inattentive subject who exists only on the margins of Scott’s text. That is, the mid-Victorian realist novel realizes Scott’s ideal of inattentive subjectivity, and it does so by absorbing those attentive objects that have only a metaphorical existence and only literary-generic connotations within Scott’s extra-diegetic act of literary-political positioning into the diegesis of the novel. Those objectified generic conventions that Scott disparaged for demanding an overly attentive mode of reading become real objects in the Victorian novel. To be a protagonist in the Victorian realist novel is often to experience a descent into the world of attentive objects—an experience similar to reading the work of one of Scott’s literary adversaries. For such characters, moreover, the promise of denouement is associated with the possibility of disengaging oneself from such objects and thus becoming the inattentive subject who exists on the horizon of Scott’s historical narrative.

II. Amelia’s Little Desk: Vanity Fair and the Tragedy of Circumscribed Attention Thackeray’s Vanity Fair offers a compelling illustration of how the realist novel absorbs and synthesizes Waverley’s intra- and extra-diegetic histories of attentional transformation. It does this through its representations of two of the novel’s principal figures, Becky Sharp and Amelia Sedley, who represent the embodiment of what are in Scott the attentive and absorbing historical epochs, respectively. The simplest way to grasp this idea is to notice how Thackeray gives his two predominant female characters names that index them to something like attentive and absorbing poles within the text’s attentional semiotics. Thus, it is no coincidence that a character named Becky Sharp is nothing if not too acute, with her eye that is only too quick to pick up social cues

40 that she might exploit for personal gain. On the other hand, if Thackeray gives Amelia the surname Sedley, it is no doubt in part because her unrelenting absorption in the figure of her undeserving lover, George Osborne, and then in the image of her infant son, little George, evokes the sedulity, seduction, and sedation of an individual who has become mesmerized by, and absorbed in, a strongly affecting object. If Vanity Fair can be said to absorb and synthesize Waverley’s two historical agones—that of Waverley’s absorption into the Jacobite plot and that of a literary field marked by a collective descent into an abject state of attentiveness—it is insofar as it pairs the history of an absorbed and saturnine widow with that of an eminently attentive adventuress.

What is Thackeray doing in presenting the reader with these two paralleling attentional histories, though? In the previously discussed The Physiology of the Novel, Dames provides important insight on this question. He contends that Thackeray’s paralleling representations of attentive and absorbed subjectivity are not meant to reify these two different psychological categories but are instead intended to upset conventional methods of categorizing psychological states that involve drawing clear distinctions between types of attention like attentiveness and absorption, say. Dames argues that because each of the novel’s characters in fact passes through a spectrum of attentional states that includes absorbed, attentive, and inattentive states, “character” in Vanity Fair “seems most vivid” not in those moments when the subject expresses a form of attention that has come to be associated with her through naming (for example) but instead “at moments when” such characteristic attention “has been disrupted” (Dames 90). Becky provides Dames with a good illustration of this idea: “For all her plotting and ability to concentrate on the tactical matters on hand, even Becky […] is caught in moments of inattention, such as her evident boredom during the daily routine of governessing” (92). One implication of Dames’s insight is that “[s]tates of attention in Thackeray are neither descriptive (a way to ‘do’ subjectivity) nor prescriptive (a moral desideratum). Thackeray […] seems to doubt that attention equals subjectivity” (95). I agree that Thackeray associates Becky and Amelia with discrete forms of attention only in order to undermine the veracity and discreteness of such attentional categories. But I claim that Thackeray does this not by invoking a temporal model that shows the subject’s attention to vacillate across time, but rather by drawing on a model of attention that is based in a spatial paradigm. I am also somewhat sceptical of Dames’s claim that Thackeray, in eliding distinctions between attentional categories, imagines attention as neither characterologically “descriptive” or morally “prescriptive”—as if the novelist is necessarily forced to choose between scientific and moral conceptions of attention. I rather argue that attention is a decidedly moral category in Vanity Fair, and specifically that Thackeray uses representations of attention to imagine the retributive medium connecting moral crime and punishiment as something that operates according to an attentional logic. Put simply, I claim that attention in Vanity Fair is both a spatial and a moral concept.

When looked at from the perspective of the history of science, Thackeray's spatial method of conceiving of attention is consistent with a certain branch of contemporary physiological thought that imagined attention through spatial metaphors. One of the most popular of such conceits is what Margaret Koehler refers to as the “spotlight” model (11). This is a model that figures attention as a spotlight illuminating a delimited portion of a larger visual or cognitive field. The model is predicated on the idea that, because the power available to this “spotlight” is of a fixed value, there is an inverse relationship between attention’s intensity and its scope. Implied by this spatial theory of attention is the idea that if we expand our attention to incorporate more aspects of this overall field, the intensity of attention directed at any given portion of the field will decrease (much like with a spotlight); however, if we focus this spotlight of attention by contracting its overall radius, the intensity per unit of space will increase proportionally. Although this spotlight metaphor is of twentieth-century provenance, the principle informing it is of a much earlier origin, and even predates Thackeray’s novel. In the Principles of Human Physiology (1847), for example, William Carpenter refers to a spotlight principle avant la lettre when discussing aesthetic perception. He states that what would later be referred to as attention’s spotlight character is illustrated “by the process by which we make ourselves acquainted with a landscape or a picture; if our attention be directed to the whole field of vision at once, we see nothing distinctly; and it is only by abstracting ourselves from the contemplation of the greater part of it, and directing our attention to smaller portions in succession, that we can obtain a definite conception of the details” (394). When Dames asserts that Thackeray was necessarily engaging temporal models of attention that are predicated on attention’s vacillations across time, he overlooks the fact that Thackeray had available to him spatially-based models of the concept both by way of Waverley and through other physiological theories of attentional spotlighting. And it is not difficult to understand why Thackeray might have been drawn to this method of modelling attention. While the spotlight model is an exceedingly simple and abstract way of understanding the concept, it is nonetheless elegant in its simplicity, representing attention as something that is lawful in abiding an inverse relationship between intensity and scope, thus evoking the elegance of Boyle’s law—which describes a similarly inverse relationship between the pressure and volume of ideal gases.

Because attention in Vanity Fair is both spatial and moral in its conceptualization, the spotlight metaphor on its own is not quite capable of capturing how Thackeray is mobilizing attentional concepts in this work. Insofar as the spotlight model is more or less structured as a non- hierarchized binary between two different but equally functional ways of attending, it does not naturally suggest that one mode is more valuable or more moral than the other. If Thackeray hierarchizes the spotlight model into a moral binary, he does so by giving it an economic dimension. This economics is alluded to at the opening of Chapter Nineteen, when the narrator discusses Mrs. Bute Crawley’s means of extracting information from Miss Briggs and Mrs. Firkin—the dependents of the wealthy and invalid Miss Crawley:

We have seen how Mrs. Firkin, the lady’s maid, as soon as any event of importance to the Crawley family came to her knowledge, felt bound to communicate it to Mrs. Bute Crawley, at the Rectory; and have before mentioned how particularly kind and attentive that good-natured lady was to Miss Crawley’s confidential servant. She had been a gracious friend to Miss Briggs, the companion, also; and had secured the latter’s good- will by a number of those attentions and promises, which cost so little in the making, and are yet so valuable and agreeable to the recipient. Indeed, every good economist and manager of a household must know how cheap and yet how amiable these professions are, and what a flavour they give to the most homely dish of life. (224, emphasis added) The narrator describes attention here in economic terms. He characterizes attention as a type of social currency that is magical because, unlike traditional currencies, it is not defined by its scarcity—it “cost[s] so little in the making”— and yet is “valuable and agreeable to the recipient” nonetheless. This social currency is paradoxical, moreover, insofar as it tends to accrue interest when it is spent rather than saved, with the payment of attentions working to secure even more attentions from others. If this passage works to hierarchize the spotlight model, it does so by representing the diffusion and broadcasting of attention (the opening wide of the attentional spotlight) as a practice more “valuable and agreeable” than the focusing and circumscription of the same. The passage also implies a social law that ties the subject’s social fate to her ability and tendency to distribute attention widely. I highlight this passage because this social law is relevant not only to the character of Mrs. Bute Crawley; it also determines the fates of the novel’s two principal female characters. In Vanity Fair, these characters’ fates are determined by their ability (or inability) to abide by the law that the narrator gestures toward in this passage.

A particularly acute example of this is seen in the reversal of fortunes that marks the apex of Becky’s tragic plot. This plot climaxes with Becky’s precipitate rise to social prominence through the patronage of Lord Steyne and then by her almost immediate and tragic fall from grace, which takes place when Rawdon is made aware of their affair in that scene when he walks in on the couple after his sister Jane has released him from debtor’s prison. The scene suggests that one way to explain Becky’s fall from grace is to trace it to her inveterate frugality. Thus, after Rawdon is apprised of Becky’s affair with Lord Steyne, he begins to suspect that she may have profited by it, and demands that she disclose the location of her hoard. When Becky is unwilling to co-operate, Rawdon is forced to rifle through her possessions on his own, and eventually discovers her cache in the “little desk that Amelia had given [Becky] in early days,” and this “contained,” among other things, “a pocket-book with bank-notes. Some of these were dated ten years back, too, and one was quite a fresh one—a note for a thousand pounds which Lord Steyne had given her” (679). The desk thus becomes a metonym for Becky’s penchant for hoarding; and the details around this scene of discovery imply that Rawdon, in locating the cache after a drawn- out search, has pierced the heart of Becky’s character in uncovering indisputable evidence of her overweening frugality. For when Rawdon asseverates, “[y]ou might have spared me a hundred pounds, Becky, out of all of this” (679), he not only criticizes her lack of charity but also

43 intimates that she could have delivered him from debtor’s prison—and thereby prevented the unintended revelation of her affair and its deflating consequences—through only a slight deviation from her parsimonious tendencies. The scene in this way invites us to interpret Becky’s fall as a result of her having exceeded some lower threshold of thriftiness.

And yet if we revisit the events leading up to the climax, we discover that both the cache and “little desk” do more than simply stand in for Becky’s thriftiness; they also serve as proof of her transgression of that attentional law that Thackeray alludes to in Chapter 19. When the events around Becky’s rise to social esteem are read in reference to her subsequent and precipitate fall from grace, it becomes clear that this fall results not from a financial transgression simply but instead because she contracts the scope of her attentional-economic spotlight too tightly or too sharply, and thereby violates those rules that seem to govern social conduct in the world of Vanity Fair. This is first evoked through the representations of attention and the many instances of attentional diction that accompany the narrator’s description of Becky’s final ascent to her social summit—those events surrounding her performance of Clytemnestra at Lord Steyne’s charades. The text represents this ascendency as a process of increasingly focused attentional spotlighting, with Becky more and more becoming the object, centre, and economic repository of social attention as the events of the evening progress. During her performance, for example, with all the hall lights dimmed in the picture gallery of Gaunt House, she stands out in stark relief from her surroundings, embodying the white radiance of a focal point personified: “her arms are bare and white—her tawny hair floats down her shoulder—her face is deadly pale—and her eyes are lighted up with a smile so ghastly, that people quake as they look at her” (650). As this white silhouette set against a black background, Becky evokes the image of an object of pure attention, with all those physiological details that might invite distracted contemplation having been whitewashed (so to speak), and those peripheral stimuli that might distract from her radiant visage obscured by darkness. Her acutely attentive quality is also expressed through the behaviour of the audience members, who sit in the large dark hall, transfixed by the surface of white light presented to them: Becky “performed her part so well, and with such ghastly truth, that the spectators were all dumb, until with a burst, all the lamps of the hall blazed out again, when everybody began to shout applause” (650). Of course one might argue that Thackeray, in repeatedly using the term ghastly to characterize Becky in this scene, is representing Becky not as an object of attention per se but rather as an object of terror first and foremost: as one who only commands attention as a result of her ability to perform the role of the criminal Clytemnestra in such a convincing fashion. One might contend, in other words, that Thackeray is not necessarily highlighting the concept of attention here, but is rather subordinating attention to morality in this scene, representing Becky not as an attentional subject primarily, but instead as a frightening criminal subject who only demands attention by the way.

But as the text’s depictions of Becky as this attentional spotlight continue throughout the chapter, these attendant suggestions of criminality begin to fall away, and her evocations of attention begin

44 to take centre stage, so to speak. Thus, at the ball that follows the charades, “everybody pressed round Becky” and viewed her as “the great point of attention in the evening” (655, emphasis added)—an image suggesting that Becky has finally consummated her sublimation into a unalloyed spotlight of attention, one dissociated from its connection to criminal frisson. As the scene progresses further, economic terms come to replace the vacancy left by the exit of the moral terms, particularly when Becky, after having been transformed into an object of pure attention, is offered a seat at dinner by Lord Steyne. After Becky sits down to dinner, this “great point of attention” is served on gold plate. She might have had pearls melted into her champagne if she liked; and the potentate of Peterwaradin would have given half the brilliants off his jacket for a kind glance from those dazzling eyes. Jabotiere wrote home about her to his government. The ladies of the other tables who supped on mere silver, and marked Lord Steyne’s constant attention to her, vowed it was a monstrous infatuation, a gross insult to ladies of rank. (656, emphasis added) An economics of attention is threaded throughout the passage, in diction that stitches together two semantic registers. The “gold plate,” “pearls,” “champagne,” and “brilliants” that Becky does (or might very well) receive are set against the “kind glance” and “attention” she so capably attracts with her “dazzling eyes.” The dinner in this way marks the culmination of Becky’s evolution through the course of this chapter: from a talented but sinister actress, to a pure white spotlight of attention, and then to the economized version of this spotlight in the form of a rich spot of gold plate. The pinnacle of Becky’s social ascendency thus occurs when she insinuates herself into a buzzing marketplace in which she has the opportunity to sell herself to the highest bidder: not as a piece of political or financial capital, nor as an object of sexual favours, but rather as an invaluable object of attention. Once we appreciate this we also begin to appreciate the significance of Lord Steyne’s one-thousand-pound note, which Becky squirrels away in Amelia’s “little desk,” and which comes to signify not money per se but instead a piece of currency within this attentional marketplace: a note of payment for attentional services rendered.

If the text represents Becky’s rise as taking place within an economy of attention, it also represents her fall in similar terms. In a notable instance of narrative anachrony, an analeptic chapter tracing Becky’s fall to her increasingly parsimonious expenditure of attentional capital immediately follows the chapter describing the charade at Gaunt House. This subsequent chapter describes Becky’s evolving relationship with Lord Steyne in a way that sets up a correspondence between their growing intimacy and Becky’s growing tendency to dissociate herself from those relations who can be said to have a natural claim upon her attention. It is here, for example, that Becky is finally relieved of the necessity of attending to little Rawdon. Thus, when Steyne offers to enrol their son in a public school in London, Becky feels liberated from that child who “bored her” immensely, and for whom her “mother-vision had faded” before he had reached the age of eight (563). It is also in this chapter that Becky, having “disposed of” little Rawdon (663), is able to dispense in a similar manner with the aforementioned Briggs—that human repository and

45 financier of attentional capital—who is conveniently relocated to the remote and desolate Gauntly Hall. And it is in this chapter, moreover, that Becky expresses a wish to be relieved of Rawdon as an object of attention as well; although she does this using the specious and patently deceitful rationale that liberating herself from her husband would leave her more time and attention to dedicate to his affairs: “Do what you like—dine where you please—go and have ginger-beer and sawdust at Astley’s or psalm-singing with Lady Jane—only don’t expect me to busy myself with the boy. I have your interests to attend to, as you can’t attend to them yourself” (662). As Becky justifies the series of disassociations, which she claims will free her to direct her attentional capital more efficiently and in a more focused manner toward Rawdon’s affairs, she sets distinct limits on the scope of her attentional spotlight. So, when she fails to give even a modicum of attention toward the task of liberating Rawdon from debtor’s prison, we begin to see just how radically circumscribed this spotlight has become. During this period in her career when she has been able to accumulate a hoard of attention in the form of gifts and cash, she has also been engaged in a plot to narrow down the scope of her own attention to a radically conservative circumference. Thackeray concretizes Becky’s tendency toward accumulation and circumscription using the metaphors of the one-thousand-pound note and the small space in which she locks away her hoard of attentional capital: “Amelia’s little desk.” These object serve as evidence, respectively, for that effective accumulation of attention that marks Beck’s social climax and that sharp curtailment of her own attention that precipitates her fall. Reinforcing the idea that Becky’s tragic flaw is a disinclination to distribute her attention widely is another spatial metaphor that Thackeray uses to figure her tragic fate: “Whenever Becky made a little circle for herself with incredible toils and labour, somebody came and swept it down rudely, and she had all her work to begin over again” (822, emphasis added). Although this summary of Becky’s fate is rife with pathos, fatalism, and inevitability, it also implies a moral: that Becky could have avoided these tragedies by not hoarding her attentional wealth but rather putting it into circulation and thus out of reach of this catastrophic hand.

Becky’s plot therefore advances according to a dynamics of attentional concentration, and it culminates when her attentional capital becomes concentrated in the diminutive object of Lord Steyne’s one-thousand-pound note—a point of attentional focus that, metaphorically, recedes to nothingness when Rawdon returns the bill to Steyne. If Thackeray elides distinctions between Becky and Amelia, and between the attentive and absorbed subjective modes that these two characters represent, it is by structuring Amelia’s plot according to a homologous dynamics of attentional spotlighting. As I mentioned above, when Becky and Amelia are appreciated in semiotic terms—that is, as two sets of character traits or receptacles of meaning—they exist in antithetical relation to one another and represent two opposing extremes in the text’s characterological spectrum. Frank Palmeri has commented on the significance of this antithesis in writing that “although Becky’s energetic pursuit of her own advancement is not exonerated by any means, but is painted as vicious, the angelic passivity of her opposite Amelia comes to seem a species of imbecility and parasitism. There appears to be no middle ground available between

46 these two alternatives” (768-70). The energetic adventuress versus the saturnine widower; Eros versus Thanatos. For Palmeri, the two characters represent two characterological poles that cannot be amalgamated into anything resembling an Aristotelian mean within the thoroughly satirical world of Vanity Fair. And this strongly opposing characterological binary maintains if we index these characters to traditional attentional categories, since doing this encourages us to consider Beck as the epitome of an attention to, and Amelia as that of an absorbed withdrawal from, the details of the social world and the game of social profiteering. And yet when we consider the two characters as plotted subjects in a novel that imagines attention in spatial terms, these irresolvable differences begin to break down.

Although Amelia’s plot is driven by her transgression of Vanity Fair’s laws of attentional circulation, she is represented as different from Becky in the sense that she betrays these laws not by hoarding a well-won attentional boon but by never even entering the attentional marketplace. Her transgression is linked to her unnatural and unhealthy tendency to become transfixed by objects that exist outside the traffic of meaning and exchange. And, for this reason, her history is structured not on the pattern of rise and fall but instead as a direct and linear descent into the depths of attentional abjection. Thackeray marks the three principal stages in this descent with a series of diminutive attentional objects. And, in doing so, he plots her descent into an unmitigated condition of exile and unrequited love along the pattern of a narrowing attentional spotlight, with the metonymic object progressively shrinking in size as this plot advances. This plot begins at the point when Amelia is a young unmarried woman, when she sits, “pin[ing] silently” in “her little room,” dying “away day by day” from hopeless love for the unworthy George Osborne (222). At this relatively early point in the narrative, her lover’s letters stand in for their absent author, and represent the dead space upon which Amelia’s attention has collected and congealed into a pernicious and deathly preoccupation: “It was over these few worthless papers that she brooded and brooded. […] these relics and remembrances of dead affection were all that were left her in the world. And the business of her life was—to watch the corpse of Love” (222).

This epistolary “corpse of Love” is more than a metonym for a type of unrequited desire that manifests itself as an unhealthy obsession with love’s sentimental relic; it also exists as one point in a chain of similar objects that structure Amelia’s plot as a descent into the abject world of absorbed attention. Thus, after the death of George Osborne, Amelia’s attention begins to congeal upon the space of a new object: the figure of her infant son. This shift in Amelia’s attention does not seem to mark much of a shift in the novel’s attentional plot, since young George—whom Thackeray says has “the eyes of [the] George who was gone” (452)—simply reflects the image of his deceased father. But it is important to recognize that Thackeray identifies the son as “little George”; and when compared to the figure of her dead lover, this new object of attention represents a more circumscribed attentional space. Illustrating Amelia’s attentional state during this later period is a scene where her prospective lover, Dobbin, delivers a bounty of toys, including a “wooden horse, a drum, a trumpet, and other war-like toys,” to a newborn George—a

47 gesture to which Amelia responds in the following manner: “‘Hush!’ said Amelia, annoyed, perhaps, at the creaking of the Major’s boots. […] ‘Hush! Don’t wake Georgy!’ she added, as William Dobbin went to the door with heavy steps. She did not hear the noise of his cab-wheels as he drove away: she was looking at the child, who was laughing in his sleep” (454). Predictably, Amelia’s annoyed response to Dobbin’s benevolent gesture fails to accord with the Major’s expectation of gratitude. However, her response is not at basis rude or unkind or immoral—it is not a sign of disapproval or ingratitude. It is rather a feeling of frustration at Dobbin’s having disturbed her absorption in little George’s image. That is, while her reaction might seem to express ingratitude, it also recalls Michael Fried’s description of the painting-beholder relationship in Absorption and Theatricality (1980). According to Fried, absorption is less a quality that inheres in a psychological subject than it is a relationship between a painted figure and the subject beholding that figure; more specifically, it is, for Fried, a condition facilitated by the painted figure’s apparent “oblivious[ness] to the beholder’s presence” (100). Fried argues that a painted figure will invite absorption from a viewer if it is depicted in such a way that its eyes do not engage with those of the viewer. On the other hand, if the eyes of the painted subject do meet the gaze of the beholder with something like a direct glance, the coherence of the beholder’s absorption breaks down. This is because the direct glance from the painted figure forces the beholder to become conscious of herself as an attending subject, thereby disrupting her absorption in the object of her gaze by forcing her to acknowledge herself—to pay attention to herself—as a gazing subject. Similarly, in threatening to wake little George, Dobbin threatens not so much to disturb the peace of the child as to transform the child into a subject who might meet Amelia’s gaze and thereby disrupt the coherence of her absorbed state. Her impolite and somewhat imperious “Hush” as Dobbin enters with his gifts thus expresses not only her failure to acknowledge Dobbin’s act of generosity, and not only her overweening maternal cautiousness, but also—and primarily—her tendency to appreciate the child more as a prop for absorbed attention than as an object of maternal care. It is no wonder, then, that she is not able to hear the noise of the cab-wheels as Dobbin departs, since by this time the integrity of little George’s unconscious condition—and thus the integrity of her own state of absorbed attention—has been thoroughly restored.

If Amelia’s absorption in the image of her infant son marks the second point in her plotted descent into the depths of circumscribed attention, a third and climactic point is marked when such threats to the coherence of her absorption in the image of her son need not take place. For later, when little George is adopted by his paternal grandfather, Amelia is compensated for being divested of her only child with a version of that child that cannot help but behave, and that can thus serve as a more dependable and constant object of her inveterate absorption: the painted image—or miniature—of little George. When this boy comes to be replaced by his miniature, it becomes clear that Amelia’s fate is being plotted across the text as a series of substitutions that represent the increasing circumscription of her range of attentional focus, following a dynamics that is strikingly similar to that which characterizes Becky’s fate. Like Becky’s plot, which

48 advances according to the dynamics of the increasingly circumscribed spotlight, Amelia’s plot follows a similar course, with the object or metonym of her attention becoming more absorbing, less theatrical, and—most importantly—increasingly smaller as this plot advances. As her story of social exile proceeds, the size of the absorbing object diminishes by increments, moving from the corpse-like figure that represents an absent but nonetheless full-grown George, to the little George that is the couple’s offspring, and then finally to the miniature of little George—the last of these being an object that would fit quite comfortably, next to Lord Steyne’s one-thousand-pound note, in the delimited confines of “Amelia’s little Desk.” The desk thus serves as a metaphoric site upon which the seemingly antithetical characters of Becky and Amelia overlap, and offers us an image with which we might visualize their respective plots—as well as the logic governing their respective declines—in similarly attentional and spatial terms.

In paralleling the plots of his seemingly antithetical heroines in this way, Thackeray thus elides distinctions between attentive and absorbed subjectivity not (or not only) by borrowing a temporal model of attention from contemporary discourses on human physiology (as Dames claims), but rather by attributing to both Amelia and Becky a similar type of spatially circumscribed attention that is indexed to metonyms of spatialized objects. While these representations of attention also express a temporal structure, this temporality is not one that is borrowed from the physiological model that tracks changes in human consciousness across time (as Dames asserts); it is instead that of the more fundamentally literary structure of plotting. A better reference point than mid- century physiological science for appreciating the role of attention in Vanity Fair is Scott’s Waverley. The correspondences between these two texts are most apparent when we recognize how much Thackeray’s twinned attentional plots evoke the literary-historical narrative through which Scott represents historical decline as a descent into the world of “attentive” objects. It is also apparent when we recognize how, in both Waverley and Vanity Fair, characters experience the narrative agon as an abject state of attention, with Edward Waverley, Becky Sharp, and Amelia Sedley all experiencing agones that are coded as attentional crises. Vanity Fair, of course, reimagines the form of Waverley’s structure in significant ways—particularly insofar as it can be said to absorb Scott’s historical structure into the diegesis of the novel, telescoping this structure and thereby realizing it by figuring it as, at basis, a law that governs everyday life. In other words, if attentiveness and absorption represent two different stages in a narrative of historical development in the world of Waverley, they represent two expressions of the same abject state of spatially restricted attention, and the same betrayal of attentional laws, in the world of Vanity Fair. And if the threat of such circumscribed attentiveness is only discursive in Scott—that is, only a rhetorical element in a literary-political strategy—it becomes something of a real issue for the individuals represented in Vanity Fair, insofar as it comes to structure the laws of moral conduct within the diegesis of Thackeray’s novel. In Thackeray, in short, Scott’s attentional method of giving order to a national-cum-literary history becomes a way of making sense of the social and moral dynamics of everyday life.

But while Thackeray sublimates the national-historical and literary-historical politics that stimulated Scott’s use of spatialized concepts of attention by subsuming these within the realm of everyday life, he does not quite de-historicize Scott’s attentional structure. He rather develops it into a new way of representing history as a process of attentional transformation. In this “Novel Without a Hero”—which is so often understood as a space of moral undecidability and criminal agnosticism—Thackeray depicts a society where traditional moral terms and categories have become outmoded, and where the system that mediates social exchange and determines individual fate is best understood not in Judaeo-Christian but instead in attentional terms, and according to a law of attentional spotlighting. This has implications for how we categorize the novel as a metahistorical text—by which I mean a text that not only re-presents historical events but also serves as an icon for a process of historical transformation. Much has been made about the historical status of Vanity Fair—a text that is in many ways ambivalent in its historical significations and wavers between historical and ahistorical modes of expression. For example, while Thackeray sets his novel around the Battle of Waterloo, he also explicitly avoids representing details of the battle; and while his novel is set during a period some thirty years before its publication, it also presents an extended commentary on its own contemporary mid- Victorian moment.22 Critics have been sensitive to Thackeray’s self-conscious ambivalence about his novel’s status as a historiographic work, and have decided to interpret the text less as a representation of history than as a form of metahistory.23 Edward T. Burnaby, for example, argues that Thackeray’s novel is best characterized as a sort of metahistorical satire that engages the tactic of via media by simultaneously satirizing two prominent historiographic modes: the subjective mode of German historiography and the more objective one of the French school of historiography (39). But I claim that Vanity Fair, when considered as an expression of the attentional plot, is less a historiographic satire and much more consistent with the form of the historiographic tragedy. Hayden White describes the historiographic tragedy as a form that, unlike the historiographic satire, implies a progressive historical narrative by explicating the conditions and limitations impinging on historical progress: The reconciliations that occur at the end of Tragedy are […] in the nature of resignations of men to the conditions under which they must labor in the world. These conditions, in turn, are asserted to be inalterable and eternal, and the implication is that man cannot change them but must work within them. They set the limits on what may be aspired to and what may be legitimately aimed at in the quest for security and sanity in the world. (9) Thackeray’s is a historiographic tragedy in White’s sense. It depicts a social world that is subject to inalterable attentional laws—and in which the use of spatially circumscribed forms of attention is inevitably disparaged and punished—to suggest that social progress can only take place once such limitations are recognized. As we will see in the next section, Eliot’s Silas Marner evokes

22 For a helpful summary of these arguments, see Hammond 19-22. 23 See Burnaby; Griffin; and Hammond.

50 something like a fuller realization of the progressive history that is only implicit in Thackeray’s novel. Structured on the basis of a full-fledged comic-historical plot of attentional transformation, Silas Marner illustrates what happens when the subject submits to the limitations set by those attentional laws that Thackeray develops in Vanity Fair.

III. Substitution or Transformation?: Silas Marner and the Eppie-phenomenon That Eliot, like Scott and Thackeray, values states of inattention is apparent from only a cursory scan of some of her most prominent novels, and is evident both at the level of narrative discourse (particularly in her mode of narration) as well as characterization. Her narrators are famous for engaging in prolonged discursive tangents that trace out elaborate aesthetic metaphors, drawing the reader’s attention into the metaphor’s labyrinthine patterns and thus away from a focus on the text’s principal narrative. Such examples include the narrator’s extended discourse on literary and painterly realism in Chapter XVII of Adam Bede (1859), or the parable about the candle and the pier glass that interrupts the narrative of Middlemarch (264). These narrators also make distracting interjections that are more abrupt and perfunctory in nature, such as the famous exclamation in Middlemarch, “but why always Dorothea?”—a linguistic act that suddenly redirects our perhaps too-focused readerly attention away from Dorothea and toward Casaubon. Moreover, Eliot expresses a similar predilection for inattention and distractibility when she characterizes her protagonists—and not disparagingly so—as subjects who show a habitual inability or reluctance to pay attention. An evocative example of this can be found in the final paragraphs of Middlemarch, where the narrator compares Dorothea to the flow of the river Cyrus, whose power is diminished when it is diverted into a series of small channels. It may very well be posited that Eliot invokes this metaphor of the series of small rivulets to highlight Dorothea’s relative lack of social agency and moral reputation. But when we read this passage in light of Carpenter’s conceit for focused attention—which he describes as attention confined to “any particular channel” (394)—Eliot’s echoing diction suggests that if Dorothea has contributed to the “growing good of the world,” it is because she has refused to restrict her attention to “any particular channel” but has instead distributed it across a series of such conduits. Another conspicuous representation of inattentive subjectivity is found in The Mill on the Floss (1860), where, in the moments when the reader first meets Eliot’s inimitable young heroine, Maggie Tulliver, Maggie is presented as a flurry of impulse and changefulness. In this fitful opening sequence, Maggie, having just been moved by a sudden impulse to spring from the grasp of her hair-dressing mother, distracts herself from the shame of her childish insolence by torturing her beloved “Fetish,” after which she is subsequently distracted by the sudden appearance of a wayward beam of sunlight (24-25). Eliot thus opens The Mill on the Floss by introducing Maggie not as a distinct set of traits and qualities but instead as a process of change and transformation. By characterizing Maggie as a character who moves, continually, from distraction to distraction, Eliot introduces her protagonist as distractibility incarnate.

But Eliot’s depiction of Maggie as this ever-distractible subject does more than simply epitomize the child’s inexperience and lack of formal education; it also serves as an analogue for Eliot’s ideal authorial method. Thus, in this same chapter from The Mill on the Floss, Eliot conflates the figures of the inattentive character and narrator to convey the sociological and ethical significance of her inattentive narrative mode. This occurs when Maggie’s attention is attracted by a spectacle that serves as a metaphor for Eliot’s textual practice: that of the Dorlcote mill. In ventriloquizing a narratorial reverie on the Dorlcote mill through one of Maggie’s characteristic moments of distracted attention, Eliot treats us to a parable about her own textual practice. This parable appears when Maggie’s attention suddenly shifts from her captivation in the absorbing spectacle of the mill as a piece of machinery—with its “resolute din” and its “unresisting motion of great stones” that give Maggie “a dim delicious awe as at the presence of an uncontrollable force”—to a contemplation of the day-to-day existence of the spiders who make a “little world apart” within the confines of the mill (25-26). The significance of this instance of distracted subjectivity becomes apparent when we read this passage in reference to observations made by Sally Shuttleworth, who describes Eliot as an author bent on opposing and correcting models of society that were predicated either on the image of the individual’s harmonious integration into the organic social system or on the individual’s domination by such a system (22). When read in light of Shuttleworth’s comments, this parable suggests why it is important that this narrator be able to shift, suddenly, from an evaluation of the structural workings of collective society (which is represented in this scene by the ceaseless turning and churning of the mill) to a description of the particular trials of the society’s individuals (which is identified here not with the atomistic grains of the mill, but rather with the spiders who live within this little world and bear an uncertain relation to the larger system). This is because the distracted mode of perception—with its ability to jump between different and often incommensurable levels of social organization—is indispensible to an author who wishes to represent both the structures of everyday life and the structures of society, but who at the same time wishes to avoid simply confusing one with the other or representing the individual simply as grist to a societal mill, as if it were a mere function of the social organism, or vice versa.

While Shuttleworth helps disclose why Eliot is invested in the condition of distractible subjectivity, she names this condition using a different term: unconsciousness. Her choice of terminology is by no means unconsidered or insignificant. She chooses the term unconsciousness because she traces Eliot’s investments in vagrant psychological states to contemporary theories of unconscious thought that were being developed by mid-nineteenth-century physiologists around the time of the publication of The Mill on the Floss: “To appreciate the full significance of George Eliot attributing an apparently moral action not to the sphere of conscious mind and memory but to the unconscious,” she writes, “one must place her work” in relation to contemporary work on physiological psychology dealing with the subject of unconscious cerebration (75). I claim, however, that situating these representations in reference to mid-nineteenth-century scientific theories of unconscious processes does not necessarily permit us to grasp the “full significance”

52 of Eliot’s investments in vagrant psychological states; nor does it necessarily help us pinpoint the source of her representations and narratorial expressions of this psychological condition. If we redirect our own attention to how Eliot’s plots are structured using spatialized objects, and according to a dynamics of attentional transformation, we can come to view her many textual investments in vagrant psychology as instances that work toward the realization of a process initiated by Scott and later taken up by Thackeray: the strategy of epitomizing the modern subject using spatialized representations of inattentive subjectivity. Eliot’s novels express the consummation or ripening of this impulse; and they do this not only by way of those prolific instances of inattentive rhetoric and subjectivity, but also in how they bring the transformational plot of inattention to its comic fulfilment.

Appreciating Eliot’s work in the tradition of the spatially conceived attentional plot is facilitated by studying what is perhaps the most structured and linearly plotted of Eliot’s novels: Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe (1861). Whereas Eliot’s longer novels also include plotted narratives, they also chiefly evoke a narrative form that is best captured by the metaphor of the geographical plane, insofar as they often trace out a network of social connections in delimited provincial locales such as Middlemarch and Hayslope. Silas Marner is somewhat unique in Eliot’s oeuvre because, in its textual brevity, it is less sprawling and more linear-temporal in its structure, taking the form two plot strands that interweave with one another. The most prominent of novel’s two histories is that of Silas Marner—the cataleptic weaver who has been exiled from the sectarian community of Lantern Yard and subsequently takes up residence as a hermit and miser on the periphery of the parochial village of Raveloe. Slightly subordinate to the story of Silas, but also interconnected with it at important points, is that of the young squire Godfrey Cass, whose plan to marry the sober and industrious Nancy Lammeter is put in jeopardy when his first wife threatens to reveal herself and the couples’ infant daughter, Eppie, to Godfrey’s father and the other members of the Raveloe community. With these two twinning plots, the form of the novel evokes the figure of a double helix, as its two strands intersect at two key points in the heart of the narrative. The first of these points takes place when Godfrey’s brother, Dunstan Cass, robs Silas of his cherished hoard of guineas and thereby defrauds the miser of his only source of consolation for his traumatic excommunication from the community of Lantern Yard. The second takes place when Godfrey’s infant daughter, Eppie, wanders into Silas’s cottage after her mother dies of exposure when she takes a dram of opium and settles down on the snow-covered ground. This latter event is felicitous for both Silas and Godfrey: it facilitates Nancy and Godfrey’s marriage, since it temporarily quells the threat that Godfrey’s profligate past in the form of his illegitimate daughter will appear on his family’s doorstep; and it serves as both a substitute for the gold that had previously been Silas’s sole domestic companion and his link to the broader community of Raveloe, insofar as the adoption transforms Silas into a sympathetic figure in the eyes of the residents and also motivates him to join the local ecclesiastical community from a desire to christen his new charge.

As the novel’s critics have previously highlighted, Eliot once described Silas Marner as a text that is both mythological and literary-realistic in character, and specifically referred to the germ of the narrative as a “legendary tale” that she would give “realistic treatment” to through the process of composition (qtd. in Carroll 33).24 In his work on Eliot’s engagement with mythological narratives, Joseph Wiesenfarth has referred to the process of creation implied here as one of demythologization, where “all that is legendary” in the novel “is used to demonstrate how human joy and sorrow stem from moral feeling and human action” (127). The novelist’s demythologizing impulse might be seen in the epistemic gap that divides the Christian characters from the text’s naturalistic narrator who, as Wiesenfarth contends, transcodes the characters’ expressions of Christian faith and charity into the analogous secular-humanist terms of love and sympathy. But when we read the text in reference to Thomas Carlyle’s social criticism, and particularly to one of his most notable characterizations of the modern social condition in Chartism (1840), we are encouraged to describe the relationship that Eliot establishes between mythology and secular modernity somewhat differently. We are inclined to read it not as the transposition of a Christian morality into a secular ethics, but instead as the transposition of a modern myth of social crisis and redemption into a plot of attentional transformation. Carlyle’s myth characterized modern industrial society as a fall from feudal organicism, with social relations having come as a result to be governed not by a system of social obligation but instead by a monetized system of intersubjective relations: “O reader, to what shifts is poor Society reduced, struggling to give still some account of herself, in epochs when cash payment has become the sole nexus of man to men!” (58). In Silas Marner, Eliot invokes the social masterplot implied by Carlyle’s statement but transcodes Carlyle’s abject system of financial relations into something like an attentional economy.

Eliot engages with this myth of cultural modernity early on in the text, where she links Silas’s descent into a state of hermitic social exile to his penchant for hoarding: “So, year after year, Silas Marner had lived in this solitude, his guineas rising in the iron pot, and his life narrowing and hardening itself more and more into a mere pulsation of desire and satisfaction that had no relation to any other being” (20). This passage suggests a sort of socio-economic law predicated on an inverse relationship between hoarding and isolation. Also implicit in this passage is the idea that Silas, by putting his cash into circulation, might thereby integrate into society by insinuating himself into what Carlyle derides as the intersubjective cash nexus. But Eliot presents this potential resolution only to balk at it. For Silas’s reintegration takes place not when he disseminates the gold widely and freely but instead when his guineas are stolen from him and replaced by the orphan Eppie. When read in purely artistic terms, Eliot’s decision to precipitate denouement with this miraculous substitution (or transubstantiation) of a child for a pile of gold comes across as something of a ham-fisted deus ex machina. But when read as an intervention into contemporary mythopoeia, this clumsy artistic maneuver comes to serve a rhetorical

24 See Carrol; Wiesenfarth.

54 function: it screams at the reader, with all the flagrancy of a crude gesture, that the narrative will be re-imagining Carlyle’s social masterplot, replacing its cash nexus with something different.

If Eliot reimagines Carlyle’s social masterplot, what kind of plot does she offer in its stead? And how should we understand this story of substitution as a social masterplot? A number of critics have taken up this question, including Robert H. Dunham, who argues that Eppie’s appearance is Wordsworthian in its effects on Silas, insofar as it allows Silas to escape his imprisonment in an eternal and unchanging present by encouraging him to take up “healthy and continuous relations with [his] past” (652). Shuttleworth describes this transformation in much the same way as Dunham does, albeit using the terms of physiological psychology. For Shuttleworth, Eppie encourages Silas to pursue an “unconscious association of ideas,” and this in turn “allows him to heal the breach in his social experience” by “stimulating the dormant channels of his mind” (87). Wordsworthian memory, unconscious cerebration—to this list of processes that stimulate Silas’s reincorporation into society we might also add that of attentional transformation. Set in a pre- industrial locale on the verge of modernization, Silas Marner invokes the cash nexus as a possible endpoint for this developmental trajectory, only to swerve abruptly into a different teleological pathway with the disappearance of the gold and the advent of Eppie. In thus abruptly replacing the gold with the infant character, Eliot engages with this modern social myth, but does so by transforming it. She transcodes Carlyle’s social crisis—which draws on economic terms—into an attentional problem primarily, and this allows her to offer an attentional solution to this problem of social alienation. In effect, her revision of the Carlylean masterplot follows the asymmetrical dialectic of novelistic attention, insofar as it transposes a seemingly intractable social problem into a problem of attention, which then allows her to propose an attentional solution to the original problem.

The notion that Eliot is transposing a socio-economic problem into an attentional one is evoked through the diction she employs in depicting Silas’s hoarding. For instance, she describes his hoarding as an example of “how the love of accumulating money grows an absorbing passion in men whose imaginations, even in the very beginning of their hoard, showed them no purpose beyond it” (19, emphasis added). Eliot is using the term absorbing, here, not in an abstract or metaphysical sense but instead to codify Silas’s hoarding as a physical—and particularly a psycho-perceptual—affliction. Due to the prolonged repetition of his daily routine, which involves alternating between an acute focus on the details of his weaving labour and his absorbed admiration of his gold, Silas’s “eyes,” which “used to look trusting and dreamy, now looked as if they had been made to see only one kind of thing that was very small, like tiny grain, for which they hunted everywhere” (20). As a result of his routine of hoarding and weaving, weaving and hoarding, Silas develops a kind of narrowed attention span that he takes with him into the world abroad. The narrator remarks, for instance, that his thoughts were still with his loom and his money when he made his journeys through the fields and the lanes to fetch and carry home his work, so that his steps never wandered

to the hedge-banks and the lane-side in search of the once familiar herbs: these too belonged to the past, from which life had shrunk away, like a rivulet that has sunk far down from the grassy fringe to its old breadth into a little shivering thread, that cuts a groove for itself in the barren sand. (21-22) Through the use of a series of metonyms and metaphors—such as the absorbing pile of gold, the “tiny grain for which” Silas constantly “hunted,” and the “rivulet” of his thoughts that have “sunk far down into a little shivering thread”—Eliot develops a decidedly spatialized method of psychologizing Silas’s condition of miserhood and hermitism. Indeed, her decision to invoke the rivulet metaphor does this quite effectively, insofar as it evokes Carpenter’s depiction of attentiveness as a channel into which the attention is funnelled. But the metaphors have not only contemporary-physiological but also literary-historical connotations. By epitomizing Silas’s withdrawal from social life using metonyms and metaphors for spatialized forms of circumscribed attention, Eliot reprises one of Thackeray’s chief attentional characters by evoking the terms in which Thackeray describes Amelia’s similarly hermetic condition. Like Amelia’s lovelorn absorption, Silas’s self-cloistered condition is depicted as a close association—almost to the point of identification—with a small absorbing object. And much like Becky, moreover, Silas possesses a cache of money that represents not so much the fatal flaw of frugality (remember, he is not liberated through the expenditure of his wealth) as it does his circumscribed spotlight of attention, which never expands wide enough to take in the “hedge-banks” or even the “lane-side.”

But the difference between Vanity Fair and Silas Marner is that Eliot brings her protagonist to denouement. And if Eliot revises Carlyle’s modern masterplot by transposing its economic terms into decidedly attentional ones—representing the abject state of modern subjectivity as an abject condition of circumscribed focus—it should come as no surprise that she also depicts the narrative’s denouement as one that takes place through the expansion of Silas’s attentional scope. When Silas reflects upon the events that have brought about the reversal of his fortunes, he comprehends these events not in terms of a process of exchange where Eppie merely replaces the gold, but instead as an uninterrupted process of transformation: “Thought and feeling were so confused within him, that […] he could only have said that the child was come instead of the gold—that the gold had turned into the child” (122). Silas is thus confounded about the nature of this transformation, conceiving of it only in mystical terms, as type of reverse alchemy or transubstantiation. But the more knowledgeable and conceptually prolific narrator is better able to explicate this transformational mechanism. Thus, even prior to the moment of what Dunham would call Silas’s Wordsworthian revelation, where the narrator describes how Eppie’s appearance permitted Silas’s “mind” to “gro[w] into memory” (126), the narrator depicts the earliest stages of Silas’s transformation using metaphors that evoke an expanding attentional spotlight: “The gold had kept [Silas’s] thoughts in an ever-repeated circle, leading to nothing beyond itself; but Eppie was an object compacted of changes and hopes that forced his thoughts onward, and carried them far away from their old eager pacing towards the same blank limit” (125, emphasis added). If we recall the metaphorical terms with which Thackeray describes

Becky’s fate at the hands of attentional laws—how “[w]henever Becky made a little circle for herself […] somebody came and swept it down rudely” (822)—we begin to appreciate Silas Marner as a rewriting not only of Carlyle’s social masterplot but also of Vanity Fair’s attentional plot. It is as if Eliot is conducting a thought experiment here, asking the reader to imagine what would have happened if Becky’s small pile of attentional capital, after being tragically swept away by a jealous Rawdon, would have been replaced by an antithetical object: one that would have encouraged Becky to diffuse this capital, to spend it widely.

Eliot dramatizes this alternative history in an iterative description of Silas and Eppie’s summertime strolls: Silas might be seen in the sunny mid-day, or in the late afternoon when the shadows were lengthening under the hedgerows, strolling out with uncovered head to carry Eppie beyond the Stone-pits to where the flowers grew, till they reached some favourite bank where they could sit down, while Eppie toddled to pluck the flowers, and make remarks to the winged things that murmured happily above the bright petals, calling “Dad-dad’s” attention continually by bringing him the flowers. Then she would turn her ear to some sudden bird-note, and Silas learned to please her by making signs of hushed stillness, that they might listen for the note to come again: so that when it came, she set up her small back and laughed with gurgling triumph. Sitting on the banks in this way, Silas began to look for the once familiar herbs again. (126) The passage brings us to the Wordsworthian resolution, with Silas taking a renewed interest in those herbs that were a preoccupation of his youth. But we arrive at this point not through the physio-psychological route that Shuttleworth would demarcate as “unconscious association” (87), but rather through what would better be described as the expansion of a spatially conceived faculty of attention that is represented using metonyms and metaphors of attentional objects. In this iterative passage that illustrates Eppie’s ameliorative effects on Silas, the young child who is “compacted of changes and hopes” is represented as an analogue of Maggie Tulliver. As a consummately distractible subject who is ever-responsive to new sense impressions, she functions to pull Silas’s attention in an ever-widening circle that moves from the flowers, to the birds’ songs, and then to those herbs of his youth—his previous unawareness of which exemplified not only a deviation from Wordsworthian subjectivity but also the extremity of his former attentional circumscription. Moreover, Eliot’s representation of Silas’s expanding attention expresses not only his renewed sensitivity to the details of the natural world but also his reintegration into the community: “Silas began now to think of Raveloe life entirely in relation to Eppie: he must have everything that was good in Raveloe; and he listened docilely, that he might come to understand better what this life was, from which, for fifteen years, he had stood aloof as from a strange thing, wherewith he could have no communion” (130). In both the natural and social milieus, then, Silas is led out of his hermitic constraints as he lets his attention wander in the direction of Eppie’s curious perceptions. And although, in one sense, his fortunes are reversed when a young child comes to replace his hoard of gold, this substitution only serves to index a transformation that

57 occurs on what we might call an epiphenomenal level: on the linear plane of a plot of attentional transformation that serves to smooth over those disjunctions implied by the metaphoric narrative of simple substitution. When the object of Silas’s attention is substituted, his habitual mode of attention transforms from a spatially circumscribed focus to a type of spatially dispersed inattention and distractibility that precipitates his incorporation into a mythical Raveloe society.

IV. Conclusions: The Realist Plot and the Possibility of an Attentional Counter-Plot Eliot can thus be said to employ attention in much the same way that Thackeray does—as a shadow discourse to imagine the ways in which social and moral laws operate according to attentional mechanisms. And both authors develop this idea not, primarily, by borrowing temporal models of attention or theories of unconscious cerebration from contemporary discourses and clinical research in the area of physiological psychology (as Dames and Shuttleworth assert). And when Thackeray and Eliot do evoke contemporary psychological discourses, they do so by drawing upon mid-century psychology’s spatialized models of attention—models that elide distinctions between attentiveness and absorption by figuring both through reference to spatially circumscribed attentional objects and spaces. But insofar as both Thackeray and Eliot invoke the concept of attention as a function in narratives of historical transformation, the source of their attentional concepts can be said to predate mid-nineteenth-century physiological psychology, to have a provenance that can be dated to Scott’s Waverley at the latest. Moreover, much like Scott and his national-cum-literary history, these realist authors associate the modernization of the subject with her ability to cultivate forms of inattention and distractibility (or, more properly, with her ability to disperse her attention across space). And yet these texts do more than simply reprise Scott’s narrative structure. In addition to recapitulating Scott’s narrative form, mid-Victorian realists also revise this form in a number of important ways. For one, they represent an improvement on, and greater sophistication of, Scott’s earlier attentional structure. Waverley’s original attentional plot is, in one sense, overly rhetorical in its function. The artificial nature of Scott’s use of the attentional plot is perhaps most apparent in the novel’s introductory chapter, where Scott mobilizes spatially inflected concepts of attention in a patently rhetorical manner to transform the variegated literary field of the turn of the nineteenth century into a simple opposition between attentive and inattentive narrative modes. It is quite apparent at this moment that Scott is using the attentional plot as a literary-political strategy rather than treating it is something that is immanent in everyday processes of historical change. Realist novelists innovate on Scott’s method by absorbing his attentional objects into the diegesis of the novel, figuring these objects as part of the fabric of everyday life and its dynamics of social change, and giving them a degree of plausibility or verisimilitude that they did not have in Scott’s novel. In the work of mid-Victorian realists, objects that Scott merely used to exemplify a set of threadbare conventions that are repeated across a corpus of literature—such as his “black cowls, caverns, daggers, electrical machines, trap-doors, and dark-lanterns” of the German romance—become

58 real, individuated objects that exist within the world of the diegesis (such as Becky’s banknote or Silas’s pile of gold).

The realists’ invocation and incorporation of Scott’s attentional objects also has other important implications. In thus transforming Scott’s attentional objects into real objects, mid-Victorian authors also sublimate Scott’s literary politics, insofar as their attentional objects no longer refer to denigrated sets of literary conventions but rather index psychological modes of everyday existence. Moreover, in giving the attentional process of historical transformation an air of plausibility and an everyday quality, mid-Victorian realists transform Scott’s original historical narrative by telescoping its historical breadth and reducing it to a process that occurs over the span of hours, days, months, and years, as opposed to decades and centuries. In this new realist dispensation of the plot of attentional transformation, absorbed and attentive conditions of subjectivity exist simultaneously, and cease to index broad, sequential historical epochs. And, finally, in collapsing Scott’s long attentional history, realists also elide distinctions that Scott’s tripartite historical narrative had maintained between different types of attention like romantic absorption and realistic attentiveness. More thoroughly invested than Scott in spatialized models of attention, they do this by depicting all forms of acute, focused, and sustained attention— including both attentiveness and absorption—as expressions of the same spatially delimited attentional mode. In fine, if realists innovate on Scott’s attentional plot, they do so by realizing Scott’s attentional objects and thereby sublimating his literary politics; by telescoping the scale of his attentional history; and by eliding distinctions between attentional types by engaging with spatial models of attention in a more thoroughgoing manner than Scott did.

As I argue in the next chapter, Wilkie Collins inaugurates a counter-trend that develops toward the end of the nineteenth century, where romance novelists distinguish themselves from realists by revising and innovating the realist plot of attentional transformation. Romance writers do this, primarily, by reimagining the nature of the attentional object, as well as by reviving those affordances of the attentional plot that realism had suppressed, such as its potential to operate as a tool within a literary politics and its ability to represent stages of history and longer processes of historical transformation. In the next chapter, we will come to see how Collins reimagines the attentional object by considering it less as a physical object and more as a linguistic one. In The Woman in White, for instance, the attentional object is not represented as a spatialized metonym upon which the subject’s attention is imprisoned or congeals; this object is instead a linguistic object that operates as a component within a discursive structure that evokes the dynamics of linguistic syntax. In reimagining the attentional object as a part of this dynamic syntactic process, Collins is able to redeem those forms of acute and sustained attention that realism had dismissed as expressions of morbidly inert conditions such as preoccupation or even monomania. But not only does Collins take up this different method of modeling and evaluating concepts of attention; he also revives Scott’s method of using the attentional plot to engage in a literary politics, as well as to chart stages of social history. Harry E. Shaw claims that “nearly every challenge to realist

59 fiction involves a wish to rewrite its notions of what history involves” (6). And in the next chapter, I will begin my investigation into how authors of romance fiction positioned themselves against their realist counterparts by developing new ways of thinking about the nature of the attentional object and also by reviving and reformulating Scott’s method of using the attentional plot to coordinate narratives of social-historical and literary-historical change.

Chapter 2 The Post-Spatial Object: Syntax and Flow in Collins’s Major Novels

As a literary-historical movement, the late-Victorian romance revival is easy to capture in its broad outlines but much more difficult to characterize in its formal and historical specificity. Anna Vaninskaya conveys this idea through an astute and relevant question: “So what made the late-Victorian romance revival a new period-specific departure? After all, romance had been defining itself against realism ever since the rise of the novel, and so-called ‘romances’ had been written throughout the [nineteenth] century” ("Late-Victorian" 58). Vaninskaya’s query suggests something like a critical maxim: that in order to grasp the late-Victorian romance revival as a historically specific phenomenon, one must first develop a historically specific understanding of the realist form to which it was responding, only afterwards studying the revival of romance as a discursive act of opposition to realism in this historically specific formal guise. The previous chapter considered Victorian realism as a specific expression of the narrative of attentional transformation, and in doing so took the first step in such a process of reevaluating the phenomenon of late-century romance revival. The following chapters will use this image of the Victorian realist text as a reference point for evaluating what I call the long history of the late- Victorian revival of romance—a history that I see stretching from Wilkie Collins’s sensation novels of the 1860s, through Robert Louis Stevenson’s adventure fiction of the 1880s, to William Morris’s late prose romances of 1890s. I claim that, insofar as these authors can be said to exemplify the later-Victorian revival of romance, they perform this cultural-historical movement by rewriting and reimagining the mid-Victorian realist plot of attentional transformation.

This late-Victorian romantic process of rewriting comprises two principal strategies: one conceptual and the other historiographic. Through the first of these two strategies, the romantic novelist reimagines the nature of the attentional object, figuring it as conceptually different from, and often more complex than, the form in which appears in the realist novel (which functions on a relatively simple equivalence between the space of attention and the space of the metonymic object). The second strategy is more historiographic in form, and involves reframing and rewriting the history of attentional transformation, indexing the horizon of this history to these newly conceived—what one might call “post-spatial”—forms of attention. While romantic authors often divide these engagements across different narrative texts, the two strategies nonetheless work in tandem with one another, as the novelist’s reconceptualization of the attentional object often generates new ways of narrating the history of attentional transformation.

In the current chapter, I look at how Collins conducts such a strategy by dividing these two processes of re-conceptualization and re-historicization across three novels—The Woman in White

60 61

(1859-60), Armadale (1864-66), and The Moonstone (1868). While the latter two novels primarily perform the task of rewriting the history of attentional development, the former cultivates a new form of textual attention—one that is non-spatial, or post-spatial, in its conceptualization. Of course, a number of critics have already offered observations about how The Woman in White induces, encodes, and expresses forms of attention that are not based in spatial paradigms. And they have done this by describing the novel as a sort of textual technology that, through the depiction of a series of sensational incidents, works to shock a nervous reading body into states of rapt absorption and alarmed attention.25 Fundamental to this line of criticism is the idea that Collins primarily held a somatic understanding of human attention and that his fiction expresses an attentional form that is physiological at basis. In the current chapter, however, I read against this general critical trend by arguing that the type of attention that Collins idealized and attempted to induce through the narrative form of The Woman in White was not sensational shock or frisson but an uninterrupted and disembodied form of attention similar to what modern-day psychologists refer to as “flow.” And I argue that Collins encouraged this type of attentional response not by composing this text as a linked series of sensational episodes, but rather by developing a narrative form that evokes a particular linguistic-syntactic structure—a structure that Herbert Spencer thought absolutely efficient in its use and manipulation of readerly attention. How the novel’s narrative form approximates Spencer’s linguistic-syntactic form will be discussed below. Suffice it to say, for now, that in composing a text that evokes the attentional form of linguistic syntax, Collins reimagines the nature of the attentional object. Unlike the attentional form of the realist novel, which is produced through the structured representation of physical objects, Collin’s novel attains attentional form through a sort of indefinite deferral of a narrative function homologous to the linguistic object—call this the noun or substantive element in a linguistic syntagm. In reading The Woman in White as an expression of a more properly linguistic-syntactic form of attention, I attempt to strip the text of the physiological appendage of the embodied reader that critics so often read the text in reference to, replacing this physiological-attentional avatar with a textual paradigm that is more properly linguistic and textual, as opposed to physiological, in nature—a form of attention that is located on the surface of the text and in language rather than in the peripheral site of the reading body.

If there has developed something of an all-too-automatic tendency to read Collins’s sensation fiction through the avatar of a nervous reading body, it has also become something of a critical commonplace to view realism and sensation in dialectical terms—as two co-dependent and mutually defining genres that produce one another through a process of generic opposition and cultural antagonism. Often motivating and guiding this line of inquiry is the question of which of the two genres is historically antecedent: realism or sensation.26 Does sensation fiction come into

25 See Daly, Sensation and Modernity in the 1860s; Kennedy; Lonoff; Thomas; and Winter. 26 Whereas Richard Nemesvary has argued that realism in its particular mid-Victorian guise was in many respects a product of the sensation phenomenon of the 1860s (17), Janice M. Allan

62 existence through the amalgamation of preexisting gothic and realist conventions—as Henry James suggests in claiming that the sensation novel is more thrilling than its gothic predecessor insofar as it represents not a bygone Mediterranean world but instead the “mysteries that are at our own doors” (“Miss Braddon” 110)? Or does mid-Victorian realism arise in response to the mid-Victorian sensation phenomenon, particularly through the consolidation of a group of like- minded novelists who opposed the dangerous and increasingly popular sensation genre? While the current chapter will broach this question of generic primacy, it will not attempt to answer this question one way or another, with anything like historical certainty. Instead, it will examine how Collins himself attempted to construct a history of generic primacy and succession that positions his brand of romantic fiction both as the culmination of a history of romance forms and as the rightful successor to mid-Victorian realism. Collins uses two later sensation novels, Armadale and The Moonstone, to develop a literary-historical narrative that represents the hyper-attentive sensation novel as a technical improvement not only on that absorbing romance literature of the past but also on the relatively inattentive and distracting realist novel. How this triptych of Collins’s quintessential and most oft-studied sensation novels operates as a unit to re- conceptualize the paradigm of attentional form while at the same time rewriting realism’s narrative of historical transformation will be the subject of the remainder of this chapter.

I. “Magnetic Evenings” and Clairvoyant Reading: Collins and the Attention of Flow Collins rewrites realism’s narratives of attentional transformation; but he by no means does this in anything like a simple, direct, and intentional way, as if this process of revision were what he had in mind when he sat down to pen his series of 1860s novels. This act of rewriting instead takes place through a sort of historical coincidence that occurs when his early intellectual investment in the value of paying attention collides in the 1860s with his growing awareness of how mid- Victorian realism demonstrates an investment in forms of inattention and distractibility. Collins was already developing an interest in the forms of attention common both to romance reading and to certain expressions of mesmerized subjectivity early in his career. In his essays on topics such as mesmerism and romantic fiction, for instance, he often demonstrates a fascination with the idea and the potential of purely efficient and uninterrupted modes of attention—particularly with psycho-perceptual states in which the subject receives and conveys information and knowledge in ways that seem unmediated or minimally mediated because they are unaffected by distractions, interruptions, and other forms of receptive inefficiency. And after this early interest in attentional efficiency eventually culminates with an attempt to encode and encourage such attention in and through the medium of his sensation fiction, he seems to become cognizant of Victorian realism’s investment in forms of attention that are seemingly inefficient in character, such as distractibility and diffuse attention. Having recognized this contrast, he then attempts to construct a historical argues that sensation fiction is the product of literary realism, insofar as realist narrative strategies played a key role in the sensation genre’s attempts to elicit a sensational effect from its readers (99).

63 narrative where the efficient and hyper-attentive sensation novel intervenes in a society made distracted and inattentive by the proliferation and popularity of inattentive forms of fiction.

But this is by no means how past critics have framed Collins’s textual allusions to, and evocations of, concepts of attention. Since the advent of the sensation phenomenon, reviewers and literary scholars have often connected Collins to the concept of attention circuitously, by way of a readership imagined to be shocked into a state of rapt absorption by the novels’ sensational incidents. And critics have largely done this by evoking the language of the mid-century physiological sciences, and by highlighting physiology’s prominence within mid-century discourses on consciousness and psycho-perception.27 Henry Mansel is famous for making a connection between bodily shock and readerly attention in stating that sensation novels like those of Collins stimulate the reader’s excitement and attention by “preaching to the nerves” of their readers (189). Mansel’s contemporary Margaret Oliphant used similar imagery in claiming that the sensation novel’s numerous shocking incidents affect the reader like an illicit drug, with a state of absorption resulting when the reader hunts up such shocking incidents with all the interest of a desperate addict (565). Illustrating the longevity of these physiological metaphors, Nicholas Daly has recently recapitulated Oliphant’s interpretation of the opening scene of The Woman in White (Sensation and Modernity 3) in the process of claiming that Collins uses shocking incidents to capture the attention of a mid-Victorian reading subject who was otherwise prey to the vagaries of a modern spectacular culture (Sensation and Modernity 48). Sue Lonoff takes a similar view; while she interprets the absorbing effect of the major novels not as the product of nervous stimulation but of moral indignation, she similarly contends that when Collins is not cajoling his readers into attentiveness by placating their moral opinions, he is shocking their overly emotional bodies into a state of rapt absorption by affronting those same opinions (15).

This abiding tendency to read Collins’s allusions to and evocations of attention through the lens of mid-century physiological, nervous, and affective discourses comes with a few important (and what I see as negative) implications. It tends to characterize the attentional element of Collins’s sensation novels as something that occurs as a result of frisson to an imaginary reader outside the texts, thus giving relatively little or no importance to how the subject of attention is treated within and through the works themselves. It also tends to recapitulate the rhetorical strategies through which Collins’s contemporary reviewers discredited his sensation fiction as a technology that captures readerly attention by attacking and immobilizing a feminized, animalistic, or abject body. To thus view the forms of attention implicit in Collins’s novels in physiological and somatic terms is very much to perpetuate the rhetoric (if not the sentiment) of sensation’s moralizing critics, such as the anonymous author of an 1864 article in the Christian

27 Rick Rylance discusses the influence of physiological science on mid-century psychology, particularly in Chapters 3 and 5 of his book. The latter chapter—on Alexander Bain—describes the resistance felt by psychologists who expressed too great an emphasis on the role of the body in determining thought and consciousness.

Remembrancer who asserts that the sensation novel “devotes itself” to “unfitting the public for the prosaic avocations of life” by “stimulating the attention through the lower and more animal instincts” (210).

But what makes the physiological approach additionally problematic and unsuited to a study of Collins’s attentional form is that physiological psychology by no means provided the primary source for Collins’s own interests in attention. His interest in this subject was rather mediated through discourses that represented attention as a relative disembodied phenomenon as opposed to one that is governed and regulated by physiological laws. The first of these was mesmeric theory and practice. Although mesmerism was very much a sub-field within the broader discipline of physiological science, it at the same time cut against the grain of physiological discourses in tending to conjure a subject who was not shocked and prodded into attention through nervous and physiological mechanisms but rather made attentive in achieving a state of relative disembodiment. Because Collins’s writing on mesmerism evokes the work of John Elliotson— whose name Collins even references in The Moonstone’s oft-cited discussions of mesmeric science (459)—it will pay to use Elliotson’s work as a point of comparison. Elliotson was notable for underlining the scientific and medical potential of mesmerism, even to the point of proposing the practice as a potential cure for disease and as a substitute for surgical anesthetics (Numerous Cases 80, 93). This is how Elliotson describes the mesmeric trance, to which he ascribes the appellation “sleep-waking”: The patient becomes insensible to all around, but may have the inward senses augmented, as in common ecstasies […]. The external senses may become so impenetrable that a pistol fired in the car is not heard, nor melted wax dropped on a body felt, nor ammonia applied to the mouth or nostrils perceived, although the gentlest word of the operator (magnetiser) is heard and answered, what similarly treated (magnetised) by him tasted and found ferruginous, and the gentlest touch of him recognised. (Human Physiology 660-61, parentheses and emphasis in the original) For Elliotson, then, sleep-waking is conducive to a hyper-attentiveness state of receptiveness—a state in which the magnetized subject’s attention is so acute that she is able to pick out the “gentlest word,” the subtlest taste, and the softest touch from among a din of ambient stimuli. But the subject is brought to this pitch of attentiveness not by having her nerves shocked or her “animal instincts” stimulated—not, that is, through appeals to the body and its tissues. The mesmerized subject becomes hyper-attentive in being made insensible to stimuli from sources like scorching hot wax and pungent ammonia. She is made hyper-attentive, that is, when she becomes disembodied to a large degree. As the term sleep-waking implies, Eliot conjures a subject whose acute and penetrating attentional capacities are awakened only after her distracting sensible body is put to sleep.

Collins communicated his own thoughts on mesmerism most sustainedly and directly through his series of six letters on the subject addressed to George Henry Lewes, and published in The Leader

65 from January to April 1852, titled “Magnetic Evenings at Home.” Describing a number of experiments in animal magnetism conducted in domestic English settings by a skilled magnetizer named Count P—, the letters evoke much of Elliotson’s writing, insofar as they draw on the rhetoric of the first-hand account to validate the science of mesmerism and its supposed curative potential. In Letter I of this series, Collins provides the following introductory description of the Count’s sleep-waking female subject: I […] tested the fact of her being really asleep, by calling out close at her ear, and clapping my hands before her eyelids—neither proceeding produced the smallest effect, outwardly […]. She could hear and answer a whisper from the magnetizer at the other end of the room, which was too faint to be audible to any of us. To every one else—say what they might, as loudly as they chose—she was deaf and dumb. (64) This passage contains distinct echoes of Elliotson’s description of magnetic sleep-waking. As in Elliotson’s description, the mesmerized subject is made insensible to concussions close at hand that are addressed to her perceiving body directly. As in Elliotson’s account, moreover, the mesmerized subject, after being made insensible to such ambient distractions, gains an acute ability to attend to faint stimuli that are imperceptible to the other individuals present. That this passage so closely echoes Elliotson’s description of the hyper-attentive sleep-waking subject suggests that Collins, too, imagined mesmeric attentiveness as a condition that results not (or not only) through intense sensorial stimuli directed at the body but rather when the body, in its roles as such a mediating mechanism, is subdued and put to sleep.

Collins’s interest in such hyper-attentive receptive states is not confined to his writing on mesmerism only; it also crops up in his writing on romance reading, which engages with strikingly similar representations of attentive reception. Bridging Collins’s interests in mesmeric and romantic expressions of attention is the phenomenon of clairvoyant reading. As the term suggests, clairvoyant reading is a facility through which the mesmerized subject is given the power to read a piece of writing that is absent, obscured, or otherwise imperceptible. Ilana Kurshan describes this phenomenon in writing that in “some phreno-mesmeric experiments, the mesmerized subject was asked to read aloud from a printed text that was concealed both from the subject and the mesmerizer. The subject had to make out the words on the page in spite of the intervening physical barriers” (36). Collins demonstrates a conspicuous investment in the concept of such clairvoyance through his writing on mesmerism: most explicitly in his letter “The Incredible Not Always Impossible,” in which he attempts to assuage G.H. Lewes’s skepticism about the possibility of clairvoyant experience. He also demonstrates a sympathetic attitude toward clairvoyant reading in providing a credulous account of the practice in Letter V of the “Magnetic Evenings” series, in which he describes an experiment where Count P—’s mesmerized subject is able to read, through closed eyelids, the name on a missive that is placed within her grasp (232). These descriptions of clairvoyant reading imply a kind of fantasy of unmediated experience and communication. When appreciated within the context of discourses on mesmerism and its perceptual and communicational potential, clairvoyant reading represents an extreme case

66 of that hyper-attentive state that is facilitated by sleep-waking. Because the sleep-waking subject is radically free from distracting sensations addressed to the body, she attains such an immense power of attentive focus that she is able to perceive textual markings through seemingly impenetrable barriers and across incredible distances. And when clairvoyant reading is studied somewhat askance—that is, from the perspective of discourses on books and media— accounts of clairvoyant reading suggest another type of unmediated experience. They evoke a mode of reading that is free from all medial resistance and interrupting distractions: a mode that is able to transcend the limitations of communications media and the noise that clutters the process of communication.28 To read clairvoyantly is to access textual content directly, without having to experience those inevitable moments when the book confronts the reader as a barrier or a distraction. The clairvoyant reader is thus doubly hyper-attentive insofar as she is granted direct and uninterrupted access to textual content because she is able to bypass both the frictions and limitations of physical media and the mediating (and often distracting) mechanisms of the reading body.

Collins’s writing on romantic literature and its relation to reading bears echoes of his earlier descriptions of mesmeric states, principally insofar as they also idealize a disembodied, unmediated, and efficient mode of reading that is similar to the one that is facilitated by mesmeric sleep-waking. We see hints of this in his essay “Books Necessary for a Liberal Education” (1886)—an essay in which Collins sketches a curatorial code for assembling a humanist library. In addition to offering a guide to anyone interested in assembling a humanist library, this essay is also a sort of homage to the nineteenth-century romantic novel; highlighting Collins’s list of necessary books are works of adventure fiction by Alexander Dumas, Charles Reade, and James Fennimore Cooper. This is how Collins characterizes the type of romantic text that he feels should sit at the centre of the ideal library: “I have never got any good out of a book unless the book interested me in the first instance. When I find that reading becomes an effort instead of a pleasure, I shut up the volume” (2). While Collins’s comments here suggest that the alpha and omega quality of his ideal book is pleasurableness, the structure of this passage suggests a different ideal. With the emphasis it places on “interest” (what Théodule Ribot would later call the “necessary condition of attention in all its forms” [105]), and the syntactic priority it gives to the minimization of mental labour (or “voluntary attention,” to borrow another term from Ribot), it figures his ideal book as one that can be consumed with expediency and efficiency first and foremost. 29 Collins reinforces this idea in a later passage, in which he recommends the novels of

28 In this sense, clairvoyant reading is akin to late-century utopian visions of the future of the phonograph, wherein the phonographic medium promises information consumption that is unmediated, frictionless, and not beset by the practical necessities of, and barriers to, reading implied by the book’s ineluctable materiality. Such necessities and barriers include the eye and muscle strain that result from sitting, holding, and reading a book, which can have adverse effects on readerly focus. See Rubery 233. 29 Théodule Ribot defines “voluntary attention” as “a product of art, of education, of direction, and of training. It is grafted, as it were, upon spontaneous or natural attention, and finds in the

Reade and Dumas for the core of his ideal library: “Let my dear lost friend, Charles Reade, seize on your interest, and never allow it to drop from beginning to end in ‘Hard Cash.’ Let Dumas keep you up all night over ‘Monte Cristo’” (2). When read in the context of his writing on mesmerism, “Books Necessary” exemplifies Collins’s textual ideal as a book that addresses itself not to the nerves or the body but rather seizes upon that ethereal and immaterial faculty that Ribot would call interest. Having an ability to bypass the body and access attention directly, in an efficient and unmediated (or immediate) manner, this ideal book is a romantic novel that encourages the reader to engage in a reading practice evocative of clairvoyant reading. It is important to note that this essay on romantic reading adds another quality to this receptive ideal. In addition to figuring his ideal as unmediated and disembodied, it also characterizes it as linear and uninterrupted, as a romantic text that never allows the reader’s attention to “drop from beginning to end.”

Discourses on mesmerism, clairvoyant reading, and romantic reception thus offered Collins a new way of imagining romantic attention. Whereas Scott’s account of Waverley’s pseudo-quixotic education figures romantic attention as a withdrawal into an imaginary romance world, and whereas critics of sensation fiction figured romantic attention as a state of thralldom that results when the romantic text plays on the somatic medium of the nervous body, Collins takes a different tack in his non-fictional writing. Drawing on the connotations of mesmeric subjectivity, he imagines romantic attention as a process that is at once disembodied, highly efficient, and linear and uninterrupted. When summarized in this manner, Collins’s attentional ideal is somewhat diffuse and inchoate. It is less a distinct scientific concept than a conceptual thread that runs through mesmeric and bibliographic discourses: a thread that exhibits not one single quality but instead a cluster of qualities. In order to give greater coherence to this diffuse attentional concept, I will identify it using a term that has been popular within the field of positive psychology recently: flow. Although flow is of mid-twentieth-century provenance, it nonetheless bears many of those qualities that Collins attributed to his attentional ideal. For example, it has been used to identify an uninterrupted state of attention, similar to the one with which an artist might pursue the completion of a painting in single-minded haste (Nakamura and Csikszentmihalyi 195). It also describes an ideal state of linear-continuous attention: an “optimal state of inner experience in which there is order in consciousness” (Csikszentmihalyi 6, emphasis in the original). And it is often characterized as a disembodied state, that is, as a state that is accompanied (and even produced) by a disregard for the self and the demands of the body including “hunger, fatigue, and discomfort” (Nakamura and Csikszentmihalyi 195). I am being latter its conditions of existence, as the graft does in the stock, into which it has been inserted. In spontaneous attention the object acts by its intrinsic power; in voluntary attention the subject acts through extrinsic, that is, through superadded power; in voluntary attention the aim is no longer set by hazard or circumstances; it is willed, chosen, accepted or, at least, submitted to; it is mainly a question of adapting ourselves to it, and of finding the proper means of maintaining the state; and hence voluntary attention is always experienced by a certain feeling of effort” (29, emphasis added).

68 somewhat anachronistic, of course, in reading Collins’s works in reference to, and as expressive of, this mid-twentieth-century concept of flow. But because this unitary concept is able to corral the conceptual diffuseness of that idealized type of attention that Collins espouses through his writing on reading and mesmerism, I will henceforth refer to Collins’s attentional ideal using this term that is of twentieth-century provenance.

II. “Black Horse,” White Woman: Flow and Narrative Form in The Woman in White In the years leading up to the publication of The Woman in White, Collins used a concept evocative of flow as a standard for evaluating literary production, measuring the worth of a literary text against its ability to elicit flow from its readers. He does this not only in “Books Necessary for a Liberal Education”; he also does so in his essay “The Unknown Public” (1858), which engages with the question of how British novelists might best go about capturing the attention of working-class reading publics. In this pseudo-sociological essay, Collins tells the story of how he had discovered the existence of a British working-class readership of about three million people almost by accident when he went “walking about London, more especially in the second and third rate neighbourhoods” (439). To Collins, this underappreciated readership represents a vast untapped market for those British novelists who have hitherto only directed their wares at middle-class readers. But because this public’s literacy and capacity to attend to a literary narrative have been debased and undernourished through its exposure to the type of substandard fiction contained in ubiquitous penny journals, capturing this public’s attention means not only providing it with texts that will suit its appetites but also addressing its underdeveloped capacity to pay attention in the process. Collins’s particular plan for overcoming these deficiencies involves providing the Unknown Public with works like Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo— only better: The former proprietor of one of these penny journals commissioned a thoroughly competent person to translate The Count of Monte Cristo, for his periodical. He knew that there was hardly a language in the civilized world into which that consummate specimen of the rare and difficult art of story-telling had not been transcribed. In France, in England, in America, in Russia […], Alexander Dumas had held hundreds of thousands of [middle-class] readers breathless. The proprietor of the penny journal naturally thought that he could do as much with the Unknown Public. Strange to say, the result of this apparently certain experiment was a failure. The circulation of the journal in question seriously decreased from the time when the first of living story-tellers became a contributor to it! (221) Collins’s later surmises that if Dumas’s novel is unable to captivate this working-class readership, it is because it fails to hold their attention with the same unbroken efficiency with which it captivated the attention of its middle-class reading audience. The novel’s “foreign names, titles, manners, and customs” are confusing for an untutored readership; they “puzzle the Unknown Public” and leave them confused and left stranded “on the threshold” of the text (222). Dumas's

69 novel is inadequate, in other words, for two reasons: its numerous allusions to unfamiliar places and persons inhibit unmediated access to textual meanings and contents, setting up barriers to something like clairvoyant reception; and these unfamiliar allusions each generate a moment of readerly distraction, insofar as each disrupts what, for Collins, in the ideal case, should be a linear-continuous reading process. So whereas Collins considers Dumas’s novel as the apotheosis of textual attentiveness—as the gold standard of uninterrupted and linear-continuous attention in narrative form—he also views it as a threshold to be exceeded. In imagining a print-cultural utopia where all of Britain’s readers will have unfettered access to literature, and where having access means receiving a well-wrought story in a state of attention that is unmediated and continuous, Dumas’s imperfection in this regard opens up a space of possibility. It signals the need for a novel that would better capture the attention of the larger public by better capturing the attention of flow in and through narrative form.

It is my claim that with The Woman in White, Collins attempted to achieve this ideal. Appreciating The Woman in White as a textual form that captures the attention of flow means dispensing with those somatic and physiological models that tend to figure the novel’s form as nervous and intermittent—as a form that stimulates attention through a sporadic series of affecting and shocking incidents. The model of attentional form that such physiological criticism tends to conjure is that of a steam locomotive whose reciprocating pistons work to maintain the momentum of the readers’ interest by administering to the body a series of sporadic shocks.30 But such critics often overlook how such mechanical and intermittent imagery stands in sharp contrast to the imagery through which Collins actually represented the attentional form of the novel. Far from describing the novel as a structured series of shocking episodes, or as something like a machine or steam engine that stimulates the reading body through a series of jolts and provocations, Collins rather characterized his narrative form using images of chains and threads— images that are distinctly linear-continuous and relatively non-mechanical in their connotations.

Encouraging this reevaluation of the novel’s attentional form is Collins’s story in the preface to the first French edition of The Woman in White (1861) about the inspiration behind his idiosyncratic style of epistolary narration. The Woman in White is noted for conveying its narrative through a chained series of epistolary acts of narration, with each of the novel’s narrators picking up the thread of the story at a point where the previous narrator had left off. Collins claimed that inspiration for this technique came when he witnessed a criminal case that was structured as a similar chain of eyewitness accounts:

30 Nicholas Daly provides an example of this tendency. In associating the experience of reading The Woman in White with the anxiety and suspense of mid-nineteenth-century rail travel (Literature, Technology, and Modernity 49), he imagines the novel as a sort of textual locomotive, with an intermittent series of shocking scenes and incidents that function to work the readers’ nerves into a state of uninterrupted excitation. Daly writes: “What the sensation novel was preaching to the nerves was a new time-discipline: to be immersed in the plot of a sensation novel, to have one’s nerves quiver with those of the hero or heroine, was to be wired into a new mode of temporality” (Literature, Technology, and Modernity 49).

I was struck by the dramatic nature of the unfolding of the story then being submitted to the scrutiny of the magistracy by successive definitions by the witnesses being heard in turn. As each one rose to provide his portion of personal involvement and as, from one to other each separate link was connected to the others to form an incontrovertible chain of evidence, I felt that my attention was being increasingly ensnared; I could see that the same was happening to those around me; and this phenomenon took on an ever augmenting intensity as the chain grew in length, as it stretched out, as it came closer to what in every narration is the climax. Certainly, thought I, a series of fictitious events would lend itself very easily to a presentation such as this one. (qtd. in The Woman in White 621, emphasis added) It is significant that while Collins highlights the engaging quality of this form of sequential narration he never refers to anything like its affective or somatic effects. Anticipating his later account of reading Charles Reade’s Hard Cash, he describes how this criminal narrative seized his interest in a direct and decidedly non-physiological manner. It is also significant that Collins never refers to the details of the criminal case in this passage. In eliding the content of this criminal narrative, he indicates that what captured his attention was not the viscerally shocking, horrifying, or scandalous details of the crime but simply the form through which the story of the crime was retailed. That Collins composes The Woman in White as a similarly unbroken series of testimonies suggests that he was attempting to capture the reader’s attention primarily through the mechanisms of form rather than through the fascinations of content. Indeed, a verb such as capturing reflects very well what Collins is doing in structuring his narrative as this chain of narratorial acts, as this chained form captures attention in two senses. First, like the works of Dumas and Reade, it captures the reader’s attention by “never allow[ing]” it “to drop from beginning to end.” But it also captures attention at the narrative and textual levels, to the extent that the novel’s narrative technique, with its unbroken chain of narrating acts that parallel the reader’s unbroken chain of attention, encodes the form of reader’s captivation as a textual form.31 Collins, then, not satisfied to leave the attentional reception of his text to chance—to produce a narrative text like Dumas’s, which, depending on the disposition, nationality, or class position of the reader, may or may not be compelling and captivating—in effect absorbs the conditions of attentional reception into the frame of the narrative discourse, grasping the reader’s attention by consecrating and preserving it at the level of narrative form.

31 In the preface to the 1860 three-volume edition of the novel, Collins explains that his technique of using multiple narrators that are “all placed along the chain of events” is part of his attempt to “keep the story constantly moving forward” (qtd. in The Woman in White 618). The novel’s second narrator, Vincent Gilmore, uses a similar image in describing the plan of the narrative’s fictional editor and orchestrator, Walter Hartright: “The plan [Hartright] has adopted for presenting the story to others, in the most truthful and most vivid manner, requires that it should be told, at each successive stage in the march of events, by the persons who were directly concerned in those events at the time of their occurrence” (159).

If Collins’s comments about the novel’s conception describe its attentional form in sweeping and metaphorical terms, the reflections of the novel’s narrators’ on the subject of narratorial practice provide insight into the nuances and particulars of this form. The narrators describe the novel’s narrational style as one that works both to capture readerly attention from beginning to end and to use readerly attention effectively and efficiently by minimizing readerly distractions. A telling example of this can be seen when the novel’s principal narrator, Walter Hartright, discusses the importance of narrative elision in opening the second part of the novel. In the passage in question, Hartright justifies his decision to refrain from narrating the details of his grief-stricken reaction to his (later falsified) discovery that his lover, Laura Fairley, has passed on: I open a new page. I advance my narrative by one week. The history of the interval which I thus pass over must remain unrecorded. My heart turns faint, my mind sinks in darkness and confusion when I think of it. This must not be, if I, who write, am to guide, as I ought, you who read. This must not be, if the clue that leads through the windings of the Story is to remain, from end to end, untangled in my hands. (421) The passage openly contradicts the notion that the novel’s narrative stimulates attention by exploiting the reading body and its susceptibility to nervous and affective extremes. Indeed, it suggests something like the opposite of this: that in order to keep hold of the thread of attention, Hartright must in fact resist narrating overly sensational and emotional events. This is because narrating such events would threaten to throw the narrator into a state of emotional excitement and confusion, which in turn would lead the course of the narrative on tangents away from the thread of the “Story” and ultimately launch the reader into a state of distracted reception by proxy. Suggested by this and other such narratorial reflections is the idea that Collins’s narrators are not shock artists who wantonly exploit their readers’ affective and nervous weaknesses but are rather something closer to conscientious caretakers of attention: narrator-guides who suppress the appearance of shocking incidents in the process of striving to never let the thread of the reader’s attention drop “from beginning to end.” 32 Hartright’s comments also belie the notion that the novel’s attentional form exists only in and through subjects who are located outside the text (particularly reading subjects, nervous or otherwise). By conjuring a narrator who strains to pay proper attention to the events of the story so that the reader may do so as well, Collins indicates that a significant structure within the novel itself (let us call this the structure of narrative discourse) expresses, encodes, and is governed by a type of efficient and unbroken attention.

32 Hartright reprises the thread image at a later point, when he discusses events that take place after Laura Farley’s departure from Blackwater: “I shall relate these narratives, not in the words (often interrupted, often inevitably confused) of the speakers themselves, but in the words of the brief, plain, studiously simple abstract which I committed to writing for my own guidance […]. So the tangled web will be most speedily and most intelligibly unrolled” (423, emphasis added). Although she never develops a theory of the novel’s attentional plot, Sue Lonoff expresses a sense of the existence of such a form when she writes, “Collins’s novels […] are tightly knit constructions that proceed along a plot-line with a minimum of distraction” (18).

But I am not interested in analyzing narration in the novel in isolation from that other level of narrative structure against which “discourse” is often opposed: call this story, content, or plot. Of interest to me, with my focus on attentional plots, is how the levels of story and discourse engage with one another to exhibit an attentional form, and principally how what we might call the deeper structural level that is The Woman in White’s “story” functions to produce attentiveness at the level of narration. 33 Hartright’s comments seem to suggest such two-way traffic between the attentive structure of discourse and that of the story. On the one hand, his thread image conjures an attentive narrator who carefully selects and elides narrative content in order to produce an attentive narrative thread. The narrator in this account is a sort of manufacturer of attention: one who creates an attentive narrative out of that chaos of distraction that is the story’s raw material. On the other hand, his reference to a story thread that preexists proper narratorial handling—his image of a narrator who simply unwinds the spool of the story—implies that the story itself bears a linear, thread-like, and thus attentive quality. It further suggests that the narrator’s function in producing and maintaining the reader’s attentiveness is a subordinate or mechanical one: a relatively uncreative act of unwinding the thread of an inherently attentive preexisting story structure. When read in this latter sense, Hartright’s reflections hint that the text—in addition to encoding an efficient and uninterrupted form of attention at the level of narrative discourse—also contains something like an attentional plot that plays an important role in producing a form of narrative discourse that evokes the characteristics of flow.

What exactly is the attentional thread that Collins’s narrators so carefully handle and hold from beginning to end? Hartright never describes this textual phenomenon with any greater technical specificity or precision than he does in the previous passage. But I would argue that the plot of the novel takes attentional form insofar as the character of the Woman in White serves a plot- generating and narrative-structuring function. The Woman in White, in the process of organizing the diverse actions and events of the narrative into a plot with coherence and direction, produces the narrative’s attentive discourse by inspiring the novel’s narrators to follow the plot using a form of attention evocative of flow. The simplest way to explicate this idea is to consider how the Woman in White operates as the narrative’s (and consequently the narrators’) chief object of interest, and how she holds and accumulates interest across the course of the narrative. The novel begins, in effect, when Hartright happens upon the Woman in White—or, Anne Catherick—on the road to Hampstead. At this point she is introduced as an object of pure fascination: an object that captures Hartright’s interest immediately and directly (that is, in a manner similar to that in which Hard Cash would seize Collins’s attention). Later on, when she delivers a cryptic and ominous letter to the pair—warning Hartright’s lover and Halcombe’s cousin, Laura Fairley, against marrying the sinister Percival Glyde—she accrues even greater interest in the eyes of the novel’s sleuthing narrators, Hartright and Halcombe; she is interesting at this point not only in

33 Genette evokes the relational nature of narrative discourse in the following definition: “As narrative, [narrative discourse] lives by its relationship to the story that it recounts; as discourse, it lives by its relationship to the narrating that utters it” (29).

73 herself but also as the key to Laura’s marital happiness. Her significance as this object of interest only increases after Glyde catches a hint that Anne might possess compromising information about his illicit past actions, at which point she becomes the chief object of his elaborate plot to silence her and defraud his young bride, Laura Fairley, of her property and identity. Also believing that the Woman in White holds the secret that would unlock the mystery behind Glyde’s schemes as a result of this, the novel’s two primary narrators become increasingly captivated with the occupation of discovering who she is and what she knows, and engage in an all-consuming investigation into these matters in an attempt to return to Laura her wealth and name. As this object who increasingly accumulates significance as the narrative develops, the Woman in White is thus the embodiment of narrative interest in a double sense. In holding the key to everyone’s interests in the financial and business sense (or at least seeming to do so), and in doing this for the duration of the novel (even beyond her death in the middle of the text), she inevitably captures and holds interest in the psycho-perceptual sense as well. It is thus not difficult to grasp how she encourages narrative acts that express a thread-like form of attention. In concentrating a divergent set of personal and financial interests, and in holding this collective interest across the space of the text, she evokes the form and shape of something like an attentional thread. For the novel’s narrators, keeping hold of the thread of the story means keeping a constant eye on this all- important character that holds the key to everyone’s interests and thus commands their full attention.

But upon examining those scenes in which Anne is shown to be interesting in the eyes of the narrators, it becomes apparent that her influence is more complicated, more nuanced, than this simple formula would suggest. It is not simply that the Woman in White commands a large amount of attention because she is this capacious repository of interests. She also produces a specific and technical form of attention by evoking a specific linguistic-syntactic structure. Reading The Woman in White in reference to Herbert Spencer’s stylistic theory of attentive syntax can help elucidate how she functions to structure narrative discourse as this specific, technical linguistic form of attention. Written in 1852, when Wilkie Collins was contributing his essays on mesmerism to George Henry Lewes and The Leader, Spencer was publishing an essay on literary stylistics titled Philosophy of Style. This essay is germane to the present study because Spencer’s stylistics is predicated on the same principle that informs Collins’s own processes of creation and narration. Spencer opens his essay by listing a series of stylistic “maxims” that can help the writer achieve an efficient written style, stating, for instance, “that parentheses should be avoided” and “that Saxon words should be used in preference to those of Latin origin” (2). He then describes the principle at basis of these maxims: “On seeking some clue to the law underlying these current maxims, we may see shadowed forth in many of them, the importance of economizing the reader’s or hearer’s attention. To so present ideas that they may be apprehended with the least possible mental effort, is the desideratum towards which most of the rules above quoted point” (3). He thus argues that a preference for Saxon over Latinate words is psychologically justified on the basis of the former’s general brevity, stating that the “greater forcibleness of Saxon English,

74 or rather non-Latin English,” makes more economical use of the reader’s attention because a measure of attention is “absorbed […] by each syllable” (5-6). But most relevant to my own argument is how Spencer justifies his preference for English over French syntax. Here he argues that the French method of placing the substantive before the adjective diverts and thereby unduly taxes the reader’s attention. He illustrates this idea by pointing to the example of “cheval noir.” He contends that such a construction leads to distraction by causing the reader to conjure horses of a variety of different colours and shapes before the horse is qualified as black (10-11). According to Spencer, that is, such a syntactical order is inefficient in its use of readerly attention because it tends to tangle the thread of attention by diverting the reader’s thoughts on tangents of connotation and suggestion. Spencer claims that the English construction “black horse” is preferable because “black” is a pure abstraction that does not call to mind any concrete mental picture, and therefore does not interrupt or divert the constant flow of the reader’s attention as it moves from one syntactic unit to another (11). His preferred syntactic order can be said to imply an imaginary reader who exists in that liminal space between these two linguistic units. Having not been distracted by the connotations and associations of the adjective (given that the adjective lacks anything like concrete suggestions), this reader is fully prepared to grasp the meaning of the subsequent noun with utmost attention and efficiency.

If the figure of the Woman and White structures acts of narration into a form of attention similar to flow—a form both unbroken and efficient—it is because she holds the narrators’ interest in a way that evokes the structure and effects of Spencer’s syntactic ideal. Illustrating her non- distracting nature is that famous early scene where Hartright first meets her on the road from Hampstead. Whereas physiological critics have tended to interpret this scene as the first of many of those nerve-jangling episodes that punctuate the text and structure it as an intermittent form of alarmed reception, reading this scene as an expression of non-distracting syntax permits us to situate it in reference to this other, more properly linguistic and less somatic, attentional structure. Of course, the sudden appearance of the Woman in White does work to shock Hartright, as it causes “every drop of blood in his body [to be] brought to a stop by the touch of [her] hand” (63). But if the Woman in White also commands attention from Hartright, it is for other reasons and through other mechanisms: I looked attentively at her […]. It was then nearly one o’clock. All I could discern distinctly by the moonlight, was a colourless, youthful face, meagre and sharp to look at, about the cheeks and chin; large, grave, wistfully-attentive eyes; nervous, uncertain lips; and light hair of a pale, brownish-yellow hue. There was nothing wild, nothing immodest in her manner: it was quiet and self-controlled, a little melancholy and a little touched by suspicion; not exactly the manner of a lady, and, at the same time, not the manner of a woman in the humblest rank of life […]. She held a small bag in her hand: and her dress—bonnet, shawl, and gown all of white—was, so far as I could guess, certainly not composed of very delicate or very expensive materials. […] What sort of woman she was,

and how she came to be out alone in the high-road, an hour after midnight, I altogether failed to guess. (63, emphasis added) If Collins had intended to introduce the Woman in White as a stimulant of shock or terror, say, or as a trigger to sexual exhilaration, we could hardly tell from this opening description. The description is rather notable for being shot through with negating language. The Woman in White is “colourless” in both skin and hair, and “meagre” of face. Her class position is indeterminate, as she appears to be neither a lady nor a subaltern. Hartright evens doubles down on such negative diction in remarking that “[t]here was nothing wild, [and] nothing immodest in her manner.” In the midst of such diction, her “bonnet, shawl, and gown all of white” come to symbolize not only her lack of immodesty but also this neuter identity, in effect materializing that profusion of negating diction with which Collins surrounds her; Collins represents the Woman in White in this scene as the Woman in White—as a presumably substantive figure completely concealed within or behind a surplice (or surplus) of negation.34 And if Hartright shows the ability to look “attentively” at her during their first meeting, it is not because he is shocked or alarmed by what she is or what she suggests but because he is not distracted by the appearance of the substantive element—not distracted, that is, by concrete thoughts and images about who she is or what she may be. This is made clear in the final line of the passage, where Hartright states that at no point during this first meeting was he able to determine or even speculate about “what sort of woman she was.” Like the word “black” in Spencer’s “black horse,” this purely white, purely neuter figure inspires no concrete anticipation of substantive thought in Hartright’s mind. Not distracted by any such suggestions, Hartright becomes wholly interested in and attentive to her because she promises to reveal a something that is not something in particular.

This opening scene can be seen as a pattern for how the Woman in White is represented—and for how characters and narrators engage with her—across the course of the novel. If this early scene exemplifies how her “whitewashed” appearance serves to inspire and encode an at-once captivated and non-distracted mode of reception, a later scene demonstrates how the insinuations of what she knows (or what she is thought to know) about Sir Percival Glyde are designed to inspire a similar form of attention. This later moment comes on the eve of Laura Fairley’s marriage to Glyde, when Anne sends a letter of warning to Laura expressing intimate “knowledge” about an ominous secret regarding Sir Percival. The letter mirrors the scene of the Woman in White’s first appearance insofar it wraps Glyde in a similar vestment of unsubstantive interest. The following are the climactic lines of that anonymous letter, in which Anne expresses her knowledge about Glyde primarily through a string of negations and adjectival expressions: “I saw down into his inmost heart. It was black as night; and on it were written, in the red flaming letters which are the handwriting of the fallen angel: ‘Without pity and without remorse […]’”

34 Nicholas Daly provides a similar reading of the Anne Catherick’s whiteness in Sensation and Modernity in the 1860s. However, Daly interprets whiteness, here, not as an absence of distraction, as I do, but as symbol of the spectacle and its ability to secure the attention of the “distracted consciousness of the modern subject” (31).

(117, emphasis added). As Anne lays out the chain of her knowledge about Glyde, from the appearance of his “heart” to the revelation of his true nature, she follows a syntactic course that leads from abstract and largely adjectival characterizations and evocations (“black as night,” “red flaming letters”) not toward the revelations of anything like a substantive secret or truth but merely toward similarly abstract and negating expressions such as “[w]ithout pity and without remorse.” The latter expressions are also incomplete insofar as they leave the reader wondering, “‘[w]ithout pity and without remorse” for what exactly? In a letter that is supposed to reveal something of her knowledge about Glyde’s character and history, all that Anne manages to do is enshroud his character in the mist of insubstantive verbiage. Nor does she substantiate her negative portrayal of Sir Percival at any other point in her letter, as she makes no explicit reference to the particular acts or crimes that might warrant this negative description. Recapitulating the earlier scene where Hartright first meets Anne Catherick, the letter leaves the two detectives captivated by the possibilities of revelation but unable to guess or ponder what such a revelation might entail. Evoking the function of the Spencerian adjective, the letter functions to pique their interest in a mystery that needs to be solved but does not provide concrete details or suggestions about the mystery that would send them on distracted, speculative narratorial tangents.

If the letter is maximally attentive in its form, it is similarly attentive in its effects. It inspires sustained attention to the extent that it functions to focus the narrators’ attention on the Woman in White as an object of preeminent interest and source of information, and instigates their riveted, text-long attempt to locate her and discover what she knows about Glyde. A later scene illustrates how this structurally attentive letter works to produce a homologous form of attention in her narratorial readers. While Hartright is waiting in the porch of the Cumberland church for the possible approach of Anne Catherick and Mrs. Clements, the latter happens to mention the dream- letter in an oft-hand remark to the former. Hartright, overhearing this conversation, then tells the reader that Mrs. Clements’s mention of the letter “strung up my attention to a pitch of expectation that was almost painful” (129). He later makes sure to clarify the source and reason for his reaction, stating that his attention was riveted to this extreme of expectation not by these words or their speaker but by the thought of the letter’s author: “The person who had delivered the letter was of little consequence. The person who had written it was the one centre of interest, and the one source of information” (130, emphasis added). When read in isolation, this scene in the Cumberland churchyard simply illustrates the extent to which the Woman in White captures the narrators’ attention by being the principal object of interest at the centre of a budding mystery. But when Hartright refers to this object of interest not as a woman simply but as the “person who had written [the letter],” he implicitly traces the source of his hyper-attentive reaction and captivation back to the influence of a letter that evokes the structure of Spencerian syntax. He hereby invites us to view Anne Catherick as a figure who, in conveying insinuations about Glyde’s mystery through an epistolary style that evokes the structure of non-distracting syntax, stimulates the narrators to pursue and narrate the mystery using a mode of attention reminiscent of

77 that of Spencer’s non-distracted, and thus hyper-attentive reader: that reader who, not being distracted by the premature appearance of substantive content, sits in unqualified anticipation of the appearance of the substantive, with her attention “strung up to a pitch of expectation.”

The scene demonstrates that the Woman in White is more than simply another character in Collins’s novel; she is also a structuring structure. In addition to structuring the actions and events of the story into the form of a coherent plot, she also has a structuring influence on the narrators, insofar as she inspires them to execute their narration in a non-distracted attentional mode. Indeed, that this mode of following her is sustained across the text, and is not simply confined to Hartright’s experience in the churchyard, is suggested by a message that Hartright conveys to Marian Halcolmbe. In leaving England for Central America in the middle of the narrative, Hartright is forced to pass the role of storytelling on to Halcombe, thereby producing one of those links in the chain of the novel’s sequential narration. It is not insignificant that Hartright, upon passing the baton of principal narrator to his successor, gives her the following advice: “These events have a meaning, these events must lead to a result. The mystery of Anne Catherick is not cleared up yet. She may never cross my path again; but if she ever crosses yours, make better use of the opportunity, Miss Halcombe, than I made of it. I speak on strong conviction; I entreat you to remember what I say” (210, emphasis in the original). This passage is significant for its resonances with the letter through which Anne originally insinuated the mystery of Percival Glyde. Echoing the diction of Anne’s earlier letter, Hartright states that the Woman in White promise not to resolve a particular mystery but instead to effect some unforeseeable “result.” Hartright also states that Anne promises to do bring about this result not by confirming one of the narrators’ previously developed suspicions (or one of a set of possible suspicions) but instead by simply producing a purely abstract and unanticipated “meaning.” His advice to Halcombe thus reproduces the structure of Anne’s original letter, insofar as both work to generate interest in a mystery while at the same time never inviting anything like substantive speculation and conjecture on the nature and details of that mystery. As a result, Hartright’s letter, much like Anne’s earlier one, encourages Halcombe not only to pursue and narrate the mystery with interest but also to do so while experiencing a form of attention that is reminiscent of the kind that Spencerian syntax is supposed to inspire. In effect, the Woman in White’s influence as a stimulant of Spencerian attentiveness is contagious. As a structuring structure, her influence not only travels across narrative levels, from story to discourse, but also across what Collins’s describes as the novel’s chain of discursive acts, moving from one narrator to another.

That the Woman in White was included in the text not so much as a character in the conventional sense, and more as a narrative thread whose principal purpose is to hold the narrators’ attention in a state of non-distraction across the space of the text, is suggested by a third and final letter: Mrs. Catherick’s to Hartright. In this letter that is delivered near the novel’s end, Mrs. Catherick explains to Hartright that Anne was never privy to Sir Percival’s secret but only made a pretense of being so (533-34). This letter reveals, in other words, that Anne could never have served as a

78 means to solving the mystery because she was never in possession of the secret at the mystery’s heart. Never in possession of this substantive content to the very end, the Woman in White fulfills her identity as a narrative function whose only purpose is to structure the narrative into an attentive form by never inviting distracting speculations on the substantive aspects of the mystery. As such a function, she exists alongside the novel’s chain-like mode of narrative discourse and its generally absorbing mystery story as one of those forms of narrative attention with which Collins stuffs his text. While these forms interact with one another to produce an act of narrative discourse that evokes what modern-day psychologists call flow, their multiplicity also evokes a supplemental logic: call this the supplemental effect of Collins’s attempts to capture attention without addressing (and in the decided absence of) actual reading bodies. In desiring to elicit an unmediated and uninterrupted bout of attention from his reading subjects—but not satisfied to leave this process to chance by presuming a natural and a priori relationship between literary representation and readerly effect—Collins loads his novel with a redundancy of such attentional forms. This supplemental strategy represents Collins’s attempts to better The Count of Monte Cristo—a novel that is able to capture flow only to a relative and not universal degree because it has to rely on contingent reading bodies (with their variations of understanding and class disposition) in order to elicit flow. In contrast to this earlier novel, The Woman in White captures attention to the point of being full of attentional forms, and therefore does not need such contingent reading bodies in order to be attentive. And of all of the attentional forms that fill this text, it is perhaps the figure of the Woman in White that ultimately represents Collins's most successful attempt to capture the attention of flow, insofar as this structuring structure generates a type of attention that is, at once, disembodied, efficient, and uninterrupted.

III. Bad Books, Bad Attention: Forms of Distraction in Armadale and The Moonstone When The Woman in White’s historical and cultural significance is described in these terms, it comes across as somewhat limited in scope—relevant only to the history of a literary genre. This prompts the following question: what is the broader cultural and social value of a text that is eminently able to elicit and capture continuous, disembodied, and uninterrupted forms of attention, that is, beyond its merely being better able to do so than past examples of the romantic novel? This is a question that Collin seems to address in writing his later sensation novels Armadale and The Moonstone. We can think of these two novels as acts of publicity that work on behalf of The Woman in White by retrospectively framing this novel within a thicker attentional history—a history that has a social and cultural significance that extends beyond the limited confines of the history of romantic novels. These later works perform this task by characterizing the social context surrounding Collins’s first sensation novel—the context into which this novel intervenes—as an epoch fraught by problems of inattention and distractibility and rampant with literary forms that only exacerbate this problem.

Reading Collins’s 1860s fiction in this manner affects how we think about the ways in which it engages with contemporary social and cultural problems. Established methods of contextualizing Collins’s sensation novels often represent his works as literary-discursive responses to a set of mid-century discourses and problems related to the fields of technology, psychology, and popular politics.35 Daly has been perhaps most vocal on the subject of sensation’s relationship to mid- Victorian culture, addressing this same topic in two separate books. As I have already noted, in Literature, Technology, and Modernity, 1860-2000, he reads The Woman in White as a text that uses shock effects to accommodate a distracted public to the rhythm, pace, and attentional demands of modern transportation and communications technologies (49-50). And in Sensation and Modernity in the 1860s, he explores the political origins of sensation, using mid-century debates around election reform as a touchstone for reading Collins’s sensation fiction as an attempt to capture the attention of the crowd in an age that anticipated the extension of the franchise and increasing democratization (16). Common to both these arguments is the assumption that The Woman in White’s representations and forms of attention constitute a literary-discursive response to larger social and cultural issues that predate the sensation genre and motivate its representations and forms of attention. However, my claim is that reading The Woman in White in reference to forms and representations of bad attention in Armadale and The Moonstone invites us to explore a different relationship between Collins’s first sensation novel and its broader social context. While Daly assumes that expressions of narrative attention in The Woman in White are the product of a broader, pre-existing social problem, it is also possible to read Armadale and The Moonstone as texts that look back to the period leading up to the publication of Collins’s first sensation novel to manufacture this problem a posteriori, so to speak. After devising a narrative solution to a problem of relatively limited scope and significance in writing The Woman in White, Collins uses Armadale and The Moonstone to give this problem greater social and literary-political significance, in effect manufacturing a particular cultural problem of inattention and distractibility after the fact. Constructing this problem within the pages of his own works allows Collins to take control of how this problem is imagined, specifically by permitting him to tailor this problem in such a way that The Woman in White comes to read as a fitting and effective solution to it. Because Collins’s first sensation novel offers a solution that is textual and narrative-formal in nature, these later novels construct this social problem less as an issue originating in the fields of technology or politics and more as a literary-discursive problem resulting from the prevalence of books and narrative forms that, unlike The Woman in White, fail to capture readerly attention effectively and properly.

That Collins’s sensation novels of the later 1860s construct a narrative world plagued by inattention and distractibility is perhaps most apparent in The Moonstone—a novel that repeatedly evokes problems of distraction at the level of narrative discourse. The novel’s narrators often betray a sustaining inability to keep hold of the thread of the story, and often make sustained

35 See, for example, Daly; Griffin; Loesberg; Straley; Taylor; and Tondre.

80 excurses on topics that bear little relation to the events surrounding the narrative’s chief subject: the theft of, and search for, the missing gem. And yet this is not what we might expect from a narrative that is in many ways designed on the same formal pattern as the hyper-attentive novel The Woman in White. Like its predecessor, for example, the story of The Moonstone is narrated by multiple individuals and takes the form of a connected, sequential series of epistolary narrative acts. The narrative’s editor, Franklin Blake, says as much in instructing his narrators on how to proceed with telling this story: “We have certain events to relate […] and we have certain persons concerned in those events who are capable of relating them. Starting from these plain facts, the idea is that we should all write the story of the Moonstone in turn—as far as our own personal experience extends, and no further” (60). The reason that Blake advises his narrators to go “no further” than stating the plain facts surrounding the diamond’s disappearance—and not to dally in speculations about potential suspects and motives, for example—is that, in the two years since the theft, “the characters of innocent people have suffered” as a result of such speculations and conjectures (60). In short, Blake intends to produce a narrative that, being conveyed as a linear- continuous chain of narrative texts by eyewitnesses, does not deviate into speculations about the details surrounding the crime. If his plan of narrative action sounds familiar, it is because it evokes the form of Collins’s first sensation novel—with its linear-sequential form, and its narrators who refrain from speculating on the nature of the mystery’s substantive content. One might therefore expect The Moonstone to mirror the attentional form of this earlier novel by encoding that uninterrupted, efficient, and linear-continuous mode of attention that is flow.

But if such a possibility is immanent in Franklin Blake’s original plans for narrating the mystery of the stolen diamond, it is by no means realized in the final result, as the narrators repeatedly turn their attention away from the task of reconstructing the events surrounding the crime. This problem of narrative distraction is introduced very early in the text, through the medium of the story’s first narrator, Gabriel Betteredge. Evoking David Copperfield’s Mr. Dick—that slow- witted author who is continually distracted from his autobiographical writing by the image of Charles the First’s severed head—Betteredge is often distracted by reflections on Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, and such distractions inhibit his ability to follow Blake’s directive to stick to the details surrounding the diamond’s theft. Why does Betteredge so often reflect on this earlier novel? It is because he values Defoe’s book not as an entertaining adventure story or a myth of bourgeois individualism but as a spiritual guide that he uses as a substitute for the Christian Bible. At many points during his narrative—particularly at times of spiritual need or moral indecision— he turns to Robinson Crusoe, but not by reading it for its narrative content. He rather scans the text for spiritual guidance, turning to passages at random, and using a technique of textual engagement evocative of bibliomancy. His habitual tendency to reflect on Robinson Crusoe in this manner affects his ability to abide by Blake’s editorial dictates, and this is highlighted in the very first lines of his narrative, where Betteredge opens his narrative by writing: “In the first part of Robinson Crusoe, at page one hundred and twenty-nine, you will find it thus written […]” (59). Betteredge thus begins his narrative in the midst of a state of narratorial distraction, opening not

81 with the story of the diamond but instead by directing his reader’s attention to a specific page within an entirely different work. And although he later goes “back to [his] writing-desk to start the story” once again in a manner more faithful to Blake’s original designs (61), he is soon lured away from the narrative a second time as his mind once again turns to the topic of Robinson Crusoe. Eventually catching himself in the midst of this second reverie, he extends to the reader the following apology: “Still this don’t look much like starting the story of the Diamond—does it? I seem to be wandering off in search of Lord knows what, Lord knows where. We will take a new sheet of paper, if you please, and begin over again, with my best respects to you” (61).

These instances of narratorial distractibility do more than simply characterize Betteredge as a scatterbrained lover of Robinson Crusoe; they also inaugurate a narrative pattern. For upon the conclusion of Betteredge’s contribution to the story, the novel’s second narrator—the evangelical diarist Drusilla Clack—continues in the same vein. Clack is at many points marked as an unreliable narrator, insofar as she often expresses sympathy and approbation for Godfrey Ablewhite—a character who would later be revealed to be the diamond’s thief. But she also demonstrates a deficiency as a narrator in making frequent irrelevant asides on the topics of religion and morality. For example, after noting how Ablewhite dutifully responded to (what she believes to be) a letter from a potential benefactress to the “Mothers’-Small-Clothes-Conversion- Society,” Clack cannot help but extract a moral from this detail, exclaiming that whereas “[o]rdinary people might have hesitated before setting aside their own engagements to suit the convenience of a stranger […] The Christian Hero never hesitates where good is to be done” (260). Later, after Clack describes how Godfrey was ambushed by group of Indians looking to reclaim the diamond, she closes this episode by abstracting another such moral: “When the Christian hero of a hundred charitable victories plunges into a pitfall that has been dug for him by mistake, oh, what a warning it is to the rest of us to be unceasingly on our guard” (263). One can see how Collins uses watchwords to signal that Clack’s narrative attention has drifted away from the story into the realm of moral digression, with her mention of “the Christian hero” announcing the onset of a bout of narrative distraction just as assuredly as Betteredge’s mention of Robinson Crusoe does the same. As in Betteredge’s narrative, moreover, Collins draws attention to these narrative digressions by having Clack deliver mock apologies for this tendency: “I beg a thousand pardons. I have fallen insensibly into my Sunday-school style. Most inappropriate in such a record as this. Let me try to be worldly” (260).

The Moonstone is therefore a narrative that repeatedly fails to achieve the type of flow exhibited by The Woman in White, insofar as the novel’s two most prolific narrators apart from Blake demonstrate an inveterate inability to take hold of the narrative thread. Of course, these moments of narratorial inattention do not simply signal Collins’s failure to achieve the same type of attentional form that he had achieved with his first sensation novel; The Moonstone rather performs this attentional deficiency in repeatedly drawing ironic attention to it, in a way that suggests an attempt at a rhetorical effect. But if these instances of narrative distraction perform a

82 rhetorical function, what sort of function is this, specifically? An answer to this question comes from noting how these patterned instances of narrative digression themselves often follow a pattern. Instances of narrative distraction in The Moonstone have a particular structure; they follow a bathetic trajectory insofar as these distracting digressions move from the invocation of lofty, spiritual matters to a sort of wallowing in the depths of material and bibliographic detail. As Clack’s narrative progresses, for instance, her interruptions change in type, transforming from occasional observations on proper Christian comportment to dogged attempts to interleave her narrative with extensive extracts from evangelical pamphlets. What begins as her sustaining interest in questions of Christian virtue, in other words, descends, as her narrative advances, into an increasing obsession merely with the pieces of paper on which those virtues are inscribed. This obsession eventually climaxes with that crisis in narrative composition that occurs near the middle of the novel, as the narrative of the missing Moonstone devolves into a drawn-out epistolary argument between Blake and Clack not about morality or narrative technique but simply about the propriety of including these evangelical papers among her narrative contributions. Betteredge’s interruptions on the topic of Robinson Crusoe express a similar pattern of descent from the spiritual to the material and bibliographic; but they do so not by collectively comprising a devolutionary trajectory but insofar as the individual digressions themselves follow the pattern of descent. This is exemplified by the second of Betteredge’s above-mentioned references to Robinson Crusoe. Whereas Betteredge begins this particular excursus by remarking on the moral and therapeutic virtues of Defoe’s novel (he refers to it as a companion for “[w]hen my spirits are bad”), he deviates from this train of thought when he begins to enumerate the number of editions of the novel that he has owned in his lifetime, ending this extended excursus by simply listing the cost and bibliographic details of his most recently acquired edition of the novel—“Price four shillings and sixpence, bound in blue, with a picture thrown into the bargain” (61).

In other words, the novel’s instances of narrative distraction evoke those conventional forms of literature that Scott denigrates in his introductory remarks to Waverley. As I highlighted in the first chapter, Scott transforms a populous literary field into a simple binary by figuring all of the diverse adversarial literary forms as expressions of the same debased mode of attention: namely, an overweening attentiveness to the details of the object world. Collins appears to be executing a similar literary-rhetorical strategy in The Moonstone; and this politics is conducted in opposition to two general positions. The first might be identified, generally, as that of religious literature; this position is represented in the text by those tracts and pamphlets that Clack becomes preoccupied with as her narrative progresses, and which reflects the type of literature published by organizations such as the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. The second is that contemporary body of neo-religious, but decidedly secular, literature; and this position is exemplified by a type of realism that is concerned less with telling stories and more with supplanting religious literature by giving the reader access to more veritable and therefore more authentic truths (note how Betteredge reads Robinson Crusoe—a founding text in the British canon of realist form—not for its story but as a sort of secular Bible divided into chapter and

83 verse). These two positions signify forms of literature that would pose a stiff challenge to Collins’s sensation novels in a competition of literary value and authority, especially in the age of High-Victorian seriousness. When compared to such literature, with its focus on questions of social, spiritual, and moral truth, a plot-driven sensation novel such as The Woman in White is liable to be viewed merely as an entertaining distraction from larger social and moral questions. But Collins uses instances of narratorial distraction to trouble this hierarchized binary that sets serious religious and realist literatures above entertaining romantic forms such as the sensation novel. And he does this by representing how these religious and secular varieties of moral literature both lead the reader not toward anything resembling elevated spiritual or moral truths, but instead on a course of descent that terminates in a mere preoccupation with bibliographic details. But he does more than simply trouble this binary by bringing such serious literature down to the same debased level of sensation fiction; he also inverts this hierarchized binary through the rhetorical medium of attentional form. Thus, in The Moonstone, when “serious” literature generates distractions that subvert the production of narrative flow, it at the same time frustrates Blake’s attempts to produce a narrative that would lead him and his readers to the truth about the stolen diamond. Through such instances of narrative distraction—where literary forms that are assumed to grant the reader access to moral and spiritual truths actually work to distract both reader and narrator from this endeavor—Collins dramatizes an inversion of that hierarchy that situates literary modes such as realism over supposedly entertaining and diverting forms of the romantic novel such as sensation fiction. What Collins does in The Moonstone, through the medium of narrative discourse, is thus quite similar to what Scott does in the introductory chapter to Waverley. Both novelists invoke attention as a mediating category in order to transform a relatively unruly, complex, and hotly contested cultural field into a simple, hierarchized binary that opposes cultural self to cultural other. And both novelists do this, moreover, by denigrating the cultural other as an abject material object that absorbs the attention of the reader and thereby draws the reader’s attention away from broader inquiries into questions surrounding truth and the universal.

Like The Moonstone, Armadale also uses attention as part of strategy to upset conventional generic binaries. It does so, however, not at the level of narrative discourse but through the medium of plotting—and particularly that aspect of the novel’s plot that relates to the character of Lydia Gwilt. Critics have often tackled this complex, roving, and intellectually ambitious work, with its numerous characters who all share the same name, by highlighting the episode of Allan Armadale’s dream-vision—that moment in the text when Allan, while asleep aboard the timber ship in which his father was murdered by the father of his close friend, Ozias Midwinter, has something like a prophetic dream in which Ozias reprises the crime of murder that was earlier perpetrated by his father. Critics tend to treat this dream-vision as a synecdoche for how the novel dramatizes a conflict between competing epistemological paradigms, as well as a guide for appreciating the structure of the novel, insofar as the dream establishes a strong link between the events narrated in the novel’s prologue (namely, the original crime of murder) and the events that

84 take place at the point of denouement (the near-repetition of that original crime).36 This method of highlighting the dream vision tends to figure Armadale as a text motivated and structured by the following questions: Should the dream-vision be interpreted through a materialist or a religious lens? Do Collins’s characters have free will, or are they fated merely to reenact the sins of their forebears? And are the laws that govern the world of the diegesis providential, mesmeric, or naturalistic in character? By thus emphasizing the dream-vision and the textual cruxes that congregate around it, however, one is in danger of overlooking how much the character of Lydia Gwilt gives form and focus to this complex and divagating novel, and one risks, as a result, overlooking how the novel is structured around a different but equally pressing set of questions: will Gwilt be able to distance herself from her criminal past and her former co-conspirator, Maria Oldershaw? Will she be compelled by the demons of her past to execute the murder of Allan Armadale in order to appropriate his fortune? And finally—and perhaps most importantly—what social forces will work to influence this outcome?

These open questions are eventually answered in that fatal scene where Gwilt, after having made an aborted attempt to take the life of Allan Armadale, ends her own life by submitting herself to that noxious gas that was supposed to incapacitate her intended victim. That this denouement occurs within the space of a sanatorium—and particularly within one of the hospital’s cells— suggests that Collins is using this plot to engage with issues around psychopathology and its treatment. It is no doubt noteworthy that the hospital exemplifies the tenets and practice of moral management: lacking physical harnesses and chains, and including ingenious mechanisms that open and close doors noiselessly, the hospital eschews physical restraints and places importance on the curative powers of rest, seclusion, and domestic comforts. Jenny Bourne Taylor, in focusing on the details of the sanatorium and its methods for treating the ill, offers one explanation for why the denouement takes place in such a scene. According to Taylor, Collins’s representations of moral management at the end of the novel imply a literary-discursive assault on the theory and treatment of moral management—especially when these representations are read in reference to the novel’s denouement. Because the novel concludes with the tragic asphyxiation of Lydia Gwilt in one of the sanatorium’s silent and ostensibly restful rooms, the novel represents “moral management […] as a sinister force” that “transform[s] seclusion and repose into literal suffocation” (Taylor 171).

And yet there is another way to interpret the novel’s denouement and its attendant representations of the sanatorium. Coming to this other interpretation involves reading Collins’s ironized references to moral management at the point of denouement not as an attempt to criticize the practice per se but as means of engaging in a contemporary literary politics. That Collins uses the scenes in the sanatorium as an occasion to intervene in such a politics is suggested by that

36 See, for example, Jaffe; Taylor.

85 instance when the sanatorium’s proprietor, Dr. LeDoux, describes to a group of visitors the type of literature permitted in the hospital: Nothing painful, ma’am! There may be plenty that is painful in real life—but for that very reason, we don’t want it in books. The English novelist who enters my house (no foreign novelist will be admitted) must understand his art as the healthy-minded English reader understands it in our time […]. All we want of him is—occasionally to make us laugh; and invariably to make us comfortable. (623) Noteworthy in this passage is how the doctor refers to the type of literature allowed in his hospital. LeDoux describes this literature not as a material or textual form—as a set of books, pieces of paper, or stories, say; instead, he identifies it with the metonym of the book’s author, specifically in referring to the books that are allowed in his sanatorium as the “English novelist who enters my house.” It is also worth noting that LeDoux misnames the sanatorium as a home. At the same time as this misnomer marks him as one of those proponents of moral management who tend to think of psychological treatment as a form of domestication, it also helps figure the sanatorium as a scene of domestic reading. LeDoux uses this figurative expression to conjure an at-once private and nationalistic space of reader-author relations—call this British house of fiction—where the relationship between British author and reader takes the form of a personal, direct, and face-to-face colloquy between associates. Such a depiction associates the dominant mode of mid-Victorian fictional discourse—that affable and engaging style of direct address that is often associated with the realist novel (particularly works by Trollope, Thackeray, and Eliot)— with the quiescent technologies employed in LeDoux's hospital. And, thus, if LeDoux characterizes the realist text not as a textual form or mode of storytelling, but instead as a mode of direct, sober, rational address that is meant to comfort the reader in the same way that the Doctor aims to do, his characterization conflates the phenomena of realism and moral management within the space of the sanatorium.

In so conflating these literary and clinical subjects, Collins executes a critique not only of moral management but also of a contemporary literary genre. The nature and basis of Collins’s critique becomes more apparent when LeDoux’s ideal of the relaxing author is read in reference to Collins’s depiction of the members of the actual reading public who visit the sanatorium. When Dr. LeDoux gives a tour of his facility to members of the general public with Lydia Gwilt in tow, he expresses pride at the ingenuity of his mechanisms for pacifying his nervous patients. But the scene is rife with irony because Collins also gives us the impressions of LeDoux’s visitors, who fail to share the Dr.’s approbation of the hospital’s methods, goals, and mechanical contrivances. As the narrator points out, the “proprietor of the Sanatorium received his visitors in the hall with Miss Gwilt on his arm. The hungry eyes of every woman in the company overlooked the doctor as if no such person had existed; and, fixing on the strange lady, devoured her from head to foot in an instant” (622). When these female visitors ignore Dr. LeDoux and his clinical innovations entirely, they not only perform a critique of these innovations in particular and moral management in general; they also perform a critique of LeDoux’s idealized image of the dominant mode of the

86 contemporary British novel. That is, they demonstrate that, contrary to LeDoux’s assumptions, the female readers who enter this house of fiction are not nervous bodies that must be pacified by a calming, rational, and authoritative authorial voice; they are instead rapacious vessels who are starved for something to pay attention to—something like the fascinating adventuress of Collins’s sensation novel, who they devour with hungry eyes. When this scene is read in conjunction with LeDoux’s ironic ideal of British fictional discourse, it works to present a public problem. It underlines the need not for that calming and comforting authorial voice that LeDoux associates with the British novel but instead for a form of literature that would nourish a rapacious readership whose attention goes largely underfed. In the process, the scene figures Britain’s dominant mode of sober and rational literary discourse as something that only further exacerbates this problem; in effect, it represents realism as a species of moral management that, like its psychological corollary, misdiagnoses a national crisis of hungry attention as a universal case of jangled nerves.

These episodes in the sanatorium thus function to construct a literary hierarchy by implying that the absorbing, engaging, and plot-driven romantic novel is more capable of addressing this public need than is its more sober, honest, and digressive realist counterpart. But the novel’s representations of hungry female attention do more than simply reinforce that clichéd dichotomy between sober, digressive, and philosophizing realism and its exciting, absorbing, and plot-driven sensational counterpart. They also work to distance Collins’s brand of engaging sensation fiction from those dangerous forms of romance that capture readerly attention through facile appeals to the reader’s baser need for excitement. This is highlighted at a critical juncture in the plot, where a crisis of hungry attention and the pernicious influence of a work of sensational literature operate in conjunction with one another to induce Gwilt’s final descent into the world of deceit and criminal plotting. As mentioned previously, the novel’s plot gains a degree of focus and narrative impetus from the character of Gwilt, who vacillates throughout much of the novel between good and evil intentions, balancing an urge to defraud Allan of his fortune with a desire to reform her criminal ways and take up a normative domestic lifestyle. By marrying Midwinter near the novel’s midpoint, she seems to have settled, permanently, into the latter course of existence. But what tips the scales in the other direction—what leads Gwilt back to a life of crime and eventually to make an attempt on Allan’s life—is a crisis of attention that is exacerbated by the lack of a cultural form that would be able to properly hold her attention. This crisis is introduced in Book the Fourth, when Gwilt recommences her diary entries after two months of marriage to Midwinter, and after she has resolved never to open the chronicle again. At this critical and fatal point in the plot, Collins represents Gwilt as akin to those female readers who visit LeDoux’s sanatorium, with their voracious, unappeased attentional appetites: “Why have I broken my resolution? Why have I gone back to my secret friend of my wretchedest and wickedest hours? Because I am more friendless than ever; because I am more lonely than ever, though my husband is sitting writing in the next room to me” (532). She returns to her diary, that is, because her new husband, Midwinter, having become utterly consumed by his journalistic labours, leaves her

87 bereft of that conjugal helpmate whose principal duties involve occupying her attention. In the absence of her husband’s society, she considers: “What am I to do with myself all the morning? […] Shall I read? No; books don’t interest me; I hate the whole tribe of authors. I think I shall look back through these pages [of my diary], and live my life over again when I was plotting and planning, and finding new excitement to occupy me in every new hour of the day” (534).

In the absence of a literary surrogate that might take Midwinter’s place as the chief object of her attention, Gwilt is forced to return to the riveting accounts of her diary. But with its evocations of the Newgate novel, the diary exerts a pernicious influence on Gwilt, and ultimately sets her back on the path toward criminal plotting. Collins takes care to establish a causal chain that leads from her desire for something to occupy her attention, through her decision to revisit her diary, and ultimately to her conviction to put into practice her plot to murder and defraud Allan. Thus, after contemplating the contents of her diary—“I have been reading and thinking; and, thanks to my Diary, I have got through an hour” (535)—Gwilt eventually begins revisiting the merits of the plot (536). After “reading and thinking,” she begins supposing; and supposing results in a resolution to take up this course of action: Supposing I was not the altered woman I am—I only say supposing—how would the Grand Risk that I once thought of running [that is, her plot against Allan] look now? […] Well, having taken the first step, then, whether I would or no, how—supposing I meant to take a second step, which I don’t—how would present circumstances stand towards me? Would they warn me to draw back, I wonder? Or would they encourage me to go on? (535) Of course she does eventually settle on the idea of returning to the plot. And this scene—which begins with Gwilt’s simple lack of something to occupy her attention and ends with her resolution to murder—thus roots her return to a criminal lifestyle to an absence of a type of literature that could effectively satiate her hungry attention (save the sensational narratives of her criminal diary). When read in conjunction with the denouement that takes place in Dr. LeDoux’s sanatorium, with its similar representations of hungry attention, this episode implies a literary- political message. It suggests that, in a context where literary realism neglects its duty to address itself to the attentional needs of its readers, subjects might be inclined to pick up scandalous and riveting forms such the Newgate novel as a way of appeasing their attentional needs—but with potentially dangerous and tragic consequences similar to those that Gwilt eventually experiences. While Victorians often viewed literary realism and such debased forms of criminal sensation as opposing types of fiction, Collins’s representations of hungry attention function to conflate these two genres, insofar as they show how both genres contribute to the same cultural problem of improperly managed attention. Realism does this by not addressing the attentional demands of the reader at all, while dangerous fiction like the Newgate novel does so by exploiting the reader’s unappeased hunger. And in the middle of this Scylla and Charybdis would sit something like The Woman in White: a text that is successful in captivating the reader’s attention, but not by appealing to the nerves through extremes of frisson but instead by “capturing” attention using linguistic and textual structures that, being much more direct, pure, and disembodied in their

88 mechanisms, are therefore both efficient and benign. Far from reinforcing the idea that Collin’s narratives mean to shock a weak and abject body, Armadale thus frames The Woman in White as an alternative to such dangerous, shocking, and sensational forms like the Newgate novel, while at the same time figuring Collins’s hyper-attentive brand of sensation fiction as superior to more sober and moralizing forms such as the realist novel—forms that fail in their obligation to engage the reader’s attention sufficiently.

IV. Conclusions: The Subordination of the Later Works Although Hartright advises his attentive readers not to dwell on the connotations and emotional suggestions of Laura Fairlie’s tombstone, there is another tombstone that does bear consideration within the context of Collins’s attentional plots: Collins’s own. Situated in Kensal Green Cemetery, this monument to Collins’s life and career is inscribed with the following statement (which the author himself prescribed): “In memory of Wilkie Collins, author of ‘The Woman in White’ and other works of fiction.” That Collins esteemed his first sensation novel as superior to his other works is made clear by this memorializing gesture. This chapter has attempted to explain why he was inclined to do so. It is because this author who expressed an early interest in the forms of efficient, unbroken, and unmediated attention associated with mesmeric sleep-waking and romance reading, and who imagined the history of the romantic novel as a series of imperfect attempts to capture such attention, eventually managed to consecrate this ideal, and culminate this generic history, by capturing flow in The Woman in White—specifically at the levels of plotting and narrative discourse. Of course, in subordinating his later works to this earlier one, Collins also gives his career something of an anti-climactic arc. If the foregoing chapter provides an explanation for why Collins privileged The Woman in White above his other works, it also offers an explanation for why and how Collins subordinates Armadale and The Moonstone to what their author deems to be the best of his novels. These later works are subordinate not in the sense of being inferior in artistic quality but insofar as they perform a subordinate function. Set in the years leading up to and surrounding The Woman in White’s publication, Collins sensation fiction of the later 1860s works to exaggerate the value of his first sensation novel’s cultural intervention by representing the context preceding and surrounding the advent of this work as a period plagued by inattentive and distracted subjectivity, as well as by inattentive and distracting discursive forms. Armadale, for example, in constructing a diegetic world where familial aggression and conflict originate in unaddressed crises of distraction and boredom, works to emphasize the cultural need for a novel like The Woman in White, with its demonstrated ability to structure narrative and readerly attention into an orderly, syntactic sequence. The Moonstone performs a similar historicizing task, particularly in parodying Victorian realism’s digressive and interrupted mode of narration through the narrators of Gabriel Betteredge and Drusilla Clack. These parodic representations of realist narration give favourable context to Collins’s first sensation novel. They suggest that in an age dominated by a digressive and distracting mode of literary realism there exists an acute need for cultural forms that would better direct and manage readerly attention—a

89 need that The Woman in White, retrospectively, comes to fulfill. Together, these three novels from the 1860s represent the meeting of two histories. After The Woman in White performs the culmination of the history of the romantic novel imagined as a form of attention, later works give greater significance and historical depth to this intervention by representing the period surrounding the advent of Collins’s first sensation novel as a period marked by subjects who are hungry for a form of literature that might capture their attention, and by forms of literary discourse that either fail to address this demand or address it in an unacceptable—and even dangerous—manner.

In the process, Collins’s sensation novels innovate on realism’s attentional form in a number of important ways. They reimagine the nature of the attentional object, for one. Whereas realists used representations of attentional objects to figure attention as a spatial concept, Collins evokes discourses around mesmerism, reading, and stylistics to conceive of attention as linguistic and textual at its conceptual basis. By indexing human attention not to physical objects but to textual and linguistic processes, Collins is also able to redeem those states of sustained and focused attention that realists had frequently denigrated as morbid conditions of immobility and confinement. In Collins’s sensation fiction, unbroken attention instead evokes an active and dynamic condition that becomes associated with social progress, psychological health, and objective intellectual inquiry. Collins also represents such attention as a means of appealing to working-class readerships (“The Unknown Public”), treating widespread problems of psychological dis-ease (Armadale), and facilitating the unprejudiced investigation into ongoing criminal cases (The Moonstone). In reconceiving of the nature of attention along textual and linguistic lines, Collins thus inverts realism’s social narrative of attentional transformation, indexing sustained attentiveness not to an abject developmental position but instead to the apex of a social narrative. Collins further innovates realism’s attentional plots by reviving one of those affordances that realists had come to suppress: its potential to be used as a tool for engaging in an on-going literary politics. As realist authors absorbed Scott’s attentional plot into the diegesis of their novels, and used it not to dramatize a literary politics but instead to rationalize the processes of everyday life, they sublimated the attentional plot’s literary-political potential. In Collins, on the other hand, we see the return of this repressed potential—particularly in works like The Moonstone and Armadale, which demonstrate a tendency to denigrate counter-genres as discursive forms marked by an abject form of attention. In the next chapter, I will turn my attention to Robert Louis Stevenson. As I show here, Stevenson makes even more ambitious use of the attentional plot’s cultural-political potential. Stevenson mobilizes the attentional plot not only to perform an intervention into a conflict between competing literary genres, but also to coordinate his diverse engagements with issues in the areas of evolutionary philosophy, literary genre, and professionalization. But if Stevenson will make fuller use of the political affordances offered by the attentional plot than Collins did, he will at the same time have to confront a particularly pressing problem. Writing in the wake of what was, by the end of the nineteenth century, an accumulating history of attentional narratives that includes the inattentive realist

90 narrative and the hyper-attentive form of sensation, he will have to navigate the thorny oppositions between established attentional forms to manufacture an innovative expression of the plot of attentional transformation—one that aspires toward a new attentional ideal.

Chapter 3 “To obey the ideal laws of the day-dream”: Stevenson and Kaleidoscopic Reverie

Artistic sight is judicious blindness. Sam Bough must have been a jolly blind old boy […]. He saw, not the scene, but the water-colour sketch. Every artist by sixty should so behold nature. Where does he learn that? In the studio, I swear. He goes to nature for facts, relations, values— material; as a man, before writing a historical novel, reads up memoirs. But it is not by reading memoirs that he has learned the selective criterion. He has learned that in the practice of his art; and he will never learn it well, but when disengaged from the ardent struggle of immediate representation, of realistic and ex facto art. He learns it in the crystallisation of day-dreams. —Robert Louis Stevenson, Letter to Bob Stevenson (1883)

The previous chapter argued that Wilkie Collins’s attentional plots mediated two histories: the history of romantic prose fiction as Collins had imaged it (that is, as a series of attempts to capture attentive flow in and through narrative form), and the history of an adversarial group of novelistic genres that disseminated either inadequate or dangerous forms of attention. For Collins, among this set of adversarial genres was the realist novel, which was misguided in its tendency to encourage forms of inattention and distractibility insofar as this only exacerbated a contemporary problem of attention. Two decades later, another proponent of romance would engage concepts of attention in a similar manner. Like Collins (and Scott before him), Robert Louis Stevenson would use attention as a sort of cultural-political shorthand to group together, and then oppose himself to, a diverse set of cultural positions that he criticized as expressions of abject and harmful forms of attention—including the realist novel. But the forms of attention that Stevenson associated with realism, and the forms that he came to privilege and espouse through his own romance narratives, would differ markedly from those of his predecessor Collins. This difference was not only due to the fact that Stevenson was addressing a different set of cultural antagonists; it also had to do with changes in the types of attention that could be associated with realism near the end of the nineteenth century.

This changed circumstance was the result of two parallel developments. The years dividing Collins's 1860s sensation novels and the beginning of Stevenson’s career as a writer saw the death of many of the most prominent mid-century realist authors, including George Eliot (d. 1880) and Anthony Trollope (d. 1882).37 With the disappearance of these lions of the mid-Victorian novel,

37 Stephen Arata highlights this phenomenon in Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Siècle (1996). He describes how Rudyard Kipling was hailed in the 90s as a “literary savior,” as “the

91 92 realism would eventually become less and less associated with those inimitable, digressive, and philosophizing excurses that had come to distinguish the realist voice. Over the same period, there were also intimations that literary naturalism—with its narrative mode that might be said to give close attention to small details of the social world—was beginning to fill the void left by the evacuation of the exemplars of mid-century realism.38 As the epoch of the mid-century realist novel waned, and as literary naturalism looked more and more like the successor to the mid- century realist novel, it became possible at the end of the nineteenth century to view literary history as on a course of descent from an earlier, mid-Victorian concern with social, philosophical, and pseudo-religious issues into a mere obsession with, and focus on, the more earth-bound minutiae of naturalistic detail. To articulate this change in attentional terms: during this period, it was possible to view literary realism as a narrative mode that was becoming more and more attentive in form; and it was also possible to view this shift toward narrative attentiveness as problematic—as a turn toward narrow-mindedness, parochialism, worldliness.

If Stevenson’s attentional plots differ from the plots of Collins’s earlier sensation novels, it is in part because they perform a narrative response to this problem of literary genre that postdates the 1860s. Stevenson performs this response by composing attentional plots that are marked by two principal elements: a narrative agon where the protagonist becomes afflicted by those forms of narrow and circumscribed attention that naturalism was seen to espouse; and a denouement where this same protagonist is eventually alleviated of this affliction when he learns to exercise counter- forms of attention such as inattention and reverie. His novels in this way use the attentional plot to perform an opposition to what was for Stevenson and others a pernicious literary-historical trend marked by a descent into the abject world of literary naturalism. In the process of performing this literary-political opposition, Stevenson’s texts also respond to a diverse set of cultural positions and trends that could be seen to promote similarly pernicious forms of narrow, constricted, and otherwise spatially delimited attention. These positions and trends included phenomena as disparate as Herbert Spencer’s synthetic philosophy as well as a late-century professional culture marked by increasing specialization and an increasing division of professional labour. In the broadest intellectual terms, these positions have little in common (what do the principles of literary naturalism have to do with Spencer’s Principles of Sociology, for example?). However, because each of these diverse positions can be exemplified with the same focused, narrow form of attention, Stevenson—in a move reminiscent of those strategies used by Scott, Collins, and even Nordau—is able to transform a messy cultural-political field into a more elegant set of cultural positions that all espouse the same form of attention. Somewhat paradoxically, because realism was becoming more and more associated with naturalistic detail toward the end of the nineteenth

new Dickens”: that is, as an author who had come to fill the void left in British literary culture by the deaths of the great mid-Victorian novelists (152-53). 38 Andrew Lang takes such a position in “Realism and Romance” (1887). Lang considers the works of those “modern amateurs of Realism” such as Howells and Zola as but debased and humourless versions of the works of mid-century realist novelists such as Thackeray (687).

93 century, Stevenson composes romantic attentional plots that are in many ways reminiscent of those of mid-century realist novels insofar as they also index attention to spatial metonyms and metaphors and follow a protagonist who has been afflicted by, and imprisoned within, a spatially circumscribed attention span. Not surprisingly, then, in both Stevenson’s fiction and mid-century realist fiction, the promise of denouement is linked to the protagonist’s ability to shake off those forms of attention that are imagined as a confinement in space.

Of course, structural dichotomies can rarely bear the weight of close scrutiny, as poststructuralist critics of various stripes are only too ready to point out. And this holds true in the case of Stevenson’s attentional politics, insofar as his methods of positioning himself within this politics are more complex, more nuanced, and less dichotomous than the image of a formally inattentive romantic text counterpoised against a set of attentive others would suggest. If Stevenson’s novels rarely culminate with the protagonist adopting that spatially diffuse form of attention that marks the point of denouement in the mid-century realist novel, it is because he is wary of simply reprising established forms of the attentional plot. But if he is wary of simply recapitulating these past literary forms, it is not because he is reluctant simply to reproduce, in derivative fashion, the forms of mid-century realism. What complicates Stevenson’s attentional politics—what makes him wary of simply repeating the attentional forms of the past—is his consciousness of the lion of the Scottish romance novel: Sir Walter Scott. As I discussed in Chapter 1, Scott had already employed the “inattentive” strategy to distinguish his own novels from the works of his contemporaries. Because Stevenson recognizes how much Scott’s narratives evoke—and are invested in—forms of inattention and distraction, Scott comes to figure as something of an uncanny double for Stevenson, who is inclined simply to repeat this same strategy in confronting his own literary antagonists. Stevenson is therefore pressed with the following problem: in the looming presence of Scott’s shadow, how can one avoid simply replicating—or producing an inferior, less consummate version of—Scott’s textual politics of attentional difference?39

Stevenson navigates this problem, I claim, by invoking the concept of kaleidoscopic reverie (or daydreaming). This concept allows Stevenson to maintain a simultaneous opposition to both his inattentive forebear Scott and that group of contemporary cultural producers that he groups together as different expressions of the same form of textual attentiveness. This is because kaleidoscopic reverie, when appreciated as a mode of attention, has both negative and positive attributes. As a mode of unfocused and wavering thought that advances according to the unpredictable dynamics of a series of kaleidoscopic images, it represents the opposite of that

39 Ian Duncan dwells upon Scott’s pervasive influence within the early-nineteenth-century Scottish literary field—an influence that he refers to as “Scott’s shadow”: “Scott’s presence and example were unavoidable, especially for those novelists who would assert their own originality. Not surprisingly, we find them reckoning with that presence—with Scott’s cultural centrality, his society and literary influence—in their own works of fiction” (37). As a Scottish author of romance novels, Stevenson writes under this same influence, even at a great historical distance from Scott, in the late nineteenth century.

94 focused and spatially circumscribed mode of attention implicitly espoused by literary naturalism. In the state of kaleidoscopic reverie, images move freely through the mind, and thought lacks a structuring logic.40 At the same time, kaleidoscopic reverie, while vacillating and seemingly unstructured in its dynamics, also suggests the possibility of structure and lawfulness. This is because, while kaleidoscopic dynamics might seem random and unpredictable, they also evoke occult laws of movement and change that have not yet been explicated by science or fully explored through the medium of the novel and consecrated at the level of attentional form. Stevenson evokes this ambivalence—this idea that what is thought a lawless and unstructured mode of attention might be able to reveal its laws—when he writes in “A Gossip on Romance” that the goal of the creative writer should be to aspire to follow, and crystallize in narrative form, the “ideal laws of the day-dream” (56). Kaleidoscopic reverie—with its paradoxical status as both a negative and disordered, but also positive and potentially lawful, form of attention—represents for Stevenson both the antithesis to naturalistic attentiveness and the antithesis to the type of pure inattention espoused by Stevenson’s forebear Scott. By writing fictions that drive toward a denouement where the protagonist would come to adopt this ambivalent form of attention, Stevenson is thus able to execute a cultural politics on these two fronts simultaneously. That is, he is able to stake a firm opposition against his cultural-political adversaries while at the same time attempting to escape the shadow of that most influential and overwhelming past proponent of the prose romance. This chapter uses readings of An Inland Voyage (1878), the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), and Weir of Hermiston (1896)—and, of course, “A Gossip on Romance” (1882)—to study how Stevenson uses attentional plots that privilege reverie to position himself in a sort simultaneous opposition to two already-antithetical positions within the history of plotted forms of attention, thus generating a new position within the ongoing history of the plot of attentional transformation.

I. Inattentiveness as Cultural Counter-Position: The Denouement of An Inland Voyage The idea that the Stevensonian romance performs an opposition to its author's contemporary cultural antagonists is not wholly novel. Critics who study Stevenson’s relationship to late- nineteenth-century writing on evolution and anthropology have previously advanced this idea in suggesting that Stevenson’s romance praxis inverted the structure of contemporary anthropological discourses—particularly those expressed in Herbert Spencer’s Principles of Sociology.41 To understand how Stevenson inverted the structure of Spencerian discourse, it will pay to first rehearse the elementary features of this structure. Spencer’s philosophy employed a recapitulationist method to organize a series of anthropological, philosophical, biological, and

40 In The Psychology of Attention (1890), Théodule Ribot at one point defines the concept of attention negatively by setting it against all those states of mind that are not forms of attention. One of these other states is reverie, which is a condition in which “we seem to be merely the sport of suggestive forces, our thoughts being led hither and thither without any exertion of our own” (224). 41 See, for example, Reid; and Block.

95 sociological ideas and processes into a systematic whole. This structure is premised on the idea that both social and political processes of development follow the same biological and evolutionary laws that produced advanced and highly differentiated morphological structures in biological species. The synthetic philosophy is also analogical to the extent that Spencer structures his synthetic schema using two paralleling sets of analogies. One is a collection of analogously primitive stages of development (childhood psychology likened to primitive psychology, primitive physiology likened to primitive forms of social organization, etcetera); and the other is a series of analogously civilized states (the fully developed adult likened to the highly developed society, the evolutionarily advanced human brain likened to the most advanced form of political organization, and so on). The upshot of Spencer’s analogical method is that it ultimately works to structure his discourse into a hierarchized binary that consistently elevates “civilized” over “primitive” states of biological, social, and political development.

Julia Reid, in her work that looks at Stevenson’s relationship to late-century writing on anthropology and evolution, suggests that Stevenson borrowed Spencer’s structured binary to develop a theory of romance. But Reid notes that at the same time as Stevenson adopted this analogical system of binary oppositions he also inverted its implicit hierarchy of values: Stevenson’s essays, celebrating the endurance of humankind’s primitive heritage into an apparently refined contemporary world, unsettle the hierarchical evolutionary relations between savagery and civilization, past and present, low and high culture, and sense and the intellect. Rejecting the evolutionist picture of gradual imaginative refinement, Stevenson applauds the revitalizing connection with the past offered by romance, childhood make-believe, oral narratives, and the creative imagination, and deems it their mission to revive and gratify humankind’s instinctual desires. (Robert 30) For Reid, then, Stevenson’s romance praxis suggests a structured opposition to Spencer’s discursive semiotics: a discourse that borrows Spencer’s system of analogies, but that also opposes this system by elevating the host of subjugated moieties—such as the romance, the savage, the child, orality, adventure, the unconscious, etcetera—over the corresponding set of civilized terms. In thus indexing the romantic quality of Stevenson’s texts to their attempt to promote and propagate this set of primitive qualities and practices that had been subjugated to the corresponding civilized set of terms by the likes of Spencer and E.B. Tylor, Reid bestows on the Stevensonian romance the epithet of the “romance of anthropology” (“Robert” 55). And in thus imagining the Stevensonian romance as a discursive endorsement of the subjugated half of a structured anthropological binary, she illustrates what we might call the anthropological-semiotic approach to the analysis of Stevenson’s textual politics. This method traces the politics of Stevenson’s romance texts to their tendency to espouse conditions and modes of subjectivity that contemporary anthropological discourses tended to devalue or subjugate.

But in the process of imagining Stevenson’s “anthropological romances” as reflecting this structured semiotic system, Reid is also forced to recognize the many places where Stevenson

96 defies its logic. So, whereas she claims at one point that “Stevenson’s essays” celebrate “the endurance of humankind’s primitive heritage into an apparently refined contemporary world,” at another she writes that although “Stevenson’s essays are predominantly affirmative, […] his adventure fiction dramatizes the resurgence of primitive appetites” as “brutal” and violent (Robert 30, 53). Reid is also forced to acknowledge that in “[d]epicting the childhood imagination as a ‘primitive’ survival,” Stevenson “hailed […] the endurance of the child’s consciousness in the modern adult; yet this neo-Romantic vision of childhood fantasy’s rejuvenating power was also undercut by a darker reading of the childhood imagination as prone to nervous pathology” (“Childhood” 52). Such examples illustrate that if Stevenson executes his romance politics by inverting the anthropological binary, he is by no means consistent in maintaining his position within this politics. Reid rationalizes these moments of contradiction by characterizing Stevenson as a sort of proto-poststructuralist: one who interrogates the structures of meaning underpinning evolutionism and in the process “destabilize[s] colonialism’s hierarchal vision of savagery and civilization” (Robert 9). Yet these moments of self-contradiction in Stevenson’s work can also be said to highlight the need for a new way to theorize the Stevensonian romance as an attempt to perform a systematic opposition to contemporary cultural discourses. This need is not motivated by a desire to redeem Stevenson as a perfect Cartesian subject liberated of self-contradiction, but simply by a wish to better understand the logic motivating and guiding the politics of his romance praxis.

In place of this anthropological-semiotic method that considers late-nineteenth-century anthropology, along with Stevenson’s romantic response to such discourses, as a synchronic, binary system of meanings, I propose a method that confronts these texts as diachronic structures, and that specifically takes the dynamics of narrative plotting into account. Developing this other method involves reconsidering the structure of Spencer’s synthetic philosophy—and particularly his Principles of Sociology—not only as a synchronic set of structured meanings but also as discourse that has a distinct and meaningful temporal structure. At the same time as Spencer’s Sociology evokes what Reid refers to as a “meliorist” philosophy that groups meanings using a synchronic civilized/primitive binary, it is also conveyed in a particular discursive order that Spencer takes pains to maintain and develop. Of course Spencer’s attempt to convey his sociological narrative in its proper order is, in one sense, simply another expression of his attempt to organize his sociological data into a binary of conceptual clusters. As he makes his way through the text from beginning to end, he is careful to follow an evolutionary trajectory, moving from a discussion of primitive “societies which are small, loose, uniform, and vague in structure” to a discussion of modern Western “societies which are large, compact, multiform and distinct in structure” (Vol. II: 646). This method of ordering discourse along a developmental trajectory keeps the two opposing clusters of analogous terms in their proper places within the structural economy of the text, and in this sense simply reinforces Spencer’s binary logic. But there comes a moment in the Principles of Sociology when Spencer acknowledges the necessity to deviate from this method of discursive ordering by mixing his survey of primitive societies with the knowledge

97 and epistemology of civilized cultures. This occurs at the end of Part I, at which point Spencer apologizes to the reader for deviating from the linear course of his evolutionary narrative, which is supposed to move, consistently, from a discussion of pre-social subjects to social forms—that is, from the data of sociology to sociology per se: Through the minds of some who are critical respecting logical order, there has doubtless passed the thought that, along with the Data of Sociology, the foregoing chapters have included much which forms a part of Sociology itself. Admitting an apparent justification for the objection, the reply is that in no case can the data of a science be stated before some knowledge of the science has been reached; and that the analysis which discloses the data cannot be made without reference to the aggregate of the phenomena analyzed. (Vol. I: 435) Thus, although Spencer credits his hypothetical critic’s objection—he acknowledges the importance of presenting his ideas in an order that reproduces the course of evolutionary history and thus maintains strong conceptual distinctions between pre-civilized and civilized evolutionary moieties—he also recognizes the need to follow a higher principle of discursive ordering. This is a need to present the reader with abstract sociological concepts before illustrating these concepts using specific sociological details.

In other words, this aside on ordering illustrates that, for Spencer, it is just as important for his reader to receive the text in an attentive fashion as it is for him to maintain the discursive order that keeps civilized and primitive epochs in their proper respective places in the space of the sociological text. This becomes apparent when we appreciate how this passage echoes a text discussed in the previous chapter: Spencer’s Philosophy of Style. As noted previously, the Philosophy of Style indexes readerly attentiveness to a syntactic order of increasing specificity. So, according to Spencer, the construction “black horse” is preferable to that of “cheval noir” because, unlike “horse,” with its nominal specificity, “black” merely gestures toward an abstract category and therefore arouses no definite ideas and images that would distract the reader in his course through the text (11). In his aside on ordering in Sociology, Spencer betrays a desire to produce a similar (or homologous) form of textual attentiveness, albeit at a broader discursive level. Rather than proceeding directly from the data of sociology to the discussion of sociology itself, Spencer first introduces the abstract sociological frame of reference in an attempt to save the reader from the confused and distracted condition that would result from conjuring the individual data in their multiplex, and therefore distracting, particularity (romantic imaginings about the savage subject in its natural habitat, for example). Such comments suggest that if Spencer’s philosophy espouses a set of analogous qualities including civilization and progress through the medium of sociological content, his sociographic practice is also guided by another structural principle, specifically the principle of textual attentiveness that he articulates in the Philosophy of Style.1 For Spencer, ordering discourse in a way that economizes readerly attention, and in a way that follows an order toward increasing attentiveness, is as important—and at times

98 even more important—than ordering it in a way that strictly maintains structural distinctions between primitive and civilized moieties.42

If the Stevensonian romance performs an opposition to contemporary discourses on evolutionism in general, and toward the Spencerian expression of evolutionary philosophy in particular, it does so not so much (or not simply) by inverting the semiotic structure of Spencer’s work and privileging the subjugated moieties of Spencer’s anthropological binary. It does this, more properly, by engaging with the attentional structure of Spencer’s work, and specifically by inverting Spencer’s attentional form—that textual form that moves from abstraction to specificity and in the process encodes increasing attentiveness at the textual level. To develop a sense of what it means to perform a cultural politics by inverting attentional form, it will pay to direct our own attention to a place where Stevenson engages Spencer directly and overtly: a prominent allusion to The Principles of Sociology in An Inland Voyage. This travelogue is a non-fictional account of Stevenson’s 1876 trip with Walter Simpson down the river Oise through Belgium and France in the sail-rigged canoes. Although this is ostensibly a work of non-fiction, it also shows the features of a fictional literary text in culminating with something like a narrative denouement that occurs when the travellers reach a point in their journey where the Oise is met by a tributary. Until this point in the journey, the Oise is small and winding, and canoeing is often difficult work that involves a constant attention to the river’s frequent twists and changing currents. But when the river opens up, and becomes a broad, flat highway, the Stevensonian traveller experiences a state of relaxation and self-dislocation that is entirely unique within this narrative: Canoeing [here] was easy work […]—there was not much art in [it]; certain silly muscles managed it between sleep and waking; and meanwhile the brain had a whole holiday, and went to sleep. […] The central bureau of nerves, what in some moods we call Ourselves, employed its holiday without disturbance, like a Government Office. […] And what a pleasure it was! What a hearty, tolerant temper did it bring about! […] There was less me and more not me than I was accustomed to expect. I looked on upon somebody else, who managed the paddling […]. Thoughts presented themselves unbidden; they were not my thoughts, they were plainly someone else’s; and I considered them like a part of the landscape. (167-68) Due to the ease with which canoeing is performed on this pacific span of river, the traveller’s brain is permitted a break as his body executes the work of locomotion with the mechanical actions of an automaton; without abrupt changes to the river’s pace and course, the canoeist is

42 Supporting this idea is a comment that Spencer makes in the “Preface to Volume I” of the Sociology. Spencer states in this preface that one of his text’s objectives will be to foster the reading subject’s attentiveness by eschewing footnotes (none appear in the Sociology): “If footnotes are referred to, the thread of the argument is completely broken; and even if they are not referred to, attention is disturbed by the consciousness that they are there to be looked at. Hence a loss of effect and a loss of time. […] [I]t was needless to waste space and hinder thought with these distracting foot-notes” (ix-x). His decision to forego footnotes is thus in line with the priority he places on attentiveness at the levels of content and form.

99 able to perform the task of paddling without paying any attention to it. But unlike with Collins’s sleep-waking subject, whose mind is made hyper-focused once her sensible body is put to sleep, this traveller, in becoming inattentive to the needs and demands of the body, becomes similarly inattentive in his thoughts, which begin at this point to move in a haphazard and unfocused fashion. Unlike the mesmerized subject, that is, the traveller’s inattention to his sensible body here does not function to concentrate the attentive powers of the mind, but instead precipitates inattention at the mental level. Inattentive to both the needs of the body and the contents of mind, the traveller becomes saturated by inattention, experiencing something like the consummation of the inattentive condition. It is not insignificant that this scene in which the traveller achieves the quintessence of inattentiveness marks the epitome or high point of the trip. Occurring in conjunction with the river’s high-water mark, the traveller refers to this experience as an “apotheosis” and “about as near Nirvana as would be convenient in practical life” (168). That this episode takes place at the river’s broadest point, and that the narrator uses pseudo-religious diction to privilege this episode of inattentiveness, earmarks this moment as remarkable and exceptional within the larger narrative structure of An Inland Voyage.

Stephen Arata reads this episode in a similar fashion. Identifying this as a scene through which Stevenson expresses a kind of affinity for states of inattention, he claims that the scene “encourages us to reimagine attention as a more dispersed and decentered phenomenon, one capable of inducing that ecstatic stupor that [Stevenson] so valued” (“On Not Paying Attention” 204). Arata also claims that Stevenson positioned this scene at a structurally significant point in his travel narrative in an attempt to engage in an ongoing cultural politics around the question of attention (“On Not Paying Attention” 193). For Arata, Stevenson placed this scene of inattention in such a privileged structural position not only to expresses a personal, idiosyncratic predilection for the inattentive state, but also to express an opposition (using the tools of narrative rhetoric) to those late-nineteenth-century pedagogues who promoted what might be thought to be inhumanely laborious and attentive reading practices.

However, in reading Stevenson’s representations of inattention as such a narrative-rhetorical act of opposition, Arata overlooks two aspects of the passage that give us a more precise understanding of how and why Stevenson uses the resources of narrative structure to engage in a cultural politics. First, Arata—at least in my view—misidentifies this scene as one of climax. That is, he views the scene as a synecdoche for Stevenson's broader trip, arguing that this climactic scene exemplifies how the traveller generally fails to pay attention throughout this trip, and takes “only passing interest in the topography Stevenson traces, the communities he encounters, the people he meets” (194). According to Arata, in other words, the scene on the swollen Oise is a climax insofar as it brings to a climactic pitch that general condition of inattention that the traveller has maintained throughout the foregoing narrative. But in making this claim, Arata overlooks those instances of attentive distress that lead up to this episode of profound inattention. In this earlier portion of the narrative, the traveller’s attention is often called upon to navigate the

100 winding and often dangerous Oise in the complex and unruly conveyance of a “canoe under sail” (1). The climax of what we might call this sustained phenomenological tension occurs in an earlier chapter titled “The Oise in Flood,” in which the two travellers are forced to ratchet up their focus in order to navigate the racing river: The canoe was like a leaf in the current. It took it up and shook it, and carried it masterfully away, like a Centaur carrying a nymph. To keep some command on our direction required hard and diligent plying of the paddle. The river was in such a hurry for the sea. Every drop of water ran in a panic, like so many people in a frightened crowd. But what crowd was ever so numerous or so single-minded? All the objects of sight went by at a dance measure; the eyesight raced with the racing river; the exigencies of every moment kept the pegs screwed so tight that our being quivered like a well-tuned instrument. (87) This earlier scene is in many respects a companion to the later depiction of the relatively pacific Oise. It is one of a series of scenes that develop a rising tension of attention—a tension that is relieved or unwound at the point of denouement (note that the root of the word denouement is the French verb dénouer, which means “to untie”). Unlike the broad Oise of the denouement, where paddling is mindless and inattentive work, the river here is so fast-moving and so treacherous that the traveller is forced to keep his attention riveted on “the exigencies of every moment,” with his “eyesight” racing along “with the racing river.” Of course, in this particular scene on the fast- racing Oise, the traveller is a match for the racing river, as his attention “quiver[s] like a well- tuned instrument,” responding in kind to its every changing movement. But the Stevensonian traveller would eventually come to be outmatched by his fluvial adversary. Thus, at a later point in the canoeist’s contest with the racing river, when the challenges posed by the fast-flowing water are compounded by the presence of a series of fallen trees, the traveller is overwhelmed by the attentional demands required to navigate this perilous course, at which point he is thrown from his canoe and nearly drowned. If the later scene of inattentive nirvana on the swollen Oise is placed in context with these earlier scenes where a smaller, faster Oise nearly slays the Stevensonian traveller, the attentional climax of the plot moves from the point where Arata locates it. It comes to be indexed not to the moment when the river becomes broad and calm but rather in a scene where the attentive demands posed by the narrow and winding river outstrip (or overstretch) the attentive capacity of the traveller. And when Stevenson’s waterborne subject eventually arrives at a place where the Oise opens up into a vast plain of tranquil waters (markedly different than the small spaces in and around the fallen trees of “the Oise in flood”), and where he is therefore allowed to relax his attention and allow his canoe to drift along this broad aquatic highway, the tone of the scene reverberates with the denouement to a narrative that has up until this point emphasized tensions between self and surroundings: tensions that place heightened demands on the traveller’s attentive powers.

Moreover, in contrast to The Principles of Sociology, then, which functions to privilege and promote attentiveness through the careful ordering of discursive elements, An Inland Voyage uses

101 narrative ordering toward something of an opposing end, that is, to position inattentive subjectivity at the nadir of the canoeist’s voyage. It is not simply a coincidence that Stevenson’s text reflects this inversion of Spencer’s attentional form; inverting Spencer’s form seems to be a key objective of Stevenson’s textual strategy. This interpretation is supported by an allusion that Stevenson makes to Spencer’s Sociology in the scene of denouement. Thus, Stevenson, in describing the mechanisms through which the traveller achieves inattentive nirvana, explains that when the traveller throws off that “central bureau of nerves, what in some moods we call Ourselves,” this bundle of nerves “employed its holiday without disturbance, like a Government office.” This description bears echoes of Spencer’s articulation of social evolution in the Sociology, in which Spencer elaborates a similar analogy between the functions of the brain and the functions of a governmental assembly—between the human body and the body politic: As in man the cerebrum, while absorbed in the guidance of conduct at large, mainly in reference to the future, leaves the lower, simpler, older centres to direct the ordinary movements and even the mechanical occupations; so the deliberative assembly of a nation, not attending to those routine actions in the body politic controlled by the various administrative agencies, is occupied with general requirements and the balancing of many interests which do not concern only the passing moment. (Vol. I: 531) This passage equates that “bundle of nerves” of the cerebrum with the offices of democratic government by figuring the two as analogous higher-order states of biological and social development. It is perhaps also not a coincidence that the cerebrum—specifically the prefrontal cortex—is the area of the brain that is responsible for the control of attention. Spencer’s image of the cerebrum-cum-governing agency exists as something like the apex of his synthetic philosophy, and it does so for two reasons. It marks the epitome of his developmental narrative, insofar as it functions as a conceptual site on which his biological- and social-evolutionary narratives both meet and culminate (this is a simile that captures what are, for Spencer, the highest forms of both physiological and political development). And it is an organ that controls what is, for Spencer, a privileged mode of intellectual existence: that of sustained, efficient, and focused attention. Given that the figure of the cerebrum-as-governing-agency is such an important one in Spencerian discourse, there is much symbolic and political meaning to be gleaned from the fact that Stevenson’s traveller, at the point of denouement in An Inland Voyage, reaches euphoria after throwing off the governing agency that is the cerebrum, and by being relieved of having to maintain the state of attentive focus that Spencer privileges in and through his writing. The denouement is thus not simply an innocent description of a euphoric experience; nor is it best described as a moment when Stevenson critiques contemporary pedagogical endorsements of attentive reading (as Arata suggests). It represents a literary-discursive opposition to one of the “giants of the mid-Victorian […] intelligentsia” and his all-encompassing Synthetic Philosophy that was gaining broad influence in the 1870s (Cameron 64-66).43 At this pivotal moment in An

43 Lauren Cameron gives us a sense of Spencer’s social stature at the time, writing,“[t]wentieth- century critics were not particularly sympathetic to Spencer’s philosophy or literary influence, but

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Inland Voyage, Stevenson in effect performs a symbolic disavowal of two of the most privileged concepts within Spencerian philosophy and discourse. As the travelling Stevenson disburdens himself of the weight of this cultural authority in this moment of denouement, he not only rejects one of Spencer’s privileged evolutionary analogies (cerebrum-as-governing-agency) but also inverts that attentive structure that Spencer takes such pains to construct through a process of careful discursive ordering.

So, whereas what I have been calling anthropological-semiotic criticism on Stevenson tends to characterize the author’s textual politics as a systematic inversion of contemporary anthropology’s binaries and implicit hierarchies of value, my reading of An Inland Voyage uncovers a different oppositional strategy. According to this other, attentional-formal way of reading these texts, Stevenson performs his textual politics less by inverting anthropological binaries than by inverting the attentional form of contemporary cultural narratives. As the remainder of this chapter will attempt to illustrate, Stevenson would continue to employ this strategy throughout his career, as he continued to invoke similar scenes of attentional transformation to engage other cultural positions coded as forms of attention. And as he proceeded to use this form to take on a greater number and variety of cultural antagonists, he also developed a better sense of his own position in this politics, as well as a better sense of the form of attention he would wish to espouse in and through his romance texts. Indeed, Stevenson’s ideal of romantic attention would very much be a product of his continued investment and continuing exploration, across his career, of this method of conducting a cultural politics.

II. The Chemical Isolate, the Kaleidoscopic Spectacle, and Gothic Attention in Jekyll and Hyde This structure crops up again, conspicuously, in Stevenson’s gothic tale The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. While An Inland Voyage used the attentional plot to perform an opposition to Spencerian discourse, this later work uses a similar strategy to perform an opposition to two cultural trends that could be thought to promote pernicious forms of attentiveness. The first is a trend in the development of literary realism, which at the end of the nineteenth century was coming to be allied with, and exemplified by, literary naturalism. It is not surprising that romance—as a genre that is often theorized in contradistinction to contemporary realist forms— was sometimes defined in this period as a form of anti-naturalism. Indeed, two of the most prominent proponents of romance at the end of the century—Stevenson and Andrew Lang— imagined romance in just this way. This strategy is on conspicuous display in Lang’s essay in the late-Victorian era Spencer was widely considered to be ‘one of the world’s greatest philosophers,’ ‘the philosopher of his time’; in fact, he might have been the first philosopher to sell one million copies of his work during his lifetime. […] Spencer was at the height of his fame in the 1870s and 1880s, primarily because of the Synthetic Philosophy, which brought evolutionary perspective to a number of biological and social scientific fields as well as to philosophical and theological concerns” (66).

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“Realism and Romance” (1887). Lang writes, “were I in the mood to disparage the modern realists […] I might say that they not only use the microscope, and ply experiments, but ply them, too often, in corpore vili [on a vile body]” (687). In this example, Lang, in figuring literary naturalism as a microscope pathologically fixed on small details of the natural world, represents it as a mode of spatially circumscribed attention—as a narrative mode that “blinks” much of life by being too much focused on such naturalistic detail (Lang 687). In the process, he suggests that there is a larger, broader, and more pleasant object of study left unexplored by the naturalistic mode; and that capable of surveying and cultivating this unexplored space of intellectual inquiry is a romance genre imagined as a less circumscribed mode of narrative attention. In “A Note on Realism” (1883), Stevenson expresses a similar sentiment in describing the difference between realism and romance (referred to as “idealism” in his essay) in the same attentional terms. He writes that whereas the “immediate danger of the realist is to sacrifice the beauty and significance of the whole to local dexterity,” the “idealist has his eye singly fixed upon the greater outlines, loves rather to fill up the interval with detail of the conventional order, briefly touched, soberly suppressed in tone, courting neglect” (71, 70). Peter Keating states that in “spite of Stevenson’s more considered critical judgments, it was largely under his influence that ‘romance’ lost whatever specific meaning it might once have had and became, in effect, almost anything that wasn’t realism” (348). As this passage from “A Note on Realism” suggests (and to qualify Keating’s expression), romance, after Stevenson, became “almost anything that wasn’t” a literary mode epitomized by acute attention to the minutiae of natural and social detail. In thus transposing the opposition between realism and romance into an opposition between two opposing modes of narrative attention, Lang and Stevenson invoke what should, by now, be appreciated as a common rhetorical figure. Much like Scott did earlier, they pit the idealistic novel not against a pragmatic, empirical, or secular mode of literature but instead in contradistinction to an overly acute and spatially circumscribed form of narrative attention. And after vilifying this too-focused literary mode as the enemy of idealism, they imagine the idealistic novel not as one that expresses a transcendent philosophical principle, religious sentiment, or humanistic virtue, but as one that promotes narrative inattention (or “court[s] neglect”) as a means toward re-enchantment.44 In other words, they perform a literary politics that evokes the asymmetrical dialectic of the attentional narrative.

The second late-century trend that Jekyll and Hyde responds to by way of its attentional plot is the increasing specialization of professional labour. If the last decades of the nineteenth-century not only saw the rise of literary naturalism, they could also be imagined as a period when an industrialized mode of production, along with its dehumanizing effects, was beginning to colonize

44 Stephen Arata gestures toward this idea when he highlights Stevenson’s “seemingly perverse insistence on the value of not paying attention” (“On Not Paying Attention” 195). This insistence seems less perverse when we situate it within the context of this late-nineteenth-century inter- generic literary politics, where differences of genre were being transposed into differences of attention.

104 the realms of intellectual and professional culture.45 As Magali Larson notes, with the increasing specialization of a growing professional class—along with the increasing balkanization of the professional field into discrete areas of expertise—the late-Victorian professional context was beginning to look a lot like the divided industrial workplace, with its dehumanized workers who each conduct only a small, insignificant, and repetitive task (xvi). John Ruskin illustrates how the trend toward an increasing division of labour could be figured as a crisis of attention. For Ruskin, divided labour breaks individuals “into small fragments and crumbs of life; so that all the little pieces of intelligence that is left in a man is not enough to make a pin, or a nail, but exhausts itself in making the point of a pin or the head of the nail” (23). While Ruskin’s imagery highlights the diminished intelligence of the divided labourer, it also evokes an attentional condition. The image of the miniscule fragment serves not only as a metaphor for the diminished scope of the labourer’s intelligence and subjectivity but also as a metonym for the extreme focus demanded by such labour. Ruskin’s metaphor emphasizes the spatial character of the form of sustained attentiveness that is encouraged by industrial labour, which is dehumanizing because it imprisons the worker’s attention in a small span of space, and not primarily because it stretches this attention across an extensive duration of time, say.

Ruskin wrote this description of dehumanized industrial labour in the early 1850s. Nearer to the end of the nineteenth century, James Sully would use a similar rhetorical figure to exemplify a later period of overly specialized and esoteric professional labour. In his “The Psycho-Physical Process in Attention”—an article that touches on the trend toward increasing specialization of professional disciplines—Sully highlights the qualitative effects of the trend toward specialization in terms that are strikingly similar to those that Ruskin had used almost forty years earlier: “[A]ttention follows the lines of interest, and for most of us interest is apt to narrow itself down, as life advances, to a few circumscribed regions. The specialization of professional work, so characteristic of the social condition of our age, compels the attention itself to become the slave of that very habit of which it is the natural enemy” (163). According to Sully, then, as the professional disciplines become more and more specialized, and as the professional becomes more and more focused on only an delimited portion of a larger intellectual field, this individual runs the risk of having his attention become imprisoned within the space of that circumscribed, esoteric region. And while Sully does propose a solution to this problem in his essay, this solution does not involve addressing the systemic root of the cause and checking the trend toward increasing specialization. Evoking the asymmetrical dialectic of attentional transformation, this solution rather involves treating the attentional symptom as if it were the original problem. Thus, Sully advises that the specialized professional counteract his imprisonment in the minutiae of esoteric detail by “mak[ing] the effort of tearing himself for a moment from daily absorbing topics and from himself into politics, art, music, or even the lightest vein of fiction,” as this can

45 This feeling is perhaps best exemplified in George Gissing’s New Grub Street (1891), where Edwin Reardon’s writing sessions reflect the monotony and repetitiveness of factory labour.

105 function as a “safeguard against worry and other more serious evils” (163). Sully’s warnings about the dangers of increasing specialization thus evoke the structure of the attentional plot. After dramatizing the dangers of increasing specialization as a sort of collective descent into the prison of attentional confinement, he promises a release from such confinement—a release that would take place when the professional learns how to liberate his attention from this delimited area and broadcast it across space.

Critics often associate Sully and Stevenson by noting the two writers’ simultaneous membership in the Savile Club, their shared interest in that cluster of discourses around psychology, evolution, anthropology, and childhood, and the fact that both expressed an interest in psychological states indicative of the child and the savage (Block 445, Reid 15-16, 29). But what these critics have largely failed to recognize is how Sully and Stevenson expressed similar concerns about the late- nineteenth-century trend toward specialization using plots of attentional transformation. Perhaps not surprisingly, this similarity becomes apparent when Sully’s “The Psycho-Physical Process in Attention” is compared to Jekyll and Hyde—a text that highlights the theme of bourgeois professionalism and critiques professional mores.46 Sully’s and Stevenson’s texts mirror one another insofar as both represent the dangers of the professional lifestyle through images of spatially restricted attention, and insofar as both dramatize the course toward increasing professional specialization as an increasing imprisonment of the professional’s attention. But Stevenson does more than simply echo the concerns and rhetoric of his contemporary Sully; he also augments these concerns using the techniques of the gothic novel, underlining the “evils” of overly focused, overly specialized professional attention through the convention of gothic confinement.

Jekyll and Hyde engages with such issues of professional specialization primarily through the character of Henry Jekyll. Stevenson highlights the topic of professionalism early on in the text by associating Jekyll with an impressive list of professional acronyms: “Henry Jekyll, M.D., D.C.L., L.L.D., F.R.S., etc.” (37). But although he is initially characterized as a polymath through this extensive list of professional credentials, Jekyll makes a deeper and deeper descent into the arcane world of specialization as the story progresses, moving further away from an original condition of professional generalism as he draws closer to the consummation of his tragic fate.47 Stevenson encodes the early history of this professional career in the space of Jekyll’s laboratory. He uses this space as a sort of expositional snapshot that brings the reader “up to speed” by explicating Jekyll’s character and conveying the early history of his career through an architectural semiotics. Stevenson’s description of this laboratory introduces Jekyll as a character in the midst of a

46 Arata has treated this subject extensively in “Atavism, Professionalism, and Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde” (1995). 47 The text first hints at this descent when it mentions Jekyll’s professional dispute with Lanyon. Although the two surgeons once shared “a bond of common interest,” this bond is broken when they “differed on some point of science” (38).

106 change—in the midst of transitioning from a member of a college of surgeons into an increasingly isolated inorganic chemist. For instance, the narrator remarks that while Jekyll’s laboratory was once the dissecting room of a “celebrated surgeon” and was “crowded with eager students” (50), its most recent owner has since transformed the room into a “gaunt and silent” chemical laboratory, with tables laden with enigmatic “chemical apparatus [sic]” (50). This laboratory, then, which was once a place of teaching and fellowship, where a college of aspiring professionals congregated to absorb knowledge about life in its holistic, material, and organic form, has transformed into the private laboratory of a self-ostracized specialist working in an inorganic scholarly field that is disconnected from that intellectual realm of organic totality represented by the physician’s object of study. The room thus serves as a metaphor for Jekyll’s tendency toward increasing specialization, in effect surrounding him and framing him for the reader as a professional on the road toward an isolating overspecialization.

If this space functions as an architectural-semiotic form of exposition that tells the story of Jekyll’s recent descent into the world of specialization, other spaces work in a similar fashion to structure the novel’s plot proper. The simplest way to describe the structure of the novel’s plot is by tracking the frequency of Jekyll’s transformations into his monstrous double. The novel expresses a sort of proportional relationship between the advancement of the plot and the frequency of such transformations; as the plot advances toward conclusion, these transformations become more and more frequent. And Stevenson’s method of developing this plot evokes the strategy that Thackeray employs in Vanity Fair insofar as he indexes the advancing stages in Jekyll’s career toward overspecialization to spaces and objects that become smaller and smaller in size. If Stevenson encodes the early history of Jekyll’s transformation into an isolated and esoteric professional in the space of the chemical laboratory, he indexes the more advanced stages of Jekyll’s career to the doctor’s preoccupation with increasingly smaller objects of study, as well as his confinement within smaller spaces of intellectual research. Thus, after the period when Jekyll works in the space of the laboratory to pursue his general interest in inorganic chemistry, Jekyll tends more and more to “confin[e] himself to the [much smaller] cabinet over the laboratory” (57) as he becomes increasingly preoccupied with only one small aspect of this larger field of chemistry—the production of that single inorganic compound that would effectively reverse his transformations into Hyde. These parallels between Jekyll’s increasing tendency toward specialization and the decreasing size of his space of study climax when Jekyll becomes obsessed with only a fraction of that inorganic compound that works to reverse his transformations: what Stevenson describes as a pure white salt. Jekyll’s servant Poole illustrates the extent of the doctor’s obsession with this powder in explaining that “every day, ay, and twice and thrice in the same day, there have been orders and complaints, and I have been sent flying to all the wholesale chemists in town. Every time I brought the stuff back, there would be another paper telling me to return it, because it was not pure, and another order to a different firm” (57, 62). It is not insignificant that when Jekyll eventually meets his tragic end, Utterson and Poole find him dead in the cabinet above his laboratory alongside a small pile of this same white powder (67). By

107 juxtaposing scientist and reagent at the point of Jekyll’s tragic end, Stevenson evokes the idea that Jekyll has, like Ruskin's pin makers, and through a form of metonymic transubstantiation, become the small pile of white salt that has been the object of his overspecialized attention.48 The plot of Jekyll and Hyde thus charts Jekyll’s movement away from the broader community of medical professionals represented by his multiple titles, to the more esoteric and specialized world of inorganic chemistry, to the even more singular obsession with only one small aspect of inorganic chemistry (represented in the text by the cabinet and the chemical salt). And as it does so, it also generates an attentional plot through the use of spatialized metaphors. In bringing Jekyll to this tragic end, where his attention becomes imprisoned by only one sub-field within a broader science, and then by only one compound within this broader sub-field, the text evokes the image of Ruskin’s divided labourers, for whom sustained attention to such a diminutive thing as a pin, and then to only one small portion of a pin, represents specialization as a sort of descent into a state of attentional imprisonment.

But unlike Ruskin’s earlier critique of industrial labour, Stevenson’s spatially structured attentional plot performs an opposition to two specifically late-nineteenth-century social trends. On the one hand, this plot can be read as a coded critique of the late-century trend in literature toward a more naturalistic or mimetic mode of realism. When the novel is read in reference to Stevenson’s writing on literary naturalism and its opposition to idealism and the spirit of romance, Dr. Jekyll represents one of those naturalistic authors who, for Lang, “not only use the microscope, and ply experiments, but ply them too often, in corpore vili.” Jekyll’s decision to direct his attention not to the whole of life (as symbolized by the human form that was once the centerpiece of Jekyll’s surgical theatre) but only to a tiny fragment of the empirical world conjures the image of the naturalist author who was seen to adopt as his modus operandi the attentive observation of small scientific details. On the other hand, the plot’s more explicit politics is directed toward that late-nineteenth-century trend toward the increasing specialization of professional labour. Stevenson uses the figure of the chemical isolate, in conjunction with the gothic convention of the protagonist’s confinement, to dramatize the “evils” of professional attentiveness that Sully’s essay describes only briefly. There is, however, one important distinction to be drawn between the two authors’ attentional plots. Sully’s professional narrative implies a simple and straightforward denouement, where the professional is released from confinement simply and easily, merely by cultivating any of an array of non-specialist interests. On the other hand, Stevenson’s gothic narrative never comes to denouement, as Jekyll never experiences the type of release that Sully sees as so easy to attain. Indeed, Jekyll only becomes more and more confined within the increasingly delimited space of his professional interests as the novel’s plot approaches conclusion. And yet there are moments when Stevenson gestures toward a possible denouement to Jekyll’s tragic narrative. It is at these moments that Stevenson

48 Reading Jekyll’s fate in reference to the Biblical story of Lot’s wife—who was transformed into a pillar of salt due to her inability to avert her eyes from Sodom—reinforces the moral of this tale as one of mismanaged attention.

108 gives us a glimpse of the type of attention that he was coming to view as his romantic ideal—that type of attention that would release the subject from that large-scale social, professional, and literary crisis that is indexed to the problem of circumscribed attention. Not surprisingly, these suggestions come in those scenes when Stevenson describes Jekyll’s transformations to and from the diminutive Hyde.

As the plot of this novel advances, Jekyll’s transformations into Hyde not only increase in frequency and duration; they also become more and more inadvertent, as Jekyll comes to experience these physiological changes without having ingested the chemical potion. The novel thus poses the following question: what is it that eventually precipitates these transformations if it is not this potion? Stevenson hints at an answer in a detailed and evocative description of one of Jekyll’s inadvertent transformations into Hyde that takes place in Regent’s Park: It was a fine, clear January day, wet under foot where the frost had melted, but cloudless overhead; and the Regent’s park was full of winter chirrupings and sweet with spring odours. I sat in the sun on a bench; the animal within me licking the chops of memory; the spiritual side of me a little drowsed, promising subsequent penitence, but not yet moved to begin. After all, I reflected, I was like my neighbours; and then I smiled, comparing myself with other men, comparing my active good-will with the lazy cruelty of their neglect. And at the very moment of that vainglorious thought, a qualm came over me, a horrid nausea and the most deadly shuddering. […] [A]nd then […] I began to be aware of a change in the temper of my thoughts, a greater boldness, a contempt of danger, a solution of the bonds of obligation. I looked down; my clothes hung formlessly on my shrunken limbs; the hand that lay on my knee was corded and hairy. I was once more Edward Hyde. (86-87) It is interesting to note how much this passage evokes the denouement of An Inland Voyage. At the beginning of this scene, Jekyll is on the verge of having an experience similar to that which marked the denouement of Stevenson’s earlier travelogue. As Jekyll’s governing ego “drowse[s],” a certain harmony begins to develop between himself and his bucolic surroundings, and we expect this change to evolve into that profound state of inattentiveness that Stevenson’s canoeist experienced on the swollen Oise. Unlike his travelling counterpart, though, who cultivates and luxuriates in this experience, Jekyll supresses this it by drawing strong distinctions between himself and those who surround him, and thereby reinstituting the discriminating authority of the governing ego. It is not insignificant that at this very moment, when Jekyll inhibits an experience of pure inattentiveness, he suddenly and unintentionally transforms into the diminutive Hyde. In this scene of Jekyll’s inadvertent transformation, Stevenson reprises his earlier denouement; but this time, the result is different, as Jekyll’s disinclination to revel in pure inattentiveness initiates a transformation that would eventually culminate with the doctor’s tragic demise.

But this transformational passage from Jekyll and Hyde also differs in other important ways from the denouement of the earlier travel narrative. It contains supplementary meanings that suggest

109 what Jekyll suppresses in this instance is not simply that pure form of inattentiveness of An Inland Voyage but rather another, more specific, more technical form of (in)attention. For example, Stevenson writes that as Jekyll’s governing ego drowsed he began “licking the chops of memory.” While this expression works to represent Jekyll as bestial or atavistic, insofar as it conjures the image of an animal licking his jowls while basking in a spell of clement weather, it also plays on the ambivalence of the term chops—which, in a variant usage, means pieces or fragments. By evoking this other meaning, Stevenson suggests that Jekyll, in this moment of transformation in the park, is not simply suppressing a return to an earlier developmental stage but is more properly inhibiting an opportunity to savour a series of memory fragments. To put this more specifically and technically: what Jekyll inhibits in this instance is the bubbling onset of a full-blown experience of reverie. Helping us understand how Stevenson’s allusion to memory fragments evokes the condition of reverie is G.H. Lewes’s discussion of the concept in The Principles of Success in Literature (1865). In his work on modes of artistic creation, Lewes represents reverie as the form of attention most closely associated with the process of poetic creation. And in the course of presenting his image-focused theory of artistic creation, Lewes describes reverie as a series of “kaleidoscopic fragments of memory” that emerge from the poet’s unconscious (98).49 For Lewes, this series of fragments is best described as kaleidoscopic because, in a state of artistic reverie, thought proceeds not as a stream of conscious signs but as a kaleidoscopic play of image fragments; and the artist creates the literary text by fixing, assembling, and focalizing these fragments into the form of the poetic object. Stevenson’s echoes of Lewes’s definition of reverie in this scene of transformation suggest that what precipitates Jekyll’s tragedy is something more specific than a general urge toward primitive feelings and desires, or an urge to cultivate a vague condition of inattention. They rather suggest that what triggers this event is Jekyll’s actively suppressing the onset a state of reverie imagined as a kaleidoscopic series of images and memory fragments.

Further supporting the notion that Stevenson represents kaleidoscopic reverie as somehow implicated in the process of Jekyll’s unwilled transformations is a later scene where this unwilled transformation in Regent’s Park is reversed. This reversal takes place in the home of Jekyll’s sometime friend and colleague Dr. Hastie Lanyon, in the moments after Lanyon has supplied Jekyll with that combination of chemicals that work to transform the atavistic Hyde into the civilized Jekyll. Lanyon states that when Jekyll (in the form of Hyde) mixes the crystalline and liquid constituents of the antidote, the resulting concoction, which was at first of a reddish hue, began, in proportion as the crystals melted, to brighten in colour, to effervesce audibly, and to throw off small fumes of vapour. Suddenly and at

49 This passage is also evocatively—if somewhat anachronistically—reminiscent of Gaston Bachelard’s description of reverie, which draws on the imagery of crashing waves in representing this state using the figure of the seashell: “by listening to certain words as a child listens to the sea in a seashell,” he writes, “a word dreamer hears the murmur of a world of dreams” (49).

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the same moment, the ebullition ceased and the compound changed to a dark purple, which faded again more slowly to a watery green. My visitor, who had watched these metamorphoses with a keen eye, smiled, set down the glass upon the table, and then turned and looked upon me with an air of scrutiny. (74) This cascading liquid eventually incites the process of reversal, insofar as Jekyll is divested of Hyde’s atavistic features upon consuming it. But Stevenson also leaves open the question of precisely how this change is effected. Of course, the obvious answer is that the chemical effects this change through a pharmacological mechanism—that upon consuming the drug, Jekyll experiences a physiological transformation that culminates with a change to his outward appearance and form. But Stevenson also allows for the possibility that this process of reversal has already begun before Jekyll has even ingested the liquid, and that what precipitates this transformation is the mere spectacle of this cascading liquid concoction—independent of its pharmacological function. He conveys this idea by using kaleidoscopic imagery to represent the spectacle of the liquid antidote; thus, after Jekyll mixes the liquid and crystalline components of the antidote together, their combination produces a kaleidoscopic series of colour changes that move from red, to bright red, to dark purple, and finally to a watery green. By having Jekyll experience the reversal of his transformation after “watch[ing] these [iridescent] metamorphoses with a keen eye,” Stevenson suggests that Jekyll’s reversal is stimulated by his finally allowing himself to experience kaleidoscopic reverie vicariously, through the psycho-perceptual prosthetic of this parti-coloured spectacle. This conclusion is further reinforced when one juxtaposes this scene of reversal to the earlier scene of transformation in Regent’s Park. This juxtaposition suggests the following syllogism: if Jekyll’s transformations into Hyde are caused by his suppression of kaleidoscopic reverie, then the reversal of this transformation could very well be induced when Jekyll is forced or tricked into experiencing a bout of reverie—in this case, through the aid of this kaleidoscoping chemical prop. Of course, the kaleidoscopic spectacle of the cascading liquid brings Jekyll only temporary relief from his imprisonment in the body of the diminutive Hyde. And Stevenson suggests that if Jekyll never gains something like absolute relief from these bouts of unintended transformation, it is because he never discovers the psycho- physical laws governing these transformations, instead mistaking them for pharmacological laws and processes that he is never fully able to control.

But if Jekyll and Hyde never achieves something like a satisfying attentional denouement, it nonetheless evokes a complex attentional form that comprises two semantic structures. The first is encapsulated by the image of the chemical isolate, which indexes Jekyll’s descent into the nadir of specialized professional labour, and which plays a key role in Stevenson’s structured opposition to both literary naturalism and the trend toward professional specialization. The second is encapsulated by the metaphor of the kaleidoscopic antidote, which, in its role as a prompt for palliative reverie, represents the promise of denouement in a narrative about Jekyll’s otherwise tragic descent into the nadir of a type of circumscribed attention encouraged by both professional specialization and the late-century turn to literary naturalism. This bipartite attentional structure

111 represents an improvement on the simpler attentional plot of An Inland Voyage. Unlike the earlier travelogue, which consistently invokes spatial forms of attention to set a spatially circumscribed attentiveness against an idealized, spatially diffuse inattention, Jekyll and Hyde draws on a concept from the field of aesthetics to develop an attentional ideal that is, at basis, not spatial simply but also kaleidoscopic. Jekyll and Hyde in this way marks a point of progress in Stevenson’s thinking about his attentional ideal and in his methods of structuring the plot of attentional transformation. And as I will argue in the final section of this chapter, his decision to privilege reverie by linking it to the denouement of his attentional plots was as much informed by discourses around aesthetics (and their kaleidoscopic models of attention) as it was motivated by his desire to differentiate himself from established positions within the history of attentional forms. For Stevenson, reverie is more than simply a reactionary primitive vestige—an innate attentional disposition that the romantic author must recuperate through a return to simpler forms of storytelling; it also represents a novel position and new horizon within the ongoing history of the plot of attentional transformation.

III. Toward “the ideal laws of the day-dream”: Weir of Hermiston as a Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man That the concept of reverie comprises a new position, a new ideal, within the history of the attentional plot is suggested by the structure of Stevenson’s famous encomium on the romance genre, “A Gossip on Romance.” This essay opens with an evocative description of the type of reading experience that Stevenson feels the romantic novelist should attempt to elicit from readers: In anything fit to be called by the name of reading, the process itself should be absorbing and voluptuous; we should gloat over a book, be rapt clean out of ourselves, and rise from the perusal, our mind filled with the busiest, kaleidoscopic dance of images, incapable of sleep or continuous thought. The words, if the book be eloquent, should run thenceforward in our ear like the noise of breakers, and the story, if it be a story, repeat itself in a thousand coloured pictures to the eye. It was for this last pleasure that we read so closely, and loved our books so dearly, in the bright, troubled period of boyhood. (52) The terms with which Stevenson characterizes his romantic ideal are strikingly consistent with the promise of denouement offered by Jekyll and Hyde. For Stevenson, the figure of kaleidoscopic reverie evokes the ideal form of the romantic text. Indeed, Stevenson is so invested in this figure that he invokes it twice within the short space of this introductory passage. Thus, he refers to the ideal romance text both as a work that produces a “kaleidoscopic dance of images” in front of the mind’s eye and as a story that “repeat[s] itself in a thousand coloured pictures to the eye.” When this opening passage is read on its own, apart from the remainder of the essay, it suggests that, for Stevenson, the aim of the romantic author is simply to reproduce the experience of childish reading—simply to trigger a reactionary return to that “bright, troubled period” of childhood when reading was such a kaleidoscopic experience. At other points, however, Stevenson takes a

112 more progressive tone; whereas he represents his ideal romantic text through reference to childish reverie early on in the essay, at these other points he describes the manifestation of this ideal as a more consummate or more mature expression of the form of reverie that appears in the childish imagination. Thus, he states that while the experience of childish reading provides something like a pattern for the ideal romantic text, it takes the genius of “the great creative writer [to] sho[w] us the realisation and the apotheosis of the day-dreams of common men. His stories may be nourished with the realities of life, but their true mark is to […] obey the ideal laws of the day- dream” (56, emphasis added). For Stevenson, then, the perfect work of romance fiction does not simply recapitulate, or provoke a simple return to, the psychological experience of childish reading; it rather represents a perfected, a more idealized expression of that experience—both the “realisation and the apotheosis of the day-drea[m].”

Stevenson returns to this opposition between childish and mature forms of romance at the end of his essay. This latter portion of “A Gossip on Romance” is dedicated to an appraisal of the works of his Scottish progenitor Sir Walter Scott, and it begins with Stevenson using honorific terms to describe his forebear. At this point, Scott is, for Stevenson, “out and away the king of the romantics” (61) and Guy Mannering, in particular, marks the epitome of the romance form, with the “scene when Harry Bertram lands at Ellangowan [being] a model instance of romantic method” (62). Notwithstanding these commendatory remarks, Stevenson also censures Scott for failing to achieve the ideal of romance form. Thus, although he refers to Scott as “the king of the romantics,” he also descries him as “hardly a great artist,” and “hardly, in the manful sense, an artist at all” (64). Stevenson’s ambivalence about the unrefined, underdeveloped Scott is summarized with a telling dash in the final sentence of the essay, where he refers to his Scottish forebear as a “great romantic—an idle child” (64). But why is Scott this underdeveloped and childish artist? The essay broaches this question in its discussion of Scott’s narrative style and form. Stevenson offers the following passage from Guy Mannering as a particularly egregious example of Scott’s bad form: “A damsel, who, close behind a fine spring about half-way down the descent, and which had once supplied the castle with water, was engaged in bleaching linen” (qtd. on 63). Stevenson pans Scott’s syntax in this passage, writing, A man who gave in such copy would be discharged from the staff of a daily paper. Scott has forgotten to prepare the reader for the presence of the “damsel”; he has forgotten to mention the spring and its relation to the ruin; and now, face to face with his omission, instead of trying back and starting fair, crams all his matter, tail foremost, into a single shambling sentence. It is not merely bad English or bad style; it is abominably bad narrative besides. (63) According to Stevenson, then, Scott is an underdeveloped, an “unmanly” writer because, in beginning with the noun and then “cram[ming] all his matter, tail foremost, into a single shambling sentence,” he fails to prepare the reader to receive the narrative in a linear, continuous, and attentive manner. This critique of Scott’s style is reminiscent of that theory of attentive syntax that Spencer puts forth in the Philosophy of Style. According to Stevenson, because Scott so

113 consistently introduces the nominal component of the sentence in advance of a string of adjectival qualifiers, his narrative syntax is akin to that of Spencer’s bad French writers who also court distraction by way of similar syntactic inversions. Stevenson makes sure to make it clear that Scott’s inattentive shortcomings extend beyond the scope of style to infect and undermine his broader narrative form, stating that his bad syntax works to produce not only “bad English or bad style” but also “abominably bad narrative besides.” Stevenson suggests, in short, that the principal flaw keeping Scott from achieving the apotheosis of romantic is a tendency to produce an inattentive narrative form. That Stevenson critiques Scott in the guise of an apologist for Spencerian attentional form does not mean that Stevenson has suddenly become a champion of those forms of textual attentiveness that Stevenson associated with Spencer. For Stevenson, Scott’s tendency toward narrative inattentiveness represents a deficiency not because it represents a betrayal of some ideal of textual attentiveness that Stevenson aspires to; it is rather insofar as this flaw of narrative inattentiveness inhibited Scott from achieving Stevenson’s romantic ideal of textual reverie. This becomes clear when we read Stevenson’s critique of the careless, inattentive, and ultimately childish Scott in reference to the earlier portion of this essay on romance, where Stevenson associates artistic maturity and genius with the ability to produce a text that reflects “the ideal laws of the day-dream.” Stevenson suggests that whereas the Spencerian and naturalist forms are too attentive to accommodate the vacillating and relatively inattentive dynamics of textual reverie, Scott is too careless and inattentive in his narrative style to facilitate the textual consecration of reverie in its ideal form.

Stevenson’s ideal of textual reverie thus indexes a third, more progressive position within this textual politics conducted between competing attentional forms. In closing “A Gossip on Romance” with this description of Scott’s developmental deficiency, Stevenson highlights the need for a new type of romantic author: one who will correct these childish errors and thereby realize the romantic potential latent within Scott’s texts. “A Gossip on Romance” is in this way evocative of Wilkie Collins’s “Books Necessary for A Liberal Education.” In the earlier of these two essays, Collins indexed his ideal of romantic form to the attention of flow; and in explaining how even the most absorbing of past romance novels failed to capture flow completely, he highlighted the need for a new form of romance narrative that would consecrate this ideal by expressing flow more thoroughly. As we saw in Chapter 2, Collins attempted to fulfill this lack through the medium of his fiction, particularly by attempting to capture romantic attention in and through narrative form in The Woman in White. In “A Gossip on Romance,” Stevenson makes a similar move insofar as he indexes his ideal of romance form to an idealized form of attention and then highlights how a past exemplar of romance failed to achieve this ideal. But Stevenson would take a different approach than Collins in striving to fulfill this lack. Instead of attempting to capture his ideal of romantic attention in and through the form of narrative fiction, he uses the family romance to chart the coming of age of a young subject who aspires to be the type of artist who would achieve the type of artistic success that had so eluded Scott.

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Stevenson executes this strategy in his final, unfinished novel, Weir of Hermiston. Set in 1814 in the Scottish Lowlands, this tale tells of the travails of a young aspiring law student Archie Weir. The first part of the novel relates Archie's banishment from the professional society of Edinburgh as a result of his publicly criticizing his father, the renowned and powerful judge Adam Weir. After witnessing his father deliver a sentence of death to the pitiable petty criminal Duncan Jopp, Archie experiences a strong, visceral aversion to the brutality of this judge who “pursued” his defenseless criminal “with a monstrous, relishing gaiety” (26-27). Disquieted by the judge’s decision, Archie attempts to give voice to his filial dissatisfaction at a meeting of the Edinburgh Speculative Society, where he raises the question of “[w]hether capital punishment be consistent with God’s will or man’s policy” (29). When Adam eventually learns of his son’s public act of betrayal, he uses his authority as both father and member of the College of Justice to quash Archie’s hopes of a career in the law and banish him to the family’s provincial manor in Hermiston. The manor at this point becomes the scene for a conflict that structures the second part of the story, which centres on a love affair between Archie and a young highlander named Christina. Brought together by powerful feelings of mutual attraction, the couple is kept from marrying due to a class disparity (he is a lord and she is a lowly highlander) along with Archie’s unwillingness to solicit his father’s blessing. When summarized in this way, Weir of Hermiston has a bipartite form: the first part is set in Edinburgh and highlights the problem of Archie’s professional future; and the second part moves to Hermiston, where the problem of Archie and Christina’s relationship takes centre stage. Over both parts looms the figure of Adam Weir, who plays the role of a symbolic censure that complicates Archie’s choice of both profession and bride.

As critics have noted, this narrative that drives toward the young protagonist’s deliverance from paternal oppression evokes the genre of the family romance. The is a psychodramatic genre that often focuses on a young male subject who struggles for his “[l]iberation, as he grows up, from the authority of his parents” by conjuring imaginary scenarios that involve “getting free from the parents of whom he now has a low opinion and of replacing them by others” (Freud 236). Critics who read Weir of Hermiston as an example of the family romance often take the history of Stevenson’s family life as their point of reference in order to highlight how the novel’s Oedipal conflict bears echoes of—and perhaps drives toward an imaginary resolution to—the author’s real-life conflict with his father, Thomas Stevenson.50 The most compelling of such readings marshal Lacanian psychoanalysis to interpret Archie’s conflict as principally linguistic and verbal in nature. According to Penny Fielding, for example, in this novel that “plots Archie’s experiences as a child and young man through his acquisition of language and his troubled transition to the power of words and signs,” the protagonist’s attempts are frustrated by a father “who imposes his law upon his son, condemning everyone of Archie’s sensitive disposition by

50 In addition to Fielding’s work, Jenni Calder’s biography RLS: A Life (1980) offers a good example of how critics tend to read Robert Louis’s relationship with his father in reference to a paradigm of Oedipal conflict.

115 naming them” (Orality 184). For Fielding, that is, Archie is plagued not only by a real authority figure but also by his own internalization of the judge’s symbolic authority—a sort of Lacanian father figure who exerts overweening control over Archie and his place in a world of symbolic relations. And so, for Fielding, a successful resolution to this Oedipal conflict would involve Archie’s accession into the world of language: that transition into the symbolic order and the recognition of another, more symbolic other, the Name-of-the-Father. Weir of Hermiston is in this sense not only a family romance that drives toward the independence and maturation of the adolescent subject but also a sort of Künstlerroman in which Archie “struggles […] to find words that will correspond to an objective truth but will still remain ‘his’ words,” and which would reach denouement when Archie learns to “write himself” (Fielding, Orality 188-189).

Fielding argues that Stevenson nuances the family romance into a Künstlerroman by transposing the larger symbolic conflict between father and son into a series of localized conflicts between writing and orality, realism and romance, and other such literary and linguistic oppositions (Orality 188). But one thing she overlooks is how the novel also transposes these linguistic and generic problems—the protagonist’s “struggles […] to find words that will correspond to an objective truth but will still remain ‘his’ words”—into problems of attention. Indeed, if the text can be divided into two parts, both parts pivot on a crisis of attention. The first such crisis is precipitated by Archie’s father, who demonstrates striking similarities to Stevenson’s earlier gothic professional, Henry Jekyll. As in Jekyll and Hyde, Stevenson connects the novel’s agon to a problem brought about by a professional subject’s tendency to exercise a form of attention that is limited in its spatial scope. The topic of attention is introduced in the chapter titled “Father and Son,” where the narrator emphasizes Adam’s lack of interest in his son’s education using the figure of the averted gaze: “He saw little of his son. […] Archie went the usual round of other Edinburgh boys, the High School and the college; and Hermiston looked on, or rather looked away, with scarce an affectation of interest in his progress” (19). Further evoking Stevenson’s methods of characterization in Jekyll and Hyde is how the narrator of Weir of Hermiston roots Adam’s tendency toward neglect and inattention in professional habits that are encoded in the metonym of the Judge’s habitual place of professional study. For example, the narrator notes how, at a certain point every evening, the Judge would leave the company of his son and take refuge in the cloister of his private study in the following manner: “Well ye have a long jaunt before ye yet!” he might observe, yawning, and fall back on his own thoughts (as like as not) until the time came for separation, and my lord would take the decanter and the glass, and be off to the back chamber looking on the Meadows, where he toiled on his cases till the hours were small. There was no “fuller man” on the bench; his memory was marvellous, though wholly legal; if he had to “advise” extempore, none did it better; yet there was none who more earnestly prepared. As he thus watched in the night, or sat at table and forgot the presence of his son, no doubt but he tasted deeply of recondite pleasures. (20)

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This iterative passage illustrates Adam’s tendency toward inattention through a survey of his habitual place of legal study. Because the Judge enters the study at a point in the night when he “fall[s] back on his own thoughts,” its walls come to signify the delimited scope of his attention and his nocturnal tendency to “forg[et] the presence of his son.” Other features of the chamber serve as metonyms for the Judge’s delimited professional attention, including the casebooks that he compulsively analyzes every evening, as well as the window that “look[s] on the Meadows.” Because the Judge never attends to the prospect of these Meadows, the window does not represent his penchant to contemplate natural or romantic vistas (he tends to ignore these things); it rather orients the customary position of his body, which, in facing the back of the house and the Meadows, is habitually directed away from his son and the general domestic space of the household. Much like Stevenson’s earlier description of Jekyll’s laboratory and chamber, then, this description of a space of professional study spatializes Adam’s attention, figuring it as a delimited faculty that often fails to stretch beyond certain circumscribed spatial limits. Moreover, this passage also evokes Eliot’s description of Silas Marner’s attentional agon, insofar as it represents this space as a sort of halo of circumscribed attention that the judge carries with him abroad, outside his study. Thus, in the midst of this description of Adam’s chamber and the activities that often take place therein, the scene suddenly (and jarringly) shifts to other locales: to his judicial bench, and then to his seat at the dinner table. These shifts characterize the study—and the delimited professional attention it signifies—as something that Adam takes with him when he ventures into the broader familial and social spheres. Whether the Judge is at home or abroad, he always exists in that delimited attentional space represented by his professional study.

After introducing Adam as a character who lives within the halo of this delimited purview, Stevenson figures the Judge’s decision to banish Archie as a decision determined in large part by this tendency toward cloistered professional attention. Stevenson establishes this connection in the scene where Adam reprimands his son for having criticized his professional opinion on capital punishment. This scene recalls the Biblical story of Genesis in a number of ways—most conspicuously insofar as Archie represents the evicted sinner and Adam fills the role of a reprimanding God. Stevenson also makes allusions to Genesis through his use of diction. For example, Adam Weir’s declaration to Archie that “[i]f I set ye down at Hermiston, I’ll have to see you work that place the way it has never been workit yet” (37) echoes the description of Adam’s eviction in the Bible, where it is said that “the Lord God sent [Adam] foorth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground, from whence he was taken” (Genesis 3:23). However, at the same time as Stevenson reprises the story of Genesis, there is also evidence to suggest that he is revising this story in significant ways, and particularly in inverting the relationship between father and son. Stevenson does this, in part, by giving his banishing father the name of the transgressing and banished son of the Bible. He also does this by suggesting that Archie’s banishment has been necessitated not by his own act of transgression but rather by what one might call the attentional sins of his father. Stevenson first alludes to this idea in his earlier description of the study, where he characterizes Adam’s delectable immersion in the space of delimited attention as sinful, as a

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“tasting deeply of recondite pleasures.” Stevenson also makes a connection between error and delimited attention during the scene where Adam delivers his judgement. While Adam claims that he is banishing Archie to the provinces because he is not fit for any of the professions of Edinburgh, a closer look at the language of his judgement suggests that the error is rather on the father’s side. Thus, after deciding that Archie is not suited for the law for the reason that he does not condone capital punishment, Adam is unable to imagine another suitable profession for his son because he cannot help but evaluate these other possibilities within a legal conceptual framework. Adam says, “What do ye fancy ye’ll be fit for? The pulpit? Na, they could never get diveenity into that blockhead. Him that the law of man whammles is no likely to do muckle better by the law of God” (35). Adam also rules out the military for similar reasons, arguing that “if you were to go to it, you would find out for yourself whether Lord Well’n’ton approves of capital punishment or not” (36). In each of these instances, the Judge draws a conclusion by drawing on a legal reference point. He ultimately concludes that Archie is not suited for any of the other professions not on the basis of his knowledge of what these other professions entail but rather on the basis of the single (and specious) premise that Archie is not suited for the law because he cannot condone capital punishment. Stevenson thus suggests in the scene of Archie’s eviction that because the Judge lives within the halo of the legal profession, he can only judge matters with the selective and delimited attention exemplified by the space of his legal study, in which his eyes are always fixed on his casebooks. And in thus associating Adam’s delimited professional attention with “recondite pleasures” and errors in judgement, Stevenson identifies Adam Hermiston, and not Archie, as the Adamic sinner. He further reinforces this transposition of roles through the diction with which he has Adam censure Archie. Thus, Adam, after dismissing all professional possibilities in this matter, concludes by saying: “by my way of it—and my way is the best— there’s just the one thing it’s possible that ye might be with decency, and that’s a laird” (37). By making Archie laird (or Lord), Adam places his son above himself, in an ascendant position. The Christian name that Stevenson gives to his protagonist further evokes this idea, with its root “arch” connoting not only his protagonist’s waggish (or “splairging”) nature but also his position of ascendancy above his Adamic father.

The first part of Weir of Hermiston can thus be read as another coded critique of the culture of attentiveness that Stevenson had previously attacked in Jekyll and Hyde. Like Henry Jekyll, Adam Weir evokes that overly specialized professional who never lets his attention range beyond the delimited space of his professional cloister. The two texts differ, however, to the extent that Stevenson represents Adam’s inclination toward attentiveness not as a gothic pathology that impinges on the body of the attentive subject (Adam is not tragically diminished and snuffed out in the same way that Jekyll is), but as both a sin and a tacit refutation of the right to rule. In representing a professional subject who unwittingly gives up his right to rule by tacitly espousing a mode of spatially delimited attention, Weir of Hermiston bears echoes of Stevenson’s critique of literary naturalism in a “A Note on Realism.” As I have already highlighted in my discussion of this essay, Stevenson conducts his critique of naturalism by suggesting that because realism was

118 tending at the end of the end of the nineteenth century too much toward a mode that simply directed a narrow attention span at minutiae and small, almost microscopic spaces, this previously dominant literary genre was forfeiting its right to speak to larger moral and philosophical issues. As a result of this strategic misstep on the part of late-nineteenth-century realists, romance is granted the opportunity to assume a position of authority within the realm of competing literary genres almost by default, by promising to occupy that attentional space that realism wilfully abdicates. The plot of Weir of Hermiston follows this same cultural logic, and can even be said to dramatize the late-nineteenth-century attentional politics in which Stevenson saw himself. At the end of the first part of the novel, when a symbolic authority tacitly disavows its right to rule by cultivating and espousing an overly circumscribed mode of attention, Archie finds himself in a position similar to that of the romantic Stevenson: on the brink of ascendency due to the strategic misstep of a ruling authority.

But while the text uses the conventions of the family romance to dramatize a late-century cultural politics transposed into an opposition between competing forms of attention, it is not insignificant that Stevenson’s unfinished novel also displaces this politics historically, from the late to the early nineteenth century, by setting the novel not in England at the fin de siècle but in Scotland in 1814. In “Stevenson and Fiction,” Ian Duncan underscores the significance of this date for Stevenson; in noting how “Scott himself appears in and around the edges” of Weir of Hermiston, Duncan points out that the year 1814 is significant “not just as the year of Napoleon’s defeat and exile to Elba, but [also] as the year of Scott’s first Scottish historical novel Waverly” (21). Duncan makes sense of this allusion by arguing that if, in Weir of Hermiston, Stevenson recapitulates Scott's “fable of fathers and sons as a psychological plot of Scottish historical romance,” he also “appears to be turning away from the Scottish tradition […] towards an ‘advanced’ aesthetic” (22). I agree that Weir of Hermiston represents something like a revision or rewriting of Scott’s career as a novelist. But my concern is less with discerning how Stevenson’s literary style revises the aesthetic mode of his Scottish forebear, and more with how Stevenson dramatizes a type of Künstlerroman in which an artistically inclined subject within the text attempts to achieve a revisionist aesthetic. By reading this Künstlerroman, which is significant for being set in the year of Waverley’s publication, in the light of Stevenson’s critique of the “unmanly” Scott in “A Gossip on Romance,” Stevenson’s last, unfinished novel begins to look a lot like a rewriting of Scott’s development as a novelist. In Weir of Hermiston, Archie Weir in effect aspires to develop into that mature romantic author that Stevenson opens up a space for in "A Gossip on Romance." This is the author that Scott failed to become by never finding the ideal textual form in which to register and preserve the attention of kaleidoscopic reverie.

Stevenson’s attempt to write the career of a Scott-like author who aspires toward such maturity takes place in the novel’s second part, which is set in the Weirs’ provincial holding in Hermiston. The conflict that focuses this second part of the novel is initiated in the chapter “A Leaf from

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Christina’s Song Book.” It is no doubt notable that the scene that introduces this conflict bears unmistakeable echoes of Jekyll’s unintended transformation into Hyde in Regent’s Park, as well as more subtle resonances of the scene of denouement in An Inland Voyage. These are all part of a series of scenes that stretch across Stevenson’s oeuvre and make up a leitmotif of attentional transformation. Weir of Hermiston’s particular expression of this broader pattern occurs immediately before Archie first meets his lover, Christina, inside the parish church. As Archie sits and waits to enter the church, he experiences the following sensations of awakening or transformation: It was warm, with a latent shiver in the air that made the warmth only more welcome. […] The gray, Quakerish dale was still only awakened in places and patches from the sobriety of its winter colouring; and he wondered at its beauty; an essential beauty of the old earth it seemed to him, not resident in particulars but breathing to him from the whole. He surprised himself by a sudden impulse to write poetry—he did so sometimes, loose, galloping octosyllabics in the vein of Scott—and when he had taken his place on a boulder, near some fairy falls and shaded by a whip of a tree that was already radiant with new leaves, it still more surprised him that he should find nothing to write. His heart perhaps beat in time to some vast indwelling rhythm of the universe. (68) As in the scene of transformation in Jekyll and Hyde, the setting here is a cool day in a pastoral, park-like setting, where the emergence from within this otherwise frigid and hostile atmosphere of a degree of warmth, of life, stimulates in the reposing subject a desire for communion with the natural. The details of the passage also bear subtle hints of the wavering, “shivering” dynamics of kaleidoscopic movement, with Stevenson’s description of how the “Quakerish dale” is being “awakened in places and patches from the sobriety of its winter colouring” expressing that obscure, fluctuating “rhythm” of kaleidoscopic form. However, this scene differs markedly from its companion scene in Jekyll and Hyde, insofar as Archie’s instinct is not to suppress, but rather to maintain and express, the wavering movements of this natural life-force. Thus, after this natural spirit “breath[es] to him,” Archie is affected by a parallel reflex, as he yearns to give voice or form to the inner impulses that are “perhaps” commensurate to the “indwelling rhythm.” But more than this, he also expresses a desire to concretize these natural rhythms through a medium of art: something like the poetry of Scott, but different. The scene no doubt works to presage the destiny of this wayward protagonist who is sent to Hermiston without a career or calling by showing him to be an innate and aspiring artist. It also characterizes him as a particular type of artist: one who would achieve his calling not by attending to and describing the “particulars” of the world around him but by giving literary form to obscure dynamics and processes that suggest the vacillating rhythm of the kaleidoscope.

After this momentary bout of romantic feeling, the chapter advances by recounting Archie’s series of abortive attempts to translate this experience into an acceptable form. This conflict of artistic form is not confined to the natural scene outside the church but lingers beyond this scene, serving to structure the remainder of this chapter as well as the remaining text. Thus, after bemoaning the

120 inefficacy of his own strain of poetry, Archie looks to Torrance, the elderly minister at the Church in Hermiston, as an individual who might be able to give proper form to this experience through the medium of prayer: “The voice of the aged Torrance within rose in an ecstasy, and he wondered if Torrance also felt in his old bones the joyous influence of the morning” (69). But because old Torrance “with […] his rheumatisms” bears a trace of the spectre of death—or “something of the chill of the grave” (69)—his prayer is out of harmony with the life-affirming mood of Archie’s nascent feelings: “[Archie’s] body remembered; and it seemed to him that his body was in no way gross but ethereal and perishable like a strain of music; and he felt for it an exquisite tenderness as for a child, an innocent, full of beautiful instincts and destined to an early death. And he felt for old Torrance […] a pity that was near to tears. The prayer ended” (69). The summary conclusion to the prayer marks the end of Archie’s second abortive attempt to give form to his burgeoning feelings, and suggests that Archie's reverie is not commensurate with the forms of Christian ceremony. Unable to give form to these feelings, then, Archie is left in a melancholic state of limbo, as he “lean[s] back” in his “pew and contemplate[s] vacancy with the shadow of a smile between playful and sad” (69-70).

However, Archie does eventually happen upon a form that is (for a time, at least) commensurate with his earlier experience. While he is in the midst of contemplating the deficiencies of Torrance’s prayer, he is interrupted when the highlander Christina “chose that moment to observe the young laird” (70). This look precipitates a series of looks and counter-looks—a mute, coy, and playful flirtation—that is conducted across the space of the church. The narrator describes the subject of Archie’s gaze in the following manner: “Archie was attracted by the bright thing like a child. He looked at her again and yet again, and their looks crossed. The lip was lifted from her little teeth; he saw the red blood work vividly under her tawny skin. Her eye, which was great as a stag’s, struck and held his gaze […] and he found in her the answer to his wishes” (72). If Archie claims to have “found in [Christina] the answer to his wishes,” it is because he appreciates her as a suitable outlet for—or form on which to graft—the inclination that he had developed in the scene outside the church: that desire to consecrate reverie in material or artistic form. Christina evokes the figure of the kaleidoscope not only through the dynamics of her “red blood” that “work[s] vividly under her tawny skin” but also—and more explicitly—through the detail and makeup of her dress: Her frock was of straw-coloured jaconet muslin, cut low at the bosom and short at the ankle, so as to display her demi-broguins of Regency violet, crossing with many straps upon a yellow cobweb stocking. […] She wore on her shoulders […] a French coat of sarsenet, tied in front with Margate braces, and of the same colour with her violet shoes. About her face clustered a disorder of ringlets, a little garland of French roses surmounted her brow, and the whole was crowned by a village hat of chipped straw. Amongst all the rosy and all the weathered faces that surrounded her in church, she glowed like an open flower—girl and raiment, and the cairngorm that caught the daylight and returned it in a

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fiery flash, and the threads of bronze and gold made her hair precious—like a bed of tiger lilies in a country garden. (72) Christina's accoutrements are dazzling in their quantity, colourfulness, intricacy, and brilliancy. She is laden with a frock, a coat, braces, stockings, a hat, a garland, a jewel, a pair of brogues, as well as the mantelpiece that is her hair. This superfluence of items also displays a variety of colours of varying tones and intensities. Thus, in addition to her soft straw-coloured hat and dress of muslin, she displays a pair of brighter yellow stockings, violet brogues and a matching violet sarsenet, and (presumably) pink French roses; and these natural and floral hues provide a foil setting off a set of gleaming, metallic details, such as the bronze and gold that shimmers in her locks and the fiery glint of sunlight that flashes from her cairngorm. She also displays a captivating panoply of textures, as her superfluous items of clothing and decoration twist and turn in a series of complex and beguiling configurations, including the open and regular patterning of her cobweb stockings, the intricate weave of her straw hat and garland, and the loose and disorderly curling of her hair. As a figure who, almost impossibly, combines a shimmering and dazzling variety of colours, textures, and patterns into coherent form, Christina represents to Archie something like kaleidoscopic reverie incarnate. It is thus no wonder that Archie, in his desire to give form to his earlier experience of reverie, feels a sense of satisfaction in contemplating Christina, for she is introduced to him as the very embodiment of kaleidoscopic form.

But whereas Archie appreciates Christina as the resolution to his desire to give aesthetic form to an experience of reverie, the Stevensonian narrator takes a different position—and he expresses this position through the use of ironic diction. The narrator suggests that Christina constitutes only an immature manifestation of the type of attentional form that Archie is destined to make manifest. That this experience marks only a waypoint in Archie’s process of artistic development is suggested, that is, when the narrator echoes Stevenson’s critique of the immature Scott by referring to Archie’s attention to Christina as merely a “child[ish]” attraction to a “bright thing.” In Weir of Hermiston, the spectacle of kaleidoscopic reverie thus operates in the same way as it does Jekyll and Hyde. In both the earlier gothic novel and this later family romance, the spectacle signals the manifestation of suppressed or inarticulate feelings of reverie, but only in their sublimated or un-ideal form. In both texts, the kaleidoscopic spectacle provides only a temporary, imperfect solution to a problem of reverie that Stevenson identifies as the text’s principal conflict. But the difference in how the two novels treat the kaleidoscopic spectacle is related to the question of genre. Stevenson’s earlier gothic tale never reaches denouement because its principal function is to highlight and exaggerate the pernicious psychological and spiritual effects of professional specialization. On the other hand, because Weir of Hermiston is of the Künstlerroman tradition, it drives toward a denouement where the problem of attention that Stevenson inscribes on Christina’s body would be resolved when Archie reaches maturity and learns to write the type of reverie of which she is only the imperfect manifestation.

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Of course, because this novel of artistic development remains unfinished, with Stevenson passing away in the midst of composing it, it leaves Archie very much in the depths of his attentional conflict. The reader is therefore denied the privilege of witnessing how Archie eventually realizes the ability to produce reverie in literary form, and what form such a romantic text would take specifically. There has been much speculation about how Stevenson intended to conclude his drama.51 But this speculation is moot insofar as Weir of Hermiston is a meant as a prologue to Stevenson’s literary career—as a sort of portrait of the artist as a young man that tracks an artist in the process of becoming. That the novel is left unfinished, with Archie never achieving such a discovery, is very much appropriate. With its open-ended form, it tells the symbolic prehistory of Stevenson’s own literary career. It functions as a narrative-historical bridge linking the end of Scott’s career and the start of Stevenson’s. In its function as such a bridge, it originates Stevenson’s oeuvre as a body of works that resolve a problem that was overlooked by those who espoused the culture of attentiveness and never even overcome by the king of the romance, the magisterial Scott: the manifestation of the ideal laws of the daydream in attentional form. At the conclusion of this unfinished novel, at the moment when Stevenson dies as a practicing author, he is born as the champion of this history of the plot of attentional transformation.

IV: Conclusions: A Tripartite Attentional Form Through its bipartite structure, Weir of Hermiston engages with two different positions within the politics of attentional forms: a culture of attentiveness exemplified by literary naturalism and the increasing specialization of professional labour; and the looming shadow of Scott—that lion of the romance novel who had made a virtue out of courting inattention and distractibility. Stevenson’s final novel is ambivalent insofar as it contains a double-barrelled agon that engages in a conflict with two opposing positions within the politics of attentional forms. But this is not the first time that Stevenson has been characterized as an author who maintains a stance of ambivalence with respect to forms of attention and their implicit values. Thus Arata, in his aforementioned essay on An Inland Voyage, characterizes Stevenson as an artist torn over which of two competing forms of attention he valued most: Stevenson was thoroughly committed to the virtues we associate with modernist literary artistry: elegance, austerity, indirection, compression, irony, and so on—the kinds of things you cannot achieve without paying close attention to what you are doing. And as a result Stevenson’s works amply reward our close attention as readers. Yet often Stevenson seems actively to discourage that kind of readerly response […]. Stevenson [at these moments] tries to relieve us of the burden of paying attention, or more precisely, he encourages us to reimagine attention as a more dispersed and decentered phenomenon,

51 According to the most common of such theories, Stevenson would have concluded the novel with the following sequence of events: Archie murders a rival out of jealousy, is sentenced to death by his father, and is then released from prison by Christina and her kin.

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one capable of inducing that ecstatic stupor he so valued. […] It is this combination which makes Stevenson so intriguing. (203-04) Arata thus imagines the Stevensonian text as an interface between author and reader that expresses a bipartite attentional form: at some moments this form encourages and rewards the reader’s active, focused, and precise attention; and at others it promotes that diffusion and wandering type of attention that Stevenson’s traveller experiences on the swollen Oise. But as I attempted to illustrate through the above readings, Stevenson’s texts demonstrate an attentional structure that is more fundamental than this liminal interface between reader and author. This is a form that exists within the text itself, at the level of incident and plotting. And this more fundamental attentional form is structured not by two, but by three, principal components. The first is represented by those spatial metaphors that are used to represent a character’s acute attention as a form of detention—or imprisonment—within a confined space. These metaphors often index the text’s agon (or part thereof), and express an opposition to Spencerian sociology, the rise of literary naturalism, the increasing specialization of professional fields—diverse trends that, collectively, contributed to the overall culture of attentiveness that was developing in the late nineteenth century. The second is expressed through those representations of the kaleidoscopic spectacle that also contribute to the agones of Stevenson’s attentional plots, and which signify the possible, but imperfectly realized, means of escape from the constraints and deleterious effects of this attentive culture. And the third is the figure of the Stevensonian novel itself—that text that through the medium of its plot aspires toward the realization of the ideal laws of the daydream in literary form. To overlook this deeper, more multifaceted structure is to overlook how Stevenson’s representations and evocations of attention respond to an already thick history of the attentional plot, and how they transform realism’s relatively simply binary between spatially constrained and spatially diffuse attentional forms into a more multidimensional set of oppositions that reflects the rich history of the attentional plot.

Reading Stevenson’s fiction as this performed opposition to a series of cultural positions that all represent forms of attention not only affects how we understand why and how Stevenson engages with concepts of attention in his works; it also affects how we understand the politics of the Stevensonian romance. As I stated above, past criticism has often underlined Stevenson’s indebtedness to anthropological theories and discourses in order to interpret his romance novels as part of a cultural intervention intended to encourage and avow primitive states of psychology and subjectivity (such as childishness and intellectual play). Implied by this body of anthropological criticism is the idea that Stevenson’s textual primitivism was motivated by a cultural politics— particularly an opposition to a set of cultural discourses that traced individual and social improvement to intellectual discipline, rigour, and other expressions of “civilized” subjectivity. But the anthropological method of evaluating Stevenson’s textual politics is beset by a handful of problems. For one, it fails to account for those moments when Stevenson denigrates states of childish and primitive subjectivity—when he represents these state as dangerous, misguided, and puerile, for example. It also elides the various points at which Stevenson avows a type of

124 enlightened or abstract thinking that anthropologists rarely associated with primitive subjectivity. In light of the problems and inconsistencies associated with the anthropological method that has been used previously to come to grips with Stevenson’s cultural politics, this chapter has proposed an attentional method instead. This attentional method is less fraught by the inconsistencies that arise when one attempts to consider Stevenson as a sort of reverse- recapitulationist—simply a purveyor of those personal qualities and modes of existence associated with the primitive and the underdeveloped. This is because Stevenson used concepts of attention to mitigate his own ambivalence about conventional notions of primitive and childish subjectivity. If Stevenson’s fiction and non-fiction espouses the ideal of attentional reverie more consistently than it champions the pure and unadulterated expression of primitive or childish subjectivity, it is at least in part because reverie exists as a site on which both his inclination toward primitive forms of storytelling and subjectivity and his inclination toward the pursuit of moral and philosophical ideals are able to reside together. In the next chapter, I will read William Morris's late prose romances in light of his work at the Kelmscott Press in an attempt to study how the typographical form of distraction called dazzle performs a similar coordinating function in the world of Morris’s attentional plots.

Chapter 4 After the Letter: Dazzle, Distraction, and Morris’s Late Prose Romances

For the authors I have studied thus far, objects of attention are often problematic things. I introduced this idea through my analysis of Scott’s Waverley. In this early example of the attentional plot, Scott described the texts of his literary competitors as simple catalogues of mimetic objects and objectified conventions, and he did so to attribute to these works a problematic mode of attention that never extended beyond the delimited scope of the mimetic. Mid-nineteenth-century realist novelists later drew on similar objectified figures within their own novels. In works by authors such as Thackeray and Eliot, small objects such as miniatures, banknotes, and sovereigns work to index the character’s attention to a delimited scope of space and carry the narrative’s attentional agon across the text; these novels also aspire toward a denouement where this same character would learn to direct her attention away from these problematic objects, and toward a broader, more diffuse attentional space. Of course, romantic novelists such as Collins and Stevenson would later complicate and contravene realism’s tendency to equate the spatialized object with the space of attention. Collins broke from this realist tradition by reimagining realism’s spatial object as a linguistic object and then by constructing a plot of attentional transformation that evokes a linguistic, as opposed to a spatial, dynamics. And yet as novels such as The Moonstone and Armadale attest, Collins nonetheless occasionally reprised Scott’s strategy of using problematic attentional objects to engage in a literary politics. This is most evident in The Moonstone’s parodic instances of distracted narration, which represent forms of literature such as realism and religious writing as a descent into the abject world of bibliographic objects. Stevenson would later take a similarly ambivalent position with respect to the object of attention. Thus, whereas kaleidoscopic objects such as Jekyll’s prismatic antidote or Christina’s spectacular apparel function to anticipate the promise of attentional denouement, objects such as Jekyll’s small white pile of salt, as well as interior spaces like Adam Weir’s study, index the characters’ descent into the abject attentional world of specialized professional labour. In fine, although romantic novelists complicated realism’s spatial methods for representing and conceiving of attention, and although they sometimes demonstrated a more sympathetic attachment to attentional objects, they also often sustained realism’s problematic relationship to such objects. For these romantic novelists—as for the realist novelists before them—the attentional object often simply represents an undifferentiated space that delineates the size and scope of the character’s attention.

If William Morris is unique within the history of the plot of attentional transformation, it is primarily because he was more ready and willing to interrogate the specific features of the attentional object—to come to understand the nature and dynamics of this space. His originality in

125 126 this respect is not surprising given that he dedicated so much of his life to designing and producing such objects. Over a career that was largely dedicated to the study and practice of visual arts and handicrafts, Morris designed and created a host of decorative objects that included paintings, wallpapers, textiles, books, and stained glass. But it was particularly in planning and organizing the Kelmscott Press—and specifically in researching the history and theory of book design—that Morris developed an abiding interest in how specific features of aesthetic objects work to encode and elicit technically specific forms of attention. This work taught him to consider the attentional object as something more than a vague and undifferentiated space that simply indexes the scope of a subject’s attention span, and that represents only one position in political dialectic. It taught him that such objects often encode complex, technical, and dialectical forms of attention, and that these forms of attention register a history of political conflicts between competing approaches to textual production. It taught him, in short, that bibliographic objects are themselves structured like the dialectical plot of attentional transformation. This realization influenced not only how Morris designed his books but also how he structured his romance narratives. As he became more and more interested in the forms of attention that can be encoded in bibliographic objects, he began to produce romance narratives that mirror the structure of these dialectical, bibliographic forms of attention.

In the current chapter, I aim to study this phenomenon—how Morris’s attentional plots change after he takes an active interest in the theory and practice of typographical design and practice. Tracking these changes will involve comparing the attentional plot of his socialist-utopian romance, News from Nowhere (1890), to the plots of later prose romances such as The Story of the Glittering Plain (1891) and The Well at the World’s End (1896). Morris’s early critics have often viewed this shift in Morris’s career—from those politically motivated romances such as News from Nowhere and A Dream of John Ball to these later, medievel-esque prose romances—as a sign of Morris’s regression as an artist and as a political subject.52 These early critics saw Morris’s decision in the 1890s to write what they viewed to be simply antique fairy tales as a sign of his late-life retreat from politics into the worlds of pure aestheticism and escapist fantasy. More recently, however, critics have troubled this regressive narrative, both by highlighting political themes and imagery within the late prose romances and also by pointing out how these seemingly apolitical fairy tales encode politically useful modes of aesthetic vision. In the current chapter, I continue this work of revising the traditional critical narrative that sets a technically proficient and politically sophisticated News from Nowhere against the derivative, puerile, and politically quietist late prose romances. But I will do this not by focusing on representations and expressions of vision in Morris’s works but instead by uncovering how, in the late prose romances, Morris performs a politics by representing and evoking politicized, bibliographic forms of attention. This textual politics becomes apparent when we notice the parallels between the attentional structure of the typographical surface of the Kelmscott book and the attentional form of Morris’s late prose

52 This critical history will be reviewed in Section II, below.

127 romances. Such parallels suggest that after Morris learned how to engage in a textual politics by suppressing textually encoded forms of distraction that tend to crop up on the printed page, he continued to intervene in this politics when devising the plots of his late romances, in which his heroes pursue the object of the quest by actively confronting and overcoming distractions of a similar nature. The remainder of this chapter will explore how Morris’s books and prose romances evoke these homologous structures, how these structures encode a textual politics, and how Morris’s work in the areas of typography and book design encouraged him to view the attentional object as a dynamic space, which ultimately allowed him both to generate a novel expression of and give entirely new form to the plot of attentional transformation.

I. News from Nowhere and the Surface of the Utopian Book Before surveying how Morris’s work in these areas influenced how he wrote and structured his attentional plots, it will pay to uncover the attentional plot that structures News from Nowhere, in an attempt to generate a baseline for understanding how Morris’s attentional plots change as a result of his experience with the Kelmscott Press. Of course, my decision to analyze the plot of News from Nowhere is something of a counterintuitive strategy, given the text’s status as a utopian narrative about a time and place in history that has been sanitized of all those conflicts that often serve to fuel plots and plotting. Mario Ortiz-Robles writes that in late-Victorian utopian fiction, as in utopian fiction in general, “the future is as reassuringly uneventful as the narrative that shapes it—nothing actually happens in utopia” (218). The text’s subtitle, “An Epoch of Rest,” would seem to support such an interpretation. When read as a bland, post-revolutionary utopia, News from Nowhere would seem to lack a plotted structure, insofar as the text comprises only the fragment of a plot—only the falling action of a larger historical narrative that tracks the series of events leading up to and following the violent revolution of 1952.

Notwithstanding the text’s status as an expression of a genre that is generally antithetical to plots and plotting, I argue that News from Nowhere in fact does include a plot; and this plot takes the form of a series of structured references to states of distraction and attention. The narrative’s initial state of conflict or disequilibrium is introduced in the early portions of the text, as Guest is introduced to the world of Nowhere and its utopian inhabitants. In his role as the narrative’s focalizer, Guest functions as the reader’s eyes, allowing us to look into the world of Nowhere; whatever Guest attends to, we attend to. But there are moments early on in the text when Morris’s textual vision of utopia threatens to be fragmented or disrupted when Guest’s attention becomes distracted by an enticing spectacle. This occurs when Guest’s attention becomes attracted by a figure that is clearly meant to be unexceptional—at least according to the text’s implied author. One such instance occurs when Guest is introduced to the motley figure of Boffin: “I looked over my shoulder, and saw something flash and gleam in the sunlight that lay across the hall; so I turned round, and at my ease saw a splendid figure slowly sauntering over the pavement; a man whose surcoat was embroidered most copiously as well as elegantly, so that the sun flashed back

128 from him as if he had been clad in golden armour” (59). If Boffin threatens to monopolize Guest’s attention, and thereby distract him from his duty to give full attention to Nowhere, it is not due to the spectacle of his luminescent surcoat, but because Guest assumes that this “exceedingly handsome” figure of “haughty mien” (59) is a man of preeminent importance—“at least the senator of these strange people” (60). But Guest’s cicerone, Dick, is quick to correct Guest’s misconception; he notifies Guest that this seemingly lionish presence is simply a lowly dustman who will no doubt distract Guest from his task of surveying this people and their customs by forcing him to answer an endless series of questions about Guest’s own nineteenth-century homeland (60). Another such instance occurs when Guest and Dick, after examining the lavish and stately architecture of the Hammersmith market, engage in a discourse about the customs and habits of the market goers. Once again, Guest is here serving as the reader’s medium for information about this aspect of Morris’s utopian society. And, once again, he risks shirking this role when his attention is drawn to a figure that Morris codes as unexceptional. When Guest is in the midst of inquiring if the market goers are “regular country people” (63), he is momentarily distracted from forming his question by the appearance of a woman who commands his attention: “As I spoke, my eye caught the face of a beautiful woman, tall, dark-haired, and white-skinned, […] who smiled kindly on me, and more kindly still, I thought, on Dick; so I stopped a minute, but presently went on” (63). If this apparition momentarily forestalls Guest’s request for interpretive guidance from his cicerone, it also threatens to distract him from receiving Dick’s response: “I heard him, though my eyes were turned away from him, for that pretty girl was just disappearing through the gate with her big basket of early peas, and I felt that disappointed kind of feeling which overtakes one when one has seen an interesting or lovely face which one is never likely to see again; and I was silent for a little” (63). Guest’s lament is clearly ironic, for such visions of feminine beauty are by no means as rare and fleeting in Nowhere as Guest makes them out to be; as a result of this society’s vigorous and healthful lifestyle, nearly all of its residents are as youthful and comely as this young market goer. But Guest is transfixed by this vision of beauty as if she is the only one to be found in utopia; and, as a result of this misconception, he has once again run the risk of being distracted from his role as the reader’s guide through the world of Nowhere. These examples illustrate that, in News from Nowhere, narrative distractions threaten to take place when Guest’s attention becomes absorbed and monopolized by a figure or vision that, while deserving of momentary attention, is not deserving of Guest’s full and sustained attention.

Such moments are more than simple parentheses through which Morris characterizes his time traveller as out of tune with his new surroundings. They form part of an agon that eventually builds to a climactic moment of distracted subjectivity. This climax occurs when Guest, Dick, and Clara—now on their way up the Thames toward Kelmscott Manor—take rest for an evening near Runnymede. It is at this point in his trip that Guest meets his third and final cicerone on his tour through Nowhere: the wise, beautiful, and energetic Ellen. Ellen is Guest’s most advanced tour guide insofar as she encapsulates the best qualities of Guest’s two previous guides: the waterman Dick—with his youthful sociability, healthful lifestyle, and love of industrious labour; and the

129 antiquarian Old Hammond—with his wisdom, intelligence, and historical sensibility. Adding to her preeminence is the fact that she is also strikingly beautiful on top of all this. Because Ellen represents the consummation of all the best aspects of Morris’s socialist utopia, she has the potential to play two different roles vis-à-vis Guest. As the most knowledgeable and comprehensive of Guest’s three tour guides, she shows the potential to reveal to Guest aspects of this utopian world that he has not been made privy to until this point. However, as an eminently beautiful utopian subject who has qualities that set her above her peers—as a subject who would be qualified to be “the senator of these strange people,” if their system of government were different—she poses, for Guest, the greatest threat of distraction so far. And if she triggers the climax of this narrative’s attentional plot, it is because when Guest first makes her acquaintance, he engages with her as the second, more distracting of these two possibilities.

This climax occurs during an ironic set piece in which Guest gives in to the allure of Ellen’s visage at the very moment when she is giving a speech that attempts to direct everyone’s attention to the semiotic surface of Nowhere. This speech is prompted by a comment made by Ellen’s grandfather, who, in praising the literature of the bygone capitalist society for its liveliness and “spirit of adventure,” bemoans the passing of a vigorous era of nineteenth-century fiction (174). Ellen takes issue with this position in exclaiming: “‘Books, books! always books, grandfather! When will you understand that after all it is the world we live in which interests us; the world of which we are a part, and which we can never love too much? Look!’ she said, throwing open the casement wider and showing us the white light sparkling between the black shadows of the moonlit garden […], ‘look! these are our books in these days!’” (175).53 Morris then signals the importance of this sentiment by having Ellen reiterate it: “Yes, these are our books, and if we want more, can we not find work to do in the beautiful buildings that we raise up all over the country (and I know there is nothing like them in past times), wherein a man can put forth whatever is in him, and make his hands set forth his mind and his soul” (175). But when Ellen closes this speech that articulates the idea that the surface of utopia is a surface that should be read and attended to in a tender, loving fashion, like a good book, Guest reveals that he has not registered its message. If he has failed to follow this lesson on reading from his third and final tutor, it is because he has been more interested in surveying the orator’s features instead: “She paused a little, and I for my part could not help staring at her, and thinking that if she were a book, the pictures in it were most lovely. The colour mantled in her delicate sunburnt cheeks; her grey eyes, light amidst the tan of her face, kindly looked on all of us as she spoke” (175). If Ellen’s father generally fails to give attention to the utopian world around him because he gives priority to the printed word, Guest fails to do so in this instance because he would prefer to survey the

53 In his narrative about “How the Change Came,” Old Hammond describes the spirit that galvanizes the newly born post-revolutionary society in the following manner: “The spirit of the new days, of our days, was to be delight in the life of the world; intense and overweening love of the very skin and surface of the earth on which man dwells, such as a lover has in the fair flesh of the woman he loves; this, I say, was to be the new spirit of the time” (158).

130 physical features of his guide. Of course, it is tempting to view Guest’s actions in this instant as consistent with the orator’s message, insofar as Ellen’s visage is continuous with that broader geographical text that can be read for evocations of the utopian lifestyle. Like the “beautiful buildings that [the utopians] raise up all over the country,” Ellen’s sunburnt cheeks express important information about this society—specifically its inhabitants’ love of healthful, dignified labour. However, this is not how Guest “reads” Ellen’s features; in fact, he does not read these features at all. He studies them as aesthetic spectacles that are removed from that larger utopian text of which they are a part. He appreciates her sunburnt cheek, for instance, not as a sign of her predilection for outdoor work but instead as an aesthetic detail. Thus, after comparing her cheek to the rouge or mantling of a painted figure (evoking both the cosmetic and artistic senses of the word) he considers her darkened cheek as a foil that enhances the subtle beauty of her light grey eyes. In other words, Guest gives so much attention to Ellen’s visage not because she is consistent with the surface of the utopian text but rather because he thinks her an aesthetic decoration that is superior to the broader utopian text of which she is a part. Morris makes this idea clear by riffing on Ellen’s bibliographic metaphor. Although Morris explains that Guest studied Ellen as a book that (presumably) includes both text and image, he also has Guest focus on the book’s images to the exclusion of the text because he finds these pictures to be “most lovely.” Morris uses a subsequent piece of dialogue to give emphasis to the idea that Guest has missed Ellen’s lesson on how best to pay attention in utopia. When Ellen’s grandfather asks Guest to answer the question that had been posed before Ellen began her speech—that is, whether people are more lively and happier under capitalism—Guest betrays his distraction quite clearly: “‘What question?’ said I. For I must confess that Ellen’s strange and almost wild beauty had put it out of my head” (176). Up until this point in the narrative, the attentional agon had only bubbled and simmered occasionally in those isolated moments where Guest became temporarily preoccupied with images and figures that did not deserve his full, sustained attention. But this agon reaches the climax of a full boil in this ironic scene where Guest fails to receive the author’s lesson on how best to pay attention in utopia because he has become distracted by the appearance of the author’s mouthpiece.54 Whereas Ellen speaks on behalf of the narrative’s author in inviting Guest to survey every inch of the utopian surface as if it were a text to be read carefully—and with pleasure— from beginning to end, Guest chooses instead to focus his attention on the pictures in this book to the exclusion of the “words” written on its broader surface.

In order for the plot to reach denouement, then, Guest must be released from this bout of distraction—this absorption in the image of Ellen—and learn to distribute his attention across the textual surface of utopian society. This transformation occurs when Ellen, having failed in her explicit attempts to tell Guest how to attend to this surface, instead tries to show him how to do

54 Whereas Elizabeth Carolyn Miller contends that Ellen’s panegyric both expresses Nowhere’s “antitextual disposition” and “targets the nineteenth-century novel as a particularly loathsome form” (Slow Print 76), I read this scene less as one that stakes a position in a textual politics and more as one that contributes to this utopian romance’s attentional plot.

131 so, in a chapter appropriately titled “The Journey’s End.” The process through which Guest acquires the ability to pay attention can be tracked by following his changing perception of Ellen’s eye. When he was in the midst of the agon of his thralldom to the aestheticized image of Ellen, he objectified her eyes as “light jewels” that passively reflected the light shining on “her sunburnt face” (179). But after Ellen joins him on his tour of the Thames, and after he takes up the oars of the rowboat for the first time, he notices that these eyes are not only passive, objective things but also quite actively attentive organs. Guest thus remarks how “Ellen leaned back in the stern and seemed to enjoy herself thoroughly. I could see that she was looking at things and let nothing escape her” (204). Ellen gives voice to her mode of actively attending to the utopian surface through an apostrophe to the ever-changing scene of the upper Thames: “‘Oh the beautiful fields!’ she said; ‘I had no idea of the charm of a very small river like this. The smallness of the scale of everything, the short reaches, and the speedy change of the banks, give one a feeling of going somewhere, of coming to something strange, a feeling of adventure which I have not felt in bigger waters’” (209). Guest eventually learns to imitate her method of attending to this natural surface after witnessing her habits: In spite of my new-born excitement about Ellen, and my gathering fear of where it would land me, I could not help taking abundant interest in the condition of the river and its banks; all the more as she never seemed weary of the changing picture, but looked at every yard of flowery bank and gurgling eddy with the same kind of affectionate interest which I myself once had so fully, as I used to think, and perhaps had not altogether lost even in this strangely changed society with all its wonders. (215) In the earlier part of the narrative, Guest’s distractibility was related to his tendency to isolate particular individuals as exceptional objects of interest; as a result, he would become transfixed by such individuals and fail momentarily to direct his attention to the beauty and significance of the broader surface of the utopian world. Evoking the miscalibrated attention span of a Silas Marner or an Amelia Sedley, that is, Guest’s attention had a tendency in this earlier portion of the text to become confined within the delimited space marked out by these exceptional individuals. But in this moment when Guest learns to pay attention to the surface of the world in the same manner that his tour guide “let nothing escape her,” he is relieved of his earlier tendency to let his attention pool within the delimited spatial confines of the exceptional object. And yet unlike his fictional antecedent Marner, Guest is not relieved of this condition when he learns simply to let his attention wander away from a spatially circumscribed object; he is relived of this condition when he learns how to pay a type of attention that is similarly diffuse in its scope, but also atomized and systematic in its dynamics. That is, he learns how to pay attention when Ellen shows him how to turn the surface of the world into an attentional grid composed of a number of small spatialized units. What makes her attention so active, so dynamic, and so inapt to become fixed by only one object or spectacle is her appreciation for the “smallness of the scale of everything,” where every section of the attentional grid on the surfaces of utopia comprises a new adventure, something new to attend to. Guest learns to do the same by dividing this surface into

132 so many “yards” of “bank” and so many “gurgling edd[ies].” By imposing on the surface of the earth this grid work of small spaces—each of which deserves as much attention as any other— Guest ensures that he will never again hierarchize objects and sites of attention as he so often erroneously did in the agon of this utopian plot. Morris, moreover, by representing Guest’s transformation in this manner, develops in News from Nowhere a new way of narrating the denouement to the attentional plot. In Morris’s version of this narrative form, the character reaches denouement not simply when his attention is released from the spatial confines marked out by the attentional object but also when he becomes mindful of how each inch of the surface of the world is just as deserving of attention as any other. He reaches denouement, that is, when he comes to pay attention to the surface of the world as if it were a cartographic grid facilitating a thoroughgoing geographical survey, or as a text that he reads, word by word, grapheme by grapheme, from beginning to end.

For Ellen and Guest, reading the surface of the world in this manner is an enchanted experience attended by feelings of “enjoy[ment],” “interest” and “adventure.” But notwithstanding these testimonies, there is at the same time something anti-climactic, bathetic, and even disenchanting about this attentional plot where characters come to observe the natural world in this plodding, systematic manner, as if they were simply scanning so many atomized spaces or so many words on a page. There is something blandly indiscriminating about this readerly mode of attention that only differentiates between images and objects along the lines of an abstract and arbitrary geographical grid that divides the world simply into units of space. And there is also something ahistorical about this leveling and thus universalizing way of representing attention, as if how— and to what—one pays attention does not have a history or politics, and as if attention could be considered outside of these things. If News from Nowhere is a bland narrative text, then, it is not for the reason that it does not contain a plot; it is instead because this plot concludes with a sort of leveling of the utopian world into this prosaic, undifferentiated, and ahistorical attentional space.

Morris would come to develop ways of thinking about attention in more discriminating, historicized, and political terms; and facilitating this new way of thinking was his work for the Kelmscott Press. Through his collaboration with the printer and print historian Emery Walker, which exposed him to the history and theory of typographic design, Morris came more and more to see the surface of the printed page as a dialectical, agonistic space populated by bibliographic and typographic details encoding forms of attention and distraction that evoke a print history and politics. And as he learned to view the space of the page as this historicized and politicized attentional space, he also learned to compose narratives where characters engage the surface of the world as a similarly dialectical, historicized, and politicized space of textual attention.

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II. The Kelmscott Press and the Surface of Bibliographic Object The Kelmscott Press and the late prose romances: within the world of Morris criticism, these two projects are often considered to be twinned and coeval phenomena. No doubt there are good reasons for imagining them in this way. There is, of course, the historical coincidence connecting the two. Thus, Morris, from 1891 until his death in October 1896, and following a decade largely dedicated to socialist politics, spent an inordinate amount of time and capital on his Kelmscott Press, which employed at one time as many as eleven printers and produced over fifty titles; and during this same period, he also began writing his series of late prose romances, and many of these were published for the first time in Kelmscott Press editions.55 There are also certain aesthetic parallels that connect the Kelmscott Press and the late prose romances. This idea is well illustrated by Figure 1: the opening spread of the Kelmscott edition of Morris’s The Wood Beyond the World (1894). As we can see, the archaic and hyper-aestheticized features of the material book—its detailed wood engraving, heavy Gothic lettering, ornate initial letter, and interlacing borders—are mirrored in the literary text’s artificial and antiquated diction (“goodly,” “roisterer”), instances of kenning (“war-fellow,” “head-man”), and traces of Old English alliterative verse. Leah Price has recently underlined the “gulf” at the center of the Victorian book dividing its linguistic and bibliographic modes of signification, and has argued that it is therefore most “productive to turn our attention to moments where these two strands of evidence” convey distinct meanings (35). But the Kelmscott romances are exceptional among Victorian books insofar as they suggest Morris’s deliberate attempt to heal this rift by coordinating diverse codes within the space of a single biblio-textual object. That Morris’s late-life bibliographic and textual projects come together and intertwine in this way, on the surface of the page, has doubtless played a large role in encouraging critics to consider them as two parts of a single aesthetic project that exemplifying the labour of the final years of his life.

As has been thoroughly documented, Morris’s early critics were largely unsympathetic to the socialist artist’s late-life turn toward these twinning artistic projects. They considered the Kelmscott late romance as a sort of icon of Morris’s growing late-life preoccupation with aesthetics alone, to the exclusion of socialist politics. Exemplifying this line of criticism is George Bernard Shaw, who judged the late prose romances to be conspicuously lacking in political and moral substance, and who perceived the Kelmscott Press to be simply a machine for disposing of such useless texts: “Morris, to fill the maw of the Kelmscott Press, began to pour out tale after tale of knights in armour, lovely ladies, slaughterous hand-to-hand combats, witches in enchanted castles changing humans into beasts, lovelorn heroes going mad in the mountains, haunted woods, quests after impossibilities, all under medieval conditions” (qtd. in Peterson 179). Here, Shaw evokes the image of a snake eating its own tail to depict Morris’s two end-of-life preoccupations

55 I take the late romances to comprise The Story of the Glittering Plain (1891), The Wood Beyond the World (1894), Child Christopher and Goldilind the Fair (1895), The Well at the World’s End (1896), The Water of the Wondrous Isles (1897), and The Sundering Flood (1897).

134 as wasteful, self-indulgent, decadent, and—most importantly—politically pointless. E.P. Thompson would later draw on similar figures from the pantheon of decadent imagery to represent these twinned projects as the deserved final tryst of a weak and dying man who had already spent sufficient effort on the socialist cause: Insofar as [Morris] withdrew from active propaganda, it is important to remember that he was forced to withdraw by reason of his failing health. […] He had given the best of his mind and energy to the Cause, and now, when he must have known that he had not many more years to live, he allowed himself to indulge in his pleasures. […] Both his late prose romances and his work with the Kelmscott Press were undertaken in this mood. (672, emphasis in the original) As both Shaw’s and Thompson’s comments suggest, early criticism of Morris’s late-life work was often predicated on a binary that structured a set of distinctions between his pre- and post-1890 careers. On the one side are life, health, energy, and Morris’s early political work and writing; on the other are disease, decline, degeneration, waste, aesthetic pleasure, and (conspicuously and consistently paired to embody this second set of traits) the late prose romances and the Kelmscott Press.

More recently, however, critics have attempted to trouble this traditional decadent narrative by uncovering the political meanings evoked—as well as the political functions performed—by Morris’s late-life projects. Much of this work has focused on the content of the late prose romances to excavate political meanings from texts that were previously read as vacuous fairytale plots.56 But there is also a subspecies of such criticism that has done much to tear down the semantic wall that early critics had erected between the so-called political and aesthetic phases of Morris’s career by studying how the later works express an aesthetic mode of vision that has political value and potential. This latter approach rests on the assumption that although the Kelmscott romances eschew overt political themes and representations, and although they evoke signs of material decadence, they nonetheless perform political work by encouraging their readers to adopt a type of vision that might stimulate positive social change. Christine Bolus-Reichert illustrates this position by writing that in “the late romances, Morris continually prioritizes active over passive looking, for his heroes and readers. Social transformation […] depends on inner sight, visionary dreaming, rather than on the givens of the external world” (74-75). Demonstrating a similar understanding of the texts’ visual phenomenology is John Plotz, who asserts that Morris promulgates a socialist sensibility by “captur[ing] in” his romances “not so much the features of the world as its feel, not the social spaces we move through but the sensory traces those movements produce” (“Nowhere and Everywhere” 948). Such language is not only confined to discussions of the late romances; it also crops up in writing about other facets of Morris’s artistic oeuvre. Thus, Carole Silver argues that in “both the literary and visual arts,” Morris’s “fidelity

56 See Bennett; Silver, “Socialism Internalized”; and Vaninskaya, William Morris and the Ideal Community.

135 was less to truth in nature than to the truths revealed by the inner eye” (The Romance xii). And Norman Kelvin claims that the Kelmscott books “expres[s] concretely” Morris’s “commitment to the aesthetic as the true life of the senses that socialism promises to fulfill” (162). This branch of visionary criticism thus sidesteps the problem of how Morris’s late-life art lacks political representations by considering this art in non-representational terms. Its members argue that Morris’s biblio-textual objects communicate a political message not through linguistic signs or symbols but through textually encoded acts that inculcate in the reader or observer, in a phenomenological fashion, the inner political vision of the socialist artist. And in contrast to Shaw’s image of the Kelmscott late romances as closed circuits that have no political force or purchase, the image implied by these later critics is that of an open circuit where Morris’s art achieves its political agenda by actively engaging and positively influencing its readers and observers via a visual mechanism.

But while this more recent branch of “visionary” criticism discovers an ingenious way of salvaging these works from the pleasure heap of history, it nonetheless introduces a particularly pressing problem. In emphasizing the internal quality of Morris’s political vision—figuring it as a private communiqué between artist and consumer—it largely fails to index this quality to specific features of the artworks, to concrete political movements or theories, or to established discourses on psycho-perception. This is evoked by terms like “inner eye,” “inner sight,” “sensory traces,” and “the true life of the senses.” Such terms imply that even when Morris’s vision is projected onto the surface of a text or textile it cannot be fully explicated, evaluated, or historicized due to its always maintaining a measure of inaccessibility, interiority, indistinctness, and rarefied idealization. How is one to appraise the value and efficacy of such a furtive and mystical critical object?

Capable of addressing this issue is a critical method that considers the texts’ redeeming psycho- perceptual quality more as a form of attention and less as a mode of vision. One reason for its relative efficacy is that unlike optics or vision, which are predominantly theorized at the level of the perceiving subject, attention is often theorized as an interface between subject and object. To appreciate this, it will pay to return to that example from the work of N. Katherine Hayles with which I opened this dissertation. When Hayles explicates a typology of attentional forms, she does so not through reference to a purely subjective and introspective experience, but rather by conjuring a scene of subject-object relations. Thus, she illustrates the concept of “deep attention” by invoking the mental “picture” of “a college sophomore, deep in Pride and Prejudice, with her legs draped over an easy chair, oblivious to her ten-year-old brother” (187-88). To elucidate the concept of deep attention, that is, Hayles borrows from the bibliographic features of the Austenian text, transposing the quality of depth from the thick (or deep) nineteenth-century novel onto the attention of the reading subject. This cursory example illustrates how critical and theoretical work on attention—contra that on optics or vision—tends to locate its terms and concepts in that

136 tangible (and therefore less furtive and rarefied) inter-subjective material medium that is the book or artwork.

Within the context of Morris criticism specifically, Stephen Arata and Jerome McGann have perhaps gone furthest in using the attentional approach to uncover the forms of politicized attention implicit in Morris’s artworks. As we have already seen, Arata has done this by highlighting the easy style of Morris’s prose and poetry, claiming that this style promotes in the reader a state of “diffused attention”—a non-laborious attentional mode conducive to intellectual multi-tasking (197-98). For Arata, this textually encoded form of attention also implies a textually mediated politics; that is, it reflects Morris’s active opposition to—and his attempts to counter the pernicious influence of—late-century professional and pedagogic discourses that promoted the “bureaucratization of reading” and the laborious mode of sustained voluntary attention associated with it (202). McGann takes a different approach, directing his analysis not to style per se but to the biblio-linguistic surface of the Kelmscott book. He argues that Morris arranged the book’s bibliographic and linguistic markers in a way that draws the reader’s full attention to the surface of the page, and he names this phenomenon the “text’s attentiveness” (49). His essay—while never fully articulating the political implications of this phenomenon—nonetheless suggests an attentional politics. This is one where Morris, in drawing the reader’s attention to the details of literary and print craftsmanship, presents the book to the reader as a made thing and thereby disrupts the reader’s fetishistic tendency to overlook its production history. In their differing ways, then, Arata and McGann anticipate what I wish to call the third phase of criticism on Morris’s late-life works. They do this by illustrating how the attentional approach, with its focus on concrete textual details, can be more transparent than the visionary method in explicating and interrogating these texts as psycho-perceptual zones of political praxis conjoining author and reader, maker and user.

Taken together, however, these two authors evoke a Morrisian text marred by split attention. Whereas McGann’s concept of textual attentiveness entails a reader whose attentional resources are fully consumed by the codes of the print surface, Arata’s notion of diffused attention implies a decidedly inattentive reader—one left with an attentional surplus that might be put toward other productive tasks. This inconsistency suggests that neither attentiveness nor diffused attention is an autochthonous feature of the Morrisian text but instead a quality that the critic projects onto it in somewhat arbitrarily isolating a set of textual features. It thus signals the need for a standard for distinguishing between the attentional quality resident in Morris’s work and one that is merely projected onto it.

I propose that if we wish to pursue the third phase of Morris criticism in earnest, we must first establish our bearings in the midst of these divergent theories by focusing on the technical concepts that informed the production of the Kelmscott books, specifically those of the nineteenth-century printers and typographers who wished to revive old-style typefaces. There are

137 two good reasons for doing so. First, Morris’s Kelmscott Press was at the center of this typographical movement, with its genesis often traced to a November 1888 lecture by Morris’s chief typographic advisor, Emery Walker, on the principles of old-style revival. As historians have often remarked, Walker’s lecture precipitated a shift in Morris’s artistic career, stimulating his first steps in establishing the Kelmscott Press.57 Second, this typographical movement in which Walker and Morris were so undeniably engaged was primarily concerned with issues around textual attention. Its principal objective was to reverse the damage done by modern typographers who designed typefaces on the basis of mathematical precision and geometrical consistency—features that were thought to diminish the text’s readability and, in extreme cases, elicit from the reader a typographically specific form of distraction called dazzle. In recapitulating the design principles from the early days of print, revivalists interrogated the intimate details of type to understand how they might better manage readerly attention by preventing such distractions from arising. It is because Morris was so caught up in these typographical discourses and concepts—both invoking and reimagining them through his Press—that I wish to draw on them as a means of orienting the critical conversation that re-evaluates his late-life works as something like textual zones of psycho-perceptual praxis.

It is well known by now that Morris employed a host of pre-industrial technologies, materials, and methods at the Kelmscott Press. In the age of powered rotary presses, linotype machines, and machine-made paper, Morris insisted on using hand presses, manual typesetting, and handmade linen paper. That the Press was born in the teeth of the Second Industrial Revolution has no doubt encouraged critics to interpret his use of antiquated technologies as part of an attempt to countervail the age’s increasingly efficient and fast-paced modes of print production and consumption.58 Thus, Miller’s decision to place the intricately (and presumably slowly) engraved frontispiece from the Kelmscott edition of A Dream of John Ball on the cover of her book Slow Print (2013)—a work which claims that the Kelmscott books were “[p]ointedly removed from the general flow of mainstream print” and “construct themselves as utopian spaces outside the ‘march of progress’ narrative [...] that had accrued to print and to capitalism” (26). Thus, also, Frederick Kirchhoff’s characterization of Morris’s Kelmscott productions as “Anti-Books”—“legible if read slowly,” but otherwise frustrating the reader’s attempts to skim the text for information (94). According to these and other critics, because the Kelmscott book asks its labourers and readers to conduct their respective tasks at a relaxed and humane pace, it exists on one side of a

57 May Morris recalls that, after Walker’s lecture, “Father was very much excited. The sight of the finely-proportioned letters so enormously enlarged, and gaining rather than losing by the process, the enlargement emphasizing all the qualities of the type; his feeling, so characteristic of him, that if such a result had been once obtained it could be done again, stirred in him an overwhelming desire to hazard the experiment at least. Talking to Emery Walker on the way home from the lecture, he said to him, ‘Let’s make a new fount of type.’ And that is the way the Kelmscott Press came into being” (415). For similar accounts of the Press’s origins, see Peterson 74; and Sparling 8. 58 In addition to Kirchhoff and Miller, see Kelvin 154.

138 revolutionary dichotomy dividing the speed and efficiency of industrial capitalism from the slowness and deliberateness of anti-capitalist and utopian conditions.

But when we use Walker’s lecture as a touchstone for understanding how revivalist ideas influenced the Press, we begin to appreciate this anti-capitalist politics in other, less strictly utopian and idealistic, terms. Walker’s lecture was a visual tour through the history of typography aided by a series of lantern slides. It was never published, but its contents survive in the form of his lecture notes and in a review of the lecture by Oscar Wilde. We know from Wilde’s review that Walker structured his history upon the evolving relationship between printed and handwritten letterforms: “[Walker] pointed out the intimate connection between printing and handwriting—as long as the latter was good the printers had a living model to go by, but when it decayed printing decayed also” (qtd. in Peterson 329). This brief summary encapsulates the chief principle informing the revival movement. Its proponents like Walker and the American printer Theodore Low De Vinne—whose writing distinctly influenced Walker’s ideas about typography—traced the advent of the modern age of printing and type design to a rupture between printing and handwriting.59 They noted how modern type designers often stripped their letters of the vestiges of handwriting (its bold lines, natural inconsistencies and imperfections, and squat and almost square dimensions) and in the process straitjacketed the letter into an appearance of geometrical consistency and uniformity. They also contended that such transformations made the modern typeface too narrow, its hairlines too fine, and its overall appearance too slight, gray, and spindly.60 For them, reviving old-style typefaces meant returning to the convention of using the bold and idiosyncratic form of the handwritten letter (as well as types originally modeled on this letter) as a model for new typefaces.

Of course, in taking Wilde as a messenger for Walker’s ideas, I risk characterizing this movement as a reaction against Philistinism and its apparent distaste for beauty, grace, and non- instrumentality. But old-style revival was not simply predicated on preserving humanistic values in an increasingly mechanized and utilitarian age. It also engaged modern type designers directly on the issue of speed and efficiency, attempting to remedy the misconception that modern letterforms were more efficient in their use of time and space than their old-style counterparts. For example, De Vinne valued old style not for its beauty but because it could be read quickly and efficiently—deciphered “at a glance” even by those of “failing eyesight” (The Practice 231). He also undermined the assumption that the modern letter, with its narrower shoulder and smaller footprint, used page space more economically than did old-style fonts. He claimed that while this should be the case in theory, it was not so in practice, since the modern letter’s slight, gray, and

59 Morris’s connection to the movement can be traced to De Vinne via Walker. Berkson writes, “we know of Walker’s familiarity with De Vinne,” and “it is hard not to credit [Walker’s] views about readability and nineteenth-century type to De Vinne’s influence” (10). 60 For a summary of the distinctions between old-style and modern typefaces, see De Vinne, The Practice 188-90.

139 indistinct appearance often forced printers to add spaces between words and lines to make this letter legible (Historic 88-90). Printers using old-style type, on the other hand, had the luxury of setting the text more closely, since the old-style letters’ thick lines and natural irregularities permitted the reader to identify words and letters with relative ease. Walker echoed De Vinne’s observations in his lecture notes, claiming that an old-style font set with minimal spacing “‘gets in’ about the same amount” of print per page as a modern font properly spaced; at the same time, it allows “for the use of a larger face of type” and precludes the “objectionable appearance of white stripes” that result from too much leading (qtd. in Peterson 327). In characterizing the distinctions between the two styles in this way, De Vinne and Walker illustrate that revivalists were not attempting to carve out a space for beauty and slowness in the midst of an increasingly ugly and fast-paced world. They were challenging modern printers on the point of efficiency, exposing as false or overblown the progressivist motivations implied by modern type design— particularly the idea that the slimmer, stripped-down modern letter was more efficient in its use of readerly time and bibliographic space than its stouter and more capricious predecessor.

While Walker’s claim that old style “‘gets in’ about the same amount” per page implies an ambivalent choice between two equally efficient options that differ along aesthetic lines alone, Morris is less ambivalent in his own writing. He not only highlights the aesthetic distinctions between the two styles, but also underscores the relatively unreadable nature of modern types by emphasizing the concept of typographical dazzle. The print historian William Berkson defines this concept, and in the process suggests how it could imply, for Morris, an intensification of Walker’s insights: Dazzle is […] due to what I call the “picket fence” effect. When blacks and whites are close and even parallel stripes, they create visual dazzle. This has been a running complaint about Bodoni, including by De Vinne. […] What exactly is the cause of the picket fence effect isn’t clear. It could be what are called “Mach bands”—apparent bands of brighter white just outside a dark area. Or it could be a confusion by the eye as to what is figure and what is ground. In any case the “dazzle”—a word that has kept coming up over the centuries—is real and reduces readability in a text type. (21) According to Berkson, then, types sometimes generate instances where the reader’s vision becomes blurred or confused—dazzled, in effect. Illustrating this phenomenon is Figure 2, where the series of evenly spaced black and white lines should be perceived as a blurred, buzzing muddle of black and white, figure and ground. Typographers often index a typeface’s readability to its tendency to produce such parallel patterns: the greater the number of vertical parallel lines that show up between and within the letters, the more dazzling and unreadable that type is judged to be. Dazzle is in this respect a textually encoded form of distraction—a form of readerly confusion that, like Hayles’s “deep attention,” can be indexed to specific features of the textual object.

140

Because revivalists often singled out Bodoni as exemplary of how modern typefaces produced this dazzling effect, analyzing a sample of Bodoni will help us appreciate the connection between readerly distraction and the shape of modern letterforms. Figure 3 shows how dazzle might be traced to the contrast between Bodoni’s thick rectangular stems and its razor-thin hairlines. By focusing on Bodoni’s lower case “b,” we see that its thin hairlines cause its shoulder to approach invisibility. In sharp contrast, the stem of the “b” is bold and linear-rectangular, a quality that is mirrored in the shape of the bowl. This causes the “b” to appear less as a circular bowl attached to a linear stem by way of a prominent shoulder, and more as two vertical black lines (or pickets) interceded by a rectangle of white space. It is principally the combination of these two qualities within a type—this rigidly linear vertical-rectangular shape and this disparity between thick and thin lines—that was thought to produce the appearance of parallel pickets within the text and thus the resulting dazzling and distracting effect.

Like De Vinne, Morris was aware of this connection between typographical style and dazzling effect, demonstrating this awareness in his writing about typography and through the design of his Kelmscott typefaces. In his essay “The Ideal Book,” he articulates his principles of type design by invoking Bodoni as his counter-ideal, denouncing it as “the most illegible type that was ever cut” due to the “preposterous” disparity between its “thicks and thins” (69). Moreover, in his essay about the founding of the Kelmscott Press, he uses similar diction to explain why he designed his own fonts on the basis of fifteenth-century Italian and German exemplars: “I wanted […] letter pure in form; severe, without needless excrescences; solid, without the thickening and thinning of the line, which is the essential fault of the ordinary modern type, and which makes it difficult to read” (“A Note” 75-76, emphasis added). That he took pains to prevent dazzle from arising within his own fonts is also made apparent through an analysis of his types. For example, if we focus on Morris’s lower case “b,” and compare it to the “b” of Bodoni, we see that the former shows greater consistency across thick and thin lines. And when Morris does occasionally modulate the width of his line (particularly in the Troy type), he does so in a way that the resulting parallels between “thicks” do not contribute to the advent of vertical pickets between letters. This is because such parallels occur on a bias and not in line with the vertical axis, as they do in Bodoni (fig. 4). Such evidence demonstrates that Morris chose to design his typefaces upon fifteenth-century exemplars not only for aesthetic or symbolic reasons, but also as a way of actively avoiding the folly of readerly inefficiency and distraction that characterized the dazzling modern letter. Indeed, Morris quite openly articulates this double intent in the mission statement for the Kelmscott Press, where he states, “I began printing books with the hope of producing some which would have a definite claim to beauty, while at the same time they should be easy to read and should not dazzle the eye, or trouble the intellect of the reader by eccentricity of form in the letters” (75, emphasis added). An interesting pairing, this: not beauty and slowness, nor beauty and dignified labour, but rather beauty and readability—and particularly the suppression of dazzle.

141

Thus, after Walker opened Morris’s eyes to the ambivalence between modern and old-style types in terms of speed and efficiency, Morris seized on the concept of dazzle as a means of expanding on Walker’s inversion. It is not difficult to understand why Morris would do so. Dazzle communicates, through a veritable experience of perception, that modern styles, with their geometrically precise and stripped-down aspect, not only fail in their implied objectives to enhance readability and productive efficiency but also induce a form of readerly distraction that is wholly antithetical to such objectives. In that dazzling moment of confused perception, when the bond between printer and reader is suddenly and unquestionably short-circuited, the progressivist logic of modern typographic innovation—such as the inclination toward the increased speed and efficiency of print consumption—is undeniably exposed as hollow doxa. In fixing so keenly on this incriminating concept in his writing, and by deliberately avoiding this phenomenon when designing his typefaces, Morris behaves not simply as a utopian artist cultivating a space “outside the ‘march of progress’ narrative” (Miller, Slow Print 26). He also takes on a more confrontational posture, not willing to give up the field of speed and efficiency to the capitalist mode. This is the Morris of “Useful Work Versus Useless Toil” (1884) who characterizes classed society not by the unequal distribution of wealth across classes but as a system that denies real wealth to everyone—even members of the privileged class (294). This is the Morris, in other words, who not only creates dream visions of an ideal society to counterpoint the inhumane pace of contemporary social reality but also exposes the false logic of capitalism and its attendant techno-progressive narrative. If we overlook the technical specificity of the term dazzle—as well as the importance Morris places on avoiding this phenomenon—we risk overlooking an important political dimension of the Kelmscott project.

My insistence on making the suppression of dazzle exemplary of Morris’s print praxis might seem immoderate, given that type design counted for only one part of a book-production network that included papermakers, compositors, press operators, illustrators, and wood engravers. But as revivalist typographers made clear (and as Morris was no doubt aware), the goal of suppressing distractions was effected not only through type design but also via other aspects of bookmaking, including the variety of paper and method of impression used by the printer. De Vinne explains this idea: “Great changes in the appearance of types are […] made by different methods of presswork. […] An elastic or ‘soaking’ impression from new types on wet, coarse or laid paper will have the thickness and bluntness of worn-out letter; on hard, smooth paper, impressed against a hard surface, the same types can be made to show hairlines almost as delicate as those of copper-plate” (Historic 99). De Vinne also underlines the correlation between dazzle and modern print practices using diction that may have influenced the language of Morris’s Kelmscott mission statement. He states that in books produced through modern practices, “the color of the print is too often more gray than black, the lines are weak, the letters ‘run together,’ and are dazzling and confusing […] Types made sharp enough by the type-founder are made still sharper by feeble”

142 modern “presswork” (Historic 98, emphasis added).61 Revivalists were therefore well aware that the fight against the dazzling modern letter had to be waged on fields of type design and print practice simultaneously. By situating Morris within this movement, we come to view his decisions to print his texts on dampened handmade laid paper using an Albion hand press not only as part of his attempt to recuperate an early-modern aesthetic, or the slow and dignified conditions of pre-industrial labour.62 We also come to see them as part of his aim “to get the impression black enough” (Morris, Letters 179), and thereby avoid the modern techno-progressive folly of the faint and illegible letter, and particularly the over-slight hairline, which was believed to be among the chief causes of typographical dazzle.63

Claiming that Morris executed printing and type design in accordance with revivalist principles is by no means novel.64 But what I wish to do—in addition to highlighting the politics implicit in Morris’s typography—is revise the standard print-historical narrative about Morris’s relationship to the revival movement. I wish to do this, in part, by bringing into the fold of the Press’s coordinated effort to eliminate typographical distractions Morris’s idiosyncratic and much- maligned typesetting practices. These are the practices that contributed to the close-set and distinctively dark and saturated appearance of the Kelmscott page. For example, Morris urged that “the modern practice of ‘leading’ should be used as little as possible,” and that “the lateral spaces between the words should be […] no more than is necessary to distinguish clearly the division into words, and […] should be as nearly equal as possible” (“A Note” 78, 76). He also imposed unwritten rules stipulating that lines should be end-justified and that new paragraphs should be identified not with a paragraph break but with a pilcrow or a small leaf ornament, which eliminated much of that white space that appears at the ends of paragraphs in conventionally composed texts (fig. 5). Print historians have often disparaged these rules, claiming that Morris imposed them only to produce the striking aesthetic effect of the Kelmscott page, and that he sacrificed the readability of his texts in the process. De Vinne, for instance, who was a champion of the Kelmscott Press on the whole, criticized Morris’s books for failing to meet a minimum standard of readability, observing that whereas “[u]nleaded and thin-spaced composition is preferred by the disciples of William Morris, […] it is not liked by the average reader, who does need a perceptible white blank between words or lines of print” (The Practice 105). Ruari McLean similarly claims that Morris’s types and typesetting practices “make fine black pages but we balk at reading them” (11). Contra these assertions, however, I argue that Morris’s typesetting practices are consistent with his aims in adopting revivalist typographic principles, particularly that overarching objective of suppressing those typographical distractions that crop up in spaces

61 Walker made a similar claim in his lecture: “Type looks best when printed upon a moderately smooth Hand made [sic] paper which has been damped” (qtd. in Peterson 328). 62 See Peterson 108 for a description of Morris’s printing methods. 63 De Vinne himself articulates this idea, writing that the typographical “merit” of the Press’s “old-style faces is enhanced by Morris’s admirable selection of paper, press, and processes of printing” (The Practice 370). 64 De Vinne makes this observation in 1900, for example. See The Practice 208.

143 around words. What print historians have failed to notice is how those rivers and large pools of white space that Morris so often bemoaned, and so vehemently avoided by setting his texts in this way, are not simply unsightly blemishes that disturb the aesthetic consistency of the page. They can also lead to a confusion between figure and ground similar to that of the dazzling modern letter, insofar as these are instances where the white background suddenly confronts the reader and makes itself (and not the type) the object of attention. Morris’s typesetting practices thus cohere with his particular brand of revivalist logic, since to allow such patterns to crop up would signal a level of neglect on par with that of modern printers, whose preoccupation with the ideological semiotics of type and page, and whose concomitant disregard for its more fundamental psycho-perceptual effects, is expressed in such instances where the typographical background becomes a distraction.

It is thus now possible to imagine the Kelmscott book as a space of coordinated action, as a series of acts all conducted in the thick of an ongoing print politics, and all organized around the suppression of typographical distractions. But toward what positive effect, we might ask, is this coordinated effort conducted? Is it meant to produce the antithesis of modern distracting typography: the absolute attentiveness of an eminently readable text expunged of all distracting features? We should resist the temptation to answer this question in the affirmative, since mere functionalism seems not to have been Morris’s intent, as evidenced by the books’ abundant ornamentation. But we should also be wary of drawing the same conclusions as the print historians did, who have come to interpret the Kelmscott Press as a prominent but ultimately unsuccessful experiment in the implementation of revivalist principles. While these writers have consistently characterized Morris as a revivalist who lost his way—lured off the course toward the ideal of the absolutely readable text by the sirens of aesthetic splendor—I claim that Morris’s texts are readable, although not in the traditional sense of the term. They are readable insofar as they make legible on the surface of the page many of the deliberative production decisions and actions executed by his workers as they engage in this print politics.

Useful for characterizing this other type of readability is what Margaret Cohen calls “craft”: a variety of ingenious maritime labour that is “performed and celebrated by sea adventure fiction” (16). Although the working conditions at the Kelmscott Press were vastly different from those of the merchant vessels that Cohen focuses on, three general features of craft are expressed through Morris’s books. First, that craft is often conducted in the face of “the remarkable occurrence”: an abnormal event that threatens the integrity of the maritime vessel (7)—or, in this case, the page of print. Second, that craft is conducted not in response to strict rules, but rather using a resourcefulness and spontaneity indicative of “jury-rigging”: the improvisation of makeshifts conducted in the face of remarkable occurrences (32). And, third, that craft is able to communicate to the reader its process of practical reasoning through a phenomenon that Cohen calls the “performability effect” (72). Cohen uses Robinson Crusoe to illustrate this last feature, asserting that the way in which “Defoe plays out Crusoe’s series of problems and their solutions,

144 adhering to common-sense notions of the natural world,” shows “the reader how Crusoe’s achievements are operable: how she could effect such deeds, were she in Crusoe’s place” (72). If the Kelmscott books are readable, I claim, it is because they produce an effect where the reader is permitted to read legibly, on the surface of the page, those acts of practical reasoning that the labourer conducts in the face of chance occurrences that threaten the integrity of the print page by threatening the appearance of textually encoded distractions.

I have already shown how these decisions are legible in the morphological details of the Kelmscott typefaces, each slight curve and modulation of which registers Morris’s efforts to suppress the dazzling effect. Also contributing to craft’s legibility within the Kelmscott book is the nature of its composition work—those decisions and actions that functioned to suppress the appearance of those distracting rivers and pools of white space. Describing composition work at the Kelmscott Press as reliant on ad hoc decision-making is counterintuitive, given that this work seems to have been guided by a handful of strictly defined and immutable rules about spacing and justification. But a closer look at the surface of the book reveals that this was far from the case. In order to uncover the traces of such practical reasoning, it will help to compare the Kelmscott texts to baseline texts that fail to record such deliberation, and to locate the Kelmscott book’s performability effect in the differential space between Kelmscott text and baseline work. One such work is Nicholas Jenson’s edition of Pliny’s Historia naturalis (1472) (fig. 6a). This fifteenth-century book is a fitting benchmark both because its stout and heavy typeface was the model for Morris’s Golden type and because its layout exemplifies the close-set, architecturally sound page that Morris strives for in his own books. Both Morris’s book and this fifteenth-century precursor exhibit a minimum of patterns of white space; and both Morris’s and Jenson’s compositors achieve this effect through end-of-line decisions: decisions about where to break words and how to distribute end-of-line spaces in order to achieve right-hand justification and fulfill the objectives of close and consistent spacing. And yet the two books are foils to one another in one significant respect. This difference lies not so much in the overall effect produced by the two texts, but rather in how the compositor achieves this effect, and how this work does (in the case of Morris’s texts) or does not (in the case of the Pliny) become registered on the surface of the page.

The simplest way to appreciate this difference is to notice the size of the Pliny, which is a large folio edition. Notwithstanding the book’s wide margins and broad typeface, Jenson is able to fit about twelve to thirteen (often polysyllabic) words on a single line of its large page. And because a long line has a natural capacity to absorb end-of-line spaces—diffusing this superfluous space across its many inter-word spaces—this feature makes the compositor’s work of achieving justification, and at the same time minimizing patterns of white space, a relatively easy and non- deliberative process. On the other hand, Morris produced very few books in folio format; the only completed works to employ this format were The Collected Works of Chaucer (1896) and The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs (1898). The majority of his books were

145 printed in quarto and octavo volumes; and even the number of sextodecimo books (at six) far surpasses the number of completed folios. Compared to Jenson’s Pliny, these medium- and small- sized books had narrower pages and thus shorter lines, and therefore a more limited capacity to absorb end-of-line spaces. This capacity was further limited by Morris’s frequent use of large decorated initials, which often crowd the text from the left-hand margin and reduce the amount of space available for resolving end-of-line problems.65 For a compositor working in such conditions, meeting the ideal of the simultaneously justified and close-set page required ingenuity, compromise, and cunning: it involved deliberative acts of practical reasoning evocative of jury- rigging.

A concise example of how these books demand and record such deliberative labour is found in the Kelmscott edition of Morris’s Child Christopher and Goldilind the Fair (1895). This sextodecimo volume, which is printed in 12-point Chaucer type, permits approximately three to six words per line. This feature presents complications to the compositor charged with the task of justifying each line without producing unsightly patterns. We need only glance at a particularly acute example registered on the surface of this book to appreciate this dilemma (fig. 6). If we turn our attention to the beginning of Chapter V, we see that the compositor is met with the stiff challenge in the face of a large initial letter that essentially cuts the line in half. In composing the line “Geoffrey at,” she finds herself with an inordinate amount of white space but nowhere to deposit it—save between the only two words of this extremely short line. But because doing so would contribute to the development of a river down the right-hand side of the page, she forgoes the attempt to achieve justification and instead settles on a makeshift, simply centering the two words “Geoffrey at.” If this were a larger volume, achieving justification would not have been so problematic, since the compositor would have been afforded a longer line in which to displace this superfluous white space. But in the closer confines of this Kelmscott book, she is often forced to resort to such makeshifts, and this deliberative labour is left registered on the surface of the page in the form of an ad hoc deviation from the general rule.

These makeshifts are legible not only in the smallest editions, however. In looking at the 1894 edition of The Story of the Glittering Plain—a large quarto volume printed with the 18-point Troy type—we can read signs of such labour by tracking the compositor’s use of a non-alphabetical piece of type: the Kelmscott leaf ornament. Morris often used this ornament to mark divisions between paragraphs, and in lieu of paragraph breaks. His critics panned this practice, claiming that although the ornament helped prevent ugly patterns of white space from forming, it also

65 Morris enumerates these difficulties in a letter to Frederick Startridge Ellis about the printing of The Golden Legend (1892): “One thing that may disappoint you—to wit, that we cannot make a double-column page of it, the page will not be wide enough. For my part, I don’t regret it [...] Jenson did not print even his Pliny in double column. But it is a case of a fortiori in modern printing: because we have no contractions, few tied letters, and we cannot break a word with the same frankness as [the printers of incunabula] could: I mean we can’t put whi on one side and ch on the other. This makes the spacing difficult” (Letters 250).

146 produced shadow patterns of ugly black blotches (fig. 5). For example, Peterson argues that while the leaf ornament “did […] shape the text into the black rectangle which Morris desired, […] it also disfigured the page with measles-like spots” (131).

But such criticism misreads the ornament (or fails to read it in the sense I outline here) by treating it strictly in aesthetic terms and not as a trace of print labour. To illustrate the ornament’s performative dimension, it will help to conduct another baseline assessment, comparing Morris’s 1894 edition of The Story of the Glittering Plain to a text composed using conventional typesetting rules: the 1891 Reeves and Turner edition of the same work. Pages 20-21 of the Kelmscott edition correspond to pages 16-18 of the Reeves and Turner edition, in that both excerpts contain the same conversation between the story’s two chief characters: the hero, Hallblithe, and his trickster adversary, Puny Fox. Because this is a dialogic portion of the text, with the speech shifting frequently between characters, the conventionally composed 1891 edition includes frequent paragraph breaks, and these produce large amounts of pooled white space around the right-hand margin of the text. In the 1894 edition, however, the leaf ornament often takes the place of paragraph breaks, and this helps eliminate much of this end-of-line white space, thus contributing to the aesthetic effect that Peterson calls the “black rectangle” (fig. 5). But the ornament serves more than this aesthetic function, since it also makes legible on the surface of the page the compositor’s deliberations. Indicating this is a particularly telling discrepancy between the 1891 and 1894 editions (fig. 7). Whereas Hallblithe’s response to Puny Fox—“No,” said Hallblithe, “for the six others are not here”—is broken and indented in the 1891 edition, the Kelmscott text does not include the corresponding leaf ornament at this point; nor does it signal the new paragraph using any other means. This is because including the ornament here would have added to the length of the line; and this, in turn, would have put the compositor in the impossible situation of having to either break the single-syllabled word “said” at the end of the line (which Morris would not have allowed) or move “said” to the beginning of the following line (which would have introduced an unacceptable amount of end-of-line space following “Nay”).66 In the face of two equally unpalatable options, the compositor decides on a makeshift: dispensing with the leaf ornament altogether. This instance where the compositor jury-rigs an expedient demonstrates that these ornaments were not used with strict mechanical consistency simply to produce an aesthetic effect; nor are they merely textual blemishes that reduce readability by producing a distractingly black page. They also aid the legibility of craft, insofar as they create a network of surficial reference points that permit the reader to trace some of the various practical decisions the compositor makes in attempting to suppress the appearance of dazzling pools and rivers of white space.

As these examples illustrate, encoded on the surface of the Kelmscott book is a legible network of craftwork comprising a set of politically inflected actions that Morris and his press workers took

66 Ibid.

147 in designing and setting up the Kelmscott type. Each of these acts represents a sort of plot of attentional transformation in miniature, insofar as each is a textually inscribed instance where the labourer actively works to overcome the agonistic threat of an adverse form of textual distraction. Moreover, much like the attentional plots of a Scott, Collins, or Stevenson, this typographical plot of attentional transformation also engages a politics, insofar as each of these textually inscribed acts that work to suppress typographical distractions performs a tilt with the doxa of modern typographical practice. But the attentional structure of Morris’s Kelmscott book is in one important sense different from many of the attentional plots I have studied thus far—including News from Nowhere. In these previous texts, an agon that is represented as and through a form of attention is ameliorated when the protagonist adopts a counter-form of attention. Structured as this transition from one form of attention to another, the goal or telos of these earlier plots was effectively a form of attention. But in those miniature attentional plots encoded on the surface of the text, the action of overcoming the attentional agon produces not a different, idealized form of attention (Morris’s critics are in many ways correct in arguing that the Kelmscott approach to type design and typesetting does not result in an eminently readable, and thus fully attentive, page). Such actions produce, more properly, the idiosyncratic aesthetics of the Kelmscott page. Exemplifying this connection between attentional act and aesthetic effect is the compositor’s deliberative use of the leaf ornament, where the action of eliminating distracting patterns functions to produce not so much an eminently readable text or a fully attentive reader but rather the book’s saturated aesthetic appearance. If Morris’s late prose romances would come to reflect the lessons of the Kelmscott Press, it is for two reasons: because their heroes, in proceeding through their narrative quests, combat an agonistic form of distraction that is evocative of typographical dazzle; and because, in successfully overcoming this crisis, these same heroes drive toward a telos that is unlike that of News from Nowhere, Weir of Hermiston, and Waverley, insofar as it is no longer simply indexed by an idealized form of attention.

III. Dazzle in the Late Prose Romances Given that the late prose romances were written and published during the period of Morris’s intense interest in the history and practice of typographic design, and given that these texts were often printed for the first time in Kelmscott Press editions, it should come as no great surprise that these romances betray the influence of Morris’s typographical theories and concepts.67 But how— one might ask at this point—do concepts related to the design of books and letterforms influence the production of romantic texts that are not about typographers and bookmakers at all but rather follow the travels of questing heroes through a medieval-esque fantasy land that, from all appearances, is devoid of post-Gutenberg print technologies? The answer is that the influence of typographical theories appears in the late prose romances not in the form of representations of

67 Only The Story of the Glittering Plain—the first of Morris’s late prose romances—fails to meet these criteria. It was first published in the English Illustrated Magazine from June to September, 1890.

148 bookmaking and type design but rather in scenes where Morris shows his questing heroes to be afflicted by an adverse psycho-perceptual effect evocative of dazzle, in scenes, moreover, which function to structure Morris's quest narratives. Whereas Morris’s later romances reflect elements of the same plot of attentional transformation that he had used in News from Nowhere, the form of distraction that structures these later texts is not that of Guest’s preoccupation with an unexceptional figure but rather a form of distraction that is evocative of dazzled perception. And while the concept of dazzle makes an appearance to varying degrees in all of the late romances, its influence on Morris’s writing is best illustrated by two works in particular: The Story of the Glittering Plain and The Well at the World’s End. Dazzle plays a significant role in these two works, insofar as Morris often uses the concept to epitomize the anti-utopian societies that his questing heroes pass through, and insofar as his heroes’ most challenging contests take the form of psycho-perceptual tilts fought against such dazzling distractions.

Of all the late romances, The Story of the Glittering Plain perhaps makes the most sustained and engaged invocation of the concept of dazzle. This romance tells the story of a hero named Hallblithe who, in pursuing through distant lands the men who have kidnapped his fiancée, finds himself imprisoned in the false utopia of the story’s title—a heavenly place whose inhabitants are freed from labour and bestowed with the gift of everlasting life. The title that Morris’s gives to this story is intriguing insofar as it sets up a provocative series of periphrastic equivalences: The Story of the Glittering Plain which has been also called the Land of Living Men or the Acre of the Undying. 68 This long, periphrastic title invites us to ask why glittering is the first—and most appropriate—appellation for this land whose most distinguishing characteristic is everlasting (or unending) life. Further adding to the enigma is the fact that the term glittering by no means defines the physical features of the land, for as Hallblithe comments upon arriving there, “I have been told that the land is marvellous; and fair though these meadows be, they are not marvellous to look on now: they are like other lands, though it may be, fairer” (69). So, what does the appellation signify, and how does Morris’s title work to equate glitter with everlasting life? To decipher the story’s enigmatic title, it will pay to compare this text to Morris’s earlier News from Nowhere. In The Story of the Glittering Plain, Morris in effects inverts the world of the earlier text insofar as this later romance depicts a utopian world turned upside down.69 Unlike the world of Nowhere, which is set in a utopia whose people have come to value and exercise the humanizing potential of dignified labour, the Glittering Plain is a sort of anti-utopia: a false

68 This is the title of the first few book editions of the text, including the 1891 Reeves and Turner edition, the 1891 Kelmscott edition, and the 1894 Kelmscott reissue. On the other hand, the first serial edition (1890) bore the following title: “The Glittering Plain; Or, The Land of Living Men.” 69 Anna Vaninskaya also makes this connection in writing, “the Acre of the Undying in Glittering Plain was an individualistic inversion of the social earthly paradise of Nowhere […]. Hallblithe rejected a life of instant gratification as vehemently as Guest in utopia embraced the epoch of rest” (William Morris 68-69). Amanda Hodgson expresses a similar idea in stating that The Story of the Glittering Plain “employs the form and conventions of romance in order to criticize the unquestioning acceptance of the romance ethos. It is as if Morris were warning himself not to place too much reliance on the coming of his Utopia” (151).

149 paradise that lays bare the (pejoratively) utopian values of religious and liberal societies, such as everlasting life, unremitting leisure, and a desire for the end of the necessity to labour. As part of this process of inversion, Morris also associates the land of the Glittering Plain with forms of attention that are antithetical to that enchanted and dynamic attentiveness to surfaces that he had inscribed on the skin of Nowhere. Whereas the world of Nowhere is overwritten by a close, active, and universal form of attentiveness that evokes that of active and uninterrupted reading, the dystopian world of The Story of the Glittering Plain becomes inscribed—as the epithet Glittering suggests—with an abortive form of distraction that evokes that form of typographical dazzle that typographers thought disrupted continuous reading.

So, if Morris used the figure of Ellen in News from Nowhere to knit together connections between utopian modes of living, working, and attending to the natural world, he used the title of The Story of the Glittering plain to establish similar connections between anti-utopian ways of living and attending. Like his earlier utopian romance, The Story of the Glittering Plain reinforces these connections in scenes where the hero is hindered from pursuing his quest by distracting stumbling blocks. One such instance occurs in a pivotal moment in Hallblithe’s quest for his kidnapped fiancée: that instance when he attempts to glean information on her whereabouts from the King of the Glittering Plain. Of course, if the King actively subverts these attempts at information, he does so from motives of his own—he wishes Hallblithe to remain in the land of the Glittering Plain so that he may marry the King's lovelorn daughter. But there is also something else—some quality in the space of the King’s royal pavilion itself—that works to subvert Hallblithe’s aims as well. Thus, as Hallblithe makes his way to the King’s pavilion, and he perceives that it is “wrought all over with […] orphreys of gold and pearl and gems,” and that the King sat in “an ivory chair” and was “clad in a golden gown, girt with a girdle of gems” (79-80), what Hallblithe first encounters, in advance of this pivotal colloquy with the King, is the spectacle of a jewel-encrusted surface. Morris even attempts to manifest the glittering surface of the pavilion at the level of consonance, with a series of g’s that knit “gold,” “golden,” “gown,” “girt,” “girdle,” “gems” into an impressive and dazzling patina. This glittering surface threatens to undermine Hallblithe’s aims to pursue information about his fiancée; but it does so not (or not only) by intimidating him with overwhelming significations of the King’s fantastic wealth and power. It does so through a kind of psycho-perceptual mechanism. Thus, after Hallblithe sets eyes on the pavilion, as well as on the King’s face that “shone like a star,” he experiences a strong physiological response, as “his heart beat fast” and he is forced to “strengthen” himself in order to proceed with an errand that is central to his quest (80). Significantly, this moment when a glittering spectacle debilitates Hallblithe physically and psycho-perceptually, and in the process threatens to halt the progress of his quest, evokes both those instances in News from Nowhere when Guest is tripped up by the sight of distracting and unexceptional figures and those typographically encoded moments in the print book when the reader is halted in her progress across the page by a dazzling, confusing effect.

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This notion that Morris is deliberately invoking the concept of dazzle in The Story of the Glittering Plain is supported by a subsequent scene of halted progress that Hallblithe does not participate in, but which he perceives from the position of spectator or voyeur. Like the scene of Ellen’s speech about attending to the surface of the world of utopia as if it were a book to be read, this scene in the Glittering Plain is framed as a sort of exemplum sunk in the middle of the narrative that is meant to teach the story’s hero a lesson on how best to pay attention. In this particular example, however, a female character exemplifies not what it means to pay attention in a utopian world but instead what it means to be distracted in an anti-utopian one; and this other female character exists, therefore, not as a model upon which Hallblithe should pattern his attentional conduct but instead as a warning about the stultifying effects of succumbing to a form of anti-utopian distraction. The setting of the scene is a copse on the plain, and its subject is the King’s daughter, whose nature it is to be forever halted and immobile—forever transfixed in a lovelorn state of pining over the absence of her lover (much like Amelia Sedley is in Vanity Fair). In this particular scene, the King’s daughter sits spellbound in a copse over a decorated book that represents a series of heroic figures. And she is said to return to the copse everyday to peruse the book until she is forced to desist with the waning of daylight. When Morris describes this book that immobilizes the King’s daughter, he focuses on the following details: Now a maiden went away and came back with a book covered with gold set with gems; and the [King’s daughter] took it and opened it, and I was so near to her that I saw every leaf clearly as she turned the leaves. And in that book were pictures of many things, as flaming mountains, and castles of war, and ships upon the sea, but chiefly of fair women, and queens, and warriors and kings, and it was done in gold and azure and cinnabar and minium. (89) What Morris focuses on in this description, more than anything else, are the details of the book’s paratext. Gérard Genette has referred to the paratext as a “vestibule” or “zone” of “influence” that sways the reader’s engagement with the text upon entrance (2); and it is not insignificant that the jewelled paratext of this particular book—with its binding that is “covered with gold” and “set with gems,” and with its illuminations that are “done in gold and azure and cinnabar and minium”—conjures a dazzling textual entryway that evokes the previous scene in the King’s pavilion, where the dazzling effect of the King’s bejeweled vestibule immobilized Hallblithe momentarily. This scene makes another important allusion, moreover: it alludes to that biblio- attentional exemplum that is sunk in the centre of News from Nowhere. It evokes that metaphorical picture book that Guest had become too much distracted by to take in Ellen’s lesson about what it means to pay attention in utopia. Interesting, however, is that this later material expression of bad attention is not only a book of pictures but also a book of pictures that has been supplemented by a dazzling bejeweled paratext. By adding this dazzling paratext to his representation of the distracting object, Morris does two things: he avoids having to condone—if even momentarily—a binary opposition that privileges the word over the image, the text over the illustration; and he demonstrates how his exposure to the history and theory of typography has

151 taught him to imagine distraction not as a product of being attracted to relatively unexceptional figures and images but as a halting and enervating physiological effect produced by something like bad books. The scene’s evocations of these two earlier instances of distracted immobility suggest that if the book beguiles the King’s daughter, it is because she has succumbed to a moment of distraction that is like the one that Guest experiences in News from Nowhere’s climactic scene, but perhaps more closely akin to that dazzled condition that Hallblithe has just, a moment earlier, escaped. And insofar as the scene serves as an exemplum for the questing hero, it ultimately conjures the notion that Hallblithe cannot escape the Glittering Plain in part because of an immobilizing, distracting quality that is inscribed in the surface of an anti-utopia that, like the world of Nowhere, betrays the qualities of a physical book.

If The Story of the Glittering Plain represents a dystopian space that, like the page of a poorly designed and printed modern book, is littered with dazzling distractions, The Well at the World’s End would see Morris invoke the concept of dazzle in a more literary-structural manner, that is, as a fundamental component within the agon of this romance's quest plot. The Well at the World’s End is a romance about a hero named Ralph who ventures on an object-less journey that eventually evolves into a quest to taste of a fountain of youth located at the proverbial end of the world. Whereas the object of this quest is the gift of eternal youth that the water of the well bestows, his course toward this object is beset by a number of obstacles and trials—the most significant of which are a series of tilts with immobilizing spectacles. The first of these psycho- perceptual contests takes place at one the first waypoints on Ralph’s trip to the well: the abbacy of Higham-on-the-Way. As Ralph enters the town, he notes that every man there is “exceeding courteous”; that the town is well-built, in good repair, and “flourishing”; and that the townspeople praise the Lord Abbot, whose “will it was to help and to give, and be blithe with all men” (I: 28). The narrator states that this Abbot has improved on the work of his predecessor by having renovated a market square that comprises both secular and religious edifices, including many “tall and fair houses” and a “Great Church” (I: 27). The narrator also remarks that “most of [the town] was new-built; for the Lord Abbot that then was, though he had not begun it, had taken the work up from his forerunner and had pushed it forward all he might” (I: 27). While this abbacy could be interpreted, simply, as an abstract representation of an idealized religious municipality, the scene nonetheless includes a historical reference, insofar as it alludes to the historical abbacy of Carlyle’s Past and Present. There are striking similarities between the communities portrayed in these two works. Like the Abbot of Higham-on-the-Way, Past and Present’s upstart Abbot Samson—who is elected governor on the basis of merit—is praised by Carlyle for his proficiency as a municipal leader and his ability to improve local infrastructure, having “built many useful” as well as “many pious edifices” (120). And, like the Lord Abbot of Higham, Abbot Samson is said to have effected these improvements while distinguishing himself from his predecessor; in the case of Past and Present, Samson stimulates development after clearing the debts accrued by the previous governor, Abbot Hugo.

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But Morris invokes Carlyle’s idealized past not as a means of representing a similar abbatial ideal, but in order to critique Carlyle’s representations of this ideal. One way that Morris effects this critique is by rewriting and revising Carlyle’s representation of the scene of Samson’s “coronation,” with its revelling and holidaying that “the entire population” attends (87). In the original scene in Past and Present, Carlyle depicts this celebration as a sort of soundscape. Thus, the Abbot’s ascension is announced to the town when “the bells of St. Edmundsbury clang out one and all, and in church and chapel the organs go”; and after the Lord Abbot ascends the High Altar, to this symphony of religious instruments is added “the loud Te Deum from the general human windpipe” (87). Carlyle uses this soundscape to represent Abbot Sampson’s ability to galvanize a people within a church, with this harmonious amalgamation of bell and voice representing an idealized social integument that is preferable to the false medium of connection that pervades Victorian society: the “Cash-Gospel” (189). As a counterpoint to this picture of a harmonically harmonious society, Carlyle depicts the world of the Victorian “present,” using visual imagery, as a society that has been dazzled or “enchanted” not only by Mammon, but by its own powers of intellectual and scientific illumination, which have blinded it to the moral merit of a modest, Samson-like figure that might be present in its midst:70 Brethren, have we no need of discovering true Governors, but will sham ones forever do for us? These were absurd blockheads of Monks; and we are enlightened Tenpound Franchisers, without taxes on knowledge! Where, I say, are our superior, are our similar or at all compatible discoveries? We also have eyes, or ought to have; we have hustings, telescopes; we have lights, link-lights and rush-lights of an enlightened free Press, burning and dancing everywhere, as in a universal torch-dance; singeing your whiskers as you traverse the public thoroughfares in town and country. […] Is it not lamentable; is it not even in some sense amazing? (88) Whereas the medieval subject’s moral insight is epitomized in aural terms, with the harmonic symphony of voice, bell, and organ, Victorian moral blindness is represented as the result of too much dazzling illumination emitting from a falsely “elucidating” science and an “enlightening” fourth estate. For Carlyle, the result of such “illumination” is a sort of blinding intellectual regression, which is symbolized here by the primitive and dazzling spectacle of a great conflagration of torchlight.

In The Well at the World’s End, Morris rewrites this scene from Past and Present by conflating Carlyle’s sonic and visual figures to elide those distinctions that Carlyle sets up between the Victorian present and medieval-abbatial past. In Morris’s revised version, the culture of the Church is represented as a dazzling, spectacular technology similar to Carlyle’s image of the

70 Carlyle opens his text with the chapter called "Midas," in which he represents Victorian society as one of general enchantment: the idle poor of the workhouses are enchanted by their state of inactivity; the middle classes are enchanted by their material wealth, which has a deleterious effect on their bodies (dyspepsia, for example); and the landowner is struck dumb by that untenable situation that is the future preservation of his property (5-9).

153 intellectual technologies of Victorian England. This is made apparent in an instant where Ralph takes in the spectacle of the revelry. When Ralph enters Higham during the universal holiday of St. John’s Eve, he is forced to maneuver through a throng of revelers on entering the gates. Morris’s text draws on Carlyle’s conflagration imagery when Ralph’s guide—a monk from the Abbey—escorts our hero to the minster roof to view a series of bale-fires that have been lit for the Midsummer feast, from which vantage point Ralph “saw fire after fire break out to the westward” (I: 32).71 As the two men survey this prospect, the monk states that these bale-fires have a function beyond their festal one: given that each fire represents at least a half-score of men who are faithful to the Abbot, they serve as a sign of the military might of Higham, and thus as a deterrent to any of the abbacy’s potential adversaries. However, like the spectacles of The Glittering Plain, they not only signify political power but also exercise this power as a form of physiological influence that evokes both Carlyle’s fiery images of “enlightenment” technologies and the typographical effect of dazzle described by Morris in his “Note” on founding the Press. This is made clear in a passage that reprises that momentary distraction that Guest experiences at the Hammersmith market, where he is checked from continuing his colloquy with his cicerone by the appearance of a comely market goer. In this latter expression of the motif, however, it is not the hero’s absorption in an exceptional figure but rather his distraction by the dazzle of a luminous spectacle that inhibits him from sustaining a colloquy with his tour guide. Thus, at the same time as the monk is explaining the political function of the bale fires, “Ralph hearkened [the speaker], but said nought; for amidst all this flashing of fire and flame, and the crying out of folk, and the measured clash of the bells so near him, his thought was confused, and he had no words ready to hand” (I: 33). As in The Glittering Plain, this spectacular scene threatens to undermine the progress of the hero’s quest. Thus, when the Monk notices the “lucky look” in Ralph’s eyes as the latter stands stunned by this scene, he attempts to take advantage of his susceptible state by using this moment to try to convince him to settle down in Higham and join the host of the Lord Abbot (I: 33)—a position from which it is not easy to escape, as Ralph’s brother Hugh later demonstrates (II: 213). But Ralph, much like Guest, eventually regains the use of his faculties, declining the monk’s proposal, and returning on his wending way toward the well. This passage also alludes to that festive soundscape of bells and voices that gives the atmosphere to Carlyle's representation of Abbot Samson’s coronation. But the difference in this case is that Morris represents the sonic here as a “clash of bells” and the “crying out of voices,” and situates these representations of a discordant noise within the context of a broader spectacle that includes that variety of visual dazzle that Carlyle used to epitomize the nineteenth century’s false enlightenment. In so revising the earlier scene from Past and Present, Morris elides Carlyle’s distinctions between a harmonious past and a dazzling present, conflating both in a single

71 Note that Morris is also allusive in his choice of holiday. In having Ralph enter Higham-on-the- Way on St. John’s Eve, the author evokes one of the typological anticipations of Christ: John the Baptist. And, in so doing, he makes a subtle allusion to Carlyle’s Abbott Sampson, who is figured in Past and Present as the typological forerunner of the saviour of the fallen, Mammon- worshipping people of the Victorian present.

154 spectacular scene. The scene thus merges past and present to conjure a long history of the dazzling spectacle that encompasses both the mystifications of a medieval-Catholic culture and a so-called “enlightenment” nineteenth-century epoch enchanted by its own powers of illumination.

This spectacular episode in Higham performs two functions: in addition to serving as an important structural node in Morris’ quest plot it also uses concepts of attention (in this case the distraction of dazzle) to do the same thing that Scott does in Waverley: to erase and redraw traditional boundaries dividing historical epochs. Another episode that uses the distraction of dazzle to these same two ends comes at the point of pathos in Morris's quest narrative. The pathos of this narrative occurs at the penultimate stage in Ralph’s quest for the well: the scene in the Valley of the Dry Tree. In keeping with the relative danger and severity of the quest pathos, or death struggle, this scene of dazzle is stronger, and affects Ralph more powerfully, than the earlier spectacle of Higham. And when we begin to unpack the historical allusions encoded in this scene, we begin to understand why this is the case: So came they to the brow and looked over it into a valley, about which on all sides went the ridge, save where it was broken down into a narrow pass on the further side, so that the said valley was like one of those theatres of the ancient Roman Folk, whereof are to be seen in certain lands. Neither did those desert benches lack their sitters; for all down the sides of the valley sat or lay children of men; some women, but most men-folk […]. Whatever semblance of moving was in them was when the eddying wind of the valley stirred the rags of their raiment, or the long hair of the women. But a very midmost of this dreary theatre rose up a huge and monstrous tree […]. All round about the roots of it was a pool of clear water, that cast back the image of the valley-side and the bright sky and the desert, as though it had been a mirror of burnished steel. […] And as they passed by the dead folk, for whom they had often to turn aside, they noted that each of the dead leathery faces was drawn up in a grin, as though they had died in pain, and yet beguiled, so that all those visages looked somewhat alike. (II: 83-84) Carole Silver notes how, in the late prose romances, Morris encodes a cultural history in the stories' geographic terrain by having his heroes cross through different epochs of anthropological and economic development as they travel through the romance world (The Romance 161). But like the spectacular episodes set in Higham-on-the-Way, the scene of the Dry Tree does one better; in it, Morris encodes a range of historical eras in a single place, representing the Valley of the Dry Tree as a sort of transhistorical palimpsest of spectacular cultures. Thus, the Valley includes references to the coliseum of ancient Roman games, the spectacle of Christian iconography (with the “tree” evoking the cross upon which Christ was crucified), and the simulacra of a nineteenth-century image culture (with the pool of “burnished steel” suggesting both the mimetic mode of the realist novel and the steel-plate engravings through which detailed,

155 true-to-life images were distributed to a mass public in the nineteenth century).72 It is not surprising, then, that in the face of this telescoped history of the dazzling spectacle—this scene that evokes the spectacular technologies of three different historical epochs simultaneously— Ralph is afflicted with a bout of dazzle that is magnitudes worse than the one he had experienced in response to the bells and bale-fires of Higham-on-the-Way. Indeed, his psycho-perceptual opponent is here so powerful that Ralph is unable to shake this abject state of distraction; and he is only able to avoid the same deadly fate as those forever-"beguiled" subjects seated in the theatre because his travelling companion, Ursula, directs his attention to what might be termed a counter-spectacle: the non-existent image of an approaching villain. Ursula thus cries, “O my friend how is it with thee? […] O Ralph, Ralph! look up yonder to the ridge whereby we left our horses! look, look! there glitters a spear and stirreth! and lo a helm underneath the spear: tarry not, let us save our horses!” (II: 85-86). This episode is reminiscent of the final pages of News from Nowhere insofar as in both instances a heroine who is also the hero’s travelling companion saves the hero from a crisis of attention by directing his gaze away from the object by which he has become problematically distracted. In this case, Ralph is able to survive the deadly spectacle of the Valley, to continue on his quest toward the well, and to eventually reach the object of this quest, because of the aid of a female fellow traveller who is shown to display stronger powers of attention than he has. But this moment of denouement is more than a simple repetition or recapitulation of that similar scene from Morris’s earlier utopian romance. Far from using the resources of plot to promote a form of attentiveness that is stripped of historical significance and denuded of political force (as he does at the end of News from Nowhere), Morris is here drawing on the technically specific and politically significant concept of dazzle, and then using the resources of plot, to make this concept more functionally ambiguous; he is adding further historical layers to this typographical concept that is specific to the history and context of typography in an attempt to extrapolate its significance, to blow it up to a point where it can exemplify a long history of spectacular cultures. The plot of The Well at the World’s End is in this sense like a snowball, insofar as its representations of dazzled distraction accumulate historical significance as Ralph’s outward journey toward the well advances, culminating in this scene where the long history of dazzle, from Roman to Christian to modern industrial epochs, is encoded in the spectacular prospect of the Valley of the Dry Tree.

IV. Conclusions: After the Letter: The Dialectical Structure of the Attentional Plot Reimagined It is now possible to think of Morris’s relationship to concepts of attention as something that evolves over the latter part of his career. This process begins with News from Nowhere, which invokes the plot of attentional transformation, but which makes no reference to technical or

72 Charlotte Oberg argues that the “dead tree suggests that Christianity is dead” (42). However, it is rather the case that within this theatric scene that telescopes the history of the spectacle, Morris is suggesting that the spirit of Christianity survives beyond the end of the practice of the religion in the form of the spectacle.

156 scientific discourses on attention and distraction. Being distracted in Morris’s socialist utopia simply means giving prolonged and focused attention to an object that does not deserve such consideration; and being attentive means allowing one’s vision to play across the surface of the world in something like an impartial, indiscriminate, but ostensibly enchanted manner. The result is a text that uses the resources of plotting to promote a form of attention that is by and large blandly utopian, and that does not evoke the politics, science, or history of the concept. In the late prose romances, however, which Morris began publishing in the same year that he began printing at the Kelmscott Press, we see evidence that Morris is attempting to apply to the writing of his fiction the understanding of the history, nature, and politics of attention that he had developed through his exposure to typographical theories. For example, in The Story of the Glittering Plain, he presents the reader with an anti-utopian world that is inscribed with a psycho-perceptual phenomenon similar to the dazzling effect produced by poorly set type. With its string of periphrastic subtitles, and with its imprisoning and immobilizing world that is exemplified by a dazzling surface, The Story of Glittering Plain represents an anti-utopia in the form of geographical and conceptual space shot through with the distraction of dazzle. If Morris uses the distraction of dazzle to define the space of a false utopia in this, the first of his late prose romances, by the time he is writing The Well at the World’s End (one of his final works), he has already learned how to use the distraction of dazzle in conjunction with the attentional plot in a more historically conscious (or historiographic) manner. Thus, as Ralph advances through the romance world of this text (a world that Morris’s early critics made the mistake of labeling as an ahistorical and apolitical space of pure fantasy), layers of historical significance begin to accrete around the concept of dazzle. As a result of this accretive structure, which culminates with those events in the Valley of the Dry Tree, a form of distraction that was originally understood only as the psycho-perceptual expression of a flawed form of typographical logic comes to define Roman-spectacular, Catholic-feudal, and techno-Victorian epochs. Thus, whereas the denouement of News from Nowhere works to denude attention and distraction of their historical significance and purchase, the pathos of The Well at the World’s End does the opposite. In its pivotal position in this story's attentional plot, which functions to multiply the political and historical significances of typographical dazzle, this pathos represents the distraction of dazzle as the psycho-perceptual product or outcome of what we might call (without taxing the Marxist significance of these terms too far) the Ancient, feudal, and early-capitalist modes of production. And for Morris’s heroes— as for his press workers—productive action, progressive motion, and (ultimately) historical progress principally involves suppressing, avoiding, and overcoming this dazzle effect. What Morris thus acquires after News from Nowhere, in his work in the areas of typography and bookmaking, is the typographical germ that sits at the centre of, and functions as the impetus behind, this attentional method of modelling history.

Finally, The Well at the World’s End also differs from News from Nowhere in a way that gives insight into its place not only in the history of Morris’s engagements with concepts of attention but also within the broader history of the plot of attentional transformation. We can appreciate this

157 by highlighting dissimilarities between the two texts' denouements. Whereas Ellen relieves Guest of his prolonged bout of aesthetic distraction by replacing it with her own attentiveness to natural detail, Ursula interrupts Ralph’s fit of dazzle not by giving him the gift of an antithetical condition of attentiveness, but merely by directing his attention toward a counter-spectacle: the false and illusory image of an adversary with a glittering spear. Nor is Ralph rewarded at the final stage of his quest, after having “slayed” a series of dazzling non-human adversaries, with the boon of attentive subjectivity; instead, he receives at this point the gift of eternal youth and vigorous health. As this example illustrates, the late prose romances refrain from rewarding their heroes' attempts to overcome the agon of distraction with anything like an antithetical and idealized form of attention. In this way, they reflect the attentional structure of the Kelmscott books, where the labourers’ efforts to suppress textual distractions produce not a fully attentive—that is, a highly readable—text, but rather the idiosyncratic aesthetics of the Kelmscott book, as well as a textually inscribed record of print labour. This parallel suggests that what Morris learned between News from Nowhere and The Well at the World’s End is something like a way out of the asymmetrical dialectic of the plot of attentional transformation. That is, whereas the previous examples of the attentional plot have been structured, predominantly, as transformations from one form of attention to another—thus anticipating Crawford’s attempts to address the absence of a common ethics by mining an ethics of attention—and whereas previous authors have situated themselves within the history of attentional forms by using their narratives as vehicles for imagining new idealized forms of attention, Morris rather demonstrates that the plot of attentional transformation need not simply replace one form of attention with another, in a never-ending cycle of exchange. He shows, instead, that there is life beyond attention.

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Fig. 1. The opening spread of Morris’s The Wood Beyond the World. From a facsimile of the Kelmscott Press edition (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1972): 1.

Fig. 2. An illustration of dazzle. Berkson: 21.

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Fig. 3. A sample of Monotype Bodoni. The Encyclopaedia of Type Faces by W. Turner Berry, A.F. Johnson, and W.P. Jaspert (New York: Pitman Publishing Co., 1958): 49.

Fig. 4a. A sample of Morris’s Golden Type. The Encyclopaedia of Type Faces: 148.

Fig. 4b. A Sample of Morris’s Troy Type. The Encyclopaedia of Type Faces: 154.

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Fig. 5. From Morris’s The Story of the Glittering Plain: The 1894 Kelmscott Edition (New York: Dover Publications, 1987): 36.

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Fig. 6a. From Historia naturalis by Pliny, the Elder (Venice: Nicholas Jenson, 1472): n.p. The University of Manitoba Archives and Special Collections Dysart Memorial Collection.

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Fig. 6b. From the Kelmscott edition of Child Christopher and Goldilind the Fair (Hammersmith: The Kelmscott Press, 1895): 33. The Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto.

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Fig. 7a. From the 1891 edition of The Story of the Glittering Plain (London: Reeves and Turner): 18. The Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto.

Fig. 7b. From The Story of the Glittering Plain: The 1894 Kelmscott Edition (New York: Dover Publications, 1987): 21.

Afterword The Organizational Potency of Attention in the Face of “Big History”

In lieu of an extensive conclusion, I want to use the remaining space to address a potential misconception about the attentional plot’s value to, and usefulness for, nineteenth-century novelists. The reader may have felt at points in the foregoing chapters that I was representing the nineteenth-century novelist as a kind of literary homo economicus who merely engages the attentional plot as a rhetorical ploy to attain a hollow distinction, or to manufacture cultural capital, within a buzzing and hyper-competitive literary marketplace. (Indeed, there were certainly moments in this dissertation—particularly during my discussion of Scott's Waverley, Collins's The Moonstone, and Stevenson’s “A Note on Realism”—when I did willingly depict the nineteenth- century novelist as a figure who mobilizes the attentional plot and the rhetoric around attention to inflate the value of his own artistic wares while at the same denigrating the value of the art of others.)73 Or perhaps the reader felt at points that I was figuring the nineteenth-century author as a shrewd, cunning, and overly subtle craftsperson who works to refine and perfect past and contemporary examples of the attentional plot simply in an attempt to carve out a small niche of space within a crowded contemporary literary field. Can it not be said, for instance (although I am less inclined to endorse this particular interpretation), that Stevenson—with all his objections to the horrors of the late-nineteenth-century trend toward professional overspecialization—draws on the concept of kaleidoscopic reverie to mark his own uniqueness, his own specialization, his own small scrap of distinctive professional real estate within a fin-de-siècle literary arena imagined as an array of attentional forms?

I by no means wish to deny that nineteenth-century novelists did use the attentional plot toward such literary-political ends, and particularly to gain distinction within literary history and the literary field (in fact, I feel it is somewhat naïve and even negligent to overlook the ways in which the production of the nineteenth-century novel was motivated by a desire for symbolic capital and artistic distinction). But what I wish to do more than anything else is emphasize that, for

73 I am here not only evoking Bourdieu’s theory of the literary field and his (principally social- economic) method for modeling processes of literary production (Bourdieu, “The Field of Cultural Production”); I am at the same time evoking David Graeber’s critique of Bourdieu’s sociological theory of distinction (and particularly the concept of cultural capital), which Graeber feels is overly indebted to theories of economic exchange, insofar as it invites us to view all social activity—even economically irrational activity—as economically motivated at basis (29).

164 165 nineteenth-century novelists, the attentional plot was useful and valuable not simply to the extent that it could be employed as such a literary-political tool but also (and primarily) because it carried with it a profoundly valuable organizational capacity. And I hope that the reader who attempts to grasp this dissertation as an analytical and conceptual whole will see how the foregoing chapters comprise a survey of the principal ways in which concepts of attention enabled nineteenth-century novelists to organize otherwise discordant and inconsistent histories and transformational processes into a single narrative of attentional transformation. To reinforce such an appreciation, I thus wish to call to the reader’s remembrance all those moments when nineteenth-century novelists took advantage of those functionally ambiguous and, by and large, spatially imagined concepts of attention to consolidate differing and otherwise unrelated political interventions and historical processes. I would like us to recall, for instance, how Gaskell used spatialized concepts of attention to coordinate the fates of her industrial, working-class, and domestic characters into a single teleological narrative, or how Thackeray, in a similar fashion, used representations of diminutive attentional objects to conflate the histories of such antithetical characters as Becky Sharp and Amelia Sedley. I would also like us to recollect how Scott invoked the attentional plot not only to engage in a cultural politics but also to integrate this politics into a much longer historical narrative that he structured as a series of attentional epochs; or how Collins developed attentional forms that functioned to situate him both at the forefront of a history of the romantic novel and against a contemporary set of inattentive and badly attentive narrative forms; or how Stevenson used kaleidoscopic reverie not only to distinguish his fiction from the attentional forms of both Scott and the naturalists but also to critique contemporary trends in the professional fields. And we should by no means forget what is perhaps the most ambitious of such attempts to exploit the organizational potential of the attentional plot: Morris’s work on both the Kelmscott Press and the late prose romances, where the motive to suppress and oppose the distraction of dazzle both coordinates the Press’s diverse print-labour tasks into a uniform collective of political praxis and structures Morris’s quest plots as a processes of transcending the history of spectacular cultures. Such examples illustrate that, for nineteenth-century novelists, concepts of attention were potent with a host of organizational affordances that stretched well beyond their capacity simply to structure a literary politics. For example, the immensely tensile and highly metonymic concept of attention permitted novelists to coordinate their literary- political and literary-historical acts of position-taking with their broader interventions into a contemporary social politics. They also provided novelists with conceptual tools to represent literary-historical and social-historical processes of change as interconnected and coextensive phenomena—as part of a single overarching transformational process. And, finally, these highly

166 flexible and metonymic concepts also facilitated novelists’ attempts to organize the various plots contained within a single novel, and to organize the fates of differently classed and gendered characters, into a single teleological history. So, if there is a single thing that I wish the reader to take away from the foregoing dissertation, it is the idea that attention is not only a psychological faculty, or a construct of technological modernity, or a way of theorizing textual space; it is also (and perhaps most valuably and significantly) a narrative function that has the power to organize and give structure to large and complex master narratives of social and cultural change.

Another way to frame this idea is to view the plot of attentional transformation as a response to a particularly pressing problem that is not specific to the nineteenth century but rather endemic to cultural modernity broadly imagined (although this is not the same problem of attention that Jonathan Crary described). There has been much discussion recently about the difficulties posed by so-called “big data”: statistical data sets that—as a result of the ease with which information is collected and stored in the current digital age—are so large that they defy processing, comprehension, and visualization (Gorton and Gracio 10). It might be said that, in their diverse ways, the nineteenth-century novelists I have studied used the attentional plot to address an analogous problem: what might be termed the problem of “big history.”74 Confronted with an overwhelming diversity of historical narratives—including a range of literary, political, and social histories that each encompass a multitude of individual genres, classes, and subjects—nineteenth- century novelists were beset by the difficulty of organizing this array of histories that are each germane to a different field of human enterprise, and to a different scope of human existence, into a single, coherent developmental narrative. If concepts of attention were of value to nineteenth- century novelists, then, it is in large part because they enabled these novelists to meet the challenge of “big history” by consolidating this diversity of often-discordant historical narratives into a uniform attentional plot. With this idea in mind, I will close this dissertation by posing two questions to future researchers working at the intersections of attention, narrative, and history: How else have past authors of both fictional and non-fictional narratives exploited the organizational potential of attention to confront this historiographic challenge? And to what extent, and in what ways, might we marshal concepts of attention and the attentional plot today to tell the story of our own transnational and globalized epoch?

74 This is not a new term or concept. Scholars have extensively explored the concept of “big history” in the past (see, for example, Cynthia Stokes Brown; and Christian). But this scholarship has primarily aimed at imagining a long history (or myth) of human origins that begins with the astronomical Big Bang. In contrast, I conceive of big history more along the lines of a thick history that is full of a number of normally discrete historical narratives.

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