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Reading Gosse's Reading: a Study of Allusion in the Work of Edmund Gosse

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Reading Gosse's Reading: a Study of Allusion in the Work of Edmund Gosse ANGLIA RUSKIN UNIVERSITY READING GOSSE’S READING: A STUDY OF ALLUSION IN THE WORK OF EDMUND GOSSE KATHRYN REES A thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements of Anglia Ruskin University for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Submitted: September 2014 (i) Acknowledgements I take great pleasure in expressing my thanks and my debt to Professor Valerie Purton, who has been the most supportive supervisor I could ever have wished for. I have benefitted from, and hugely appreciated, Val’s scholarly discernment, her extensive knowledge, and her infectious passion for literature. Our discussions have been consistently invigorating, memorable and enjoyable: I have always left Val’s office feeling enthused and inspired. Although I am now pleased to have reached the Conclusion, I shall certainly miss the excitement, thrill, and close rapport of our discussions. However, Val’s most precious and enduring gift has been to give me a new way of reading literature: this has been the most profound aspect of the PhD process. My brilliant supervisory team also includes Professor Sarah Annes Brown and Dr Zoe Jaques, whose observations have been highly motivating. I am also grateful to Professors Eugene Giddens and John Gardner, who provided very useful guidance at my Confirmation of Candidature meeting. Behind this faculty ‘front line’, I have appreciated Anglia Ruskin’s excellent support structure, in terms of sessions organised by the Research Support and Training Team, and the unfailingly friendly assistance offered by ARU library staff. Due to the preponderance of Gosse’s now out-of-print volumes in the Rare Books Room of Cambridge University Library, I have spent many happy hours within its walls. I have been helped on numerous occasions by the very patient and knowledgeable CUL staff, especially Rosalind Esche, who shares my enthusiasm for tracking down obscure references! I would also like to highlight the helpful role played by the British Association for Victorian Studies, whose postgraduate conference programme provided opportunities to present papers about Gosse in Keele, York, Leeds, and Hull. Last but definitely not least, I want to record my gratitude to my family, all of whom are scientists and have little natural affinity with Victorian literature. My husband Dave, and my two now-adult children, Holly and Peter, have during many long family walks, listened patiently to me rehearsing Gosse-related stories; I remain hopeful that one day, one of them at least will finish reading Father and Son! And finally, my thanks go to my mother, whose recent enthusiastic help in checking my Bibliography, is characteristic of the support she has always afforded any venture I have undertaken. It is due to the contribution of all these people - but especially Val - that my research project has been such an exciting and absorbing experience. (ii) ANGLIA RUSKIN UNIVERSITY ABSTRACT FACULTY OF ARTS, LAW AND SOCIAL SCIENCES DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY READING GOSSE’S READING: A STUDY OF ALLUSION IN THE WORK OF EDMUND GOSSE KATHY REES September 2014 Gosse’s reputation, both during his lifetime and thereafter, was compromised by his propensity for error, a trait that Henry James famously described as ‘a genius for inaccuracy’. Though much of his biographical and critical writing justifies this criticism, my study of Gosse’s use of the device of allusion, mainly in his fictional writing, reveals a strategy of misprision that is creative and innovative. Since the concepts of Modernism and Postmodernism have changed the way in which texts are read, it is now time to re-read Gosse, and to explore the potential meaning of passages that would hitherto have been dismissed as error or exaggeration. Using Ziva Ben-Porat’s characterisation of allusion ‘as a device for the simultaneous activation of two texts’ as my methodology, I explore the complex and often subversive resonances of Gosse’s allusive practice. Allusion requires four participants: author, reader, the source text by the precursor, and the alluding text. Because a phrase does not ‘become’ an allusion until all four parties have been ‘activated’, many of Gosse’s allusions have for a long time lain dormant in the palimpsest of his writings. I argue that Gosse’s evangelical, tract-writing mother, rather than his father, exerted primary influence on him. I foreground the impact of her prohibition of fiction as the genesis for Gosse’s idiosyncratic vision, showing that its legacy was more bewildering, and ironically more creative, than has hitherto been recognised. Using the revisionary ratios of Bloom’s theory of the anxiety of influence, I establish a trajectory of charged interactions between the texts of Gosse as ephebe and those of his mother as precursor. Many hitherto puzzling and unresolved aspects of Gosse’s writing now make sense in the context of his ‘answering back’ the spectral Bowes. Although Gosse never fully extricates himself from his maternal precursor, he metaphorically orphans himself, and transfers his ephebe allegiance to a host of literary foster- fathers, constantly invoking them in his texts. He thus secures his ‘mental space’ through the covert mode of allusion, and the zenith of this practice is manifested in Father and Son. My thesis demonstrates the potential of allusion as a methodological tool in literary analysis. By his acts of re-reading, Gosse achieves the paradoxical act of simultaneously arresting and promoting a sense of cultural continuity. On the one hand, Gosse arrests tradition by fragmenting texts: by importing a phrase or a passage from a past work into his present text, he engenders textual instability in both. On the other hand, Gosse promotes cultural continuity by importing into his work fragments that serve as allusive bridges forging connections through space and time. I hope that this exploration of his practice will initiate a reassessment of Gosse’s role in relation to the allusive mode as employed by the early Modernists. Gosse, allusion, influence, Bloom, evangelical. (iii) Table of Contents Reading Gosse’s Reading: A Study of Allusion in the Work of Edmund Gosse (i) Acknowledgements (ii) Abstract (iii) Table of Contents (iv-v) List of Figures (vi) List of Appendices Introduction: Gosse and the Process of Allusion 1 Chapter One: Gosse and his Mother: Reading and Writing Authoritative Truth 23 Chapter Two: Gosse and his Father: Reading and Writing the Fairy-Tale 53 Chapter Three: Reading the Mother-Son as Precursor-Ephebe: Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence 95 Chapter Four: Gosse’s Open Secret: Testing the Boundaries of Allusion 120 Chapter Five: From Saint to Sinner: Gosse’s Fantasy Re-Creations of Emily Bowes 152 Conclusion 184 Bibliography 193 Appendices 224 (iv) List of Figures Chapter One 1. Terracotta Relief Plaque of The Sons of Cydippe by George Tinworth (1884) 49 Chapter Two 2. Pages One to Three of ‘Sleep in the Deep’ 63 3. Page Four of ‘Sleep in the Deep’ 64 4. Illustration of swordfish from Philip Gosse’s The Ocean (1844:179) compared with Gosse’s drawing in ‘Sleep in the Deep’ 67 5. Gosse’s personalised bookplate, drawn by Edwin Abbey 84 6. Two of Abbey’s illustrations for Selections from the Poetry of Robert Herrick (1882) 85 Chapter Four 7. Narcisse (1890) by Gustave Moreau 122 8. Le Transi de René de Châlons by Ligier Richier Cadaver tomb at Bar-le-Duc 122 9. Three Images of woodcuts illustrating Petrarch’s The Triumph of Death a: Predica dell’Arte del Bene Morire 134 b: Countess of Pembroke’s translation of Petrarch’s Trionfo della Morte 134 c: Bernard Quarich’s edition of the works of The Italian Engravers 135 of the Fifteenth Century. 10. Triangular composition of Petrarch’s Triumphus Mortis 137 11. Christ on the Cross, flanked by thieves, painted wood, by Ligier Richier, Bar-le-Duc 143 12. Artemis and her Hound (1882) by Hamo Thornycroft. Marble. Eaton Hall, Cheshire 147 13. Detail from ‘Mr Heinemann’s Announcements’ in The Athenaeum, 1895 149 (v) Chapter Five 14. The eight illustrations from The Booklover’s Edition of Father and Son (1912) 153 15. Gravestone and detail of epitaph for Emily Bowes-Gosse in Abney Park Cemetery 154-5 16. Portrait of Emily Bowes as a young woman 156 17. Portrait of Emily Bowes compared with Fashion-Plate of Romantic-Era dress. 159 18. Portrait of Bowes created for Dennis Potter’s play, Where Adam Stood (1976) 161 19. Water-colour portrait of the dying Emily Bowes, 1857. 162 20. Bowes’ deathbed photograph 163 21. ‘Changes at Home’ by Phiz from David Copperfield 165 22. Reynolds’ Muscipula, or Girl with Mouse-Trap 169 23. Painting of Emily Bowes, aged 8, by W.A. Beechey R.A. 172 24. Max Beerbohm’s caricature of Edmund Gosse in Observations 183 For sources of illustrations, and details of copyright, see Appendix 8. 236-38 (vi) List of Appendices Introduction App. 1 A Brief Comment on Poetic Quotation in some of 224 Philip Gosse’s Natural History texts App. 2 Poem: The Whitethroat (New Poems 1879) 225-28 Chapter One App. 3 Poem: The Wallpaper (In Russet and Silver 1893) 229 Chapter Two App. 4 Transcription of Gosse’s manuscript story: Sleep in the Deep (CUL Add.7027.17) 230 Chapter Three App.5 Old and New (Collected Poems, 1911) 231-33 Chapter Four App.6 Diagram showing triangular structure of relationships in The Secret of Narcisse (1892) 234 Chapter Five App.7 Comparison portraits of Emily Bowes and Maria Edgeworth. 235 Throughout dissertation App.8 Source List for Illustrations 236-38 1 Introduction: Reading Gosse’s Reading Put [Gosse] in a room with a shelf of books, and like Dr Johnson he would at once “pore over them almost brushing them with his eyelashes from near examination.” He ran to books as a painter to pictures.
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