Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture

A Companion to the English Novel Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture

This series offers comprehensive, newly written surveys of key periods and movements and certain major authors, in English literary culture and history. Extensive volumes provide new perspectives and positions on contexts and on canonical and post‐canonical texts, orientating the beginning student in new fields of study and providing the experienced undergraduate and new graduate with current and new directions, as pioneered and developed by leading scholars in the field.

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Edited by Stephen Arata, Madigan Haley, J. Paul Hunter, and Jennifer Wicke This edition first published 2015 © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Registered Office John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK Editorial Offices 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148‐5020, USA 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK For details of our global editorial offices, for customer services, and for information about how to apply for permission to reuse the copyright material in this book please see our website at www.wiley.com/wiley‐blackwell. The right of Stephen Arata, Madigan Haley, J. Paul Hunter, and Jennifer Wicke to be identified as the authors of the editorial material in this work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher. Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks. All brand names and product names used in this book are trade names, service marks, trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. The publisher is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and authors have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. It is sold on the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services and neither the publisher nor the author shall be liable for damages arising herefrom. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought. Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data A companion to the English novel / edited by Stephen Arata, Madigan Haley, J. Paul Hunter, and Jennifer Wicke pages cm. – (Blackwell companions to literature and culture ; 155) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4051-9445-7 (hardback) 1. English fiction–History and criticism. 2. Literary form–History. 3. Fiction–Technique–History. 4. Narration (Rhetoric)–History. 5. Authors and readers–Great Britain–History. I. Arata, Stephen, author editor. II. Haley, Madigan, author editor. III. Hunter, J. Paul, 1934– editor. IV. Wicke, Jennifer, author editor. PR823.C66 2015 823.009–dc23 2015001069 A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Cover image: Detail from Faces of Flower Avenue by George Fishman, original mosaic artwork in Silver Spring, MD, USA. Source: George Fishman / photo courtesy of Jim Kuhn, Creative Commons Attribution Set in 11/12.5pt Garamond 3 by SPi Global, Pondicherry, India

1 2015 Contents

Notes on Contributors viii Preface xiii

Part I The Novel and Its Histories 1 1 The 1740s 3 Patricia Meyer Spacks 2 The 1790s 18 Lynn Festa 3 The 1850s 34 Ivan Kreilkamp 4 The Long 1920s 49 Jennifer Wicke 5 The 2000s 71 Ashley Dawson

Part II The Novel and Its Genres 87 6 Realism and the Eighteenth‐Century Novel 89 John Richetti 7 Romance 103 Laurie Langbauer 8 Gothic 117 John Paul Riquelme 9 Popular and Mass‐Market Fiction 132 Janice Carlisle vi Contents

10 Experimental Fictions 144 Mark Blackwell 11 The Novel into Film 159 Jonathan Freedman

Part III The Novel in Pieces 175 12 Some Versions of Narration 177 Alison Booth 13 Some Versions of Form 192 Stephen Arata 14 A Character of Character, in Five Metaphors 209 Deidre Lynch 15 Affect in the English Novel 225 Nicholas Daly

Part IV The Novel in Theory 239 16 The Novel in Theory before 1900 241 James Eli Adams 17 The Novel in Theory, 1900–1965 256 Chris Baldick 18 The Novel in Theory after 1965 271 Madigan Haley

Part V The Novel in Circulation 289 19 Making a Living as an Author 291 Deirdre David 20 The Network Novel and How It Unsettled Domestic Fiction 306 Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse 21 Reading Novels, Alone and in Groups 321 Andrew Elfenbein

Part VI Geographies of the Novel 339 22 London 341 Cynthia Wall 23 The Provincial Novel 360 John Plotz 24 Intranationalisms 373 James Buzard Contents vii

25 Internationalisms and the Geopolitical Aesthetic 387 Lauren M. E. Goodlad

Part VII The Novel, Public and Private 407 26 The Novel and the Everyday 409 Kate Flint 27 The Public Sphere 426 John Marx 28 The Novel and the Nation 441 Christopher GoGwilt 29 World English/World Literature 456 Jonathan Arac

Index 471 Notes on Contributors

James Eli Adams, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, is the author of Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Masculinity (Cornell, 1995) and A History of Victorian Literature (Wiley‐Blackwell, 2009), as well as the co‐editor, with Andrew Miller, of Sexualities in Victorian Britain (Indiana, 1996).

Jonathan Arac is Mellon Professor of English and founding Director of the Humanities Center at the University of Pittsburgh. A longtime member of the boundary 2 Editorial Collective, he also chaired from 2002 until 2012 the Advisory Committee of the Successful Societies Program of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. His most recent book is Impure Worlds: The Institution of Literature in the Age of the Novel (Fordham, 2010).

Stephen Arata is Professor of English at the University of Virginia. He is a General Editor of The New Edinburgh Edition of the Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Edinburgh) and the author of Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Siècle (Cambridge, 1996, 2008) and the forthcoming A History of the English Novel (Wiley‐Blackwell). He has edited William Morris’s News from Nowhere and George Gissing’s New Grub Street for Broadview and H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine for Norton Critical Editions.

Nancy Armstrong is Gilbert, Louis, and Edward Lehrman Professor of English at Duke University. Her books include Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (Oxford, 1987), (with Leonard Tennenhouse) The Imaginary Puritan: Literature, Intellectual Labor, and the Origins of Personal Life (California, 1992), Fiction in the Age of Photography: The Legacy of British Realism (Harvard, 1999), and How Novels Think: The Limits of Individualism, 1719–1900 (Columbia, 2005). A book titled The Conversion Effect: Early American Aspects of the Novel, co‐authored with Leonard Tennenhouse, is forthcoming from the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2015. She also edits the journal Novel: A Forum on Fiction. Notes on Contributors ix

Chris Baldick is Professor of English at Goldsmiths, University of London. His publications include Literature of the 1920s (Edinburgh, 2012), The Modern Movement (Oxford, 2004), Criticism and Literary Theory, 1890 to the Present (Longman, 1996), and The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms (4th edition, Oxford, 2015).

Mark Blackwell is Professor of English and Associate Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences at the University of Hartford. His most recent scholarly project is an edition of object and animal tales entitled British It‐Narratives, 1750–1830 (Pickering & Chatto, 2012).

Alison Booth is Professor of English at the University of Virginia, specializing in narrative, feminist studies in nineteenth‐century literature, and digital humanities. Her books include Greatness Engendered: George Eliot and Virginia Woolf (Cornell, 1992) and How to Make It as a Woman: Collective Biographical History from Victoria to the Present (Chicago, 2004), and she has completed a book on transatlantic literary tourism, house museums, and reception of authors. A Fellow of ACLS (Digital Innovation) and the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, she directs the Collective Biographies of Women project, http://womensbios.lib.virginia.edu and http://cbw. iath.virginia.edu/public/women.php.

James Buzard is Professor of Literature at MIT. He is the author of The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to “Culture,”1800–1918 (Oxford, 1993) and Disorienting Fiction: The Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth‐Century British Novels (Princeton, 2005), as well as of numerous articles in journals and books. He is also a contributing editor of Victorian Prism: Refractions of the Crystal Palace (Virginia 2007).

Janice Carlisle is Professor of English at Yale University. In addition to many essays in journals and books, her publications include The Sense of an Audience: Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot at Mid‐Century (Georgia, 1981), John Stuart Mill and the Writing of Character (Georgia, 1991), Common Scents: Comparative Encounters in High Victorian Fiction (Oxford, 2004), and Picturing Reform in Victorian Britain (Cambridge, 2012).

Nicholas Daly is Professor of Modern English and American Literature at University College Dublin. His publications include Modernism, Romance, and the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge, 1999), Literature, Technology, and Modernity (Cambridge, 2004), Sensation and Modernity in the 1860s (Cambridge, 2009), and The Demographic Imagination and the Nineteenth‐Century City: Paris, London, New York (forthcoming). He is currently working on a collaborative study of Ruritanian narratives, from The Prisoner of Zenda to The Princess Diaries.

Deirdre David has published several books dealing with the nineteenth‐century novel, women writers, and British imperialism. She is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel (2nd edition, 2013) and the co‐editor (with Eileen Gillooly) of Contemporary Dickens (Ohio State, 2009). Her most recent publications, as a biographer, are Fanny Kemble: A Performed Life (Pennsylvania, 2007) and Olivia Manning: A Woman at War (Oxford, 2013). She is now at work on a biography of Pamela Hansford Johnson (under contract to Oxford). x Notes on Contributors

Ashley Dawson is Professor of English at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center and at the College of Staten Island/CUNY. He is the author of the Routledge Concise History of Twentieth‐Century British Literature (2013) and Mongrel Nation: Diasporic Culture and the Making of Postcolonial Britain (Michigan, 2007), and co‐editor of three essay collections: Democracy, the State, and the Struggle for Global Justice (Routledge, 2009), Dangerous Professors: Academic Freedom and the National Security Campus (Michigan, 2009), and Exceptional State: Contemporary U.S. Culture and the New Imperialism (Duke, 2007).

Andrew Elfenbein is Professor of English at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. He has published Byron and the Victorians (Cambridge, 1995, winner of the Choice Outstanding Academic Books award), Romantic Genius: The Prehistory of a Homosexual Role (Columbia, 1999), and Romanticism and the Rise of English (Stanford 2009, winner of the Choice Outstanding Academic Book award). For Longman Cultural Editions, he has edited Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. His forthcoming book is The Gist of Reading.

Lynn Festa is Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University. She is the author of Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth‐Century Britain and France (Johns Hopkins, 2006) and co‐editor, with Daniel Carey, of The Postcolonial Enlightenment: Eighteenth‐ Century Colonialism and Postcolonial Theory (Oxford, 2009).

Kate Flint is Provost Professor of English and Art History at the University of Southern California. She has published The Woman Reader, 1837–1914 (Oxford, 1993), The Victorians and The Visual Imagination (Cambridge, 2000), and The Transatlantic Indian 1776–1930 (Princeton, 2008), and edited the Cambridge History of Victorian Literature (2012). She is completing a book entitled Flash! Photography, Writing, and Surprising Illumination, and has a new project on cultural manifestations of the ordinary and the overlooked.

Jonathan Freedman is the Marvin Felheim Collegiate Professor of English at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He has also taught (in various capacities) at Yale, Caltech, Oxford, Williams College, and the Bread Loaf School of English. He has published books on Henry James and aestheticism, Jews and the making of high culture in Anglo‐America, and the relation between Jewish and other ethnic American cultural formations.

Christopher GoGwilt is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Fordham University. His book The Passage of Literature: Genealogies of Modernism in Conrad, Rhys, and Pramoedya (Oxford, 2011) won the Modernist Studies Association book prize for 2012. He is also the author of The Invention of the West: Joseph Conrad and the Double‐ Mapping of Europe and Empire (Stanford, 1995) and The Fiction of Geopolitics: Afterimages of Culture from Wilkie Collins to Alfred Hitchcock (Stanford, 2000).

Lauren M. E. Goodlad is the Kathryn Paul Professorial Scholar of English and Criticism & Interpretive Theory at the University of Illinois, Urbana. Her publications Notes on Contributors xi include The Victorian Geopolitical Aesthetic: Realism, Sovereignty, and Transnational Experience (2015), Victorian Literature and the Victorian State: Character and Governance in a Liberal Society (2003) as well as essay collections including Victorian Internationalisms (a 2007 special issue of RaVoN co-edited with Julia Wright) and The Ends of History (a 2013 special issue of Victorian Studies co-edited with Andrew Sartori).

Madigan Haley is Postdoctoral Preceptor in the Department of English at the University of Virginia. He has published on the novel genre, geoculture, and world- scale analysis in the minnesota review and on the ethics of global fiction in Novel: A Forum on Fiction.

J. Paul Hunter is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Virginia and the University of Chicago. His many publications include The Reluctant Pilgrim: Defoe’s Emblematic Method and Quest for Form in Robinson Crusoe (Johns Hopkins, 1966), Occasional Form: Henry Fielding and the Chains of Circumstance (Johns Hopkins, 1975), and Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth‐Century English Fiction (Norton, 1990).

Ivan Kreilkamp is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Indiana University, where he is also co‐editor of the journal Victorian Studies. The author of Voice and the Victorian Storyteller (Cambridge, 2005), he has published widely on both Victorian and contemporary literature and culture.

Laurie Langbauer is Professor of English at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She is the author of Women and Romance: The Consolations of Gender in the English Novel (Cornell, 1990) and Novels of Everyday Life: The Series in English Fiction, 1850–1930 (Cornell, 1999). In 2015, Oxford University Press will publish her book The Juvenile Tradition: Young Writers and Prolepsis, 1750–1835.

Deidre Lynch is Professor of English at Harvard University. Her books include The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning (Chicago, 1998), which won the Modern Language Association Prize for a First Book, and Loving Literature: A Cultural History (Chicago, 2015).

John Marx is Professor of English and a member of the Humanities Innovation Lab at the University of California, Davis. He is also an Editor of the journal Contemporary Literature. He is at work on a solo book entitled Mega: How Mass Media Make Contemporary Cities and is collaborating with University of South Carolina film scholar and archivist Mark Garrett Cooper on a project called “Mass Media U” (instances of this work in progress can be found at http://humanitiesafterhollywood.org/). To date, his publications largely have been devoted to twentieth‐century anglophone fiction, including his most recent book Geopolitics and the Anglophone Novel, 1890–2011 (Cambridge, 2012).

John Plotz, Professor and Chair of English at Brandeis University, is the author of The Crowd (California, 2000) and Portable Property (Princeton, 2008), as well as a young‐ adult novel, Time and the Tapestry: A William Morris Adventure (Bunker Hill, 2014). His current project is “Semi‐Detached: The Aesthetics of Partial Absorption.” xii Notes on Contributors

John Richetti is A. M. Rosenthal Professor (emeritus) of English at the University of Pennsylvania. His most recent book is The Life of Daniel Defoe: A Critical Biography (Wiley‐Blackwell, 2005). He has also edited The Cambridge History of English Literature: 1660–1780 (2005) and The Cambridge Companion to Daniel Defoe (2008), and with Toni Bowers he co‐edited and abridged Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (Broadview, 2011). He is currently completing for Wiley‐Blackwell The History of Eighteenth‐Century English Literature. In 2010–2011 he received a Mellon Emeritus Fellowship.

John Paul Riquelme, Professor of English at Boston University and Co‐chair of the Modernism Seminar at the Mahindra Humanities Center (Harvard), has published, in addition to his work on modernist writers from Joyce to Beckett, essays on Frankenstein and science fiction, Dorian Gray and aestheticism, and Dracula’s stylistic excesses from a post‐structural perspective. He has edited Gothic & Modernism: Essaying Dark Literary Modernity (Johns Hopkins, 2008) and Dracula (2nd edition, Bedford, 2015). He is currently at work on a study of the discursive modernity of Gothic narratives and a study of Oscar Wilde and literary modernism.

Patricia Meyer Spacks is Edgar F. Shannon Professor of English Emerita at the University of Virginia. Her most recent books are On Rereading (Harvard, 2011) and an annotated edition of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (Harvard, 2013).

Leonard Tennenhouse is Professor of English at Duke University. In addition to a number of articles on the early American novel, he is the author of The Importance of Feeling English: American Literature and the British Diaspora, 1750–1850 (Princeton, 2007) and, with Nancy Armstrong, of The Imaginary Puritan: Literature, Intellectual Labor, and the Origins of Personal Life (California, 1992).

Cynthia Wall is Professor of English at the University of Virginia. She is the author of The Prose of Things: Transformations of Description in the Eighteenth Century (Chicago, 2006; Honorable Mention, James Russell Lowell Prize 2007) and The Literary and Cultural Spaces of Restoration London (Cambridge, 1998), the editor of the Concise Companion to the Restoration and Eighteenth Century (Wiley‐Blackwell, 2005), and has edited works by Bunyan, Defoe, and Pope.

Jennifer Wicke, Professor of English at the University of Virginia, is the author of Advertising Fictions: Literature, Advertisement, and Social Reading (Columbia, 1988) and the co‐editor of Feminism and Postmodernism (Duke, 1994). The twentieth century editor for the first editions of the Longman Anthology of British Literature, she is a founding executive board member for the Society for Novel Studies; her book Born to Shop: Modernism, Modernity, and The Global Work of Consumption is forthcoming. She has published widely on nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century literature from a global anglophone perspective, as well as on film and other media. Preface

This Companion is addressed to readers interested in the English novel and the many ways there are to think and write about it. Each of the twenty‐nine essays presumes a basic familiarity with the tradition of the English novel and an appetite for learning more, but none presumes the possession of any specialized knowledge. Collectively, the essays are informed by a vast body of scholarly and critical work while remaining accessible, lively, and intellectually engaging. Readers will acquire a sharp sense of some of the main lines of inquiry that have shaped criticism of the novel over the course of its still relatively brief history, but the essays also vibrantly testify to the innovation and diversity that marks the field at the present moment – as is only fitting for the study of a genre that itself has always been marked by innovation and diversity. As a glance at the table of contents reveals, the essays in this Companion are not arranged by chronology. Rather than thread essays along a time line, we have organized the volume topically in the belief that our contributors could cover more ground, pursue more original approaches, and cumulatively achieve a greater overall coherence if they were set loose from the requirements of a chronological survey. Without exception, the individual essays are informed by an awareness of history and chronology: arranging discrete events in meaningful sequences is one way novelists make sense of experience, and it is one way scholars make sense of the development of literary forms. But the volume’s alternative structure makes it possible for our contributors to be rigorously historical yet not constrained by the demands of “coverage” or by the need to canvass particular periods or centuries. Individually and in aggregate, then, the chapters seek to address the pivotal dimensions of the English novel both in time and across time, including its aesthetic and formal properties and its embedding in a variety of social and cultural contexts. Calling this a Companion to the English Novel raises the question of what is covered by the designation English. Until recently, “the English novel” was generally used by critics to refer to works written in English by British authors, thereby taking in Scottish, Irish, and Welsh writers while putting to one side the ever‐expanding corpus of anglophone fiction originating elsewhere in the world – including North America. xiv Preface

Limitations of space prevent the present volume from doing full justice to the richness and variety of world anglophone literature, but readers will find throughout the following pages perspectives that are anything but parochial. From its beginnings, the “English” novel has been an international form, open to continental, transatlantic, and now global influences and energies. Our contributors are everywhere alive to those energies and to the many ways they have shaped, and continue to shape, the novel in English. Part I The Novel and Its Histories

1 The 1740s Patricia Meyer Spacks

Exuberance marked British literary production in the 1740s. In prose and in poetry, the decade saw a vivid explosion of energy. Poetry ranged from Samuel Johnson’s passionate Vanity of Human Wishes (1749), composed in heroic couplets and imitating a classical model, to William Collins’s Odes (1747), innovative in form and content; from Alexander Pope’s Dunciad (1743), a satiric anti-epic in couplets, to the final version of James Thomson’s The Seasons (1744), a long blank verse poem with a rhapsodic view of the natural world. Prose fiction included moralized fable, social satire, imitation biography and autobiography, sentimental investigation, action narrative, erotic exploration, and various combinations. The many important published novels did not necessarily have much in common. Clarissa (1747–1748) bears little obvious resemblance to Roderick Random (1748). Eliza Haywood’s Anti‐Pamela (1741) and Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews (1742) share almost nothing beyond their common satirical target of Pamela (1740). The efflorescence of fiction implied only a few widely held assumptions about what the novel is, does, or should do. Most of its manifestations, however, suggested a conviction that fiction, providing vicarious experience for its readers, should dramatize for them human experience in its common forms. That rather obvious project carried significant weight in the 1740s. The notion that experience provides the only secure basis for knowledge was at the heart of philosophic empiricism, strongly articulated by the philosopher David Hume, whose Treatise of Human Nature (1739–1740) insisted that we must content ourselves with experience as the stuff of knowledge and that experience provides sufficient basis for the conduct

A Companion to the English Novel, First Edition. Edited by Stephen Arata, Madigan Haley, J. Paul Hunter, and Jennifer Wicke. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. 4 Patricia Meyer Spacks of life. Hume elaborated the point in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748) in terms suggesting the central principle of many novelistic plots:

There is no man so young and unexperienced, as not to have formed, from observation, many general and just maxims concerning human affairs and the conduct of life; but it must be confessed, that, when a man comes to put these in practice, he will be extremely liable to error, till time and farther experience both enlarge these maxims, and teach him their proper use and application … Not to mention, that, to a young beginner, the general observations and maxims occur not always on the proper occasions, nor can be immediately applied with due calmness and distinction. (Hume 1998, 88)

The investigation of how a young man – or, often, a young woman – acquired and used experience provided a vibrant topos for the decade’s novels. History, Hume believed, because factual, exerted great power over the human mind; but fiction, imitation history, could concern itself with ordinary individuals, whose version of experience might bear a closer relation to a reader’s than could happenings befalling princes or generals. Although novels throughout the decade explored many possibilities – as they would continue to do for the rest of the century – the pattern of following an imaginary young person’s acquisition of life experience persisted. Such narratives could provide vicarious experience, safer and less costly in emotional terms (particularly for women and young people) than direct experience of the world. At the decade’s opening, terminology about fiction remained unstable, with novel and romance interchangeable labels for extended pieces of prose fiction. What we now call “romances,” fictions of a certain length that represent fanciful events, with no concern for probability, had long existed and were thought to have wide readership. Not many new ones, however, were being published. The Eighteenth‐Century Short‐Title Catalogue indicates that between 1700 and 1740, on average, ten or fewer new works of prose fiction in English emerged annually. “A brief but limited upsurge” developed between 1719, the year of Robinson Crusoe and Eliza Haywood’s Love in Excess, both hugely popular, and 1726. After Pamela appeared in 1740, however, to wide acclaim, the average enlarged to about 20 novels a year, doubling again by the century’s end (Downie 2000). As the 1740s concluded, multiple possibilities remained in play. The novel had begun to solidify its authority as a form, but no one had won the struggle over its ongoing direction. When Richardson and Fielding began writing, in the early 1740s, the novel could hardly claim a form at all. Fiction, of course, had flourished since ancient times, but the notion of an extended prose work focused on nonaristocrats was recent. The moral and aesthetic status of such a composition remained uncertain; novelists of the 1740s had to justify their enterprise. They did so most often by invoking a classical rationale: literature instructs and pleases. The first of these purposes carried more weight than the second. The familiar claim to offer moral instruction persisted in the eighteenth century – especially in the works of such writers as Haywood, where it might seem dubious. Fielding, though, a great innovator of the 1740s, offered a new kind of teaching. In Tom Jones (1749), he purported to instruct his readers about that large, vague concept, human nature: to teach them, along with his hero, how human beings operate in the world and on what principles. The claim aligned him with Hume, whose Treatise of Human Nature, his first major work, had similar aspirations if different methods. The 1740s 5

Although not every novelist articulated the same justification, the emphasis of prose fiction in the 1740s, despite the novel’s diversity in other respects, steadily moved in this direction. Instead of knights and ladies of high birth, novels now concerned themselves with men and women who might work for a living, whose origins might be indeterminate, whose fate depended not on heroic combat but on Providence as well as their own effort – effort that could prove, as often as not, misguided. Like the popular romances on our newsstands today, these fictions customarily had happy endings, but their protagonists typically faced arduous struggles, against internal as often as external obstacles. They thus educated their readers in the nature of moral endeavor, as well as in its proper goals, and they suggested the kinds of problem one might face in the world. As for the other traditional justification, the pleasure literature provided, that too remained important to novelistic offerings, but now in new forms. The exuberance of Fielding’s play with language and with plot, the abandon with which Smollett sends his protagonists on wild travels, the inventiveness of detail, of happening, and of characterization in many of the decade’s novels: all promised and provided forms of lively delight. While the British novel developed in new directions, attracting enthusiastic readers and listeners (reading aloud remained a common practice, and illiteracy, though decreasing, was still widespread), difficulties beset the country in which it pursued its course. During most of the 1740s, Great Britain was at war. The War of Jenkins’ Ear, against Spain, began in 1739, provoked by a merchant captain, Robert Jenkins, who displayed to the House of Commons his ear, allegedly cut off by a Spanish official. It merged into the War of the Austrian Succession, which ended only in 1748. In 1743 and 1744, the nation experienced constant threats of invasion from France, in support of claims to the British throne by James III, son of the deposed King James II. In 1745, a small force led by James’s son, Charles Edward (“Bonnie Prince Charlie”) invaded Scotland and, joined by considerable numbers of Scotsmen, managed to get within 150 miles of London. War and rumors of war, in short, formed a constant background to English life. And not a background only. The threat of French invasion and the actuality of Bonnie Prince Charlie’s arrival stimulated divisions among the British. In 1689, after the so‐called Glorious Revolution, Parliament had summoned the Protestant William of Orange and his wife Mary, daughter of James II, to the throne, replacing Mary’s father, unacceptable mainly because of his Catholicism. By 1740, George II ruled, as he had since 1727, the second of the Hanoverian kings. His father, George I, had succeeded Mary’s sister, Queen Anne, as her closest Protestant relative. German by birth and by residence, George I did not even speak English. His successor, without sharing this linguistic disability, likewise remained oriented toward Germany. Less unpopular among the English than his father had been, he was yet widely thought too bellicose, cause for anxiety in an era of widespread European wars. Although relatively few British citizens had Catholic sympathies, many felt troubled at the breaking of the Stuart line when George I succeeded Anne, and many deplored the incursion of German rulers. Jacobites, as sympathizers with James’s cause were called, wanted an invasion and a new king who would restore the old lineage. Most of their countrymen did not. Such political divisions within the nation, less 6 Patricia Meyer Spacks widespread than they had been 50 years before, yet contributed to national unease both before the 1745 invasion and after, when those who had provided military or financial support to Prince Charles were ferociously punished. The custom of “impressing” soldiers and sailors – taking men by force from their usual pursuits – generated uncertainty and fear in the working classes. The wars might come all too close to home – as, indeed, they literally did in 1745 after Prince Charles landed from France and won a series of military victories that carried him from Scotland to within striking distance of London before his army was defeated by the English. More than war troubled the nation. Corruption was thought to abound in the government. Money, as opposed to landed property, took an increasingly important place in individual lives. Both public and private corruption derived from desire for wealth and from easy possibilities for achieving it. The vast gap between the rich and the poor began to attract attention, as members of the growing mercantile class flaunted their money and its appurtenances. Possibilities for dealing with money had amplified: paper credit now existed, and stock trading was increasing – developments fraught with uncertainty. Anyone who looked around could find much to criticize – a situation familiar in every era. In the 1740s, however, the novel provided not only an imaginative escape from troubling actualities but also a fresh medium for conveying criticism. Tied to some version of ordinary life, the novel could attend both to the ways that human beings proceed through their careers and to matters that trouble them along their paths. Among these matters, in the 1740s as always, were national and international political issues. To suggest that novels engaged the period’s large concerns is not to say that they focused as much attention on public as on private matters. But this fiction manifested not only intensifying interest in individuals, not only heightened concern for realism,1 but also fresh possibilities for pondering authority, succession, legitimacy, negotiation – issues alive in national and international politics. Moreover, many novelists used fiction to criticize corruption, public and private, and to convey anxiety about, or condemnation of, the place of money in national life. Such actualities figure mostly as objects of overt or implicit criticism, and their incorporation suggests the novel’s ambition. In Clarissa, a work conspicuously concerned with its characters’ intimate lives, social and political allusions occur mainly by analogy. Early in the novel, while Clarissa still believes that she can negotiate successfully for her own freedom, she comments that the “world is but one great family” (Richardson 1985, 62). Her comment acquires increasing ironic force as her own immediate family ever more clearly epitomizes the viciousness of the larger world. Helpless against her siblings’ machinations, her mother’s weakness, her father’s obsessions, and her uncles’ venality, she grasps with increasing clarity the degree to which, both before and after her defection from her father’s home, those around her, like most in society at large, operate on the basis of narrowly conceived self‐interest. A series of apparently casual analogies strengthens the connection between intimate groupings and larger ones. The early part of the narrative, before Clarissa’s elope- ment, offers frequent comparisons between happenings in the Harlowe family and what Clarissa at one point calls “intrigues and plots carried on by undermining cour- tiers against one another” (82). Anna Howe, imagining herself married to her meek and compliant wooer, Hickman, fancies “how he ascends, and how I descend, in the The 1740s 7 matrimonial wheel, never to take my turn again, but by fits and starts, like the feeble struggles of a sinking state for its dying liberty” (277). Only two short paragraphs intervene before she begins generalizing about marriage. Two people who come together, she says, should have suitable tempers, yet need boundaries between them. Unless each holds the other to these boundaries, encroachment threatens. She illustrates her assertion:

If the boundaries of the three estates that constitute our political union were not known, and occasionally asserted, what would become of the prerogatives and privileges of each? The two branches of the legislature would encroach upon each other; and the executive power would swallow up both. (277)

The novel’s vocabulary reinforces the implications of Anna’s comparison. Authority, liberty, independence are key words in the early part of Clarissa, abstract but potent nouns familiar from public politics. Clarissa, having inherited a house and money from her grandfather, already potentially possesses independence (meaning, primarily, financial freedom). Fear lest she assert that independence torments her family. Although she has turned the management of her estate over to her father, she could assert her legal right to reassume it. She professes no desire to do so, yet her family’s fear remains: fear of an overturning of established order, a miniature revolution. In this narrative the language of national politics, belonging to women as well as men, calls attention to the novel’s concern with sexual and familial politics, both in their operations reminiscent of national and international possibilities. Young women’s awareness of political issues informs their responses to personal dilemmas. Politics generates wars – in families and in erotic pairings as on a larger scale. Analogical references to politics interpret personal experience, reflecting characters’ and shaping readers’ understanding. Roderick Random provides more direct reference to social and political actualities. The novel concerns a young man encountering unexpected situations that reveal at every social level the destructiveness of corrosive and apparently universal self‐interest, focused mainly on financial gain. Roderick’s predicaments seem more or less arbitrary, exacerbated by his conflicted desire for wealth and importance, often resolvable only by providential happening. Whether comic or uncomfortable or desperate (and all these emotional registers occur), the protagonist’s perplexities demonstrate operations of a social world that rewards malevolence and encourages disregard for individual need. Roderick must endure a painful education – experience is, or should be, education – about his chaotic and perverse social environment. Roderick Random, suggesting that education in the world’s dangers facilitates maturity, finally rewards its central character both financially and erotically. Late in the novel, Roderick sums up his moral experience and his conclusions from it. He speaks of “scoundrels, … habituated to falsehood and equivocation,” of “the knavery and selfishness of mankind,” and of the “perfidious world” (Smollett 1995, 394). He would seclude himself permanently from this world, were not his beloved Narcissa part of it. Thus he in effect accepts while acknowledging the imperfect state of being. The scoundrels who persecute one good man have persecuted others and will continue to do so. They epitomize human knavery and selfishness, about which nothing can be done. 8 Patricia Meyer Spacks

The novel depicts war directly. At the moral center of Roderick Random lies Roderick’s account of the Battle of Cartagena. The 1741 battle in the War of Jenkins’ Ear produced an unexpected defeat for the British, who had sent a large fleet against a Spanish fort in present‐day Colombia. Dissension among the expedition’s leaders, as well as the wiliness of the vastly outnumbered Spanish, contributed to the British downfall. Smollett interests himself in the battle primarily as an image of British society. Harsh, rather clumsy, but passionate satire creates a new narrative tone. As Roderick reports it, squabbles within the upper class effectually sacrifice thousands. Sheer stupidity appears to dictate British tactics; Roderick can only surmise that the tacticians, motivated by British sportsmanship, don’t wish to take advantage of their opponents when they might easily do so. Dreadful conditions on board ship contribute to numberless deaths.

Wounds and stumps being neglected, contracted filth and putrefaction, and millions of maggots were hatched amidst the corruption of the sores. This inhuman disregard was imputed to the scarcity of surgeons; though it is well known that every great ship in the fleet could have spared one at least for this duty; an expedient which would have been more than sufficient to remove this shocking inconvenience: But, perhaps the general was too much of a gentleman to ask a favour of this kind from his fellow‐chief, who, on the other hand, would not derogate so much from his own dignity, as to offer such assistance, unasked … (190)

The narrative implicitly indicts “gentlemen,” concerned with forms rather than substance, and the idea of “dignity” as a substantive value. The inhumanity that destroys human lives emanates from “chief[s]” of the expedition. The fierce understatement of calling enormous loss of life a “shocking inconvenience” (“shocking” an intensifier used casually and frequently by members of the upper class) emphasizes the narrator’s perception that “gentlemen” ignore their social inferiors. The character Roderick, like the novel he inhabits, throbs with energy, which informs frequent exposés of human costs generated by universal preoccupation with rank and wealth. Roderick’s comprehensive view of the human condition discerns significant innocence or virtue only occasionally, as in an imprisoned playwright, helpless victim of injustice, and in Narcissa, barely sketched as a character, who exists quite outside the novel’s dominant scheme and has imaginative power, if at all, only as a fantasy. All characters of fiction derive from fantasy, but Narcissa, a fantasy within a fantasy, seems Roderick’s creation, and even he hardly believes in her. The novel’s unconvincing resolution of happy marriage signals that Roderick responds to harsh experience by evasion, escaping into his own fantasy. Novels can claim the significance of the stories they tell by hinting, as Clarissa and Roderick Random do, that the problems of private persons adumbrate those of public groups. Jerry C. Beasley speaks of the “elevation of private experience to the status of public history” in novels of the 1740s (Beasley 1982, 43). He means that novels take ordinary individuals as seriously as histories take the extraordinary. One way to do so, I would add, is to indicate connections between stories told by novelists and those that make the stuff of history. History can illuminate novels, these fictions suggest, and novels can shape public opinion. The 1740s 9

Novelistic allusions to public events call attention to one aspect of fiction’s ambitions. One of Fielding’s half‐playful claims for his own accomplishment suggests another aspiration: a formal one with large implications. Joseph Andrews originated in satiric impulse, as a comment on Samuel Richardson’s Pamela and Colley Cibber’s Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber (1740). Predicated on the comic notion of a young man who, like Pamela, must defend his chastity, the novel soon goes far beyond its origins. It causes Fielding to hold forth on his invention of a new form of writing, albeit one with roots in classic tradition. Joseph Andrews is, he avers, a comic romance, by which he means “a comic Epic‐Poem in Prose” (Fielding 1999, 3). The claim insists on the kinship between a mainly light‐hearted narrative and the genre universally considered the highest literary form. Poetry provided the traditional medium for epic. Fielding argues by his practice for prose as appropriate to grand literary endeavor, and for the possibility of affirming positive values both by attacking the corrupt and by celebrating virtue. As revolutionary as his claim of a new form of epic is his use of an apparently low‐born protagonist to embody goodness. Joseph’s sidekick and mentor, Parson Adams, moreover, is inept, clumsy, and naïve, the butt of derisory jokes, yet also embodies the good man in action. Although the rich and powerful mock him, the poor parson with his tattered cassock emerges as heroic by virtue of his moral force. In asserting the kinship to epic of a prose comic fiction while translating epic conventions into a modern key, Fielding in effect boldly intervenes in literary history, delineating his own place in it. As the word novel suggests, he is doing something new. He says so again, explicitly, in Tom Jones, where the narrator declares himself “the founder of a new province of writing” and therefore “at liberty to make what laws I please therein” (Fielding 1996, 68). Richardson, with none of Fielding’s playfulness, makes comparable claims. First he tentatively suggests, in relation to Pamela, that he “might possibly introduce a new species of writing”;2 then he retrospectively proclaims his resolution, in writing Clarissa, “to attempt something that never yet had been done” (Richardson 1751, 8: 279). The sense of newness many novelists shared encourages inventiveness. Cumulatively, the novels of the 1740s indeed did much that was new, innovating in characterization, in tone, and in substance, engaging moral, political, and psychological dilemmas, investigating society and individuals. Fielding may have been alone in his grandiose assertion of epic intent and achievement, but his contemporaries likewise demonstrate large purposes. Their heroes hardly resemble the epic variety, and the novels frequently articulate values by negation, through sharp criticism of perceived failures in fulfilling public obligations. Yet social values remain a central concern. Experience properly used, many novels suggest, teaches how to defend the good. Their protagonists assume many shapes. Clarissa inhabits the most commanding position. She needs no education beyond her early religious indoctrination to combat evil, embodied in her family, in her would‐be lover, and in many less intimate associates. Experience teaches her the intractability of omnipresent evil, although it also affirms the rare possibility of fidelity and virtue. She comes to think death a welcome escape from a corrupt world. An imperfect mortal, she yet approaches perfection. 10 Patricia Meyer Spacks

Such a summary may raise questions about the degree of “realism” involved in Richardson’s construction and, by extension, about realism’s desirability. Samuel Johnson, agreed in his own time and ours to be the period’s greatest literary critic, pondered the matter in a 1750 essay, beginning with a salient definition of the previous decade’s novels:

The works of fiction, with which the present generation seems more particularly delighted, are such as exhibit life in its true state, diversified only by accidents that daily happen in the world, and influenced by passions and qualities which are really to be found in conversing with mankind. (Johnson 1969, 19)

The essay meditates about verisimilitude: it’s all very well to imitate life, but not promiscuously; some things, Johnson insists, should not be imitated. “It is therefore not a sufficient vindication of a character, that it is drawn as it appears, for many characters ought never to be drawn” (22). Concerned with literature’s moral function, Johnson worries about the representation of imaginary persons who combine good and evil qualities. Such “mixed characters,” Johnson believes, endanger readers, who might choose to imitate bad behavior exemplified in attractive fictional figures. He recom- mends that novelists instead depict unmistakably evil and almost perfect human beings rather than ambiguous characters. Realism does not much matter. Although Johnson does not name names, he seems to be denigrating books like Tom Jones and Roderick Random, preferring to them such works as Clarissa, in which readers can know clearly whom to admire and whom to despise. Tom Jones has a good heart, but he also has a tendency to go to bed with every available woman. He is therefore “mixed,” a dangerous model. Roderick Random exploits women in order to solve his financial problems. Conversely, Clarissa, although (as Richardson himself pointed out) not devoid of human flaws, behaves for the most part admirably. She is thus essentially “unmixed,” or so Johnson believes. But Johnson is wrong. Even Clarissa, examined closely, has traits a moralist would not wish imitated. Richardson’s epistolary technique encouraged, almost required, emphasis on his letter writers’ inner lives, enlarging the notion of experience and stressing intricacies and paradoxes of character. Readers have long found Clarissa compelling because of her complexity, ambivalence, and failures of self‐knowledge: her divided nature. Despite Johnson’s objections, many of the decade’s novelists eagerly pursued the possibilities of such “mixed” characters, possibilities that potentially increased readers’ interest in imagined persons’ behaviors and their motivations. Richardson’s representations of Pamela and Clarissa and Lovelace, as even the earliest readers perceived, had more dimensions than their creator acknowledged. He repeatedly revised and enlarged Clarissa, in a vain attempt to make Lovelace, the novel’s villain, so villainous that readers would see nothing attractive in him. He never succeeded. Other novelists deliberately employed unmixed characters, despite their implausibility, to chart contemporary experience. Henry Fielding’s sister Sarah, for instance, delineates a protagonist not only unmixed but “simple,” in name and in nature. In Adventures of David Simple (1744), Sarah Fielding imagines her central character as a good Christian man in a bad society. In a series of episodes that sometimes approach The 1740s 11

Bunyanesque allegory, the eponymous figure, “simple” in the sense of “pure,” travels England in search of a friend. He witnesses hypocrisy, greed, and malice. He engages himself to a woman who turns out to care only for money, but he quite easily disen- gages. Eventually he acquires three friends, two female and one male, all victims of society. The novel ends with two marriages, involving all four friends, and with the promise of an idyllic future. More specifically, it ends with an emphatic statement of the characters’ relevance to the good of society at large, suggesting that every man of intelligence “make use of his Talents for the Advantage and Pleasure of the Society to which he happens more particularly to belong,” and that members of that society use their abilities on his behalf. Then, “what Happiness would Mankind enjoy, and who could complain of being miserable?” (Fielding 1987, 305). Sarah Fielding’s imaginings evoke a utopian world apparently devoid of politics, in which the small society to which each person “happens more particularly to belong” determines well‐being. Realistically implausible, this solution to the problems of a larger society apparently became in the long run unpersuasive even allegorically to Fielding herself, who in her sequel to David Simple, Volume the Last (1753), would represent the little community as bombarded by malice and avarice until three of the four die. Death rescues them from hardship. The narrator invites her readers, if they wish, to imagine David still bustling about on earth, but her final sentence suggests that only death can protect him from “falling into any future Afflictions” and ensure that no future suffering will “rend and torment his honest Heart” (1987, 432). As in Clarissa, death, given the Christian vision of an afterlife, provides the only solution to the problem of earthly corruption. As David Simple illustrates, the “unmixed” character, relatively rare in fiction with realistic settings and circumstances, provides a ready instrument for social criticism. David Simple’s innocence, producing his astonishment at what he sees around him, facilitates satire; so does Clarissa’s initial idealistic vision. Such employment of the characters tacitly acknowledges the mixed nature of actual experience, which the pure figures that Dr. Johnson preferred have difficulty grasping. The reader – even the young or female reader – perhaps understands more than David does, particularly at early stages of his progress through the world. Readers’ roles in relation to this early fiction of experience involve more than vicarious participation in the protagonist’s career. Readers enlarge their own experience by in effect watching and judging characters in action, as well as by imaginatively sharing their predicaments and solutions. They function simultaneously as spectators and as imaginative participants. That fact becomes especially apparent in works involving unmixed characters who do evil rather than good, as in as in Haywood’s Anti‐Pamela and Henry Fielding’s Shamela. Both works convey skepticism about Richardson’s Pamela, who guards her chastity against seduction and force and claims her primary commitment to Christian virtue yet, in the view of Haywood and Fielding, demonstrates an eye for the main chance that discredits her goodness. Richardson’s novel has long interested readers through the letters that convey Pamela’s lack of self‐awareness despite her constant self‐examination, and the degree of self‐interest that sometimes motivates her without her conscious knowledge. Thus, for a minor instance, Pamela decides (in the course of elaborate delays about leaving her master’s house, despite her proclaimed desire to depart) that she must dress as a country girl in order to return to 12 Patricia Meyer Spacks her rural parents. She gradually acquires the necessary materials, attires herself in her new garb, and appears before her master. “To say Truth, I never lik’d myself so well in my Life,” she writes, after looking at herself in the mirror (Richardson 2001, 55). That night, Mr. B for the first time attempts to rape her (rather halfheartedly, to be sure). Before he appears, Mrs. Jervis, the housekeeper, remarks that she has never seen Pamela look so lovely as she did in her country dress, and that of course she struck Mr. B as attractive. Pamela declares that she “expected no Effect from [the clothes]; but if any, a quite contrary one” (62). The remark seems disingenuous at best, in relation to her acknowledgment of how much she liked her image in the mirror. When Mr. B sees through what he calls her disguise, he accuses her of hypocrisy – the accusation that would be made by numerous critics in Richardson’s time and later. In order to make that point, both Anti‐Pamela and Shamela represent unmixed figures, motivated and acting entirely in terms of self‐ interest, hypocrisy their consistent resource. Syrena Tricksy, the anti‐Pamela, trained from girlhood by her mother to find and get a profitable man, learns her lessons well and thinks herself cleverer than her mother. She consequently loses her virginity early and inadvertently but goes on to effect one rewarding liaison after another, until she is dis- graced and banished to Wales, with no men in the vicinity. Shamela, like Pamela a servant, has, like Syrena, a mother of dubious morals. Although she has already had a baby by Parson Williams (who figures in Pamela as an honorable although unrewarded suitor), Shamela successfully presents herself as a frightened and chaste young woman, concerned mainly about her “Vartue.” Fielding has fun with his characters, making Mr. B into a man of dubious virility but extreme lewdness and having Shamela use talk about her Vartue as a resource in every extremity. Shamela gets her man, such as he is, and ends up pleased with herself. Experience teaches such characters nothing about virtue, and their machinations hardly invite imaginative participation. As spectators, readers witness their activities and perhaps internalize their implicit criticism of Pamela. Shamela and Syrena differ from Pamela in their full awareness of what they are doing. Hypocrisy implies awareness, and Pamela’s revealing letters to her virtuous parents suggest that she doesn’t understand her own motives. But Haywood and Fielding implicitly mock Richardson for having it both ways: for representing Pamela as an innocent and demonstrating as well that more than innocence occupies her mind. They in effect criticize the character for being “mixed” while pretending otherwise, and they purport to demonstrate what Pamela might look like if truly “unmixed.” Incidentally, though, they raise a question about the valorizing of experience in more realistic novels. Shamela and Syrena learn nothing that can change their direction in life. Experience in itself has no necessary effect. To be useful, it must intersect with specific human qualities. Reflecting on Shamela and Syrena calls attention to the limitations of Pamela’s education through experience. A good student, the girl has learned domestic skills and decorum from her late mistress. She takes advantage likewise of her experiences with Mr. B – but only, the perspective of Shamela suggests, to effect her advantageous marriage. Each encounter with her master sharpens her skills for dealing with him the next time. Experience demonstrates Pamela’s courage, ingenuity, and determination. It teaches her how to get and keep a husband: precisely the skill she needs. It does not greatly enlarge her human capacities. The 1740s 13

Joseph Andrews, Fielding’s second satire of Pamela, surpasses his first not only by developing a novel that goes far beyond satire, but also by complicating the satiric point, adding Cibber’s Apology as a target and pondering diversities of human response. Published, like Pamela, in 1740, the Apology constituted a new form of memoir. Its first paragraph proclaims that the author will publicize his follies because they have made him happy. At the beginning of Chapter 2, he announces with satisfaction “that nothing gives a Coxcomb more Delight, than when you suffer him to talk of himself; which sweet Liberty I here enjoy for a whole Volume together!” (Cibber 2000, 21). He also boasts of his own vanity, a note that he will strike often. Pamela and Cibber alike manifest conspicuous self‐absorption. Cibber acknowledges his delight in talking of himself; Pamela talks of little beyond herself, though she acknowledges nothing of the sort. Cibber cheerfully proclaims his follies, his vanity, and his egotism; Pamela, in Fielding’s perception, possesses the same qualities without knowing it. Both use their experience to polish their self‐representation. They share, most importantly, their marked theatricality. Cibber deliberately forms himself on the page into something resembling a fictional character. He is his own creation, self‐manufactured, a performer on his own stage. The metaphor of performer suits Pamela equally well, as she attires herself in country costume and appears before her master, or constructs her self‐presentation in the letters to her parents, or dexterously carves a fowl for upper‐class visitors. Such staginess speaks to one of the period’s central concerns: how to distinguish performance from straightforward action, fictional character from true character, role from substance.3 Experience presumably helps, but a masterful hypocrite can deceive even a person of much experience. (Squire Allworthy, the wise patriarch of Tom Jones, does not see through his evil nephew Blifil until the novel’s conclusion.) Haywood and Fielding attack Pamela as a hypocrite partly because they can hardly imagine a more serious indictment. In their view, she not only claims her primary concern with virtue to disguise her seeking of personal advantage; she also conceals her sense of her own importance behind an appearance of humility. During the 1740s, the idea of individual significance was taken seriously, pondered by philosophers and largely accepted by imaginative writers. Nonetheless, both Pamela and Cibber could be challenged as self‐important: the significance of every individual does not warrant a claim of superiority over others. Cibber proclaims his own weak- nesses, but, like Pamela enacting her humility, he glories in them. Both he and Pamela reveal – so Haywood and Fielding claim – a dangerous delight in their poses. Fanny Hill, a heroine of pornography who happily violates professed social norms, feels no apparent need to pose for her readers, although she frequently deceives her clients. John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748–1749), widely known by the name of its protagonist, provides unexpectedly useful perspective on other novels of the 1740s. Relying heavily on such models as Pamela, it conforms to and parodies the new pattern of romance in the lower social ranks, exposing some of its implications: with particular clarity: ambiguities of hypocrisy, and ambivalent attitudes toward sex and money. Like Pamela, Fanny comes from poor‐but‐honest rural parents. When she arrives in the city seeking work, however, she quickly finds herself in a brothel. Her extensive sexual education yields to more intellectual pursuits in time to prepare her for the 14 Patricia Meyer Spacks return from enforced travel of the man to whom she had long before lost her virginity. Married to him, mother of a son, she announces herself a champion of morality. In the novel’s final paragraph, she reports how her husband takes their son to a brothel in order to familiarize him “with all those scenes of debauchery, so fit to nauseate a good taste” (Cleland 1999, 188). Her memoir implicitly serves a comparable function. The notion of hypocrisy as usually defined hardly applies. Fanny believes what she says; she has changed her mind as a result of her happy marriage. The narrative has previously emphasized her continued pleasure in the maneuvers and deceptions of her role as prostitute, as well as her pleasure in experience for its own sake. Now her delight in sexual relations with the man she loves provides new perspective. Yet her new morality rings false because she has neither repented nor essentially changed. Just as she comfortably assumed various roles in her life as prostitute, she now comfortably assumes the role of domestic partner. Like Colley Cibber, she postures happily on any stage. Like Cibber, too, she feels no need to conceal anything from the public – except the vast amount she can be thought to conceal from herself. Fanny’s role as what we might now call a sex worker makes transparent the connection between erotic attraction and monetary reward, a connection present although unemphasized in much fiction of the 1740s. Men and women alike, in this fiction, tend to marry prosperously, although money never consciously motivates their marriages. Every stage of Fanny Hill’s career stresses the importance of money: testimony to her attractiveness, means of subsistence, temptation to deceit, source of luxuries, and, increasingly, index of respectability. It serves all these functions in other novels as well. Before Fanny’s reunion with Charles, she acquires, by inheritance from one of her lovers, a large fortune. Meeting Charles unexpectedly, she is thrilled to discover that he, in contrast, has lost all his money: now she can act as benefactor. She begs him to accept her fortune as a gift, but he insists on marrying her, although she worries about his possible social disgrace as a result. But money, it turns out, makes everything all right: makes black into white. Fanny subsides into maternity and moral smugness. Nothing in the tone of Fanny Hill – a first‐person narrative by its complacent protagonist – suggests any criticism of this development. Criticism of misguided and misdirected acquisitiveness abounds in other 1740s novels. The Harlowe family’s desire to increase their already significant wealth largely motivates their persecution of Clarissa. Roderick Random’s desire (and, often, need) for money motivates his most morally dubious behavior, and he witnesses much similarly motivated reprehensible behavior in others. David Simple sees the corruptions of wealth everywhere. Corruption stems, many novels suggest, from caring too much about money, from wanting too much of it, and from being unscrupulous about acquiring it. Definitions of “too much” and “unscrupulous,” however, remain vague; and the desirability of money continues to be assumed even as fiction castigates the evils it brings. Fanny’s large inheritance rewards fornication, which has been her career. The novel’s romantic resolution asserts but hardly substantiates her new moral insight. This is, after all, pornography; one can hardly demand rigorous moral logic. The novel’s crude construction exposes the comparable illogic implicit in more well‐crafted novels of experience, which betray a love–hate relationship to money and discomfort at thinking too much about it. The 1740s 15

Sex, along with money, is on everyone’s mind in these novels, and it too makes everyone – even Lovelace, the great seducer – uncomfortable. Fanny Hill takes it for granted and describes its activities with cheerful detail. In David Simple it vanishes as a subject. In Anti‐Pamela it assumes center stage but is represented as sordid and ugly rather than pleasant. Between these extremes – in Pamela, Joseph Andrews, and Tom Jones, for example – it figures always in the background, sometimes in the foreground, but rarely as a subject for explicit consideration. Would‐be rapists, who show up in all three of the works I just mentioned, are clearly reprehensible, but sexual feelings in male or female protagonists are typically obfuscated. Fanny Hill tells us that women as well as men enjoy sex and the prospect of sex, an idea just beneath the surface in other novels of the period. The pornographic novel tells us of experience commonly denied or obscured. For the reader, as spectator and as vicarious participant in the fiction, it may bring discomfort as well as titillation. The trajectory of the novel of experience (a pattern followed even by Fanny Hill) typically begins with a young person in straitened economic circumstances and ends with the advent of money and permitted sex: marriage. Tom Jones, toward the very end of the decade, focuses especially sharply on the question of experience, its rewards and dangers. Experience informs Tom about money and sex. He encounters a doctor who diagnoses according to the fee he anticipates; innkeepers who charge what the market will bear; men who, for money, swear that an innocent man has committed a capital crime; a father who would happily make his son miserable in order to have him bring wealth into the family by marriage. Suffering from lack of money himself, Tom falls into the position of gigolo. He meets (and rescues) a family suffering the utmost miseries of poverty; the father of that family has in his desperation tried to turn highwayman. He sleeps with a woman who betrays him and with one who is thought to be his mother. All these instances (and others) testify to the corruption that desire, for money or sex, can bring. Tom has demonstrated his fecklessness at the beginning of his travels, when he loses a £500 note given to him by Squire Allworthy. Although lacking other financial resources, he fails even to look at the note: he doesn’t know how much he has lost. Nothing in the text directly shows that he will handle money better by the end, but the experience he is reported to have had provides abundant negative models. His experience also presents him many monitory instances of hypocrisy. Blakey Vermeule writes, of Tom Jones, “the narrative energy comes from sex, the vast human quest for status, and hypocrisy. People care about these things most of all” (2010, 147). Tom certainly cares about sex. He doesn’t start out caring about hypocrisy; he’s lived with it for a long time, in the person of his foster brother, Blifil. His travels, however, educate him in its omnipres- ence, in those he trusts (like his friend Black George, who steals his money) and those he cares about not at all. His final willingness to retreat to the country may reflect his unwillingness to continue dealing with hypocrisy on a large scale. Status never matters to him, except inasmuch as it proves necessary in order to win the woman he loves. The novel tells us that money creates status, though, and Tom learns to take money seriously. Sex, status, and hypocrisy are certainly on the narrator’s mind. The presence of this narrator differentiates Tom Jones from all its contemporaries. He functions as a strong character, expressing himself on matters literary, psychological, and moral and stressing his role as artificer, even while insisting that he offers a “menu” of various forms of “human nature.” He claims wide knowledge derived from wide experience. Most 16 Patricia Meyer Spacks important, he claims absolute control over his characters and the happenings that involve them, and he makes that control convincing. Most readers over the age of, say, seven know that authors invent and manage their characters, even though they (we) don’t remember this every minute. Fielding’s narrator, though, makes his presence constantly felt. Self‐aware and domineering, he emphasizes his power; intersperses into his text essays about novelistic practice, the imagination, and moral responsibility; and calls upon readers to use their own experience as a basis for understanding his fiction. His voice generates much of the novel’s pleasure. It also provides steady reassurance. Narrative control displays itself in the ostentatious artifice of the plot, where everything connects. Unlike the loose structure of Roderick Random, in which chronological sequence often provides the only link between happenings, an intricate system of causes and consequences operates throughout Tom Jones. As the narrator frequently hints, he knows much more than the reader knows. When everything works out nicely in the end, the good rewarded and the wicked punished, the force of the narrator’s repeated hints of his godlike power becomes apparent. Like a just deity, he has enabled his hero to acquire a moral education and to get his girl. Fielding too recognizes that experience does not inevitably produce learning. He ponders what enables a young man to utilize what happens to him. Tom learns from his experience because of his ways of engaging with it. His antagonist, Blifil, like Syrena and Shamela before him, learns nothing because he believes that he already knows everything he needs. The young protagonist acquires prudence – capacity to discriminate in moral and in practical matters – from his adventures and misadventures; he can therefore be endowed with wealth and social position and marry his beloved Sophia. Yet this happy ending, like the endings of other 1740s novels of experience, has its shadows, hinting that experience will not suffice to protect against the world’s evils. Recognizing and exposing corruption change nothing at all. Endless negotiation succeeds Pamela’s fairy‐tale marriage; her husband proves imperfect. Roderick Random and Fanny Hill offer fantasy resolutions. David Simple’s idyllic community will not survive. Shamela’s marriage resolves nothing, and one suspects that the same is true of Syrena’s banishment. The happy ending of Clarissa entails the deaths of its central characters. Experience may provide sufficient foundation for living, but it does not solve the problems it exposes. Hume’s vision of time and experience enlarging maxims of conduct and teaching their proper use and application does not address the realities of what I earlier called a chaotic and perverse social environment. The novel of experience, in the 1740s, most often ends in a vision of escape.

Notes

1 Since the publication of Ian Watt’s The Rise of things, that the notion of realism is itself a the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and fiction. Fielding (1957), what Watt called “formal 2 Letter to Aaron Hill, 1741 (quoted in realism” has generally been agreed to be a Bartolomeo 1994, 53). characteristic of the early British novel. 3 For a thorough discussion of the place of Subsequent critics have modified and enlarged hypocrisy in eighteenth‐century thought and Watt’s views – pointing out, among other behavior, see Davidson 2004. The 1740s 17

References

Beasley, Jerry C. 1982. Novels of the 1740s. Athens: Fielding, Sarah. 1987 [1744, 1753]. The Adventures University of Georgia Press. of David Simple, edited by Malcolm Kelsall. Bartolomeo, Joseph F. 1994. A New Species of Oxford: Oxford University Press. Criticism: Eighteenth‐Century Discourse on the Hume, David. 1998 [1748]. An Enquiry Concering Novel. Newark: University of Delaware Press. Human Understanding, edited by Antony Flew. Cibber, Colley. 2000 [1740]. An Apology for the Life Lasalle, IL: Open Court. of Colley Cibber, With an Historical View of the Johnson, Samuel. 1969 [1750]. The Rambler, Stage During His Own Time, edited by B. R. S. edited by W. J. Bate and Albrecht B. Strauss. Fone. Mineola, NY: Dover. The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, Cleland, John. 1999 [1748–1749]. Memoirs of a Volume 3. New Haven: Yale University Press. Woman of Pleasure, edited by Peter Sabor. Oxford: Richardson, Samuel. 1751. Clarissa; or, The History Oxford University Press. of a Young Lady, 3rd edition. 8 volumes. London: Davidson, Jenny. 2004. Hypocrisy and the Politics of S. Richardson. Politeness: Manners and Morals from Locke to Austen. Richardson, Samuel. 1985 [1747–1748]. Clarissa; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. or, The History of a Young Lady, edited by Angus Downie, J. A. 2000. “Mary Davys’s ‘Probable Ross. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Feign’d Stories’ and Critical Shibboleths about Richardson, Samuel. 2001 [1740]. Pamela: or, ‘The Rise of the Novel.’” Eighteenth‐Century Virtue Rewarded, edited by Thomas Keymer and Fiction 12: 309–326. Alice Wakely. Oxford: Oxford University Fielding, Henry. 1996 [1749]. The History of Tom Press. Jones, a Foundling, edited by John Bender and Smollett, Tobias. 1995 [1748]. Roderick Random, Simon Stern. Oxford: Oxford University Press. edited by David Blewett. London: Penguin. Fielding, Henry. 1999 [1742, 1741]. The History of Vermeule, Blakey. 2010. Why Do We Care About the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and of his Friend Literary Characters? Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Mr. Abraham Adams and An Apology for the Life of University Press. Mrs. Shamela Andrews, edited by Douglas Watt, Ian. 1957. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Brooks‐Davies, revised by Thomas Keymer. Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. Berkeley and Los Oxford: Oxford University Press. Angeles: University of California Press. 2 The 1790s Lynn Festa

Politics and art, like forms of knowledge, construct “fictions,” that is to say material rearrangements of signs and images, relationships between what is seen and what is said, between what is done and what can be done. (Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics)

To single out the 1790s for special treatment in a history of the novel in English is not perhaps an immediately intuitive move. Canonical histories of the novel tend to fast‐ forward from the genre’s mid‐century flowering with Richardson and Fielding to the achievements of Walter Scott and Jane Austen, skipping over what Ian Watt called the “mediocrity and worse” in between (2001, 290), and almost every critical account of the 1790s begins with a disclaimer about the poor quality of the novels to be dis cussed. The decade is typically distinguished more for the cataclysmic historical events surrounding the French Revolution and for its role in the advent of political modernity than for any signal contributions to the history of the novel. Better known for its poetry than its prose fiction, the period witnesses both the last gasping effusions of the age of sensibility and the dawning of the Romantic era, the consummation of Enlightenment ideals and the puncturing of their utopian potential. It presents a curious conundrum for literary histories in search of neatly demarcated movements, radical formal innovations, aesthetic programs, or even a few great names. The occa sional shout‐out to outliers such as Elizabeth Inchbald’s A Simple Story (1791) or William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794) heralds these texts less on their own terms than as harbingers of the more accomplished psychological portraits or historical anchorage of nineteenth‐century realism. Why then devote a chapter to English novels of the revolutionary decade? In part, it is because exhausted or unsuccessful forms – the literary dead‐end, the technical failure, the aesthetic mistake, the one‐hit wonder, the honorable mention,

A Companion to the English Novel, First Edition. Edited by Stephen Arata, Madigan Haley, J. Paul Hunter, and Jennifer Wicke. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. The 1790s 19 and the also‐rans – are also part of the history of the novel, enabling us to read literary history with an eye not just to progress and supersession, but also to the persistence of tapped‐out genres and the agency of forms that proved not to have a future. It is also because these failures have much to tell us about the novel’s role in what Rancière in the epigraph characterizes as the work of fiction: its “material rearrangement of … [the] relationships between what is seen and what is said, between what is done and what can be done” (2006, 39). If, as I will argue, the ideological instrumentalizing of fiction during the 1790s invited it to theorize its own activity, so too does formal failure enable readers to objectify form and remark on the cultural and political labor it (once) performed. The novelistic conventions available to the writers of the 1790s often proved inadequate to the demands of the historical moment: insufficiently elastic to accommodate the array of subjects who sought a voice, lacking in explanatory power before the magnitude of current events, unable to suture cause and effect, ideal and reality, into a unified world order. In what follows, I want to argue that what might be deemed the literary shortcomings of the 1790s novel – the generic mishmash that characterizes many of the texts, the overt political polemic that reduces characters to talking heads, the exhaustion of conventions that exposes the glaring implausibility of the plots – reveal the difficulty of redistributing the resources of literary and political representation in an era in which new populations claimed the rights of man – and woman – and of the citizen.1 In seeking to close – or to expose – the gap between philosophical principle and daily life, between the aspirations of the revolutionaries and the world as it is, novelists drew on an exceptionally wide range of genres (novel, romance, satire, drama, epic, georgic, pastoral) and modes (the sentimental, the Gothic, the picaresque). This generic plurality also produced a marked degree of reflexivity about the novel’s con ventions, its representative capacities, its referential status, and its power to bring about what it depicts. Authors sought to shape opinion both through the novel’s didactic content and through the formal properties of the text that set the mind into motion and impelled the individual into action. As Patricia Meyer Spacks puts it, “Certain late‐eighteenth‐century novels, defining new relations between force and feeling, between psychic reality and worldly effectiveness … announce change and embody ways that fiction can become an agent of change in modes of understanding the world … All plots in their nature raise questions about agency and causality: what, or who, makes things happen?” (1990, 178). Both supporters of the revolution and their opponents recognized the constitutive and performative force of what might be called fiction’s political formalism: its capacity to move people to alter or to defend the status quo, to imagine alternative forms of subjectivity or to affirm their fidelity to existing roles. Novels of the 1790s grapple with the capacity of different literary forms to accom modate the voices of hitherto excluded populations: women, workers, the poor, the enslaved. Granting the disenfranchised a place in the story world marks an expansion of the entities deemed worthy of representation: individual exemplary figures instan tiate the generality of abstract suffering. Inasmuch as the novel confers a voice upon some characters but not others, or assigns agency to political forces but not economic ones, it designates who or what will play an active role in the body politic, or in the moral‐sentimental communities described within novels. Who counts as a neighbor, 20 Lynn Festa friend, fellow creature, as human? Who has a title to rights, and how can these rights be attained? Fictions of the 1790s both redefine the individual, and draw the individual into relations with a broader public, creating imagined communities and structuring the identification of readers with characters so as to define the terms of inclusion and exclusion. As these texts draw eclipsed subjects into view, they reconfigure the constel lation of identities (including those of empowered men) that are derived from and in opposition to these groups. Although theories of the novel have often focused on the individual, variously understood as self‐possessed individual, citizen, subject, self, the novels of the 1790s apply intense pressure to these categories through the experi mental extension of the prerogatives associated with each – psychology, affect, rights, freedom, property – to new bodies of humanity. In the process, they expose the ten sions between the communities imposed through institutions (the franchise, the courts, economic structures) and those constituted through the bonds of kinship, custom, or sentiment. The gap between the emotional claims of sentimental figures and the reasoned assertion of political rights accounts for the generic fissures in many texts of the period, as texts struggle to convert the wrongs described in texts into rights to be affirmed. The forms of subject construction to be found in novels of the 1790s thus raise ques tions about whether the attribution of psychological depth also confers the preroga tives of the citizen: whether the progressive developmental model suggested by the pedagogical aims of many of these texts can call into being the kind of rights‐bearing subject the radical novel celebrates. For how can those who do not have rights – the poor, the stateless, the disenfranchised, and women – become subjects able to assert or enact these rights? Inasmuch as the capacity to hold or exercise rights depends upon the possession of specific traits (race, sex, age, property ownership), those who do not already possess those traits are constitutively debarred from acquiring them. Fiction creates a hypothetical space in which rights may be experimentally extended to or exercised by those who do not (yet) have them. This emphasis on the experimental and transformative capacities of fiction turns us away from narratives of the rise of the novel that emphasize realism, for when fiction is designed to be revolutionary, it no longer can be exclusively mimetic. “Even as the novel began to totalize its mimetic range,” as Ian Duncan has argued, “it reasserted fiction, and not mimesis, as its critical principle, in an elaborate commitment to plot … as a grammar of formal conventions, that is, a shared cultural order distinct from material and histor ical contingency. To read a plot – to take part in its work of recognition – is to imagine a transformation of life and its conditions, and not their mere reproduction” (1992, 2). Fictions of the period not only sought to represent unprecedented events – a matter of mimesis – but also to shape their outcome – a matter of rhetoric and historical emplot ment. The numerous vindications, reflections, declarations published in the 1790s grant language the agency to persuade, to promise, to transform. Fiction, as its etymology attests, is a form of making, and these novels not only seek to give narrative shape to unprecedented events and to instantiate abstract concepts in particularized form, but also to refashion reality. Many novels of the 1790s, that is, do not just represent “man as he is”; they aspire to produce something that will become mimetic. We witness, so to speak, a tense shift in the mimetic in which the literary copy becomes the imitation of something not yet in being. As the philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft argued in her The 1790s 21

Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Rousseau shows that in the state of nature “all was right originally: a crowd of authors that all is now right; and I, that all will be right” (2004, 23). Under these circumstances, the novel not only represents a state of affairs mimetically, but also envisions counterfactual (utopian/dystopian) possibilities: both things as they are and things as they might be. As a narrative form that fashions contingency into plot, novels are uniquely suited to render causality intelligible in a world in which events increasingly outstrip the theories available to explain them. At a moment in which the French Revolution cast the connection of past, present, and future into question, the novel strains to impose narrative structure – a beginning, middle, and end – on events without precedent or definitive closure and to organize inchoate experience into intelligible form. As the course of Revolutionary events seemed to overtake the will and intentions of individual actors, conventional notions of causality involving the agency of individuals cease to provide an adequate account. Fiction of the period thus attempts to incarnate histor ical agency in local and visible form, recasting grand events on a more manageable scale and redistributing powers to individuals, to collectives, and even to extrahuman forces, whether the supernatural entities in Gothic texts or the structural causality of political and economic systems and institutions. There was, of course, more than one story to be told about the French Revolution, and novels of the decade reflect the heterogeneous response it provoked in Great Britain. Many Britons greeted the fall of the Bastille with rapture, exulting at the overthrow of a longstanding enemy, France’s Bourbon monarch, and at the revolution aries’ embrace of what was deemed a distinctively British form of liberty. In its immediate aftermath, the Revolution gave renewed impetus to the reform movement in Britain, which had been unsuccessfully militating since the 1770s for the expansion of the franchise, annual general elections, the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts that discriminated against religious Dissenters, and the abolition of the slave trade. Radical organizations such as the London Corresponding Society organized debates, circulated petitions, and published newspapers and periodicals, promoting these causes and protesting against the increasingly repressive legislation passed by the government. Their efforts were countered by loyalist associations, such as the Association for the Preservation of Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers (the Crown and Anchor Society), founded in November 1792.2 As the Revolution grew more violent, and war between Britain and France was declared in February 1793, William Pitt’s administration took increasingly repressive measures, including proclamations against seditious writing, the infiltration of radical and reform circles by government informants, the judicial prosecution of radicals for sedition in Scotland in 1793–1794, and the treason trials of Thomas Hardy, John Thelwall, and John Horne Tooke in 1794. Invasion fears, food riots, labor disturb ances, and the naval mutinies of 1797 led to the drastic expansion of government powers – Pitt’s “Terror” – in the second half of the decade. Parliament twice suspended habeas corpus, the Treasonable Practices Act of 1795 widened the scope of the law of treason, and the Seditious Meetings Act of the same year authorized magistrates to forbid public meetings. It was against this backdrop that the immense public debate about the Revolution was conducted in coffee houses, in inns, and at gatherings of artisans, laborers, shopkeepers, and merchants – all part of an ever‐growing literate 22 Lynn Festa population that devoured the broadsides, pamphlets, sermons, poetry, periodicals, prints, and novels that poured from the presses. Novels in particular helped dissemin ate these arguments. As the Monthly Magazine put it in 1797, novelists “have probably diffused more liberal, and more just moral ideas, than could, in the same space of time, have been inculcated upon the public by a thousand sermons, or by as many dry political disquisitions” (Anon. 1798a, 349). In the 1790s, the novel resurged in popularity after a slackening in its numbers in the mid‐1770s (coinciding with the American war). Raven and Forster list 315 new novels in Britain in the 1770s, 405 in the 1780s, and 701 in the 1790s – a prolifera tion made all the more astonishing given the scant numbers of novels published in Revolutionary France (2000, 1.26).3 Contemporary reviewers spoke disparagingly of this abundance. They “spring into existence like insects on the banks of the Nile,” the Monthly Review observed in 1790, and “cover the shelves of our circulating libraries, as locusts crowd the fields of Asia” (Anon. 1790, 334). This “democratisation of the republic of letters,” as Emma Clery points out, was “not unrelated to the threat of political democracy in the eyes of British anti‐Jacobins” (1995, 134). The novel was one of the principal avenues through which writers of all political stripes sought to disseminate their philosophical ideas. Fiction in the first half of the decade was profoundly shaped by the Revolution con troversy, in particular by Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) and the responses it provoked from radical philosophers such as Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, and Tom Paine. Incensed by what he saw as an unheeding embrace of Revolutionary principles and the illegal overthrow of monarchy, Burke in his Reflections warned against the dismantling of customs and institutions that uphold the continuity of the political and social order. In the figure of the beautiful queen, Marie Antoinette, besieged by ruffians in her bedchamber, Burke lamented the demise of what he called the age of chivalry. It is not, for Burke, reasoned commitments to abstract principles or declared rights, but local affections and daily practices, reverence for tradition, and the gratitude, fidelity, and veneration inspired by traditional figures of authority that sustain the social order and create political legitimacy. Burke’s evoca tion, as Marilyn Butler observes, of “the living experience – alternately of belonging to the community and of threatened alienation from it – in the half‐consciousness of the reader” places the Reflections in close proximity to the modes of lived experience that novels increasingly sought to capture (1987, 38). Burke’s Reflections provoked vigorous responses. First off the presses was Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), which attacked Burke’s celebra tion of rank, hierarchy, and monarchical privilege, lambasting his sentimental rhetoric as effeminate and mocking his famous tearful response to the plight of Marie Antoinette in the face of the suffering masses: “Man preys on man; and you mourn for the idle tapestry that decorated a gothic pile, and the dronish bell that summoned the fat priest to prayer” (1989, 58). Wollstonecraft’s Vindication was soon succeeded by Tom Paine’s bestselling Rights of Man (1791, 1792), with its arguments for natural rights, a written constitution, and the prerogative of generations not to be governed by the pacts of their ancestors, and William Godwin’s 1793 Political Justice, which became notorious both for its ruthless pursuit of the consequences of rational principles (Godwin famously insisted that reasoned calculation meant that one should rescue a Fénélon The 1790s 23 from a burning building before a chambermaid) and for its critique of conventional morality. Marriage, Godwin insisted, was a despotic monopoly over women and hence should be abolished, while the act of promising, that bedrock of much ethical theory, was an absurdity given that one could not know future circumstances. In a similar extension and critique of Revolutionary principles, Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) decries the exclusion of women from the rights and duties of “man and citizen.” Simultaneously educational treatise, republican manifesto, philosophical treatise, theory of historical progress, feminist critique of the family, and psychological analysis of masculine and feminine relations, Wollstonecraft’s Vindication raises fundamental questions about the connections between patriarchy and the public order, about political freedom and sexual liberation, about education, family structure, and the reproduction of unequal gender relations. Novelists sought to trans late these principles into action, tracing the consequences of living in accordance with these ideals, not for the impersonal universal subject of political theory, but for the embodied individual. Aspiring to be the engineer of a new order or a guardian of the rapidly vaporizing old one, the novelist of the 1790s was a bricoleur, drawing on plots, stock characters, and generic forms that had recognizably outlived their moment, and scrambling to devise new ones. Thomas Holcroft’s 1792 Anna St. Ives, the epistolary tale of a well‐ born young woman torn between Frank Henley, the virtuous son of her family’s estate manager, and the brilliant but villainous aristocrat, Coke Clifton, offers a bizarre medley of Godwinian philosophy and sentimental novel – complete with Gothic mad house, a Richardsonian rape plot by the Lovelacean Coke, and a sentimental hero who rescues the worthy poor from debtor’s prison. The novel offers characters who are little more than personifications of abstract principles, “the vehicles,” as William Hazlitt noted in his continuation of Holcroft’s memoirs, of “general sentiments, or machines put into action, as an experiment to shew how these general principles would operate in particular situations” (1816, 2.109). Aptly described by Gary Kelly as a “sans‐culotte Clarissa” (1976, 17), Anna rarely descends from her Godwinian soapbox – her decision to marry Frank is based on whether “the marriage of two such people can benefit society at large” (1792, 4.219) – and the actions of Holcroft’s paragons frequently strain credulity. The sentimental plot cannot accommodate the political principles its characters espouse. Indeed, the plot reveals the ease with which those principles may be perverted. The libertine Coke produces a pernicious mimicry of revolutionary ideas by ruthlessly following them to their logical extremes. Frank’s critique of marriage as a form of property, he notes, implies communal property in women (an argument also made in the Marquis de Sade’s La Philosophie dans le boudoir [1795]), and justifies his eventual abduction of Anna. If the text’s principles are democratically available to all, the fact that they can be so easily hijacked for other ends undermines their universality. Nor does Holcroft adhere to the principles his characters espouse. Although philosophical consistency would demand that Frank and Anna not marry, the novel ends with their union and with the miraculous reform of Coke by the power of repub lican ideals. Anna St. Ives enacts aspects of its political argument through its epistolary form, embroiling the reader in the present tense of an ongoing education that alters perspec tive through the sociable and dialogic exchange of letters rather than the authoritative 24 Lynn Festa account of a retroactive narrative. Bringing multiple voices together in a cacophony of ideas, the form both renegotiates the threshold between public and private and approximates the kind of tumultuous debate that produces revolutionary change. The letter allows for spiritual self‐examination, even as the immediacy of “natural” self‐ revelation forges sentimental social bonds through Rousseauvian transparency. If the lack of an objective narrator licenses the reader to draw her or his own conclusions, however, it also enables the reader to cheer for the wrong team, potentially compro mising the political agenda. The fact that Coke Clifton, the Lovelace‐like libertine with whom we are meant to disagree, is far more seductive a writer than either of Holcroft’s paragons in Anna St. Ives raises problems that would have been familiar to Richardson. Holcroft’s novel, with its Richardsonian plot and sentimental set pieces, endeavors to repurpose the conventions of earlier eighteenth‐century novels. Robert Bage, the Birmingham‐based paper manufacturer and author, is likewise both the heir of mid‐ century novelists like Sterne, Smollett, and Mackenzie and a reader of Godwin, Wollstonecraft, and Paine. His best‐known novel, Hermsprong, or, Man as he is not (1796), decants the political principles of the 1790s into mid‐eighteenth‐century literary form. The eponymous hero exemplifies a kind of natural man. Raised in America, Hermsprong possesses sufficient money, physical strength, and principle to exempt himself from societal constraint. This model of autonomous virtue is – until the novel’s closing revelation that he is heir to the corrupt Lord Grondale – a sociological cipher. His lack of cultural markings (property, title, birth, personhood, name) enable him to serve as the blank template for the new man of the novel’s subtitle, or as what Anahid Nersessian calls “the bearer of an exemplary if inimitable emptiness licensed by a modernity that rewards it” (2011, 651). Incarnating both the unrealized ideals of the Revolution and an abstract empty subjecthood to which all may aspire, Hermsprong preserves the possibility of “the material realization of a common humanity still only existing as an idea” (Rancière 2006, 27), serving as a kind of universal equivalent that enables the richly drawn characters around him to enter into relations that will achieve equality. Thus Hermsprong’s insistence that “as a man, I have rights, and will support them” enables the narrator to claim status as a man: “I, Gregory Glen, the son of nobody, felt myself raised, exalted by it. I almost began to think myself a man” (Bage 2002, 171). Despite such celebrations of human equality, Bage’s novel does not advocate revolution. Hermsprong dispels rioters by reminding them that “we cannot all be rich; there is no possible equality of property which can last a day” (314), and the revelation of his birth, like his marriage to Miss Campinet, justifies his status according to both old and new systems of thought. Nor do all aspects of the novel’s form support its ostensibly progressive politics. Even as the plot of the novel ultimately reinforces the status quo, its Shandean playfulness – frequent digressions, narratorial asides, dashes, zeugmas – produces bathetic conjunc tions that only superficially level distinctions, as the narrator’s mother, for example, is seduced “by a too tender heart, and a flowered cotton gown” (58). Bage’s conversational, comic style avoids tyrannical dogmatism and suspends the need for immediate revolu tion in the easy back‐and‐forth of playful debate. Whereas Bage and Holcroft offer plots of overcoming in which isolated villains – understood as the source of evil – are thwarted or converted to the noble cause, more radical writers offer tales in which the capacity of the individual to master the course The 1790s 25 of events is challenged by the corruption not of individuals, but of institutions. The law that vindicates Hermsprong is the instrument of injustice in the novels of Mary Hays, Godwin, and Wollstonecraft, and no happy revelation of exalted birth comes to guarantee redemption to the injured protagonists of their texts. Bage’s comic mode, with its ineffectual villains and resilient witty female characters, and Holcroft’s opti mistic idealism, which shows Anna St. Ives holding her rapist at bay with high‐flung moral scorn, contrast with the darker tragic optic of these novels. Mary Hays’ autobiographically based Emma Courtney (1796) offers the history of the heroine’s passion for and active pursuit of a man she perceives as the embodiment of virtue and sensibility. Cast as a letter to the son of Emma’s beloved Augustus Harley, the novel offers a first‐person account of Emma’s fruitless courtship of Augustus, who rebuffs her overtures because he is, unbeknownst to her, already married. In the second half, Emma, on the verge of destitution, accepts the proposal of the worthy but dull Mr. Montagu in a marriage of rational esteem. If Emma’s outpourings reveal the ways economic circumstances pervert human relations, they also suggest the inadequacy of philosophy to govern the subject and the object of desire. The life of reason and the ideal of republican womanhood cannot accommodate the sensibilities of Hays’s pas sionate heroine. When Emma’s Godwinian counselor, Mr. Francis, chides her for not striving to overcome her attachment to Augustus, his insistence on independence pre sumes a radical autonomy that women cannot attain. “Why call her to independence – which not nature, but the barbarous and accursed laws of society, have denied her?” Emma rages. “This is mockery!” (1996, 143). When the universal subject of rights is re‐embodied, differences of economic and political power, sex, physical strength, and sensibility reassert themselves. Although Hays endorses revolutionary ideals, the fates of Emma Courtney and of Mary Raymond, the heroine of her 1799 Victim of Prejudice, indicate the high price exacted from women who act as if the promise of Enlightenment justice extends to all. The works of Mary Wollstonecraft likewise endeavor to extend the principles of the Revolution to embrace women, while recognizing the ways these principles fall tragic ally short. Wollstonecraft recognizes the way that the impoverished nature of female education perpetuates traditional gender relations, which grant women access to power only through the sexual enthrallment of men and prevent women from attaining equality, even under the Revolution. For Wollstonecraft in the Vindication of the Rights of Woman, the humanity that provides the basis for rights is not a simple matter of species belonging (for women are often degraded to the status of prattling creatures, pets, birds), but of acquiring and perfecting reason and virtue through education. Rights on these terms are not simply to be conferred or arrogated, and they should not be confused with the exercise of mere power: the entitlement of the mistress, the aris tocrat, the queen. Instead, rights are acquired through duty, which entails the exercise of a distinctively human virtue. It is domestic and maternal duty that enables women to demonstrate that they are possessors of a humanity that distinguishes them from animality, and thus have a title to the rights otherwise reserved to man. In the Vindication, Wollstonecraft celebrates the fruits of reasoned education and excoriates the cult of sensibility for, among other things, the ways it naturalizes gender hierarchies.4 Yet she endeavors to exploit sensibility’s ability to establish sympathetic bonds that transcend rank and wealth in her incomplete, posthumously published 26 Lynn Festa novel, Maria; or, The Wrongs of Woman (1798). The tales of Maria – torn from her infant and incarcerated in a madhouse by her vindictive husband – and of Jemima – former prostitute and present attendant in the asylum – are designed to invite sympathy, but Wollstonecraft also wants her reader to recognize that suffering calls for both pity and justice. The novel’s fragmentary structure – the interlarded narratives, the shifts in register from the Gothic to the sentimental to the philosophic to the polemical – interrupts identification, compelling the reader to recognize that the sequential stories are not meant to prolong the pleasures of sentimental reading, but to communicate the fact that each tale is the single instantiation of a general injustice to be traced to structural forces rather than local villainy. By returning insistently to the pitiless institutions of the state – the madhouse, the court of law, the prison – Wollstonecraft conjoins the eth ical dimension of recognizing moral wrongs to the reclamation of political right. Wollstonecraft’s deployment of sentimental feeling reminds us that, as Claudia Johnson has argued, “the emotional excess of fiction during the 1790s” carries “political rather than the purely psychological import” (1995, 2). Affect shapes the citizen as well as the inward‐turning self. Godwin’s Things as They Are, or The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794) melds psychologically nuanced analysis with an anatomy of the con sequences of despotism for oppressor and oppressed alike. The tension between the social order and the individual is apparent in the title: whereas the first half – Things as They Are – emphasizes the political status quo and the structures that lock that order in place – the second half – The Adventures of Caleb Williams – contracts the focus to the history of an individual. The fulcrum of the title (“or”) converts the tautological struc ture of “things as they are” from the benign and static backdrop of “the adventures” into a fundamental force shaping them. Drawing on multiple genres – religious autobiography, lives of criminals, picaresque narrative, tragedy, the sentimental and the Gothic novel – Caleb’s first‐ person retroactive narrative tells of the curiosity that led his younger self to discover that his chivalric master, Squire Falkland, had murdered his enemy Tyrell, and traces his subsequent persecution by Falkland and his “infernal” agent Gines (1988, 314). Godwin’s insistence that the novel is “no refined and abstract speculation” but a “delineation of things now passing in the moral world” (3) tethers the text to its immediate historical moment. Caleb’s victimization by Gines and Falkland parallels the surveillance and persecution of radicals by the agents of Pitt’s government. Although Godwin, like Wollstonecraft, is interested in institutions that sanction the unjust persecution of the innocent Caleb, the novel recognizes that this power is exercised through fictions. The theatrical spectacle of the courts, the reputation of individuals, stories circulating in print, all create an oppressive world of panoptic surveillance that leaves the hero without refuge. If, as Rancière observes in the epigraph, fiction entails a material rearrangement of the “relation between what is seen and what is said,” Caleb Williams recognizes that this power cuts both ways. When Falkland frames Caleb for theft, the lies carry conviction. Gines’s broadside renders Caleb a marked man. Fiction in Caleb Williams possesses the power to reconfigure reality with potentially lethal outcomes, while the truth is revealed to be impotent in the face of superior force. Although Godwin’s Political Justice celebrates reason and human perfectibility, making politics into an extension of personal ethics, his novel demarcates the limits of this vision. The 1790s 27

Although Caleb Williams is not strictly speaking a Gothic novel, Godwin capitalizes on the mode’s trappings (and market allure) to materialize oppression in concrete form. Metaphorical constraint likewise becomes literal imprisonment in Eliza Fenwick’s Secresy; or, The Ruin in the Rock (1795), where the heroine is immured by her misanthropic uncle within a castle protected by a moat. The tumble‐down manors featured in Charlotte Smith’s The Old Manor House (1794) and Marchmont (1796) epitomize a crumbling ancien régime, while the claim of the eponymous heroine of Wollstonecraft’s Maria that “Marriage had bastilled me for life” (1994, 87) is literalized in her imprisonment by her husband in a madhouse. Blackstone’s famous characterization in his 1765 Commentaries of the law as “an old Gothic castle, erected in the days of chivalry, but fitted up for a modern inhabitant” (1979, 3.268)5 suggests why the Gothic was a potent figure for Burke’s age of chivalry, but it also serves as an emblem of the feudal codes from which society must be emancipated. Although the mode pre‐dates the Revolution, with the rise of Robespierre and the advent of the Terror, the Gothic becomes, as Robert Miles succinctly puts it, “a way of speaking the unspeakable” (2002a, 55). Typically set in a southern European Catholic country, the Gothic pits an essentially English sentimental heroine against the feudal aristocracy and oppressive ecclesiastical institutions of a tyrannical Romish past. Although the Gothic is decidedly formulaic, the plots themselves often involve the arbitrary relation of cause to effect. The unex pected irruption of the past into the present creates broken sequences that create incer titude about how things begin, how long they persist, and what will bring closure. In this sense, the Gothic novel is the perfect form for an age in which seismic historical events have unsettled any neat understanding of causality. History in the Gothic novel cannot be put to rest. The dead haunt the living, the sins and crimes of fathers and mothers are visited upon sons and daughters alike, and seemingly fictive entities attain real agency. Forces that elude rational comprehension prove to inhabit not only our world but also our inner being, challenging Enlightenment assertions about human reason, goodness, and perfectibility. “The Gothic novel,” in Peter Brooks’s words, “stands in reaction to the pretensions of rationalism. It reasserts the presence in the world of forces which cannot be accounted for by the daylight self and the self‐sufficient mind” (1973, 249). Whereas the philosophical novel of the 1790s is bound by a stern commitment to principles, and the novel of sensibility is designed to elicit sentiments of pity and benevolence, the literary tale of terror is “detached from the didactic function which had guaranteed the social utility of the realist novel. What could seem more gratuitous, more free of social determinations, than this indulgence in a fantasy of fear?” (Clery 1995, 9). Even as eighteenth‐century discussions of the sentimental strive to explain the pleasures to be gleaned from suffering, the Gothic invites one to fathom the delight extracted from terror. Both compel readers to engage in a series of experi ments upon the self, calibrating the intensity of fear and suffering in order to produce a readerly frisson. Both expose the difficulty of delineating the thresholds of the individual subject. Whereas the sentimental reader engaged in strategic sorties, dab bling in the emotional lives and sufferings of others, the Gothic reader finds the threshold between interior and exterior confused by specters that take up residence both within and outside the self. If, as Tzvetan Todorov puts it in The Fantastic, “the rational schema represents the human being as a subject entering into relations with 28 Lynn Festa other persons or with things that remain external to him, and which have the status of objects,” then “the literature of the fantastic disturbs this abrupt separation” (1975, 116). At a moment in which, as Adela Pinch and Claudia Johnson have argued, “the stakes of declaring feelings to be either extravagant or natural responses to political ‘terrors’ were high” (Pinch 1999, 112), the Gothic’s scrutiny of the proper intensity of feeling, and of the reality or spectral nature of the objects that elicit these feelings, has far‐reaching implications for the body politic. For if part of the debate over the universal rights‐bearing subject revolves around the nature of its individuality, then the pronounced difficulty that the Gothic novel has in delineating where one individual stops and another one begins is a political question par excellence. Ann Radcliffe’s paradigmatic novels – above all, The Romance of the Forest (1791), The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), and The Italian (1797) – feature virtuous heroines caught up in plots involving usurped inheritances, sexual transgressions, and illicit desires. The secluded mansions, crumbling ruins, dark dungeons, aristocratic villains, and menacing specters featured in these novels incarnate the oppressive structures of the ancien régime and of domestic, patriarchal despotism and exteriorize the inward recesses of the psyche in the labyrinthine topography of the castle, the monastery, the ruin. Radcliffe uses the responsiveness of her heroines to heighten the suspense for her readers, who remain in the same ignorance as the character. Her omniscient narrator retains, however, the ability to dispel the mystery through Radcliffe’s famous “explained supernatural” – the Scooby Doo plots that reveal other‐worldly elements to be anchored in everyday causality. In revealing the mechanisms behind these dramatic effects, Radcliffe locates the causes of the evils suffered by her virtuous heroines in the designs and desires of people in this world. In this sense, Radcliffe shares Jacobin writers’ suspi cion of superstition, irrationality, and the effects of arbitrary power. Her characters – like Caleb, like Maria – are subjected to unjust persecution by demonic figures in collusion with opaque but all‐powerful institutions. Not all Gothic novels, to be sure, rise to Radcliffe’s level. Her popularity spawned a host of cheap imitations. The Minerva Press furnished a dependably lurid stream of terror fiction through its network of lending libraries. In addition, translations of German sensationalist fiction, such as Schiller’s Ghost‐Seer (1789; English translation 1795), flooded the market. “From 1788 until 1807,” Robert Miles notes, “the Gothic maintains a market share of around 30 percent of novel production, reaching a high point of 38 percent in 1795, then dipping to around 20 percent in 1808” (2002a, 42). The formulaic aspect of Gothic fiction was much mocked: “Take – An old castle, half of it ruinous. /A long gallery, with a great many doors, some secret ones. / Three mur dered bodies, quite fresh … Mix them together” (Anon. 1798b, 223–225; quoted in Clery 1995, 147). Yet the sense of generic exhaustion conveyed by such recipes bespeaks a broader awareness of the shattered historical frameworks that drain conven tions of explanatory power. Nowhere are these tensions more evident than in Matthew Lewis’s The Monk, the succès de scandale of 1796. The central plot concerns the pious monk, Ambrosio, his seduction by the diabolical Matilda, his subsequent (incestuous) rape and murder of the virginal Antonia, and his fall. A secondary plot revolves around the forbidden union (including premarital sex) of Raymond and Agnes, which results in the pregnant Agnes’s incarceration in a convent from which the hero fails to rescue her. In both plots, repressed desire leads to explosive consequences at its liberation. The 1790s 29

The Monk mocks as nonsensical superstition the supernatural elements that drive its plot, but unlike Radcliffe, Lewis does not explain its machinery. As Catherine Belsey points out, the novelty of Lewis’s text stems from the fact that “it withholds from the reader the security of a single position from which the narrative as a whole is retrospectively intelligible” (1986, 58). Lewis’s campy appropriation of conventions thus jostles against a sense of the real power of the irrational forces at work in a world no longer governed by a stable sense of the sacred. When the eloping lovers, Raymond and Agnes, seek to exploit the legend of the Bleeding Nun (the improperly buried victim of a family crime who haunts the castle in which Agnes is held captive), the forces they deride as superstition rise up against them, as Agnes is supplanted in her flight by the Bleeding Nun. If the supernatural forces in the novel exceed rational explanation, so too do the deeds of this world. When, in the closing sequences of the novel, the mob hears of the “inhuman murder of Agnes,” they attack the convent and literally tear the abbess to pieces, leaving her body “no more than a mass of flesh, unsightly, shapeless, and disgusting” (2008, 355, 356). The release of the bloodthirsty energies of the mob involves no supernatural power, but its acts defy reason, and its deeds are sanctioned by no law. In such sequences, it is no longer possible to relocate ethics in the individual. The ferocity of the mob depicted in such episodes helped fuel conservative backlash against the Revolution, as the darkening scene in France – the September massacres of 1792 in which citizens butchered enemies of the Revolution in the streets, the execu tion of the king in January 1793, the declaration of war later that year – led to a pro liferation of loyalist publications. Novelists such as Jane West, Isaac Disraeli, Charles Lucas, and Elizabeth Hamilton published “anti‐Jacobin” novels designed to combat the revolutionary threat to property, status, and hierarchy. M. O. Grenby numbers fifty, noting that there are far fewer radical novels, although the political divides used to class these novels – radical and conservative, reform and reaction, Jacobin and anti‐ Jacobin – create organizing binaries that do not quite hold up (2001, 1). Conservative women writers, for example, often shared their radical counterparts’ positions on the flaws in female education and the need for reform, while their rejection of “Revolutionary feminist civic ‘woman’ for a renewed model of ‘domestic woman,’” as Gary Kelly argues, allowed them to represent themselves as the “professionalized custodian of the ‘national’ conscience, culture, and destiny” (1993, 21). To skewer the radicals, more over, is not to align oneself completely with the loyalists, and vice versa. As Claudia Johnson has argued, the primacy granted to the “consciousness of unempowered char acters,” coupled with the strategic use of “irony, antithetical pairing, double plotting, [and] the testing or subverting of overt, typically doctrinaire statement with contrast ing dramatic incident,” allowed seemingly conservative writers to interrogate the very stances they ostensibly upheld (1990, xxiv). Writers, male and female, frequently employ contrasts – between characters and their fates, between sentiment and deed, doctrine and dramatic action – to articulate their stances without the overtly polemical statements that might bring down the repressive forces of the state upon them, using juxtaposition to expose contradictions within the social and political order. Here as elsewhere, it is important to read with an eye to the way form and content meet and depart from one another. The progressive Elizabeth Inchbald’s Nature and Art (1796) at first glance appears to be a reductive Rousseauvian fable in its contrast between the virtuous child of nature, Henry, and the 30 Lynn Festa corrupt product of society, his brother, William, but the generic immixture within the text – which moves from didacticism to satire, from fairy tale to psychological portrait, from political polemic to melodramatic account of the sufferings of fallen virtue – never fully sanctions any stable organizing framework for judgment. The conservative Jane West’s A Gossip’s Story (1796) – best known as an anticipation of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (1811) – pits the good sense of the elder sister, Louisa, against the excessive sensibilities of the younger romance‐reading Marianne in a thinly veiled conduct book, but the narrative structure complicates the moral to be extracted from the text, as the “gossip” of the title – Prudentia Homespun, a financially self‐sufficient, cat‐owning spinster – offers caustic, metacritical observations about herself, her fellow gossips, and her text, complete with self‐referential chapter titles, tart admonitions, and comments on her reader’s expectations. Serving as the engine of the plot, the traffic in information within this feminine public sphere presents a benign counter image of the government surveillance that characterized Pitt’s Terror (Butler 1987, 98). Although the “compare and contrast” format of these texts suggests a neat division, the narrative forms selected by these writers often complicate the simple binaries they set up. Whereas more radical writers such as Hays and Wollstonecraft stress the unjust fate of the “ruined” woman, anti‐Jacobin novels focus on the effect of the female loss of virtue on the social fabric as a whole. The Jacobin novels typically feature aristocratic seducers after virtuous republican maidens, while the threat in the anti‐Jacobin novel comes from the unscrupulous New Philosopher, such as the charming but corrupt Jacobin Deist Fitzosborne, who ultimately kidnaps and rapes the virtuous Geraldine Powerscourt, leaving her to die of grief, in Jane West’s 1799 A Tale of the Times. Celebrating piety, chastity, and maternal duty as forms of patriotism, and converting female virtue into the guarantor of national stability, West and other conservative women novelists simultaneously exalt women’s place in the domestic sphere and inflate the domestic world’s political significance:

Should it therefore be told to future ages, that the capricious dissolubility (if not the absolute nullity) of the nuptial tie and the annihilation of parental authority are among the blasphemies uttered by the moral instructors of these times … they will not ascribe the annihilation of thrones and altars to the successful arms of France, but to those prin ciples which, by dissolving domestic confidence and undermining private worth, paved the way for universal confusion. (1799, 2.274–275)

Although West endorses the sundering of the “female” domestic sphere from public and political life, her anticipation of the future’s past insists on the political signifi cance women’s domestic lives already possess. Whether deliberately or inadvertently, West stages what Rancière calls a dissensus: “a division put in the ‘common sense’: a dispute about ... the frame within which we see something as given” (2004, 304). The French feminist revolutionary Olympe de Gouges, Rancière argues, creates a dissensus in her insistence that women’s presence on the scaffold entitles them to a seat in the assembly. In placing women’s domestic duties on the same table as the political fate of the nation, West also stages a dissensus, but, unlike de Gouges, she refuses to draw any conclusions about the title of women to rights therefrom. The 1790s 31

Conservative writers emphasize obligation and duty over rights, locating their characters within a moral order that interrogates the possibility of autonomy upon which individual models of rights are based. In Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800), Elizabeth Hamilton satirizes philosophers such as Mary Hays (the insupportable Bridgetina Botherim), Godwin (Mr. Myope), and Holcroft (Mr. Glib). Sneering at goodness that does not flow “from a conviction of general utility, pursued through the maze of abstract reasoning” (2000, 173), Hamilton’s philosophers laud equality in glowing terms but mistreat their servants, exalt duty to all mankind but shirk daily obligations, and abuse the language of rights to justify a self‐indulgent disregard for others. Yet Hamilton, like Hays, like Wollstonecraft, recognizes injustice in existing institutions and divisions of power. Her good Mrs. Fielding has founded an organiza tion to prevent dire need from compelling women to turn to prostitution, demon strating Hamilton’s recognition of the economic causes behind ostensibly “moral” effects. And while Hamilton itemizes the cost of violating social conventions, she happily violates literary ones: the novel concludes, to be sure, with Vallaton’s poetically just end at the guillotine, but the narrator spends the final pages explaining how she has found “the heart to disappoint the Misses, by closing our narrative without a wedding,” and ventriloquizing the objections of her readers (384). Like many other novelists of the decade, Hamilton toys with convention, overtly commenting upon the labor and artifice needed to impose closure on the narrative. The communities with which novels of the 1790s conclude are themselves a commen tary upon the plausibility of revolutionary plots. Even where the sentimental sufferers or injured parties are invited to join the community with which the novel ends, no class‐action suit confers justice or equality on the commonality of humanity, and vari ous unincorporated remainders lurk at the fringes, as a reminder of the forces that cannot be fully absorbed by the community. Although Charlotte Smith’s Desmond (1792), her novel of the French Revolution, ends with the marriage of the titular hero and the now‐widowed woman whom he has long pursued, Geraldine is obliged to adopt Desmond’s love child with a Frenchwoman. The excessive protestations of enduring love offered by the flighty former libertine Montfleuri, moreover, suggest scant hope that he will remain faithful to his new wife. The contingencies that shape the social and political order create multiple possible futures emerging from the pres ent order of things as described in the narrative, yet literary conventions are not sturdy enough to guarantee the plausible afterlife of the characters or their probable fate in the world. The multiple speculative endings Wollstonecraft produced in her notes for Maria, like the two dramatically different endings Godwin wrote for Caleb Williams, indicate that – even if the exact outcome is not inevitable – nothing in the social order can assure that the wrongs of the disempowered will be righted, or even mitigated. In drawing attention to the constructed nature of these novelistic endings, these texts expose the fictive foundations of their world‐constituting power. And it is per haps there, and not in the visions of a revolutionary society, that their political agency is to be found. By placing matters of literary and political representation in particularly close proximity, novels of the period reveal the fictive basis of political forms. And it is the fact that these forms come to seem fictive (made) and hence changeable that helps pro duce revolution. The reflexivity produced within these texts both allows readers to 32 Lynn Festa contemplate alternative futures and sets up new possible relations to the past. The novel of the 1790s thus not only puts political and philosophical theory to work, giving nar rative form to static ideals or enacting utopian possibility. It also operates as a kind of theory, devising, through the medium of fiction, new relations to the referential world.

Notes

1 A number of important books have been (1996), Emsley (1979), Goodwin (1979), Jones dedicated to novels of the revolutionary (1983), Thompson (1991). decade. In addition to books cited else 3 On the dearth of novels in revolutionary where, see Watson (1994), Wallace (2009), France, see the relevant years in Martin and Ty (1993), and London (2006), especially Mylne (1977). pp. 139–201. 4 On sensibility in the 1790s, see Jones (1993). 2 There are many histories of British responses to 5 On the Gothic, see also Miles (2002b), Punter the French Revolution. See, for example, (1980), Watt (1999), Castle (1995), especially Barrell (2000), Dickinson (1985), Duffy pp. 120–189, Brown (2005), Ellis (1989).

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Consensus, Harmony, Equipoise?

Like the United States’ 1950s, the English 1850s was a decade of wealth, comfort, and consensus that in time revealed itself to be too good to be true, too exclusionary to be just or sufficient, and to have always harbored the seeds of its own undoing. Part of the “age of equipoise,” a label coined by historian W. L. Burn in 1964, the 1850s were the decade of the Great Exhibition of 1851’s proud showing off of global economic prowess, of riches as if from an enchanted river of gold, of a long sigh of relief that Great Britain had narrowly missed the revolutions of 1848 that roiled the rest of Europe. World‐ and nation‐transforming forces that had, in the decades previous, often appeared frightening, baffling, or potentially unmanageable (the railroad and the telegraph, Evangelical dissent, the demands of the working poor, the explosion of industrial cities, mass print culture, and the novel as an insurgent form challenging more traditionally prestigious genres) seemed to begin to settle into profitable routines. Historian G. M. Young memorably declared in 1934 that these were “the years when … England was renewing her youth”; “Of all decades in our history, a wise man would choose the eighteen‐fifties to be young in” (1977, 87). An army of self‐made industrialists tied the nation up into an efficiently value‐adding web of railway‐ enabled commerce and flourishing public institutions; a legion of energetic and sometimes visionary reformers, politicians, and bureaucrats (James Kay‐Shuttleworth, Edwin Chadwick, Matthew Arnold as school inspector rather than poet) tackled some of the major problems of a modern, industrial world power (hygiene and sewage, housing, disease, the welfare of the poor, the franchise); the evangelical and Dissenting insurgency of the earlier decades had matured into comfortable middle‐class,

A Companion to the English Novel, First Edition. Edited by Stephen Arata, Madigan Haley, J. Paul Hunter, and Jennifer Wicke. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. The 1850s 35 post‐aristocratic codes of decency, propriety, family domesticity, and discretion; at least until the end of the decade, Britain’s expanding global empire appeared under profitable control; the 1830s and 1840s explosion of print culture and competing subgenres of fiction cohered into regular procedures of serial‐into‐three‐decker realist novels and periodicals distributing high‐level writing and thought to every provincial corner of the nation and even the empire, helping to knit disparate regions, worldviews, and dialects into a self‐regulating totality. To many, the nation’s systems of value seemed miraculously in tune, with economic, cultural, aesthetic, ethical values all apparently chiming to one strain. And this was one of the triumphant periods of the English novel, as well: the moment of Victorian realism’s full flowering, containing a disproportionate share of the English novel’s greatest monuments. The novel served as a crucible for geopolitical conceptions of identity and nation, performing and reflecting England and Great Britain’s self‐ understanding as a flourishing, benevolent, and harmonious world power. Victorian fiction of this period could be characterized (on the model of the 1960s Italian art movement Arte Povera) as in some sense an Arte Ricchezza, an art of wealth, abundance, and amplitude. That is to say, at once a generous and profuse art, and also one with a notably tight fit to a wealthy and confident society. The mid‐Victorian novel represented the mid‐Victorian nation, was one of its most successful commercial products, criticized it, celebrated it, offered its most far‐reaching diagnosis and analysis. England’s self‐understanding as a nation of consensus and harmony provided ideological material for the aesthetic form of the novel – which, like the nation, gathered up multitudes and produced a totality. This was the greatest decade of the “inimitable” Charles Dickens, containing several of his masterpieces (David Copperfield [1850], Bleak House [1853], and Little Dorrit [1857]) and other key novels as well (Hard Times [1854], A Tale of Two Cities [1859]). It was also a rich period for the two authors most seen at the time as Dickens’ primary rivals, with Anthony Trollope publishing the first three volumes of the great Chronicles of Barsetshire (The Warden [1855], Barchester Towers [1857], and Doctor Thorne [1858]), and William Makepeace Thackeray following up Vanity Fair (1848) with a novel that many at the time felt to be its superior, Henry Esmond (1852). After the 1847 annus mirabilis of the three Brontë sisters, Charlotte Brontë, by now a celebrated and nearly clubbable lady author rather than one of a trio of mysterious pseudonymous sisters from the moors of Yorkshire, followed Jane Eyre (1847) and her “condition of England” novel Shirley (1849) with the strange and powerful Villette (1853). England in the period loved to assess its own “condition” like a cheerfully compliant medical patient. Elizabeth Gaskell followed up on the strength of her own debut “condition of” novel, Mary Barton (1848), which took as its donnée clashes between industrialists and factory workers in Manchester, with a somewhat more polished follow‐up within that mode, North and South (1855), whose formal, political, and ethical principles of harmony, compromise, and balance encapsulate those key ideals of the decade. Charles Kingsley’s Alton Locke (1850) and Yeast (1851) are two more notable “condition of” novels. Wilkie Collins invented sensation fiction (a grafting of Victorian realism’s contemporary everyday with some of the horrors of Gothic and crime fiction) with Basil (1852) and The Woman in White (1860). George Meredith published a strange novel, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859), which would, in retrospect, appear a key ancestor of the experimental and 36 Ivan Kreilkamp aesthetic fictions of the late century. And George Eliot inaugurated her monumental career with the bestseller Adam Bede (1859), her first full‐length fiction, the single Victorian novel that most influentially elevated “realism” to the status of a self‐conscious aesthetic doctrine. Fiction had become a metadiscourse, an omnium‐gatherum, an aesthetic means by which to account for, reflect on, and do justice to the amazing plenitude of the triumphant British nation‐state. The novel’s very capaciousness served as an analogue for the nation in its pride at managing to contain so much, including an expanding empire, and still call it British (see, for example, Plotz 2008). In its most successful and dominant aesthetic form, England narrated and enacted an irresistible story of consensus and political unity – a story no less appealing for being in many respects a fantasy.

Wreck and Illth

For it did not even take as long as the conclusion of the 1850s – or the fourth paragraph of this essay – for the seams and fault lines of this post‐1848 equipoise (a term W. L. Burn never in fact meant to imply a lack of tensions) to show. If the US 1950s ended, perhaps, in 1962/63 with the Cuban Missile Crisis and the arrival of the Beatles’ first album, the English 1850s may have ended as early as the traumatic wounding of the “Indian Mutiny” or Rebellion of 1857, and the turn it inaugurated towards a more racist and embattled mode of imperial governance; or perhaps the decade should be recognized as at once culminating and overcoming its own self‐ understanding with the transformative books of 1859 and 1860: pre‐eminently Charles Darwin’s world‐historical On the Origin of Species (1859), but also Essays and Reviews (1860; a vehicle for the German‐inspired, historicist Higher Criticism of the Bible), John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (1859), and Unto This Last (1859), John Ruskin’s excoriating jeremiad, published with what we can imagine might have been mixed feelings by Thackeray in his Cornhill. Ruskin threw cold water on any equipoisal illusions in pronouncing the British wealth that had been dramatically embodied in the Great Exhibition to be in fact “illth,” not value but the absence of value, not wealth but unwealth: a poverty of riches. “He looked more like a prisoner at the bar than a gentleman at his own house” (1975, 220), a line from Collins’s end‐of‐decade “sensation novel” The Woman in White – so successful as to invite comparisons with cholera in the speed with which it infected English readers – sounds a tone at odds with the cheerfully complacent har- monies of the equipoisal 1850s. For that “gentleman at his own house,” read England itself, attaining a glimpse of unheimlich self‐knowledge. The empire becomes restless, the working poor are still hungry and only appeased, the economy is built on debt and credit and perhaps lies, the family home and domestic sphere contain long‐suppressed secrets and instabilities that cannot remain hidden, and representational codes, however masterfully refined, cannot fully control or expel unwanted data. Like the nation and empire in which they were created and on which they reflect, the novels of this period are committed to harmony and consensus, both thematically and formally, but cannot keep out material and insights that trouble these ideals. It is not so much that a structural whole reveals visible seams, but that those seams were always woven into The 1850s 37 the structure. Little Dorrit’s Arthur Clennam could be that “gentleman,” a figure for an English guilty conscience, “haunted by a suspicion” that his fortune and happiness are “not honestly and justly mine,” impelled to seek “reparation” and “restitution” (1982, 40), but in precisely what manner, and to whom, he does not know. Or Thackeray’s melancholic, memory‐haunted Henry Esmond, “not the first that has regretted his own act, or brought about his own undoing” (1989, 350). Or Charlotte Brontë’s Lucy Snowe, in Villette: “Picture me then idle, basking, plump, and happy, stretched on a cushioned deck, warmed with constant sunshine, rocked by breezes indolently soft. However, it cannot be concealed that, in that case, I must somehow have fallen overboard, or that there must have been wreck at last” (2000, 35). Many of the protagonists of the decade’s major novels see themselves as shipwrecked, waking from dreams of sunshine to the shock of falling overboard. Had there ever really been a sunny deck and a plump and happy passenger to begin with? Indeed, the untroubled and comfortably “at home” 1850s always was a fantasy‐ formation. Deeply committed as they are to decorum and discretion, none of the period’s landmark fictions altogether succeed in keeping the repressed, the abject, or the unspeakable from making their presence felt. In hindsight, reading triumphal commentary from the decade, it’s easy to forget that these writers were not long past the traumatic “Hungry 40s.” What can sound like irrational exuberance may often have been an effort, through magical thinking and writing, not to jinx the amazing good luck. At least for a while in this period, a fragile aesthetic‐political‐ethical consensus, based on aesthetic realism, political and economic liberalism, moderate reform, and post‐Evangelical morality – probably best understood not as “harmony” but what Barchester Towers identifies as a productive state of “moderate” and managed schism (1996, 188) – did enable a mode of fictional realism capable of delivering formal innovation and mastery, and readerly pleasure, in profuse abundance. In Bleak House, Dickens’s narrator Esther Summerson tries to explain why a particular account by an “old lady” of the relationship between a father and son struck her as convincing: “What I might have thought of them without the old lady’s account, or what I might have thought of the old lady’s account without them, I cannot say. There was a fitness of things in the whole that carried conviction with it” (1996, 210). Mid‐Victorian fiction itself, we might say, conveyed such a sense of “fitness of things in the whole,” a convincing and pleasing discursive representation of a plausible world, to readers willing to sign on to the implicit aesthetic contract we now call realism. We can find such a sense of realist fitness in earlier and later novels as well, of course, but fiction of this period is stamped by the particular brand of a mid‐century British nation that felt it had discovered how to transform hetereogeneity into a self‐regulating and happy totality.

Realism, Culture, History

In George Eliot’s 1856 review of the third volume of Modern Painters, she praises Ruskin’s “realism – the doctrine that all truth and beauty are to be attained by a humble and faithful study of nature, and not by substituting vague forms, bred by imagination on the mists of feeling, in place of definite, substantial reality” (1990, 368). She asserts 38 Ivan Kreilkamp that a “thorough application of this doctrine would remould our life” (368). Here and in the famous Chapter 17 of Adam Bede, Eliot aims once and for all to dispel any lingering prejudice against realism as a vehicle for Continental unsavories (Flaubert’s Madame Bovary was published and banned in France in 1857) or as a wallowing in insignificant or grubby low life for its own sake. She was not the first or the only novelist to take up this standard, of course; think also of Charlotte Brontë beginning Shirley (1849) with a caveat to any reader hoping for “sentiment, and poetry, and reverie … passion, and stimulus, and melodrama” as the proper materials for fiction: “Calm your expectations, reduce them to a lowly standard. Something real, cool, and solid lies before you; something unromantic as Monday morning” (2006, 5). Or think of Thackeray’s earlier acts of genre‐murder in his devastating parodies of the 1830s “Silver‐Fork” fiction of aristocratic society and high life, or his later Henry Esmond: “I would have History familiar rather than heroic” (1989, 4). (Note Thackeray’s chatty and familiar direct address, which assumes or conjures a unified and consensual “we” – a significant realism‐effect.) By the time Eliot wrote Adam Bede, she could brilliantly encapsulate a newly dominant structure of feeling that recognized one of art’s – and certainly fiction’s – pre‐eminent tasks to be the “humble and faithful” representation and imaginative recreation of everyday life. Rejecting prophets, “sublimely beautiful women,” and “heroes” as the necessary proper subjects of art, Eliot declares, “I can’t afford to give all my love and reverence to such rarities: I want a great deal of those feelings for my every‐day fellow‐men, especially for the few in the foreground of the great multitude, whose faces I know, whose hands I touch” (1996, 178–179). In describing herself as walking among her characters, or the real people who inspired them, touching their hands, Eliot exemplifies what Harry Shaw (1999, 103–104) has characterized as nineteenth‐century realism’s master trope of “historicist metonymy.” As most influentially defined by Erich Auerbach in Mimesis (1953) and by Ian Watt in The Rise of the Novel (1957), fictional realism is a dominant mode of modernity, defining a world of secular (rather than divine or preordained) temporality, individually “realistic” characters (rather than allegorical types or heroes), and narrative techniques synchronized to a modern world defined by capitalism and Protestantism’s rhythms of everyday life (rather than the heroic or tragic modes of epic drama or poetry). Realism is, however, like rock and roll, one of those aesthetic modes that can always seem to be either already long‐deceased or at risk of collapse. For Georg Lukács in The Historical Novel (1937), to cite one famous case of realism–pessimism, realism loses its way after Walter Scott when, for example, in Flaubert, decorative historical details proliferate for their own sake, obscuring rather than illuminating the underlying logics of historical development, or when, in Thackeray, great events and historical movements are viewed only “from the proximity of everyday private life” (1983, 202). Shaw, no realism‐pessimist, argues rather that Victorian realism adapts from Scott techniques that press readers to stretch their imaginations in order to feel their way, with powerful effects, into the experiences and causal links of other lives. (This logic is “metonymic” in that its most resonant images and figures operate not as metaphorical symbols but as chains of details embedded in contiguous and historically delimited circumstances.) Realism illuminates, in Auerbach’s phrase, “the present as history,” insofar as great works of realism allow us a way into worldviews and ways of living that, whether they are situated “60 years hence” (Waverley) or in the The 1850s 39 contemporary moment, require readerly acts of empathetic identification in order not (impossibly) to transcend our own historical and cultural situations, but to glimpse how experience might be perceived outside of them. What is arguably most crucial in Eliot’s manifesto for realism is not its emphasis on low or ordinary lives, the everyday nonheroic reality, for its own sake, but rather its agenda to use fiction as a launching pad for acts of insight into other lives, other times, other minds. Another way of thinking about such acts of insight would be, in Andrew H. Miller’s terms, as a “responsiveness” to the models of other lives and an assent to the “proposal that we come to understand ourselves through others” (2008, 191) and in relation to the model of lives that we ourselves can and will not live. To read a great work of realism is to join Eliot in dwelling among fictional characters understood as potential exemplars, trying to see the world through their eyes and to feel their sensations, positioned as they must always be differently from “us,” whoever we may be. Shaw reconceives Victorian realism as a powerfully generative mode, heavily indebted to Walter Scott’s historical fictions, offering a matchless “recognition of the complexity of societies as they move through history, and the fragility of the individuals who face them” (1999, 31). In this account, Victorian realism’s key achievements rely on, just as much as or even more than on a post‐Austenian, post‐Romantic illumination of subjective “inner life,” Scott‐indebted “emotional and cognitive activities that allow us to experience what it would be like to come to grips with the way history moves” (35) and to understand how a given historical moment constrains, defines, and enables the consciousness of situated characters. Kathleen Tillotson also observes that the mid‐Victorian novel increasingly reveals “the wish to record change, in its process or by implied contrast” (1954, 92). As L. P. Hartley put it in the opening lines of his The Go‐Between (1953), thinking back to an idealized childhood summer of 1900, “the past is a foreign country. They do things differently there” (2002, 17). His nostalgia for a late‐Victorian youth figured as an exotic land with strange customs is itself in a Victorian key.

Natives and Foreigners

In Adam Bede, Eliot looks back (in a distinctly Scott‐indebted span of 60 years, one lifetime) from 1859 to England in 1799, which any reader from 1859 on must understand as in some sense a foreign culture, a now‐vanished particular nexus of history, culture, and individual character. By reading the novel, we, like Eliot’s original readers, grapple with the gap between our own determining circumstances and those of this other time and culture, and so apprehend history as a living force imprinting individual lives as well as societies. This gap within the novel is, crucially, distant but not unbridgeable. The narrator tells us that she has actually spoken to the modern successor of the novel’s preacher Mr. Irwine, underlining the fact that contiguous ties of memory and association link present and past. “Put your face to one of the glass panes in the right‐hand window,” Eliot commands as we approach the home of some of the novel’s central characters; “what do you see?” (1996, 72). Her realist methodology impels us to perform such acts, which partake less of voyeurism or judgment than of sympathetic imagination and a protoethnographic recreation; we must engage in 40 Ivan Kreilkamp cognitive effort to take in all the profuse details of Hall Farm – “plenty of life there” (72) – and to apprehend them as part of a totality, a complete culture at a specific moment in time. Eliot conjures her 1799 village of Hayslope as a “knowable community,” in Raymond Williams’ phrase (1973, Chapter 16), but that phrase should not be taken to connote any simple or unproblematic epistemology, as if we could simply glance into Eliot’s world under a glass bowl (the famous image Nathaniel Hawthorne applied to Trollope’s realism), and “know” it absolutely. Knowability is rather an ambitious aesthetic, cognitive, and ethical goal. To read the novel properly is to work strenuously to attain such a knowledge – of other people, cultures, mores – that is impossible fully to attain (as it may be in our own lives as well). In her opening lines Eliot compares her act of historical recreation to that of an “Egyptian sorcerer” who uses “a single drop of ink” to reveal “far‐reaching visions of the past” (5). Eliot’s is a powerful magic (what we call realism turns out to be more prone to acts of enchantment than is often recognized), but like any Cassandra, her prophecies and visions call for equally powerful efforts of interpretation and understanding. Eliot’s emphasis on fiction’s role in cultivating sympathetic response across divides – of history, culture, class, ideology – exemplifies something fundamental about mid‐ Victorian ideology and its aesthetic forms. Shift 60 years hence or hitherto, to the 1790s or 1910s, and you will not find novels sharing such aims or ideals. For another example of the ways Victorian realism mobilizes such responsive understanding, consider North and South, in which Elizabeth Gaskell’s comfortably middle‐class protagonist Margaret Hale, plunged into the exotic world of a northern industrial city, initially can make no sense of – or misinterprets – the language of the workers she passes in the street; she perceives only threatening otherness. But by befriending a working‐class family, the Higginses, and visiting their home, she for the first time comes into personal contact with the details, habits, and circumstances of these other lives, and can begin to sympathize and understand. A reader alert to the ideological blind spots of a middle‐class Victorian author hopefully addressing the problem of industrial labor may have difficulty taking seriously Gaskell’s optimistic ambitions here. Her realist method might uncharitably be viewed as a means to prove the good intentions and open‐mindedness of a cultured young woman from the rural south willing to befriend uncouth northern factory workers, thereby offering a model for national harmony and reconciliation. When Margaret marries the mill owner Thornton, who under her influence learns to take seriously and try to ameliorate his workers’ difficulties, many readers have seen a classically and unsatisfyingly Victorian demonstration of limited bourgeois reform by fictional means. Having published the more politically raw Mary Barton, with its greater willingness to acknowledge unbridgeable cultural and epistemological divides between social classes, in 1848, the year of revolution abroad and Chartist working‐class agitation at home, the more confident follow‐up “equipoisal” novel of the 1850s is content to model gestures of small‐scale liberal outreach. In this sense North and South can appear distinctly mid‐Victorian in a pejorative sense, in its suggestion that consensus must be the last word both politically and aesthetically. But we should look beyond Gaskell’s cautious liberal politics to recognize how North and South emplots its characters, its author, and its various readers through time in an ongoing link of historicist realist metonymy: every new reader of the novel faces a slightly new challenge in feeling her way towards imaginative contact with the novel, The 1850s 41 so as almost to “touch the hand” of Margaret or the Higginses, to sense just what it might feel like to live in Manchester in 1855 in Margaret Hale’s or Bessy Higgins’s skin. We need not embrace Gaskell’s ideology or politics to admire the artistry and commitment with which she constructs her novel to make possible and “fit” such acts of cognition and imagination. Any realist novel survives by virtue of its continuing capacity to induce such movements of the reader’s mind and emotions. A corollary of Victorian realism’s concern with community knowable and unknowable, with Gemeinschaft (typified by small communities and families) and Gesellschaft (typified in more dispersed and impersonal associations), is a continual tracking of insiderness and outsiderness: who belongs, who is a native, who is a stranger, an interloper? The novels under discussion can all be “mapped” out in terms of geographical, social, and psychological location and boundary crossing, with many central plotlines initiated by the movement of a key character from one symbolically charged location to another: Margaret Hale’s in North and South from London to Manchester, Arthur Clennam’s in Little Dorrit from China back to London, Lucy Snowe’s in Villette from England to Lebassecour (Belgium), the smuggling of King James III from France to England in Henry Esmond, the importation of the murderous French maid Hortense into an aristocratic household in London in Bleak House, the return of Trollope’s glam- orous and dangerously Italianate Madeleine Stanhope to provincial Barchester. As we have seen, fiction at once models, explores, and reflects national conceptions of identity and ideology. Historian Linda Colley has influentially argued in her Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (1992) that the English of the first half of the nineteenth century were fundamentally Protestant in self‐understanding to such a degree that the figure of the non‐English “other” was most likely to take the form of Catholic from the Continent or even from Ireland (rather than, say, a native African). John Henry Newman’s conversion to Catholicism in 1845, and the so‐called “Papal Aggression” (the re‐establishment of Roman Catholic hierarchy in England and the founding of the archdiocese of Westminster) in 1850, particularly roused Protestant anti‐Catholic sentiments in England, and such novels as Villette, Henry Esmond, and most of Dickens’s 1850s fiction offer narratives of British self‐formation via symbolic rejection of non‐ Protestant others. Sometimes, though, as with the odiously ambitious and “impure” social climber Obadiah Slope in Barchester Towers, the scapegoat is as English as any other character, simply defined by characterological flaws (often including a suscepti- bility to the non‐native) that necessitate his ritual humiliation and expulsion. A harmonious community – Gemeinschaft – and a healthy “culture” narrate their own identity in part through ejecting the other, with the novel as a genre containing elements of an often‐exclusive social register or national census.

Systems, Institutions, Contagion

One corollary of Victorian realism’s focus on the embeddedness of individuals within social milieus perceived as “cultures” is a perception and representation of these milieus as systems in which each piece links to a larger web. Victorian realism tends to see all individuals, and potentially even the tiniest observed details (a style of dress, a way of eating, an economic transaction, a manner of speaking), as embedded in the 42 Ivan Kreilkamp

“systematicity” of a particular culture, one that whether it is placed decades ago or in “the present as history,” must be apprehended as a totality, a complete “world.” James Buzard, drawing in part on earlier work by Christopher Herbert (1991), has convincingly defined the British novel of the early and mid‐nineteenth century as informed by an “autoethnographic project” that aims “for a view of a social field that comes into view as ‘one’s own culture’ through the very act of disengaging from it” (2005, 11, 106). Even decades prior to the colonial fictions of Stevenson, Kipling, Schreiner, or Conrad, English fiction turns out to rely centrally on a logic of self‐alienation that can only recognize “home” or “England” or “Britain” by peering on it from outside with the gaze of an observant visitor or ethnographer. The novel becomes a mechanism for crystallizing one slice of English culture at a particular time in order at once to understand it as a total system, a complete culture with every detail contributing to meaning, and to gain the possibility of disengaging from it: to attain a view from “outside,” like an ethnographer who is at once in and out of the social world he studies. Or in the terms of Amanda Anderson’s argument about objectivity and distance as intellectual desiderata of the period, these novels struggle with a paradoxical desire: at once to attain the critical distance on Englishness afforded by a “cosmopolitan” vision that transcends the nation, and to avoid the deracinated “rootlessness” or foreignness associated with such cosmopolitanism (2001). The Victorian realist novel grants a narrative perspective that is at once inside and outside, rooted and cosmopolitan: peering through the glass pane with critical distance, but also brushing the hands of the characters depicted in sympathetic identification. The great texts of Victorian realism are not, then, the “loose baggy monsters” of Henry James’s influential put‐down, which inaugurated a modernist rejection of Victorian realism as too profuse, inexact, casually constructed, and (implied by both Lukács’s The Historical Novel and Woolf’s “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” [1924]), too obsessed with verisimilitude‐granting historical or social details for their own sake. We can instead understand these novels, even those representing contemporary England, as projects of “historicist” imagination and as assays into protoethnographic cultural understanding. “[U]ntil we know what has been or will be the peculiar combination of outward with inward facts, which constitutes a man’s critical actions, it will be better not to think ourselves wise about his character” (1996, 313), Eliot cautions in Adam Bede; “[c]onsequences are unpitying” (172). A novel allows us to understand and to feel our way into the necessarily “foreign” territory of the “peculiar combination of outward with inward facts” that constrains and enables any individual’s worldview and actions. These novels must, then, perhaps, be long and even a bit “baggy” in order effectively to be “world‐making” in this sense – to construct a fictional totality possessing sufficient nuance, detail, and illusionistic realism (“fitness of things in the whole,” in Esther Summerson’s terms) that its chains of “circumstance” and “consequence” will feel convincingly binding. Yet in these authors’ ambitious portrayals of any such particular “pitiless” structure of culture and history at one moment in time, a potential unbinding key is given to a reader who may now attain a better understanding of how what feels at a given moment to be immutable reality will shift and realign over time. The greatest novel of social systematicity in this decade – and on any shortlist of very greatest Victorian or even English novels – is Dickens’s Bleak House, in which each The 1850s 43 character struggles for knowledge of his or her proper place within a social and verbal system of dizzying complexity. In a massive book containing the imaginative wealth, characters, and plot strands of several more typical novels, one of the text’s main through‐lines concerns the paranoia‐inducing experience of living in a world that is understood to have organizing logics binding individuals into larger systems, but logics that cannot be understood or fully grasped. Bleak House is often said to be “Kafkaesque” – in this it resembles its successor Little Dorrit – in its representation of an emergent modern world of systematicity that defies individual understanding and that perhaps could never be understood from any single individual perspective: “There again!.... The system!.... I mustn’t look to individuals. It’s the system” (1996, 231). Elizabeth Ermarth has influentially defined realism as characterized by a yoking together of a multiplicity of different perspectives, “an aesthetic form of consensus, its touchstone being the agreement between the various viewpoints made available by a text” (1998, x). According to this definition, Bleak House approaches an utter collapse of realism to the degree that it implies the impossibility of such final “agreement” or “consensus.” This breakdown is also implicit, perhaps, in the novel’s brilliantly innovative split narrative form. Narrated alternately by Esther Summerson, a personable, eminently “knowable” young woman whom, as we have seen, Dickens associates with the discursive “fitness” of a functioning realism, and an impersonal third‐person narrator whose perspective often approaches a terrifyingly panoptic and visionary pitch, Bleak House at once employs and undoes the signal achievement to date of fictional realism, the “omniscient” Austenian narrator whose perspective brings a “world” into harmony and consensus. One of Bleak House’s most emblematic characters is the homeless street sweeper Jo, who “shuffle[s] through the streets, unfamiliar with the shapes, and in utter darkness as to the meaning, of those mysterious symbols” (1996, 236). His illiteracy and ignorance (he insists that he “don’t know nothink”) becomes one instance of a much broader state of unknowing and non‐understanding that Dickens depicts as endemic to life in London in 1853. Dickens’s famous opening image of “fog everywhere,” producing a world in which “groping and floundering” (11) seem the most characteristic actions, establishes the keynote of a realm in which one must struggle to understand one’s own plottedness in narratives, systems, and bureaucracies – most pointedly, the notorious Chancery Court whose interminable case Jarndyce v. Jarndyce has entangled most of the novel’s characters in a sometimes‐fatal quest for resolution. The Chancery legal court that one character respectfully calls “a very great system” is to most others a nightmare of impersonal systematicity and of incomplete, unreadable, or jealously guarded information. In this sense, Mr. Snagsby is typical in his feeling that he is “a party to some dangerous secret without knowing what it is” (374). Like Dorrit’s Clennam, Snagsby’s is a haunted subjectivity that perceives itself to be embroiled or trapped within social systems the meaning of which are persistently elusive, inducing both guilt and despair. Bleak House contains the first detective in an English novel. Transcending (at its outset) the genre of “detective fiction,” however, Bleak House posits a world in which to know oneself is to strive to understand one’s placement in a system, and to hunt desperately for clues. As J. Hillis Miller puts it, the novel “is full of unsuccessful detectives” and “is deliberately constructed by Dickens in a way calculated 44 Ivan Kreilkamp to make the reader a bad detective” (1990, 186–187). Whether we envision the novel’s characters and readers as would‐be detectives (solving a crime) or ethnographers (interpreting a culture), Bleak House presents itself as an object of analysis that will finally elude any investigator’s grasp, or blow up in his hands (as one character notoriously does in a moment of “spontaneous combustion”). A character even more emblematic than Jo in this novel is “Nemo,” an anonymous clerk who mysteriously disappears and thus “established his pretensions to his name by becoming indeed No one” (1996, 153), figuring an emptying‐out of subjectivity and character into a vacancy repelling knowledge or understanding. To be “no one” and to “know nothink” can seem the only available means to drop out of the system of social tracking and ordering that the realist novel as a genre mirrors, mimics, and often challenges. One striking and near‐ubiquitous figure for systematicity in 1850s fiction is disease, notably the dreaded smallpox, typhus, and cholera that make significant appearances in many of novels of the decade. Bleak House asks in its opening pages, defining a challenge facing both a dispersed modern polis and a multiplot realist novel, both containing scores of seemingly‐unrelated persons:

What connexion can there be between the place in Lincolnshire, the house in town, … and the whereabouts of Jo the outlaw with the broom … ? What connexion can there have been between many people in the innumerable histories of this world who from opposite sides of great gulfs have, nevertheless, been very curiously brought together! (1996, 235)

Bleak House finds an effectively deadly vehicle for social “connexion” – across divides of class, geography, milieu – in smallpox, which Esther contracts after nursing the infected young pauper girl Charley. So too, Gaskell’s fallen woman Ruth redeems herself morally by nursing typhus victims, leading to her own fatal infection, in Ruth (1853). Henry Esmond’s innocent flirtation with a working‐class girl at the pub leads to his own smallpox infection, which he brings into the home of his noble benefactors (like Esther, Esmond’s Lady Rachel Castlewood has her good looks spoiled by smallpox’s facial scarring; smallpox allows a new identity of a sort). Madame Beck’s school in Villette shuts down to pre‐empt the spread of fever. Infectious disease also slips easily into metaphor. In Collins’s Basil, a key plot development depends on a woman running to the bedside of a typhus victim, causing her own infection, but infection as metaphor also pervades this novel as a figure for moral and cultural ill influence: “It was as if the fiery, effervescent atmosphere of the Boulevards of Paris had insolently penetrated into the old English mansion, and ruffled and infected its quiet native air” (1980, 15). The pervasiveness of imagery of infectious disease is, of course, in part simply a matter of history. Epidemics of cholera struck England in 1848/49 and 1854; in one often‐cited 1853 pamphlet, a Dissenting preacher cited as two of the “three great social agencies” of the day (along with the London City Mission, an evangelical ministry founded in 1835), “the Novels of Mr. Dickens,” and “the cholera” (quoted in Young 1977, 69). But infection finds an especially receptive home in Victorian fiction as a resonant figure for connection, system, coembeddedness, and vulnerability to invasion from “outside.” The 1850s 45

Mudie Rules and Aesthetics of Discretion

For readers who prefer the racier Continental alternatives of a Zola or a Flaubert, the sexual prudishness of high Victorian fiction has traditionally been seen as a hypocritical blind spot – a turning away from the historical and psychological real – in a mode that stakes its authority on Eliot’s “faithful study of nature.” But Stephen Marcus’s The Other Victorians (1966) a half‐century ago demonstrated the existence of a vibrant underworld of erotica and pornography in Victorian print culture, and Michel Foucault’s dismantling of the “repressive hypothesis” in The History of Sexuality (1978) revealed the ways that a discourse that can appear simply to repress, deny, or conceal sexuality is often better understood as a practice of fascination and preoccupation. By this account, Victorian fiction is less prudish about than obsessively concerned with sexuality, which often functions as a disavowed but powerful referent. Foucault’s influence, in tandem with Marxist‐inspired reconsiderations of the workings of class in English culture and the linguistic turn of deconstructive theory, revived the study of Victorian fiction in the 1980s and opened it up as a newly heterogeneous archive bristling with often‐contradictory tensions and meanings. The “Angel in the House,” Coventry Patmore’s famous figure for the angelic Victorian wife, began to appear almost kinky in her insistent chastity and purity. Without trying to revive the repressive hypothesis, we can admit that there remains, however, at least some common‐sense truth to the “old” understanding of Victorian fiction. In terms of frankness about sexuality, Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1721) has much more in common with Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers (1913) and Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) than it does with Barchester Towers or Bleak House. Any proper understanding of what we can consider an aesthetics of discretion in mid‐Victorian fiction needs to keep in mind its location in print and publishing history. Mudie’s Select Library was founded by Charles Edward Mudie in 1842 in response to the high costs of three‐volume novels, far beyond the means of even most middle‐class families. In concert with serial and magazine publication in parts (prior to the eventual publication of a three‐volume version), and the growth after 1848 of so‐called “railway fiction” cheap reprints, the English circulating library made fiction an affordable mass commodity for the first time. An earlier version of the Netflix business model meant that for a reasonable yearly subscription price, a family gained access to a steady flow of new fiction. With a huge subscriber list and “sufficient bulk purchasing power to demand a 60 per cent discount on the retail price from the publishers,” it was Mudie (and his rival W. H. Smith) “who could dictate the success of a novel” and, crucially, who could “censor content from his Evangelical perspective” (Davis 2004, 208; see also Adams 2009, 219). It’s an intriguing counterfactual exercise to ponder what might have been the fate of mid‐Victorian fiction if de facto monopoly veto power over the limits of the sayable had been in the hands of someone other than a devout Evangelical – although the particular power of Mudie’s, however great, was only one piece in a larger culture of discretion (also typified in the passing of the 1857 Obscene Publications Act). Fiction of the 1850s certainly lacks the comparative freedom of the eighteenth and twentieth centuries to refer directly to matters of the flesh. In an 1867 essay in Blackwood’s on the new “sensation fiction” of the decade that had followed the lead of Collins’s earlier novels into new territory, Margaret Oliphant noted this fiction’s “intense appreciation 46 Ivan Kreilkamp for flesh and blood” and its “eagerness of physical sensation” (quoted in Davis 2004, 323), an eagerness that springs from a context of earlier restraint. By the 1880s – when George Moore in his angry polemic Literature at Nurse (1885) complained that the English novel is necessarily written for children, read in the schoolroom “or nowhere” – the modernist revolution was mounting its forces, and the Mudie reign was soon to collapse. But the codes and strictures of the mid‐century were something other than a negative block to full expression. It is surely no coincidence that so many touchstones of English fiction were written under these publishing restrictions, elements of an exquisitely fine‐grained discourse in which many desires, impulses, and experiences of the body could be acknowledged only in encoded and often elaborately figured forms. If one can accept that even after modernism’s liberation of form, the formally rule‐ governed sonnet retains a particular aesthetic force, one should also acknowledge that the restrictions governing the mid‐Victorian novel’s representations could have been necessary and productive rather than simply limiting. Thackeray’s teasing references in Vanity Fair to Becky Sharp as a kind of mermaid‐cum‐sea‐serpent, with “the monster’s hideous tail” (1994, 637) coiled just out of visibility underneath the surface, is brilliantly typical of mid‐century fiction’s tendency to allude to, hint at, and imply sexuality without direct representation. Often, as in The Woman in White, “the Secret, hidden deep under the surface of the … story” (1975, 435) hints at reserves of desires and meanings that are especially powerful because not openly articulable. Sometimes such representations, like Thackeray’s, approach simple misogyny or a disgusted phobia about (usually female) sexuality. But even if we can sense such disgust or fear, we also see an unmistakable vitality of imagery – with a force of sexuality serving, like Becky’s tail, as a half‐hidden source of powerful energies and images. Sexuality is certainly often negatively defined in 1850s fiction as infection or invasion, a violent force destabilizing norms and institutions of social order and “ruffl[ing] and infect[ing] … [the] quiet native air” (Collins 1980, 15). The incipient forces of frankness that, by the later century, swept the Mudie rules out of English fiction allowed necessary new things to be said and new attitudes to take form. But in mid‐ century, much of the pleasure and wit of the novel was inseparable from a constant awareness of those constraining rules and community norms shaping the limits of representation. Sexuality and desire, as Sharon Marcus suggests, need to be looked for in mid‐Victorian fiction in unexpected locations. Miss Havisham in Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861) moulds Estella “into the form that her wild resentment, spurned affection, and wounded pride found vengeance in” (1999, 297). Marcus argues that Miss Havisham and her charge define a “female dyad” conjoined by pleasure and sexual desire as well as rage (2007, 175). Thackeray’s Henry Esmond spends “nights of rage, … days of torment, of passionate unfulfilled desire, of sickening jealousy” (1989, 206), and “the fever of balked desire” (258). Miss Wade in Little Dorrit, whose desires seem clearly female‐directed, “writhes under her life” (1982, 452); “a woman more angry, passionate, reckless, and revengeful never lived” (452). Trollope’s Eleanor Stanhope toys with Obadiah Slope and “spitted him, as a boy does a cockchafer on a cork, that she might enjoy the energetic agony of his gyrations” (1996, 271). A husband in Thackeray whose wife now views him with cold resentment boasts that once, “when I came a‐courting, you would see miss blush – blush red, by George! for joy … She said The 1850s 47 herself, when I joked with her about her d—d smiling red cheeks: ’Tis as they do at St. James’s; I put up my red flag when my king comes’” (1989, 134). In such instances, sexuality flies a flag that is no less – and is perhaps more – potent for being encoded. When a new bishop is installed in the opening pages of Barchester Towers, Trollope’s chatty narrator assures us that although he does not know the exact details of the ceremony, he “know[s] that everything was properly done, and that nothing fit or becoming to a young bishop was omitted on the occasion” (1996, 18). Mid‐Victorian fiction can appear conventional by contrast with late‐Victorian and modernist novels that traffic in transgression. This is fiction acutely sensitive to what Trollope refers to as the “value of forms” (18). Part of what makes the fiction of mid‐century so intensely pleasurable, rich, and profuse, however, is precisely its belief, soon to be challenged on various fronts, that all potential authors and readers were parties to an implicit contract regarding those forms governing what is “fit or becoming” to be included or left out. Trollope’s narrator comments on one detail of public social life, “It was as good as a play to any there who had eyes to observe it and wit to comment on what they observed” (382). Among the gifts of mid‐Victorian realism is its power to impart temporarily to its readers, at least to those willing to imagine themselves into these fictional worlds or cultures as temporary natives, the eyes to observe and the wit to comment on the other lives they encounter there.

References

Adams, James Eli. 2009. A History of Victorian Davis, Philip. 2004. The Oxford English Literary Literature. Malden: Wiley‐Blackwell. History. Volume 8: 1830–1880: The Victorians. Anderson, Amanda. 2001. The Powers of Distance: New York: Oxford University Press. Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment. Dickens, Charles. 1982 [1857]. Little Dorrit, Princeton: Princeton University Press. edited by Harvey Peter Sucksmith. Oxford: Auerbach, Erich. 1953. Mimesis: The Representation Oxford University Press. of Reality in Western Literature; translated by Dickens, Charles. 1996 [1853]. Bleak House, edited Willard R. Trask. Princeton: Princeton by Stephen Gill. Oxford: Oxford University University Press. Press. Brontë, Charlotte. 2000 [1853]. Villette, edited by Dickens, Charles. 1999 [1861]. Great Expectations, Sally Shuttleworth. Oxford: Oxford University edited by Edgar Rosenberg. New York: Press. Norton. Brontë, Charlotte. 2006 [1849]. Shirley, edited by Eliot, George. 1990. “John Ruskin’s Modern Jessica Cox. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Painters, Vol. III.” In Selected Essays, Poems and Burn, W. L. 1964. The Age of Equipoise: A Study of Other Writings, edited by A. S. Byatt and the Mid‐Victorian Generation. New York: Norton. Nicholas Warren, 367–378. London: Penguin. Buzard, James. 2005. Disorienting Fiction: The Eliot, George. 1996 [1859]. Adam Bede, edited by Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth‐Century British Valentine Cunningham. Oxford: Oxford Novels. Princeton: Princeton University Press. University Press. Colley, Linda. 2003. Britons: Forging the Nation Ermarth, Elizabeth. 1998. Realism and Consensus in 1707–1837. London: Pimlico. the English Novel. New York: Columbia Collins, Wilkie. 1975 [1860]. The Woman in White, University Press. edited by Harvey Peter Sucksmith. Oxford: Foucault, Michel. 1978. The History of Sexuality. Oxford University Press. New York: Pantheon Books. Collins, Wilkie. 1980 [1852]. Basil. New York: Hartley, L. P. 2002 [1953]. The Go‐Between. New Dover. York: New York Review Books. 48 Ivan Kreilkamp

Herbert, Christopher. 1991. Culture and Anomie: Shaw, Harry E. 1999. Narrating Reality: Austen, Ethnographic Imagination in the Nineteenth Century. Scott, Eliot. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press. Thackeray, William Makepeace. 1989 [1852]. The Hillis Miller, J. 1990. “Interpretation in Dickens’s History of Henry Esmond, edited by Edgar F. Bleak House.” In Victorian Subjects, 179–199. Harden. New York: Garland. Durham: Duke University Press. Thackeray, William Makepeace. 1994 [1848]. Lukács, Georg. 1983. The Historical Novel, trans- Vanity Fair, edited by Peter Shillingsburg. New lated by Hannah and Stanley Mitchell. Lincoln: York: Norton. University of Nebraska Press. Tillotson, Kathleen. 1954. Novels of the Eighteen‐ Marcus, Sharon. 2007. Between Women: Friendship, Forties. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England. Trollope, Anthony. 1996 [1857] Barchester Towers. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Edited by John Sutherland. Oxford University Marcus, Steven. 1966. The Other Victorians: A Study Press. of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid‐Nineteenth‐ Watt, Ian. 1957. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Century England. New York: Basic Books. Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. Berkeley and Los Miller, Andrew H. 2008. The Burdens of Perfection: Angeles: University of California Press. On Ethics and Reading in Nineteenth‐Century Williams, Raymond. 1973. The Country and the British Literature. Ithacs: Cornell University City. New York: Oxford University Press. Press. Young, G. M. 1977. Portrait of an Age: Victorian Plotz, John. 2008. Portable Property: Victorian England, edited by G. Kitson Clark with a bio- Culture on the Move. Princeton: Princeton graphical memoir by George Clark. London: University Press. Oxford University Press. 4 The Long 1920s Jennifer Wicke

The title of this chapter pays homage to the custom of designating centuries with particularly momentous occurrences at either end “long” centuries, if the 100‐year span seems to exclude significant episodes or events that inform the cultural idea of that century or period. This fast and loose play with what seem to be firm designations of time was exemplified by the noteworthy historian and erstwhile literary and cultural critic Eric Hobsbawm, who coined the term “the long nineteenth century” in order to emphasize the momentous historical arc from 1789, the start of the French Revolution and the beginning of the United States under its Constitution, through 1914, the start of the First World War, when Europe came undone. Hobsbawm is equally well known for his final foray into historical date‐changing in the third volume of his trilogy The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century (1994), which begins in 1914 and ends in 1991, tracing the extreme history of the century in its movement from the First World War, through the Second, on to the Cold War and the latter’s demise along with the fall of the Soviet system. A shorter century is not the same thing as a longer century, yet Hobsbawm’s willingness to divvy up time according to matters of pressing significance, and to offer an interpretation of what matters most in that period, is the presiding spirit for this chapter. The 1920s for the English novel would be reckoned by any reader or scholar as a decade akin to the commonplace Latin phrase annus mirabilis for a miraculous or wonderful year. The 1920s are not only a “decennium mirabilis,” given the extraordinary flowering of the novel over that ten‐year period, but also a “long decade,” in that aspects of this miraculous decade begin to crystallize in the last years of the 1910s, and persist and are prolonged in significance well past 1929. In another way, the decade echoes the sense of “short and extreme” in Hobsbawm’s parlance, since it is near its

A Companion to the English Novel, First Edition. Edited by Stephen Arata, Madigan Haley, J. Paul Hunter, and Jennifer Wicke. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. 50 Jennifer Wicke start, in 1922, that James Joyce’s Ulysses is published, a revolutionary event that marks the literary equivalent of a meteor hitting the earth and leaving a crater behind so immense and impalpable that the very notion of restoring a semblance of order to the “novel in English” afterwards is nearly impossible. The “long 1920s” for the English novel stands for the decade when it stopped being English, or at least easily identifiable as British, opening out to a world and to other literary traditions that far exceed a neat and tidy identity where what “English” means and what the “novel” implies is not open to much question. In the long 1920s, both are blown out the window, or at least are up for grabs. We cannot survey the 1920s as business as usual for the novel in English, because Joyce blows up the novel as a genre, and the pressures of empire, war, and global writing begin to complicate “English” as both a noun and an adjective. This essay starts its foray into the global and modernist novel of the 1920s with an outlier, Ronald Firbank’s Valmouth, published in 1919, then traverses the seismic decade with interrelated novels by James Joyce, E. M. Forster, and Virginia Woolf that between and among themselves bring the global modernist novel in English into being, and finally argues that the global and modernist flourishing of the 1920s finds its truest endpoint with two novels that saw publication in the mid 1930s: Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark (1934) and Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable (1935). Even focusing on the novel alone, within the “long 1920s,” forces us to recognize an abundance too great to last, and a decisive shift in the very terrain of the novel itself. My focus falls, then, on a braided series of novels that comprise an arc over the stretched decade, a double rainbow for focusing on changes in the form of the modernist novel that was so creatively innovative in this period, and the content, or at least the context, of this set of chosen works as they exemplify a global tilt, an expansion to embrace a worldwide purview that will allow us to see the novel emerging in the 1920s as both global and modernist, simultaneously. For the embrace of worldliness is as spectacular a development across the long 1920s as is the innovative experimental form of these disparate but related works, and inseparable from it. The “English” novel, when it becomes modernist, goes global, too. Making such a choice allows us to break the grip of a commonplace criticism of the modernist novel. The argument goes that modernism declares its lack of interest in the world or society or everyday life, and in turning its back on everything from politics to ordinary life to action in the world, devotes the energies of art to building intricate and insular, and sometimes proudly useless, experimental art palaces out of prose. This argument – and its adherents include those who believe that the best art does ignore the world and turns inward, and those who see modernism as a reaction formation to a terrible and hopeless world, with no role for artists except on a private island of aesthetics – can be a self‐fulfilling critical prophecy, and has caused a certain blindness to the ways in which the modernist novel is engaged fully in the world. The experimental form of the modernist novel brings the world into visibility, and into the reality of its readers. The novels in English of the long 1920s are as active and real‐world‐oriented a form of literature as can be imagined, even with all the formal fireworks they bring along with them. The modernist novel in English sets the stage for the postcolonial novel shortly to follow it, and from many locations around the world as the global anglophone novel emerges, but only if we choose to see it as a global modernism in the first place. The Long 1920s 51

There is another temporal and cultural keystroke that makes the period stand out for the novel in English, a tragic bookending caused by war. The long 1920s makes for an extremely fraught period between the end of one world war and the seeds of another, yet that period was also a decade of possibility in art, one of hope for social transformation that the modernist novel in English tried to write, quite literally, in its pages.The modernist novels of the 1920s did not and could not stop another war, quite obviously, but this group of modernist novels in English was urgently dedicated to the notion of literature as a means to sound an alarm, and also to try to heal the global breaches and scars responsible for it. Along the time‐deckled edges of the long 1920s for the English novel, its before and after, are provocations of style and structure that cut directly to the very word “English” in this Companion’s title. One of the things that makes the decade so striking, so unprecedented and unmanageable in its literary overflowing, is that both structure and style operate in tandem as stealth weapons against a predetermined or socially sanctioned understanding of what it is for something to be English, let alone what the modernist novel might be during this period. An enormous dark trench or scar cut a jagged swath that separated the novelistic innocence of pre‐war writing from its 1919 aftermath. At the self‐same moment, and, according to many of its interpreters, for a related reason, the “Empire on which the sun never sets” was fraying, under both ethical and economic strain and beset by fierce resistance – externally by colonized peoples, and internally by national movements and political groups that questioned the rationale for the British Empire, and deplored its massive social and ethical costs. English novels had addressed and reviled and repudiated empire from the end of the nineteenth century, when Joseph Conrad of course set the funereal tone in Heart of Darkness (1899) for an empire that was not only waning, but simply had to disappear on both moral and economic grounds. Heart Of Darkness zeroes in on the appalling personal empire of King Leopold of Belgium in the unnamed but recognizable Belgian Congo, the place where the British seaman Charles Marlow hires on for a contract job that becomes a literal nightmare. The novel ends, however, by squarely placing the “heart of the darkness” in London, the imperial metropolis, as the leisure boat carries Marlow, witness firsthand to “the horror, the horror” he tries to recount, and his listeners, shadowy captains of British banking and industry, along the River Thames: “the tran- quil water‐way leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed somber under an overcast sky – seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness” (2008, 187). This strand of the modernist lineage, a voyage into the dark that circles back to embrace “home” as well, itself suffused in a dark ambiguity, comes in many ways to dominate the “long 1920s” for the novel in English. The urgency of unmasking empire was only more strongly impelled by recognition that the First World War had emerged out of the maw of imperialism, with the European imperial powers competing militarily on their own soil, in a war that saw troops from India, Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and Australia, for example, mobilized to fight on behalf of England. It is crucial to add that Conrad’s modernism dissolved the stable solidity of characters, eliminated the linearity of narrative in favor of a looping structure that moves inward into impressions, fantasies, and fears, and in its highly charged, almost surreal language gave witness, through Marlow’s tale, to the massive violence of imperialism, crystallized in Kurtz’s flash of truth, the postscript to his report on the “civilizing 52 Jennifer Wicke mission” of the Belgians: “Exterminate all the brutes” (155). The unstable valence of the terms “light” and “dark,” and the shifting terrain of self‐knowledge as cracks develop between the very words used to construct the world, are carried forward in the modernist novel in English of the 1920s, where Conrad’s slim confidence in the power of the “voice” of his truth‐teller, Marlow, faced even stronger pressure in the aftermath of a world war and the fragmentation of voice in a welter of mass media and the global scale of violence. The Second World War finished off the British Empire for good and all, with a few straggler colonies remaining into the 1970s and beyond, but the English novel in the 1920s was preternaturally alert to the problems and sounded the warning of the unsustainability of empire just as it registered the traumas of the war. Its disenchantment with the rigid authority, the deadening hierarchies of race, class, and gender, and the extremes of inequality characterizing empire, can be read as a strategic textual encounter with the literary languages of “English,” and its total demolition of business as usual in the literary genre of the novel, as aspects of the urgency to write in a new way, one written from the margins in every sense of the word. Ushering in the long 1920s as an assault on the nature of Englishness and a daring approach to what a novel may contain is Valmouth, a 1919 novel by Ronald Firbank that uses artifice and masquerade to strike fresh ground, borrowing from the late‐ nineteenth‐century aesthetics of Oscar Wilde, who had declared: “The only Truth is the truth of Masks” (2008, 1244). Arthur Annesley Ronald Firbank, the grandson of an illiterate railway worker who became a titan of industry, and whose father was knighted and served as an aristocratic peer in parliament, dropped out of Cambridge University and died in Rome in 1926 at the age of 40, after a peripatetic life spent wandering to Spain, the Caribbean, North Africa, Italy, and the Middle East, while writing the eight novels, numerous poems, and several plays for which he is known. Firbank’s reputation as an aesthete who outlived his Wildean moment, despite his very short life, has obscured the ways he melded his world travel and aesthetic concerns with his inclusion of many openly gay characters, characters of multiple races and ethnicities, and unusual textual experiments that blend prose with drama and poetry, often in an arch and subversive style, and always as an affront to the rigid divisions that obtained in British society, if not always in its literature. Valmouth is filled with improbabilities. Among other things, it recounts the adventures of a group of people who seem staid until we find that they are mostly cen- tenarians, living in a spa resort on the west coast of England. Some of the characters are old enough to date back to the seventeenth century and the reign of Charles II. The plot is neither linear nor really the matter at hand, since the realist marriage plot is being put through a global modernist wringer in Valmouth, where two of these stag- geringly old ladies try to marry off the heir to a local estate, Captain Dick Thoroughfare. The captain, away at sea, is already engaged to a black woman, the “negress” Niri‐ Esther, the niece of the immigrant masseuse Mrs. Yaj, and, it appears, is also a member of one of the sea‐going marriages between men that were often solemnized among sailors, and considered “legal” during the voyage. As he says of his “chum” Lieutenant Jack Whorwood, “that little lad, on a cruise, is, to me, what Patroclus was to Achilles, and even more” (1949, 160). Firbank’s friend the poet and writer Osbert Sitwell noted in a posthumous introduction to his work that the First World War forced Firbank to The Long 1920s 53 write: “He felt himself totally out of place in a khaki‐clad, war‐mad world, where there was no music, no gaiety, and in which one could no longer travel except about the business of death” (1949, xii). Firbank’s writing is so successfully audacious that its seriousness tends to disappear behind the curtain of witticisms, and even a supporter and fellow gay man, E. M. Forster, worried that Firbank wasn’t concerned enough with ethics, and the “right and wrong” of the soul. But Firbank is in another camp on this matter. Oscar Wilde developed an argument for the importance of truth as style, and of “taste” as the basis for human culture, rather than “ethics”: “Aesthetics, like sexual selection, make life lovely and wonderful, fill it with new forms, and give it progress, and variety and change” (2008, 1058). Firbank brings this sensibility into the novel, where it becomes an ethics after all, and a global one. Firbank’s ideal pastoral realm in Valmouth is a paradise for racial, sexual, and global coexistence, at a time when the empire still raged, the war was barely over, homosex- uality was a crime in Britain, and women did not have the vote. Captain Thoroughfare is able to have it both ways. He marries Niri‐Esther, but without repudiating his affection for Jack; the latter finds other fish to fry in Valmouth’s temple of desire, expressing his interest in someone of the Gypsy persuasion; the ancient ladies pursue their matchmaking just as they enjoy a utopian space for female desire far beyond male authority. The pain of exclusion, of violence, of all the insistence on essences and the “natural” truth of the superiority of rich, white, British, straight men is capsized in a flurry of ruffles and saintliness. The experimental mood of Firbank’s novel might be described as the flip side of Empire, almost as a queer counter‐Empire presided over by elderly women, gay people, and persons of color who find themselves not at the battle- front and not brandishing guns at one another, but instead offering a novelistic version of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). In Wilde’s drama, Algernon pretends to visit an ill friend named Bunbury as a cover for pursuits that are never named but fall outside the rigid rules of British propriety; as others too start pursuing their secret life of bunburying, each becomes a Bunburyist in solidarity. In Valmouth such bunburying is out in the open, and its characters offer a refuge from the hierarchies and exclusions and the rampant violence of the war‐torn world of the British Empire. This makes the experience of reading the novel, in its mixture of realist dialogue and description, delivered by characters chatting over tea who are likely to be women of color, pirates, or more than 100 years old – or all three – uncannily like watching a novel gone Wilde and global. It sets the stage for the amalgam of aesthetic experimentation and global awareness of the long 1920s. Virginia Woolf was singlehandedly responsible for a major part of the history of the novel in English in the 1920s in each of these trajectories – as a formal experimenter and as a global modernist in the range and intent of her work. Woolf had begun writing before this decade, and in The Voyage Out (1915) she produced a novel that could be called a transitional one in each of the two senses. In a very explicit reworking of Heart of Darkness as a female Bildungsroman, Woolf’s central character Rachel Vinrace finds herself on a colonial voyage to British Guyana. Among the passengers on board the ship her father captains are the satirically drawn Richard and Clarissa Dalloway. Unlike Marlow, who returns as a kind of human shell, Rachel does not survive her own voyage into imperial darkness, succumbing to a fever that meshes with the lack of possibilities for a young woman eager to escape the social definition of marriage, and 54 Jennifer Wicke the social domination of empire, expiring in a still somewhat realist ending that points the way toward the dark absences of Woolf’s modernist style. Mrs. Dalloway (1925) returns to Clarissa in the aftermath of Woolf’s own encounter with Ulysses, but Woolf truly enters the modernist aesthetic fray with her First World War novel Jacob’s Room (1922), a book that writes its main character Jacob Flanders into the thoughts, dreams, memories, impressions, and desires of those who surround him in his short life, a victim as were so many of the war, who vanishes from the novel as suddenly as he does from the room that encases all that is materially left of him after his death. This room is the space at the very end of the novel where a reader has to infer Jacob’s death in the war, when his mother Betty Flanders and Ralph Bonamy, his university friend and a “bon ami,” who has loved Jacob without its being openly declared, come together to gather up his things in the aftermath of a death that is never described or pinpointed, although it is as piercing as shrapnel. Jacob’s very name inscribes this death, since it was in Flanders that the British troops experienced some of their greatest losses of the war, with almost a quarter of a million men buried there. His name has a nimbus of cultural associations that make Jacob as much an icon as a character in the nineteenth‐century novel’s sense of a “well‐ rounded” construction of a person, and he is only known in the novel from the outside, from stray encounters or scraps of conversation or in the absent spaces left by his passage through the world. In Jacob’s Room the boundaries between words and their referents, the supposedly solid things underlying language, dissolve and even disappear, leaving empty space, an aspect of Woolf’s style first deployed in this novel about a loss so enormous it cannot be spoken. If society commonly assumes that words are authoritative, whole, and contain only one unambiguous meaning or referent, Woolf’s writing displays the opposite: she shows the permeability of words to one another, the fluidity and even evasiveness of referent or meaning alike, and opens up the rich silence hovering around the often flattened or eroded words of social discourse, the clichés and conventional phrases of course, but also the preposterous lack of meaning that haunts such words as “I” and “you.” Jacob’s Room is an empty room full of the traces of Jacob Flanders, just as all people in some sense occupy empty rooms of selfhood where the words used to define them or name them are less meaningful than the silent spaces surrounding them. The novel merges the claim for the unknowability of the individual person, unknowable even to that very person her‐ or himself, with the vast mystery of collective death in war. Jacob had gone from his middle‐class home to be educated at Cambridge University as the flower of the British elite. His education consisted primarily of an immersion in the Greek and Latin classics, seen as appropriate for that elite class of educated men, and this molding of young men – Woolf’s novel is sharp and bitter on the exclusion of women from higher education, as she herself had been excluded – is another form of cultural shaping for a purpose that turns out to be death, mass death in a war that is inexplicable. Like so many students at Oxbridge at the time, who were overwhelmingly wealthy, male, white, and good English “gentlemen,” Jacob is driven to experience Greece firsthand, and travels there hoping to capture the grandeur and majesty of the classical texts of Ancient Greece he has read as if they were his cultural birthright. This means, in essence, that he is traveling to visit a set of ruins and tombs, since classical Greece is long gone, and modern Greece holds no meaning for the elite The Long 1920s 55 student traveler seeking to channel the immortal past. Visiting the Acropolis by moonlight, Jacob had hoped for a poetic encounter with this fabled remnant, but he is instead distracted by the tourist trappings and the real life surrounding the vista, and annoyed by a middle‐aged woman who has the nerve, as he sees it, to be taking photographs of the temple, a kind of modern female agency that displaces the presumed centrality of his own knowing male gaze on the monument. He is further distracted erotically by another woman who shocks him by expressing her sexual interest in him first, rather than the other way around. The cultural imaginary of Athenian wisdom that was supposed to be in his possession as an educated, elite British male – in short, the experience of the fabled ancient Greece he felt entitled to perceive beneath the modern tourism and graffiti, the presence of women and other marginal people like the actual Greeks laboring nearby – has vanished entirely. Jacob was viewed as a rare and superior being, an English gentleman whose sense of self is built from words that imply his superiority as if it sprang in a direct line from Greek and Roman cultural forbears. Woolf’s novel does not blame or judge Jacob for this entitlement, but rather shows how fragile and even self‐imprisoning are the words that construct us, even those who, like Jacob, are groomed as civilization’s flower. A crucial scene in the novel adopts a collage‐like motif as multiple characters we will never meet again walk through a London park where an official memorial to the dead of the FirstWorld War has been erected. The bureaucratic, official words carved into the monument are stone craters of nothingness, vacant words that cannot capture the grief, loss, or reality of so much death without any reason for it. In questioning the national ideology of patriotism surrounding the war, Woolf’s novel shows that, underneath the rigid surface distinctions of words etched into monuments, there lies another kind of evanescent knowledge, one where Jacob is alluded to as if he were a vanished god. The mourning, the shock, the ruin that the war leaves in its wake is exemplified by the evanescence of Jacob as a living young man, and scored into us by the terrifying and sudden absence his death, one of so many, magnifies. There is another example of how to mourn on display in that park; it comes in the form of one of Woolf’s female crone figures (another appears in a park in Mrs. Dalloway) who sings a song to herself:

Long past sunset an old blind woman sat on a camp‐stool with her back to the stone wall of the Union of London and Smith’s Bank, clasping a brown mongrel tight in her arms and singing out loud, not for coppers, no, from the depths of her gay wild heart … (1998, 50–51)

The words of the song are not given to the reader, but this song is the gift of elegy, a gift because it is truly sung for all the world, the living and the dead and the dog included, by a woman without any authority, without expectation of reward or attention, and without any division or exclusion, except of the marginal woman who sings. Left gaping open in his mother’s hands at the end of the novel are Jacob’s now useless shoes, a mute analogy for his empty yet word‐filled being, shoes whose leather outlines once encased his feet and now trace two tomb‐like spaces within which there is seemingly nothing. The novel has boldly written itself around a character who in a 56 Jennifer Wicke sense does not exist, or exists only in his absences. The words used to describe him across the novel take flight, embroider empty spaces, and reveal the outlines of the tomb‐like definitions of the words that set him (and all others like him) apart from the world, apart from others deemed lesser, in a hierarchy that did nothing to prevent or protect him from early death:

In any case life is but a procession of shadows, and God knows why it is that we embrace them so eagerly, and see them depart with such anguish, being shadows. And why, if this – and much more than this is true – why are we yet surprised in the window corner by a sudden vision that the young man in the chair is of all things in the world the most real, the most solid, the best known to us – why indeed? For the moment after we know nothing about him. Such is the manner of our seeing. Such the conditions of our love. (54)

The aesthetic styles of his room – found in the eighteenth‐century patterned wallpaper and the fine moldings around a mirror where his reflection will nevermore appear – speak to his final absence, since they now frame nothing at all, and one can argue that these are also reminders of an earlier form of the novel, whose confident descriptions of what is real are no longer operative in modernity. Bereft, gallant Betty Flanders holds up those shoes for a last inspection, asking the other person in the room who loved Jacob without really knowing him: “What am I to do with these, Mr. Bonamy?” Thus are the conditions of our love, and our mourning, made manifest. The same two strands of the long 1920s – experimental form and global awareness – are also brought to the fore in James Joyce’s Ulysses. This was a novel that could not be imitated, but in its very singularity it called forth constant imitation in its aftermath – as we will note, Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway bows to its power by being similarly shaped around one single day, as does Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable, and E. M. Forster imitates the performativity of language in Ulysses by the emphasis throughout A Passage to India on how language stages and performs individual and colonial identity. Kevin Birmingham’s The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses (2014) describes Joyce’s novel as “most dangerous” because it was revolutionary, and understood by authorities and courts in Europe, Britain, Ireland, and the United States, as well as globally, to be so. The “battle” it outlines, one that has been traced before in works on the publication history of Ulysses, involves the sheer difficulty of getting it into print without censorship or confiscation, whether in the little magazines that bravely published excerpts from it as it was being composed, or in the legal battles that first banned the book outright and then subjected it to protracted trials on the grounds of obscenity. The fierce struggles over the social danger posed by Ulysses and the initially successful bans of the book that made it contraband in most Western nations, subjected to literal book burning as when 500 copies were set afire by authorities in Folkestone, England, smuggled across the border as the prohibited menace it was proclaimed to be, and denied as a work of literary value are not ancillary to its importance, or evidence of a quaint conservatism that came out right in the end. Ulysses was and is revolutionary, and appreciating that fact alters its place in the “long 1920s” just as in our reading of it today, when its revolutionary cutting edge is not blunted by its having by this time been judged by many to be the greatest novel of the The Long 1920s 57 twentieth century. How a book made up of other books, a modern epic that goes back to Homer’s Odyssey for its formal architecture and dallies with Virgil, Dante, Cervantes, and Shakespeare, along with Bunyan, Richardson, Wilde, Ibsen, Edgeworth, Flaubert, Dickens, Cummins, James, and a myriad of poets, a book that is so difficult to read in the first place that it called for a guidebook and a “skeleton key” to its mysteries and allusions, how that exquisitely literary book can be deemed revolutionary – mad, bad, and dangerous to read – is in fact why this excursion into English as a literary language is so often left out of accounts of the English novel. The double rainbow we have been following of formal innovation and global embeddedness is knocked out of the sky by Ulysses, or maybe one could say redoubled, and yet understanding why it is at the heart of a genealogy in the novel initiated by another outsider, the Polish Joseph Conrad, is crucial. While Joyce was writing Ulysses – a task of seven years from 1914 to 1921, carried out primarily in Trieste, Paris, and Zurich during a self‐imposed exile, ending the final proofreading on his fortieth birthday in February 2, 1922, with publication coming shortly thereafter in France by Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company bookshop in Paris – Ireland did not yet exist as the nation it became in January of 1922. An independent Irish Free State had been proclaimed by a coalition of Irish freedom fighters in 1919, followed by the Anglo‐Irish war of independence as Britain continued its long fight to keep Ireland in its colonial orbit. The resulting compromise agreed to by Michael Collins – that Britain would still have a say in Ireland’s self‐determination, and that it would be considered part of a British “dominion,” led to the assassination of Collins and a civil war between Irish factions who had so recently been united in their revolutionary efforts. This volatile frame surrounds the writing of Ulysses, since its incendiary literary form wages a nonviolent revolution in words that also insists on freedom and parallels this to Irish self‐determination. Famously, Ulysses is often described as the first full‐ fledged novelistic experiment in “stream of consciousness,” since it begins lodged in the mind of Stephen Dedalus, whose thoughts flow in that “blooming, buzzing confusion” William James attributed to a baby first making sense of the world, carried over into our fragmentary, free‐associative internal theater of words as adults. Leopold Bloom cuts in on the stream of consciousness when his very different mode of internal dialogue emerges in Chapter 4; where Stephen’s flow of thoughts is constantly impelled by the flotsam and jetsam of his reading in philosophy, literature, and theology, so that the log of “ineluctable modality of the visible” floats through his inner stream with ease, Bloom’s psychic liquid is made up of fewer high cultural quotes and allusions and more borrowings from common wisdom, mass culture, or urban folklore. A few chapters beyond that and these “streams” will be intercut by cultural forms and discourses that give shape to collective thought as well, as in the “Aeolus” chapter and its intersection with the idioms of newspapers, advertisements, and tabloid entertainment, or in “Ithaca,” which melds the style of the Catholic catechism with the pattern of scientific theorems. The final chapter returns to the earlier mode in Molly Bloom’s unpunctuated stream of consciousness, as this puts into play a female, doubly colonized thinking subject. Molly’s mother, long since dead, hailed from Gibraltar and may have been a “gypsy” or perhaps a North African Jew, who met Molly’s father, Major Tweedy, when he was on military duty there on behalf of the British Empire. 58 Jennifer Wicke

Molly’s famous affirmation that ends the novel with “yes I said yes I will Yes” (1986, 644) finally puts a period to her chapter and to the book as a whole without submis- sion to the grammar of domination. That “Yes” reverberates into a future where the word “No,” however omnipresent in real life, has been written out, or written past. The delirious “Circe” chapter of Ulysses, set in the “night‐town” world of Dublin’s red‐light district, patrolled by British soldiers who frequent the area’s prostitutes as they enforce colonial order, operates with a surreal dream logic that makes it the “night world” of the novel as a whole, as if the book had gone to sleep and dreamed itself. The entire chapter is structured like a play, complete with stage directions that are increasingly improbable to fulfill in any known universe, since they include Bloom being reduced to a mute, carbonized life form, giving birth to eight children who spring up full‐grown, Stephen shattering “all time and space” with his ashplant, and then an italicized direction that Dublin is burning, as if Goethe’s Faust had been superimposed upon the Irish city. Not only the characters but also the important objects, sounds, and signs reappear and offer either dialogue or vigorous accompaniment to the spectacle, and, just as in our dreams, it is possible for a bar of soap to sing and for the nymph in an advertising picture to come to life. During the chapter, in which Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus finally encounter one another as Bloom rescues Stephen, lying drunk and proudly disorderly in the street, from being truncheoned by the British soldiers, Bloom undergoes a trial of sorts in the dreamspace or, as has often been proposed, the subconscious of the book. One can also look at this textual terrain as the place where every facet of life as a colonial subject is performed by the entire ensemble of people, things, ideas, and affects or emotions that might comprise this global phenomenon in the Irish instance. Accosted by a British soldier who demands his name and his papers, Bloom gives a series of wildly divergent answers that momentarily are enacted but that give way to a courtroom where he is on trial for his very being. Accused by a number of women for his impure thoughts and actions, including by a nude female statue whose anatomical form he had gazed at rather too intimately earlier in the day at the National Library, by trial’s end Bloom has taken on many identities including being named Lord Mayor of Dublin, and then morphs into a social prophet and something of a revolutionary. He declares his political program:

I stand for the reform of municipal morals and the plain ten commandments. New worlds for old. Union of all, jew, moslem and gentile … Tuberculosis, lunacy, war, and mendicancy must now cease. General amnesty, weekly carnival with masked license, bonuses for all, Esperanto the universal language with universal brotherhood … Free money, free rent, free love and a free lay church in a free lay state. (399)

Esperanto, of course, really existed as a modern attempt to get past the divisions caused by language difference by generating a single world language that could move human cultures beyond the Tower of Babel curse. What Joyce seems to have realized about Esperanto is that it is a dream language, a supposedly utopian and nonpolitical universal language that relies on a fusion of imperial tongues. Ulysses is a book that invents a global modernist tongue that relies on complexity and difference to articulate its political and personal dreams. Bloom’s revolutionary announcement has comic overtones, since he is in the dock in a manner of speaking, but upon closer inspection The Long 1920s 59 his plan is one endorsed in a deeper way by Ulysses as a whole, not as a flat wafer of political jargon, but instead as its animating and genuinely global revolutionary method. The “union of all” in a “free lay state” where all are laypersons and no group is singled out for subjugation, violent suppression, condemnation, or exclusion is brought into being by taking the very words that would enforce or justify or ratio- nalize such inequities and throwing them into motion, creating a literary free zone which depicts what has gone wrong in the world such that insanity, total war, and the dire poverty of the many is let stand, and performs its overturning, the necessary shattering of cultural norms that abase women, denigrate Others, repress freedom, and extirpate joy. Every chapter of Ulysses recapitulates in some way an event from the Odyssey, where Leopold Bloom the humble advertising canvasser undertakes during his day and his travels around Dublin adventures that correspond to those of Odysseus in his epic journey of 20 years trying to return to Ithaca after the Trojan War, a trajectory that includes long stays with Circe and Calypso, encounters with the Sirens, the Cyclops, and other challenges, until in his nostos or homecoming he revenges himself against the suitors, restores his marriage to Penelope, and establishes his son Telemachus as his heir to the kingdom. Bloom is not a king like Odysseus, rather he is ruled as a colonial subject by a British king and the English nation, in an arrangement of 700 years’ duration. In his own home he has lost his infant son Rudy to death, his teenage daughter Milly to the exigencies of earning her living as a teenage seaside photo booth girl, and his wife Molly, at least on the day in question, June 16, 1904, to a far more dashing and virile suitor, Blazes Boylan, with whom she will sleep in their own bed. Stephen Dedalus is a Telemachus without portfolio, also a colonized subject without any patrimony to receive, since his father Simon resents him and has impoverished the family, his mother’s death from cancer has brought him back from studies in Paris, and his commitment to being an artist appears dubious in a culture under the dominion of Britain. Stephen’s literary patrimony in this respect is borrowed from the language of his colonizers, and making art out of the scraps and leavings permitted to Ireland seems an impossible task, especially if it involves adopting a backward‐looking idealization of Celtic legend and lore, which is Stephen’s stance on the medieval stylings of the movement known as the Celtic Twilight, privileging a mythic past and a language, Gaelic – unknown to Stephen just as to James Joyce – whose use had been criminalized in the nineteenth century. Homecoming is a fraught subject when one does not have a national home to call one’s own, when every kind of knowledge, of labor, of creation is hemmed in by what has already been named by those who rule you and set the standards of value and meaning, under the sign of both symbolic and outright violence. Every dazzling page of Ulysses enters into this perplexity: the entire literary tradition in English must be taken apart and revitalized so that it can belong to the new voices speaking through it, which explains the experimental fireworks of the novel, so huge is the task. Writing “as usual” – in the form of a realist novel that takes for granted the shared worldview communicated by its narrative – would not work when the challenge is to disrupt the illusion of a transparent reality and to trouble the smooth surface of language itself, showing the dark underside of its signification, revealing the gaps and silences and differing associations that compel words viewed from the other side of things. There is a famous moment in Joyce’s earlier work 60 Jennifer Wicke featuring Stephen Dedalus, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916): Stephen has been called in to talk to the English Dean of Studies of his college, and thinks “The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and on mine!” (2008, 132). So much for Esperanto: here is a savage hierarchy, a regime of difference and a gulf of power brought about and maintained in the shared language of English. What Ulysses is doing, then, is making English global in spite of itself, using all its linguistic powers and possibilities to enlarge and embrace and finally say “Yes” to making it a global home for all who live within it. E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India is among the most remarkable novels of the 1920s by any measure. To place it on a continuum of experimental modernist form and the concomitant enlargement of modernism to a global horizon requires a fresh consideration of Forster’s achievement. This was Forster’s last novel published in his lifetime, which stretched on to 1970 and a very different world that he had helped to make back in the long 1920s with this touchstone book. Forster has never made it to the accepted and hallowed circle of modernists; his work is often, though not always, seen as exceptionally important but a kind of holdover of realism, as if Thomas Hardy or George Meredith or a less prolix George Eliot were still writing marvelous and ethically subtle novels right through to the 1920s. Although it was so early in his own long life, Forster’s fiction has a belated quality, as if he had outlived the period of his own peers. And fair enough, we readers do not see language virtually standing up on the page as it does in Joyce’s Ulysses, nor a narrative voice that almost telekinetically moves inside and outside a whole set of characters inside of a mere paragraph, as his friend Virginia Woolf’s tensile narrator defies rules of time and space to burrow into the silences behind words and pass straight through the supposedly firm walls between human selves. Instead, the failure to recognize Forster’s modernity arises because the global has not usually been seen as a primary endeavor of modernism, so strong is the prejudice in favor of viewing modernist writing as turning away from the world, insular and self‐enclosed, autonomous and proud of it, circling the drain in textual solitude. The moment we instead look for the global signature informing the shape‐shifting forms of the modernist novel, going back of course to Heart of Darkness, it is discernible just how much modernism’s experimental form and style is the result of its entry in a world that the official cultural ideology had walled off with its narrative illusions of “progress,” imperial domination by right, and its insistence in the simplest sense that the world was not worth knowing. The modernist novel in most of its valences is a repudiation of that, a rejoinder to it, and the construction in aesthetic form of a world that will allow the global to become visible. That is not a straightforward proposition, as if a revived realism could have done the job better, since realism is as far from reality as any other mode. What is so special about A Passage to India is how this novel pretends to be something it is not – that is, pretends to be readily accessible, pretends to partake in the realist currency of “full, round” and thus knowable characters, alludes to the linear, plotted passage of time, and avoids appearing to alight on those internal moments of duration – stream of consciousness in Joyce, or the interpenetration of subjective moments in Woolf – that have been viewed as the hallmark of modernist writing. Its modernist experimentalism is there, hiding in plain sight. This is stealth The Long 1920s 61 global modernism, and the reasons for Forster’s sleight of hand are global ones. The experimentalism of A Passage to India derives from the same urgency to give a modern shape to revolution and freedom as does Ulysses, and the same drive to unmask and dissolve the cruel inequities that underwrite power and knowledge that animates Woolf’s novels. A conscientious objector in the First World War, Forster volunteered with the International Red Cross and served as an ambulance driver in Alexandria, Egypt, one of the many theaters of war in the colonies or protectorates of the European powers, as Egypt was largely under the control of Great Britain at that time. By 1914 all but one of his novels had been published. In the early 1920s he was briefly the private secretary to the Maharajah of Dewas, among those Indian elites permitted to exercise a limited form of local power in their regions by the British Raj, and it was after this stint that A Passage to India was written, along with an important non‐fiction account, The Hill of Devi (1953). In the 1930s and 1940s Forster was a broadcaster for the BBC with a crucial role in organizing programs that gave a voice to artists, activists, and political leaders from the British colonies, and became a public political and cultural figure in the Union of Ethical Societies. A Passage to India takes its title from Walt Whitman’s poem. For Whitman, this was a passage of the soul, an embrace of what his poem calls “the earth to be spann’d, connected by network, The races, neighbors, to marry and be given in marriage, The oceans to be cross’d, the distance brought near, The lands to be welded together” (2005, 429). The thrust, then, is connection, a crossing on both sides to enable a weld- ing together, and Forster, as the author of the famous admonition “only connect,” the epigraph of his novel Howards End (1910), was without doubt alert to that resonance of the poem, written in part out of Whitman’s excitement at the completion of the Suez Canal in 1869, which the poet envisioned as making possible the embrace of worlds “ancient and new.” By 1924 the spiritual opportunity Whitman sang of for the connection of East and West in an inclusive whole drawing its strength from all the disparate truths and cultures welded together had long given way to a merciless hegemony of West over East, and in India, a colonial control that was predicated on denigrating Indian myths, truths, religions, and its peoples as inferior, inadequate, uncivilized, without truth. Forster writes to be read and read widely by those who believe not in connection, but the virtues of colonial disconnection. A Passage to India straddles those cultural expectations of superiority, self‐justification, and cultural dominance by reversing the passage, for benefit of those who can only imagine it going one way. The novel “looks” English, has British characters who intermingle with a variety of Indian ones, and unfolds with what appears to be a plot or narrative in place. The spaces within which the novel takes its form are spaces of alterity: the book’s three sections are “Mosque,” Caves,” and “Temple,” none of which has an immediate spatial analog in the domestic and public spaces of the novel in English, where homes or courts or gardens or prisons or churches predominated. Yet from its opening pages the novel starts on the Indian side of things, with versions of Indian truth, soul, and spirit taken as the baseline for value. The history of Western literature, and not only the novel as a much later invention, has circled around the notion that literature “imitates” real life. Plato argued that 62 Jennifer Wicke mimesis was a grave problem, since art could only ever be a copy or imitation of what was already a copy – the world of appearances that hides Truth from us. Jumping ahead a few thousand years, the question of mimesis or imitation had become the default explanation of what a literary work, especially a novel, was engaged in: “imitating” the real. When reality is under pressure in modernity – when what is “real” is no longer that easy a question to answer – modernist literature is part of what destroys the consensus about the nature of reality. Forster’s fiction – and especially this last book – understands that cultural reality is always a consensus provided by scripts and narratives that shape what seems blindingly obvious and therefore “real.” What makes A Passage to India so very modernist, then, is how it pulls at the thread binding one of the most accepted cultural scripts of its time: that is, the script that authorized the British Empire as the result of British superiority and even righteousness in extending its benefits to pathetically inferior cultures, whose subjugation was a small price to pay for being ruled by the mightiest culture on earth. Forster’s novel is in the broadest sense about how British colonialism has been staged, as if it were an ongoing and arduous performance with life‐and‐death consequences for its actors, many of whom on the Anglo‐Indian side are only dimly aware of being part of a vast shadow play, while those they unthinkingly dominate have a keen understanding of the roles and parts that have been assigned, and the nightmarish reprisals meted out if one fails to play the designated part. This novel seems in many ways conventional, with something of a plot taking place in a hill station for British colonial administration, with comprehensible characters, even if a few of them are regrettably “Other,” and with events that seem to unfold in a linear way, without stream of consciousness or strange jumps in style to get in the way, and yet all of this is a ruse, since every scene can and finally must be read to reveal the fragile, threadbare stagecraft that, while it is still capable of ruling with ruthless power, is dissolved in the novel by the very forces that were altering all the notions of what was real and natural underlying it. To read A Passage to India is to find yourself lodged in the difficulties, thoughts, and desires of young Dr. Aziz, who is perfectly aware of the contempt in which he and other Indians are held, and who has to strategize about how to make it through each day without antagonizing his British medical superior at the hospital – for example, by keeping to a script of self‐effacement, false humility, and docility, and the pretense that all that is British is best, whether an inept play “Cousin Kate” performed for the community, or the ignorant and hostile remarks directed, in Dr. Aziz’s case, against his Muslim religion and against the literature and knowledge of that tradition in Indian thought and art. This is effectively like giving an actor the wrong script at a reading, but on purpose. The vast majority of the audience for Forster’s novel was English‐ speaking and likely to be British citizens rather than colonial subjects of whatever region, yet the novel uses every section – Mosque, Caves, Temple – and most scenes to expose the scripted nature of imperialism, right down to the nonspeaking parts, such as that played by the Indian punkah‐puller who pulls on the fan cooling the courtroom. In the scene that brings this fateful script, Dr. Aziz is on trial for allegedly having raped Adela Quested in a Marabar Cave, thus confirming the narrative of Indian bes- tiality attacking British righteousness and purity. Miss Quested herself is brought up to testify – to play her part – and to give a display of her wronged white womanhood The Long 1920s 63 in an outcome that is a foregone conclusion for the British audience to the trial. Adela has been mulling over what has happened since her agonizing break or mental split during the moment she spent inside one of the caves with Dr. Aziz, while Mrs. Moore waited outside, a moment when she “lost herself” and went off script as a dutiful British fiancée to the colonial administrator Ronnie Heaslop, Mrs. Moore’s son, running headlong out of the cave as a perplexed Aziz watches her tumble in her haste down the dusty hill. Adela had already alienated the Anglo‐Indian women at Chandrapore, first by her respectful ardor to “know India,” which disgusts them as much for its suspicious intellectual independence in a woman, who shouldn’t want to know more than what her husband or father has laid out for her, as it does for wanting to “know” something – colonized India – she should be able to see is repellent, subhuman, and inferior. She is gripped by a moment of exposure to the limitless reflective “nothingness” inside the cave, a glimpse of a liberating abyss or freefall into the space between the lines of her all too scripted part. Once back at the station under the now tender ministrations of the British women who had spurned her previously, Adela’s empty inner space is temporarily colonized by a longstanding narrative of the British empire in India, one going back to the traumatic aftereffects of the 1857 Mutiny, in which conscripted Indian troops rebelled against their British masters and, in the wave of suppression of their rebellion with executions and massacres, led one themselves that involved the rape and murder of women and the killing of their children. It seems Forster had a more recent incident in mind, perhaps, something characteristic of the searing realism of the novel in depicting empire. Amritsar, India, in 1919 was the site of sustained political resistance to the deportation of several Indians agitating for independence; riots broke out, and in the course of extreme violence on both sides of the struggle, a British woman who had lived in India for many years and who was riding her bicycle down an alley was knocked down and beaten, although she was rescued and recovered later from her serious injuries. Brigadier‐General Dyer declared martial law; in the turmoil that followed, with 20 000 Indians gathering to protest, the crowd was fired upon and at least 400 Indians were killed outright. In addition to what was seen as a massacre that crystallized resistance to British rule, according to Gandhi, Dyer infa- mously declared the alley where Miss Sherwood had been attacked as a “crawling alley,” where Indians were forced to enter and crawl its width, being flogged as they went along. In A Passage to India that inflammatory approach is mentioned by, among others, Mrs. Turton, who feels that a similar “crawling” posture should be mandated for all Indians after Aziz’s offense. Adela becomes a new version of the outraged white woman, the affront to whose chastity and goodness would be avenged by the trial of Aziz, with his punishment made an example against any thought of resistance. In A Passage to India Aziz is acquitted when Adela takes the stand and says he did nothing. This leads to the collapse of her engagement and her swift departure from India. What Forster’s novel then stages is an extraordinary shift to the global voice. The educator Cyril Fielding has prided himself on the Enlightenment universality of his own stance. When he comes back to India well after the trial it is during a temple ceremony in a distant province, where Fielding’s notion of universalism is cast aside by the emphasis on the polyglot multiplicity of that event, one that gathers together Dr. Aziz and Professor Godbole in their Muslim and Hindu diversity as manifestations 64 Jennifer Wicke of unity in difference. A misprint in one of the festival signs serves as a slogan for this vibrant union based on sight: “God si Love.” One spark animating Mulk Raj Anand’s novel Untouchable – written in its first version supposedly over the course of a weekend at a desk in the reading room of the British Museum, and subsequently revised in part (this too may be somewhat apocryphal) on the basis of a stern review of the manuscript by Gandhi, whose advice Anand had gone to seek in India – was to offer a reply in fiction, and ultimately beyond fiction in political action, to what Anand regarded as the pessimism of Forster’s ending in A Passage to India, where Fielding and Aziz are unable to regain their active friendship, even though, as Fielding says to Aziz “It’s what I want. It’s what you want.” (2005, 362). But the horses they are riding swerve apart, and following that sign “the temples, the tank, the jail, the palaces, the birds, the carrion, the Guest House … they didn’t want it, they said in their hundred voices, ‘No, not yet,’ and the sky said, ‘No, not there’” (2005, 306). Untouchable rewrites this not by proposing that Indian independence will come about as a result of the British colonizers making friends with their Indian colonial subjects, of course, but by giving an example in fiction of how a mostly illiterate, uneducated, and poverty‐ stricken young Indian man can nonetheless be inspired for awakening to an awareness of himself in the world, and to how that world can be transformed. Untouchable pairs with A Passage to India, despite the eleven years between them, both because E. M. Forster was a supporter of Anand’s creative writing and of his pro‐Indian independence activism, and also because it was Forster’s offer to write a preface for the novel that allowed Untouchable, which had received so many rejections from British publishers that Anand despaired of its ever being published, to go out into the world wearing a British press imprint, and a book jacket referencing E. M. Forster’s foreword inside its covers. The reference to costume and the “clothing” of the book is a deliberate metaphor, since the controversy over the manuscript of Untouchable centered on whether it was an “authentic” work or a version of Bloomsbury modernism in ill‐fitting Indian garb, a weak copy or a mere imitation of a modernist English novel. Anand saw his novel from its inception as in dialogue with Forster’s A Passage to India, set squarely on the subcontinent and in the context of British empire, yet it is also inspired in its literary modernism by Joyce, whose style of “scrupulous meanness” in Dubliners is grafted by Anand onto aspects of Joyce’s later style and narrative structure of Ulysses in being set on one single day in the life of Bakha, and being filtered through his consciousness. Anand dar- ingly uses that modernist technique to render a character who would be seen by many as lacking consciousness at all – for the British, a colonial Indian subject of Bakha’s status bordered on being subhuman, while for the upper‐caste Hindus in colonial India, Bakha is also beyond a boundary. The novel was banned by Britain’s colonial government in India owing to the recognition that its focus on the “untouchable” character of its title – the young man Bakha of the so‐called sweeping caste, a group now referred to as Dalit, whose relegation to the removal of human and other waste from the streets and homes rendered their presence or touch “contaminating” to those of a higher Brahmin caste – was also profoundly directed toward the independence struggle. While after Indian independence Anand was regarded as a crucial founder of modern Indian literature, his complicated involvement with modernist writing in English led to contradictory evaluations of Untouchable, either that it was “merely” a social realist novel and thus not modernist at all, which would mean it could not actually be a The Long 1920s 65 literary source for Indian postcolonial writing by Salman Rushdie and others, or else that it was implicated in an act of colonial mimicry, in which Anand’s novel was a desperate attempt to imitate British modernism. Instead, Untouchable is a capstone of this chapter on the long 1920s for the novel in English because Anand’s novel can only be seen on its own terms as very much a part of the global modernist novel in English. Untouchable, for all the seeming exoticism of its Indian setting and its non‐British protagonist Bakha, does not stand outside the perimeter of the novel in English, but instead within it, fully modernist and part of fashioning global modernism itself. Treating Anand’s novel as if it were an outlier denies the multiple sources, locations, and exchanges that engender modernist writing, and with his fluencies in English, Urdu and Punjabi, French and Russian, Anand is no less “English” a writer than Joseph Conrad, who came to English as his third or fourth language, or than James Joyce, whose Hibernian English had a shadow partner, Gaelic, which Joyce did not speak, and who, unlike Anand, never lived in England. One common feature of all modernist literature is its self‐reflexivity. A modernist novel always includes a reflection on itself as an artifact, as something made, created out of language – which by its very nature can never be wholly original. The modernist moment of self‐reflexivity in Untouchable extends across its length in Bakha’s fascination with fashion, something he calls “fashun” after hearing it in English. For him clothing can only be fashun, or fashionable and thus desirable, if it is an item worn by British soldiers:

He had felt that to put on their clothes made one a sahib too. So he tried to copy them in everything, to copy them as well as he could in the exigencies of his peculiarly Indian circumstances … Ever since he was a child he had walked past the wooden stall on which lay heaped the scarlet and khaki uniforms discarded or pawned by the Tommies … And he had hungered for the touch of them. (1990, 11)

Bakha tries to collect enough thrown‐away or used items to be able to make a whole uniform, something he imagines would magically transform him if he could wear it just once. The self‐reflexivity of Untouchable as a globally modernist novel lies in putting the imitation of literary style at its own heart, boldly recognizing that for many readers Anand’s novel would be judged as a copy of modernist literary fashion. Instead, Untouchable builds on the ways that all people, writers included, borrow from or imitate others in acts that ultimately create something new from the pieces, allowing Bakha in the course of the novel’s day of action to move beyond his desire to simply copy in clothing a military fashun that can never give him an identity nor the power to join with others, to his realization that he has created something new:

With this and other strange and exotic items of dress he had built up a new world, which was commendable, if for nothing else, because it represented a change from the old ossi- fied order and the staggering conventions of the life to which he was born. He was a pioneer in his own way … (78)

This is a harrowing novel because of its unsparing depiction of the daily life of a person who has internalized a sense of abject inferiority that he gets from the presence of the British rulers around him, and from his own people, where he is seen as without 66 Jennifer Wicke value. The grueling round of his daily life is shot through with violence, with rejection, and with the abysmal waste of his potential as he goes about the endless and lifelong labor of sweeping away human and other waste. Yet these constructions of his lack of worth are also subject to being undone, or to being altered by how he experiences himself in language, and reciprocally, by how he and others like him come into the language of literature. Bakha is filled with yearning, with a desire to know more, with a love for beauty that coexists with his abasement. The shimmering modernist style of the novel as Bakha’s thoughts and hopes intersect with grim events allows for a shared and global sense of hope or at least possibility to come into being. The “not yet” of A Passage to India could refer to the importance of having the announcement that the time for undoing British colonialism has arrived come from the voice of those who have been voiceless – the unspeakable or as yet unspoken as much as the untouchable. Untouchable was published a full decade before Indian independence was achieved in August of 1947, and it is pervaded by the moment‐to‐moment uncertainties of how that might be achieved. Yet at the close of the long day and in a nightfall where “a handful of stars throbbed in the heart of the sky,” Bakha experiences a shift in things and the novel seems to blend Stephen Dedalus and his ashplant in “Circe” with Bloom’s return to his home as a newly needed father figure, as:

a sudden impulse shot through the transformations of space and time, and gathered all the elements that were dispersed in the stream of his soul into a tentative decision: “I shall go home and tell father all that Gandhi said about us,” he whispered to himself, “and all that that poet said” … And he proceeded homewards. (157)

This homecoming has resonance for all with ears to hear, and eyes to read. A Passage to India also crosses over with Ulysses in Virginia Woolf’s pivotal Mrs. Dalloway, as her global modernist novel registers the deep scars of gender in speaking to the modern world. Woolf melds the one‐day structure of Ulysses with the explicitly imperial context of her friend Forster’s final novel, although she brings the heart of darkness back from the colony and situates it in the heart of imperial London. The modernist novel in English can emanate from the periphery, as with Joyce’s Ulysses, a relaying back from the colony guised in the language of the center, and as we have seen in Anand. Virginia Woolf’s work also occupies this skewed location, since the formulation of difference between center and margin slips so perilously and resoundingly also into the language of sexual difference. This points to how acutely her works enmesh the crisis in feminine representation in an analogous social crisis, the waning of imperial ideology without a viable expression of global solidarity to replace it. Where the tendency within some modernism is to hyperbolize and foreground the feminine, by analogy to a dark continent of unfathomable desires, Woolf’s texts connect the mystification to the circumstances of powers, both domestic and historical. This is accomplished in Woolf’s work by a sustained engagement with the circumstances of empire and the dislocations, both linguistic and social, it produces, and Mrs. Dalloway is a novel where the impact of that dislocation on everyone it has touched enters into the very narrative style. The narration moves between and among characters and across and through time and space with quicksilver speed. The telekinetic narration also serves to gather the inchoate subjectivities of ordinary crowds or groups The Long 1920s 67 and show – by telling – how they are joined together in mysteries of power that also divide them. This makes for the overarching patterns of loneliness and estrangement that cut through the novel: Septimus Smith the First World War veteran, with his clerkly aims at cultivated status, dying by suicide at the hands of medical condescen- sion when the doctors summoned by his worried wife interpret his shellshock – or post‐traumatic stress syndrome – as un‐English weakness that needs only a dose of Proportion (enforced hospitalization) to cure it, Clarissa Dalloway stuck wondering what those in the social sphere just above hers actually think of her and her parties, as she tries to recover from the grief and shock of the war – the book is shot through with desire, memory, global history and national tradition, sex, loss, and acts of shopping that bring the characters together in front of London’s gleaming shop windows, bereft or lost or alienated though they may be. “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself” is the first sentence of the novel, set off by itself as if to emphasize the solitary nature of the shopping trip for one of life’s most necessary luxuries. The words that follow as Clarissa sets forth are affectively ecstatic – “What a lark! What a plunge!” (2005, 3) – yet are also terms for how the narrative will dart like a swallow back and forth through characters who will become porous nets, and also head down into the depths, the “wedge‐shaped core of darkness” (Woolf 1989, 62) that exists in those narrative perforations. As readers we are still stepping off the curb to buy the flowers in the early morning air, but what follows disconcerts us, as the plunge takes us back in time to the eighteen‐year‐old Clarissa in the pristine morning air of her girlhood home, Bourton, where she stands at an open window conversing with Peter Walsh. It is not until she folds up her reminiscence of Peter like the pocketknife he always carries that we are returned to the pavement and “She stiffened a little on the kerb, waiting for Durtnall’s van to pass.” As she crosses the street under the invisible leaden circles of Big Ben’s chime she contemplates her investment in life: “For Heaven only knows why one loves it so, how one sees it so, making it up, building it up round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh” (4). The reverie on life is also a comment on consciousness and its powers of creation, a self‐reflexive interval that is matched by another kind of textual moment, one where the powers of making also give way to structures of power that hold everyone, even the narrator, in thrall. In Mrs. Dalloway that moment comes early on as a mysterious automobile – possibly driving the prime minister or a royal personage anonymously through London – wends through the streets and in its passage summons and seizes any form of agency:

For in all the hat shops and tailor’s shops strangers looked at each other and thought of the dead; of the flag; of Empire. In a public house on a back street a Colonial insulted the House of Windsor, which led to words, broken beer glasses, and a general shindy, which echoed strangely across the way in the ears of girls buying white underlinen threaded with pure white ribbon for their weddings. For the surface agitation of the passing car as it sunk grazed something very profound. (18)

Everyone is affected by the current of power that shapes their common life. What the novel searches for is a way to generate instead a commons, a space where the values are shared, and dislocation recedes. 68 Jennifer Wicke

Mrs. Dalloway is centered by the pastoral greensward of Regent’s Park, public ground that echoes this notion of a commons the novel itself aspires to become, the swath across which on this day of Clarissa’s party all the major characters cut their path and intersect: Clarissa herself, her old friend Peter Walsh, returning from years in India, the mad Septimus Warren Smith trailing his Italian bride Rezia, Richard Dalloway plunged in the serious thoughts of a civil servant and bureaucrat, a country servant girl come to London to try her luck, an ancient woman who sings a primordial British melody. This green world is sliced and scored by the irresolvable divisions and distinctions that march across it. The park becomes a virtual parade ground for these incommensurabilities created by world war, empire, class war, and the striations of the gender hierarchy that initiate and perpetuate its ravages. The impossibility of covering over the effects of the First World War, the difficulty of assimilating the rural and the colonial in flux, the intractability of the problem of the urban underclass: all these converge in an outburst of group creativity, as the vaporous puffs of sky‐written letters above the park draw all and sundry into a collective act of reading. As the antic letters begin to spell out something in the sky, words still have their mystic powers, almost as if they were runes or smoky oracles rising up. While the message is ultimately a commercial one – Glaxo‐Creemo Toffees are being advertised in an airspace colonized by candy – the mobilization of a commons around the desire to know and to imagine a new message together is of a piece with the hopes of the party Clarissa will give. It too will involve crass motives and divisiveness of all kinds, and yet sounding the bass‐ note underneath it is Septimus Smith’s death, a sacrifice that has the power to dislodge business as usual with the eruption of real feeling. The death of a person seen by the various powers that be in the official British state as a political inconvenience, a working‐class weakling, a lunatic Other, or a valueless being, becomes through the alchemy of fiction a gift capable of bringing a commons into imaginative being:

A thing there was that mattered; a thing, wreathed about with chatter, defaced, obscured in her own life, let drop everyday in corruption, lies, chatter. This he had preserved. Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone … (184)

As Clarissa turns from the dark window where she has seen the reflection of an old woman mounting the stairs, she exults anew at his gift: “She felt somehow very like him – the young man who had killed himself. She felt glad that he had done it; thrown it away.” His expenditure allows her, and the novel, to answer his call. As Clarissa puts it, “She must assemble” (186). If only for a moment, there is revelation of what exists beyond the strictures that make us strangers to one another. She takes on the “terror and ecstasy” of delivering such revelation in her own being, as the novel ends with an opening into a common space beyond location or dislocation: “For there she was” (190). To close with a pendant novel of the long 1920s, Voyage in the Dark (1934) punctuates this lineage of the global modernist novel in English. Jean Rhys makes reference in her title to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and to Woolf’s The Voyage Out, which her novel reverses, since its voyage in the dark heads toward an England that is figured as a dark, cold deathworld in contrast to the life‐exuding Caribbean island, a British colony, that The Long 1920s 69 its protagonist Anna Morgan has been forced to leave. The geographic valences of colonialism are flipped for Rhys, as are the cultural values that underlie the British Empire, where Great Britain is culturally superior in all ways, the source of truth, value, knowledge, and power. The reverse narrative starts in Anna Morgan’s own story, since Anna’s dead mother was from a long‐time Creole family, and her British father had come to the island as so many did to establish families based on their Creole wives’ land and possessions. Once her mother has died, her father remarries a British woman, and on his death Mr. Morgan’s widow inherits the land, rather than its being passed on to Anna. Her British stepmother promptly sells Anna’s legacy, cashes out the profits, and returns to England, leaving Anna with no choice but to leave her home and make her own way in an England that is entirely foreign to her. Anna finds the only job an uneducated young woman can as a bit player in touring theatricals, a position that is assumed to be a prelude to prostitution. The British gentlemen who prey on Anna’s vulnerability see her as exotic because of her Caribbean birth, and rape her with impunity since she is a “rum little devil” in their eyes. At the same time they assume she feels lucky to be in civilized England, and away from a place they associate with savagery. For Anna, it is England that is savage, predicated on an unquestioned white masculine hierarchy that belies her own experience of a tropical motherland, and her own identification since childhood with the black majority population of her island. She begins to realize she has been assumed to be a prostitute all along by the gentleman who promised to marry her, and when she becomes pregnant is thrown back on the help of fellow actresses‐cum‐sex workers in procuring an abortion. Her traversal of England on an increasingly desperate and lonely voyage into the dark of exploitation, where the stark hierarchies of empire converge on her very identity, despite her ostensibly British background, is modernist throughout in being written as a dream. Her childhood home and everything about it is dreamlike and fantasmatic, just as her present circumstances in England are a dream with fluid contours that blur past and present, self and other, death and life. She begins to identity with a long‐dead female slave whose name she had found in nineteenth‐century records of the plantation estate; the terse entry “Maillotte Boyd, aged 18” (1994, 53), her own age as she is sent in exile to England, becomes a trace or scrap of identity she clings to in her mind at moments of extremity, when it is clear that no one knows her or can even imagine who she is in the world. Maillotte Boyd, aged eighteen, was lost to the world except for the accident of being entered as property in a logbook, yet those few words create a short narrative of a person who vanished in history, and with whom Anna Morgan, across boundaries of time and space and race, can nonetheless find kinship. While not a slave, of course, Anna has been translated into money or labeled in fiscal terms by everyone in her life, starting with her father. The unreality of her existence as a tissue of tropes is echoed by the novel’s bursts of flashback memories and its pastiche of quotes from British literature. Just as Mrs. Dalloway uses a line from Shakespeare’s Cymbeline to ironize and underscore its global dimensions – “Fear no more the heat of the sun” is a constant internal refrain for Clarissa, with its linguistic adjacency to the proud claim of Empire about “mad dogs and Englishmen under the noonday sun” – so too does Voyage in the Dark deploy Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence,” and its line in a new key: “The harlots cry from street to street shall weave old England’s winding sheet” (Blake 1997, 492). Jean Rhys begins the book as Anna sets foot in England for 70 Jennifer Wicke the first time: “It was almost like being born again.” As the book ends, Anna is being treated for the self‐induced abortion that has nearly killed her by a doctor who declares cynically “She’ll be all right … Ready to start all over again in no time, I’ve no doubt” (Rhys 1994, 187). The book offers a global modernist dream to deflect that judgment in its final lines as Anna sees a ray of light under the door. “I lay and watched it and thought about starting all over again. And about being new and fresh. And about mornings, and misty days, when anything might happen. And about starting all over again, all over again …” (188). That ellipsis speaks volumes: in the open‐ended space of the last sentence the world’s hope waits.

References

Anand, Mulk Raj. 1990 [1935]. Untouchable. Joyce, James. 1986 [1922]. Ulysses, edited by Hans Penguin: New York. Walter Gabler. New York: Vintage. Birmingham, Kevin. 2014. The Most Dangerous Rhys, Jean. 1994 [1934]. Voyage in the Dark. Book: The Battle for Ulysses. New York: Penguin. New York: Norton. Blake, William. 1997. The Complete Poetry and Prose Sitwell, Osbert. 1949. Introduction to Five Novels, of William Blake. New York: Anchor. by Ronald Firbank. Norfolk: New Directions. Conrad, Joseph. 2008 [1899]. Heart Of Darkness. Whitman, Walt. 2005. The Complete Poems. New Oxford: Oxford University Press. York: Penguin. Firbank, Ronald. 1949 [1919]. Valmouth. In Five Wilde, Oscar. 2008. The Complete Works of Oscar Novels. Norfolk: New Directions. Wilde: Stories, Plays, Poems & Essays. New York: Forster, E. M. 2005 [1924]. A Passage to India. Harper. New York: Penguin. Woolf, Virginia. 1989 [1927]. To the Lighthouse. Hobsbawm, Eric. 1994. The Age of Extremes: The New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991. New York: Woolf, Virginia. 1998 [1922]. Jacob’s Room. Vintage. Mineola: Dover. Joyce, James. 2008 [1916]. A Portrait of the Artist as Woolf, Virginia. 2005 [1925]. Mrs. Dalloway. a Young Man. Oxford: Oxford University Press. New York: Harcourt. 5 The 2000s Ashley Dawson

History returned with a vengeance after the new millennium. Not, to be sure, that it had ever really gone away, but some had been able to avert their eyes from its messy presence during the 1990s. Francis Fukuyama’s notorious paean to the tri umph of liberal capitalism, The End of History and the Last Man (1992), set the tone for much of the last decade of the century. The collapse of the Soviet Union, Fukuyama argued, had left the conjoined systems of free market capitalism and parliamentary democracy as the indisputable telos toward which world history was evolving. For Fukuyama and his followers, a new world order had dawned, with an undisputed Pax Americana guaranteeing tranquility and economic growth around the globe. This new imperium helped fuel the rise of New Labour in Britain, which under Tony Blair jettisoned the remaining explicitly socialist elements of the party’s constitution and proceeded to implement a bevvy of neoliberal policies while pro claiming the arrival of a rejuvenated Cool Britannia. While very much a junior partner in the Anglo‐American alliance, Britain seemed securely placed at the center of an uncontested global hegemonic bloc. 9/11 changed all of that. US policymakers and their NATO allies suddenly found themselves confronted by antagonists whose use of asymmetrical tactics and Islamist ideology was largely unforeseen by those who made it their business to diagnose emerging challenges to empire. As the Retort Collective (2006) argued, the attacks of 9/11 struck at the heart of the spectacle through which the American empire projects its power around the globe, doing damage far disproportionate to the number of casu alties and economic damage inflicted in New York and Washington. As its name sug gests, al‐Qaeda (The Base) existed outside the system of nation‐states over which the United States exercised hegemony, a hydra‐headed foe capable of coopting failed states

A Companion to the English Novel, First Edition. Edited by Stephen Arata, Madigan Haley, J. Paul Hunter, and Jennifer Wicke. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. 72 Ashley Dawson like the most virulent virus. Commentators such as Jacques Derrida opined that 9/11 had generated a sense of existential trauma over the “unpresentable future” and the “open threat of an aggression capable of striking” at any moment (Derrida and Borradori 2003, 98). The anguish and rage that resulted from this awareness of vulner ability legitimated paroxysms of retributive violence such as the US‐led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, in both of which Britain participated despite significant domestic opposition. In tandem with such retributive violence, new narratives were needed to make sense of a world in which the dominant triumphalist post‐Cold War perspective of the Clinton/Blair era seemed completely complacent. Pundits such as Samuel Huntington consequently offered to reorganize the world according to the sim plistic binary logic of a global clash between a (secular) West and a militant Islam along lines drawn straight from the most reductive Orientalist discourses of the past.1 The novel also played a role in the cognitive mapping of this unsettling new epoch. The return of history that figured so prominently as the public awoke from the post‐ideological trance of the 1990s and witnessed the resurrection of power‐ laden terms such as “evil” and “empire” was also apparent in the novel, where the character of Britain’s past, present, and future became a galvanizing subject of fic tional inquiry. The notion that the era of empire had ended in 1960 became impos sible to sustain, and, as the economy imploded in the second half of the decade, the instability of the global financial networks of which London is the linchpin hit home domestically. All efforts to reckon with the present after the start of the new millennium consequently tend to take place under the sign of crisis, and in many cases the stakes are magnified to nothing short of survival. If anything binds people today, a close reading of the English novel after 9/11 suggests, it is a feeling of polymorphous insecurity. Yet such insecurity is not felt evenly in Britain, much less around the planet. One of the fundamental characteristics of our times is the uneven distribution of risk and damage, the effects of which are visible in fiction just as much as they are in everyday life. This situation, like the attacks of 9/11, raises fundamental questions about the status and even the tenability of the body politic. It could therefore be said that if heterogeneous forms of insecurity charac terize life in Britain, one of the primary characteristics that defines works of fiction written during the 2000s is a renewed insistence on grappling with the Condition of England, although in this case, unlike in the Victorian social novel, the nation tends to be seen as but one node within a global network. This attempt to assess the changing terrain of the present using fictional means necessarily also involves the construction of counterhistories that unearth occulted pasts, as well as the pro jection of minatory futures. The English novel after 2000 thus engages in a working through of history, one that ineluctably involves a confrontation not just with what Paul Gilroy has termed “postcolonial melancholia” – the inability of the English to apprehend and mourn the loss of their empire and the prestige that went along with it – but with the insecurities of the imperial present (2006). After 9/11, a nation marked by postcolonial melancholia faces even more unsettling reckonings with the eclipse of Euro‐American hegemony and with the unsustain ability of capitalist modernity. The 2000s 73

The Present

Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2006) offers a particularly potent allegory for the traumatic events of 9/11. McEwan’s novel focuses on a day in the life of the affluent British neurosurgeon Henry Perowne, a day that happens to be February 15, 2003, the date of massive public demonstrations around the world against the impending US‐led invasion of Iraq. Perowne travels around London on this fateful day wrapped in the protective cocoon of his wealth and class status, despite the fact that his day began with a baleful glimpse from his bedroom window of an airplane in flames. As in many of his other narratives, in which everyday life suddenly gives way to catastrophe, McEwan interrupts Perowne’s cosseted life with a series of apparently random events that quickly spiral towards violence. As he motors away from the traffic snarl created by the antiwar demonstration, Perowne collides with a dilapidated car driven by a man named Baxter, who violently demands restitution for the accident and, later in the day, invades Perowne’s well‐appointed home in a posh London neighborhood and threatens to rape his pregnant daughter Daisy. The barbarians are no longer simply at the gates, but have penetrated into the fortified bourgeois sanctum. Like Howards End (1910), E. M. Forster’s portrait of English liberalism in crisis at the beginning of the twentieth century, Saturday depicts a complacent world thrown into confusion by the intrusion of a member of the dispossessed classes.2 In Forster’s novel, the elites are internally divided into the educated and aesthetically inclined Schlegels and the industrious but philistine Wilcoxes. In contrast with these elites, the lower‐middle‐class interloper Leonard Bast is hopelessly fawning in his attempt to acquire cultural capital. McEwan’s angry and violent Baxter is no Leonard Bast, but he is nevertheless disarmed by high culture when Daisy recites Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” (1867) at his command. Moved by this poetry, Baxter is emotionally over whelmed, and Perowne and his son succeed in catching him unawares and throwing him down the stairs. Problem resolved? Hardly. The famous epigraph to Howards End – “only connect … ” – frames empathy as an antidote to the increasingly intractable class antagonisms that fissured early‐ twentieth‐century English society. Forster embeds this sympathetic imagination in his novel not simply through the Schlegel sisters’ attempts to aid Leonard Bast but also through an omniscient narrator who gives the reader a modicum of insight into Bast’s interior life. Moreover, the novel concludes with Margaret Schlegel empowered as rightful owner of the home after which the novel is named (a home that is a synecdoche for England itself), and her sister Helen pregnant with Leonard Bast’s child. Such a reconciliatory plot, as wishful as it might seem, is entirely absent from McEwan’s Saturday. If anything, connection is seen as a problem rather than a boon. As McEwan wrote in an opinion piece published shortly after the 9/11 attacks, “the technology that was bringing us these scenes has wired us closely together into a febrile, mutual dependency. Our way of life, centralised and machine‐dependent, has made us frail” (2001a). Yet, in another contemporaneous piece, McEwan also emphasized the need for empathy and compassion (2001b). We have, in other words, proximity without propinquity.3 Indeed, in contrast with Howards End, Saturday is told entirely from the circumscribed perspective of Henry Perowne. Although, as a neurosurgeon, he is liter ally able to see into people’s brains, including that of Baxter, whom he is called to 74 Ashley Dawson operate on near the novel’s conclusion, Perowne is signally lacking in an ability to connect empathetically with other people. Despite his extensive scientific knowledge, he is every bit as philistine as Henry Wilcox, expressing disdain for literature despite the fact that his daughter Daisy is a poet. His antagonist Baxter remains a complete cipher to him and, consequently, to the reader. Baxter’s appearance out of nowhere is a function of the fragmented and radically uneven geography of London and of the public sphere in contemporary Britain in general, but also of the inability of Perowne and the elite class he embodies to empathize with the increasingly downtrodden majority. Perowne’s hitherto insular existence is symptomatic of a nation that has, since the days of Margaret Thatcher’s famous pronouncement that “there is no such thing as society,” torn the social contract to shreds. This fundamentally violent act can do nothing but, sooner or later, incite more violence. The great unstated factor in McEwan’s Saturday is race. Baxter and his mates are never described in racial terms, yet they are made to stand within the novel’s allegorical structure for all those elements within and outside the nation that threaten its pow erful bourgeois beneficiaries. The seemingly paradoxical invisibleness and ubiquity of race in Saturday renders McEwan’s novel very much of its time. As an unwanted intruder who appears out of nowhere, Baxter offers a cipher for the dominant repre sentation of postcolonial immigrants to Britain, who were technically British sub jects but were consistently represented as aliens who threatened a purportedly homogeneous English way of life. The harsh impact of this British racism was recorded early on by writers such as Sam Selvon and Louise Bennett, who traveled to the “mother country” as part of a wave of migrants recruited by British firms during the postwar economic expansion. As Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956) documents, the illusions of fair play and quick riches that brought migrants from Caribbean nations such as Jamaica and Trinidad and other former colonies to Britain were quickly dashed as they encountered the many barriers, informal and formal, to equality. In the face of such forms of exclusion, Black and Asian writers turned to the creation of autonomous communities and cultural forms, beginning with the Caribbean Artists Movement in the 1960s and culminating in the Black and Asian Renaissance of the 1980s, when British ska and reggae music, filmmakers like Isaac Julien and John Akomfrah, artists such as Anish Kapoor and Rashid Araeen, and writers and theorists like Grace Nichols, Stuart Hall, Salman Rushdie, and Hanif Kureishi, among many others, created vibrant cultures of opposition to Thatcherism that put Britain on the global cultural map. The achievements of these generations of cultural activists, in tandem with the dismantling of most formal barriers to racial equality in Britain, contributed to a buoyant sense of optimism in literature produced by British writers of color around the millennium. Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000) is symptomatic of what might be called the hybrid generation’s moment of arrival on the cultural stage, although Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) might be seen as a forerunner. Smith’s novel traces the interwoven histories of two families, the Iqbals and the Joneses. Samad Iqbal and Archie Jones meet (rather improbably) in a tank in Eastern Europe during the Second World War, a setting that allows Smith to raise the question of service to the British Empire by subaltern classes from England and its colonies. Much of the satir ical energy of the novel derives from Smith’s comic depiction of Samad and Archie’s The 2000s 75 kids’ ambivalent explorations of what it means to be British in an ostensibly postracial London. In what comes as close to a programmatic statement as the novel makes, the narrator states that:

This has been the century of strangers, brown, yellow, and white. This has been the century of the great immigrant experiment. It is only this late in the day that you can walk into a playground and find Isaac Leung by the fish pond, Danny Rahman in the football cage, Quang O’Rourke bouncing a basketball, and Irie Jones humming a tune. (Smith 2000, 271)

The cosmopolitan kids found in Smith’s fictional playground, “children with first and last names on a direct collision course” (271), embody the hybrid bloodlines and cultures that resulted as European empires broke apart and were reconfigured in the twentieth century. Despite a century’s worth of immigration, Smith’s narrator implies, many Britons still cannot acknowledge the diverse character of the country. To do so would be to confront the imperial legacy that brought immigrants to Britain, to grapple with and lay to rest the nation’s postcolonial melancholia. For many, this is too much to bear. As a result, according to White Teeth, there are still “young white men” who “roll out at closing time into the poorly lit streets with a kitchen knife wrapped in a tight fist” in anger at the nation’s mongrel character (272). This is the bloody upshot of postcolonial melancholia. The stakes are clearly high for children like Irie, Magid, and Millat, kids of, respec tively, Archie and Samad, whose efforts to fit in or to assert fierce independence often have tragicomic results. Irie’s attempt to conform to dominant norms of feminine beauty by straightening her kinky mixed‐race hair, for example, leads to a humiliating episode of baldness, while her moves to assimilate herself into the bourgeois Chalfen family find her working for the family patriarch Marcus, a scientist who, ironically, believes that one’s genetic identity determines one’s fate. In contrast, the increasingly alienated young Millat is fawned over by Marcus’s wife Joyce, who is fascinated by his recalcitrant behavior as he becomes increasingly scornful of the English values that she and her family embody. This rebellious trajectory concludes with Millat’s membership in KEVIN, an Islamist group whose acronymic name stands for Keepers of the Eternal and Vigilant Islamic Nation, as well as not coincidentally being a British slang term for someone who is a fool. At one point in the novel, Millat accompanies other mem bers of KEVIN to a demonstration in the English Midlands that is clearly intended to reference the burning of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses in Bradford in 1989. Despite the gravity of this event, which generated extremely acrimonious and in some cases murderous clashes in Britain and around the world, Millat’s radical trajectory is treated predominantly in a comic key, his attempts to play the role of Islamist militant derailed by his addled De Niro‐style posturing and dope smoking. Herein lies the datedness of Smith’s novel, which certainly is not characterized by postcolonial melancholia, but could be said to suffer from a postmodern hangover. Written and published before the attacks of 9/11, White Teeth picks out the comic con tradictions and hybridity in a character such as Millat in a typically deconstructive move. In doing so, however, the novel seems to suggest that hybridity will win out despite all odds, that the trajectory of history is ineluctably carrying us towards greater 76 Ashley Dawson cosmopolitanism and harmony, despite white men with knives and organizations like KEVIN. In making this move, Smith’s novel takes its cue from theoreticians such as Homi Bhabha, whose work, intended to dismantle xenophobic assertions of cultural purity, found hybridity everywhere, as well as from Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, which sought to demonstrate the impurity of all cultural traditions, a fact that was at the root of the furor the novel caused.4 While all antiracist activists might wish, along with Zadie Smith’s character Irie Jones, to finally escape the dead weight of the last centu ry’s brutal ethnic animosities, the deep fissures that opened up in Britain and interna tionally after 9/11 suggest that it will take more than simply the passage of time and a sense of humor to get us to such a happy resolution, although, admittedly, such dis parate qualities can’t hurt. Irie’s hopes and travails certainly render her an infinitely more attractive character than the arrogant and insular Henry Perowne, yet White Teeth’s comic mode makes it, like Saturday, suffer at times from what might be termed imperial myopia: the inability to see and understand the globally embedded, radically uneven power relations upon which one’s quotidian reality relies. This can be seen as a contemporary version of the modernist silence on the imperial question diagnosed by Fredric Jameson (1990). While the links between quotidian experience and the uneven economic, political, and cultural lineaments of the world‐system in which that experi ence is embedded remain difficult to assess, as McEwan’s Saturday underlines, the con tradictions of this system will ultimately impinge on even the most cocooned of lives in the imperial center. It is this “absent or attenuated totality at the core,” in Jed Esty’s words, that was shattered after 9/11 (2003, 7).

The Past

In Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2003), the fifth installment in J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter saga, the highest‐selling novel series in history, the Ministry of Magic’s imbecilic leader Cornelius Fudge appoints the odious Dolores Umbridge High Inquisitor at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. While cruel teachers are nothing new in the tradition of English school novels that goes all the way back to Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s School Days (1857), Umbridge is particularly interesting inasmuch as she embodies the destructive blindness and oppressive stric tures of the Ministry of Magic’s inept bureaucracy. Fudge and the Ministry of Magic whom Umbridge serves refuse to believe that the evil Lord Voldemort has returned to plague the world of witches and wizards, and use organs of propaganda that they con trol such as The Daily Prophet to spread calumny about Harry and his friends. The demiurge of this bureaucracy, Dolores Umbridge seeks to thwart Harry’s efforts to combat Voldemort with nearly inexplicable malice. Indeed, in order to resist her cen sorious interventions, Harry and his friends are forced to form a clandestine organiza tion, Dumbledore’s Army, which trains in defensive spells like a guerrilla group in preparation for the onslaught of Voldemort and his evil minions. Harry’s Hogwarts‐ based confederacy parallels the Order of the Phoenix, the organization begun by Harry’s mentor Albus Dumbledore in order to fight Voldemort. It too must operate underground in order to avoid the fatuous functionaries of the Ministry of Magic. The fact that Rowling sets the Potter series in a fantasyland populated predominantly with The 2000s 77 creatures from medieval English legend helps to obscure the contemporary resonance of her depiction of the Ministry of Magic. Yet compare the Harry Potter novels to that other great English fantasy series, J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (1937–1949). Written mainly during the Second World War, Tolkien’s trilogy also features a confederacy, the Fellowship of the Ring, who band together to battle the evil Lord Sauron. Like Dumbledore’s Army, the Fellowship of the Ring are an apparently ragtag band, with the diminutive hobbits and churlish dwarves arrayed alongside fallible but noble humans and immortal elves. Yet they find strength in unity and in the innate humble goodness of the hobbits, which saves them from the temptation to power and evil exerted by Sauron and the One Ring. If Tolkien’s great fantasy sequence is shot through with references to Milton’s Paradise Lost and Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, it is also very much a product of the antifascist popular front politics of the time. Salvation comes in The Lord of the Rings through resistance to the One Ring’s siren song of total power, through the good offices of wizards such as Gandalf, and through the massed armies of humans and elves who fight off Sauron and his orc hordes. If governance in Tolkien’s work consists largely of the marshaling of armies, in Rowling’s work government is depicted in over whelmingly negative terms as a form of, at best, bludgeoning incompetence, and, at worst, as a clandestine arm of evil. While Harry Potter is supported in his battle with the evil Lord Voldemort by faithful friends such as Ron and Hermione, as well as by the good wizard Dumbledore, he must also battle the malice of the Ministry of Magic. Rowling’s representation of government is, in other words, firmly in line not simply with Orwell’s depiction of the state in Nineteen Eighty‐Four but with contemporary neoliberal ideology, which represents government as nothing but a yoke on popular will and energy.5 These two great English fantasy series might thus be seen as bookends on the era of the Keynesian welfare state, the one depicting the democratic struggle against fascism that helped articulate notions of the national‐popular, and the other representing a historical moment in which the state has come to be seen as a parasite on the national body. No discussion of English literature in the new millennium can ignore the impact of Rowling’s Harry Potter series, which many commentators see as having singlehandedly saved the publishing industry, although its blockbuster status arguably intensified the shift towards conglomeration that has characterized the industry in recent decades, thereby diminishing support, financial and intellectual, for less popular, more experimental works of fiction.6 Like its predecessor The Lord of the Rings, Rowling’s work presents a world in crisis, menaced by evil forces that penetrate into the lives of everyone, witch, wizard, and Muggle alike, threatening the complete dissolution of the established order. Yet, despite its vaunted complexity and its population by a vast array of creatures from English history and folklore, it also makes decisive interventions into the present through its endorsement of the hegemonic neoliberal representation of the state as an oppressive force. Rowling’s work, in other words, reminds us that the past is a battleground in which warring conceptions of the present and hopes for the future clash. In his discussion of the enthusiasm for National Heritage during the Thatcher era, Patrick Wright argues that as the neoliberal doctrines of the Thatcher gov ernment dismantled concrete elements of the body politic through, for example, the 78 Ashley Dawson privatization of nationalized industries such as the rail service and the atomization of coal mining communities, so spectacular pageants of national tradition were required in order to compensate for this hollowed‐out cultural core (1985, 141). As Wright puts it, “in place of memory, amnesia swaggers out in historical fancy dress” (78). Yet, as he is careful to point out, these dominant articulations of national heritage as empty spectacle – the 1981 wedding of Diana and Charles, for example – do not exhaust historical consciousness and people’s appetite for resonant images of the past to give meaning to the present. Indeed, it might be argued that contestation over the historical past is one of the central threads in the English novel across the twentieth century and into the 2000s. Rowling’s work might have spun national heritage one way, but there were many competing conceptions of the past in the historical novels of the period. History itself is a contested terrain. One of the fundamental characteristics of mod ernism, it could be argued, is an interrogation and rejection of the mode of “scientific,” “universal” history elaborated by largely male, university‐based historians during the late nineteenth century, a style of narrating the past that defined itself in opposition to the practices of amateur and often female historians who tended to be more concerned with what we would now term social history than with the battles of Carlyle‐inspired public heroes.7 Rejecting the realist narrative conventions that underpinned such accounts of the past, modernist writers such as Joseph Conrad, Dorothy Richardson, Ford Madox Ford, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf employed free indirect speech to moor narrative within the consciousness of the individual subject in the early decades of the twentieth century. This opened up radically new temporal vistas, as writers sought to capture the mind’s aliveness to evanescent sensory impressions and its constant interweaving of memory and present experience. Such modernist narrative experiments could be said to offer counterhistories of the present. Adding to this tradition, late modernist authors such as Naomi Mitchison, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and Jack Lindsay wrote novelistic versions of what came to be called people’s history. Lindsay’s 1649 (1938), for example, tells the story of the radi cally egalitarian Levelers whom Cromwell ultimately suppressed during the English Revolution. Even more subversively, Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Summer Will Show (1936) narrates the 1848 revolution in Paris through the eyes of a rebellious English lady who is seduced by her wayward husband’s Jewish mistress. It was out of this same radical internationalist milieu that C. L. R. James’s great history of the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins (1938), which is as skillfully plotted as any novel, was born. Although historical novels such as those of Lindsay and Townsend Warner tend not to be as formally experimental as the work of the high modernists, their efforts to plot alternative, radical versions of the past helped animate notions of the national‐ popular that were pivotal to the struggle against fascism during the Second World War and to the construction of the welfare state that followed. Although it could be argued that these accomplishments in effect contained many of the radical democratic energies unleashed by the crises of capitalism and the struggle against fascism during the 1930s and 1940s, the model of the national‐popular elaborated by such writers was crucial to the subsequent writing of cultural studies scholars like E. P. Thompson and Raymond Williams, to the formation of the New Left as a movement intended to democratize postwar society, and to subsequent social movements such as second‐wave The 2000s 79 feminism. I would, in other words, propose a radical thread, one with strong internationalist affiliations, as an alternative current within the culture of retrench ment and narrowly circumscribed nationalism in the period from 1930 to 1960 discussed by critics such as Jed Esty. The advent of Thatcherism gave renewed impetus to this drive to write counterhis tories as a result of its veneration of the kind of exclusionary narratives of the national past described by Patrick Wright, particularly those grounded in celebration of the Victorian imperial era. A key component of the Thatcherite project was a redefinition of national history, one that associated Englishness with tradition, sobriety, and self‐ regulation. The novel played an important role in this struggle over history, with the English Revolution, the Victorian era, and the First World War as pivotal moments of national self‐definition. Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy (1991–1995), for example, explored the traumatizing impact of the First World War on an entire generation of British men, whose notions of chivalrous masculinity and valor were completely incommensurate with the mechanized horror and abjection visited on them in the trenches. Barker’s trilogy incorporates historical figures such as Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, writers whose scathing attacks on the hollow ideologies of the Victorian era helped stimulate subsequent modernist iconoclasm. Interestingly, though, the Second World War has remained relatively unrepresented, despite its centrality in dominant political ideology in the period after 1945. As Paul Gilroy has argued, images of British valor during the Battle of Britain provide a touchstone that is often used to depict what is cast as Britain’s chaotic multicultural present in negative terms (2006, 88). Since the Second World War was undeniably a popular war against fascism, characterized by unprecedented domestic suffering and unity, homogenizing represen tations of the period that are mobilized to reactionary ends in the present have proven difficult to contest. This is precisely what Andrea Levy’s Small Island (2004) sets out to do. The novel depicts the experiences of two couples before, during, and after the war. The Jamaican Gilbert Joseph meets the white English woman Queenie Bligh while serving in Britain with the Royal Air Force, and returns to board with her after the war when he finds it nearly impossible to find accommodation elsewhere because of the racism that pervaded British society in the period. This setup in many ways resembles the narrative frame of Sam Selvon’s depiction of the (predominantly male) immigrant experience in The Lonely Londoners, but Levy rewrites this foundational text of the Black British literary tradition by simultaneously detailing the experience of Gilbert’s wife Hortense follow ing her arrival in postwar London, and, equally importantly, recounting the prehistory of these encounters before and during the Second World War. These portions of Small Island effectively shatter the image of wartime unity cultivated in the kind of nostalgic nationalist rhetoric discussed by Paul Gilroy. After marrying Bernard Bligh in order to escape the parochialism of life as the daughter of a rural butcher, for example, Queenie experiences the shameless classism of middle‐class Londoners, who refuse to house English refugee children despite the lofty speeches of leaders like Churchill about wartime unity. After the war, undisguised racism is added to this classism as Queenie’s neighbors are scandalized by her willingness to rent out rooms in her house to black men such as Gilbert. Levy grounds Queenie’s liberalism in her wartime affair with another Jamaican airman, Michael Roberts, and in her experience of the toxic 80 Ashley Dawson racism of white American GIs stationed in Britain during the war, an experience that cements her empathy with people of color, who were asked to sacrifice their lives for the “mother country” during the war but were still treated as second‐class citizens dur ing and after the conflict. While Small Island bravely disputes nostalgic evocations of British unity during the Second World War, it also explores the limitations of cross‐racial identification in unsparing terms. While Queenie comes across as quite heroic in her repudiation of the racism of other white people of her day, her antiracist empathy fails her at a cru cial moment. Made pregnant by a fleeting encounter with Michael Roberts, Queenie decides that she must surrender her baby to her lodgers Gilbert and Hortense in order to secure a decent future for the child. Levy grounds this most painful surrender in the racism of Queenie’s husband Bernard, who returns after extended military service in Asia, using him as a symbol of the campaign of shame to which women who became pregnant while their husbands were away during the war were subjected. Of course, English women who bore children of color after liaisons with one of the African‐American or Caribbean troops stationed in Britain during the war were sub ject to particular disgrace. Hortense’s willingness to accept the child is a signal moment in her transformation from a prim and insensitive social climber to a more caring woman, but, while Levy’s novel encourages readers to sympathize with the agreement between the two women, we are also made keenly aware of the tragedy implicit in this imposition of impermeable racial boundaries. Small Island offers a powerful tale of what Mica Nava has called the visceral cosmopolitanism of black and white people who transgressed the color bar during the Second World War, thereby challenging the pervasive forms of racism of British imperialism (Nava 2007). Levy’s novel also, however, demonstrates how this moment of antiracist unity was fore closed, paving the way for the homogenizing, exclusionary representations of British culture of the postwar era. As Gilroy’s analysis of postcolonial melancholia suggests, this is a past that is still very much present despite the best efforts of many Britons to wish it away.

The Future

The 2000s will be remembered as a decade of what Gramsci called “organic crisis” on a scale surpassing those of the 1970s, the 1930s, and the end of the Edwardian era in the 1910s.8 Like these previous eras of turbulence, the decade was marked by the breakdown of dominant institutions and belief systems that spread across the entire face of British society. And, like these previous crisis‐ridden decades, the events of the 2000s have critical implications for the future. As I have argued, 9/11 was an impor tant precipitating factor in this crisis, a breaking point that catalyzed a shocked awak ening from the relative complacency of the previous decade. But 9/11 was only the beginning of the end. The attacks, which unraveled the hegemony of the Anglo‐ American system of neoliberal capitalism and secular representative democracy, plunged the United States and its NATO allies into a phase of naked imperialist militarism.9 Of course, Britain was a decidedly junior partner in the “coalition of the willing,” but its participation in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq revived awareness The 2000s 81 that Britons are part of an imperial project.10 Britain may, in other words, be postcolonial, but it is certainly not postimperial. Like other organic crises, the 2000s were not characterized by political and military convulsions alone. In addition to its military links to the United States as a member of NATO, Britain, through the ministrations of the City of London, plays an integral role in the debt imperialism through which the United States dominates the globe.11 The City rivals New York as a hub of the global financial flows through which the contem porary capitalist economy reproduces itself. As commentators such as Giovanni Arrighi and David Harvey have pointed out, since the crisis of accumulation in the 1970s, American and British elites have turned increasingly to finance in order to realize the bloated levels of surplus that they require.12 In addition to many other aspects of neoliberalism, from crushing labor unions to outsourcing jobs to developing nations such as China and India, Wall Street and the City have come to rely increasingly on arcane financial instruments such as collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps, which generated astronomical returns on investment while supposedly being “safe as houses” because the risk entailed in such instruments was spread around through securitization.13 As we now know, securitization in fact planted the equivalent of landmines throughout the economy in Britain and the United States; when the housing bubble deflated, the entire financial system was threatened with collapse. This crisis was in fact the denouement of the contradictions sown by the response of elites to the last crisis: since neoliberalism has essentially immiserated more and more sectors of the population in advanced economies such as Britain and the United States, the only way to keep people consuming was to extend credit to them. The crafty gnomes in the financial sector then figured out how to make even more money off this debt, but, as often happens when you live off borrowed time, the whole edifice ulti mately came tumbling down. Although China, now the workshop for the world, is also inevitably caught up in this crisis, the collapse of debt imperialism has accelerated the shift of power away from the United States and the European Union to East Asia.14 Although it has not yet resolved itself, the crisis of the 2000s seems set, in other words, to reverse the hegemony of the West that began with the rise of European empires in the Renaissance. As if this were not enough of a wrenching shift, the 2000s was also the decade in which, as a result of films such as An Inconvenient Truth (2006), most of the British and American population became aware of climate change. If the financial crisis jolted us into seeing the decimating impact of capitalism’s need for relentless accumulation, the climate crisis has made us aware of the unsustainability of industrial capitalism’s rav enous consumption of the planet’s natural resources.15 While the climate denial industry and the paralysis of political elites has ensured that no significant action has been taken to address the climate crisis, the results of this crisis are increasingly evi dent, particularly in the vulnerable, war‐torn postcolonial nations of the globe lying in what Christian Parenti calls the tropics of chaos (2012). To contemplate the near future today is thus to contemplate the question of the survival of humanity.16 To a remarkable extent, then, the crisis of the 2000s has rekindled the fears of civi lizational and ecological decline that circulated at the beginning of the twentieth century. In H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895), for instance, fears about the entropic “heat death” of the universe sparked by Lord Kelvin’s second law of thermodynamics 82 Ashley Dawson are played out through the scenario of a time traveler who voyages to the moment of our sun’s extinction. Before he arrives at this fatal terminus, however, the time trav eler touches down in a time many millennia in the future in which evolution has split the human race in two, generating the dainty but infantile Eloi who, he learns, are preyed upon by the subterranean‐dwelling, cannibalistic Morlocks, descendants of the working class of Wells’s day. In his subsequent “scientific romance,” The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), Wells turned from this gloomy contemplation of the self‐ destructive evolution and eventual extinction of the human race to reflection on the ethical implications of vivisection and of the cruelty of science run amok. The epon ymous doctor engages in torturous operations through which he seeks to transform animals into quasi‐human beings. Moreau’s ruthlessly painful experiments backfire as the Beast Folk gradually revert to their animal natures, transgressing the series of prohibitions he has inculcated in order to maintain their humanlike behavior and, ultimately, slaying him. Wells’s trailblazing novels posed fundamental questions about the gloomy implications of contemporary class relations and the dogma of scientific progress shorn of ethical considerations. What was then science fiction, events seen as unfolding in the far‐distant future or in an isolated colony run by an unhinged scientist, have come, in the century since Wells wrote, to seem the stuff of our global near present. The specter of climate change, for example, generated a series of apocalyptic novels during the 2000s set in the relatively near future. Maggie Gee’s The Flood (2004), Sarah Hall’s The Carhullan Army (2007), Jim Crace’s The Pesthouse (2008), and Will Self’s The Book of Dave (2007) all trace the climate‐driven collapse of Euro‐American modernity. Self’s novel is notable not simply for the complex, Cockney‐derived lingo in which portions of the book are narrated, a stylistic move borrowed from Anthony Burgess’s Clockwork Orange (1962) and Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker (1981), but also for its portrait of a future society returned to the Stone Age by the rising waters of the climate crisis. Self’s novel juxtaposes the angry monologue of London cabby Dave Rudman with the world of climate‐change survivors in which Dave’s embittered rants against his ex‐wife and state‐mandated child‐support payments have become holy writ following the discovery of a steel plate on which Dave had his thoughts inscribed. The strength of Self’s novel lies in its juxtaposition of the psychogeography of contempo rary London with the primitive conditions in which survivors marooned on the city’s high ground live 500 years hence. Readers are catapulted simultaneously forwards and backwards in time, making us aware of how vulnerable and tenuous contemporary global capitalist modernity truly is. In The Book of Dave, the collapse of modernity, like that of the Roman Empire, has empowered a medieval clerisy who clamp down on heretics with extreme ferocity. Self’s novel thus frames its depiction of the future in dystopian terms that say just as much about the contemporary exhaustion of radical egalitarian political projects as they do about the likely shape of the future. As was true of Wells’s vision of the future, Self’s dystopia is more a reflection of the oppressive character of contemporary class relations in England than of the likely outcome of climate change. Like other such apocalyptic tales, for example, The Book of Dave does not offer a very accurate depiction of the multifarious impact of climate change. While catastrophic flooding is likely to be one of the consequences of global warming, it is unlikely that anything resembling current agricultural practices will The 2000s 83 be possible in European latitudes if even the most conservative scientific predictions concerning the impact of climate change based on current trends are accurate. As shocking as they may be, in other words, narratives such as Self’s tend to minimize the impact of climate change by setting their tales in a future England, which happens to be one of the temperate portions of the globe, and by limiting their perspective to a moment in which catastrophe has not yet extinguished the remnants of English civili zation. We are fascinated by the spectacle of the catastrophic future, in other words, but we cannot bear to contemplate a world without humanity for long, if at all. As Derrida observed in a discussion of apocalyptic narratives, literature is inseparable from what he calls “survivance”; it is, in other words, driven simultaneously to con front and to defer its own, and humanity’s, complete destruction (1984). The climate dystopias limned by writers such as Self, Crace, Hall, and Gee enjoin us to confront the two fundamental dilemmas of our time: the destruction of nature by an economic system predicated on ceaseless expansion, and our inability to empathize with the lives of others, both those who are geographically distant from the affluent consumerist cultures of Anglo‐America and who will be the worst afflicted by climate chaos, and those who are distant from us in time, the future generations whose lives are likely to be crimped and ultimately snuffed out by our unwillingness to forgo the standard of living to which we are presently accustomed. This latter dilemma returns us to the ethical issues at the heart of 9/11 novels such as Saturday, issues addressed in a radically different manner by Kazuo Ishiguro’s apparently science‐fictional novel Never Let Me Go (2005). Unlike McEwan’s novel, which firmly ensconces its reader in the subjectivity of a member of the global elite, Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go unfolds from the perspective of a being who is quite literally a form of what Zygmunt Bauman terms surplus humanity (2004). Kathy and her schoolmates at Hailsham boarding school, the reader of Ishiguro’s novel gradually comes to learn, are clones, people cre ated for the sole purpose of surrendering their vital organs to the “originals” or non cloned humans whose desire for longevity they are bred to serve. The halting efforts of Kathy and her friends Ruth and Tommy to sustain affective bonds with one another and to prove to the outside world that they are worthy of enduring life are revealed in the course of the novel to be futile. During a meeting near the novel’s conclusion with Miss Emily, the former headmistress of Hailsham, Kathy and Tommy learn that the school was an experiment designed to demonstrate to society that they and their schoolmates had souls, but that the school has been shut down, the drive to view clones simply as nonhuman organ providers having overcome the liberal ideals of Miss Emily. As clones, Kathy and her friends are fated to become “donors,” to extinguish their lives for others, in a ruthless social order which cannot recognize their humanity without terminating its mode of self‐reproduction. Never Let Me Go tends to be classified as science fiction, yet it could equally be said to meditate on the unsettling but seldom acknowledged realities of the present. It is certainly true that the novel poses profound ethical questions about the future appli cations of contemporary biotechnologies. Like Wells’s Island of Doctor Moreau, Never Let Me Go asks us to consider the toll of scientific progress. Unlike Wells’s work, however, Ishiguro’s places us inside the consciousness of a person who slowly discovers that she has been marked as a nonperson by society. Of course this narrative strategy generates powerful empathy with characters to whom subjectivity is ultimately denied. Indeed, 84 Ashley Dawson part of the tragedy of Never Let Me Go lies in the brief cultivation of self and aesthetic expression that takes place among Kathy and her friends at Hailsham, a process that develops a sense of personhood that is then brutally denied. As this brief liberal inter regnum is jettisoned, in a manner analogous to the termination of the Keynesian wel fare state in the advanced economies and developmentalism in many postcolonial nations, we, along with Ishiguro’s clones, are returned to a condition in which not only are vast numbers of people subjected to the risks and vagaries of the market, but life itself comes to be thoroughly commodified and disposable. From the molecular building blocks of life to biospheric catastrophes, all elements of life on earth are now subject to speculation and vertiginous risk.17 It is this daunting reality, along with its corollary crises and unprecedented forms of insecurity, that the English novel began to limn in the first decade of this new century.

Notes

1 For a critique of Huntington’s Orientalist power or social group, is in crisis when this discourse, see Qureshi and Sells (2003). dominant entity is forced to rely on coercive 2 I am indebted for this comparison to Ross means such as military force. A clear defini (2008). tion of Gramsci’s concept of hegemony may 3 For a discussion of related questions of ethical be found in Williams (1985, 144–146). relations in a global age, see Palumbo‐Liu 10 For a discussion of the hub‐and‐spokes system (2012). of US imperial hegemony, see Gowan (1999). 4 See, for instance, Bhabha’s “How Newness 11 On US debt imperialism, see Hudson (2003). Enters the World” (1994). 12 See, for instance, Arrighi (1994) and Harvey 5 For a more extensive discussion of representa (2010). tions of governance in Harry Potter, see 13 For a very clear explanation of the arcana of Barton (2006). financialization, see the novelist John 6 On recent trends in the British publishing Lanchester’s wonderful guide I.O.U (2010). industry, see, among others, English (2008), 14 For a discussion of this shift of hegemony to Squires (2009), and Wirtén (2004). East Asia, see Arrighi (2009). 7 On the construction of this professional, 15 On the ecological crisis of capitalism, see male‐oriented historiography, see Bonnie G. Foster et al. (2011). Smith (2000). 16 For a discussion of survivalism as the 8 For a discussion of “organic crisis” in the con fundamental episteme of our times, see text of the 1970s, see Solomos et al. (1982). Abélès (2010). 9 Hegemony, to the extent that it relies on the 17 On this commodification of life itself, consent of those subordinated by a dominant see Cooper (2008).

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Cooper, Melinda. 2008. Life as Surplus: Biotechnology Kureishi, Hanif. 1990. The Buddha of Suburbia. and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era. Seattle: London: Faber and Faber. University of Washington Press. Lanchester, John. 2010. I.O.U.: Why Everyone Owes Crace, Jim. 2007. The Pesthouse. New York: Nan A. Everyone and Nobody Can Pay. New York: Simon Talese. and Schuster. Derrida, Jacques. 1984. “No Apocalypse, Not Levy, Andrea. 2005. Small Island. New York: Now (Full Speed Ahead, Seven Missiles, Seven Picador Books. Missives).” Diacritics 14: 20–31. Lindsay, Jack. 1938. 1649: A Novel of a Year. Derrida, Jacques, and Giovanna Borradori. 2003. London: Metheun. “Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides. A McEwan, Ian. 2001a. “Beyond Belief.” Guardian, Dialogue with Jacques Derrida.” In Philosophy in September 12. http://www.ianmcewan.com/bib/ a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas articles/9‐11‐02.html (accessed December 14, and Jacques Derrida, edited by Giovanna 2014). Borradori, 85–136. Translated by Pascale‐Anne McEwan, Ian. 2001b. “Only Love and Then Brault and Michael Naas. Chicago: University Oblivion.” Guardian, September 15. http:// of Chicago Press. www.ianmcewan.com/bib/articles/love‐ English, James F. 2008. The Economy of Prestige: oblivion.html (accessed December 14, 2014). Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural McEwan, Ian. 2006. Saturday. New York: Anchor. Value. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Nava, Mica. 2007. Visceral Cosmopolitanism: Gender, Press. Culture, and the Normalization of Difference. New Esty, Jed. 2003. A Shrinking Island: Modernism and York: Berg. National Culture in England. Princeton: Palumbo‐Liu, David. 2012. The Deliverance of Princeton University Press. Others: Reading Literature in a Global Age. Forster, E. M. 1998 [1910]. Howards End (no Durham: Duke University Press. apostrophe). New York: W. W. Norton Parenti, Christian. 2012. Tropics of Chaos: Climate Foster, John Bellamy, Brett Clark, and Richard Change and the New Geography of Violence. New York. 2011. The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War York: Nation Books. on the Earth. New York: Monthly Review Press. Qureshi, Emran, and Michael Sells, eds. 2003. The Fukuyama, Francis. 1992. The End of History and New Crusades: Constructing the Muslim Enemy. the Last Man. New York: Free Press. New York: Columbia University Press. Gee, Maggie. 2004. The Flood. London: Maqi. Retort. 2006. Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle Gilroy, Paul. 2006. Postcolonial Melancholia. New York: in a New Age of War. New York: Verso. Columbia University Press. Ross, Michael J. 2008. “On a darkling planet: Ian Gowan, Peter. 1999. The Global Gamble: McEwan’s Saturday and the Condition of Washington’s Faustian Bid for World Dominance. England.” Twentieth Century Literature 54: New York: Verso. 75–96. Hall, Sarah. 2007. The Carhullan Army. London: Rowling, J.K. 2004. Harry Potter and the Order of Faber & Faber. the Phoenix. New York: Scholastic. Harvey, David. 2010. The Enigma of Capital and the Self, Will. 2006. The Book of Dave: A Revelation of Crises of Capitalism. New York: Oxford the Recent Past and the Distant Future. London: University Books. Viking. Hudson, Michael. 2003. Super Imperialism: The Selvon, Sam. 1989 [1956]. The Lonely Londoners. Origins and Fundamentals of U.S. World Dominance. New York: Longman. London: Pluto. Smith, Bonnie G. 2000a. The Gender of History: Ishiguro, Kazuo. 2005. Never Let Me Go. New Men, Women, and Historical Practice. Cambridge, York: Alfred A. Knopf MA: Harvard University Press. James, C. L. R. 1938. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint Smith, Zadie. 2000b. White Teeth. New York: L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. New Penguin. York: Dial Press. Solomos, John, Bob Findlay, Simon Jones, and Jameson, Fredric. 1990. “Modernism and Paul Gilroy. 1982. “The Organic Crisis of Imperialism.” In Nationalism, Colonialism, and British Capitalism and Race: The Experience of Imperialism, by Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, the 1970s.” In The Empire Strikes Back: Race and and Edward Said, 43–68. Minneapolis: Racism in 70s Britain, 7–44. New York: University of Minnesota Press. Routledge. 86 Ashley Dawson

Squires, Claire. 2009. Marketing Literature: The Williams, Raymond. 1985. Keywords: A Vocabulary Making of Contemporary Literature in Britain. of Culture and Society. New York: Oxford New York: Palgrave Macmillan. University Press. Tolkien, J. R. R. 2012 [1939–1947]. The Lord of Wirtén, Eva Hemmungs. 2004. No Trespassing: the Rings. New York: Mariner. Authorship, Intellectual Property Rights, and the Warner, Sylvia Townsend. 1936. Summer Will Show. Boundaries of Globalization. Toronto: University London: Chatto and Windus. of Toronto Press. Wells, H. G. 2009 [1895]. The Time Machine. New Wright, Patrick. 1985. On Living in an Old Country: York: Norton. The National Past in Contemporary Britain. New Wells, H. G. 2002 [1896]. The Island of Doctor York: Verso. Moreau. New York: Modern Library. Part II The Novel and Its Genres

6 Realism and the Eighteenth‐Century Novel John Richetti

As anyone knows who has taught novels to undergraduates (or been part of an adult book discussion group), readers tend to judge novels in terms of their plausibility, just as they invariably insist on discussing fictional characters as if they were in some sense actual people, powerful simulacra, that they can “relate to” or empathize with. Readers of novels nowadays go to them to find a life they can recognize or even aspire to, and classroom discussions inevitably return to some kind of “realism” as the central source of a novel’s value and interest, although exceptions are made in the case of pulp genres such as science fiction and mass‐market romance. Such insistence is often frustrating for instructors, who as trained literary critics and students of history know that literary representation of actuality is a deeply problematical affair and that “reality” (our varied perception of the actual) is in many ways a historical variable and even in our own times in practice an often subjective state of mind rather than a stable externality. And reading novels from past centuries has the effect of dramatizing how what was realistic then differs from our sense of the actual in the second decade of the twenty‐first century. And yet the special power and defining claim of many novels, since that term came into existence in English, lies in readers choosing to forget what literary critics nag them about. Readers readily grant the best novels a kind of virtual and essential truthfulness. There is a profound literary‐historical truth dramatized in naïve or lay readers’ insistence that fiction should be truthful, powerfully reminiscent of an actuality they can recognize. So realism is for most readers the test of a novel’s worth, and for that matter of its identity as a novel, and that has been true for a long time. The modern novel, if we date it from Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1605, 1615), defines itself as a debate between the “unreality” and artificiality of romance (the romances of chivalry that

A Companion to the English Novel, First Edition. Edited by Stephen Arata, Madigan Haley, J. Paul Hunter, and Jennifer Wicke. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. 90 John Richetti drive Quixote to his picturesque madness as a knight errant) and the novel called Don Quixote, a rendering of the particular sociohistorical and material actualities of early‐seventeenth‐century Spain that Quixote and Sancho Panza encounter in their adventures and that deflate Quixote’s grandiose chivalric fantasies. Indeed, Don Quixote features several extended debates around the worth of chivalric romance as opposed to other narrative approaches. In chapter VI of part I, two of the hero’s friends, the curate of the local parish and the town barber, at the request of Quixote’s housekeeper, examine his library, conducting as the curate says “a public auto da fe” of those books that deserve to be burned so that “they may not lead some other who reads them to follow the example of my good friend” (Cervantes 1949, 50). All of Quixote’s books are condemned to the fire, but one slips out of the housekeeper’s grasp as she throws them out the window. The curate picks it up and it turns out to be Tirant lo Blanch, a book he says that he has read with pleasure because it is in fact untypical of chivalric romance in its realistic touches:

Tell the truth, friend, and admit that in the matter of style this is the best book in the world. Here knights eat and sleep and die in their beds and make their wills before they die and do other things that are never heard of in books of this kind. (55)

And near the end of part I, in chapter XLVII, with Don Quixote being brought back home in a wooden cage by the curate and the barber (in disguise as rival knights), they meet on the road a Canon (a high‐ranking clergyman) who after hearing of Quixote’s madness induced by his reading of romances offers some literary‐critical opinions about “books of chivalry,” which he says “are nonsensical tales designed solely to amuse and not to instruct,” and even that purpose cannot be achieved “when they are so full of monstrous nonsense” (425). The Canon’s chief criticism of these books is that they are grossly fictional, claiming to be true, so that their “falsehood is all the greater when it appears in the guise of truth, and that as fiction, the more it contains of the pleasing and the possible the more it delights us” (426). Note that last phrase – “the pleasing and the possible”; we might say that the possible for the Canon pleases precisely because it is not fantastic and unbelievable. But the Canon then expands his definition of effective narration by retreating from his initial preference for strict realism by declaring that in successful fiction “the impossible is made to appear possible … so that admiration [i.e., what we would call a kind of astonishment] and pleasure go hand in hand” (426). The Canon adds that such a linking cannot be accomplished by an author “who flees from verisimilitude and the imitation of nature” (426). Despite his contempt for improbable romance, however, the Canon’s formulations bespeak a lingering attraction for its impossibilities. The trick lies, as the Canon suggests, in narrative moderation that manages to render the impossible as somehow plausible. That is to say, verisimilitude is always visible as a narrative effect. As Michael Riffaterre observes, “narrative verisimilitude tends to flaunt rather than mask its fictitious nature” (1990, 21). In Don Quixote we see an essential ambivalence in modern narrative toward the satisfactions of extravagant romance and the demands of the new novel genre for truth and probability, with verisimilitude infected by romance, by Quixote’s noble if deluded chivalric transformation. The Canon’s ambivalence is Realism and the Eighteenth‐Century Novel 91 matched by the double thematics of the novel itself – Quixote’s chivalric fantasies and their undercutting by the actualities he encounters. Cervantes stages a book‐ length literary‐critical debate; the nature of narrative and its effects on readers are always in the air in Don Quixote. If we jump from that debate among Cervantes’s characters early in seventeenth‐ century Spain to Samuel Johnson in mid‐eighteenth‐century England, we can see some continuities with Cervantes’s ambivalence toward the novel, as well as new worries about the moral dangers not of romance but of realistic fiction. In his critical pronouncements on the new novel in 1750 in Rambler essay number four Johnson characterized “the works of fiction, with which the present generation seems more particularly delighted,” as realistic in a familiar sense: these works “exhibit life in its true state, diversified only by accidents that daily happen in the world, and influenced by passions and qualities which are really to be found in conversing with mankind” (1969, 19). But Johnson in the rest of the essay stresses the moral perils of the new novel’s realism. He notes that such fictions are written “chiefly to the young, the ignorant, and the idle,” who are easily influenced and therefore “open to every false suggestion and partial account” (21). His evocation of realistic fiction’s power to influence conduct is starkly unqualified. He cautions that it can produce what we might call the Quixote syndrome or extreme and destructive empathy verging on delusion, as realistic novels can “take possession of the memory by a kind of violence, and produce effects almost without the intervention of the will” (22). Exact imitation of nature such as Cervantes’s Canon puts at the center of fiction at its best is for Johnson a moral quagmire, since it is necessary, he argues, “to distinguish those parts of nature, which are most proper for imitation … many characters ought never to be drawn … The purpose of these writings is surely not only to show mankind, but to provide that they may be seen hereafter with less hazard” (22). Johnson was probably thinking of novels like Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749) and Smollett’s Roderick Random (1748), whose titular heroes are strictly speaking attractive and energetic but morally compromised. He contrasts the realism of these novels with the unreality of “romances formerly written,” where everything represented “was so remote from all that passes among men, that the reader was in very little danger of making any applications to himself” (21). But in realistic novels “young spectators” recognize, as Johnson worries, something of themselves and their world and may be moved to imitate what they see. Johnson concludes by recommending that virtue be depicted in an almost perfect state, a virtue “not angelical, nor above probability, for what we cannot credit we shall never imitate.” In like manner, vice when it is shown “should always disgust; nor should the graces or gaiety, or the dignity of courage be united with it” (24). In these strictures, Johnson was probably thinking of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1747–1748), whose saintly heroine comes close to Johnson’s ideal for representing virtue. Clarissa is uncompromising and strong‐willed, but she can be seen as reckless and headstrong, perhaps a bad model and dangerously flawed. Lovelace is certainly vicious – self‐absorbed, megalomania- cal, scheming, and treacherous – but also brilliant and charming. Richardson’s readers were literally enthralled by these characters, and many were moved as the final volumes were in preparation to urge the author to spare his heroine and to redeem his charismatic villain and saintly heroine with a happy marital ending. And in the last 92 John Richetti revised edition of the novel, responding to many readers who for Richardson had dangerously misread his novel’s moral implications, who were charmed by Lovelace and tended to blame the rigorously moral Clarissa, Richardson tried rather clumsily, sometimes with explanatory footnotes, to blacken his attractive rake and to highlight Clarissa’s innocence. The apocryphal story that some illiterate villagers outside London were so mesmerized by the reality of the heroine of his first novel, Pamela (1740), as it was read to them that they rang the church bells to celebrate her marriage to her repentant would‐be seducer and master is another instance of the kind of deep identification or empathy with fictional characters that readers of novels then and now still experience. Much novelistic narrative in the early years of the English eighteenth century claims a powerful pseudo‐factuality that endures into the mid‐century and beyond, with Richardson for one coyly claiming to be merely the “editor” of his novels. But what readers nowadays would recognize as realism in eighteenth‐century fiction is, at best, an occasional, if often powerful, feature in the narrative market place. It is worth noting, moreover, that as a descriptive literary‐critical term “realism” did not exist until the middle years of the nineteenth century. And in the first 40 years or so of the eighteenth century, various kinds of decidedly nonrealistic narrative were popular. One good example is the career of Eliza Haywood, whose three‐part novel Love in Excess; or, The Fatal Enquiry (1719–1720), with Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), was one of the three most popular narratives of the period. Haywood’s many novels in the 1720s and 1730s are intensely romantic and often overtly erotic narratives, what we would now call “bodice rippers,” in their amatory intensity harking back to the narrative works of Aphra Behn in the 1670s, although lacking their libertine wit and political implications. Of course, the success of formulaic amatory fiction like Haywood’s depends upon intense reader response and excited empathy similar to those emotions that realism can provoke. A testimonial poem prefixed to the 6th edition of Love in Excess (1725) praises the novel for its ability to convert an “Unbeliever” like the poet to the intensities of love: “A Convert now,” he feels “that Fire/Your Words alone can paint! Your Looks inspire!” Despite their exotic locales (usually on the continent rather than in England) and aristocratic cast of characters, amatory fiction like Haywood’s is out to provide vicarious experience very like that of realistic novels. Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, and other eighteenth‐century novelists are in some strong sense “realistic” not only in their avoidance of Haywoodian melodrama and sexual stereotypes but in their insistence that their works are truthful in an original way. By the middle of the century, both authors and readers agreed that there was something new and original in recent prose narratives, exhibiting (to paraphrase Johnson’s Rambler essay), life as it was actually being lived in a contemporary world readers could recognize. As J. Paul Hunter puts it, there was a “nearly universal perception in England by mid‐ century that a literary revolution was taking place” (1990, 10). In the opening chapter of Book II of Tom Jones, Fielding declares, partly tongue‐in‐cheek, that he is the “Founder of a new Province of Writing” and therefore “at liberty to make what Laws I please therein” (1975, 77). And more somberly, Richardson in his preface to Clarissa warns frivolous readers that if they expect to “dip into … a light Novel, or transitory Romance” they will find his book “tedious” (1985, 30). Realism and the Eighteenth‐Century Novel 93

In his classic formulation of what he called the “formal realism” of the English eighteenth‐century novel, Ian Watt described the new novel’s revolution this way:

a set of narrative procedures which are so commonly found together in the novel and so rarely in other literary genres, that they may be regarded as typical of the form itself. … the premise, or primary convention, that the novel is a full and authentic report of human experience, and is therefore under an obligation to satisfy its reader with such details of the story as the individuality of the actors concerned, the particulars of the times and places of their actions, details which are presented through a more largely referential use of language than is common in other literary forms. (Watt 1957, 32)

The cultural context for the novel that drives it toward a radical particularity, as Watt explains, is what he calls that “vast transformation of Western civilization since the Renaissance” that replaced the unified world of the Middle Ages “with a developing but unplanned aggregate of particular individuals having particular experiences at particular times and at particular places” (31). Hunter, refining and reassessing Watt’s landmark study, notes that the novel does indeed represent specific sociohistorical experience “but it typically represents a single individual – alone – perceiving and reflecting upon his or her place in that society” (1990, 42). So the new novel in the eighteenth century at its most novelistic, at least in Watt’s terms, examines the paradoxical nature of the individual in modern society. Like Quixote living in his fantastic world of chivalric romance, his personality constructed in his library in his solitary reading, the protagonists of the most realistic novels in the English eighteenth century look outward at the social world and inward at the individuality enforced for both good and ill by that world. Although he does not use a term like realism, the influential Russian critic M. M. Bakhtin, like Watt and Hunter, saw the novel as a revolutionary literary tendency. In The Dialogic Imagination (1975), his meditation on the emergence of the novelistic mode, he compared it to the epic and identified its essence as the unprecedented attempt in narrative literature to represent historical reality as a process of becoming:

For the first time in artistic‐ideological consciousness, time and the world become historical: they unfold, albeit at first still unclearly and confusedly, as becoming, as an uninterrupted movement into a real future … Through contact with the present, an object is attracted to the incomplete process of a world‐in‐the‐making, and is stamped with the seal of inconclusiveness. (1982, 30)

The dynamic novelistic world for Bakhtin is distinct from the static epic world, which is “an utterly finished thing,” and the epic genre is “an absolutely completed and finished” form “whose constitutive feature is the transfer of the world it describes to an absolute past of national beginnings and peak times.” By contrast, the novel “is determined by experience, knowledge and practice (the future),” and the novelist “is drawn toward everything that is not yet completed,” with what he calls “the zone of contact with an inconclusive present” (17, 15, 27, 37). It must be noted, however, that Bakhtin is talking not about a genre but rather about a process of “novelization” that he sees as 94 John Richetti extending back to Hellenistic antiquity, although he speaks of “the emergence of a new novel‐type in the eighteenth century,” and he gives as one of his examples Fielding’s Tom Jones (9). Consider in relation to these various critical generalizations about the novel the single most popular narrative of the first three decades of the century, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), whose title page is emphatically detailed:

The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un‐inhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. With an Account of how he was at last as strangely deliver’d by Pyrates. Written by Himself.

Robinson Crusoe, from York in the north of England, offers a documentary dossier, complete with a brief discussion of how his father came to England from Bremen, Germany, where his surname was Kreutznaer. Subsequently, Crusoe’s story is not only particular but immersed in a number of late‐seventeenth‐century sociohistorical realities: English trading in Africa, European slavery in north Africa, European colonization in Portuguese Brazil, and the illegal slaving expedition that leads to the shipwreck that puts him on his island. Moreover, the literary style that Defoe gives his hero is, to echo Watt’s characterization, largely referential, evocative of the protagonist’s states of mind, of course, but also exactly precise about the objects and phenomena that provoke those mental states. For example, here in part is his description of the shipwreck that lands him on his island:

Nothing can describe the confusion of thought which I felt when I sunk into the water; for tho’ I swam very well, yet I could not deliver my self from the waves so as to draw breath, till that wave having driven me, or rather carried me a vast way towards the shore, and having spent it self, went back, and left me upon the land almost dry, but half‐dead with the water I took in. I had so much presence of mind as well as breath left, that seeing my self nearer the main land than I expected, I got upon my feet, and endeav- oured to make on towards the land as fast as I could, before another wave should return, and take me up again … The wave that came upon me again, buried me at once 20 or 30 foot deep in its own body; and I could feel my self carried with a mighty force and swiftness towards the shore a very great way; but I held my breath and assisted my self to swim forward with all my might. (Defoe 2001, 37)

Crusoe does not attempt to render exactly the panic he felt; rather, he describes very carefully the motions of the waves, his movements in those waves, and the physical effects of his efforts as he struggles to make the shore. And after he lands Crusoe writes that he cannot describe the emotional and physical effects of his “deliverance,” but he does seek to evoke the state of mind that comes with the realization that he alone has escaped:

I walk’d about on the shore, lifting up my hands, and my whole being, as I may say, wrapt up in the contemplation of my deliverance, making a thousand gestures and motions which I cannot describe, reflecting upon all my comrades that were drown’d, Realism and the Eighteenth‐Century Novel 95

and there should not be one soul sav’d but my self; for, as for them, I never saw them afterwards, or any sign of them, except three of their hats, one cap, and two shoes that were not fellows. (38–39)

After noting the inexpressibility of his emotions and their indescribable and involuntary physical manifestations, Crusoe ends the paragraph with an exact enumeration of those stray and miscellaneous objects, all that remain of his shipmates, a bleakly radical moment in which the real is reduced to random factuality or brute actuality. So Defoe’s realism is modestly empirical and objective; he evokes in all his novels extreme emotional states but he does not attempt to probe them in any analytic way. Rather, the narratives focus on the physical and physiological manifestations that accompany those subjective states, just as his narrators specialize in rendering and enu- merating the physical world of objects and phenomena. Crusoe will most often spend his time on the careful notation of things and natural occurrences that he seeks to arrange and deploy for his survival. Or, to use Watt’s terms, we may say that he begins as he must with the radical particularity of his observations and moves from them to general principles about himself and his environment. In Bakhtin’s language, we may say, Crusoe on his island is an instance of pure inconclusiveness, facing a future with no precedent, searching for language to express his terror, bewilderment, and then his loneliness and fear of hostile others. Until the cannibals at last arrive, the island sequence in Robinson Crusoe is an experiment in narrative, since in his solitude Crusoe’s existence is full of fear and trem- bling. In this regard, the book is almost an allegory of modern individualism; Crusoe is alone, both longing for society and fearing its dangers, and that ambivalence dramatizes the (realistic) truth of modern social relationships, which are both comforting and dangerous. As I have found in reading Defoe’s book with students, they readily empathize with Crusoe on his island; the book is in simplified versions a boys’ adventure story, but of course for adults there is the added frisson of existential anxiety in the face of enormous obstacles to survival and dangers from the unknown, external world of hostile others. In Defoe’s other novels, notably Moll Flanders (1722) and Roxana (1724), survival in society for women without resources or status is the realistic basis, the sociohistorical ground on which their extraordinary, and in the end quite fantastic, tales begin. That is to say, both of these feigned autobiographies, pseudo‐factual narratives, move from realistic female dilemmas to something like extravagant fantasies of survival and enrichment (Moll the orphaned waif who becomes a servant in a wealthy family, seduced by one of the sons of the house, marries the younger brother and is soon widowed; Roxana, abandoned by her feckless husband, is a mother facing starvation who abandons her children and drifts into concubinage to survive). Both narratives evoke different strategies for survival and prosperity, with Moll finding temporary security in various marriages, then in petty crime, and eventually enjoying a prosperous old age in Virginia. Saved from starvation by a rich lover, Roxana sells her body and becomes a fabulously rich courtesan and royal mistress. And for that matter, even Robinson Crusoe’s life is the record of extraordinary transformation, and his survival and ultimate prosperity are offered as mysterious and extraordinary, instances of the inscrutability of Providence. The plots of Defoe’s realistic novels, often enough, transcend or transform the actuality they claim to be representing, sliding into a sequence 96 John Richetti of improbable and delightful wonders. The eighteenth‐century novel, as Jesse Molesworth puts it strongly, can be seen as a “secular re‐enchantment” of the modern world that “recodes the commonplace into the exceptional, insignificance into significance” (2010, 252). For all their deep anchoring in sociohistorical reality and often detailed rendering of urban environments and financial and social maneuverings, however, these three novels also build on popular formats and escapist themes; their realism draws from popular genres of the day that are not realistic. Moll Flanders is in part like criminal biographies from the late seventeenth century such as The Counterfeit Lady Unveiled by Francis Kirkman (1673), and Roxana as high‐priced courtesan and royal mistress echoes scandal chronicles such as Delariviere Manley’s The New Atalantis (1709). And even Robinson Crusoe, which is substantially original, is related to popular travel narratives and to accounts of English slaves in North Africa on the Barbary coast. So, too, Richardson and Fielding are revising and revisiting the less than realistic narrative patterns of romance and of amatory fiction. William Warner has shrewdly suggested that both of them in their distinct ways were out to discredit (as well as to appropriate) the licentious tradition of amatory fiction of Haywood and Behn by moralizing and sanitizing it (1998, 181). Fielding in Joseph Andrews (1742) declares on his title page that his book is “written in the Manner of Cervantes, Author of Don Quixote.” And like his rival contemporary, Tobias Smollett, Fielding is following in the footsteps of the European picaresque tradition, with his first two novels featuring wandering protagonists encountering adventures on the roads of England. It goes without saying that the new realistic eighteenth‐century novel is linked to earlier narrative formats and forms; there are no ruptures or clean breaks in literary history. As Don Quixote makes clear, the history of the novel is built on continuities, on revisions and adaptations. Fielding’s realism is the best example, and his Cervantic imitation is overt. But in his first novel, Joseph Andrews (1742), Fielding hedges his bets on his representational ambitions as he declares “once for all, I describe not men but manners; not an individual, but a species.” He admits that readers will ask if his characters are not taken from life, and Fielding replies in the affirmative: “nay I believe I might aver that I have writ little more than I have seen” (1967, 189). He is referring to a character in a scene in Book I of Joseph Andrews when Joseph is robbed and left for dead in a ditch. A coach comes by and Fielding recounts the varied reactions of the passengers, including a cowardly and unfeeling lawyer. This lawyer, he now says,

is not only alive but hath been these four thousand years … He hath not indeed confined himself to one profession, one religion, or one country; but when the first mean selfish creature appeared upon the human stage, who made self the centre of the whole creation, would give himself no pain, incur no danger, advance no money, to assist or preserve his fellow‐creatures; then was our lawyer born. (189)

Moral and social reality for Fielding is essentially timeless and universal, at least in theory, since his literary values hark back to those of high Augustan writers like Pope and Swift. And yet if we turn back to the incident in which the lawyer appears, we need to modify that proposition. After spurning the advances of Lady Booby, his rich employer in London, Joseph sets off for the country to reunite with his sweetheart, Realism and the Eighteenth‐Century Novel 97

Fanny, when he is set upon by two robbers and left for dead in a ditch. As a stagecoach comes by, Joseph’s groans are audible to the postilion (a rider on one of the horses pulling the coach), who tells the coachman to stop. What follows is broadly comic and satiric, with the coach’s passengers as well as the coachman displaying various kinds of fear, selfishness, and callous indifference. Eventually, the naked and bleeding Joseph is admitted to the coach, but seeing a lady hiding her eyes behind her fan he declares that he will not mount unless he is “furnished with sufficient covering to prevent giving the least offence to decency” (53). When everyone in the coach refuses to lend Joseph a coat, the narrator observes that he “must have perished,” but “the postilion (a lad who hath been since transported for robbing a hen‐roost)” takes off his greatcoat, his only garment, and gives it to Joseph, “swearing a great oath (for which he was rebuked by the passengers), ‘That he would rather ride in his shirt all his life than suffer a fellow‐creature to lie in so miserable a condition’” (53). The parenthetical remark about the postilion’s future fate is crucial, the parenthesis expressing a deep irony, signaling that the lives of such proletarians are of no importance for the inhabitants of the satiric universe of Fielding’s novel. The scene is standard if skillful satire of lawyers, prudes, cowards, and callous middlemen like the coachman, but the postilion’s moral outrage is both sentimental and specifically realistic in its references. His simple decency underlines the predictable callousness of the passengers, but his subsequent fate gestures toward a historical actuality, the monstrous injustice of the eighteenth‐century English penal code, where a small theft (in this case doubtless provoked by hunger) merits transportation as a reprieve from death (which by the way is Moll Flanders’ eventual fate). There are in Joseph Andrews (and in Tom Jones) a few other moments where the realities of this penal code (Fielding was a magistrate) coexist with the elaboration of the parodic romance plot of the novel. In Whigs and Hunters (1975), his study of the notorious Black Act of 1723 that mandated the death penalty for a variety of minor offenses against property such as cutting down young trees or wearing a disguise at night while poaching, the historian E. P. Thompson calls this legislation “the onset of the flood‐tide of eighteenth‐century retributive justice” (1975, 23). Early in the last book of the novel, Squire Booby and his new bride Pamela (Joseph’s sister) arrive in the country where the squire’s sister, Lady Booby, is the main landowner. She has ordered her lawyer, James Scout, to prosecute Joseph and Fanny on the charge of cutting a twig on her land, and Thompson uses this exchange as the epigraph for his book: “‘Jesu!’ said the squire, ‘would you commit two persons to Bridewell for a twig?’ ‘Yes,’ said the lawyer, ‘and with great lenity too; for if we had called it a young tree, they would have been both hanged’” (Fielding 1967, 290). At the same time, however, the scene of Joseph left for dead in the ditch is an ancient exemplary story, a recapitulation of the parable of The Good Samaritan, just as Joseph’s refusal of Lady Booby’s sexual advances echoes the biblical Joseph’s escape from the seduction attempted by his master Potiphar’s wife. All three of Fielding’s novels, including the late and problematic Amelia (1751), are on one level deeply realistic in that they examine, albeit most of the time comically and satirically, any number of specifically contemporary realities and institutions: a partial list would include the lower clergy, the army, the landed gentry, the aristocracy, the petit bourgeoisie of innkeepers and merchants, servants, the rural working classes, 98 John Richetti the law and the penal code. Indeed, his bitter rival, Richardson, accused him of merely copying his experience of low life. Johnson reported to Boswell that “Richardson used to say, that had he not known who Fielding was, he should have believed he was an ostler” (Boswell 1965, 480). For Johnson, too, Fielding was a superficial and limited realist whose characters as he put it were “characters only of manners” where Richardson’s were “characters of nature” (389). There is, he said on another occasion, “more knowledge of the heart in one letter of Richardson’s, than in all Tom Jones” (480). What Johnson meant by “the heart” is clear enough; Clarissa is a classic of sociocultural and psychosexual realism, almost frightening in its penetrating insights, in what its strong and utterly self‐willed characters reveal about themselves. By virtue of their epistolary format, Clarissa and Pamela are dramatically open‐ended in their evocation of psychological depths, and to that extent their characters conform to our imperfect understanding in the real world of other people and indeed of ourselves. The main characters in these novels write and acquire in their expressiveness a revelatory depth and ambiguous complexity (“the heart” in Johnson’s parlance), whereas Fielding’s characters are to a large extent what he chooses to make of them as “characters of manners,” defined and delimited by their comic and satiric purposes in his novels, often existing in balanced antithetical pairs like many in Tom Jones: Tom and Blifil, or Allworthy and Squire Western, or Thwackum and Square. Richardson’s realism is far more open‐ended than Fielding’s tightly controlled pat- terning. In the Richardsonian epistolary novel readers enjoy a freedom, rather like the license they have when contemplating others, to extract implications, to see beneath the surface of what characters write or speak. A reader can construct a social and psychological dynamic that is more or less distinct from what the character says. It is nearly impossible to illustrate this by brief quotation, since this immense novel works by accumulation, by reiteration and variation in which the main characters write and write and in that extended process explore their feelings and reveal themselves to their correspondents and to themselves as well as to the patient and engrossed reader. But here is a moment from early in the book when the Harlowe family is seeking to force Clarissa to marry Solmes, the repulsive suitor whose proposal will further their plans for social and financial enlargement. Clarissa describes his visit to her friend, Anna Howe:

I went down this morning when breakfast was ready with a very uneasy heart … But, unluckily, there was the odious Solmes sitting asquat between my mamma and sister, with so much assurance in his looks! – But you know, my dear, that those we love not cannot do anything to please us. Had the wretch kept his seat, it might have been well enough, but the bent and broad‐shouldered creature must needs rise and stalk towards a chair, which was just by that which was set for me. I removed it at a distance, as if to make way to my own; and down I sat, abruptly I believe; what I had heard all in my head. But this was not enough to daunt him. The man is a very confident, he is a very bold, staring man! – Indeed, my dear, the man is very confident. He took the removed chair and drew it so near mine, squatting in it with his ugly weight, that he pressed upon my hoop – I was so offended (all I had heard, as I said, in my head) that I removed to another chair. I own I had too little command of Realism and the Eighteenth‐Century Novel 99

myself. It gave my brother and sister too much advantage. I dare say they took it – but I did it involuntarily, I think; I could not help it – I knew not what I did. (Richardson 1985, 87)

Solmes for Clarissa is “bent and broad‐shouldered,” and “squatting … with his ugly weight, that he pressed against my hoop” – these details do not express a literal reality about Solmes but evoke the reality of Clarissa’s deep feelings for him, what she can never fully articulate – her sexual disgust and fear. For all of her superb intelligence and courage, Clarissa is limited by her circumstances as a privileged daughter of an immensely wealthy family, which are both empowering and limiting. Her awful predicament is that she is caught between her duty to obey her father and thereby serve her family’s ambitions, in spite of her aversion to marriage with a man she loathes, and her need to maintain against tremendous pressure her sense of self‐ determination. Lovelace, on the other hand, seems to be supremely self‐aware, a calculating and self‐dramatizing rake, whose self‐confidence and grandiosity flow from his social privilege as the scion of an aristocratic family. And yet even he in Richardson’s rendering is caught up in contradiction, in his wish to seduce and to master Clarissa but simultaneously in his self‐abasement and guilt in front of her beauty, intellect, and virtue. Both Lovelace and Clarissa are rendered in terms of these individualized and interanimating psychosexual profiles, but crucially those profiles are firmly inserted in and derive from their class positions – Clarissa’s family, the Harlowes of the upper commercial classes, are striving for admittance to the landed gentry and even to the aristocracy; Lovelace is the pampered scion of an aristocratic family, and his libertinism is enabled by his economic freedom, his class entitlement. Richardson’s realism in Clarissa is firmly rooted in these circumstances; it is nothing less than inseparable from these sociocultural realities of mid‐eighteenth‐century England. At one early point in the novel, Clarissa meditates on her fate, recalling for Anna Howe what she has absorbed from her teachers and now has fully realized: “for don’t you see my, my dear, that we seem all to be impelled, as it were, by a perverse fate which none of us are able to resist? – and yet all arising (with a strong appearance of self‐punishment) from ourselves?” She then adds that her calamities have made her “look into myself! And what have I discovered there? – Why, my dear friend, more secret pride and vanity than I could have thought had lain in my unexamined heart” (333). Lovelace’s pride and vanity are not secret, but he is surely the victim of his fate as an enormously entitled aristocrat whose illusory freedom will lead him to self‐destruction. Despite its sexual and religious melodrama, the realism of Richardson’s novel lies in its slow, indeed massive articulation of a tragic necessity in the collision of irreconcilable wills and purposes within the sociocultural circumstances that the novel evokes so thoroughly. Despite the popularity in the years to come of epistolary fiction, Richardson’s masterpiece had no completely successful imitators, but the tracing of the intertwinings of necessity and freedom is certainly the master narrative, the ultimate reality we may say, that eighteenth‐century fiction aspires to represent or to evoke. Fielding’s first two novels, Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones, engage with this reality only to transform its tragic inevitability through comic romance, with the narrator playing the role of a benign Providence. To be sure, that jovial guide nonetheless outlines an unforgiving and brutal socioeconomic world whose power by clear implication operates in deadly fashion outside the world evoked by Fielding’s 100 John Richetti narrative. Those chickens come home to roost in Amelia, where, as various recent critics such as J. Paul Hunter have pointed out, Fielding refused (or was unable) “to provide a modal frame that insulates the comic resolution of events from their tragic possibilities” (1975, 207). Just a bit over 100 years after Clarissa and Tom Jones appeared, George Eliot published Adam Bede (1859), and in Chapter 17 of the second book of the novel she reflected on her ambitions as a realist:

I aspire to give no more than a faithful account of men and things as they have mirrored themselves in my mind. The mirror is doubtless defective; the outlines will sometimes be disturbed; the reflection faint or confused; but I feel as much bound to tell you, as precisely as I can, what that reflection is, as if I were in the witness‐box narrating my experiences on oath. (2005, 238)

Eliot and the high Victorian novelists wrote after the question of realism had been adjudicated, settled by the metaphor of the mirror which defines the novelist as supervising observer and reporter. For the eighteenth century a number of realisms, distinct mirrors and angles of vision and comprehension, competed, with Fielding’s and Richardson’s novels providing the main models but other perspectives intruding and insisting on other realities for didactic and comic purposes. And in the Gothic novel in the latter years of the century the metaphor of the mirror and the representational claims of realism are exchanged for pure and fantastic imagination, which of course provides its own kind of reader experience. The story of realistic fiction after the mid‐eighteenth century in England is too complicated to relate fully here, although it is fair to say that there is little innovation beyond the models provided by Fielding and Richardson, especially the latter. Novels of female premarital difficulties, notably those of Charlotte Lennox, Frances Sheridan, and Frances Burney, are Richardsonian in their attention to the via dolorosa isolated young women like Clarissa have to travel on their way to maturity. Lennox’s The Female Quixote (1752), Sheridan’s Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph (1761), and Burney’s Evelina (1778) and Cecilia (1782) are full of fine‐grained, sometimes comic, social observation as well as extended articulation of the sexual embarrassments and even anguish that upper‐middle‐class young women must suffer on the way to marriage. Cecilia is especially broad in its field of representations, combining Richardsonian pathos with Fieldingesque satiric social and moral panoramas. Female suffering (and sometimes release or escape into marriage) is offered to readers as an affecting spectacle, just as in the so‐called sentimental novel various pathetic scenes are deliberately distorted or elongated to produce pathos. Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–1767) and A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768) are comically ambiguous in their parodies of simple sentimentality. The real in Sterne’s fictions is reduced to the narrator’s attempt to evoke his feelings at heightened moments of perception. Failure and impotence, both literal and narratological, are represented through the consciousness of hypersensitive first‐person narrators, Tristram and Yorick respectively, and the normal material of the realistic novel takes a back seat to that consciousness as it examines its own difficulties in representing experience. For one example from Tristram Shandy, here is the hero‐narrator Realism and the Eighteenth‐Century Novel 101 looking back at his birth (an event he cannot of course remember) and the crushing of his nose (a sexual joke in context):

I enter upon this part of my story in the most pensive and melancholy frame of mind, that ever sympathetic breast was touched with. – My nerves relax as I tell it. – Every line I write, I feel an abatement of the quickness of my pulse, and of that careless alacrity with it, which every day of my life prompts me to say and write a thousand things I should not. – And this moment that I last dipp’d my pen into my ink, I could not help taking notice what a cautious air of sad composure and solemnity there appear’d in my manner of doing it. – Lord! how different from the rash jerks, and hare‐brain’d squirts thou art wont, Tristram! to transact it with in other humours, – dropping thy pen, – spurting thy ink about thy table and thy books, – as if thy pen and thy ink, thy books and thy furniture cost thee nothing. (1978, 254)

Sterne is representing his narrator’s somewhat disordered state of mind and the jumpy disposition of his body as he writes. Minutely realistic to a fault as it narrates the author’s attempt to manage what he is writing, the paragraph parodies the evocations and enumer- ations of classic realism by virtue of its detailed narrowness, its narrator’s quirky and narcissistic self‐absorption. Much the same could be said of the other inhabitants of Shandy Hall, Walter Shandy and Uncle Toby, wrapped up in their hobbyhorses (their personal and quirky obsessions), talking past each other without understanding each other. The varieties of eighteenth‐century realism that I have been surveying, no matter how focused, look outward at sociohistorical circumstances, seek to represent the interaction of self and society and history. But not Sterne’s Tristram, alone in his messy study with his pen and ink as he tries to write his life and opinions. The scene of self‐absorbed writing opens up to nothing at all except the writer’s doomed efforts at self‐understanding. Sterne carries the realistic project of the novel to its solipsistic reductio ad absurdum.

References

Bakhtin, M. M. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination, Fielding, Henry. 1975 [1749]. Tom Jones, edited by edited by Michael Holquist. Translated by Martin Battestin. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University Press. University of Texas Press. Haywood, Eliza. 1725. Love in Excess; or, The Fatal Boswell, James. 1965 [1791]. The Life of Samuel Enquiry. 6th edition. London: S. Chapman. Johnson. London and New York: Oxford Hunter, J. Paul. 1975. Henry Fielding and the University Press. Chains of Circumstances. Baltimore: Johns Cervantes, Miguel de. 1949 [1605, 1615]. Don Hopkins University Press. Quixote, translated by Samuel Putnam. New Hunter, J. Paul. 1990. Before Novels: The Cultural York: Random House. Contexts of Eighteenth‐Century English Fiction. Defoe, Daniel. 2001 [1719]. Robinson Crusoe, New York: Norton. edited by John Richetti. London: Penguin. Johnson, Samuel. 1969 [1750–1752]. The Rambler, Eliot, George. 2005 [1859]. Adam Bede, edited by edited by W. J. Bate and Albrecht Strauss. New Mary Waldron. Peterborough, Ontario: Haven: Yale University Press. Broadview Press. Molesworth, Jesse. 2010. Chance and the Fielding, Henry. 1967 [1742]. Joseph Andrews, Eighteenth‐Century Novel: Realism, Probability, edited by Martin Battestin. Middletown, CT: Magic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Wesleyan University Press. Press. 102 John Richetti

Richardson, Samuel. 1985 [1747–1748]. Clarissa; Thompson, E. P. 1976. Whigs and Hunters: the Origin or, The History of a Young Lady, edited by Angus of the Black Act. New York: Pantheon Books. Ross. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Warner, William. 1998. Licensing Entertainment: Riffaterre, Michael. 1990. Fictional Truth. The Elevation of Novel Reading in Britain, 1684– Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 1750. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of Sterne, Laurence. 1978 [1759–1767]. The Life and California Press. Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, edited by Watt, Ian. 1957. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Melvyn New and Joan New. Florida: University Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. Berkeley and Los Presses of Florida. Angeles: University of California Press. 7 Romance Laurie Langbauer

Romance turns up – during the time of the novel’s first definition but (importantly) still today – in the most exciting accounts of where the novel came from and what it means. This persistence is puzzling. Other forms might provide foils instead: Henry Fielding, for one, mentions history and biography. In contemporary criticism, Lennard Davis in Factual Fictions notably tries to concentrate on other forms, but finds he has to devote a chapter to romance to do so (1983, 25–41). Most theories of the novel isolate romance as the representative “imaginary ‘solution’ to [whatever] real contradiction” they think the novel addresses socially and historically, as Fredric Jameson does persuasively in The Political Unconscious (1981, 105). Romance’s persistence may seem reasonably to inhere in history, in what Ian Watt most famously called the novel’s “rise” out of earlier forms. But that teleology is self‐confirming, as Northrop Frye, one of romance’s most perceptive interpreters, demonstrates. In his theoretical system, romance is a mode, a myth, a genre, an attitude, a type of plot, the imagination itself – “the structural core of all fiction” (1976, 15) – and something that “eludes the sense of total form, and resists the notion of any kind of final closure” (Dolanzi 2004, xxv). Something so amorphous can be made to serve any end; reducing romance to a particular prose form at a particular moment in history has always involved predetermined selection of some meaning over others. In 1765, Horace Walpole distinguished between ancient and modern romances. In 1826, Ann Radcliffe distinguished between two other types of the form: horror and terror. To this day, romance remains protean, and it continues to be a prolific source of theories of the novel’s origins and functions.

Romance inhabits the history of the novel, but also our historiographies. For Watt, Jane Austen epitomized the novel’s maturity over romance. Contemporary discussions of romance have explored its usefulness to a variety of teleologies (Parker 1979; Duff 1994). How do assumptions about gender, class, nation, or race use romance to confirm some stories as forward‐moving because they enforce certain worldviews? For “an ever‐growing number of critics,” William Galperin writes, Austen’s writing exemplifies the “regulatory apparatus … on behalf of specific values and ideologies in whose service the novelist was working at once diligently and unconsciously” (2003, 139). Clifford Siskin argues that readers especially commend Austen’s ironic humor because it makes subjects “comfortable” with any instabilities that might question class privilege (1998, 193–209). When Austen’s novels seem to reject Watt’s developmental narrative, her refusal of teleology appears subversive, but in fact it confirms the values and power of a very limited class. This recent critique argues that contradictions – in which Austen’s novels repeat the romance elements they reject – function to enable the status quo. They don’t actually annul its assertions of what counts as progress. Siskin argues that we can recognize how Austen’s novels work if we place her within a Romantic tradition (1988, 12–47). The Romantics seem to reject straightforward ideas of growth and history by destabilizing origin and tendency. The child with its idealized imagination engenders the later poet, but that poet has always lost something the child once had. Rather than question development, however, such confusions provide a form of control. Austen’s seemingly ambivalent use of earlier romances in a work like Northanger Abbey (1817) only more effectively enforces literary and social norms. Austen tried out other narrative modes in her juvenilia, Siskin notes, but did not publish those in the expanding periodical press, a choice which underlines her preference for the novel’s management of ideology and the internalization of the social norms it insinuates. Siskin’s reading of Austen has become enormously influential and valuable. Particularly useful for an understanding of romance is his insight that placing Austen in a different context might reveal a different meaning for her writing – and for the persistence of romance, and its troubling of development, in accounts of the novel. But which context? Juvenile writing is another of those textual modes – like history or biography – neglected in histories of the novel. When associated with romance, it offers an alternative approach to the novel. Early writing seems by definition wholly contained within developmental understanding – certainly discussions of juvenilia tend to consider them apprentice work, important in leading to later growth. But, in practice, juvenilia also shrug off the valorization of growth and the rhetoric of development in which maturity figures as end‐all and be‐all. Reading Austen against this tradition reveals a different set of relations between romance and the novel. The connection of romance and the juvenile already had a long history by Austen’s time. So did contemporary schoolboy and undergraduate satiric periodicals such as The Loiterer, which her brothers edited at Oxford, and which provided a more polite version of the college humor still prevalent today. (For the Loiterer’s influence on Austen, see Geng 2001, 2009; Litz 1961.) Rather than rejecting periodicals altogether, Austen’s juvenilia engaged this periodical context, part of the “already flourishing burlesque tradition” in which B. C. Southam locates them (2001, 3). Austen’s gender effectively precluded her publication within this heritage, which Romance 105 looked back in part to the bawdy juvenilia of the Neo‐Latins. Nevertheless, her irony adopted its anarchical mode, in which forced incongruities constitute humor. In this context, Austen’s inheritors today would be not the Regency romance or the “safe” Hollywood love stories based on her books, but the Harvard Lampoon or the Onion, romantic in the sense of pushing as far as possible just how juvenile they can be. When placed through her juvenilia within a tradition of other juvenile writers, Austen no longer looks so comfortable. Though the Monthly Review records a Scriblerian savaging of undergraduate writing (Anon. 1796), school humor also echoes Scriblerian satire. Sabor argues that Austen adopts such “ferocity” (2008, 217). Such savagery inhered especially in eighteenth‐century prank culture and joke books (Dickie 2003; Keymer 2008; Regan 2005), and school humor magazines like Eton’s Microcosm explicitly acknowledge this joke‐book heritage (1788, 177, 442). Juvenilia turn romance into burlesque – the “knockabout farce, fanciful extravagance, solemn nonsense, and word‐ play” that ridicule “the absurd conventions” and “characteristic devices of the popular novel” (Southam 2001, 21) – to provide another vantage point for histories of the novel. Its humor is random, its politics at once retrograde and progressive – burlesque politics are notoriously hard to pin down because they don’t particularly care what they hold up to ridicule if they can only make nonsense out of established orders (which is both less and more than rejection of them). Seen against this history, the persistence of romance in the novel reflects an interest not in containment so much as in incontinence.

Few critical endeavors have seemed so interminable as differentiating the novel from romance. “No writings are more different than the ancient Romance and modern Novel, yet they are frequently confounded together, and mistaken for each other,” Clara Reeve wrote in 1785 (1930, 7). In The Progress of Romance she strove “to mark the distinguishing characters” (1930, vi) of the two forms for a British readership ignorant of this distinction (and of their own ignorance). Yet two centuries later, Northrop Frye still felt the need to insist that “prose romance … is an independent form of fiction to be distinguished from the novel.” His Anatomy of Criticism (1957) attempts to categorize “the essential difference between” them so that critics might not continue to reject as failed novels what are actually successful romances (2006, 285). The attempt to contrast romance and the novel began before Reeve with the anti- quarians of the eighteenth‐century romance revival, such as Thomas Percy or Bishop Hurd, who connected romance to the “juvenile and unformed” (Hurd 1762, 57) as primitive wellspring of English literature –”the unmediated, immature stage of an individual reader or culture” (as Clive Probyn summarizes it; 2004, 259) necessary to maturity. It continues long past Frye into twenty‐first‐century scholarship. Yet this endless return to romance begins to seem overdetermined. Frye asserts that “when the novel was established in the eighteenth century, it came to a reading public familiar with the formulas of prose romance” (1976, 38), although actually Reeve was at the time doubtful of that public’s familiarity with those conventions. Why, we might wonder, should romance still appear in discussions now, long past when Frye or Reeve lamented their contemporaries’ ignorance of every form but the novel? 106 Laurie Langbauer

A historical understanding of romance’s persistence might seem straightforward enough: any discussion of the novel’s emergence would have to address its antecedents. Many discussions have proceeded from this assumption. Watt perhaps most famously sees the novel as arising precisely out of “a break with the old‐fashioned romances” (1957, 10). Frye suggests, however, that defining history through antecedents tends to assume it as progressive: “romance is older than the novel,” he concedes, “a fact which has developed the historical illusion that it is something to be outgrown, a juvenile and undeveloped form” (2006, 286). Watt’s description of the “rise” out of romance has often been critiqued for unconsciously assuming within its own account of the novel the inevitability of progression he purports merely to describe. This story of growth may explain why histories of the novel return to romance – to show what the novel has moved beyond. The tautology within that story may also explain why those histories keep returning – understanding history as an account that inevitably results in whatever motivates it may ensure that it is only able to return to itself. This is a form of Whig history, as Herbert Butterfield defines it: “to emphasise certain principles of progress in the past and to produce a story which is the ratification if not the glorification of the present” (1965, v). Within her juvenilia, Austen too deliberately conjures “the Whig view of history” by playing up within the past only what accords with the present, the historian Christopher Kent emphasizes, but she does so deliberately, so that the history which results is explicitly “no less a fiction (and a potentially pernicious one) than Gothic romance” (1989, 64, 69). Austen’s self‐reflexiveness demonstrates that the problem is not exactly that Watt adopts Whig historiography for a form he identifies as a product of Whig ascendancy. In “The Law of Genre,” Jacques Derrida considers the foregrounding of generic instability historically, in the Romantic era, but for him Romanticism “can no longer be inscribed as a moment or a stage placeable within the trajectory of a ‘history’ whose concept we could be certain of.” Instead, the “teleological ordering of history” (the very assumption that history is straightforward) “remains itself a part or effect of Romanticism” (1980, 61–62). Reading history through the lens its moment provides may be inescapable. The problem “in historical composition” is not that it fails to be impartial, Butterfield contends. It is instead “the organisation of the story in such a way that bias cannot be recognised” (1965, 105). Romance persists in accounts of the novel as the principle structuring those accounts as stories of growth. Emphasizing romance can gesture to first principles, though the gesture can sometimes substitute for analysis. Brown specifically explores the self‐ fulfilling circularity within the development plot of the novel’s origins – “the story of the institutional ‘rise’ of the novel to a new legitimacy itself has a romance plot” (1996, 12) – “the allegory of natural growth and development” (15) – enforced “by means of retrospective histories that made [the form they attempt to justify] seem inaugural and exemplary at once” (14). These histories use romance to make the novel “appropriate its own origin … identify itself, absolutely, around its own pronouncement and its own birth … in order to re‐engender itself from [its own sources] as … destiny” (42). Walter Scott in his review of Austen describes the novel as “the legitimate child of the romance” (1815, 189). Brown compellingly explores these metaphors of filiation to argue that Scott constructs “romance as the story of the father” supplanted by the novel as favorite son (1997, 16). “If there were a distinction to be made between the Romance 107 romance and novel,” Brown concludes, “it was not so much a generic as a ‘generational’ difference” (10). Yet Scott’s assertion provides only the patriarchal version of that generational distinction. Frye’s statement that histories of the novel take romance as “something to be outgrown, a juvenile and undeveloped form” points to another and a different reason for the ceaseless return to what never gets left behind – romance as youth to be outgrown rather than as elder to be surpassed. The novel incorporates romance’s persistence by modifying the generational story of its rise: not just the novel understood in terms of the children romance might have, but romance understood as the children adults have been. Siskin suggests that the “rhetoric of development” (1988, 106) is actually reciprocal and dynamic, continually modifying its terms – like the conflation of romance and novel, “the collapsing of distinctions of kind into distinctions of degree” (108). A Romantic manifesto of growth, Wordsworth’s “Intimations Ode,” asserts simultaneously that “the child is part of what the man will be, but at the same time the man is but part of what the child was” (1998, 103). “The co‐relativity of origin and tendency,” Siskin concludes, “inevitably leaves a gap” within the logic of growth (1988, 121, 120). But for Siskin narratives of development arise out of this gap in order to contain it – not to close it, but to “obviate the need for such closure” (1988, 121). “Development is idealized so that it can always be pathologically interrupted. Those interruptions” he writes, “are opportunities for professional intervention and surveillance – the ongoing pronouncing of disciplinary cures” (1998, 36). Hence, what seems the potential for an alternative history winds up effectively neu- tralizing the possibility of any alternative whatsoever. But what if romance persists in descriptions of the novel not as a trap but as a placeholder for what is left out of these representations? Recontaining this possibility as simply one more way to enforce the existing organization of knowledge seems to me to close off a question before it gets entertained. Is there any way to read that this theory hasn’t already anticipated or annulled? Manufacturing an impasse that keeps us stuck in the impossibility of its solution may indeed be a strategy of twenty‐first‐century disciplinarity that allows it to continue to function. Wisely disregarding that impasse, at least sometimes, as it seems to me these critics do (must do) by their very practice, might provide one strategy to continue anyway. Deflating historical logics that compel by their capacity to account for everything might be another.

Comic deflation was always Jane Austen’s strategy. “I could not sit seriously down to write a serious Romance under any other motive than to save my Life, & if it were indispensible for me to keep it up & never relax into laughing at myself or other people, I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first Chapter. – No – I must keep to my own style & go on in my own Way,” Austen famously wrote to James Stanier Clarke, the Prince Regent’s librarian, on April Fool’s Day in 1816 (1995b, 312). When Clarke instructed Austen that she might dedicate her next novel to the Prince, scarcely a year had passed since Leigh Hunt had gotten out of prison for libeling the Regent. Clarke suggested that Austen write “an Historical Romance, founded on 108 Laurie Langbauer the House of Saxe Cobourg” (1995b, 312) (Prince Leopold of Coburg was about to become the Regent’s son‐in‐law; Clarke had been appointed his secretary). Such a task involved potential hazards for any writer (however different her politics from Hunt’s), from giving offense to toadying. Austen did neither, staging her amusement instead. Transforming threat into humor, for Siskin, clinches Austen’s (and the novel’s) regulatory efficiency. To “go on” in her way, he thinks, means jettisoning uncomfortable historical facts and the working classes from her novels, and jettisoning other less felic- itous women writers from the novel’s rise (1998, 206–209). Watt sees Austen marking the novel’s progress out of romance, and Siskin agrees “the novel actually did rise” (1998, 155, 198), but in terms of readership and market share. That rise needed the logic of development “not necessarily to undermine hierarchy but … to naturalize its instability as a sign of maturation” (1988, 142). For Siskin, too, Austen’s work became the symbol of this mature form because its comic diminishment repulsed threats to the novel’s consolidation so well, including those by more political forms such as the periodical press, conspicuously partisan and polemical. Siskin’s work has been particularly illuminating for focusing on literary modes of production in general and on the periodical press in particular in the story of the late‐ eighteenth‐century novel. He turns to periodicals to address one developmental instability within Austen’s career. What if Austen’s mature novels mark a decline from her juvenilia? Such are Margaret Doody’s “bold speculations on Austen’s early writings,” which she finds “brilliantly ‘disturbing’ … but by no means childish,” Siskin writes, and which Doody thinks Austen abandons for “the toned‐down retreat” of her later works (Siskin 1998, 202). Austen as “a young girl was ready to joke about deformity, injury, death, drunkenness, child‐bearing, and illegitimacy,” Southam asserts – not to mention larceny and murder (2001, 24). She fills her juvenilia with burlesques of sex and violence, but, Doody argues, market pressures drive her from such iconoclasm. Siskin ultimately rejects what he calls Doody’s “valorizing of the juvenilia,” as begging the question about the “sphere of activity” that enables writing like Austen’s (1998, 203). Austen’s novels keep in check the threat within the new technology of writing – that it might change behavior. Catherine Morland imitates romances but, Siskin contends, she turns out sensibly, and lives happily ever after, anyway. Austen chose not to publish the different kind of stories within her juvenilia, and in the face of a periodical press hungry for readers’ contributions. She waited instead to appear as a novelist because that form, Siskin argues, was more ideologically “manageable” (1998, 206). This insightful turn to a periodical context to explore Austen’s novels – and the persistence of romance in them – through her juvenilia seems to me highly generative, but not quite finished. Unlike the romance which they mirror (as similarly prior), juvenilia are not so much valorized as “undertheorised,” as Leslie Robertson claims; discussions of juvenilia assume them as “apprenticeship” and fail to take into account discontinuities between an author’s earlier and later production (1998, 291). Whatever the Romantic idealization of children’s imaginative capacities, the treatment of actual writing produced before adulthood remains resoundingly developmental. The writing of children who died young, such as the Scottish Marjory Fleming (1803–1811), was later idealized precisely because she could have no pretension to further development. Young writers with their eyes on future careers, Byron, Keats, Hunt in particular – who published his Juvenilia in 1801 at sixteen – all had to live down their supposedly Romance 109 immature works. Writings by ambitious teenagers such as Thomas Chatterton (or Austen, for that matter), which unapologetically assumed their own consequence and never comfortably resolved into being mere prelude, unsettle most of what we know about juvenilia. Because Austen’s juvenilia were not published until over a century after she wrote them, for Siskin they never really contested anything. This misses a crucial point about juvenilia, which can aim at but not depend upon publication. Like romance, juvenilia – neither mode, nor genre, nor attitude, but all at once – seem to come before more mature forms, but actually disregard sequence – such writings may be published much later, if at all. They flourish in obscurity, free there to lampoon a status quo so secure in its own position it ignores young people’s writing. Because they published contributions from readers, periodicals (including the single‐essay periodicals of the schools) encouraged juvenile writing, but without clarifying its definition or valence. Chatterton started publishing before he was a teen. Reeve places Chatterton’s writing with Ossian’s “among the Romances” (1930, 67), but only to mark the difficulty of classification. For Reeve, who was thinking about Chatterton’s made‐up medieval diction, paradoxically archaic and neologistic at once, like Ossian’s both narrative and lyric, romance is a provisional and last‐ditch category, not a sentimentalizing one, because “this sort of writing, corrupts and spoils our language, and destroys the barrier, which nature has placed, to distinguish between poetry and prose” (1930, 67). Given Chatterton’s resistance to classification (can we even call his work juvenilia?), Reeve may have opted to call it romance simply because that form was at least associated with youth. “The Romance of Youth” was a catchphrase of the day and later the title of a poem by John Hamilton Reynolds, whom Hunt includes with Shelley and Keats in his famous 1816 Examiner essay on the “Young Poets.” A review of Reynolds’s volume thought “at first … he had split a common, sentimental novel, into” poetic lines (Anon. 1821, 339). Juvenilia vex fundamental divisions – they may be so little invested in conventional form that we can never be sure what we are reading. Elizabeth Poole Sanford, in her Woman, in Her Social and Domestic Character (1833), like Reynolds emphasizes Romantic regret for what has been lost through growth: “though in maturer life we may smile at the romance of youth … must we often regret the depth of our young emotions, the disinterestedness of our young affections, and that enthusiasm of purpose which, alas! we soon grow too wise to cherish” (1833, 105). In Persuasion, Austen frames the same reversal in terms of romance. Because Anne Elliot “had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older – the natural sequel of an unnatural beginning” (Austen 2006c, 32). In Austen’s characterization, education into romance becomes neither progression nor regression, however, making romance’s persistence less easy to explain than as something one grows out of or into, loses or gains, breaks from or unwillingly replicates. The seventeen‐year‐old George Canning (later prime minister) edited the Eton periodical the Microcosm. In an essay on romance in it, he calls the novel romance’s “younger sister,” transforming generational progression into “family likeness” (1787, 294). Just as romances are not so much apprentice novels, he assumes that children are not apprentice writers. Canning writes that novels like Tom Jones are “generally put too early into our hands, and proposed too soon to the imitation of children” (302) in order 110 Laurie Langbauer to resituate imitation from behavior to writing: “Some of my fellow‐citizens may perhaps conjecture, that I have affected to undervalue them from interested motives; and that I would wean them from their study of them, for the purpose only of increasing the demand for my own lucubrations” (305). One of the things common to novels and romance, in their sorority, which this satiric juvenile writer in his own writing already avoids, is their sentiment. In a pointedly ironic question, which mocks the novel’s attempt to make readers even care about the feelings of a housemaid, Canning asks: “where shall we find such a thorough knowledge of nature, such an insight into the human heart, as is displayed by our Novelists?” (300). Northanger Abbey almost exactly repeats Canning’s phrasing (although with a twist): in novels, its narrator insists, “the most thorough knowledge of human nature” is indeed displayed (Austen 2006b, 31). Though there is no direct proof she did, it would be unusual if Austen hadn’t read the Microcosm (which was popular enough to go into three editions). In the Loiterer (1792) Sophia Sentiment (often thought to be Austen herself) claims to be “a great reader” of everything from “the Tatler and the Spectator to the Microcosm and the Olla Podrida. Indeed I love a periodical work beyond anything,” she writes. Journals in the juvenile periodical tradition openly referred to one another (Collins 1867, 132–134). “A young person of taste,” Austen’s narrator says straight out in her defense of novels in Northanger Abbey, only pretends to prefer the musty old essays in the Spectator – “which no longer concern any one living” (2006b, 31). Youthful writers might feel the same pressure to cleave to others like them that Austen argues reviled novelists have – because their writing remained “always a despised form,” as Frye suggests romance does as well (2004, 199). Another of Austen’s best‐known characterizations of her work also situates it in relation to juvenile writing. In mock defense against being suspected of purloining her schoolboy nephew James Edward’s lost manuscript pages, she wrote: “What should I do with your strong, manly, spirited Sketches, full of Variety & Glow? – How could I possibly join them on to the little bit (two Inches wide) of Ivory on which I work with so fine a Brush?” (1995b, 323). Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar use Henry Tilney’s burlesque of a romance involving women’s lost manuscript pages to argue that Catherine Morland’s avidity for them may seem foolish – Northanger Abbey resembles “the juvenilia in its tendency to rely on [romance] conventions for its own shape. Austen is writing a romance as conventional in its ways as those she critiques” (1979, 132). Nevertheless, they argue, the interest in those lost pages represents Austen’s longing for a tradition, too: “The writers of romance, Austen implies, were not so much wrong as simplistic” (136). Austen kept urging young writers to write within the gaps left in manuscripts and traditions. Patient and generous with all the teenagers in her family who asked her to read their writing, Austen encouraged them to use her work as springboard: loose manuscript pages by her niece Anna complete Evelyn; her nephew James Edward was allowed to write his own sequels onto the blank pages in Austen’s manuscript (2006a, 363–365), fostering an unheard community through interruptions that permit more than only institutional voices. In her twenties, Austen went back to her juvenilia, rereading and revising them, just around the time, in 1809, that she wrote to demand publication of Northanger Abbey by Crosby & Co., who had had it for over five years. In 1807, the firm had been the London agent for Byron’s juvenile Hours of Idleness, and Austen had been watching their listings Romance 111 closely. Whether Austen felt her own early writing deserved as good a chance as this younger lord’s cannot be known, but the reviews had suggested that young men’s compositions had been too readily published. Byron’s volume was criticized for flaunting his minority (even more than his title). If he did that “rather with a view to increase our wonder, than to soften our censures,” the Edinburgh Review wrote, he was mistaken; juvenile composition now seems “the most common of all occurrences; that it happens in the life of nine men in ten who are educated in England; and that the tenth man writes better verse than Lord Byron” (Brougham 1808, 285). In those poems, some written as early as fourteen, Byron associated early writing with romance. “To Romance” beseeches that “An infant bard at least may claim,/From you a sympathetic strain” (1820, 136). Rachel Brownstein links Austen and Byron through their juvenilia, both mocking “what Byron called ‘flimsy romance,’” though she acknowledges they “both wrote and rewrote their own versions of romance,” too (2005, 122). The History of England provided one version of Austen’s juvenile romance – “by a partial, prejudiced, and ignorant Historian” (2006a, 176). Though written in response to schoolbook histories shaped by “the colouring of romance” (Southam 2001, 27), the fifteen‐year‐old Austen conflates her history with romance as well, according to the definition in Joseph Andrews (1742). Fielding’s narrator prefers the truth claims of his own form – he aligns his novel with “biography,” suggesting it is truer than life because it depicts manners, not individuals – over “the Preference which may be vulgarly given to the Authority of those Romance‐Writers who intitle their Books ‘the History of England, the History of France, of Spain &c.’” (2008a, 160). He calls such histories romances because they are partial and prejudiced, fitting facts to their systems’ fantasies. In The History of Tom Jones (1749), Fielding explains “that I am not writing a system, but a history, and I am not obliged to reconcile every matter to the received notions” (2008b, 608). Though Siskin suggests that blaming the system actually allows it to continue (2001), Fielding hopes that his readers can draw their own conclusions. Austen’s history is a romance in this sense: it explicitly flaunts its bias. Northanger Abbey’s defense of the novel rejects “the nine‐hundredth abridger of the History of England” (2006b, 31) as much as it does outdated periodicals. In her own self‐mocking abridgment of The History of England, Austen conveys a sophisticated “sense that history is a constructed text,” as Jan Fergus puts it (Austen 1995a, i). But, just as Henry Tilney’s reference to England’s network of voluntary spies reveals not that subjects internalize norms so much as Austen’s awareness that they do, her historian reveals her boredom with the debate over whether irony provides a dodge that seems above it all but actually allows more of the same (one reading of Mr. Bennett’s cynicism in Pride and Prejudice). Austen’s “outrageously obtrusive” (Kent 1989, 66) ridicule of remaking history to suit the present day comments less on history’s constructedness than on those that claim to own its truth: “The recital of any Events (except what I make myself) is uninteresting to me” (2006b, 188), her narrator tells us. Austen’s account so flaunts its illogic that its wit cannot fully pacify the “burlesque incongruity” within it (Southam 2001, 22) – in that lies her “youthful sense of herself: her ability to laugh at her most cherished feelings, to view them ironically without relinquishing them … ironically examining and exposing her own prejudices while maintaining them nonetheless” (Fergus 1991, 41). Austen confronts the history 112 Laurie Langbauer textbook as literally a construction project. But the youth those books hope to shape is itself also a construction. In Lesley Castle, Margaret Lesley writes to her school friend about her father – “Sir George is 57 and still remains the Beau, the flighty stripling, the gay Lad, and sprightly Youngster” – and her niece “just turned of two years old; as handsome as tho’ 2 and 20, as sensible as tho’ 2 and 30, and as prudent as tho’ 2 and 40” (2006a, 144). Though youth may be a construct, interpreted differently depending on one’s point of view (so that those who are past it want it back and those who have it want to move quickly past), its performance is not meaningless. Margaret writes about herself (and her sister), “We are handsome my dear Charlotte, very handsome and the greatest of our Perfections is, that we are entirely insensible of them ourselves” (2006a, 144) – the incongruous change, through her assumption of first person, from descriptions of young heroines that seem unremarkable when made in third, suggests how drastic the difference of speaking from within any position, however constructed, can be. Similarly, how we regard Austen’s early writing depends on where we place it. Though relatives and editors leaked extracts of Austen’s juvenilia over the years, they were actually published only after a market for juvenilia had been created by the surprise blockbuster, a mock romance novel The Young Visiters (1919) by Daisy Ashford, aged nine. In his excellent reception history of Austen’s juvenilia, Peter Sabor demonstrates that their appearance in the wake of Ashford’s bestseller allowed them to be appreciated for themselves. The New York Times and The Times of London at the time “insisted on the intrinsic significance of the juvenilia” (Austen 2006b, xlvii). Once the enthusiasm for child authors waned, however, Austen’s juvenilia got absorbed into her career and the novel’s – from that time, discussed “in developmental terms … [as] something that Austen would have to outgrow” (2006b, liii). That Austen did not publish any juvenilia in her lifetime seems less a choice than a reality of publication opportunities. The growing periodical market had indeed fueled juvenile authorship, since it needed copy to fill pages. Austen was (as were the juvenile Brontës) from an early age a devoted reader of the Lady’s Magazine, which published readers’ fiction. But it is hard to imagine Austen’s fiction appearing in its pages, since, as Edward Copeland demonstrates, she takes “target practice” (1989, 156) against the “classic Lady’s story in a romantic vein” (1989, 170), directly parodying several of its tales. Even though it printed some satire, and reprinted an extract from Reeve’s early “Defense of Romances and Novels,” the Lady’s Magazine contained nothing at all like the outrageous and complicated mockery of romance in Austen’s juvenilia. Other periodicals did cater to satiric tastes – notably the school periodicals of the time, the nearest prototype of Austen’s humor. Their wit generally took the form of crude juxtaposition – the Microcosm, for instance, had a running joke about the growth of noses that combined phallic pride with the disgrace of having one’s own pulled (1788, 329–339). This kind of wit thumbed its nose at everything. Sabor argues that the young Austen’s “favourite device” worked similarly: “syllepsis, a form of zeugma in which a verb takes two different and incongruous objects” (Austen 2006a, 381n46). Southam speculates that Austen’s descendants opposed publication of her juvenilia for over a century because of their “lively strain of eighteenth‐century humour offensive to Victorian taste” (2001, 2). Her juvenilia could certainly be as literal as any sophomoric drinking humor. A piece her brothers published in the Loiterer insists that the liberal Romance 113 application of port wine is the best way to grant “the merest sighing swain that ever adorned the pages of romance” (1792, 82), what they later call “that durable content- ment … removed from the enthusiasm of romance” (1792, 293). In Austen’s juvenilia, men and women are simply carried home “dead drunk” (2006a, 16, 21). Despite such affinities in taste and style, these periodicals could not provide a platform for Austen’s juvenile wit. She was shut out by gender from the public schools and universities (female seminaries did not produce satiric magazines) and by training from the classical and misogynist tradition, such as the lewd and sarcastic Latin juvenilia of Secundi or Beza, behind their magazines (although the scurrilous Terrae Fillius address at Oxford had been conducted in English precisely so laypeople attending exercises could enjoy its satire). Writing in 1791, an anonymous “lady” knows she must “readily admit” that satire is by no means the province of a woman: she excuses her own satiric poem as “a frolic of … juvenile years” (Anon. 1791, iii). “Although satire was typically a male form in the eighteenth century,” Lindy Riley writes, “women writers learned to appropriate it to their uses” (1995, 206). But although Austen might look to an uneasy heritage of satire by earlier novelists such as Frances Burney and Sarah Fielding (both of whom subordinated the impulse to moralizing in order to indulge it), nevertheless she could find no easy position in satiric undergraduate journals, a dilemma crystallized by the ongoing debate about whether she wrote the letter by Sophia Sentiment (Austen 2006a, 356–361). Whoever its author, the letter is actually a demand for more publication opportunities for young female writers: Sentiment threatens that, unless the Loiterer cultivate “a new set of correspondents, from among the young of both sexes, but particularly ours,” she will be sure that its editors are actually “neither more nor less than some old fellow of a college” (1792, 52, 51) – like the Spectator perhaps, so old they no longer interest anyone living. Austen’s dull juvenile “Fragment – Written to to inculcate the practice of virtue” perhaps apes the kind of submissions that sententious periodicals such as the Juvenile Magazine sought from readers. She would have been aware that her juvenile wit was too extreme even for more rowdy undergraduate lampoons. Jillian Heydt‐Stevenson argues that “the Juvenilia’s raw erotic energy punctures the mythic representation that Austen … [wrote] in a form that was utterly refined” or comforting (2006, par. 41). There is none of The Beautiful Cassandra’s theft and battery, none of the juvenilia’s adultery or parricide, in the Loiterer’s pages. The exuberant elimination of relation in favor of accident in Austen’s early writing is anarchic: “dislocated,” Ellen Martin calls it, “the ultimate example of unlikely connection” (1989, 91). Mothers fail to remember the children they placed under haycocks (as in Henry and Eliza) and husbands forget the wives they have just married (as in The Adventures of Mr. Harley). Seats of privilege, such as Eton, may well foster such disconnections, and we find them funny because money and rank confer consequence of one sort while precluding consequences of another, so that cause and effect can seem merely laughable. Such humor, however, suggests that internalizing norms was nowhere near complete: Edward Mack cites “actual revolutions against master authority that were a distinctive feature of the period” at boys’ schools (Winchester alone had seven between 1770 and 1828) (1939, 79). At Rugby, these revolts involved such destruction that in 1797 the authorities had to call in the militia to use their bayonets and read the Riot Act (1939, 82). 114 Laurie Langbauer

The romance of anarchy might be more possible – its rhetorical expression more unfettered – in certain advantaged class settings. Yet, as an adolescent phenomenon, vandalism seems to ignore economics or status. This disregard for fundamental connections is not the romance celebrated by the upwardly mobile Walter Scott, which uses history to conserve causation and relation. Instead, it is more like the haphazard The Castle of Otranto (1764) by that Etonian Walpole, Fourth Earl of Orford (son of the Whig Prime Minister) – though its wreck of outsized helmets and disembodied feet usually gets coded as ludicrous instead of lawless – or of The Monk (1796), written at nineteen by that satellite of the Court, Matthew Lewis, a novel whose excesses are much tamer when understood only as sexual. The violence of incongruity is open to anyone with paper and pen, however. Brutally disembodied physicality structures the charity‐school boy Chatterton’s disturbing satires, too (such as the frankly obscene “The Exhibition” and “The Letter Paraphras’d”), ignored for so long because their angry lewdness did not comfortably fit pictures of marvelous and romantic youth. In the tamer “Consuliad,” a politician’s banquet nonetheless degenerates into a food fight. “There is a lot of hostility in satire,” John Halperin remarks about Austen’s juvenilia (1989, 30). Austen’s early writings, Fergus writes, are “surprisingly, though hilariously, violent” (1991, 53). That violence can reside in hilarity does not make it somehow easier to take, however – if anything, the disjunction between the two could make it seem less so. Alan Richardson argues that an entire subgenre of satiric children’s literature was lively before the turn of the nineteenth century and then largely vanished, disappearing from our contemporary literary history due to its incongruity with modern expectations about children as innocent (1994, 142–153). With that satiric tradition fading, Austen may have had no choice about whether or not she could publish her juvenile satires. Defined by a periodical context that had no room for her, Austen’s juvenile writing brings to view a fuller range of formal determinants in the history of the novel. These elements remain unsystematized within literary histories. They are piecemeal, motley, overlapping, and yet at odds: historical texts, the periodical press, juvenilia, but also other categories not yet noticed or named. Neither mature nor objective, Austen’s teenaged historian writes romantic history that challenges the rationales that make sense of the passage of time, and challenges sense itself as any kind of educational goal. Her practice depicts youth and past as more than prelude to subsequent insight – as provokingly cut free from any sense of cause or consequence. Rather than being an unwitting dupe of hegemony, the teenaged Austen (a committed Tory, but not simply that) insists that writing and selfhood are inherently political, paving the way for another understanding of politics. Excessively, preposterously, even offensively political in this sense, her juvenile History confronts head on “the extreme difficulty we all have of seeing children as political subjects,” as historian Carolyn Steedman writes (1989, 29). The politics of Austen’s juvenilia may be romantic in dis- pensing with the fundamental connections that underlie sense or society, but this remains disturbing, whether we see it as the worst kind of class privilege or the most nihilistic atomism. To preconceptions about children who speak only what shaping authorities expect they will say, such romance answers otherwise – not so much rebel- ling against authority but ignoring the logic in which authority matters inordinately to itself, dismissing adult concerns as irrelevant. This romance bets on the possibility Romance 115 that out of its irrepressible persistence might come something unexpected, random, even unthinkable. That possibility requires, however, that we pay attention to juvenile writing’s different kind of determination.

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The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. (William Blake) Nothing succeeds like excess. (Oscar Wilde)

The categories that the terms Gothic and novel name separately are both large. The Gothic as narrative is not limited to prose fiction, and novel can suggest much that is not Gothic. When combined, the terms live uncomfortably together, unless our conception of the novel is capacious enough to include narratives that do not conform to expectations for social, domestic, and psychological realism. The double term, Gothic novel, refers to a particular kind of novel and to a particular generic manifestation of the Gothic. It names prose fiction of a dark kind that, in the English‐speaking world, flourished from the middle of the eighteenth century through the end of the nineteenth century, with an initial wave of popularity from 1764 until around 1825 and a second after 1860. The conceptual discomfort of the category is appropriate for literary works that can make readers uncomfortable and even scared. The frightening effect appears to be stronger for contemporary readers of Gothic fiction. Read belatedly, the narratives can sometimes cause laughter because of their exaggerations, the self‐parodic character of which could not have escaped all their authors. It certainly did not escape Jane Austen, whose Northanger Abbey (1818) sends up Gothic writings by authors of her own generation and earlier, including The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) by Ann Radcliffe and The Monk (1796) by Matthew Lewis. By taking the end of the nineteenth century, broadly speaking, as a chronological limit for considering the Gothic novel, I am not suggesting that dark literary narratives disappeared during the twentieth century. Quite the contrary: like the vampire, they endured and multiplied, and like the image of the vampire in our culture, they are unavoidable. Modern Gothic narratives changed form and focus from their

A Companion to the English Novel, First Edition. Edited by Stephen Arata, Madigan Haley, J. Paul Hunter, and Jennifer Wicke. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. 118 John Paul Riquelme predecessors and proliferated beyond literature into popular culture in various media, from graphic novels to film and digital forms. Horror fiction and science fiction both developed out of the earlier literary Gothic tradition. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818; final edition 1831) is widely regarded as the first science‐ fiction novel because of its focus on a scientist, technological innovation that becomes uncontrollable, and a “creature,” whose alien(ated) existence insistently raises the question of what it means to be human. It is also an important Gothic novel involving doubles, revenge, and a dysfunctional family, all frequently occurring aspects of the form. Like the narrative of the vampire in Dracula (1897) by Bram Stoker, Shelley’s narrative, adaptations of it, and narratives inspired by it are versions of a modern myth, a story retold or alluded to in many ways, one that all of us know even if we have never read the Gothic novel that defined the myth initially. Dr. Frankenstein’s creature, the vampire, and later monsters keep Gothic narrative alive culturally and imaginatively, but not exclusively by means of novels. As is the case with other myths, they involve abiding contradictions. During the long nineteenth century, 1789–1918, from the French Revolution through the First World War, there is considerable diversity in the Gothic novel, an extravagant, excessive form whose action and language regularly cross conventional boundaries. With that overflow, difficult to delimit, in mind, it is worth noting that the Gothic occurs memorably as well in poetry and in drama, although Gothic prose fiction is more prevalent by far. The Gothic novel’s prehistory involves drama centrally, especially the once popular dramatic form revenge tragedy of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For example, Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (ca. 1585), which influenced Shakespeare when he wrote Hamlet (1601), is a drama set in a Catholic country, Spain, involving revenge and abundant violence and blood, as is the case in numerous Gothic novels. Oscar Wilde refers to Jacobean revenge tragedy and some of its practitioners explicitly in the eighth chapter of The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). Wilde also wrote revenge tragedies himself, the most famous of which, Salomé (1892), helped effect the transfer of the Gothic into the twentieth century by influencing modernist writers, including W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot. Nineteenth‐century Gothic drama and poetry can be revealing concerning their prose fiction counterparts, especially when salient elements of the Gothic emerge in them in densely stylized ways that are even stranger, more exaggerated, and more visible than in the novels. As a consequence, in presenting characteristic elements and implications of Gothic fiction, I make strategic reference to two important works of Gothic poetry and drama, “Goblin Market” (1862) by Christina Rossetti and Salomé. The Gothic novel was popular from its inception, with several hundred works appearing between the publication of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) and Frankenstein. The numerous works of this first wave of Gothic fiction and those that follow later in the century provide a distinctive, substantial thread within the English novel prior to the rise of the modernist novel. Gothic fiction lives alongside the nineteenth‐century novel’s dominant realistic strand but is in important ways contrary to it, especially with regard to excesses of style, setting, character, and action. It is contrary as well to optimistic cultural attitudes, whether those of the Enlightenment concerning the perfectibility of humankind and its institutions, influential in the eighteenth century, or later evolutionary thinking about human societies, current in the Gothic 119 second half of the nineteenth century. Gothic fiction’s skeptical perspective extends to the certainty and adequacy of knowledge acquired by reason and by the gathering of evidence. Instead of clarifying situations for the reader, Gothic narratives often include events and behavior that are never adequately explained. They frequently leave us, at least partially, in the dark, with significant questions unanswered at the end, whereas realistic novels typically provide satisfaction for readers by answering the questions that arise within them and by reaching closure. We willingly suspend our disbelief about the general situation when we read a Gothic narrative, but as the action develops, we typically encounter enigmas, even crucial ones, involving, for example, relations between doubles (Jekyll and Hyde; Dorian Gray and his painting) that persist. The popularity of the Gothic and its excesses, including often the presence of supernatural elements, have sometimes been held against it, as indications of a lack of seriousness that combines defective craftsmanship with playing to an undiscrimi- nating audience. Some recurring aspects of Gothic narratives, including threatening situations for women, have been the basis for criticizing the works as subliterary for apparently supporting hierarchical attitudes. The hardly credible (and arguably ironic) suggestion at the end of some prominent Gothic narratives, such as Dracula, that order has been restored also appears to be in service to a societal status quo. On the contrary, there are persuasive grounds for interpreting Gothic narratives as regularly responding to disturbing aspects of culture and to the existence of evil in ways that compellingly suggest not satisfaction with the status quo but a sharply critical response to it. The response involves staging destructive cultural tendencies in exaggerated forms in order to enable us to look at behavior and attitudes that are prevalent but normally not acknowledged or openly accepted. Gothic representations are frequently indirect and figurative, arising from cultural turbulence but presenting it in deformed, though revealing, configurations. Rather than conservative, trivial, and escapist, Gothic fiction includes meaningful culturally critical perspectives under the protective guise of being fantastic, beyond the real(istic), and beyond the domain of the feasible. In this more admiring view of the Gothic, the victimizing of women in the narratives can be understood as an exaggerated staging of misogynistic tendencies of culture that enables us to recognize and judge them (though some readers will feel that their own misogynistic attitudes are confirmed rather than challenged by the staging); and the restoration of order, when it occurs, can be jarring and ironic because it is at odds with much of what precedes it in the action. But all such moments in Gothic narratives are open to interpretation.

Describing the Gothic

A description of the Gothic cannot adequately be based on the cluster of narrative elements that occur frequently in Gothic narratives, though those elements, some of which I have already mentioned, are significant. Rather than being dependent on a combination of static motifs, the Gothic is constituted by a dynamic, variable conjunction of structural, rhetorical, affective, and conceptual perspectives that combine as a response to culturally imposed limits and delusions. Structurally, Gothic narratives are often versions of dark pastoral in their resemblance (though with more 120 John Paul Riquelme seriously threatening implications) to the movement into an alternative world in pastoral comedy (as in Shakespeare’s forest comedies). Rhetorically, they are figurative and frequently densely stylized in their evocation of contradictions and enigmas. Affectively, they can scare us both in an immediate way that involves psychological and physiological responses and in a conceptually discomforting way because we recognize something disturbing about ourselves. The specific form that dynamic takes, as literary narrative, changes over time, in relation to shifting historical, social, and intellectual circumstances, but there is significant continuity involving matters such as the character of the human and sexuality. Besides reacting to changing forms of optimism and assumptions about what we can know, the Gothic regularly raises issues concerning the limits of the human, that is, concerning hierarchical ways of thinking about the human within and between societies and about what it means to be human as a species by contrast with the subhuman or the superhuman. Set outside England in Catholic countries and filled with violence and immoral behavior, first‐wave Gothic novels reinforce in a general way a positive sense of English national identity. They do so by projecting implicitly a hierarchical difference and a positive judgment of English society. Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, for example, presented to its original English readership a narrative with potentially self‐congratulatory national implications in which the distressing action is set completely on the Continent, with an unscrupulous Italian villain. But Gothic narratives frequently enable a contrary recognition: that things in England are not so different. That recognition, concerning a blurred boundary with the foreign and a softened hierarchy, is more likely in response to later Gothic, in which the place of England at the pinnacle of hierarchies of value and power is at times overtly questioned. Dracula, for example, presents a powerful creature from the East challenging the supremacy of English culture, whose less than inspiring defenders, led by Van Helsing, are not obviously his superiors. They may not have defeated him completely by novel’s end. This lack of closure is a counterpart of the softened hierarchy, in its contribution to a dynamic projection of values in flux rather than a stable, static arrangement. Beginning with Frankenstein, the sequel is always a possibility, even when closure has apparently been reached, because the difficulties motivating the narrative have not been definitively overcome. Gothic narratives can be undead, or irrepressible, as well as sometimes also about the undead. To use language that occurs regularly in them, early and late Gothic narratives involve peculiar, strange, quaint (in the older sense of unusual and unfamiliar), or queer styles, structures, and action, inappropriate for realistic narratives. They do so while evoking doublings and the coexistence of opposites as part of a challenge to categories of understanding that rely on norms and essences to support hierarchies of value, order, and power. In this regard the Gothic constitutes a carnivalized form, markedly different in style and effect from realism, often involving disguises and transformations, as well as the crossover between the literal and the figurative. As in the excesses that are temporarily allowed during carnival celebrations, such as Mardi Gras, Gothic narratives do not adhere to the usual limits associated with daylight hours and realistic stories about conventional behavior. Many rules are broken in the telling and in the narrative of Gothic writing, and little of significance is only literal. The effect is to invite and enable speculation for the reader not intent on escape. The disguises and Gothic 121 other aspects that cross boundaries frequently have a gendered dimension that introduces issues of gender different from the victimizing of women. The threat of incest in the first wave of the Gothic novel is a heterosexual matter, but in Frankenstein the central conflict is between males who are ostensibly heterosexual but never consummate unions with females. Each of the central male characters prevents the possibility of such a consummation for his antagonist. Later in the century heterosexual incest tends to be displaced by matters of both same‐sex relations and the crossing of gender roles. The latter is particularly evident in Dracula when Jonathan Harker takes the role of the incarcerated female victim in the book’s opening chapters, Lucy Westenra behaves in a sexually aggressive way that violates late Victorian expectations for women, and Mina Harker becomes a manly woman, an androgyne. The Picture of Dorian Gray, Salomé, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) by Robert Louis Stevenson, “Carmilla” (1872) by Sheridan Le Fanu, and “Goblin Market” all present same‐sex close friendships and intimacies or gender crossings, sometimes both. The prominence of same‐sex representations in the Gothic during the second half of the nineteenth century creates a notable difference but not a discontinuity from earlier Gothic writing, since both incest and same‐sex relations challenge cultural categories and taboos intended to keep similar elements separate with regard to sexual relations and reproduction. By providing what, in effect, are disruptions and alternatives to conventional marriage, Gothic novels differ from many realistic novels, in which the possibility of a successful, culturally approved marriage between a man and a woman is central. Because Gothic narratives regularly block the possibilities for conventional marriages, the Gothic novel is the dark double of domestic realism. Anthropologically speaking, successful marriages occur within the limits set by rules of endogamy (a word that was coined in the 1860s), pertaining to marrying sufficiently inside the tribe or other community, and exogamy (also from the 1860s), pertaining to marrying sufficiently outside it. When incest is an element of a Gothic narrative, the incest taboo, a matter of exogamy, is literally at issue. The suggestion of same‐sex intimacy is also conceptually a matter of exogamy, which is meant to prevent alliances between partners who are too much alike. On the one hand, Gothic narratives disturbingly conjoin or suggest the possible conjoining of elements that are too similar, too closely related either in the family or in physiological makeup. Key aspects of many Gothic narratives are too close for comfort. But they regularly combine such violations with an element that is their opposite on the level of narrative and imaginative construction, by locating the action in exotic or otherwise strange places, or by associating a character with such a place. The locales and the foreign affiliations generate turbulence, especially when physical relations between English women and the strange foreigners raise the possibility of miscegenation, the living result of violating rules of endogamy. The physical intimacy between Count Dracula and Mina Harker, which creates a special bond between them, violates those rules. Elements of many Gothic narratives are too far removed from the home tribe for comfort. When the exotic turns out no longer to be safely far removed, keeping the stranger comfortably at arm’s length is replaced by the threat of having the stranger in our arms or the arms of our spouse. However fascinating incest, same‐sex intimacy, and sex with an alien creature may be for some (including, with regard to the last of these, for science‐fiction enthusiasts), they occur outside social norms, out of bounds. 122 John Paul Riquelme

We encounter a situation structurally similar to Dracula in “Carmilla” when the female vampire attempts to seduce Laura, who is her host in more senses than one, since the vampire is a kind of parasite. In an oddly contradictory combination, Carmilla is both Laura’s relative on her mother’s side – a member of the Karnstein family – and of the same sex, but she is also an alien creature. She is both too close and too removed. The contradiction is also captured by the fact that etymologically guest and host are words that arise from the same Indo‐European root. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’s relation parallels that of Carmilla and Laura: alike as males, even compared figuratively to son and father in the closing chapter, but so different in physical characteristics and behavior that they suggest different classes and races. A similarly contradictory situation involving race and same‐sex attraction occurs in Dracula, as I explain later. The violations concerning proximity and distance, particularly in combination, give the narratives, which are often about disturbed possibilities for domesticity, an undo- mesticated, unruly aspect. This is an important component of the Gothic’s apparent barbarity. Families are damaged or destroyed by the threat of incest, and reproduction proceeds, if at all, not through heterosexual unions primarily, which are often blocked, but in strange ways, by male parthenogenesis in Frankenstein through the creation of life in the laboratory, by means of the bite and the exchange of fluids in vampire narratives, or through a splitting, or multiplication, of the self into parts in Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and The Picture of Dorian Gray. The Gothic novel’s character emerges in another way when we consider the place of history in its development. Gothic fiction begins as an exaggerated, grotesque mode with The Castle of Otranto, in which a huge helmet and sword appear abruptly and without realistic explanation. Over time, however, particularly after the cataclysm of the French Revolution, Gothic fiction responds more directly to recent history and becomes as narrative less distinct from real historical processes. This is a retrospective judgment. It is unclear how aware of a close relation to history readers of the Gothic might have been before Frankenstein. The presence of history in The Castle of Otranto is muted but not invisible. The history evoked implicitly by Manfred’s frustrated desire for a male heir and his setting aside of a wife is English national history, specifically the actions of Henry VIII. But history changes form and importance for the English with the French Revolution’s potentially world‐transforming implications. The relevance of the Revolution to Frankenstein is an important instance of engagement with historical and political realities of a kind that I discuss below with regard to monsters. Later Gothic novels also respond, usually indirectly, to revolutions, uprisings, and mutinies, and “sensation fiction,” a development of the Gothic that emerges in the third quarter of the nineteenth century, concerns sensational events, often resembling ones that received newspaper coverage when they actually occurred. In the nineteenth century, the Gothic novel reflects the fact that history, because it is already Gothic in character, is available to be incorporated without strain into darkly imagined narratives. The crossover and merging of the historical and the gothically imagined occur more emphatically and horrifically in some of the poetry written in response to the First World War, but the link to historical events is evident in the middle of the nineteenth century, for example, in Lady’s Audley’s Secret (1862) by Mary Elizabeth Braddon. The Gothic’s staging of evil as a response to Enlightenment optimism in the first wave becomes later a response to assumptions about progress that are bound up with Gothic 123 the British Empire’s global expansion and with the rise of Victorian anthropology. By 1860, the Indian Mutiny (1857), important in Braddon’s novel, a traumatic and widely discussed uprising that included atrocities against Europeans, had occurred, and Charles Darwin had published The Origin of Species (1859), whose evolutionary theory about nature affected conceptions of society and progress, human evolution and degeneration, and gave rise to questions about the character of the human. Historical and conceptual developments such as these are reflected in the details and directions of Gothic novels in the second half of the century, as they necessarily could not be in the writings of an earlier period. Some of the details also link later Gothic narratives more explicitly to their contemporary historical context than is the case for their early antecedents in Gothic fiction, which are set far from the contemporary realities of England. These shifts toward the globally historical and the anthropological are well under way in the middle of the nineteenth century. They appear most obviously in Gothic narratives involving race, in the nineteenth century sense of that word as a physical variety within a species. In that sense, the Irish were a different race from the English, as were the indigenous inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent, and these races were considered inferior, either inherently or in their stage of development, to the English, whose Empire governed them. Part of the logic of representation regarding strangers and strange behavior from the first‐wave depictions of non‐English‐speaking, though still Western, societies continues in these later narratives, but the implications frequently concern hierarchical relations within the human species globally and anthropologically considered, not just among human societies in the West. Dracula is a tale about a foreigner and a tale of blood in which blood takes on various meanings, literal and figurative. The consumption of it raises anthropological issues because of the sug- gestions of cannibalism, but blood also means race. The conflict in Dracula is variegated, but it is definitely racial.

Continuity and Changes in the Gothic: Female Agency, Colonial Situations, Betwixt & Between

Because it includes many of the features that appear in the Gothic novel back to its eighteenth‐century origins, Wilde’s Salomé helps to establish continuities in the Gothic tradition. But there are marked, revealing differences as well, concerning the representation of women, colonial contexts, and reversals and oscillations of positions. The features it shares with early Gothic novels include an exotic setting (Judea), a sexually aggressive, violent male, Herod, Tetrarch of Judea, exercising his power (usurped from his brother) abusively over a female victim he should be protecting (Salomé is his step‐ daughter and also his niece), a dysfunctional family, the threat of incest, and the carrying out of revenge. The first Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto, involves an exotic setting, a sexually aggressive male, Manfred, incestuous desires, usurpation, and revenge. The differences, however, are equally important, since they indicate how much Gothic narratives have changed due to shifts in historical, cultural, and intellectual circumstances. Central to the change is the role of women, who are normally presented in the Gothic novel’s first wave as victims incapable of defending themselves adequately. That is the case in The Monk, in which the Italian monk, Ambrosio, rapes and 124 John Paul Riquelme murders Antonia and murders her mother, Elvira, who turn out to be his sister and mother. Even in the “female Gothic,” whose most influential practitioner was Ann Radcliffe, the women characters are comparatively weak and ineffective. In The Mysteries of Udolpho, for example, the central character, Emily St. Aubert, attempts to protect herself and to escape from captivity, but rather than being heroic and assertive, she is reticent and swoons frequently. Women in several key Gothic works after the middle of the nineteenth century are, by contrast, active agents of their own destinies, within the limits that they face, limits that they defy, at times brazenly. Often considered by critics to be a villainous femme fatale, a victimizer of John the Baptist rather than primarily a woman strenuously resisting being victimized by her stepfather, Salomé is the agent of revenge against both John, whose rhetoric is misogynistic, and her abusive stepfather. She turns the tables on Herod by making him do her bidding, which is to go against his own fears and wishes, since for him John the Baptist is a holy man whom he fears to kill. Salomé is figuratively incarcerated in the court and the palace, and she is being victimized, but the literally incarcerated victim is a male, John the Baptist, whom Salomé addresses erotically as if he were an attractive woman. Like Mina Harker, she crosses over into the male role, though more extravagantly than Mina through a rhetorical cross‐ dressing that places John in the woman’s role. Mina is not unique in Victorian Gothic fiction in her resemblance to Salomé. Lady Audley and Carmilla, who, like Salomé, give their names to the titles of Gothic narratives, are aggressive, effective agents in making their own fates. Lady Audley has risen through bigamy, having changed her name and covered up her earlier life after her first husband abandoned her and their child. Under threat of exposure, she turns violently revengeful against him when he unexpectedly re‐enters her life. She does so in ways that mingle contemporary history of a colonial kind with a mythic, Old Testament past. Her act of pushing her first husband down a well echoes events of the Indian Mutiny, in which native soldiers threw Europeans, some of them wounded but still alive, down a well. When she later sets fire to the building in which her first husband and others are sleeping, the narrator compares her to Lot’s wife, who was distracted from escaping Sodom and Gomorrah by looking at the conflagration on the horizon. Like Salomé, she is presented ambiguously, as an agent of destruction and as a victim who is taking revenge into her own hands. There is a significant colonial dimension to Lady Audley’s Secret, to Salomé, and to many other Gothic narratives of the second half of the nineteenth century, including another sensation novel, The Moonstone (1868) by Wilkie Collins, and Dracula, which would not have been possible during the Gothic novel’s first wave, before England redirected its ambitions for expansion, in the wake of the War of 1812, away from the Americas and toward other continents. The colonial dimension in Lady Audley and Salomé opens up the possibility that characters who are either not purely English or who are associated with the acts of colonial peoples are independent and admirable, as well as sometimes violent. It is difficult in texts of this kind to assign blame and to distinguish good from evil confidently. In The Castle of Otranto, The Mysteries of Udolpho, and The Monk, the reader has no difficulty identifying Manfred, Montoni, and Ambrosio – all of them foreigners – as agents of evil, and judging the villains accordingly. In response to these texts, the reader can render judgments with confidence against men in Catholic Gothic 125 countries who threaten women. It is considerably more difficult to decide absolutely what judgment to pass about Lady Audley and Salomé, who resemble the creature in Frankenstein as victims and violent revengers. In Wilde’s play, an agent of empire in his role as colonial administrator, Herod, is clearly despicable, and his violent stepdaughter is not wrong to resist him. That creates a potential dilemma for Wilde’s contemporary audience living comfortably in an imperial metropolis, especially if they reject violent actions automatically as unjustified. A related dilemma arises in Lady Audley’s Secret. Lady Audley is a victim, and taking revenge is not unjustified, but she stands in the place of the Indian soldiers who committed atrocities during the Indian Mutiny. The connection can reinforce our condemnation of her violence, or it can encourage us to re‐evaluate the violence perpe- trated against Europeans by colonial subjects in a dispute that arose on religious grounds when Hindu and Muslim soldiers refused orders to use cartridges that were greased, or believed to be impregnated, with tallow from beef (forbidden to Hindus) or lard from pork (forbidden to Muslims). We are being invited to look through the other end of the telescope, to consider a perspective that complicates the separation of good from evil. The representations of women and the references to colonies deserve comparison to an important work of English fiction published between Frankenstein and Lady Audley’s Secret that is inflected toward the Gothic. In Jane Eyre (1847) by Charlotte Brontë, neither Jane’s quiet heroism nor Bertha’s insanity provides an adequate antecedent for Lady Audley’s combination of highly competent calculation and surprising, violent acts on her own behalf. The colonial link in Brontë’s narrative is to the West Indies, that is, to an earlier moment in the expansion of English dominion. The Moonstone, by contrast, is oriented like Lady Audley’s Secret toward the later history of the Empire. The diamond of the title recalls various actual stones originating in India, such as the Koh‐i‐Noor diamond, and the plot involves its theft by an English officer serving in India, followed by the intervention of Indian guardians. Memorably, a central figure, one of the investigators in the case, Ezra Jennings, is a strange mixture of races, a half‐ breed with a discerning mind, who is addicted to drugs he takes for a medical condition. Jennings earns our admiration, but he is betwixt and between, and that is where these later Gothic narratives, by contrast with works such as Jane Eyre, put us, in a quandary compounded of gender, race, and empire. Lady Audley is an ambiguous figure, both victim and revenger; Jennings is just as ambiguous, a biracial, rational addict. As with Lady Audley, Dracula makes unambiguous judgments difficult despite the fact that Count Dracula is violent, domineering, and rapacious. Because of acts perpe- trated against him, he has turned revenger, but the objects of his violence are not those who damaged him. The male English and American vampire hunters, led by Van Helsing, whose apparently made‐up Dutch‐sounding name is an anagram of English, are not obviously to be preferred to the Count, especially considering their horrific violence committed against Lucy Westenra’s body in her tomb. Their actions could easily remind contemporary readers of the serial killer known as Jack the Ripper, active 1888–1891, some of whose victims were mutilated. Van Helsing is a bumbler who cannot speak English properly, despite his Dutch background and his education; Dr. Seward abuses drugs he has uncontrolled access to and is tempted to experiment on his patient, Renfield; Jonathan Harker has a breakdown; and Arthur Holmwood is 126 John Paul Riquelme a primary actor in Lucy’s mutilation. Dracula outwits them, possibly even at the end, when, if he does not escape their efforts to kill him, he at least has left his blood in the veins of Mina and her child. Because the imperial homeland has been invaded, in a translation of the exotic location and its associations to England, the dark foreigner’s arrival to take revenge is an instance of “reverse colonization” (Arata 1996). The empire strikes back in a manner not conceivable during the Gothic novel’s first wave , in which the foreigners are kept at a safe distance. The expansion of empire in the century’s central and closing decades made segregation and containment difficult, if not impossible, both in reality and in fictional representations. One important shift in Gothic fiction late in the nineteenth century is an expansion of the national origins of authors whose works became important. Robert Louis Stevenson was a Scotsman, and three of the authors mentioned immediately above are Irish – Le Fanu, Stoker, and Wilde. They have significant precursors on the Scottish side in James Hogg, whose The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) influenced Stevenson and others and, on the Irish side, in Charles Maturin, Wilde’s great uncle by marriage, who wrote Melmoth the Wanderer (1820). But Hogg and Maturin were exceptions among the widely read Gothic writers early in the century, who were overwhelmingly English. The difference in background and relation to the English establishment from other authors of the English Gothic novel is evident when we remember that Horace Walpole, the initiator of the form, was not only English but the son of Robert Walpole, the first de facto prime minister of England. Stoker was the son of an Irish civil servant, and Wilde’s mother was well known for her poetry supporting Irish nationalism. English‐speaking writers from the margins of the home island produced works late in the century that redirected the Gothic novel, which began with narratives about uncivilized behavior in Catholic countries culturally far removed from Protestant England. They did so by introducing monsters different in kind from Frankenstein’s creature, and by transplanting English characters to foreign locales or setting their narratives in England. Works by Le Fanu, Stoker, Stevenson, and Wilde implicate the English variously in the barbarism of a Gothic fictional world. In Salomé, the setting and characters are not English, but Herod’s position and his court are part of the Roman Empire’s apparatus for ruling its colonies. The debasement that he represents is not that of a monk but of a colonial administrator, like the many English civil servants sent out to govern the colonies. “Carmilla” presents the family of an Englishman living in Styria, later part of Austria, a Catholic region. But the family is hybrid. Laura’s English father has married locally into an aristocratic family with roots further east in Hungary. Despite his attempt to maintain an English identity for himself and his daughter, his tie to the local culture is intimate, including with the vampire, Carmilla, who shares her family descent with his dead wife and his daughter. His complicity extends to allowing Carmilla to stay in the house. At story’s end, it is not certain that Carmilla’s influence has been exor- cised. Laura recalls her fondly, and Laura’s death leaves unclear whether she has also become a vampire. Le Fanu retains from the earlier Gothic tradition a distant location as setting, but the English are not safely removed from the alien threat, having ventured into foreign territory and established themselves, apparently comfortably. In Dracula and in The Picture of Dorian Gray, as in Stevenson’s Strange Case, the Gothic fictional world has come home to the streets of London at a time in the history Gothic 127 of the British Empire in which contact with colonized peoples was affecting the character of British life and thought. In the Great Exhibition of 1851, the colonies were represented in exhibits in central London, but as oddities, like animals in a zoo. By the time of Queen Victoria’s golden and diamond jubilees, 50 and 60 years into her reign (1887 and 1897), dignitaries from the colonies were invited to London and treated with increasing respect. The relocating of the Gothic world to contemporary London brings issues home with significant transformations of first‐wave Gothic, including a focus on English characters and English culture. Stoker’s narrative goes beyond Le Fanu’s with regard to geography by sending the English out to strange territories associated with Catholicism but also making them complicit in bringing the strange foreigner to England itself. Besides the reverse colonization mentioned earlier, other salient reversals take place, ones that associate the English with their supposed inferiors. Van Helsing should speak perfect English because he is from a country, Holland, in which English was and is commonly spoken. But instead, like many inhabitants of colonies, he speaks broken English. It is worth recalling that the English‐speaking Irish were regularly derided by the English for their idioms and their accent. The hierarchy of empire is further eroded in acts such as Jonathan Harker’s attack on Dracula with a kukri knife, a barbaric weapon that would have been associated in the English imagination with the atrocities of the Indian Mutiny. The band of vampire hunters’ failure to protect their domestic and sexual territory is inflected by Stoker’s canny reversal of sexual arrangements that had grown up in the colonies under Empire. As Robert Young has argued (1995), Englishmen in the colonies were frequently attracted to indigenous women, but then, by a transfer that was easy in circumstances far from home, their erotic objects began to include the women’s native partners. Dracula presents a gender‐bending version of the cultural logic informing the erotic colonial triangle of indigenous and English characters, a logic of hybridity, gender crossings, same‐sex liaisons, and miscegenation. The Count, who is a foreigner, is presented early in the narrative as the erotic protector of the feminized Jonathan Harker when the three vampire females approach him. But eventually Mina, Jonathan’s domestic partner, becomes Dracula’s object of desire and possession, and she admits that she did not resist. Soon thereafter she develops androgynous characteristics and gives birth to the next generation, but the next generation of what? Of English protectors of the home and of the existing order? By this moment in the history of the Gothic and the history of the British Empire, there is no keeping the foreigner out of either the homeland or the home.

Gothic Narrative Structures and Styles: Dark Pastoral and the Coexistence of Opposites

Like Dracula, Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” is filled with language and situations that are highly charged erotically, and like Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, its action suggests the addiction of a central character, Laura, who has a double, her sibling, Lizzie. As in both prose narratives, the same‐sex dimension is strong, with the sisters presented, in the poem’s language and its illustrations, in bed together clasping each other. Structurally and stylistically the poem is revealing about the Gothic 128 John Paul Riquelme early and late, because “Goblin Market” is a dark pastoral that includes centrally the coexistence of opposites. Like Shakespeare’s forest comedies, such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1596), the narrative begins in an apparently stable situation for the sisters that quickly turns into an excursion into unknown, threatening territory in which transformations take place, but ultimately there is an apparent return to order and stability. In Shakespeare’s pastoral comedies, the threats in the forest are limited and fanciful (though suggesting tragic ends that they stop short of reaching), and the restoration of order seems unalloyed, as in the return to the world of the court and of marriage overseen by Theseus. Gothic narratives as dark pastorals typically include a movement into a castle or other threatening space of incarceration, followed sometimes by a release from that space and a restoration of order. But sometimes the movement out of the dark space is truncated or questionable. In The Mysteries of Udolpho, Emily St. Aubert finds herself a virtual prisoner in Montoni’s castle in the mountains of Italy, but eventually she is able to return to her home, not to her father, who has died during the narrative, but to her future husband. The threat from Montoni has been overcome. Dracula begins with Jonathan Harker leaving the stability of England on his way to Transylvania, where he finds himself a virtual prisoner in Dracula’s castle. His initial escape from the castle is ambiguous because he appears to have suffered a breakdown and because Dracula goes to England. The dark locale has spread beyond Transylvania. Dracula’s England is a place in which transformations occur, with the vampire hunters and not just Dracula participating in the violent transforming activities. At the end, order seems to be restored in England, based on the book’s last few paragraphs, but the vampire blood in the child of the Harkers makes closure uncertain. In Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Jekyll repeatedly enters the dark region of his transformation into Hyde because he is able to return to the normal world at will, until he can no longer do so. There is no return to orderly life at the book’s end. Many variations on the structure of entering and departing from a threatening locale or situation occur in Gothic fiction, but often the apparent escape from the dark castle or its equivalent is hollow in some significant way, sometimes because it is contrived, as in Ann Radcliffe’s explaining away her narratives’ threatening enigmas. Was the darkness really not so dark, or do we find the explanations mechanical and unsatisfactory? Often there is no exit from the dark wood, as in Frankenstein, when the struggle between the scientist and his creature, like the one between Jekyll and Hyde, has no ending except in death. In these cases, and in others, including The Picture of Dorian Gray, the dark experience at the narrative’s heart is a descent into an underworld, as in Dante, but without heaven as the eventual destination. In Melmoth the Wanderer, contemporary with Frankenstein, Melmoth’s wanderings over generations are presented serially and episodically as dark incursions whose ultimate direction is back toward his own point of origin as a place of dissolution. The Gothic’s darkly transformational element, with no good or lasting escape, is part of its carnivalized aspect, which involves disguises and changes of form. This aspect is especially evident in Gothic writing of the second half of the nineteenth century, at times in comparatively understated ways, as in Lady Audley’s change of name and of life, which is understated only by comparison with the stranger shape shiftings that we encounter in Carmilla, Henry Jekyll, Dorian Gray, and Dracula. Gothic 129

Carnival‐like maskings that stage the narrative’s own qualities sometimes occur, as in “Carmilla,” when Carmilla’s ostensible mother behind a mask at a masquerade ball convinces General Spielsdorf to take in her daughter. Unlike other forms of play and games, carnival is not a matter of mimesis (imitation), whose main literary form is realism, or of competition, which results in clear distinctions between winners and losers. It tends instead to perpetuate itself by giving rise to new manifestations. The narratives’ carnivalized, transformational character shows itself at times as language that evokes a coexistence of opposites, something that realism has difficulty rendering and may inherently be unable or unwilling to present, since it undermines realism’s principles of intelligibility. Highly stylized language and figures of speech can have an effect related to the threatening impact of Gothic representations. The Gothic tends to trigger an intense, heightened response from the reader, involving fear as a reaction to something unusual. The heightened response to the style of some Gothic texts can include a disturbing engagement with language that calls attention to itself as extraordinary by contrast with the more transparent language of realism. It is not surprising to encounter stylized language in a poem, such as “Goblin Market,” whose repeated similes involving the word like call attention insistently to themselves. The noticeable repetition of like, suggesting in this context, besides comparisons, both desire and the sameness of sex occurs as well in “Carmilla,” a tale of same‐sex vampirism. The language of “Carmilla” is also unusual because of the anagrammatical relation among the vampire’s aliases, including Mircalla and Millarca, which embody ortho- graphically the story’s concern with likeness. A further, unspoken, anagram is possible, lacrimal, which pertains to the tears shed and the pain suffered. This implied word can take us from the apparently trivial rearrangement of letters, as masks that the creature adopts, and from the pervasive assertions of likeness and desire in the story’s language, to the pain of penetration by sharp instruments that punctuates the narrative. The coexistence of opposites is particularly evident in the vampire’s in‐between or dual state, captured by the words “amphibious” in the last chapter of “Carmilla” and undead, which was Stoker’s prepublication title for Dracula. In a world in which the apparently no longer living turns out also to be not exactly dead, there is no separating apparent opposites absolutely as a basis for a hierarchy of preference or a linear narrative that reaches closure and resolution. A different kind of blurring of states of being occurs stylistically and conceptually in the last pages of Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde when Jekyll, if it is Jekyll and not Hyde who has done the writing, writes “He, I say – I cannot say, I.” The statement can be read variously to express the writer’s distance from his double and opposite, presumably Hyde as “He,” and to express simultaneously Jekyll the writer’s identity with him. Jekyll may be emphasizing that he is saying “He” and cannot say “I” because of the gap between “He” and “I.” Or, the writer is admitting that finally “I cannot say” “He,” at the instant “He” is displaced by “I,” which he must say, at the sentence’s end. In a related way, the book’s closing statement about putting an end to the “life of Henry Jekyll” either completes an autobiography (or a biography), or it announces a suicide (or a murder). Because they are double and antithetical, these aspects of Stevenson’s novella express the coexistence of opposites. There is no exit from the brambles of this kind of dark world for character or for reader faced with irresolvably different implications inhabiting a single statement. 130 John Paul Riquelme

The conceptual vertigo that the reader experiences in the oscillations and reversals of third‐ and first‐person pronouns is scary because it is destabilizing. We do not know who speaks the peculiar sentence, and that who may be a permanently and inherently divided consciousness, doubled within and against itself. Not every Gothic narrative includes heightened language as memorably and strategically placed as it sometimes is in these texts, but many of them include related kinds of highly stylized language that opens us to a sometimes dizzying response. Instead of a stable world of opposites that maintain their separation, Gothic narratives present a shifting world in which one regularly becomes two and two are also one in a dark, unstable space without exit.

Gothic and/as monsters

That dark world is also one of monsters, but the kind of monster that inhabits Gothic narrative changes significantly. In the main texts of Gothic fiction’s first wave up until Frankenstein, people regularly behave monstrously, both men and women, though usually the monstrous human beings are aggressively, pathologically self‐indulgent, dom- inating men. The situation changes with Frankenstein in a way that the political discourse about the French Revolution and its aftermath influenced. Victor Frankenstein’s creation is sometimes called a “creature” and sometimes less neutrally a “monster,” in nearly equal measure. The term monster has a dual history in relation to the French Revolution that Mary Shelley would have known because her parents, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, were politically engaged intellectuals. Both detractors and supporters of the Revolution and of its principles used the term, one side to characterize the violent mob as subhuman and the other side to characterize the aristocracy in the same light (Baldick 1987). From the perspective of the political discourse of its time, the narrative of Frankenstein concerns the creature’s violent response to not being recognized as worthy of respect and care by his master and, in effect, parent. The shared situation of creature and master stages the disagreement in the political discourse and marks Shelley’s narrative as post‐Revolutionary, not just chronologically but conceptually, in a way that sets it apart from a great many first‐ wave Gothic novels. There is a strong link in the narrative to history and to a politically relevant conception of monstrosity in relation to social hierarchies. Monsters recur in the Gothic for the rest of the century, but they change form in ways that reflect and respond to the steadily increasing contact between Europeans and indigenous people during the expansion of Empire. The later monsters also show the influence of evolutionary thinking on conceptions of social and human progress and degeneration (Goss 2012). Forward‐looking and influential, Frankenstein is still of its particular time, the century’s early decades, because it is pre‐evolutionary and pre‐ anthropological, as well as post‐Revolutionary. The conception of what it means to be human is in flux throughout the century, shifting in ways that respond to the interactions that came with colonialism and to humanity’s destabilized place in the hierarchy of beings – not just in European and English political contexts – once evolutionary thinking challenged Biblical history and suggested a continuity between the animal and the human. Through its connection to the bestial and to uncivilized practices, especially cannibalism, and its superhuman qualities, the vampire in particular stages Gothic 131 the instability of the hierarchy of beings and races in a global, post‐evolutionary world. Frankenstein’s creature is strong and smart, as well as associated in his appearance with non‐European peoples, and he commits crimes for the sake of revenge, but he is not an animal and not a cannibal. Although there is a connecting thread of monstrosity in the history of Gothic fiction, the creators of the later monsters are responding to new stages of empire and thinking about the human. It is not surprising that the history of Gothic writing is a history of monstrous behavior and invented monsters, since the Gothic novel appears strangely malformed by comparison with other types of novels. It is a literary monster, unruly, misshapen, grotesque. And it is a mirror, but not the sort that Stendhal had in mind when he wrote in The Red and the Black (1830) that a novel is a mirror traveling down a roadway. Mirrors sometimes play a prominent role in Gothic fiction. There is a cheval glass, a large mirror in a frame that can be tilted, in Jekyll’s laboratory, for the purpose of observing, in what must have been a mixture of fascination and horror, his own transformations, the relation between his ordinary appearance and a dark truth. In Wilde’s Gothic story “The Birthday of the Infanta” (1891) a deformed dwarf at the court of the Spanish monarchy looks in a mirror and discovers his own ugliness, a recognition that kills him. He, Henry Jekyll, and Dorian Gray, with his mirrorlike portrait, do not survive the experience of self‐observation and apparently undeluded recognition. One important effect of Gothic narratives is our recognition of an ugly monster when we look in the narrative’s deforming and clarifying mirror. Rather than killing us, that glimpse enables a return from the dark experience of reading with a changed perspective on what to make of disturbing reflections that we cannot escape.

References

Arata, Stephen. 1996. Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Goss, Theodora E. 2012. “The Monster in the Fin de Siècle. Cambridge, England: Cambridge Mirror: Late Victorian Gothic and Anthropology.” University Press. PhD dissertation, Boston University. Baldick, Chris. 1987. In Frankenstein’s Shadow: Young, Robert J. C. 1995. Colonial Desire: Myth, Monstrosity, and Nineteenth‐Century Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race. London: Writing. New York: Oxford University Press. Routledge. 9 Popular and Mass‐Market Fiction Janice Carlisle

“Unquestionably Mrs. Jarley had an inventive genius”. With those sly words of self‐ congratulation, Dickens opens the 29th chapter of The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–41), the joke being the equation of his own imaginative prowess to the representational flexibility of the owner of a traveling waxworks show. Above all, Mrs. Jarley knows how to appeal to the predilections of her audience: she transforms into Hannah More a wax figure that, at an earlier stop along the way, has been “a murderess of great renown.” The analogy linking Mrs. Jarley and her creator is not at all subtle: his main character, the famed Little Nell, is repeatedly identified as one of the waxworks, their “chief attraction” (1997, 224–225). The depiction of Mrs. Jarley therefore raises the obvious question of the status of Dickens’s novel as a work of popular fiction. Selling more copies than any other of his novels, 100 000 of its last installment, The Old Curiosity Shop certainly deserves the title popular in the sense that it sold well, even better than such profitable fiction of the 1840s as The String of Pearls, aka Sweeney Todd (1846–1847) or G. W. M. Reynolds’s The Mysteries of London (1844–1848). But what happens if one turns one’s attention away from a canonical novel like the one that enshrined Nell, and even from Reynolds’s massive, multivolume urban epic, to other productions of the same decade, particularly to the novels known as penny dreadfuls or penny bloods? What constitutes their “inventive genius”? What does the first flowering of inexpensive fiction in the 1840s have to say about similar phenomena in the mediatized present, including chick lit, crime fiction, romance novels, science fiction, and spy thrillers? The critical debates surrounding such subgenres have been remarkably persistent: controversies over often contradictory uses of the terms popular and mass; hand wringing over the effects of this form of entertainment on the moral

A Companion to the English Novel, First Edition. Edited by Stephen Arata, Madigan Haley, J. Paul Hunter, and Jennifer Wicke. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Popular and Mass‐Market Fiction 133 and political tendencies of its readers; and concern over the apparently inescapable conflict between aesthetic values and wide appeal.1 The cheap novels published in the first full decade of Victoria’s reign provide perspectives on such debates and therefore on the kind of criteria that should be brought to bear on works that have not passed or are not likely to pass the test of time as works of art. To make that case, I focus here on the novels published during the 1840s by one man, Edward Lloyd (1815–1890).2 A farmer’s son, Lloyd began his London career as a bookseller; and he, like Reynolds, had his first success as a publisher with pla- giarisms of Dickens’s early fiction such as The Penny Pickwick and Oliver Twiss. Lloyd soon expanded his business by offering original serial fiction in weekly parts, whose annual number of new titles reached a high of approximately 38 in 1847 (James 1963, 38). The nature of Lloyd’s output is indicated by a sampling of his publications:

Helen Porter; or, A Wife’s Tragedy and a Sister’s Trials. A Romance (ca. 1840) Ernestine de Lacy; or, The Robber’s Foundling. An Old English Romance (1842) Kathleen; or, The Secret Marriage (1842) The Death Ship; or, The Pirate’s Bride and the Maniac of the Deep. A Nautical Romance (1846) The Black Vulture; or, The Rival Brothers. A Romance of Passion (1847?) Ethelinde; or, The Fatal Vow. A Romance (1848?)

Lloyd also originated a number of Sunday papers, including the Penny Sunday Times and People’s Police Gazette (1840), which purportedly reached a circulation of 95 000 in 1843 (James 1963, 36), and, more important for my purposes at least, Lloyd’s Penny Weekly Miscellany of Romance and General Interest (1843), which was the venue for the original publication of serial novels that later appeared in penny parts. Some of the difficulty in working with Lloyd’s novels is their relative scarcity, resulting at least in part from his repudiation of them later in his career, when, as the respectable owner of a publishing empire of weekly newspapers, he is said to have tried to destroy as many copies of his early publications as he could locate. Lloyd cleverly made the most of the opportunities offered him. Historians of this period often remark that successes like his and Dickens’s were predicated on the changing economic conditions and technological innovations of the 1830s and 1840s – more efficient and larger mechanized presses and the ability to produce large sheets of paper – as well as the lowering of the so‐called taxes on knowledge. New and more reliable forms of communication and transport, principally the railroad, also increased Lloyd’s gains: the line to Manchester, for instance, allowed him to sell in that city approximately 6000 copies of his publications per week (Haywood 2004, 166). The expansion of literacy among the members of the working classes, along with some easing of the long hours that they worked, further bolstered the profitability of Lloyd’s publications – along, not incidentally, with the fact that his readers were becoming tired of the often dull improving literature that was being offered them in Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal and Charles Knight’s publications.3 As a result of these factors, the copies sold weekly in 1845 of all the penny serials and inexpensive magazines issuing from cheap presses, Lloyd’s included, amounted to a “staggering” half‐million (Altick 1998, 291). 134 Janice Carlisle

The serial novels that Lloyd published in the 1840s are, as objects, just about as modest as they can be: each weekly part, identified by its number on the bottom of its first page, is an octavo pamphlet eight pages long; it is usually embellished with a crude wood engraving – “the very worst that ever appeared in any English publication” (Roberts 1935, 13). In these weekly installments first pages typically serve as covers, and Lloyd’s name and the location of his office appear along their spines. Each installment of a penny serial might contain between 5000 and 6000 words, which were by the middle of the1840s printed in double columns, in approximately an eight‐point font. This format was clearly a winner. As early as 1841, one of Lloyd’s writers was boasting that the part‐issue sales of his novel had reached 30 000 a week and that the volume comprised by those parts was in its eighteenth edition (Prest 1841, iv). For purposes of analysis here, I take as my examples, which I admit to choosing at random, titles by two of Lloyd’s most productive authors: Geraldine; or, The Secret Assassins of the Old Stone Cross (ca. 1845) by Thomas Peckett Prest and The Oath: or, The Buried Treasure (1846) by James Malcolm Rymer. Prest and Rymer had written two of the longest and most popular of Lloyd’s penny novels, Ela, the Outcast (1841) and Ada, the Betrayed (1844), respectively; and Prest produced one of the few of these fictions that is still read, Varney the Vampire (1847). (To try to treat this fiction a bit more dis- passionately than Lloyd’s critics have done, I refer to these books as penny serials, not with the more derogatory and somewhat inaccurate terms penny dreadfuls or penny bloods – this despite the fact that one of the few quotations that come down to us from Lloyd is his injunction to the artist George Augustus Sala: “there must be more blood – much more blood” [1895, 1: 209].) Almost pro forma in discussions of such cultural objects is the recognition that the two terms popular and mass are difficult, if not impossible, to define; and here, I think, Lloyd’s output provides an opportunity for a relevant distinction. Often, both during the Victorian period and in more recent criticism, the two labels are used interchange- ably; and even when that is not the case, different literary historians offer different accounts of when popular culture waned and mass culture waxed, with dates for ascen- dency of the latter set in the 1840s, the 1870s, or even the Renaissance.4 Juliet John offers one of the most succinct and helpful distinctions when she defines popular as “consonant with the values and interests of the people,” as opposed to mass as commercial (2008, 163). By no stretch of the imagination are Lloyd’s penny serials of the 1840s the people’s fiction: these novels depict neither the values nor recognizable images of members of the working classes. As Margaret Oliphant pointed out in 1858 when she looked carefully at a sample of “penny papers” in an article subtitled “Reading for the Million”: “if anyone supposes that here, in this special branch of literature provided for the multitude, anything about the said multitude is to be found, a more entire mistake cannot be imagined.” My reading bears out Oliphant’s surprised realization that “What has to be read in the workshop and kitchen must be enacted at club and boudoir” (2004, 364). When the main character is a gypsy, as is the case in Ela, she turns out to be the daughter of an aristocrat; when that story opens, the reader is introduced to a simpleminded maid and to cowardly serving men. Fiction so devoid of the “values” of “the people” – self‐respect being perhaps foremost among them – would hardly seem capable of fostering their “interests.” From that perspective, the explicitly political views embodied in Reynolds’s serials would make them popular in Popular and Mass‐Market Fiction 135 intent, if not in origin. When working people in the nineteenth century chose a narrative genre in which to write, it was autobiography, not fiction: of the former there are hundreds of examples; of the latter, very few – so few that the first popular novel is perhaps The Ragged‐Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell (1914, 1955). Although the term popular has been widely adopted to signify what I would call mass‐market (Butter 2010; Gelder 2004; Schneider‐Mayerson 2010), there is good reason to distinguish between these categories. Moreover, despite attempts to find evidence of popular politics in Lloyd’s fiction (Haywood 2004; Jacobs 1995), my reading supports the claim that he published mass‐market novels, commodities meant primarily to offer entertainment, though of what sort and to what end are more complicated questions. In what is arguably the classic account of mass culture, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno (1972) link the term mass to cultural products distributed by electronic means – thus their focus on radio and television and film. Yet their recourse to the model of the factory suggests the wider applicability of their theories. For Horkheimer and Adorno, products, producers, and consumers all conform to this mode of production. As later critics have noted, mass‐market fiction is “factory fiction” (Schurman and Johnson 2002, xii) produced in “fiction factories” (Denning 1987). Another classic formulation, this one by Dwight Macdonald, despite its use of popular and mass as interchangeable, explains that “Mass Culture,” which is “imposed from above,” produces cheap objects for sale at a profit: it is “fabricated by technicians hired by businessmen” (1960, 60). Although he was a farmer’s son, Lloyd became the owner of the means of production, including eventually a paper mill and estates in Morocco where esparto, the raw material used in that mill, was grown (Hoggart 1984, 3). Lloyd clearly recognized the sources of his success: he had printed on the first page of every copy of Lloyd’s Penny Weekly Miscellany a wood engraving of a rotary press. He was, moreover, what Macdonald calls the “impersonal manufacturer of an impersonal commodity” (1960, 59), one of a group, the “hacks of Salisbury Square” known for inhabiting the “lower depth” of the “trade” in which they proved to be “the shrewdest businessmen” (Altick 1998, 290–292). Dickens’s career provides a useful comparison here. He reveled in his iconic status as the Inimitable, and he traded on his distinctive personality to develop an apparently personal and highly profitable connection with the members of his audience. By contrast, the writers employed by Lloyd were, avant la lettre, workers on an assembly line, doing piecework, if not sweated labor. They were paid ten shillings per weekly part; and to make a living, they often kept a number of stories going at once, in the case of Rymer as many as ten. Lloyd famously ensured the uniformity of the products that his writers churned out by giving them for each part a specific number of sheets of lined paper so that he would receive from them enough text to fill exactly eight pages of a penny serial. Since their books were most often published anonymously – even in the case of the creators of Ada and Ela – it is hard to see them, in Victorian terms, as independent authors. Similarly, Lloyd’s test for the prospective sales of the fiction written by these now largely unknown men and women was the lowest common denominator of its target audience: his manager would ask “a servant, or machine boy” to sample a manuscript, and it was printed only if such a reader gave it his blessing (James 1963, 46). 136 Janice Carlisle

Lloyd’s output therefore epitomizes, minus the electrification, the industrialized nature of mass‐market fiction, but what were its effects on those who bought and read or had read to them his penny serials? Jonathan Rose has objected vigorously and per- tinently to the kind of literary history that practices what he calls the “receptive fallacy,” readings that derive the meanings of a text “by examining the text rather than the audience” (2010, 4). But middle‐class Victorians who condescended to comment on Lloyd’s fiction were happy to indulge in this particular fallacy. They had no doubts about the moral – or, rather, immoral – effects of such novels; and many more recent critics are equally sure about the political passivity fostered by products of the culture industry. Like Macdonald, both groups assert that “Mass culture is not and can never be any good” (1960, 69). J. Hepworth Dixon, writing in 1847 in the Daily News, cas- tigated “Mr. Edward Lloyd of Salisbury‐square,” finding in his publications “a succession of sickly but exciting scenes [featuring] theft, seduction, violence, adultery, and murder … . Contact with such a literature is inevitable corruption.” Phrases such as “intoxicating poisons” and “embalmed pestilence” (for bound volumes of penny magazines) make clear that for Dixon these publications do their readers irreparable harm (2004, 196–197).5 More recently, the same case has been made for the untoward political effects of such fiction. According to Horkheimer and Adorno, mass culture makes its consumers docile, helplessly disposed to “say Yes” to society as it is (1972, 144).6 But who is to know if such a formulation, even with qualifications, is accurate? Appropriation is the term commonly used to signify the ability of the consumers of mass culture to turn its more apparently unwholesome features into sources of what they need and want. As Rose amply proves, “British common readers were remarkably adept at appropriating enlightenment and (mostly) harmless entertainment from popular culture” (2010, 392). If Oliphant is right about the misrepresentation of working people in penny serials, and I think that she is, who knows what workers might have thought about the chuckleheads and dolts who could have been construed as their counterparts? Ellen Bayuk Rosenman, in her essay on fiction by Reynolds and Rymer, points out the difficulty of understanding the “tropes, conventions and contexts” of cheap novels that “emerg[ed] from a different social imaginary than that of their middle‐class counterparts” (2008, 226), and her warning is apposite. Even more damaging than “the receptive fallacy” is the one that attributes to a text the presumed characteristics of its readers. In the case of penny serials, such a process depends on assumptions, accurate or not, about working‐class readers: decide who reads this stuff and then declare what this stuff has to be. The Great Unwashed were, according to their so‐called betters, ignorant and simpleminded, like children or sav- ages; they craved only sensual satisfactions and escape; and they, unlike the individuals of the middle classes, constituted a mass, an undifferentiated whole whose chief quality was its sameness, its uniformity. The fiction that appealed to such readers must therefore be simple, subliterate, unchallenging, and monotonous. This critical formulation – still widespread, if more politely worded, in commentaries on penny serials – reverses the relation of cause and effect proposed by Horkheimer and Adorno, who held that the culture industry creates the demands that it supplies and therefore creates the people who think that they have themselves generated those demands; but it has the same effect of reducing such consumers to unthinking, passive victims of a system beyond their understanding and control. Popular and Mass‐Market Fiction 137

Such an approach was frequently taken by Victorian critics of penny serials, who identified their readers as unthinking, uneducated, and perhaps uneducable. Lloyd, according to this line of thinking, must have offered purchasers of his wares mindless pleasures. Sounding like Horkheimer and Adorno discoursing on the lack of “mental effort” needed to read such works (1972, 137), Oliphant refers to penny literature as “wastes of print, which nothing possessing intellect could venture on – wildernesses of words, where everything resembling sense is lost” (2004, 360).7 The qualities of both Geraldine and The Oath belie such characterizations. Geraldine in particular does not assume a semiliterate reader: despite repetitious diction, its vocabulary frequently features words like ensanguined, ruminate, and taciturnity. If a passage from this novel were subjected to a test of its accessibility such as a Lexile measure, it would probably earn a score equal to those of texts now readable by only the college‐educated. As the heroine tries to fall asleep, the reader is asked to follow her, not only through a series of visions, but through relatively complex sentences:

A solemn silence reigned on everything around; a death‐like stillness, that served to increase the melancholy depression of spirits under which Geraldine laboured; and wild and confused ideas tormented her brain; frightful images flitted upon her imagination, of shape incongruous and untangible; and such was the effect these sickly chimeras had upon her, that she trembled with fear … . (Prest, ca. 1845, 38)

I would not want to claim that this writing reaches the imaginative heights of Dickens’s prose when it describes Nell watching as a shadowy figure steals into her room at night, but Prest’s language and sentence structure in Geraldine cannot be described as simple, much less as simpleminded. The judgment rendered against novels like Geraldine that most obviously reflects middle‐class assumptions about working‐class culture is their purported sameness. If workers themselves constitute an undifferentiated mass, then what they read is a “waste” in which there can be no individuality. Wilkie Collins, in “The Unknown Public” (1858), thus finds in penny literature “an extraordinary sameness”: having read five specimens of “serial story,” he concludes, “Each portion [serial installment] purported to be written (and no doubt was written) by a different author, and yet all five might have been produced by the same man. Each part of each successive story, settled down in turn, as I read it, to the same dead level of the smoothest and flattest conventionality” (2004, 379). This critique of mass‐market fiction remains largely unchanged (Dalziel 1958, 3, 16; Gelder 2004, Chapter 2). Not surprisingly, from its first paragraph Horkheimer and Adorno’s essay stresses the unremitting impact of the “system” of mass culture, which “now impresses the same stamp on everything” (1972, 120). For Macdonald, its effects are equally “homogeniz[ing],” and a cultural product such as Life magazine turns all variety into uniformity (1960, 62). Even a recent, relatively sympathetic account of mass‐market fiction opposes it to Literature (with that capital L), the former being the territory of the generic, the latter, the province of the singular, individual talent. Moreover, to make a point about the difference between elite and common readers, this critical study cites Janice Radway, who, in her groundbreaking study of romance novels, admitted to being “perplexed” when she discovered that the women who actually read such fiction found 138 Janice Carlisle

“different” all the heroines of novels that she had found “pretty much the same” (Gelder 2004, 41, 44). What mode of reading could account for the possibility that working‐class readers might have found variety in Lloyd’s fiction in the 1840s when later readers can see only sameness? That question prompts an approach different from the ones that determine either the nature of its readers from the nature of its texts or the nature of its texts from assumptions about its readers. More useful, I think, would be a critical approach that identifies the mode of consumption encouraged by the products created for a mass market by examining the interplay between the material facts of the lives of their consumers and the formal features of the products that they buy and buy into. The historically verifiable material conditions of the lives of working people, particularly in the first half of the nineteenth century, were characterized by relative lack – by a lack of time and a lack of money – by “inanition,” to use the term that Thomas Carlyle applied to the Condition of England in the opening paragraph of Past and Present (1843). The relation between a thin purse and Lloyd’s penny serials is so obvious as to need no explanation, but the relation of a shortage of leisure time and such fiction is a bit more complicated. An emphasis on material conditions quickly demonstrates the wrong‐headedness of middle‐class conceptions of how workers consumed fiction. The Greatest Plague of Life: or, the Adventures of a Lady in Search of a Good Servant. By One Who Has Been “Almost Worried to Death” (1847) is a comic novel written by “the brothers Mayhew,” Augustus and Henry, and wonderfully illustrated by George Cruikshank; it tells the story of a middle‐class housewife whose large family is ruined because she cannot find a “good servant.” One of the worst is Betsy, a maid addicted to “trumpery penny novels.” The Mayhews stress how often Betsy spends long stretches of time reading: “sitting for hours” over The Murder at the Old Smithy or The Heads of the Headless; spending a “whole evening” over a volume of trashy fiction; going out to buy the first number of Ela and, because numbers two through four have been included as a bonus, devoting “all the next day” to her reading of them (1847, 192, 205).8 Yet such long stretches of time, except perhaps on Sunday, would hardly have been available to a real Betsy serving in a real, would‐be genteel household. Betsy is reading, not in the way that such servants would have read, but in the way that her employer read: with absorbed concentration during periods measured in hours rather than in the few minutes that Betsy would have had at her command. Oliphant had a more accurate sense of the rhythms of working‐ class experience: “Events great and grievous come upon them [the masses] as upon their social superiors; but necessity thrusts them on without the lingering which we have time to make over our graves and shipwrecks. They have to gulp down their sob in the midst of common work … . Their leisure, [which is] brief and rapid, and sharpened with the day’s fatigue, loves, above all things, a story” (2004, 362–363). What Oliphant says about grief and leisure is equally true of reading: for working people it was a luxury that had to be indulged briefly and rapidly if it was to be indulged at all. Oliphant’s insight also comments on another middle‐class notion about how working people read, one that she ironically puts forth when she refers to their love “above all things” of “a story.” According to this line of thinking, Lloyd’s penny serials deal mainly in the conventions of melodrama and romance because their readers, too unsophisticated to care for anything else, found in fiction a means of escape from the inanition of their lives. Many of the features identified with melodrama are apparent Popular and Mass‐Market Fiction 139 in The Oath and Geraldine; their characterizations, for instance, are notably formulaic. Yet seeing in such novels only a melodramatic emphasis on plot would be to identify delayed gratification – delayed until the end of an installment or more likely to the end of a novel – as the source of its readers’ escapist satisfactions. Penny serials, however, frequently do not promise or deliver such gratification, which is more consistent with middle‐class modes of extended reading than with the necessarily “brief and rapid” indulgences of their working‐class counterparts. Accordingly, The Oath and Geraldine demonstrate a remarkable disregard for the coherence and completion of their plots. The form of their weekly installments is unlike that of Dickens’s serials, in which he made sure that each part concluded with the end of a chapter. The penny parts of Rymer’s and Prest’s novels end always in the middle of chapters and more often than not in the middle of sentences, so if the reader hopes to reach the climax of a particular episode before the part concludes, that reader is out of luck. As I chose at random which of Lloyd’s publications to treat, I am also choosing the examples here at random. The eleventh number of The Oath begins in the middle of Chapter XXXII: “‘Why, why, – what noise was that?’ inquired Nicholas, suddenly as the sound that had disturbed his father was again heard” (Rymer 1846, 81). The eleventh number of Geraldine begins in the middle of Chapter XIV: “and she quickly conquered the apprehensions which were gradually stealing over her” (Prest ca. 1845, 81). These random samples – and I take an oath that that is what they are – provide two adverbs for the mode of consumption that these novels invite: it is reading done suddenly and quickly. Such a way of enjoying fiction is particularly suited to those who cannot count on being able to buy every part of a serial novel, and it therefore makes sense that the unit of pleasure offered by a penny serial was not the whole novel with its plot fully realized or even an episode in that plot. The worker who might purchase The Oath or Geraldine for this first time, beginning to read it at its eleventh number, is invited to ask: What noise did Nicholas hear? What “apprehensions” did “she” feel and why? Intense momentary engagement with a snippet of text encourages more speculation than does the reading of any of its completed wholes: bits of disconnected narrative offer their readers occasions to invent episodes from the hints that it provides, becoming storytellers who arguably use both intellect and imagination to make up what precedes a particular moment as well as what might follow it. In other ways plot proves to matter little in both The Oath and Geraldine. In fact, if Lloyd’s readers actually had read novels for the pleasures provided by their plots, he would not have made a penny. In these works consistency of action is unimportant – not, I think, because Rymer and Prest were incompetent, but because they knew that it was a quality for which their readers could, as the agrammatical cliché goes, care less. The story of Geraldine should feature prominently its eponymous heroine, a beautiful young woman brought up by a couple who are clearly not her parents; but the novel is quickly hijacked by two other stories, the first involving the marriage of Lady Florella to the mysterious Baron of Ravensby, and the second, the love of Arthur de Clermont for Adeline, the daughter of an ambitious and money‐hungry earl. The second plot, which does more of the hijacking than the first, goes literally farther afield from Geraldine’s story by taking its hero off to fight against Saladin during the Crusades. After more than a third the length of the serial, it finally returns to Geraldine’s story, which is then linked up to Arthur’s, but in such a confusing and huddled‐up fashion that any reader hoping for a 140 Janice Carlisle satisfying conclusion would be disappointed. Similarly, whatever appeal The Oath may have, it is not narrative logic. The subtitle refers to buried treasure, but that treasure never materializes, and it is mentioned only once when one villain tricks another into thinking that the grave‐shaped hole that he is digging will lead him to gold and gems. The illustrations in both these novels also privilege momentary rather than extended modes of attention. In Geraldine, some of the unsigned wood engravings, admittedly crude but often stylishly curvilinear, have no relation to the action of the penny parts that they embellish or even to the novel as a whole. Some depict earlier or later episodes; some ignore the historical setting of the action; and at least three are not related to the text in any way. The engraving on the title page depicts at the site of the Old Stone Cross a character who never visits it in the course of the story. The illustrations for The Oath are no more predictably tied to the action of the parts in which they appear. The image on the title page, called “Alan Heron and Sandon in the Traveller’s Chamber,” represents an event that does not happen until the end of the fourth number. The episode depicted in the wood engraving that opens the twelfth number, “The Frantic Mother stays the Fury of Allan Heron,” never happens at all. A reader can enjoy the episode designated by this title only by inventing it. The incoherence and inconsequentiality of the plot in The Oath are particularly telling, I think, because it first appeared for 87 weeks in Lloyd’s Penny Weekly Miscellany as Brentwood of Brentwood; or, The Oath. A Romance (1845–1846). In its original unil- lustrated form, the story extends to 156 chapters, more than thrice the 50 chapters of penny parts; fifteen chapters of the magazine serial, for instance, become a single paragraph in The Oath. Typically sharing the sixteen pages of the Penny Miscellany with several other serial novels such as The Unwilling Bride; or, A Daughter’s Sacrifice, along with short stories and poetry, Brentwood of Brentwood seems to assume a more consistent readership than does The Oath. Plot does matter in the magazine serial, as does a sense of completion: installments end with the ends of chapters, and many of the episodes not contained in The Oath deal with the misfortunes of the son and daughter of the older Brentwood after his death, as if the stories of two generations of Brentwoods have to be told before the novel can satisfactorily conclude. The premium placed in penny serials on the moment rather than on extended narrative explains why novels that now seem so tediously dreary when read from start to finish could have had such a large following in the 1840s. Brief episodes depicting unexpected extremes of human experience follow quickly one on another in Lloyd’s publications. There is no need for the characters in Geraldine to have fully developed psychologies: they are so thoroughly defined by what they desire and by what they fear that their only emotions are longing and dread, which they experience with remarkably repetitious regularity. The opening of The Oath, which is both one of the most bloody of the penny serials and one of the most anodyne, epitomizes the aesthetic of the intense moment. The peace of the interior of St. Paul’s at midnight is broken by a terrible cry, the description of which seems to stand for the kind of interest that this tale will offer:

It was not a shriek, it was not a scream, neither was it a groan, but it seemed all that was horrible of all such sounds concentrated into one long, dreadful howling cry. Nothing could be like it. It stood alone in the intensity of its awful, shuddering terror. (Rymer 1846, 2) Popular and Mass‐Market Fiction 141

This cry has come from a man who has regained consciousness after having been immured alive in a coffin, and the exposition of his increasing horror invites the readers to align their perspectives with his. His head and arms are bloodied, one of them is broken as he crashes against the sturdy sides of his coffin, and he turns over only at “the expense of tearing from the shoulder flesh and skin” (6). The dying man then becomes frantic with thirst:

Madness now seized him; one of his hands was near his mouth, and he fixed his teeth in his own wrist, drinking eagerly the blood which flowed from the wound, and tearing out, in long, bloody strings, the veins, arteries, and sinews of his arm. They clung round his mouth, and hung entangled among his teeth, like mangled worms still writhing with the agony of death. The blood was hot, fiery and frothy, yet to him it was nectar, as he gashed at his arm, and, with a slopping, sucking noise, drank up the seething fluid. He wallowed his face in the sanguinary, slimy‐like juice he had produced, and his teeth crackled, ground, and crunched against the bone of his arm, as he laughed – yes, laughed as he went on with his mad demoniac repast. (7)

This verbal wallowing in blood and writhing sinews is the prelude to a tame story of revenge that never again rises to the level of horror with which it opens; and this kind of scene, despite the term penny blood, is rare in such fiction. Yet several of the sentences in this episode – “It stood alone in [its] intensity” and “Nothing could be like it” – epitomize, at its most extreme, the power of the single and singular moment, a power that was, I think, a good part of the appeal of the fiction that Lloyd published. Not surprisingly then, the terms offered by Oliphant and in the eleventh numbers of The Oath and Geraldine – brief, rapid, sudden, quick – characterize a mode of consumption consonant with the conditions of the lives of working people. This speculation is confirmed by Mayhew’s account of the waste‐paper trade in London Labour and the London Poor. Mostly illiterate buyers “collect their paper street by street, calling upon every publisher, coffee‐shop keeper, printer or publican” there. In one case a waste dealer told Mayhew that he regretted that so many of the pamphlets that he bought were religious texts, but he added, “I’ve heard of a page round a quarter of cheese, though, touching a man’s heart.” The separate leaves from books and periodicals of all description were used to wrap meat, fish, sweets, and tobacco, as well as cheese; and the wife of one poor man “schemed to go to the shops who ‘wrapped up their things from books’ in order that he might have something to read after his day’s work” (1968, 2: 113–114). Mayhew does not stipulate what kind of book would give this sort of pleasure, but pages from Lloyd’s serial novels, with their privileging of bits and chunks of text even smaller than their eight‐page parts, might well have been among them. That a single factory in the culture industry of the 1840s could consistently produce so many products suited to its mass‐market consumers does constitute an “inventive genius” comparable to Mrs. Jarley’s or perhaps even to her creator’s. Yet by linking the formal features of Lloyd’s fiction to the material conditions of his readers, it is possible to see not only how unlike Dickens’s fiction his penny serials were but also how thoroughly they eschewed middle‐class criteria for a good read. The purchaser of The Old Curiosity Shop must be in it for the long haul: the triple and intricately intertwined plots featuring Nell, Kit, and Quilp largely generate the contrasts that structure both the action and its meaning. Novels like Geraldine and The Oath, however, cannot be 142 Janice Carlisle dismissed because they lack the aesthetic virtues appropriate to a mode of consumption unsuited to the conditions of their readers. Successful products of the culture industry succeed precisely because they know when and how, in Mrs. Jarley’s terms, to change a murderess into Hannah More. Despite the fact that literary historians, sometimes on the basis of only one comment by one of the informants in London Labour and the London Poor, locate the demise of penny serials in the late 1840s,9 there is evidence that they sold well for decades longer (Brantlinger, 1998, 174). In an odd way, we have come full circle from the nineteenth century when a lack of time, for at least some readers, made the moment the standard measure of reading. We now live in a time of hyper rather than deep attention (Hayles 2007), when tweets and the brief segments of reality TV, sandwiched in between series of thirty‐ or even fifteen‐second commercials, ask for whatever attention is available in a distracted, multitasking culture. It is easy to assume that the culture industry, which is now more powerful and more pervasive than ever before, relentlessly turns the consumers of its products into the kind of mindless and utterly passive victims that the buyers of Lloyd’s fiction are routinely taken to have been. Yet it is worth considering that, like other products of mass culture more generally, his penny serials might have had an imaginative appeal because they asked their readers to become, pace Horkheimer and Adorno, the manufacturers of what they consumed.

Notes

1 See John (2001, Chapter 1), Gelder (2004, 5 Cf. John (2001, 25–26, 32). For context, see Chapter 1), Butter (2010), and Knapp Brantlinger (1998, Chapter 1). (2013). 6 For counterarguments, see Knapp (2013) and 2 This account draws on Roberts (1935), James Haywood (2004, Chapter 7). (1963), Hoggart (1984), and Haywood (2004). 7 See also Dalziel (1958), Jacobs (1995, 323), 3 See James (1963, Chapter 3), James and Smith Mayhew (1968, 3: 370). (1998), and Webb (1955, 78–79). 8 On Betsy, see James (1982, 355–357). 4 Respectively, Haywood (2004, 139), Vincent 9 Mayhew (1968, 1: 25). cf. James (1963, 167– (2000), and Knapp (2013). On the various def- 168), Dalziel (1958, Chapter 6), and Webb initions of these terms, see Williams (1985). (1955, 163).

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The term experimental fictions sparks in the minds of English‐speaking literature students certain conditioned associations: with the high modernism of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, for instance, or with a range of late‐twentieth‐century works labeled metafictional or postmodern. Discussing the French tradition, Warren Motte contends that experimental writing is “very much a creature of our own time” and that it “always includes a metadiscourse” which “interrogates the fundamental premises and enabling features of literary art.” Motte further maintains that experimental works, which perforce mingle tradition and innovation, put this “process of mixing … on display with some degree of ostentation” and that any experimental artifact worthy the name must appear “inescapably new” (2006, 214). Motte rightly underscores the metadiscursive, innovative, and peacocking dimensions of much experimental writing. Yet his emphasis on the twentieth‐century avant‐garde and on highbrow aesthetic self‐consciousness ignores a history of experimentation that is longer, more uneven, and less easy to characterize. Many experiments with fiction are ad hoc, responding to recent trends, to local histories, to immediately felt restrictions and time‐sensitive opportunities, whether cultural, social, political, or technological. The experimentalism that scholars of twentieth‐century fiction sometimes view as an unprecedented rejection of “the static literary code of nineteenth‐century realism” (Hutcheon 1984, 26) might alternatively be construed as a particularly notable skirmish in a longstanding battle about the shape of fictional representation, merely one in a series of attempts to reset the conventions of realism so as to bring new subject matter or overlooked experiences into view. To prefer the plural phrase experimental fictions to such near equivalents as experimental fiction or experimental novel, then, is to argue tacitly against the notion that there is a universal kitbag of experimental methods or a single coherent

A Companion to the English Novel, First Edition. Edited by Stephen Arata, Madigan Haley, J. Paul Hunter, and Jennifer Wicke. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Experimental Fictions 145 experimentalist philosophy or a continuous, progressive history of experimental fiction writing that dates from the early 1900s. This essay will gesture toward the variety of experimental fiction writing in English over the last 300 years by sketching a few possible approaches to the subject, summon- ing some of the usual suspects, to be sure, but also attempting to extend the range of the term experimental so as to make possible unusual juxtapositions and, perhaps, fresh thinking about the herky‐jerky history of fictional experimentation. Eschewing a strict chronological survey, the essay will instead briefly take up five topics typically associated with fictions labeled experimental – hybridization of genre and medium, the problem of realism, the subjects and objects of narration, the narrative presentation of other minds, and the depiction of temporal experience. But it will do so with reference to texts not conventionally identified with literary experimentalism, especially obscure eighteenth‐century fictions that seem unpromising sources of pioneering innovation (Spacks 2006). The goal is to show that experimental fiction is not the exclusive preserve of a literary elite or of intellectually daring twentieth‐ century writers, and that any fair accounting of its history must acknowledge mundane brands of fumbling invention along with the “more sublime and transcendental modes” of innovation and metadiscursive exploration typically linked with recent experimental fiction (Lupton 2006, 403).

Hybrid Genres, Hybrid Media

Thinking about hybridization – about works that blend genres or graft traditional fictional ideas onto new media – might offer one useful way of approaching a broad history of experiments with fiction. At least as early as Jonathan Swift’s Tale of a Tub (1704) and Gulliver’s Travels (1726), writers parodied and mingled different types of writing in order both to make and to mock newfangled literary modes. Works of faux scholarship like The Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus (1741) have late progeny in Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire (1962) and even in contemporary titles whose tone, aims, and genre are more ambiguous, such as J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello (2003) and Diary of a Bad Year (2007). Generic amalgamation was also common in early novels that borrowed unironically from varied literary sources; examples include the works of Tobias Smollett and Ann Radcliffe’s Gothic fiction, replete with snatches of poetry, long sections of lyric locodescription, and carefully orchestrated effects of suspense. The artful contemporary analogue of this experimental practice can be found in a genre‐weaving tour de force like David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004). The vogue for graphic novels suggests another fruitful avenue of hybridization, as artists, building upon a tradition that has roots in broadsides, in book illustration, and in the example of William Hogarth, play with the relationship between written narrative and sequential art, or even with the line dividing fiction from memoir, often with quite moving results, as in Daniel Clowes’s Ghost World (1997), Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth (2000), or Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (2006). Serialization likewise had an impact on fictional form in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, as did other aspects of the emerging print media of the day. At the close of the first volume of The Adventures of a Bank‐Note (Bridges 1770–1771), the 146 Mark Blackwell vicissitudes of serial publication generate a moment of metafictional playfulness, as the narrating banknote explains how the exigencies of print dictate the awkward shape that his tale is taking:

I am sorry I cannot now finish the story of this old genius and his son; but the end of the volume has stolen upon me unawares, and the second being half printed off, I am obliged to pop both the old gentleman, his son Jack, and an honest curate, to whom he presented me, into the latter part of the second volume. (1: 208–209)

Though Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–1767) coyly exploited its serial publication as well, its most striking moments derive from Sterne’s canny manipulation of other material aspects of print. Memorable examples include its black, marbled, and blank pages, its plot diagrams, and its visual representation of Trim’s flourish with a stick. Recent works that harness the full gamut of physical and typographical opportunities made possible by modern printing (Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves [2000] or Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes [2010]) and hypertext fiction intended for electronic consumption (Michael Joyce’s afternoon: a story [1987] or Caitlin Fisher’s These Waves of Girls [2001]), along with novels first composed as text messages or tweets (Hannu Luntiala’s The Last Messages [2007]; Matt Stewart’s The French Revolution: A Novel [2010]), demonstrate how material changes and technological innovations continue to contribute to the genre‐bending metamorphosis of fiction. The long history of metafiction – that is, of works that are self‐conscious about their status as artifacts of language and about the conventions and contrivances of narrative – might offer another way of structuring an overview of experimental fiction. One might begin with, say, the obsessively self‐regarding Tristram Shandy; touch on an obscure example – “The Adventures of the Rambler’s Magazine,” published in The Rambler’s Magazine in 1785 – that demonstrates the demotic appeal of a device sometimes regarded as sophisticated and unorthodox; note that even Jane Austen, not usually credited as an experimentalist, calls readers’ attention to their role in the story‐ making endeavor at the end of her novels through her intrusive narrators and accelerated denouements; and conclude with John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), which addresses the conventionality of endings even more directly than Austen’s novels do: by having “the writer” enter the story world in the 55th chapter, stare at one of his characters, puzzle over how to finish the tale, decide to fabricate alternative conclusions, and then flip a coin to determine which ending to offer first. Austen’s ironic self‐consciousness about supplying a conventional conclusion that satisfies readers’ expectations is complemented by Fowles’s own winking acknowledgment that the fictionality of fiction is never felt so forcefully as at work’s end. Both in turn refract the self‐conscious endings of Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey (1768), wherein aposiopesis leaves the narrator’s final sentence incomplete and his final action unfinished, and of Tristram Shandy, which offers readers cessation rather than closure. All seem to be searching for a crafty, aesthetically compelling version of the cop‐out common in serialized stories like “The Adventures of the Rambler’s Magazine,” that interruption of readerly immersion never dignified as metadiscursive – namely, the trite, oft unfulfilled promise, “to be continued.” Experimental Fictions 147

Antirealism, Hyperrealism, and the Origins of Experimentalism

The word experiment can be used to describe a procedure “adopted in uncertainty whether it will answer the purpose” (OED, sense 2). This is one way in which fictions might be experimental: by embracing an innovative method, or breaking with a recognized and accepted way of writing fiction. Why? To illustrate something new, to create an as‐yet unknown form of art, or perhaps to test a hypothesis (OED, sense 3). The idea of experimentation as trial (and error) evokes the strong ties between the term experiment and a tradition of empirical science in which direct experience, rather than ingrained authority, doubtful testimony, or ill‐founded conjecture, serves as the basis of truth claims. That tradition stretches back to Francis Bacon’s emphasis in The New Organon (1620) on experience and experiment, etymological cousins that derive from the Latin verb experiri, to try. The word experimental was first tied to the business of fiction making when, in an 1880 naturalist manifesto entitled The Experimental Novel, Émile Zola encouraged writers to adopt “the experimental method” in their representation of “living bodies.” Just as Claude Bernard had adapted the procedures “followed in the study of inanimate bodies in chemistry and physics” to physiology in an effort to “put medicine in a scientific path,” so, Zola declared, writers might compose experimental novels in order to “explain the natural phenomena, both individual and social, of which meta- physics … has given only irrational and supernatural explanations” (1893a, 2, 54). Thus, the experimental novelist must seek “to possess a knowledge of the mechanism of the phenomena inherent in man, to show the machinery of his intellectual and sensory manifestations, under the influences of heredity and environment, … and then finally to exhibit man living in social conditions produced by himself, which he modifies daily” (20–21). Zola advocated an astringent realism grounded in the cold hard facts of “scientific investigation” and “experimental reasoning” (18). Yet Zola did not claim to be the porte‐parole for an aesthetic vanguard that had broken with the novel‐writing conventions of the past. In “Naturalism on the Stage,” he associated the experimentalist’s “minute and thorough exactitude of observation” with “a literary school as old as the world,” tracing its more recent history through Balzac, Stendhal, and Flaubert (1893b, 113, 109, 121), each marking a step in the progressive development of a realism always striving to be more truthful, closer to scientific fact. From this perspective, Ian Watt’s account of the eighteenth‐century emergence of the protocols of formal realism in The Rise of the Novel (1957) might perversely be read as a story about the development of experimental fiction. Zola’s brand of experimentalism may not describe what one finds in Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), with its potpourri of styles and voices, or in Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925), with its stream‐of‐consciousness lyricism and fluid passage among minds. Indeed, mainstream modernist fiction writers are usually regarded as having reacted against the tyranny of realism by subordinating traditional mimetic representation of the world that presents itself before the observer’s gaze and championing in its stead formal experimentation, linguistic playfulness, and what Elaine Scarry calls “the mimesis of sentient awareness” (1985, 304). Yet Zola’s description of the shape of the 148 Mark Blackwell fiction he espouses – “It adopts the form which pleases it, … feeling no longer bounded by any limit” – might easily be reconciled with twentieth‐century rewritings of classic narrative structure. Moreover, his depiction of the novel as “a report, nothing more,” and of the novelist as “a recorder” whose “only task” is “to put before you true data,” is not inconsistent with, say, Woolf’s effort to render psychological processes faithfully, or Joyce’s minute attention to the mind’s experience of idiolects and guild language, to all the intelligible and unintelligible sounds that stream through us like alpha particles through gold foil, mostly passing unremarked, but occasionally jarring us into bemused awareness (Zola 1893b, 124–125). After all, as Michael Seidel maintains, “Joyce’s narration works by a careful mimesis, a mimicry almost” (1994, 768), and indeed the modernism of Joyce and Woolf might be characterized as an effort to expand realism’s range by developing fresh techniques of mimesis that capture previously unrepresented experiences of time’s vagaries and of the mind’s interaction with the world, thereby going Locke and Sterne one better in writing “a history‐book … of what passes in a man’s own mind” (Sterne 2004, 66). Zola’s depiction of the novelist as someone who “disappears” and “simply shows what he has seen” (1893b, 125) even anticipates Alain Robbe‐Grillet’s promotion of a “new novel” that employs an “optical and descriptive” method to reveal “things in their phenomenological nudity” (Motte 2006, 217), and his attendant rejection of the “suspect interiority” and “pseudo‐mystery” with which objects are endowed in psychologically oriented fiction (Robbe‐Grillet 1985, 21). David Lodge may be right that Zola did not employ the phrase “experimental novel” in quite the sense that most of us have in mind when we use it to refer to a work “that ostentatiously deviates from received ways of representing reality … to heighten or change our perception of that reality” (1992, 105). Yet for Zola as for Lodge, the goal of experimental fiction is to overcome what Viktor Shklovsky called “automatized perception” so as “to make a stone feel stony.” “By ‘estranging’ objects and complicating form,” Shklovsky argued, art makes us see objects and experiences that would otherwise be merely recognized – that is, unconsciously registered as congenial to our ideas about them but unfelt as things in themselves (1990, 6). This is perhaps what Joseph Conrad had in mind when, in the preface to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (1897), he asserted that the writer’s job is “to make you see,” to make “the light of magic suggestiveness” play over “the commonplace surface of words” that have been “worn thin, defaced by ages of careless usage” (1986, 34). Experimental practices that seem to overturn the codes of realism might be put in the service of a more rigorous or an alternative realist practice, one that offers readers a different perspective on the world, or a glimpse of a different universe altogether.

Eccentric Subjects and Objects

The early history of the novel in English is indeed bound up with making readers see new things and helping them to see everyday things anew. Works such as Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688), Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), and Gulliver’s Travels exploited period interests in exploration and discovery, teasing readers with the promise of introducing them to unprecedented sights and bringing fresh subject matter into the fold of fiction. Such later titles as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), H. G. Wells’s The Time Experimental Fictions 149

Machine (1895), and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005) – indeed, the entire genre of science fiction – test hypotheses about the limits of life, the boundaries of scientific discovery and technological achievement, and changes in the experience of being human wrought by humans’ manipulation of their environment. Sometimes the experimental novelty consists in an unusual protagonist: an outrageous female criminal in Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722), or a virtuous young female servant in Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740), or a female prostitute in John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748– 1749), or an apparently orphaned male ne’er‐do‐well in Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749), all of which challenged the scope of eighteenth‐century readers’ interest in the human experience and the range of their human sympathies. The most surprising eighteenth‐century experiment with fictional protagonists comes in the subgenre known as the it‐narrative, in which an inanimate object or animal serves as the central character and, on most occasions, the narrator. Coins, waistcoats, lapdogs, goose quills, hackney coaches, whipping tops, petticoats, air bal- loons, and mice all enjoyed their moment (Blackwell 2007, 2012); it is as if the writers of such works were playfully testing the limits of Samuel Johnson’s well‐known claim, in Rambler No. 60, that “there has rarely passed a life of which a judicious and faithful narrative would not be useful” (1761, 2: 34). To endow cats and pincushions with self‐awareness is not merely to experiment with the boundaries of biography, but also to pursue an early form of science fiction by imaginatively exploring the frontiers of consciousness, as John Locke had when discussing a “rational parrot” (1975, 333) in his Essay concerning Human Understanding (1689–1704). At the close of her formidable essay on Defoe’s “genius for fact,” Virginia Woolf uses the crude pot that Crusoe fashions for himself as an example of the novel’s capacity to bring something to view:

And is there any reason … why the perspective that a plain earthenware pot exacts should not satisfy us as completely, once we grasp it, as man himself in all his sublimity standing against a background of broken mountains and tumbling oceans with stars flaming in the sky? (1986, 57–58)

For Woolf, the pot is an emblem of the novel itself, homely but sufficient, with a satisfying heft in the hand and a beauty wrought from its functional spareness. But Woolf also highlights Defoe’s achievement in coaxing readers to see the world afresh by making Crusoe’s unusual perspective on things analogous not only to regarding the overlooked objects around us differently – to making the stone feel stony, in Shklovsky’s phrase – but also to viewing our surroundings from an unexpected point of view – that of, say, an ordinary piece of crockery. To cast an object as one’s narrator–protagonist is not simply to experiment with what counts as a worthy subject of biographical interest, nor is it merely to take up worrisome epistemological and ontological questions. It is also to make trial of an alternative narrative perspective. It was perhaps with Woolf’s essay in mind, as well as Fowles’s The Collector (1963), that Tibor Fischer composed his own version of what the world might look like from a pot’s point of view. The narrator of The Collector Collector (1997), a 5000‐year‐old Sumerian vessel, thinks of itself not as an object acquired by a shifting series of owners, but as the collector and curator of its human possessors. The pot allows Fischer to toy 150 Mark Blackwell with the possibility of a radically objective narrative perspective; it is fond of classifying human characteristics by comparing them against its vast catalog of experience: “Her navel is type sixty‐seven of two thousand, two hundred, and thirty‐four, the buried bald man” (Fischer 1997, 12). The pot’s age also permits Fischer to explore narrative omniscience; for example, its unsurpassed knowledge of medical science, accumulated over centuries, is “greater than any three teaching hospitals you could care to name,” rendering it a near infallible judge of human ailments (3). Fischer’s droll shift of perspective is indebted to Apuleius’s Golden Ass, whose protagonist, Lucius, is ambitious to spy the hidden truths that lie behind false appearances, to discover the secret – or occult – causes of things: “I thought the very stones I stumbled against must be petrified human beings … I expected statues and pictures to start walking, walls to speak, oxen and other cattle to utter prophecies” (Apuleius 1999, 22). Camouflaged human agency is ubiquitous in Lucius’s vision of the world, either in the form of the witchcraft responsible for inexplicable events or in the form of the human faces lurking in animate beings and inanimate objects alike. When a magical witch’s ointment transforms him into a braying ass, rendering him the type of trapped human he imagines to be peopling the inanimate and animal world, Lucius himself becomes a figure for unrecognized and unappreciated interiority. Yet the secrets Lucius uncovers while masquerading as an ass have little to do with magic and more to do with mundane human foibles. Because “everybody behaved and spoke with complete freedom in front of me, paying no attention to my presence,” Lucius reports, he has become “very widely informed” about human peccadilloes (154). Apuleius does not experiment with what the world might actually look like from the perspective of a beast of burden; he betrays no interest in the questions addressed in philosopher Thomas Nagel’s seminal essay, “What is it like to be a bat?,” first published in 1974. Yet he does playfully advance the idea that observing the world from a different vantage point might make it possible to see things otherwise invisible. In the same spirit, eighteenth‐century writers took an interest in animal and object narration as a formal device that expanded the narrative toolkit beyond first‐person retrospec- tion (Defoe), epistolary fiction (Richardson), and different flavors of intrusive narration (Fielding and Sterne). The testimony of things in eighteenth‐century fiction – of putatively detached and disinterested observers – perhaps promised to bleach reportage of subjective coloration, thereby offering an alternative to the objectivity effect generated by, say, the letter. Like the laboratory instruments upon which the new science of men such as Robert Boyle depended, narrating coins, lapdogs, and petticoats might be expected to provide testimony untainted by human prejudices and predispositions. According to Boyle, such nonhuman witnesses were preferable to people with their “suspicious and sometimes disagreeing accounts” of their experiences (quoted in Latour 1993, 23).

Getting Inside the Mind

The it‐narrative’s experiments with perspective were complemented by its efforts to produce explanations, however implausible, for its privileged view of others. In The Adventures of a Pin (1790), for instance, the chatty pin’s dependence on chance physical Experimental Fictions 151 opportunities for its insight into others’ lives seems downright Apuleian by contrast with the spying spirits and magical objects in works such as René Le Sage’s Diable boiteux (Devil on Two Sticks) (1707), Denis Diderot’s Les Bijoux indiscrets (The Indiscreet Jewels) (1748), and Eliza Haywood’s Invisible Spy (1755). The contrast is perhaps misleading, however, as all of these narratives strain credulity, and the protocols of realism, by depicting talking objects or bottled genii, humans with unlikely talents or things with unheard‐of powers, and most limit their narrators to external views of others. These spies enjoy a marked enhancement of their capacity to see behind disguise and artifice, yet remain restricted in their access to direct evidence of what others are thinking and feeling. Thus, while the pin is endowed with both consciousness and powers of speech, it is otherwise constrained, like Apuleius’s ass, by humanlike limits of observation. The ass depends on access to doors and windows for the private information it gleans. So too the pin. While imprisoned in a bag, for instance, the pin and a companion are only able to witness events through “a little hole.” The limit of the pin’s insight into those it encounters is propinquity, and the sorts of secrets it reveals often depend on things visible to the spying eye, as when the pin observes beg- gars, who appear to be blind and infirm, “metamorphosed into handsome well made fellows” when they remove their disguises (Pin 2012, 192, 198). In like fashion, the narrator of The Adventures of a Bank‐Note frequently breaks off episodes, sometimes mid‐sentence, because a handkerchief has been stuffed into the breeches pocket where it sits, muffling its hearing, or because it has been put up in a desk, or locked up in a dressing‐table drawer (Bridges 1770–1771, 1: 202–203, 2: 27, 87). Some it‐narratives adopt the soliloquy as a form enabling the disclosure of secret thoughts and feelings. Early in The Sedan (1757), the sedan chair is engaged by a woman who “amus’d me with anecdotes of some private families, unknown to me before, as they pass’d us in their morning walk.” By recounting these stories loudly enough for the chairmen and passersby to hear, she becomes a medium for the publication of concealed private truths. The Sedan’s mechanism for the revelation of interiority is pinched from the theater, and the limits of its plausibility are duly acknowledged: “Thinks I,” the sedan muses as it eavesdrops on another passenger talking to himself, “nobody hears this man that he knows of, Why does he prate here?” (Sedan 1757, 1: 8, 53). Questions about the device’s credibility notwithstanding, The Sedan establishes a mechanism for the disclosure of intimate interiority, with the sedan’s interior functioning as a metaphor for the mind of its occupant. In The Adventures of a Watch! (1788), the soliloquy likewise serves as a means of approximating the consciousness of another. Once again, an enclosed vehicle provides the setting for spontaneous self‐disclosure, but here the scene of confession is a hackney coach. The character in question, Mr. Revel, reveals his selfish venality through a form of direct speech that seems intended to disclose an otherwise inaccessible inward state. Nonetheless, the watch that witnesses and reports Revel’s speech distinguishes between this type of soliloquy and another, more elusive sort: “This is all that ever transpired of the soliloquy; to be sure it might be longer, for there are such things as inward soliloquies. Nevertheless, I seriously and solemnly do affirm, there never was a watch or time‐piece that could develop or make known an unuttered speech” (Watch 2012, 146–147). The watch tackles directly the problem of gaining access to the unvoiced thoughts and feelings of another and declares it impossible that any timepiece – and 152 Mark Blackwell perhaps, by extension, any thing‐narrator, or any narrator whatsoever – can report such “unuttered speech.” It is one thing, the watch suggests, to claim to overhear what others are saying and doing, even when they presume themselves to be alone and unsu- pervised in, say, a closed sedan chair. It is another thing to maintain that one can hear others’ “inward soliloquies.” Spying objects like the sedan and the watch can see things invisible to most human eyes and hear things inaudible to most human ears, yet even they recognize that their inside information is at times not inside enough. Efforts to get inside others’ heads are not always figurative in eighteenth‐century fiction. Take, for example, Vitulus Aureus: The Golden Calf. Or A Supplement to Apuleius’s Golden Ass (1739), by the pseudonymous Joakim Philander. The title alludes to Apuleius, and thus to a tradition of unusual narrative strategies for exploring “the Minds of Men.” Like The Golden Ass, The Golden Calf aims “to shew the various Causes and Effects” of people’s “Judgments and Passions.” To convince readers that they should countenance its testimony about those causal processes, the work endorses a radical empiricist standard, invoking its “Philosophical Scruple to make all Matters clear to an Ocular Demonstration.” Getting inside the mind is no mere metaphor in The Golden Calf, which waggishly proffers “An Anatomical Account of some most surprising Phaenomena found in the Opening of two Gentlemens Skulls.” Left in a tavern with the bodies of two men killed in a duel, the narrator and two acquaintances “examine the Inner Part of their Skulls, to see whether their Riches had given them any more Brains than they had before, or what new Ideas they had acquired by them.” He discovers that their obsession with gold quite literally colored their perception of the world: “we saw all his Conceptions and Ideas were gilded over with that shining Metal … This Conjecture of ours was still corroborated when we came to the Chamber of his Ideas, which tho’ few in Number, were so swell’d and blown up by that gilded Vapour, that they filled all the Cavities of his Pericranium” (Philander 1739, 18–19, 44, 52–55). The primary aim of The Golden Calf is neither to unlock what it feels like to occupy another’s mind, nor to engage seriously with Lockean epistemology or period speculation about the physiology and function of the human brain. Nonetheless, its fantasy of peering through the skull to observe the effects of gold on the mind derives from Locke’s interest in ending the “abuse of words” so that ideas may be more accurately communicated, and it points forward not only to Zola’s enthusiasm for a novel‐writing method modeled on experimental physiology, or to modernist innovations in faithfully depicting the streaming contents of consciousness, but even to, say, Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005), interested in both the physiological basis of consciousness and the capacity of literature to mimic subjective experience by getting us inside a character’s head. The ambition to reveal the workings of another’s mind or to tell the story of someone’s experiences from within entails a theory of mind, even a rudimentary one, and a flexible storytelling technology that fosters a plausible and engaging sharing of consciousness. The Golden Calf gestures toward a depiction of inner life that it can formulate as a figure, or even as a desideratum, but cannot yet achieve in the novelistic terms with which we have become familiar in the wake of modernism. “Suppose one cou’d dissect Persons of different Dignities and Stations of Life, as well as different Sexes,” the narrator posits, “what a Variety of Causes and Effects wou’d present itself to our View?” (Philander 1739, 58). The promise of the novel of interiority – of the range Experimental Fictions 153 of characters it explores, of the psychological processes and emotional dynamics it maps – lies embedded in the narrator’s wishful supposition. In its ambition to trace unseen causes and effects, The Golden Calf is the late progeny of Apuleius, but it is also kin to later fictional experiments – stream‐of‐consciousness narration, say – that offer inside views.

The Times of Fiction

Two of the monuments of modernist innovation in fiction, Mrs. Dalloway and Ulysses, portray the events of 24 hours, eager to demonstrate that a single day, like a single consciousness or a single city, can contain multitudes. The tension between the spareness of that vessel – a day – and the vast extent of what it encloses serves as a figure for the disparity between temporal regimes – externally marked clock time, always marching onward, and internally felt subjective time, ranging backward and forward, inward and outward at will. By sampling a range of different subjective experiences during that day – Septimus Smith, or even Scrope Purvis, versus Clarissa Dalloway; Molly Bloom or Stephen Dedalus versus Leopold Bloom – both Woolf and Joyce conjure the sublime variety that constitutes simultaneity, the infinity that lies couched in any given moment. Giving shape to that experience of diversity in synchrony remains an artistic aspiration, as is demonstrated by the recent crowdsourced documentary Life in a Day (2011), a medley of 80 000 films recorded on July 24, 2010, and uploaded to YouTube for cutting and pasting into the 90‐minute final product. Woolf explores different versions of temporal elasticity in To the Lighthouse (1927) and Mrs. Dalloway. The well‐known opening sequence of the latter showcases the range of memories and emotions that flow through Clarissa Dalloway’s mind during a relatively short walk, calling to readers’ attention the potentially enormous distance between two consciousnesses in close physical proximity to one another (the mystery of other minds) while also underlining the disparity between clock‐marked time and the individual experience of duration. To the Lighthouse draws a sharp distinction between the overstuffed density of its first section (depicting the Ramsays’ summer home full of people on a single day crammed with feelings and memories and hopes and unspoken thoughts) and the impersonal timelessness of its second section (describing an empty house animated for ten years only by the rhythm of the seasons and the cleaning rituals of Mrs. McNab and Mrs. Bast, contrapuntally accented by occasional reports of momentous events that typically serve as the yardsticks of familial and historical time: death, marriage, childbirth, war). One effect of Woolf’s technique is to make readers see time as multifarious and nonsynchronous. Different characters may have their own experiences of the duration and feel of a particular moment, and these varieties of subjective time may run counter to each other, or to the arc spanned by one generation of a family, or to the tempo of a historical epoch, or to the longer cadences of time measured by objects like houses which long outlast individuals, families, and occasions of historical moment. It is no slight to Woolf’s achievement as perhaps the pre‐eminent novelist of temporal experience to note that playing with time is not a uniquely modern phenomenon. Fielding’s careful manipulation of a parallel between real historical 154 Mark Blackwell events – namely, the Jacobite rebellion of 1745 – and the trajectory of his protagonist’s story in Tom Jones (1749) provides one early example of a fiction writer experimenting with the different time scales of public and private history. Sterne signals his interest in time immediately in Tristram Shandy, as Tristram attributes the unfortunate course of his life to the fact that on the night of his conception his parents were out of synchrony, their disharmony occasioned by an inopportune conversation about whether or not the clock had been wound. Tristram’s father blames the “unaccountable obliquity” with which the young Tristram spins a top on this inauspicious beginning, and that obliquity serves as an apt metaphor for the indirectness of conversation in Tristram Shandy, the slanting manner in which characters address one another, the oblique relationships that make it impossible for people to meet head on and comprehend each other’s meanings and intentions fully. It also figures the way in which the experience of time may run athwart the representation of time, a fact that gives rise to one of the most famous moments in the novel: “having got, as you perceive, almost into the middle of my fourth volume – and no farther than to my first day’s life … it must follow … that the more I write, the more I shall have to write” (Sterne 2004, 3, 225–226). Even relatively obscure eighteenth‐century fictions experimented with the possibilities of fictional time. In Charles Johnstone’s Chrysal (1760–1765), perhaps the most successful eighteenth‐century it‐narrative, the eponymous gold coin recounts the stories of all the possessors through whose hands it has passed. Its access to those stories serves as another example of eighteenth‐century experiments with getting inside others’ minds; the coin is infused with a spirit that has the capacity to enter the heads of human beings and communicate directly with spirits of consciousness perched atop the fibers of the brain. Yet, since Chrysal enjoys an immediate revelation of a person’s past when it communes with that person’s consciousness, there is sometimes a profound disequilibrium between the brevity of its encounter with a particular character – the guinea merely passes through the hand of a character named Traffic, for instance – and the length of the tale it absorbs – in this case, the story of Traffic’s life in its entirety: “The length of this story will make you wonder, when I tell you, that the spirit of Traffic shewed it to me in a moment, for no longer did the gold remain in his possession” (Johnstone 2011, 1: 44). Readers experience a temporal dislocation when they read thirty‐odd pages of Traffic’s life from birth to adulthood, only to discover that almost no time has passed in Chrysal’s own life narrative. This is Johnstone’s peculiar version of the Tristram Shandy problem, whereby recounting experiences takes more time than living them. However, the slow work of tracing the complex web of cause and effect in Sterne’s narrative is replaced by the ease with which a Godlike Chrysal immediately comprehends “the natural course” of events:

to disincumber your surprise from doubts, at my repeating the past lives of persons, in whose possession I have been but a few moments, I must premise to you, that our knowledge is very different from that of men … we know all things intuitively, without the trouble, delay, and errors of discourse or reasoning … this intuition extends not only to the present face of things, but also has a retrospect to the whole series of their existence, from its first beginning: the concatenation between cause and effect being so plain to our Experimental Fictions 155

eyes, that let us but see any one event of the life of a man, and we immediately know every particular that preceded it. (2011, 1: 70–71)

The form of omniscience enjoyed by Chrysal shares something in common with the superhuman judgment that Fischer’s pot owes to an accumulated history of empirical observation that no mortal can match. Johnstone indulges a fantasy of narrative privilege that perhaps smelt fusty by the time that Thomas Pynchon described Oedipa Maas watching an exploding aerosol can pursue an intricate trajectory through her motel bathroom in The Crying of Lot 49 (1966):

The can knew where it was going, she sensed, or something fast enough, God or a digital machine, might have computed in advance the complex web of its travel; but she wasn’t fast enough, and knew only that it might hit them at any moment. (1999, 25)

By comically underscoring the impossibility of Oedipa ever enjoying the complete knowledge of interlocking causes and effects that Chrysal boasts, Pynchon rejects the totalizing narrative that such knowledge implies, a rejection that Jean‐François Lyotard diagnosed as characteristic of The Postmodern Condition (1984). What for one generation is a fictional perspective devoutly to be wished is for another a pedestrian narrative habit or an ideological mystification to be overcome. Play with orders of time and with their attendant prospects is not uncommon in it‐narratives. A later example, The Adventures of a Silver Penny (ca. 1786), serves up a protagonist whose life spans 300 years, 150 of which are spent in a single family. The size of the penny’s tale – a slim 126 pages – seems somehow at odds with the centuries‐ long scope of its life. Indeed, it comes as a surprise near story’s end when it is disclosed that the coin, which seems to share a perpetual present with readers, has become an antique purchased for display in the British Museum. The pace of the Adventures is episodic, diurnal, yet years are passing as readers turn each page. The narrative’s compass is spatial, as it boasts geographical breadth – the silver from which the penny is fashioned is mined by slaves in Peru – and introduces us to a range of characters as the penny circulates from possessor to possessor. Yet its sweep is also temporal. The movement from owner to owner, which typically functions in it‐narratives as a means of providing a contemporary cross‐section of the networked activities and discrete occupations of human beings in a given city or country, here seems a means of sketching a diachronic portrait of English social life since the Wars of the Roses. Thus, the Adventures matches the it‐narrative’s typical tension between the centrality of the object or animal protagonist and the centrifugal attraction of the characters it meets with a like tension between the kind of narrative that measures time by the standard of a single human life and the kind of narrative that has a broader historical ambit, longer and slower temporal rhythms. What Chrysal and The Adventures of a Silver Penny share in common is a fantasy of wedding inside knowledge of everyday affairs with a temporal horizon that somehow transcends human limitations – of being at once in the moment and out of time, like John Keats’s Grecian urn. The penny, a distinct coin stamped with particular figures and circulating through the hands of specific people in particular places at certain times, embodies an immediacy that results from its total immersion in the 156 Mark Blackwell particularity of discrete spatiotemporal moments. But the penny ends as a museum piece removed from such immersion and placed beyond the reach of history’s accidents, with a perspective whose seeming objectivity depends not on the unreflective embeddedness of in‐the‐moment reportage, but on its remoteness from quotidian affairs, which it surveys from a cool distance. Perhaps this investment in two forms of immediacy, one deriving from immersion in human time and the other from its transcendence, explains Chrysal’s dual identity as both a very material circulating coin and an ethereal spirit of gold. Neither Chrysal nor The Adventures of a Silver Penny can rival Woolf’s lambent depiction of the distance between the inward time of a single consciousness and the temporal sweep of forces much larger than any individual, but their crude efforts to depict different experiences of time form part of the history of experimental fiction. Experiments with the representation of time take up not only problems of elasticity or of interference between time scales, but also questions about order and direction, and thus about plot. Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow (1991) gamely attempts the impossible task of running the narrative of a life backwards, attaching to protagonist Tod Friendly a sentient if dull‐witted narrative consciousness that is born at the moment of his death and experiences his feelings, but has no access to his thoughts, no means of controlling events that unfold in reverse chronology, and no understanding of the gravity of what he witnesses: namely, his confrère Tod’s involvement in Nazi atrocities as an Auschwitz doctor whose real name is Odilo Unverdorben. Though the narrator can translate speech that runs backwards, he is unable to do the same with the events he sees, with results that are by turns comic (Tod appears to snatch toys from children and to remove bills from church collection bowls), defamiliarizing (food seems to be collected from the trash and “gulped up into my mouth” before later being repackaged and replaced on the proper shelf in the supermarket aisle), beautiful (“I live on a fierce and magical planet, which sheds or surrenders rain or even flings it off whipstroke after whipstroke”), and poignant (since Holocaust victims seem revivified by Unverdorben, the narrator believes his purpose is “To make a people from the weather”) (Amis 1991, 11–15, 120). Though Amis carries the challenge to vectored linearity in fiction about as far as it can be intelligibly taken, other writers have pursued their own strategies for resisting what Tristram Shandy calls “reading straight forwards” (Sterne 2004, 44). Hypertext fictions with many paths, tales with plural endings, and experiments like French writer Marc Saporta’s Composition no. 1 (1962), the unbound pages of which may be read in any order, complicate the notion that lives – or narratives – must unfold in an irreversible serial progression punctuated by a determinate conclusion. By employing an odd observer who hitches a ride on Friendly/Unverdorben’s experiences, Amis defamiliarizes not only our experience of time or the inevitability of history, but also the narrative conventions that shape the relationship between a focal character and a narrator. That narrator seems a parasite strangely dependent on others’ experiences, not unlike the title character in The History of a French Louse (1779), who preys upon historical figures such as Ben Franklin and the Mademoiselle d’Eon, feeding on both their blood and their stories. By using parasitism as a metaphor for the relationship between a narrating thing and the hosts upon whose thoughts and experiences it preys, The History of a French Louse not only calls attention to the dynamics of many it‐narratives, in which animals and objects rely upon their possessors for Experimental Fictions 157 physical transport and narrative momentum, but also anticipates varieties of narrative focalization that normalize an experience of readerly voyeurism. And when the parasite changes vehicles, it enables a different experiment in fictional plotting, one that can run not only backwards but, in the spirit of Life in a Day, sideways across a range of almost simultaneous experiences, or relay‐style as the narrative baton is passed from focal character to focal character. The myriad associations sparked in a couple of consciousnesses by a day’s travel along city streets in Ulysses or Mrs. Dalloway find curious experimental counterparts in the crazy‐quilt assembly of separate narratives gathered by, say, a banknote as it moves from pocket to pocket, or a sedan chair as it carries passenger after passenger, or a flea as it feasts on host after host. Experimental fictions of all stripes from all periods are distinguished by their effort to imagine an altogether new language for the fiction‐making enterprise. Sometimes they invent that new language quite literally, as in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939) or Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (1962) or the contemporary works treated in Evelyn Ch’ien’s Weird English (2005), all of which rub up against the limits of English. Sometimes they fuse genres and incorporate new media, or claim new subject matter, or take an unusual approach to traditional objects of fictional attention, or render fiction not a transparent window through which readers spy some version of reality, but a mirror that serves as the object of its own gaze. The neologisms of fiction, like those minted each day in every living language, are coined to portray more effectively the world’s heterogeneity or to play more adventurously with the full scope of fiction’s formal possibilities or to imagine more fully the variety of human – and sometimes nonhuman – experiences of the world.

References

The Adventures of a Pin, Supposed to Be Related by Blackwell, Mark, ed. 2012. British It‐Narratives, Himself, Herself, or Itself. 2012 [ca. 1796]. 1750–1830, 4 vols. London: Pickering and London: J. Lee. In British It‐Narratives, 1750– Chatto. 1830, edited by Mark Blackwell, Vol. 4. [Bridges, Thomas]. 1770–1771. The Adventures of London: Pickering and Chatto. a Bank‐Note, 4 vols. London: T. Davies. “The Adventures of the Rambler’s Magazine.” Ch’ien, Evelyn. 2005. Weird English. Cambridge, 1785. The Rambler’s Magazine 3: 174–175. MA: Harvard University Press. The Adventures of a Silver Penny. [ca. 1786]. London: Conrad, Joseph. 1986 [1897]. Preface to The E. Newbery. Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’. In Selected Literary The Adventures of a Watch! 2012 [1788]. In British Criticism and The Shadow‐Line, edited by Allan It‐Narratives, 1750–1830, edited by Mark Ingram, 32–36. London and New York: Blackwell, Vol. 4. London: Pickering and Methuen. Chatto. Fischer, Tibor. 1997. The Collector Collector. New Amis, Martin. 1991. Time’s Arrow. New York: York: Metropolitan Books. Harmony Books. Fowles, John. 1969. The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Apuleius. 1999 [ca. 2nd century]. The Golden Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown and Company. Ass, translated by E. J. Kenney. New York: History of a French Louse; or the Spy of a New Species. Penguin. 1779. London: T. Becket. Blackwell, Mark, ed. 2007. The Secret Life of Hutcheon, Linda. 1984. Narcissistic Narrative: The Things: Animals, Objects, and It‐Narratives in Metafictional Paradox. London: Methuen. Eighteenth‐Century England. Lewisburg: Bucknell Johnson, Samuel. 1761. Rambler 60. In The Rambler, University Press. Vol. 2. London: A. Millar. 158 Mark Blackwell

Johnstone, Charles. 2011 [1760–1765]. Chrysal; Or, The Sedan. 1757. 2 vols. London: R. Baldwin. The Adventures of a Guinea, 4 vols. in 2, edited by Scarry, Elaine. 1985. The Body in Pain. Oxford: Kevin Bourque. Kansas City: Valancourt Books. Oxford University Press. Joyce, James. 1993 [1922]. Ulysses. Oxford: Oxford Shklovsky, Viktor. 1990. Theory of Prose, translated University Press. by Benjamin Sher. Elmwood Park: Dalkey Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern, Archive Press. translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Seidel, Michael. 1994. “James Joyce.” In The Harvard University Press. Columbia History of the British Novel, edited by Locke, John. 1975 [1689]. An Essay concerning John Richetti, 765–788. New York: Columbia Human Understanding, edited by P. H. Nidditch. University Press. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Spacks, Patricia Meyer. 2006. Novel Beginnings: Lodge, David. 1992. The Art of Fiction: Illustrated Experiments in Eighteenth‐Century English from Classic and Modern Texts. New York: Viking. Fiction. New Haven and London: Yale Lupton, Christina. 2006. “The Knowing Book: University Press. Authors, It‐Narratives, and Objectification in Sterne, Laurence. 2004 [1759–1767]. The Life the Eighteenth Century.” Novel: A Forum on and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, Fiction 39: 402–420. edited by Robert Folkenflik. New York: Lyotard, Jean‐François. 1984. The Postmodern Modern Library. Condition, translated by Geoffrey Bennington Watt, Ian. 1957. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. Berkeley and Los Minnesota Press. Angeles: University of California Press. Motte, Warren. 2006. “Experimental Writing.” In Woolf, Virginia. 1981a [1925]. Mrs. Dalloway. San The Columbia History of Twentieth‐Century French Diego, New York, London: Harcourt Inc. Thought, edited by Lawrence D. Kritzman and Woolf, Virginia. 1981b [1927]. To the Lighthouse. Brian J. Reilly, translated by M. B. DeBevoise, San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Company. 214–218. New York: Columbia University Press. Woolf, Virginia. 1986. “Robinson Crusoe.” In The Nagel, Thomas. 1979. “What Is It Like to Be a Second Common Reader, edited by Andrew Bat?” In Mortal Questions, 265–280. Cambridge: McNeillie, 51–58. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Cambridge University Press. Jovanovich. Philander, Joakim [pseud]. [1739]. Vitulus Aureus: Zola, Emile. 1893a. “The Experimental Novel.” The Golden Calf. Or, a Supplement to Apuleius’s In The Experimental Novel and Other Essays, Golden Ass. London: T. Cooper. translated by Belle M. Sherman, 1–54. New Pynchon, Thomas. 1999 [1966]. The Crying of Lot York: Cassell Publishing. 49. New York: Harper Perennial. Zola, Emile. 1893b. “Naturalism on the Stage.” Robbe‐Grillet, Alain. 1985. For a New Novel: In The Experimental Novel and Other Essays, Essays on Fiction, translated by Richard Howard. translated by Belle M. Sherman, 107–157. Chicago: Northwestern University Press. New York: Cassell Publishing. 11 The Novel into Film Jonathan Freedman

There seem to be almost as many stories about the origin of film as films themselves. Do we begin, with most critics, with the raft of popular entertainments out of which cinema emerged and which it then submerged – peepshows, dioramas, panoramas, showy stage effects? Or do we begin in the late 1870s, as do many textbooks, with Eadweard Muybridge’s sequenced photographs of galloping horses, reminding ourselves that he also produced titillating studies of nudes in motion? Or in 1895, with the Lumière brothers’ famous “actuality” of a train arriving at La Ciotat, which allegedly caused the audience to scream in terror anticipating the train’s arrival in their laps – a story recast by Tom Gunning (who doubts its historical accuracy) as an encounter with modernity, not mortality (1989, 31)? Or do we begin, as famous Russian director Sergei Eisenstein did in an essay of 1944, with the novels of Charles Dickens? Eisenstein, of course, was famous for his advocacy of the technique of montage – of the honing of cinematic effect through the juxtaposition of shots, the interplay of which creates a greater effect than that of any individual one. He traces the origins of this technique and a host of others (the dramatic use of close‐ups, for example) not only to D. W. Griffith’s 1909 version of The Cricket on the Hearth but to the Dickensian original, in which he espies versions of these cinematic formations being worked out for the first time. His message is that those critics who believe that “cinema is without parents and pedigree” ignore the degree to which the cinema

is based on an enormous cultured past … . Let this past be a reproach to those thoughtless people who have displayed arrogance in reference to literature, which has contributed so much to this apparently unprecedented art, and is in the first and most important place: the art of viewing – not only the eye, but viewing – both meanings being embraced in this term (Eisenstein 1971, 232–233).

Garrett Stewart suggests that Eisenstein’s staging of the translation from Dickens to Griffith is an excuse for emphasizing his superiority to his two precursors (2003, 124). Indeed, Eisenstein goes on to reference what he calls the “growth from the cine- matographic eye to the embodied viewpoint on phenomena” as the essence of “our Soviet cinema” in a way that canonized contemporaries like Dziga Vertov and Lev Kuleshov as well as Eisenstein himself (1971, 233). But beyond the familiar dialectics of influence mongering (and perhaps with an eye to the censor?), the last of these claims fascinates. What does it mean to speak of the novelistic and cinematic “art of viewing” as distinct from, or in addition to, the exercise of “the eye”? And what is it to think of the novel as a medium as originating and even furthering this art? What is it like to move from these to “an embodied viewpoint upon phenomena” – is this viewpoint uniquely cinematic, or does the novel premediate it (to play with Richard Grusin’s very useful term [2010]) as well? How does this coalescence suggest the ways in which the novel, the dominant or, to adopt a slightly different terminology, hegemonic medium of the nineteenth century, gave way to but also helped create the conditions for the rise of cinema, the dominant or hegemonic form of the first half of the twentieth? What are the conditions, in short, necessary for novels to morph into film? Fully to answer these questions would take longer than I have space for here. Indeed, there is a vast literature in both cinema and novel studies alluding to them. What I want to do is to think briefly about the ways in which the novel prepared the way for the arrival of film, and some of the ways in which film responded to the novel. Then I want to think about cinema and novel in tandem with each other, not under the rubric of adaptation – the chief focus of much of the excellent work done in cinema‐literary studies – but rather as forms that respond to the emerging new culture of visuality and its ensemble of images produced by multiform cameras and lenses and projected by various means onto screens. I adopt here as my central foci not Dickens and Griffith, but rather the slightly later figures of Henry James and the filmmaker who resembled him in so many ways, Alfred Hitchcock. Looking back to their work can project us forward into the future development of both novel and film – and perhaps beyond, into our current moment, when both of these are facing a much‐hyped demise.

Novels into Film and Back Again

To begin, I need to say a few words about novel and film before the advent of cinema to cultural centrality. For it is important to note that these two forms shared a remarkably close, if not incestuous, relation from the first. Whatever the divergence – in terms of immediacy, power, mode of address to audience, and so on – film’s rise parallels, repeats, mimics, echoes, that of the novel. Although the novel has numerous antecedents – Greek romances, or those of the late Middle Ages – it really takes off at a determinate moment in the eighteenth century under the imperative to represent a confusing contemporary reality. While similar to cognate forms emerging in print culture (chronicle, newspaper, etc.), it soon delineates itself as a coherent genre, ultimately ascending to the status of dominant form in the nineteenth century. Similarly, although film has many antecedents – in the camera obscura, stereoscope, or cinematograph, or more generally in the new possibilities for mimetic appreciation of the The Novel into Film 161

Source: Threadless.com. Design by Jayson Dougherty. https://www.threadless.com/product/ 1046/Movies_Ruining_The_Book_Since_1920. world afforded by the rise of photography – in the late years of the nineteenth century, this new medium emerged by offering representations of the world, with its parade of crowds walking down streets, trains arriving at platforms, boats setting out to sea and other “actualities.” Soon (read: almost immediately) it too delineated itself as a form of imaginative storytelling, ultimately becoming the dominant medium of the first half of the twentieth century. A similar parallel is evident in the question of audience. As the novel developed, it addressed new readers impelled by rising rates of education and literacy. According to J. Paul Hunter (1990), in the eighteenth century a wide swath of England, including clerks, servants, and domestics, consumed novels, a process extended further late in the nineteenth century with the emergence of penny novels and other forms of cheap fiction broadly disseminated and widely consumed. Film also spoke to a wide new audience, many of them immigrants illiterate in the language of their new country, many of them working‐class, many of them female; middle‐ and even upper‐class spectators were subsequently if rapidly drawn to this new form of spectacle and entertainment. As a direct consequence, both novel and film became objects of critique, seen as avatars of a new, putatively degraded mass culture and shapers of new, degraded forms of perception. In 1750, Samuel Johnson famously wrote that novels are directed at “the young, the ignorant, and the idle … . They are the entertainment of minds unfurnished by ideas, and therefore easily susceptible of impressions” (1968, 10–11). One hundred fifty years later, a similar hue and cry rose up at the popularity of the cinema. Jane Addams echoed Johnson when she wrote that “it is astounding that a city allows thousands of its youth to fill their impressionable minds with [movie‐born] absurdities which certainly will become the foundation for their working moral codes” (1921, 79–80). Similarly, arguments in England for the necessity of saving naïve youth and women from the corrupting effects of film underlay the establishment of the (voluntary) British Board of Film Censors, a generation before the Hays code was established in Hollywood. 162 Jonathan Freedman

Nowhere is this coalescence clearer than in the fin‐de‐siècle and early years of the twentieth‐century, when novelists and filmmakers started talking about their art in strikingly similar terms. “My task,” Joseph Conrad famously wrote in 1897, “is by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel – it is before all to make you see” (1914, 14). In 1913, Griffith used much the same language in describing his art: “The task I’m trying above all is to make you see” (quoted in Spiegel 1976, 4). Despite the verbal similarities, they meant radically different things. Conrad’s seeing involved an immediacy of sense perception that literary form was aspiring, at his moment, to evoke. Griffith’s seeing involved a kind of religio‐moral‐social vision that deployed but transcended eyesight. But both bring to the fore a common emphasis on seeing that was enhanced in the nineteenth century and which shaped the development of both forms at the turn of the century. Both, in short, embed their forms in the possibilities (and problems) opened up by the rise of a visual‐centered culture, one made possible by technological developments but transcending them to change the basic perceptual equipment of readers and filmgoers alike. Here one must be careful not to overstress the uniqueness of this moment, for it had been long in the making. Vision, of course, has been at the center of Western epistemology from the time of the Greeks forward, when Aristotle famously put it at the top of the hierarchy of senses, and it only became more so as Western technologies began to develop new instruments and techniques for visually apprehending the world. Galileo’s invention of the telescope in the seventeenth century and Leeuwenhoek’s perfection of the microscope almost a century later were shaped by and in turn shaped a new understanding of world and cosmos alike. Historians tell us that lens technologies remained basically static from Leeuwenhoek’s time until the nineteenth century, when new techniques of glass grinding and assorted technical achievements related to it allowed for even greater experimentation. It is therefore in this period – the period of the rise of the novel to prominence – that a host of new devices emerged to espy, represent, capture, and enhance visual experience of the phenomenal world, the camera and the art of photography being the most obvious. In their wake came a series of scopes – the stereoscope (invented by Sir Charles Wheatstone in 1838, perfected by William Brewster and Oliver Wendell Holmes in the decades that followed), the zoopraxiscope (invented by Muybridge in 1879), the kinetoscope (developed between 1888 and 1892, largely at the behest of Thomas Alva Edison) – as well as devices like the magic lantern (owing its origins to the seventeenth century but really actualized via the invention of the lime- light in the 1820s and the electric arc lamp in the 1860s) (Almqvist 2003, 73; Kittler 2010, 70). All these afforded a new species of public entertainment that led directly to the moving pictures in the 1890s and early years of the twentieth century. The new worlds opened up by these forms of representation entered into the figurative ken of the novel – both the microscope and the phenomenon of electric light casting patterns, for example, are the subject of brilliant epistemological inquiry sustained by George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–1872); so too there’s a wonderful magic‐lantern analogy in Henry James’s What Maisie Knew (1898). More indirectly, they changed how Victorian subjects conceptualized the world in ways that fiction was able to enhance, exploit, and play with, as Nancy Armstrong (2002) has powerfully (and at times playfully) argued. The enhanced role of visual perception was reflected in the actual production of books themselves. Consider, for example, the proliferation of illustrations in Victorian The Novel into Film 163 fiction. Although illustration has been with us since medieval illuminated manuscripts, Victorian novels took advantage of new technologies (first woodcut block, followed by copper etching, followed by lithographic reproduction of same) to bring the practice to a new pitch of sophistication and success. The Dickens illustrations, first by George Cruickshank and then by “Phiz” (Hablot Knight Browne), became an integral part of the popularity of the fictions; and can one even imagine Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) or Through the Looking‐Glass (1871) without John Tenniel’s illustrations? Much less Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1847–1848), in which the author’s own illustrations crowd into the text and vie for prominence with the words on the page they are supposed to be illustrating. George du Maurier, like Tenniel a Punch cartoonist, found his 1895 self‐illustrated novel, Trilby, at the top of the very first bestseller list, that of The Bookman in 1900. And the linkage to film was quite immediate. The forerunner of film, the magic lantern show, employed and recapitulated these illustrations in their own spectacles. So too did early film – indeed, as Joss Marsh and Kamilla Elliott write, the 1914 version of Trilby “seem[s] to exist for the pure pleasure of animating much‐loved illustrations” (2002, 462). Because the Victorian novel was already trending in the visual direction that cinema was to explore, exploit, and inevitably capitalize upon, the transition from novel to screen was easy, natural. As a sign of this, one might point to the perhaps misleading coincidence that illustrations began to drain out of the novel at the end of the nineteenth century, as if to acknowledge that moving pictures could do things that static illustrations could not. (Also: lithographs were expensive.) Another is the rapidity with which early film took to bringing novels – or snippets from novels – to the screen, usually those of preceding generations. Consider the case of Dickens. Just two years after the Lumière brothers terrified their audience, American Mutoscope – Edison’s company – released a now‐lost version, less than a minute long, of the death of Nancy at the hands of Bill Sykes from Oliver Twist (1838) (Pointer 1996, 7). The next year, British director R. W. Paul offered a similarly brief portrait of “Mr. Bumble the Beadle,” also from Oliver Twist. British director G. A. Smith created a highly sentimental version of the death of Poor Jo from Bleak House (1853) a few years later in 1901 – rediscovered at the British Film Institute in 2012, it can currently be accessed on YouTube. In the next eight years, numerous short films emerged in England and America illustrating other moments from Dickens, especially from A Christmas Carol (1843) and Oliver Twist, before the arrival in 1909 of Griffith’s Cricket on the Hearth. Thereafter, Dickens adaptations continued to proliferate, including versions of Nicholas Nickelby (1838–1839) in 1903 and 1912, and Little Dorrit (1855–1857) in 1920. In 1910 there was even a version of The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870) with a happy ending! And of course the Dickens boom hardly petered out in later decades. David Selznick’s famous adaptation of David Copperfield (1849–1850) appeared in 1935, and David Lean’s classic version of Great Expectations (1860–1861) premiered in 1946 (Pointer 1996, 117–119). The popularity of the latter novel continues to the present day with the release, in the last decade, of two different versions of Great Expectations: one starring Gwyneth Paltrow and set in Miami and New York (1998), and another, more faithful to the original, starring Helena Bonham Carter (2012). 164 Jonathan Freedman

Dickens was not the only novelist who provided material for film in its initial decades. Among many others the period witnessed versions of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847; 1920), Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847; in Italy, 1909; in England, 1910; in America, 1914, with Jane saving Rochester from blindness) (Painted Seahorse [n.d.]), Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1847–1848; 1922), and virtually all of George Eliot’s novels: Adam Bede (1859; 1918), The Mill on the Floss (1860; 1915), Silas Marner (1861; adapted by D. W. Griffith in 1922), Romola (1862–1863; 1915), Daniel Deronda (1876; 1922), and even “Mr. Gilfil’s Love Story” from Scenes of Clerical Life (1857; 1920) (Dolin 2005, 272–273). On the American side of the ledger, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) appeared on the screen as early as 1903, and in multiple iterations thereafter (Railton [n.d.]). Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter (1850) was adapted in 1917, preceding the more famous high‐end version in 1925 starring Lillian Gish. Frank Norris’s The Pit (1903) was remade by D. W. Griffith as A Corner in Wheat (1909). Novels were prime scenario fodder, in other words, from the earliest days of the silent film on – so much so that it has been estimated that by the 1930s roughly one out of every three movies was adapted from a novel of one sort or another. Estimates for the 1940s and 1950s move closer to the 50% range (Bluestone 2003, 3–4). One important reason for this scavenging was the simple need for stories. As films length- ened and became more sophisticated, plots needed to be found, and what better place to look than novels – unfettered by the constraints of the proscenium stage or by length, as were its rivals the theater and the short story? And despite the multitudes of movies made from potboilers, temperance tracts, detective fiction, and the like, the up‐scaling ambitions of the medium at large continued to turn it towards classic highbrow fare. Particularly in America, where cultural aspiration and cultural anxiety went hand in hand, novel adaptations in general and those of British novels in particular became, by the 1930s, status symbols. David O. Selznick, for example, was renowned for his “prestige” pictures such as David Copperfield, featuring Freddie Bartholomew, Lionel Barrymore, and even W. C. Fields as Mr. Micawber, as well as American classics like The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876; 1936) and pseudo‐classics such as Gone With the Wind (1936; 1939). The desire for prestige on the part of the studios and the desire for cash on the part of writers led many novelists to careers (usually, not very happy ones) in Hollywood, where Aldous Huxley took LSD, William Faulkner met and lost the love of his life, and F. Scott Fitzgerald drank himself to death. Sometimes fine novels emerged from this experience – Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust (1939), Fitzgerald’s unfinished The Last Tycoon (1941) – but surprisingly few, given the possibilities Hollywood would seem to make available to the novelistic imagination. (Perhaps even that imagination couldn’t successfully encompass the admixture of gaudy excess and compelling banality that makes Hollywood Hollywood.) So we might approach film’s influence on fiction by asking: How did the rise of cinema change the ways in which novels were written? What effects did film have on the style and formal possibilities of fiction itself? Here, the evidence seems mixed. It is incon- testable that early film had a strong influence on the thinking of British novelists of the 1910s and 1920s: Laura Marcus (2008), Andrew Shail (2012), and David Trotter (2007) have all variously argued that an engagement with film marks the experience of Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, H. G. Wells, and a host of others. Woolf’s wonderful 1926 essay on the cinema both charts the possibilities of the new medium and begins The Novel into Film 165 to suggest how it transforms the nature of spectatorship itself in ways that the novel is incapable of accomplishing:

[A] shadow at a certain moment can suggest more than the actual gestures and words of men and women in a state of fear, it seems plain that cinema has within its grasp innumerable symbols for emotions that have so far failed to find expression … the filmmaker [thus] has innumerable riches at his command. The exactitude of reality and its surprising power of suggestion are to be had for the asking … . The most fantastic contrasts could be flashed before us with a speed which the writer can only toil after in vain; the dream architecture of arches and battlements, of cascades falling and fountains rising, which sometimes visits us in sleep or shapes itself in half‐darkened rooms, could be realized before our waking eyes. No fantasy could be too far‐fetched or insubstantial. The past could be unrolled, distances annihilated, and the gulfs which dislocate novels … could by the sameness of background, by repetition of some scene, be smoothed away. (1994, 349)

Indeed there is just a very short step from Woolf’s claims for film as a revolutionary new way of seeing to Walter Benjamin’s famous claims for the remaking of perception itself by means of what he calls “the optical unconscious” in his 1936 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Joyce attempted to bring a movie theater to Dublin in 1909, was praised by Eisenstein, and even met with the great filmmaker in 1925, when they apparently discussed Eisenstein’s desire to represent internal mental experience with Joyce’s vividness and dexterity. Wells’s engagement with film went deeper still: he met with Brighton filmmaker Robert Paul in 1899 to help Paul design a time‐traveling cinematic experience. Although they took out a patent together, not much came of the idea. Nevertheless, as Laura Marcus puts it, “Wells’s speculations on light, vision, time, space and motion, formed part of the broader cultural context in which not only film but also the technology, philosophy, and ontology of cinema developed” (2008, 38). And more generally, beyond modernist precincts, cinematic devices were the subject of a number of shorter narratives by the likes of Rudyard Kipling, as well as by many lesser figures writing in the popular press (Shail 2010). The critics who have excavated these relations suggest a fascinating set of conjunctions, like Joyce’s linkage in Ulysses (1922) of Bloom’s scoping of Gerty McDowell on the beach to his memory of “Mutoscope pictures in Capel street: for men only … do they snapshot those girls or is it all a fake?” (Joyce 1963, 368). They also suggest formal connections – Joyce’s use of what Shail nicely calls the “continuous present” of cinematic diegesis is a good example (2012, 93–145); so is Marcus’s elegant account of the ways in which new understandings of space and time explored in cinema shape Virginia Woolf’s bending of same. For all this, there seems to be a significant problem: novels are made up of written signs; films, of visual ones. There have been some attempts to get around this problem – just as film scholars have noted the literary qualities of intertitles, Thomas Burkdall (2001) has written interestingly on the ways in which Joyce’s disruption of language is akin to Eisenstein’s montage. Kamilla Elliott has powerfully deconstructed the opposition between verbal and visual, suggesting that word and image are implicated with each other in both novel and film (2003). For a full‐blown attempt to work out a semiotics of the writing in the midst of the cinema, there’s been no more brilliant attempt than the conclusion of Godard’s Masculin Féminin (1966) – 166 Jonathan Freedman

Masculin Féminin. 1965. Directed by Jean‐Luc Godard. Anouchka Films, Argos Films, Sandrews, Svenskfilmindustri.

But all these leave open the question of whether there were deeper, even structural affinities between the cinema and novel, and how their relative developments might speak to each other’s implication in larger cultural formations and projects.

The Novel, Film, and the Culture of Visuality

Returning to Eisenstein’s formulation might allow us to address this question by searching for synergies between novel and film on a more basic level and to ask what might be the link between each form and the new perspectives on seeing that emerged The Novel into Film 167 in the later years of the nineteenth and early years of the twentieth century. On the way to Benjamin’s evocation of the film as the “optical unconscious,” a host of novelists, as well as artists, photographers, and poets, depicted a new, largely urban world where visual experiences had emerged to entertain, dazzle, instruct, and delude the individuals who live in it. One such was Henry James, whose work was frequently devoted to the exploration of practices of embodied viewpoint in senses which Eisenstein did not necessarily intend: of spectatorship verging on voyeurism and passing beyond it; of complex forms of seeing and mis‐seeing, insight and deception, embedded in the method as well as the matter of the texts. Although his work was late to be adapted to the screen – it took until 1933 for a James story be filmed, in Berkeley Square, and this was drawn from his not widely known, posthumously published novel The Sense of the Past (1917) (Raw 2006, 15–26) – his passionate pursuit of this theme and his building of a fictional practice around acts of problematic witnessing parallels that of his cinematic contemporaries and finds its fullest expression in the equally foundational work of a later director, Alfred Hitchcock. If we go through James rather than Dickens as a precursor of cinema, and install early directors like G. A. Smith and Alfred Hitchcock rather than Griffith as its quintessential figures, we can see a different prehistory or premediation of the turns its theory and practice were to take – and get a different sense of the relation of both to their ambient culture. James’s relation to manifestations of this new visual culture were complex. His attitude towards illustration were notoriously vexed – although late in his career, he did employ a young art‐photographer, Alvin Coburn, to provide frontispieces for the New York Edition of his collected works. He attended a handful of early films, and only occasionally mentioned the medium in his writings, usually as a source for metaphor. But, particularly in works of the early years of the twentieth century such as The Sacred Fount (1900), The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904), he was fascinated with visual perceptions and misperceptions of the world. James explores what it is for perceptually gifted and cursed creatures to live in a visually oriented and hence disorienting world, exploring both the powers of vision and the inevitable, indeed constitutive, misperceptions that govern experience so construed. In this, James’s works parallel, as I have argued elsewhere (Freedman 2012), contemporaneous and remarkably self‐conscious moments in early film, especially those of early British filmmaker G. A. Smith which exult in the capacity of film to problematize vision itself. I am thinking here of Smith’s Grandma’s Reading Glass (1900), in which we see an eye gazing from both sides of the magnifying glass, rendering the very act of vision both of primal significance and startlingly grotesque; or his View Through a Telescope (1900), in which we watch a middle‐aged gentleman spying on two lovers on a bicycle through that lens, only to be discovered and punished in turn by one of the figures he seems to be gazing on with impunity. James’s work bears an even greater and more fruitful relation to subsequent developments in film. In his fiction a rampant visuality is most fully exemplified – and fully problematized – in the narrative method, whether first person (rarely), or, more frequently, a form of free indirect discourse in which the narrative is restricted to the vision and thoughts of a figure or at most a few figures. The most startling example of the first is the narrator of the remarkable novel The Sacred Fount. The nameless narrator spends his time at a country house attempting to discern from obscure visual clues exactly who is involved with whom in ways that comport to his theory that every 168 Jonathan Freedman couple involves one figure waxing, the other waning, as his or her own “sacred fount” of vitality is augmented or drained in the relation, only to be told at the end by one of them that his visual examination and the theorizing that follows from it are, well, crazy. A more sublime extension of the same technique, applied to a central consciousness, can be found in The Ambassadors, whose melancholy middle‐aged American protagonist, Lambert Strether, spends much of the novel in a visually glorious yet deeply deceptive Paris, observing what he thinks is a “virtuous relation” sustained between Chad Newsome and a French woman, Madame de Vionnet, only to find, to his shock, that their relation is far from that. Although Strether and the narrator of The Sacred Fount get it wrong, indeed precisely because they get it wrong, they also point the way for a practice of the novel organized around radically limited yet deeply obsessive acts of seeing – seeing that is sometimes able to penetrate the veil of appearances, but more often is done in by their falsity (Freedman 2015). They plot the same for readers, who may be one step ahead of the narrator or the protagonist, but are ultimately just as fascinated and baffled by appearances as the figures whose quest to see they pursue. Critics note that James’s simultaneous privileging and problematizing of the act of vision in his “centers of consciousness” and the narrative consequences that follow from it radiated from his work to that of writers like his friend Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford, as well as to F. Scott Fitzgerald (notably, Nick Carraway’s visual fascination with Jay Gatsby seems even more homoerotic than Strether’s with Chad). Moreover it became, via his young friend Percy Lubbock’s recasting of James’s criticism in a book entitled The Craft of Fiction (1921), central to the early theorization as well as the practice of the novel. Perhaps the most important resonances of these Jamesian techniques, however, were the echoes it found in the matter and method of filmmaking undertaken by a figure historically separate from yet surprisingly cognate with James: Alfred Hitchcock. Although Hitchcock began to work in the film industry shortly after James died, he brought a similar grammar of scopophilia and a similar fascination with the drama of seeing and mis‐seeing to bear on his celebrated, highly influential films. Throughout his career, but with particular intensity during the 1950s, Hitchcock rings virtuoso changes on the question of vision, giving us scenes in which one character is portrayed as a voyeur whose scopophilia allows him to solve a crime (L. B. Jeffries in Rear Window [1954], played sublimely by James Stewart) or in which another is asked to follow a beautiful woman, is tricked into falling in love with her performed self as he gazes at her, and then is tragically undone in his quest to recreate her as that image (Scottie in Vertigo [1958], also played by Stewart). This exploration of voyeurism, instantiated and supplemented by Hitchcock’s extensive use of point‐of‐view shots and the effects of identification and projection they generate, implicates viewers even more fully, and doubtless more viscerally, in the mode of representation than does James’s narrative method, but the effect is the same: that of problematizing a visually oriented world of appearances, rendering it sometimes true, sometimes false, always alluring. The gull- ing of Scottie no less than that of Lambert Strether testifies to the visually ambiguous field we enter as we engage with our multiply mediated world, a world of deceptive images that we fill in with own ideas, thoughts, and desires, usually to our peril. The art of Hitchcock’s cinema, like that of James’s fiction, lies in his helping us share in the cognitive, affective, and libidinal processes as part of the experience of encountering his text. The Novel into Film 169

Further like James, Hitchcock’s example has spawned countless imitators as well as inspired responses by filmmakers – Jonathan Demme, Pedro Almodòvar, Michelangelo Antonioni, to name just a few. His example has perhaps been even more important in the critical aftermath, in which Hitchcock’s visual methodologies become crucial to theorizations of the acts of looking and gazing themselves, in both cinema and beyond. For if those novels and films alike install spectatorship at the center of narrative interest and narrative form alike, they do so in such a way as both to inflate and evacuate its force. From Laura Mulvey’s famous essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975), which focuses on readings of Rear Window and Vertigo, and makes out of them a new understanding of the male gaze – aligned with the camera to demonstrate its mastery of the object of representation – to Slavoj Zizek’s Lacanian redeployement of the gaze in Looking Awry (1992) as precisely the moment of the absence of such mastery, wrought through a reading of Psycho (1960), cinema studies developed out of their engagement with Hitchcock a bifurcated model of visual power and powerlessness that finds resonances in James’s novels, too. Although each grows in a multitude of directions, novel and the film continue to contest this visual terrain in the twentieth century, leading to unexpected affiliation as well as rivalrous distance. If I may briefly break out of the frame of the English novel to mention a movie by an Italian director cast and shot in England, Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow‐Up (1966), and its Spanish‐language source – the film is a free adaptation of Julio Cortazar’s story Las babas del diablo (1959) – I want to adduce two works that comment not only on their own medium but on that of photography at large, and on the visual experiences that grow out of it. In both, a focalized consciousness is fascinated with discovering, in a photographic image encountered more or less randomly, evidence of sex (Cortozar) or death (Antonioni), which may or may not be accurately represented in that image. In their growing obsession with the key image, the protagonist in each work comes uncannily to resemble the narrator of James’s Sacred Fount and Jeff in Rear Window, and the ultimately ambiguous end of both these works comments on the possibilities of seeing and mis‐seeing in ways reminiscent of James’s and Hitchcock’s work at large. If James’s sense of the value of Cortazar or Antonioni is perforce unavailable, we do know that Hitchcock was quite impressed with the latter. In 1964 he told his friend, screenwriter and former novelist Howard Fast, “My God, Howard! I’ve just seen Antonioni’s Blow‐Up! These Italians are a century ahead of me in terms of technique! What have I been doing all this time!” (Spoto 1983, 495–496). Only turning film into craft, and rendering seeing, looking, and gazing into the art of modernity, just as James had done with the novel 50 years previous.

Film and Novel in the Twenty‐first Century

There are of course many more intersections and resonances than these to follow through over the course of the twentieth century, that time when the novel was fully supplanted in popular audience by the movies, and that time, as well, when both forms experimented with visuality and their own distinctive agency. (I think here, for example, of Alain Robbe‐Grillet, who both invented a new novelistic form attentive 170 Jonathan Freedman to the object‐world without explication or commentary, the nouvelle roman, and crafted a remarkable screenplay for a radically new form of cinema in Last Year in Marienbad [1961].) But it needs to be remembered that neither the novel nor the film is faring particularly well in our own time. Indeed, both are dwarfed at the current moment when the death of the novel is being proclaimed daily, and that of cinema announced by the rise what Steve Shaviro has called “post‐cinematic affect” (2010). The viability of each form is being called into question by the new modes of visuality and literacy activated by the flood of words, images, and narratives generated on new screens by new technologies whose ontologies and epistemologies supplement or displace those I have been describing here. Film theorist D. N. Rodowick puts the matter plangently when he writes:

I once thought that one of the most rewarding tasks of a film teacher was to restore for students the historical and phenomenological experience of watching silent films. But I have recently come to realize, with some personal alarm, that during the past twenty years we have all lost in some degree the capacity to involve ourselves deeply and sensually in the 35 mm image, well projected in a movie theater. Film is no longer a modern medium; it is completely historical. And indeed, the task is now to ask students to imagine an era, not so long past, when the default perceptual norms were not video- graphic, when there were no expectations of interactivity with the image, and when screens were found principally in movie theaters. (2007, 93)

I find a version of the same thing in teaching novels. To students for whom IM‐ing is as common as breathing, and the 140‐character maximum of Twitter a constraint as rigorous as the seventeen syllables of haiku, the idea of reading 300–400 pages in a week (the norm when I was an undergraduate, back in the academic Pleistocene era) is simply unthinkable. That being said, the novel/film dyad still moves forward. On the side of film, novels – even high‐art novels – continue to form the basis of cinematic scenarios, particularly in what exists of the high‐end market: recent years have featured, for example, film versions of Alice in Wonderland (2010; in a trippy version directed by Tim Burton), Anna Karenina (2012), and Baz Luhrmann’s remake of The Great Gatsby (2013; the fourth big‐screen version). On the middlebrow front, the Harry Potter and Twilight franchises both kept the allegedly moribund enterprises of film and print books thriving, and the Hunger Games phenomenon doubtless will do the same. Meanwhile, on the side of the novel, interesting formal developments are pushing that form closer to its mid‐ Victorian, protocinematic dimensions. I am thinking of the rise of serious graphic fiction, which, while it stems from different sources, has moved the novel back to its duMaurieresque days of mixed text and illustration. Although the balance in their works between text and illustration swings in the direction of the latter, Art Speigelman or Alison Bechdel or David Mazzuchelli variously resuscitate narrative genres or forms (the Bildungsroman, the memoir) in ways that are distinctively novelistic. And while they pay homage to another offshoot of visual culture, comic books (whose rise is chronicled in Michael Chabon’s novel, The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay [2000]), they often reach out to the twin of the novel, the film, pointing a way forward for both mediums. I am thinking here in particular of a recent graphic novel by Gabrielle Bell, The Voyeurs (2012). Bell is herself a participant in the novel/film conjunction: on the one The Novel into Film 171 hand, her early book, When I’m Old (2003), offers her adaptation to graphic novel form of Roman Polanski’s movie Repulsion (1965) as well as contemporary versions of stories by Hermann Hesse and D. H. Lawrence; on the other, her novella Cecil and Jordan in New York (2008) was adapted as a short film by her then‐partner Roger Gondry, the publicity tour for which is chronicled in The Voyeurs. That fiction is sustained by a dialogue with film history, suggesting, à la Rodowick but in a different key, how the past history of the medium can and does continue to shape our consciousness in a new era. The book opens with a reference to Rear Window as a crowd gathered at a Brooklyn party watches a couple copulating in an open window across the airshaft – the window itself looking very much like the one in which the newlywed couple in that film disports, albeit behind closed shades – and comments on the various amatory techniques on display as they watch. A little later on, Gabrielle contemplates leaving her hotel room but decides not to; she looks at Roger, standing outside, through the door‐hole, and we see him outside from her perspective in that hole – a reversal of the voyeuristic peephole scenario from the early days of film. Near the end of the book, she visits a friend who begins to watch Godard’s Vivre sa vie (1962) and explains Godard’s use of Brechtian alienation effects but ruefully concludes, “no one watches Godard anymore” (Bell 2012, 154). (The explication Bell gives of the opening sequence of Vivre sa vie, by the way, is magnificent.) In a hotel, Roger stands in an elevator and notices not only “that guy from the new resident evil movie standing in front of his own image” but also that “the guy who pointed this out was the actor from Dogville … the one who started out as Nicole Kidman’s friend but later he was exploiting her like everyone else” (135, 136). So the moment of the so‐called end of “film” – the one where no one watches Godard anymore, where the avant‐garde excitement and cultural centrality that was associated with the medium has passed – is also the moment of the extension of film everywhere – into a wide variety of media, rendering an entire world like the elevator of cinematic mirrors Gondry describes. And more: Bell uses the ubiquity of cinematic affect to get at the question that Eisenstein, James, and Smith all variously posed: the question of visuality and its relation to embodiment. The voyeurs referred to in the title do not just include all the participants in the society of the (cinematically defined) spectacle, they include Bell’s representations of herself, as a body available for her own detached visual observation. Sometimes this double act of self‐voyeurization is rendered comically, as when she imagines her observing body (referenced as such in the written text but drawn as her alter‐ego/BFF male neighbor) watching her corporeal body talking at a party, or when she obsesses about hiding a pimple while being taped for an interview. (The artful placement of the camera hides it from public view.) Sometimes it is rendered in ways that are resonant with the very ontology of film, as when she shows herself jumping nude into a pond as Gondry tries to capture the act with a still camera, in many ways recapturing the method of (predigital) film, which is after all merely a collection of such snapshots run together very fast (and, as we remember, in Muybridge’s case, frequently involving nudity). But perhaps the most moving of these moments occurs near the end of the book, when she is riding the subway with her brother and his girlfriend, then turns to the window to see “a thirty‐four‐year‐old woman, staring back at herself” (Bell 2012, 143). This is Eisenstein in reverse, as it were: an embodied image gazing back at the gazer who never accurately represents herself, even when she is drawing herself as being seen. 172 Jonathan Freedman

For the represented “real” Bell, the Bell in the subway window‐cum‐mirror is very different from the ways Bell represents herself elsewhere in the text (there she looks much, much younger). In this remarkable moment, Bell reminds us of the possibilities and the problems of a world encountered and represented through visual means: as the aging body looks back at its viewer, it suggests that frailties of the flesh transcend the fictional self‐representations we unthinkingly call body image. There is much more to say about Bell’s take on visuality and embodiment. For now, let it suffice that it reminds us of nothing so much as the endeavors undertaken by the figures I have been describing here – Smith and James to be sure, but one could also add Muybridge, the Lumière brothers, Woolf, Joyce, Eisenstein to the list – in fact all the writers and filmmakers who, from the nineteenth century on, have systematically inventoried while they experiment with the possibilities of a visually oriented culture. Her citation of moments in early film – the keyhole shot, the stop‐action repeated still photograph – is less an homage, although it is that, than an acknowledgement of that act of shared exploration, and a glimpse at the manifold possibilities opening up in the forms of the future. Novels metamorphosed into film; films and novels are now mor- phing into something else, and only time will tell what they all shall become in the digital screen‐world that opens before us. Whatever it is, it’s clear from Bell’s example that the experimental energies uncorked by the rise of the novel and extended by the art of film will continue to bring together narrative and visuality in ways that make us more aware of the act of seeing, more percipient about its relation to the body, and more conscious of the epistemological, ontological, and cultural dilemmas that visuality as a way of knowing elicits.

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Johnson, Samuel. 1968. Selected Essays from Raw, Lawrence. 2006. Adapting Henry James to the The Rambler, Adventurer and Idler, edited by Screen: Gender, Fiction, and Film. Lanham, MD: W. Jackson Bate. New Haven: Yale University Scarecrow Press. Press. Rodowick, David. 2007. The Virtual Life of Film. Joyce, James. 1963 [1922]. Ulysses. New York: Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Random House. Shail, Andrew. 2010. Reading the Cinematograph: Kittler, Freidrich. 2010. Optical Media, translated The Cinema in British Short Fiction 1896–1912. by Anthony Enns. Cambridge: Polity Press. Exeter: University of Exeter Press. Marcus, Laura. 2008. The Tenth Muse: Writing About Shail, Andrew. 2012. The Cinema and the Origins of Cinema in the Modernist Period. New York and Literary Modernism. New York: Routledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shaviro, Steve. 2010. Post‐Cinematic Affect. Ropley, Marsh, Joss, and Kamilla Elliott. 2002. “The Hants: Zero Books. Victorian Novel in Film and on Television.” In Spiegel, Alan. 1976. Fiction and the Camera Eye: Visual A Companion to the Victorian Novel, edited by Consciousness and Modern Fiction. Charlottesville: Patrick Brantlinger and William Thesing, 458– University of Virginia Press. 477. London: Blackwell. Spoto, Donald. 1983. The Dark Side of Genius: Mulvey, Laura. 1989 [1975]. “Visual Pleasure and The Life of Alfred Hitchcock. Boston: Little, Narrative Cinema.” In Visual and Other Pleasures. Brown. London: Palgrave, Macmillan. Stewart, Garrett. 2003. “Dickens, Eisenstein and Painted Seahorse [n.d.] “Comprehensive Guide to Film.” In Dickens on Screen, edited by John Glavin. Jane Eyre Adaptations.” http://paintedseahorse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. hubpages.com/hub/Comprehensive‐Guide‐to‐ Trotter, David. 2007. Cinema and Modernism. Jane‐Eyre‐Adaptations (accessed January 1, 2013). Oxford: Wiley‐Blackwell. Pointer, Michael. 1996. Charles Dickens on the Woolf, Virginia. 1994 [1926]. “The Cinema.” The Screen: The Film, Television, and Video Adaptations. Essays of Virginia Woolf. Vol. 4: 1925–1928, Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press. edited by Andrew McNellie, 348–353. London: Railton, Stephen. [n.d.] “Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Hogarth Press. American Culture: A Multimedia Archive.” Zizek, Slavoj. 1992. Looking Awry: An Introduction http://utc.iath.virginia.edu/ (accessed December to Jacques Lacan Through Alfred Hitchcock. 14, 2014). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Part III The Novel in Pieces

12 Some Versions of Narration Alison Booth

To explore narration in the English novel is like setting out on a journey without selecting a vehicle or route, though the nationality and the genre are generally mapped. Narration and the novel are so closely associated that the exploration could begin, linger, and end with any one of the delightful novels in this shape‐shifting national tradition. The narration – how the story is told – is one of the first things anyone notices about a novel, like the climate and terrain. For instance, Robinson Crusoe narrates his travels in retrospect, the only survivor to tell the tale; Esther Summerson, a heroine in Bleak House (1853), tells her part of the story but the networks of contemporary society require an omniscient third‐person narrator. Novels have used every possible kind of narration. The novel has gained so much dominance that the field of narrative theory privileges the novel, although there is still much to discover in many other forms of narrative. In this chapter I will follow the custom of citing well‐known novels to demonstrate narrative techniques. The way a novel is narrated – inseparable from its form and content in other respects – is crucial to the reader’s experience and interpretation. What is narrative? What does this essential “piece” add to our understanding of English novels? Narrative seems to be ubiquitous in all cultures, in some way natural to humans; part of its power seems to lie in our capacity to “volunteer” emotional response, to participate in an imitation of life (Flesch 2009, 8–17). Narration in fiction is not inherently different from narration of actual events. The distinction of fiction from nonfiction lies in a kind of contract with the reader to make believe “as if” or else to refer the narrative to the world of physical reality. Yet undeniably the English novel develops from a shift in ideas of the self and perception, “a radical alteration of point

A Companion to the English Novel, First Edition. Edited by Stephen Arata, Madigan Haley, J. Paul Hunter, and Jennifer Wicke. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. 178 Alison Booth of view” in the eighteenth century (Konigsberg 1985, 7), with increasing focus on interiority and everyday experience. I cannot do justice to the variegated history of narration in the English novel. I will begin with a bit of surveying for a map of narrative in general and in the novel in particular. This will prepare for a tour of key narrative techniques in a handful of famous English novels. The examples should open up exciting possibilities for interpretations of novels under discussion in this Companion.

Defining Narrative: A Communication

Narration in the novel is a subset of a much broader phenomenon, the human tendency to use signs to represent events in a sequence (Cobley 2001, 9–10). Gerald Prince defines narrative as “the recounting … of one or more real or fictitious EVENTS communicated by one, two, or several … NARRATORS to one, two or several … NARRATEES” (1989, 58). This useful definition applies not only to fiction; the events in the narrator’s tale may have happened in real time and space or have been imagined. Notice that the narration is a report about events, not the events themselves, and that it communicates a version of events to recipients of the narrative. In a sense the “narratees,” the people receiving the narrative, put pressure on the narrator to make the telling significant. A young child may excitedly narrate everything that happened that day, but when even doting parents lose interest the narrator learns to summarize, cut, or emphasize different events. Whether the narrative is true or imagined, anecdotal or plot‐driven, it is a rhetorical exchange between someone telling and someone receiving it – whether or not the narrator(s) or the narratee(s) are identified and apparently on the “scene.” This leads to another important preliminary distinction: narration is a knowing utterance (the Latin root gnarus indicates knowing) though it may not actually be spoken (Prince 1989, 60). Although novels are often read aloud or experienced as audiobooks, the act of telling in printed texts is rather virtual. Significantly, it is not an imitation, re‐enactment, or performance of events. Drama and film are said to rely on mimesis or direct representation, but narrative relies on diegesis or telling (Keen 2003, 2). Drama and film may include narrators (for example in voice‐over or soliloquy) who tell stories to the audience or to listeners onstage or on screen. These mimetic genres (showing people in action) certainly have events and plot. I nonetheless recommend retaining this distinction for most purposes: bodily performance is not in itself narration. The most dramatic, dialogue‐focused novel uses the medium of words (or word‐image) rather than performance to relate the narrative. Some would say that a narrative requires more than one event, usually a sequence or temporal movement from point A to point B, with some significant causal connection. The most minimal event involves not only an action or happening but “existents,” the entities or agents involved in that occurrence. Existents or actants may be people or characters, but the terms also refer to nonhuman entities (living or inanimate) that can determine events. In A. J. Greimas’s model of actantial functions in narrative, a subject (usually a protagonist such as a hero or heroine) may aim toward an object in interaction with a sender, a helper, a receiver, and an opponent. Each function may or may not be Some Versions of Narration 179 personified in one or more characters in a novel; for example, an avalanche, a pet snake, a school, or the city of Paris could be either objects or opponents in a story, determining events in interaction with the protagonist (Greimas 1984; Keen 2010, 29). In practice novelistic narrative demands specific traits (aspects) for events and existents; narratives of any length should satisfy a modern audience’s expectation of individual details. (This does not mean that all or most English novels strive for realism: see Blackwell, Chapter 10 in this Companion.) The writer of long‐form fiction can devote pages to concrete features of existents such as a character’s habits, the layout of a house, or a bewildering fog or can condense and shift time and perspective as needed to create a “story world” (Abbott 2008, 20). As the English novel developed, it accrued many customs for shading in the outlines of a worldlike setting as well as the complexities of personalities and events. Again, the devices of characterization are inseparable from narration, but warrant their own discussion. (See Lynch, Chapter 14 in this Companion.) To illustrate these ideas, try this (assume that I am the narrator, though I am also the author): An event: A brick fell from a wall. My narratee stares and asks, “So what?” I attach another event: A brick fell from a wall and crushed a flower. My narratee takes the remark as something like a lyric poem. I think up a story, adding existents and some dimension of time or sequence: The flower, which had been planted by the old woman whose father built the wall, was in full bloom when the brick suddenly fell and crushed it. The narratee begins to catch some purpose other than meditative. I add a human opponent in this sad tale: The neighbor on the other side of the wall had once been the suitor of the woman, but he jilted her to marry a wealthy bride. During many years abroad, he let the roots of his trees undermine the wall. Seeing the crushed flower, the woman despaired, remembering the love scenes of long ago. Or perhaps, She laughed, went to fetch a trowel, mixed some mortar, and repaired the wall, looking forward to planting again in the spring. With such building blocks of story, the story gains coherence; the audience “gets it” as a sentimental pantomime. Some refinements in the story could make it absurd (the bricks keep falling) or scary (what is it that keeps attacking the flowers?), but quite possibly the events and existents need more significance to engage a narratee. In the “communication model” that defines narrative according to Seymour Chatman and others, there are additional frames – outside the text – around narrator and narratee (Phelan 2004, 40):

real author → implied author → narrator [narrative] → narratee → implied reader → real reader

Many narrative theorists adopt Wayne C. Booth’s concept of the implied author to differ- entiate the designer of the narrative within the text from the flesh‐and‐blood author on the one hand and the narrator on the other. (The implied author isn’t a real person but a kind of intentionality and baseline of values that a reader infers when interpreting 180 Alison Booth the work.) It is tempting, for instance, to identify the biographical person Charles Dickens (1812–1870) with both the implied author and the narrator of Great Expectations (1861). In Robyn Warhol’s version of the above model, readers usually would gender the implied author male, knowing the gender of the real author and narrator (2010, 244–245). The first‐person narrator, Pip, has some experiences and a moral development related to Dickens’s life, and there are autobiographical aspects to the novel, which is set in Rochester and elsewhere in Kent where Dickens lived in childhood and later life. But of course we know that Pip, who becomes a gentleman and then a clerk or businessman, did not write a novel entitled Great Expectations. And we also realize that the real Charles Dickens is out of reach; he probably could not have spelled out all his intentions and we cannot interview him. Moreover, other writings by Dickens vary across his career. The implied author is thus a label for the controlling agent within the text: what the reader infers about the authorship of this narrative based on the text’s evidence. The receiving end of the narrative communication reveals different roles similar to those on the sending end: narratee, implied reader, real reader. In some novels, a character–narrator like Pip tells the story to another character, but the narratee of Great Expectations is not a character in the novel. Some theorists use the term narrative audience for the reader who is immersed in the story world, who accepts Pip as real person telling his story and forgets that this is an invention (at times any reader is likely to occupy this immersed position). In contrast, the implied reader (authorial audience or ideal audience, in some versions) is aware of the discourse, understanding the communication imparted by the implied author and recognizing the formal design (again, one may slip in and out of these levels of narrative participation). These conceptual positions for the audience of a narrative obviously differ from any real reader at any particular time. My response to Great Expectations radically shifted between tenth grade and when I began teaching it as an assistant professor, having read more Dickens, learned more about Victorian fiction, and experienced adulthood. Flesh‐and‐blood readers will differ in their responses to style, character, or, in the case of the two endings that Dickens wrote for Great Expectations, their preference for happy endings or closure (Abbott 2008, 66). Given such variation among real readers, it is useful to bracket them as external to the implied reader of the specific work.

Discourse as a Version of the Story, in Fiction and Nonfiction Narrative

The implied author of Great Expectations, then, delegates a first‐person narrator, Pip, who tells the story (ordered events) in a certain way; the discourse is the textual arrangement of the matter. The story is that Pip was born Philip Pirrip, son of Philip and Georgiana Pirrip and brother of five boys who died very young as well as of one surviving sibling, Mrs. Joe Gargery. Pip was orphaned as an infant needing to be bottle‐ fed, and Mrs. Joe raised him “by hand.” Instead of starting at the beginning, however, the novel opens with the boy’s habit of deciphering his name and the family grave- stones, merging a defining occasion – “my first most vivid and broad impression of the identity of things,” in a specific bleak churchyard on the windy marshes – with a Some Versions of Narration 181 life‐changing encounter (Dickens 1996, 24). Imagine the difference if the novel began with the courtship and marriage of the elder Pirrips, or if the reader were given access to the thoughts of the “fearful man” with the “terrible voice” who suddenly seizes our narrator (24). Narrative theorists have chosen various terms for the distinction between what happened and how the narrative is told (Keen 2003, 74–75; Abbott 2008, 16–18). The events of any story (true or imagined) may be related by different kinds of narrator in different perspective, sequence, length, or depth. Many narratives begin in the middle and then use flashback (analepsis) to fill in events that must have already happened. Many narratives omit events or skip over time or exposition, expecting the audience to fill in the gaps. Readers are very good at reconstructing a chronological story from the discourse, but in essential ways the discourse is key to the experience of the work. Narration stands out more sharply when it is understood as a version or treatment of a story. Consider nonfiction narratives, which tell a story believed to have happened in linear time to real people in real places. The most faithful chronicler or biographer must shape a story with certain aspects of events and existents. If this were not so there should only be one true narrative, and it would have to be an exhausting chronological documentary. Thomas Carlyle wrote a history of the French Revolution (with influence on Charles Dickens’s novel A Tale of Two Cities [1859]). John Lockhart wrote the biography of his father‐in‐law Walter Scott, the world‐famous historical novelist. Yet there have been many other histories of the French Revolution and various biographies of Walter Scott since then. Carlyle and Lockhart shaped their respective discourses, and others have come along with fresh perspectives or information to retell the history or the life. Arguably, the sign of a nonfiction text referring to actual events is that people can reasonably try to produce a more accurate account. Historical facts can be checked in the way the facts about fictitious persons or events cannot. With novels, the question of versions (varieties of discourse relating a story) is rather different. The novel Great Expectations is fiction, but other novelists and filmmakers have taken up the idea of telling the story, as in Peter Carey’s novel Jack Maggs (1997), which fills out the back‐story of the convict Magwitch as well as Dickens himself; and there were two film versions of Dickens’s novel in 2011–2012 alone. Henry Fielding’s novel Tom Jones (1749) has an inimitable narrator describing his choices about how to tell the story, directly engaging the narratee. Though this novel is the only source for its fictitious story, a sequel appeared in the year it was published, and another in 1985; there have been parodies and adaptations, as with many famous novels. Such works refer both to Fielding’s novel and to the imagined original story, whereas a respected history of the French Revolution is expected to draw on original sources rather than adapt Carlyle’s version. Even though a work of fiction resembles a historic event in its claim to originality, we should avoid idealizing an unchanging text. A single novel may be reshaped into different formats that may reproduce the original words quite accurately but that also shape different impressions for the reader. The text of a novel is usually printed as prose divided into chapters subdivided in paragraphs (often with special tags such as quotation marks for dialogue), though it may be reprinted in different ways, with or without integral or optional illustrations (in children’s books or graphic novels, images 182 Alison Booth participate in narration). Paratext is Gérard Genette’s useful term for all the aspects that shape the delivery of a narrative, including covers, chapter titles, epigraphs, prefaces, or tables of contents. Amazon.com currently lists more than 270 editions of Tom Jones (libraries list over 2300 versions), each likely to deliver a different experience according to presentation. The original title was The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling. Many early novels link themselves, however jestingly, to forms of nonfiction. The history of the novel, beyond my theme here, shows its debts to epic and romance, but I also would call attention to the novel’s recruitment of various forms of prose addressed to the reader as probable or true. The point is not that readers were led to confuse novels for factual narrative, but that the novel picked up on many modes of narrating middling people and their thoughts and sentiments, and observable aspects of a changing world. Some of these genres were innovative, but most could trace ancestry to earlier eras: journalism, travel narratives, histories, biographies, confessions both spiritual and criminal, and forms of self‐representation in essays, letters, and diaries. Today’s readers may become irritated or puzzled when Gothic or Romantic novels devote many pages to narrate a journey down the Rhine or a visit to Oxford (the travel‐narrative elements of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein [1818]), or they may be put off by narration of the history of a war or the interjection of passages resembling advice literature, sermons, or philosophical or scientific dialogues. It is wise, however, to read the narration of a novel with a tolerance for a mixture of genres or voices. Although narrative theory has neglected nonfiction, critics usually agree that narrative components of fiction and nonfiction may be very much the same. Some eighteenth‐century novels are epistolary, or written entirely in letters, as if in a chain of narrators and narratees exchanging places, giving to‐the‐minute impressions in the style of each correspondent. Diaries and letters are used to this day in historical or biographical research, and novels have continued to interpolate such pseudo‐documents, which provide a range of plausible voices. Sometimes the most improbable stories claim to be the most documentary; shocking or supernatural events can be conveyed in manuscripts found in attics or in typed reports, from Horace Walpole’s pioneering Gothic fiction, The Castle of Otranto (1764), to Bram Stoker’s founding vampire novel, Dracula (1897). In most novels there are some established facts such as a real city, historical era, or famous people; historical fiction or auto/biographical novels maximize the proportion of real‐world reference in their stories. Narration in the novel usually reveals a blend of different kinds of discourse referring to different ontological “worlds” – perhaps continuous with ours, perhaps in the fantastic order of poetry, myth, or dreams.

Person and Perspective: Essentials of Narration

Having outlined some fundamentals of narrative communication and of discourse as a version of a story, I would like to introduce several useful terms for the perspective and distance of characters and narrator, the language of the discourse, and the pace of the narrative. But drawing upon the preceding discussion of nonfiction and fiction, I choose as my example one chapter in George Eliot’s realist multiplot novel, Middlemarch. Serialized in eight books between December 1871 and December 1872, subtitled Some Versions of Narration 183

“A Study of Provincial Life,” it was based on the author’s research and experience of its setting in the English Midlands around 1832. The characters in and around the fictitious city Middlemarch are all imaginary, but the third‐person omniscient narrator calls on the reader to regard the story world as continuous with historical reality. The implied reader is flattered by the assumption that he or she likes to be informed on such issues as hospital administration and social science as well as art – after all, this is a “study.” Thus Chapter 19 famously begins:

When George the Fourth was still reigning over the privacies of Windsor, when the Duke of Wellington was Prime Minister, and Mr. Vincy was mayor of the old corporation in Middlemarch, Mrs. Casaubon, born Dorothea Brooke, had taken her wedding journey to Rome. In those days the world in general was more ignorant of good and evil by forty years than it is at present. Travelers did not often carry full information on Christian art either in their heads or their pockets. (Eliot 2000, 120)

The king and the prime minister were real, and of course so is Rome and its treasures of Christian art. The reader has cared deeply about Dorothea’s mistaken marriage to Casaubon, but must put her and the Vincy family in perspective within the big picture of political and aesthetic history. This transition in the text can be called a “gap”; the discourse omits weeks of the story of Dorothea. The third‐person narrator is external to the story, and uses the past tense; he or she subtly addresses readers of the “present,” sharing the knowledge of hindsight but qualifying the idea of progress. Chapter 19 of Middlemarch is a splendid demonstration of focalization. Paragraph two opens a scene, “one fine morning” in the Vatican museum (120). The omniscient narrator indicates perceptions of more than one character, but is generally “limited” or “focalized” through Will Ladislaw, cousin of Dorothea’s husband Casaubon, the young Englishman seen looking at the mountain view. His friend Naumann, the German painter, summons him to gaze on a tourist, Dorothea, who seems almost to have been enchanted as a work of art on display. She was “probably not thinking” of the sculpture of Ariadne beside her; when she becomes “conscious of the two strangers” watching her, she leaves the gallery (121). That is all we know of the mind of the heroine in this chapter; henceforth, the chapter becomes a scene of dialogue, a quarrel about art that is also about possession of Dorothea. (Some theorists say that dialogue is not narration, but it seems more apt to consider the whole narrative as one utterance in different modes.) The painter wants to get a commission to paint an allegorical portrait of Dorothea, but Ladislaw resists: paint will only represent the surface; language alone can hope to convey the vitality of a woman. During this exchange, the narrator provides a few dialogue tags such as “said Naumann, in a hopeful tone,” and inserts two internal–external records of Ladislaw’s reactions, for instance, “Will could not resist [Naumann’s] imperturbable temper, and the cloud in his face broke into sunshiny laughter” (122). Neither Naumann nor Will could witness this entire sentence, whereas the narrator can “see” Will’s motives and his face. The chapter concludes with a close‐up of Ladislaw’s thoughts: “He was conscious of being irritated by ridiculously small causes … Why was he making any fuss about Mrs. Casaubon? And yet he felt as if something had happened to him with regard to her” (123). This can be called psychonarration. If it were an interior monologue, it 184 Alison Booth would be: “Why am I getting so worked up about little things? Why am I making any fuss about Mrs. Casaubon? Something has happened to me about her.” Instead, the narrator’s voice retains the “indirect” diction of third person, past tense. Among these three sentences, the question is “freer” or less formal than the other two; this is known as free indirect discourse, a blend of the character’s and narrator’s voices (both unspoken). Eliot’s narrator holds Ladislaw at a certain distance by filtering his thoughts. The implied or authorial reader has a good answer to the question: Will is infatuated with Dorothea (unrequited). (The dialogue showed rather than told us that Ladislaw is jeal- ous of his dryasdust cousin’s possession of her.) The chapter concludes, however, with a distant analysis; this implied author shares psychological precepts. The final two sentences offer “gnomic” commentary or what might also be called a “pause” (a stop in story time while the discourse proceeds): “There are characters which are continually creating collisions and nodes for themselves in dramas which nobody is prepared to act with them. Their susceptibilities will clash against objects that remain innocently quiet” (123). Ladislaw is a type, and Dorothea is an object unaware of the part she has played in his imaginary drama. Readers familiar with such effects might say that Chapter 19 is from Ladislaw’s point of view. Point of view is perhaps the most widely taught narrative concept. (For a lucid review of various concepts for narrative perspective, see Matz 2010.) Perspective in fiction depends to a certain extent on language, the use of first person or third person (or rarely second person) and whether the verbal tense is past or present (or rarely future). The diction helps to set up the narrative perspective; verbal shifters (deixis) such as “this” or “there” (Eliot’s narrator says “In those days … at present”) place the narrator in a time‐space relationship to the world of the story. But point of view or focalization, as most theorists now term it, is a matter not only of language but of perception – of all the senses including sight. Who tells the story (and how)? Who sees (or senses and perceives)? These are not the same question (the teller is often different from the focalizer), though “point of view” has sometimes treated them as if they were. I’ve measured a distance between the narrator’s telling and Ladislaw’s perception and thoughts. Focalization, moreover, can include theme or topic: Dorothea, although scarcely aware of being watched, is the remote center of attention in the chapter. After the austerity that concludes Chapter 19, the reader feels a bit of Dorothea’s “abandonment to … relief” when Chapter 20 opens in a more intimate, far from “quiet” scene. “Two hours later, Dorothea was seated in an inner room or boudoir … I am sorry to add that she was sobbing bitterly …” (123). Focalization as telling, perceiving, and focus of attention – a closer look at any passage of narration in these terms reveals a narrator’s engagement or distance from the story. Is the narrator internal or external to the story? The narrator of Middlemarch now and then uses personal expressions such as “I am sorry to say,” but remains heterodiegetic rather than homodiegetic (Genette 1983), undramatized rather than dramatized (Booth 1983, 151–153). This narrator retains the rights to private impressions of minor as well as major players and to synopses beyond the reach of any single character – omniscient, in other words, although few narrators approach being truly all‐knowing. Chapter 19 has shown how Eliot’s narrator delicately calibrates intimacy and distance. The Middlemarch example also broaches the treatment of time, in another set of discursive effects known as pace. What is the difference between discourse “time” – how Some Versions of Narration 185 much of the text passes – and time in the story? Narration may scale up or down the sense of time: a gap (omitting elapsed story time from the discourse, as in the silence on the first weeks of Dorothea’s marriage), summary (passing over action quickly, as in Chapter 18, “Some weeks passed … before the question of the chaplaincy gathered any practical import for Lydgate” [113]), scene (the text seems to pass in “real time,” as in the dialogue between Ladislaw and Naumann in Chapter 19), expansion (the narrator slows down to scrutinize a scene in the story, as in pages of meditation on the reasons for Dorothea’s “fit of weeping six weeks after her wedding” and how she dimly understands her own state, in Chapter 20), or pause (in which zero time elapses in the story but the discourse proceeds) (Keen 2003, 93). Eliot’s narrator, indeed, makes the most of pause, as in this famous paragraph acknowledging Fielding at the beginning of Chapter 15:

A great historian, as he insisted on calling himself, who had the happiness to be dead a hundred and twenty years ago, and so to take his place among the colossi … , glories in his copious remarks and digressions as the least imitable part of his work, and especially in those initial chapters to the successive books of his history, where he seems to bring his armchair to the proscenium and chat with us in all the lusty ease of his fine English. But Fielding lived when the days were longer … We belated historians must not linger after his example. (90–91)

This is a complicated rhetorical flourish, as the real Marian Evans, behind her pseu- donym George Eliot, only pretends to speak for a community of novelists; the narrator seems to chat with readers of her present day while claiming that she has “so much to do” in narrating “this particular web” that he or she can’t afford Fielding’s leisurely eighteenth‐century pauses. This digression about the art of digressions ironically inverts the idea of modern decline from the “colossi” of literary classics; this novel is a more ambitious investigation of “interwoven” “human lots.” Many studies of narrative, finally, concern the concept of levels, particularly useful for novels in which there is more than one narrator or narratee, or in which a narrator interjects commentary, addressing an external narratee. We have seen that Eliot’s omniscient narrator at times uses the first person but is not a character in the story. This might be the most common narrative stance in canonical English novels. Henry James in The Ambassadors (1902) and other novels exemplified third‐person limited narration, in which the discourse is restricted to one focal character or reflector. In such a novel the implied author and narrator seem scarcely distinguishable, while the observing character seems to relate the narrative, though the discourse is not literally in his voice. Not for James is Fielding’s or Eliot’s proscenium chat with the reader. I will just briefly note some other common models of narration. First‐person narrators may tell stories in which they are protagonists or observers from the sidelines. Pip in Great Expectations, noted above, narrates his own life. As an adult looking back, he seems trustworthy, perceiving and expressing what happened in a tone and attitude that seem close to the perspective of the implied author. (As a boy and young man, the character Pip is deeply flawed.) But many first‐ person character–narrators have been called “unreliable,” exhibiting a personal bias in their version of the story (rarely as simple as outright falsehood). The reader then is 186 Alison Booth challenged to interpret the tale transmitted through a personal filter at odds with the “norms of the work” or the implied author’s judgment (Booth 1983, 158–159). In two novellas, Cranford (1851) and Cousin Phillis (1864), Elizabeth Gaskell employed homodiegetic narrators as reflectors who guide the modern reader into a fragile, old‐fashioned, provincial place. Whereas Mary Smith, the visitor to Cranford, is a reliable narrator of sympathetic, amusing incidents in a community of elderly women, Paul Manning is an unreliable though well‐intentioned narrator in Cousin Phillis: immature, vain, dismissive of women’s intelligence, he fails to protect Phillis from falling in love with his hero, the flashy railroad engineer, and in some respects misinterprets the tale he tells. Unreliable first‐person narration is suited to tales of extraordinary experience – madness or crime included – without other witnesses (a favorite in modern short stories). Unreliable first‐person narration of longer fiction often dramatizes the act of telling through a frame narrative, as if in reminder of oral storytelling. Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898) consists of a first‐person narrative by a governess who tries to defend two children from ghosts haunting a country house; whether she truly sees ghosts or is mad, the appalling outcome of the story reminds us that she is unreliable in more than the technical sense. Her credibility and her mystery are both increased by the introductory (half‐)frame in which her one‐time friend, the owner of the manuscript, Douglas, transmits the tale to his guests, including an unnamed male narrator. Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) employs a series of dramatized narrators; within the finicky Lockwood’s diary, this gentleman visitor becomes the narratee of the housekeeper Nelly Dean’s long narration of the violent passions of the Earnshaw and Linton families. The point is not that we should doubt the “cuckoo’s” story of Heathcliff’s revenge, but that these narrators contrast an outsider’s and an insider’s bias; Nelly’s narration also shows the part she played in increasing the elder Catherine’s suffering, keeping secrets from Edgar Linton, and failing to protect the younger daughter Catherine. An implied author assembles such interdependent levels of narration, with patterns no single narrator can have intended.

Narration in or about 1811 and 1910: Austen and Forster

Identification of narrative techniques is not a postmortem but a guide to reader response to a living work. Each novel displays characteristics of its time in literary and social history, as narration adapts to changing conventions, issues, and ideas. To illustrate more contextual narrative analysis, I have chosen two novels that appear to honor tradition as well as innovation: Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (1811) and E. M. Forster’s homage to that novel, Howards End (1910). Both realist marriage plot novels grant access to the minds of two heroines, favoring the sensible one; their male counterparts are unsatisfactory in various ways. Austen’s novel was first written in the form of letters, an epistolary novel “Elinor and Marianne,” around 1795, and recast as a third‐person narrative around 1797, revised between 1805 and 1810, and published anonymously in 1811; the “Lady” listed on the title page was unknown to the public, as this was her first published novel. A century later, E. M. Forster published his third novel in 1910 to a warm reception by critics and readers familiar with his role in intellectual circles at Cambridge University and in London. It helps to have this sort of Some Versions of Narration 187 information about the real authors and the details of publication in order to align a novel with different fashions for narration. Austen’s novel reads like it has one foot in the eighteenth century and another in the nineteenth. Forster’s novel looks backward to Austen and, with misgivings, forward to modern fiction and modern life. I offer some core samples rather than overviews, considering the style of representation of events and existents, the pace (shifting modes of narration), and focalization with its effects of engagement or distance. Both novels, centering on marriageable upper‐class women who must leave their childhood home, begin with the question of a country house and anxieties about inheritance or marriage. Both are largely chronological, with omniscient third‐person narration alternating summary and scene, but Austen’s narration, unlike Forster’s, never calls attention to its gaps and rarely intervenes with direct address or pause. The Napoleonic Wars or industrialization are almost entirely offstage in the 1811 novel, whereas Forster’s narrator seems aware of the crises of capitalism, imperialism, and German expansion that will bring on the First World War; contemporary issues such as women’s suffrage, income inequality, and insurance percolate through the characters’ lives. The back‐story of adultery and illegitimate pregnancy is reported rather than represented in Sense and Sensibility. Lucy Steele, rival of Elinor Dashwood, reveals her vulgarity in poor grammar and obvious pretentions. The more modern novel, predictably, is more explicit: a patriarch’s adultery is exposed; a lady gives birth to an illegitimate child. One of the main characters, Leonard Bast, figures in scenes beyond the margins of gentility, as if Naturalism had been added to Austen’s repertoire. The opening chapters (neither novel has chapter titles) launch the reader into very different expectations about narration. The narrator around 1811 earns trust by giving nothing but facts that a family solicitor might swear to.

The family of Dashwood had long been settled in Sussex. Their estate was large, and their residence was at Norland Park, in the centre of their property, where, for many generations, they had lived in so respectable a manner as to engage the general good opinion of their surrounding acquaintance. The late owner of this estate was a single man, who lived to a very advanced age, and who, for many years of his life, had a constant companion and housekeeper in his sister. (Austen 2002, 5)

These first sentences stand at a distance: “many generations” of Dashwoods without first names have lived at this typical large country estate (no details). (Sense and Sensibility is not called Norland Park; the heroines and the reader will no longer be “settled in Sussex” but in isolated, precarious Devonshire.) A confusing succession of male heirs leaves the three young Dashwood sisters without fortune or home. The implied author of eighteenth‐century taste expects readers to bear with genealogy and exposition and a certain amount of ennui in Devonshire and London in a small social circle partly drawn from the repertoire of stage “humors.” The reward – not to mention the narrator’s own subtle humor – is a growing intimacy with the characters briefly sketched in summary at the end of Chapter 1: the excessive sensibility of the widow Mrs. Dashwood and her daughter Marianne (followed by the youngest sister Margaret) – “They encouraged each other now in the violence of their affliction” over Mr. Dashwood’s death – and the good sense of the eldest, Elinor, already at nineteen “qualified … to be the counsellor of her mother” (8). 188 Alison Booth

Not that Austen’s narrator avoids scenes. Chapter 2 of Sense and Sensibility has a husband‐and‐wife dialogue that rivals the highly dramatic first chapter of Pride and Prejudice, published two years later. Nor does the narrator ignore the physical qualities of houses or landscapes when they serve pivotal events and reflect characters’ tastes. Cleveland, the Palmers’ house, presents expected landscaping for this kind of estate: “the pleasure‐grounds were tolerably extensive, and like every other place of the same degree of importance, it had its open shrubbery, and closer wood walk … , the house itself was under the guardianship of the fir” and other trees that seem to administer the view while hiding the working part of the household (214). But in the next paragraphs the narrator focalizes Marianne, who infuses the place with romantic meaning because her former lover’s estate is only 30 miles away. She escapes the house to indulge in “solitary rambles” “through the winding shrubberies, now just beginning to be in beauty, to gain a distant eminence; where, from its Grecian temple, her eye, wandering over a wide tract of country … could fondly rest on the farthest ridge” in the direction of Willoughby’s Combe Magna (214). The eyesight is Marianne’s, and the thoughts are unknown to anyone else but the narrator and reader, but the narrative voice maintains an ironic distance from this teenager who wallows in heartbreak: “In such moments of precious, of invaluable misery, she rejoiced in tears of agony” (214). The narrator parodies the oxymorons of sentiment (joyous agony) and gently mocks Marianne’s actual lack of perspective in her driving pursuit of clichéd views and exposure to the elements. Marianne “had not calculated for any change of weather” (or any change in her lover’s intentions) (215), although it was a predictable downpour during a Romantic ramble that first led to Marianne’s fall and rescue by Willoughby, and here at Cleveland another one will bring her near death. Now and then Austen’s narrator steps forward to acknowledge her act of narration: “But Elinor – How are her feelings to be described?” (256). Often the narrator relies on the technique of free indirect discourse that I noted in Will Ladislaw’s question, in other words nearly adopting the voice and perspective of a character. Repeatedly, one of the Dashwoods focuses on the broad landscape outside their cottage, an emblem of their passive position awaiting mobile men, and misreads which hero is gradually coming into closeup. When Elinor believes the man she loves has married her rival at last, she longs for Colonel Brandon (who loves Marianne) to arrive to explain what happened:

the figure of a man on horseback drew her eyes to the window. He stopt at their gate. It was a gentleman, it was Colonel Brandon himself. Now she should hear more; and she trembled in expectation of it. But – it was not Colonel Brandon – neither his air – nor his height. Were it possible, she should say it must be Edward. She looked again. He had just dis- mounted; – she could not be mistaken; – it was Edward. She moved away and sat down. “He comes from Mr. Pratt’s purposely to see us. I will be calm; I will be mistress of myself.” In a moment she perceived that the others were likewise aware of the mistake. She saw her mother and Marianne change colour; saw them look at herself, and whisper a few sentences to each other. (253)

The rhythmic short phrases and the italics indicate Elinor’s voice and perceptions, while the past‐tense and third‐person diction maintain the narrator as filter, until the quoted monologue in Elinor’s own interior speech. In the rest of the scene, the reader Some Versions of Narration 189 has the pleasure of anticipating relief while enduring Elinor’s stunned state; speechless, she listens to his footsteps nearing the door, tries to mask her feelings when he comes in, and at last forces herself to talk of the weather. As Sense and Sensibility hastens toward felicity, the narrator more directly satirizes Elinor’s two hypocritical opponents and the “moral” of novels: Mrs. Ferrars (mother of Elinor’s beloved Edward), who remains “fearful of incurring, the reproach of being too amiable” (264); and Lucy, who “may be held forth as a most encouraging instance” of the rewards of “unceasing attention to self‐interest” (266). At the end, we know the narrator’s sympathy for her heroines has been purchased with a fund of critical distance and irony: rather than happily ever after, the novel concludes with the surprise that Elinor and Marianne, “though sisters, and living almost within sight of each other,” avoid “disagreement between themselves, or … coolness between their husbands” (269). The comedy both celebrates a reader’s belief that the couples will get along wonderfully, and acknowledges that in reality many such family arrangements go sour. Howards End is conducted in a manner more suited to a world in which time has sped up and few places in England have escaped the spread of the cities. But the implied author nods to the eighteenth‐century epistolary novel in the opening chapter:

One may as well begin with Helen’s letters to her sister. “Howards End, “Tuesday. “Dearest Meg, “It isn’t going to be what we expected. It is old and little, and altogether delightful – red brick …” (Forster 1998, 5)

“One may as well begin” seems to speak directly to a narratee in something like the present: “I have so much to tell you about how it all happened; where to begin?” But before the reader finds out who is speaking, the novel reproduces a letter written on Tuesday (just last week?) at the house that gives the novel its title. Howards End is not the imposing mansion Helen, Margaret, and the reader of Austen might expect, though it is a place that a visitor can survey, unlike Norland Park: “nine windows as you look up from the front garden.” Helen briefly serves as narrator, at times in present tense: “You open another door … and there are the stairs … ” (5). Her sister Margaret (Meg) serves as narratee, and the reader looking over her shoulder gets a good scenic introduction to the titular place and the Wilcox family currently inhabiting it. Readers in 1910 expected to feel like they were there, and had learned to fill in gaps. Not until the end of Chapter 4 does the narrator provide exposition of the “origin” and character of the orphaned Schlegels, Margaret, Helen, and brother Tibby, but we have already seen them in several scenes. The novel, published in the era of multiple daily postal deliveries, telegrams, trains, and automobiles (by the end of Chapter 2, all four of these modern conveniences have added to the embarrassment), jumps in the deep end of precipitate romance. The narrator seems to have learned from the likes of George Eliot to employ intrusive commentary or pause, as in the shared experience of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony in Chapter 5. When the Wilcox family debates whether to honor a woman’s informal will, the blunt opinion strikes a different note from Austen’s irony (though Forster 190 Alison Booth uses that too): “To follow it is unnecessary. It is rather a moment when the commentator should step forward. Ought the Wilcoxes to have offered their home to Margaret? I think not” (73). Perhaps not, dear narrator, but your implied author eventually punishes the Wilcox materialism and gives the house to Margaret. Forster’s narrator also exploits gaps and abandons characters we want to follow, much as George Eliot does when Middlemarch keeps silent about Dorothea’s story for chapters on end. Forster seems to recall the opening of Eliot’s Chapter 29, “But why always Dorothea?” (Eliot 2000, 175). Mrs. Wilcox, Margaret’s new friend, is abruptly taken away at the end of Chapter 10, and Chapter 11 begins, “The funeral was over,” from the strange aerial perspective of a workman trimming trees near the churchyard (Forster 1998, 65). The discourse of Howards End is a turbulent ride compared to that of Sense and Sensibility. Is good sense enough in the 1900s? Is it wrong, is it even possible, to focus on the gentry as Austen did? I recommend reading the narrator of Howards End as unreliable – forthright, sympathetic, yes, but limited. The unnamed narrator is a personal filter at odds, to some degree, with the value system or implied author of the whole. Thus the jarring opening of Chapter 6 seems to give up on objectivity: “We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet. This story deals with gentlefolk, or with those who are obliged to pretend that they are gentlefolk” (35). Is the implied reader really supposed to feel comfortable with class barriers in fiction as in society? The implied author urges, again and again, through characters and in propria persona (the epigraph), that we must “Only connect … ” But often the narrator seems to voice partial opinions that clash. Leonard Bast is destroyed by his connection with liberals’ and capitalists’ principles. Leonard is a victim of democracy, no longer indigent, still poor but aspiring; he is “inferior to most rich people … not as courteous … nor as intelligent, nor as healthy, nor as lovable” (35). The slur begins to sound like an explanation of environmental causes of character. “Leonard – he would figure at length in a newspaper report, but that evening he did not count for much” (221). He does not seem to count to the well‐ to‐do families with whom his lot is stealthily converging, but he certainly counts in this novel. The reader must make connections between opposing values and resist some narrative assertions. Austen’s narrator’s snobbery about Lucy Steele has its counterpart in Forster’s narrator’s blunt treatment of Dolly, Charles Wilcox’s wife, “a rubbishy little creature, and she knew it” (68), or frowsy, “awesome” Jacky Bast, toward whom “it is only you and I who will be fastidious” (37). A reader may not be able to assemble an implied author who would object to these harsh portrayals of worthless women. Our willingness to try is wooed by intimacy with sensitive and generous people, and by our dread of the loss of a beloved home, Howards End and England. Mrs. Wilcox was the presiding spirit of that home, and she is gone. The irregular pace of the novel, then, is its elegy and promise for a shared inheritance. To some extent, Howards End is a version of Sense and Sensibility. Forster, like other English novelists since 1811, could take advantage of the techniques of focalization, including free indirect discourse, that Austen pioneered or perfected. Both novels invent stories with foundations in a contemporary English world. The discourse of each novel is a communication structured by various positions, each a possible perspective on what the narrative communicates about the story, its events and existents, from characters to houses. A sense of the history of narrative in the English novel guides us Some Versions of Narration 191 to respond to this communication, as well as to compare the different treatments of similar characters, themes, and events. We assess the narrator’s address to the narratee or authorial audience and develop interpretations according to these narrative signals of authorial agency shaping the work. Some knowledge of the historical author and our own preferences and perspectives finally inform an interpretation enriched by awareness of narration as the animating spirit that tells the tale. Is Austen funnier and wiser than Forster? Is Forster more profound, acknowledging death and symbolism? Do we prefer to be charmed, schooled in social discipline, and tweaked with irony, or to be kept on edge in rapid moves, with now and then a glimpse of the sublime? These are critical comparisons to be substantiated by rereading how the novels happened to us.

References

Abbott, H. P. 2008. The Cambridge Introduction to Greimas, A.‐J. 1984. Structural Semantics: An Narrative, 2nd edition. Cambridge: Cambridge Attempt at a Method, translated by Daniele University Press. McDowell, Ronald Schleifer, and Alan Velie. Austen, Jane. 2002 [1811]. Sense and Sensibility, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. edited by Claudia L. Johnson. New York: Keen, Suzanne. 2003. Narrative Form. New York: Norton. Palgrave Macmillan. Booth, Wayne C. 1983. The Rhetoric of Fiction, Keen, Suzanne. 2010. “The Undergraduate Literature 2nd edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Classroom.” In Teaching Narrative Theory, edited by Press. David Herman, Brian McHale, and James Phelan, Cobley, Paul. 2001. Narrative. London: Routledge. 19–32. New York: Modern Language Association. Dickens, Charles. 1996 [1861]. Great Konigsberg, Ira. 1985. Narrative Technique in the Expectations, edited by Janice Carlisle. New English Novel. Hamden, CT: Archon Books. York: Bedford. Matz, Jesse. 2010. “Perspective.” In Teaching Eliot, George. 2000 [1871–1872]. Middlemarch, Narrative Theory, edited by David Herman, edited by Bert G. Hornback. 2nd edition. New Brian McHale, and James Phelan, 151–164. York: Norton. New York: Modern Language Association. Flesch, William. 2009. Comeuppance: Costly Phelan, James. 2004. Living to Tell About It: A Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration. Ithaca: Biological Components of Fiction. Cambridge, MA: Cornell University Press. Harvard University Press. Prince, Gerald. 1989. A Dictionary of Narratology. Forster, E. M. 1998 [1910]. Howards End, edited Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. by Paul B. Armstrong. New York: Norton. Warhol, Robyn R. 2010. “Gender.” In Teaching Genette, Gérard. 1983. Narrative Discourse: An Narrative Theory, edited by David Herman, Essay in Method, translated by Jane E. Lewin. Brian McHale, and James Phelan, 237–251. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. New York: Modern Language Association. 13 Some Versions of Form Stephen Arata

What do novels look like? Can a novel look like this –

– or like one of these?

The sketches are from Laurence Sterne’s comic masterpiece, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759–1767). According to Tristram, this is what the first five volumes of his novel look like – if you remove all the details and try instead to imagine their overall form (1997, 379–380). His goal, he claims, is finally to acquire the discipline and artistic skill needed to write a volume that is like “a line drawn as straight as I could draw it, by a writing‐master’s ruler, (borrowed for that purpose) turning neither to the right hand or to the left” (380). But Tristram knows, and we do too, that a narrative looking like that would be of little interest, and no fun at all. The sensible advice given by the King in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1859) – that to tell a story you should “begin at the beginning, and go on till you come to the end: then stop” (Carroll 2000, 152) – is sensibly ignored in Tristram Shandy, as it is in all good narratives. As usual, Sterne’s humor here is purposeful. Tristram’s drawings are ludicrously reductive, but they are not meaningless. At this level of abstraction, Tristram Shandy seems to disappear. Lost is not just everything that makes it memorable but nearly all that distinguishes it from other narratives. At the same time, the squiggles and bubbles and spikes, the backtrackings and sideways dartings, seem accurate if rudimentary visual analogues for the digressions, meanderings, repetitions, and abrupt time‐shifts of Tristram’s narrative. Asked to draw what it feels like to read Tristram Shandy, many of us might well come up with something resembling these sketches.

In 1921 the great Russian literary critic Victor Shklovsky called Tristram Shandy “the most typical novel in world literature” (1965, 57). Paradoxically, the very traits that make it typical also prompt Shklovsky to praise Sterne as “an extreme revolutionary” among novelists (27). Great art, he writes, works by laying bare its own techniques. Aesthetic pleasure comes not from contemplating content or subject matter but from the clarity and intensity of our awareness of the artwork as a made thing. For Shklovsky, the genius of Tristram Shandy lies in the way it foregrounds the processes of its own making. In his efforts to tell the story of his life, Tristram does not simply adopt commonly accepted narrative techniques. Rather he shows – playfully, disori- entingly – the techniques in operation, usually by misusing them or by employing them in unexpected ways. As he writes, Tristram is repeatedly distracted from what he has to say by the massive complexities involved in determining how to say it. “In general,” Shklovsky notes, Sterne “accentuates the very structure of the novel. By violating its form, he forces us to attend to it; and, for him, this awareness of the form through its violation constitutes the content of the novel” (30). For Shklovsky, Tristram Shandy is a typical novel because it displays a full range of the narrative devices characteristic of the genre. Yet at the same time it is revolutionary because those techniques are made visible and revealed to be the book’s true subject matter. What Tristram Shandy is about is its form. In 1921 it could in some quarters still be considered news that novels might be valued for their formal artistry. Despite the existence of many shapely, well‐crafted novels in the English tradition (as well as of novels such as Tristram Shandy whose 194 Stephen Arata artistry is expressed through a carefully managed shapelessness), it was commonly thought that a novel’s formal features were, at best, of secondary importance. For one thing, novels – unlike, say, sonnets or waltzes or Romanesque churches – come in many different shapes and sizes. For another, to emphasize form is to risk interfering with what has always been considered the novel’s main business, which is to represent “life” or “consciousness” or “the world.” Indeed, the narrators of countless novels have assured us that within their pages we will find not art but unmediated experience – life itself, as it is lived. That such assurances are usually embedded in highly wrought, intricately patterned fictional structures did not go unnoticed by readers, but the structures themselves seldom received extended critical attention.

Any description of a novel’s form is necessarily figural. In On Form (2007), Angela Leighton notes that “the word ‘form’ has always had a natural fit in the visual arts. Essentially, the word first comes to mind as something seen” (15). But of course the formal attributes of a novel are not visible to the eye as those of a painting or a building are – unless, that is, we attempt to translate them directly into visual terms, as Tristram does. An alternative is to make use of analogies to formal structures that can be seen. Thus we praise a book’s symmetry or commend its structure or trace its patterns or enumerate the ways its elements are put in proportion or counterpoint to one another. The terms gesture to other arts or to forms in nature. Critics compare Tom Jones (1749) to a Palladian villa in order to call attention to the skill with which Henry Fielding arranges his materials to convey a sense of architectural rhythm, balance, and scale. Marcel Proust conceived of In Search of Lost Time (1913–1927) in terms of a Gothic cathedral, its different parts corresponding to the porch, the apse, and so on (Macksey 1962, 105). Henry James habitually figured novel writing as a pictorial art, claiming that novelists, like painters, are concerned with “the related state, to each other, of certain figures and things.” Alternately, they are “embroiderer[s] of the canvas of life” (1984, 1041). But James, too, frequently employs metaphors of building, as when he says that the writer of fiction “is committed to architecture, to construction at any cost; to driving in deep his vertical supports and laying across and firmly fixing his horizontal” (1130). Virginia Woolf described different portions of Mrs. Dalloway (1925) as being connected by subterranean caves (Woolf 1978, 263). In The Waves (1931), as its title suggests, Woolf again imagined shape and rhythm in terms that gesture towards natural rather than made forms. In like manner, novelists in the nineteenth century frequently invoked the notion of organic form. In this view, the parts of a successful novel exist in the same vital relation to one another as the parts of a plant or some other living organism.

All these figures of speech – and examples could be multiplied from any moment in the novel’s history – testify to a common‐sense conviction that novelistic form is more than simply a figure of speech. Human beings are hard‐wired to perceive pattern; the Some Versions of Form 195 world would be unintelligible otherwise. Depending on your perspective, art is a tool either for uncovering the order inherent in human experience or for creating order where it does not exist. Or both: by means of its self‐evidently artificial patterns, a work of art may heighten our awareness of the looser kinds of organization that structure the real world and our experiences in it. More than other art forms, though, the novel announces its fidelity to those aspects of reality that seem to escape our efforts to reduce them to order. Novels are capacious. Gathering in the myriad details of human existence, they seek to produce a sense of the world’s fullness and diversity, its resistance to being bound within the structures of art. But of course it requires the novelist’s artistry to create that sense of fullness and diversity. In her 1810 essay “On the Origin and Progress of Novel Writing,” Anna Letitia Barbauld contrasts the “well‐written novel” constructed according to “a certain plan” with the “chance‐medley” of “real life” with its “many unconnected scenes” (2002, 412–413). But Barbauld is aware that, paradoxically, it is by means of their “certain plans” that novelists successfully convey the chance‐medley quality of real life. When James Joyce said that his goal in writing Ulysses (1922) was “to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book” (Budgen 1934, 67–68), he gave consummate expression to the novelist’s desire to reproduce the world in all its messy particularity. Yet few novels are as rigorously formed as Ulysses.

Apprehending novelistic form is no easy task even for the most alert readers. In 1921, the same year Shklovsky published his essay on Sterne, the English critic Percy Lubbock published the work he is best remembered for today, The Craft of Fiction. Here is how it begins:

To grasp the shadowy and fantasmal form of a book, to hold it fast, to turn it over and survey it at leisure – that is the effort of a critic of books, and it is perpetually defeated. Nothing, no power, will keep a book steady and motionless before us, so that we may examine its shape and design. As quickly as we read, it melts and shifts in the memory; even at the moment the last page is turned, a great part of the book, its finer detail, is already vague and doubtful. (1957, 1)

Reading occurs over time, and even a brief novel contains more information than our faulty memories can hold: obvious points, though for Lubbock they are momentous, since they lead him to conclude that “the form of a novel … is something that none of us, perhaps, has ever really contemplated” (3). Imagine trying to say something worthwhile, or even accurate, about a sculpture or a painting with only the memory of a single passing glance to work from. According to Lubbock, that is the position of the critic who tries to write of a novel’s form. “It is scarcely to be wondered at if criticism is not very precise, not very exact in the use of its terms, when it has to work at such a disadvantage” (2). Thankfully, many pleasures remain for even the casual reader. We do not need to recall all a novel’s details to appreciate what Lubbock calls “its life‐like effects” (5): the 196 Stephen Arata vivid and complex characters, sharply etched settings, compelling dramatic situations, passages of fine description, and so on. Given such treasures, “it seems perverse to say that the book is not before us when we write of such things” (5). But such is the case. We succumb willingly to the illusion of lifelikeness, “but meanwhile the book, the thing [the novelist] made, lies imprisoned in the volume, and our glimpse of it was too fleeting, it seems, to leave us with a lasting knowledge of its form” (5). For Lubbock, form is the reality of the novel, but it is also a shadow, a phantasm eluding our critical grasp.

Unlike most formalist critics, Lubbock contends that in a well‐wrought novel every detail contributes to the overall design. Nothing is superfluous; everything “tells.” According to Lubbock, we are prevented from apprehending this totality by our inability to fix in our minds any novel in its entirety. Most formalist critics adopt a less rigorous position, assuming that novels contain multiple designs and overlapping patterns, as well as much that is superfluous to those designs and patterns. For them, the first task of criticism is to identify the elements that make up a particular pattern or structure and then describe how they are arranged within a specific novel. Like other art forms, novels rely primarily on repetition to give a sense of structure. Recognizing recurrence – characters who seem to mirror or be variants of one other, sequences of parallel or antithetical scenes, types of relation that recur at different scales or in different contexts, repeated images or other kinds of figurative language, and so on – is fundamental to the perception of form. At the same time, the perception of form is determined by factors extrinsic to the novel. Judgments concerning what is integral to a novel’s design and what is superfluous differ – often dramatically – from reader to reader, for reasons that underline the differing situations (historical, cultural, disciplinary, ideological) in which novel reading takes place. Novels that one age dismissed as formless may be valued by a later age for their formal beauty. For Lubbock and critics like him, form is apprehended only when we can see a novel all at once, arrested in time.1 The novel – the “made thing” existing apart from content or subject matter – is like a material object, though it is an object visible only to the mind’s eye. Yet we also experience novels temporally, as Lubbock acknowledges. Turning one last time to Tristram’s sketches, we notice that Sterne calls attention to precisely this fact. The sketches do double work. They convey both that Tristram’s narrative has a direction and that it has a shape. Read left to right, each line traces the movement of a volume from beginning to end. But we can also take in each line as a complete unit – as a diagram or illustration of an object that exists in space. From the first perspective, the volumes of Tristram Shandy follow their own distinctive paths. From the second, the volumes possess their own distinctive shapes. These two perspectives correspond to fundamental ways readers process narratives: as sequences unfolding over time and as structures or spatial fields. “Form” is a word we apply not just to visual arts such as painting but to temporal arts such as music or dance. A musical composition is, obviously, not merely a sequence Some Versions of Form 197 of notes but an arranged sequence. Until the end of the nineteenth century, literature was commonly aligned with the temporal arts, since we have no choice but to read words in succession, one after another. In his influential treatise Laocoön (1766), Gottfried Lessing sharply distinguishes painting from poetry on the grounds that they “make use of entirely different media of expression, or signs – the first, namely, of form and colour in space, the second of articulated sounds in time” (1853, 101). It follows from this distinction that painting is best suited to represent objects in their spatial relations, since “signs arranged near to one another, can only express objects, of which the wholes or parts exist near to one another,” while writing, because it uses “consecutive signs,” can “only express objects, of which the wholes or parts are consecutive” (101). To attempt “pictorial poetry” is thus to misunderstand one’s medium, since language lends itself only to the kinds of formal patterns we experience through time. The positions mapped out by Lessing and by Lubbock have the virtue of their conceptual clarity. As all readers know, though, the experience of reading a novel tends to wreak havoc on conceptual clarity. Temporal progression and overall structure operate not in isolation from each other but rather in complex interaction. From those interactions arises our sense of novelistic form. Novelists themselves often enjoy reminding us of this.

Early in Tom Jones, Fielding informs us that as a novelist he is not required to be “time’s amanuensis” (1996, 67). That is, he is not bound to record every incident in the lives of his characters but can hop over intervals of time in which nothing of consequence occurs. In this respect a novel is unlike a newspaper, each issue of which “consists of just the same number of words, whether there be any news in it or not,” thus keeping “an even pace with time” (67). It is also unlike a romance (or a bad novel, for that matter), in which events, in the absence of any overarching scheme, simply follow one another willy‐nilly (423). By manipulating time – compressing his narrative here, elongating it there – and by including only elements essential to his plan, Fielding provides us with the pleasures arising from an awareness of conscious design. But that awareness, he reminds us, can only operate retrospectively. As we make our way sequentially through the novel, we cannot confidently distinguish essential elements from inessential. Thus at the exact midpoint of Tom Jones, Fielding warns his readers “not too hastily to condemn any of the incidents … as impertinent and foreign to our main design, because thou dost not immediately conceive in what manner such incident may conduce to that design.” Until we know “the manner in which the whole is connected” – knowledge we cannot possess in full until we finish reading – we should not “presume to find fault with any of its parts” (453). To fully appreciate his artistry, Fielding suggests, we have to reread Tom Jones with a knowledge of its overall design already in mind (810).

“I would like,” Gustave Flaubert confesses in an 1856 letter to Louise Colet, “to produce books which would entail only the writing of sentences … What I dislike are the tricks 198 Stephen Arata inherent in the making of an outline, the arranging of effects, all the underlying calculations – which are, however, Art” (1980, 189). Simply to place each well‐turned sentence after its predecessor and then move on: what bliss that would be. But the trick – or rather, as he says, the art – is to write the sentences so that, cumulatively, they convey the idea of form. In the hands of the novelist, sequence – individual sentences strung together, one after another – is manipulated to induce a vision of structure.

In a famous set‐piece in Proust’s Swann’s Way (1913), the narrator describes the church at Combray as “an edifice occupying a space with, so to speak, four dimensions – the fourth being Time.” The structure rests not just upon “a few yards” of earth but upon “epoch after epoch” of the history through which it has existed (2000, 62). This is more than a fanciful conceit, he insists. The stone porch is now “uneven and deeply hollowed at the edges (like the font to which it led us), as if the gentle brushing of the country women’s cloaks as they entered the church and of their timid fingers taking holy water could, repeated over centuries, acquire a destructive force” (60). Under the softening influence of time, even the tombstones forming the pavement of the choir are “no longer inert and hard matter” but have been made to “flow like honey beyond the bounds of their own square shape” (60). In like manner, the massive edifice of Proust’s novel occupies a four‐dimensional space. The shaping effects of time are the novel’s great theme, but they are also one of its principles of composition as well as being a central element of our reading experience. A character returns after a long absence, a forgotten or half‐remembered incident is recalled to mind, a sensual impression repeats itself, and with each recurrence the outlines of the original change. The seeming solidity of people, events, experiences is worn away like the tombstones in Combray church, their seemingly inert matter made to flow like honey beyond their initial bounds. So too is the formal architecture of Proust’s novel slowly furrowed and hollowed by the workings of the reader’s memory as she traverses its million and a half words.

In the first edition of B. S. Johnson’s Albert Angelo (1964), a small rectangle is snipped out of pages 149–152. Through it is visible a passage from the novel’s future – a portion of page 153 which might describe the death of the title character, an event that has come to seem likely by this point in the story. The cut‐out makes literal the device of prolepsis: a future event momentarily brought into the narrative present. When we reach page 153, though, we discover that the passage in fact describes the death of Christopher Marlowe in 1593. Several dozen pages further on, Albert’s demise finally does occur, which in retrospect enables us to recognize in the description of Marlowe’s death an example of foreshadowing. Meanwhile the cut‐out, seen from the perspective of page 153, now gives material form to the device of analepsis: looking through the page, we are taken back to an earlier moment in the story. Some Versions of Form 199

The narrator of Albert Angelo tells us that he arranged with his printer for the “future‐seeing hole” simply “to draw attention to the possibilities” it opens up (1964, 175). Here as elsewhere in his fiction, Johnson tries to overcome the temporality of reading, to subvert the law that binds us to move sequentially (and only in one direction) through a book. Where Flaubert dreamed of pure sequence, Johnson has a vision of simultaneity: lots of things present in a text all at once. Portions of Albert Angelo are printed in double columns, with spoken dialogue on one side and Albert’s unspoken thoughts concerning the dialogue on the other. House Mother Normal (1971) consists of nine first‐person narratives, each 21 pages long. The narrators are all physically in the same place. Their narratives, we gradually infer, are synchronous: each line in each narrative corresponds in time with the equivalent lines in all the others. To make sense of what is happening at any moment requires constant cross‐referencing, since a comment or reaction in one narrative may be a response to a simultaneous moment in another narrative from which, thanks to the tyranny of print, it is separated by many pages. The ideal reader of House Mother Normal is the impossible figure imagined by Lubbock, able to transcend time by holding in mind all at once each detail of the book. A prototype for Johnson’s experiments in House Mother Normal is the “Wandering Rocks” episode in Joyce’s Ulysses, in which each of the nineteen sections is interrupted by sentences and phrases taken from one or more of the other sections in order to indicate events occurring simultaneously but at a distance from one another. Joyce’s formal innovations in “Wandering Rocks,” like those of Johnson, make palpable the friction between “sequential symbols” and “objects in juxtaposition.” For both writers, too, any consideration of form must take in the printed book as a material object. “Every device and technique of the printer’s art should be at the writer’s command,” contends Albert Angelo’s narrator (175). In each of his novels, Johnson manipulates the printed book itself – for instance, by using cut‐outs or double columns of print or multiple typefaces – in order to disrupt conventions of reading and to explore new possibilities for narrative form. Readers of The Unfortunates (1969) are presented with a box containing 27 pamphlets of varying lengths. Apart from sections labeled “First” and “Last,” they can be read in any order. By making sequence arbitrary, Johnson releases his narrative from the requirement that it move in just one direction or settle into a single shape.

In the “Author’s Afterword” to Tree of Codes (2010), Jonathan Safran Foer calls his book “an act of exhumation” (2010, 139). Taking an English‐language translation of Bruno Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles (1934), Foer cut out large sections of each of its pages. The remaining type – isolated words or parts of words, short phrases, the occasional free‐standing punctuation mark – forms a complex visual field, with multiple pages partly visible at any place the book is opened. Tree of Codes can be read sequentially, page by page, since the words preserved on each individual page form intelligible (if often cryptic) sentences. But the words on each page also form sequences with the words seen through the cut‐outs. Visually, the book takes on a different shape, both 200 Stephen Arata physically and conceptually, each time a page is turned and new portions of later pages are revealed while once‐visible portions are covered up. Tree of Codes “is in no way a book like The Street of Crocodiles,” Foer writes (139). Schulz’s book is the source of Foer’s only in the sense of providing its vocabulary, which has been arranged to create new patterns and sequences. The trope of exhumation implies that Foer has disinterred a discrete object buried in, yet distinct from, Schulz’s work. But Foer also speculates that The Street of Crocodiles “must have, itself, been a similar act of exhumation” and that it is “from this imagined larger book, this ultimate book, that every word ever written, spoken or thought is exhumed” (139). What Foer calls “the Book” is his fantasy of a work that contains the world entire: reality itself, not its representation. Foer signals his admiration for The Street of Crocodiles by suggesting that it was exhumed directly from “the Book,” while all others, including his own, are exhumations of already exhumed material.

Near the bottom of the back cover of Tree of Codes (next to the UPC barcode) is a statement from the book’s publisher, Visual Editions, which reads in part: “We think that books should be as visually interesting as the stories they tell; with the visual feeding into and adding to the storytelling as much as the words on the page.” The visual interest of Tree of Codes is in fact more apparent than the relatively minimal interest generated by its vestigal narrative. The book calls attention to “the words on the page,” not in the conventional sense of that phrase, but as patterns of ink on layered white rectangular surfaces. Like B. S. Johnson’s novels, Tree of Codes presents itself first as a material object. Its form is made visible to the eye, not just to the mind’s eye. Needless to say, Johnson’s and Foer’s books are unusual in their foregrounding of non‐narrative elements. But every novel contains a variety of non‐narrative cues that we draw on (even if unconsciously) to make sense of its narrative structure. Most of these non‐narrative cues fall in the category of what the literary theorist Gérard Genette calls the paratext. These are elements that accompany a text, as Genette puts it, “precisely in order to present it” (1997, 1): cover, title page, dedication, foreword, table of contents, annotations, and so on. In a variety of ways, the paratext molds a reader’s expectations about the kind of book she is about to read, and thus what kinds of narrative patterns or structures to anticipate. Publishers sometimes will change a novel’s paratext in order to market the book to different audiences. Changes to, say, the front‐cover design or the back‐cover plot synopsis or even the biographical sketch of the author can subtly shape a reader’s preconceptions of a novel’s generic affiliations and therefore of its organizing principles.

As a guide to novelistic structure, perhaps no paratextual element has a greater, or less often noticed, effect on readers than chapter divisions. Genette writes extensively on the functions of chapter titles, but puts to one side what he terms rhematic divisions of Some Versions of Form 201 the text, inserted to “indicate (by way of a numeral) only a relative place and a type of textual section (book, part, chapter, and so forth)” (1997, 300). Such divisions are more than merely functional, however. In novels, they are important sense‐making devices – a fact that becomes apparent whenever they are absent. Many early novels, such as those of Daniel Defoe, lack marked divisions of any kind, and as a consequence they have often been criticized for being formless. In Defoe’s case, it is probably more accurate to say that the structure (admittedly loose) of novels such as Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Moll Flanders (1722) is difficult to discern precisely because the narrative is not broken into smaller units. Without the cues provided by “Chapter 1,” “Chapter 2,” “Chapter 3,” and so on, it is harder to perceive the kinds of repetition‐ with‐variation that contribute to a reader’s sense of novelistic form. Fielding was the first novelist fully to exploit the resources of the chapter for arranging and managing his materials, as well as for regulating the pace and rhythm of reading itself. The “architectural” structures of Joseph Andrews (1741) and Tom Jones – the way that episodes are seen to reflect or balance one another, or are grouped so as to produce a sense of symmetry or proportion – rest on the sturdy foundation of the chapter. The frequency, as well as the high‐spiritedness, with which the narrator of Tom Jones calls our attention to his manipulation of chapter, book, and volume breaks is one sign of Fielding’s conviction that what he is doing is innovative. In turn, one sign of the success of an innovation is the speed with which it becomes normative, as was the case with chapter divisions. And one sign of the chapter’s normative status in the decades after Fielding is that it could be parodied, as it is in Tristram Shandy – through reversed or “missing” chapters most conspicuously but also through Tristram’s often arbitrary parceling out of his material. For readers of Sterne’s novel, chapter divisions frequently militate against a sense of narrative structure. As a structuring device, the chapter may seem inconsequential. Yet by the nineteenth century the novel had become unthinkable without it. Serial publication reinforced the predilection for segmenting narratives into more or less equal portions, a practice that encourages writers and readers alike to conceive of novels in terms of discrete units that become meaningful by being put in imaginative relations with one another. The chapter becomes so dominant a structuring device in the Victorian period that it often overrides other forms of organization. In Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), for example, the story is presented by way of the entries in Lockwood’s personal diary – which is, implau- sibly, divided into chapters. Presumably, we are not being asked to believe that Lockwood himself inserted chapter numbers into his diary. Rather, we implicitly attribute them to an implied author aware of the formal conventions of the novel and solicitious of the reader’s expectation that the story will be parceled out in segments of roughly equal length. A chapter grid is likewise laid over the journals, letters, and personal memoranda that comprise the narratives of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1819), Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1859) and The Moonstone (1868), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). By the early twentieth century, however, Virginia Woolf was calling on novelists to slough off the shackles of the “well‐made” novel rather than “go on perseveringly, con- scientiously, constructing our two and thirty chapters after a design which more and more ceases to resemble the vision in our minds” (1994, 160). In pursuit of their vision, “whether we call it life or spirit, truth or reality,” modern novelists find that “the form of fiction most in vogue more often misses than secures the thing we seek” 202 Stephen Arata

(160). That Woolf dispenses with chapters in Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and The Waves (1931) is far from the most significant of her formal experiments, but it does intimate her belief that such divisions would have obscured the design of her novels. A more militant rejection of the convention of portioning narratives into units can be found in Samuel Beckett’s Molloy (1951): the second and final paragraph of Molloy’s monologue contains just over 40 000 words, or roughly 125 pages of unbroken text. And just as in Tristram Shandy Sterne parodies the new conventions associated with chaptering novels, Flann O’Brien in At Swim‐Two‐Birds (1939) parodies the new conventions associated with unchaptered novels. The first page of At Swim‐Two‐Birds is headed “Chapter One,” but there are no subsequent chapters.

As with Defoe, many readers of modernist novelists such as Woolf and Beckett equate long stretches of unbroken narrative with formlessness. (This is almost invariably the case with so‐called “stream‐of‐consciousness” soliloquies, such as Molly Bloom’s in the “Penelope” section of Ulysses.) More generally, novels arranged or presented in unfamiliar ways are likely to be perceived as lacking structure, as even a brief perusal of contemporary responses to many modernist works confirms. As time passes and the innovative becomes familiar, readers more readily discern form in works once considered ill‐formed or even formless. Another way to put this is to say that the perception of form does not arise from the application of objective criteria but instead depends on the recognition of shared narrative conventions and norms, which can differ across cultures and historical periods. Early readers baffled by Mrs. Dalloway or Ulysses were not less skilled or perceptive than later readers. They could see that these novels were not put together according to the old rules. But figuring out the new rules takes time. Plus, some readers may prefer the old ways. Writing in the Times Literary Supplement in 1918, Virginia Woolf makes these very points. She remarks on the curious fact that readers, herself included, seem to recognize more readily the formal qualities of works from earlier periods than their own. In fact, she contends, “half our pleasure in reading the writers of the eighteenth century comes from the delight we take in their sense of form” (1987, 324). But perhaps our grasp of their formal artistry is simply a function of our distance in time from them, Woolf writes. When she considers writers closer to her own generation – the late Victorians, for instance – Woolf has trouble discerning the formal artistry of their works. (A century after Woolf, we may pause at her claim that “we are only now beginning to make out with hesitation and difficulty the form concealed in what still appears to many the formlessness of Hardy’s novels” [325–326]. Though critics continue vigorously to debate the virtues and flaws of Thomas Hardy’s novels, it has been a long time since charges of formlessness have been leveled against them – a fact that supports Woolf’s general argument regarding the critic’s need for historical distance.) In the case of works written in the present, “it is almost impossible to see that such a thing as form exists” (324). Contemporary works do possess form, Woolf concludes, but it becomes visible only over time. Formal artistry “is everywhere scattered about us but … we are as yet unable to see it” (325). Some Versions of Form 203

But why the hyperopia? When it comes to literary form, why is it easier to make out something in the distance than it is to bring into focus something up close? Woolf’s answer calls to the fore a cluster of issues that will occupy us for the remainder of this chapter, issues having ultimately to do with the novel’s function in the world. For Woolf, the novel’s fundamental task is to give structure and meaning to life, which would otherwise remain largely unintelligible. Her admiration for eighteenth‐century authors is “a tribute to the completeness with which they triumphed, imposing shape upon the tumult of their experience” (325). Indeed, so complete is the triumph that we are left to infer the original tumult, since few traces of it remain in the finished works. The “grace and perfection” of their art is paid for by the exclusion of all that might mar the design (325). But it may be that “some very important qualities were excluded” as a result – more precisely, qualities that we would consider important and therefore would wish to see treated artistically (325). We cannot know exactly what those qualities were, though, since we are removed from the experiential tumult of the eighteenth century by the combined effects of historical distance and the shapings – which is to say, the suppressions – of art. We thus cannot fully inhabit the place of eighteenth‐century readers, who could discern the ways in which these texts grappled with contemporary lived experience. For these readers, the need to impose intelligible order was real and active. For belated readers such as herself, Woolf suggests, such texts have lost any vital relation to lived experience. For us, then, little is at stake in these earlier struggles to wrest order from disorder. We have trouble even perceiving the signs of struggle. What we do perceive are the texts’ formal beauties, which become ever more visible as they float free of the messy historical contexts in which, for their original readers, they were so thoroughly entangled. In Woolf’s capsule version of literary history, old forms inevitably outlive their usefulness. “It is not that life is more complex or difficult now than at any other period, but that for each generation the point of interest shifts, [and] the old form puts the emphasis on the wrong places” (326). The same organizing principles that elicit Woolf’s admiration when she encounters them in earlier novels appear as “fragments [thrown] together at random” when they are used in contemporary novels (326). Imposing old forms on new life deforms both life and art and ends by “disdaining the very thing that we are trying our best to win from chaos” (326). New formal strategies are called for, but when they appear their novelty prevents them from being immediately recognized for what they are. Whether novelistic form “is ever visible to the generation that is engaged in creating it seems very doubtful” (325). Yet it is finally form we value most, Woolf insists, for form alone justifies the making of art.

The belief that form is not merely ornamental, is in fact the essence of the art of fiction, is reiterated across three centuries of critical speculation on the novel. It is, as we have seen, one of the take‐home messages of Woolf’s reflections on the historicity of novelistic forms. To delight and to instruct are, traditionally, the twin offices of art, and the formal qualities of wrought things are central to both endeavors. Apprehension of 204 Stephen Arata form can be the keenest of the aesthetic pleasures we derive from an engagement with a work of art. Even as we delight in its design, though, we are – or can be – aware of its designs on us. That is to say, form has work to do. More than content or subject matter, it is by means of form that novelists most fully express their visions of reality. And it is primarily by means of form that they in turn shape our perceptions of reality. According to James, “life being all inclusion and confusion,” the artist must practice a rigorous “discrimination and selection” (1984, 1138). But discriminating – selecting some things while excluding or marginalizing others – is never an innocent practice. To remake the world artistically, to give it one form rather than another, is inevitably an act with ideological implications. One of the oldest defenses of fiction is that it is a vehicle of moral instruction. In the eighteenth century, apologists for the novel often distinguished it from earlier kinds of prose fiction, such as the romance, by claiming that its greater formal sophistication made it a more effective means of instilling moral principles. In the preface to his novel Alwyn (1780), for example, Thomas Holcroft contrasts the “unity of design” governing good novels with the “detached and independent adventures” characteristic of the typical romance, which have “no other purpose than to amuse” (1780, vi). It is precisely because a novel has been “made to form a whole” that it is able to impress its ethical vision on readers (vi). The novel has more in common with the fable, Holcroft contends, than it does with the romance, since both engage in moral instruction. But fables appeal only to children, whereas more sophisticated artistic designs “are required to attract the attention of [adult] readers” (ii). Like many of his contemporaries, Holcroft names Fielding as the most successful practitioner of this new genre. In Tom Jones order and symmetry prevail. The represented world of the novel is one in which established social orders are affirmed and the beliefs and practices that knit them together are ratified. The structural stability of the novel seems to underwrite the stability of its moral teachings. But Fielding is also aware that the social realm, in all its unruly complexity, exceeds whatever “unity of design” the novelist attempts to impose on it. From this perspective, the elaborate structures of the novel are not a faithful mirroring of pre‐existing structures in the world but compensation for their absence. Fielding calls attention to the artifice of his design and therefore to the disjunction between the world of his novel and the world, where experience does not always produce wisdom nor good deeds their intended results, where plots are not always resolved satisfactorily and virtue more often than not is left unrewarded. Near the close of his novel, Fielding reminds us that, outside the pages of Tom Jones, Tom Jones would probably have been hanged (1996, 772). For Fielding’s successors over the next century and a half, the tension between the form of the world and the form of the novel becomes a sharp spur to critical meditation and an inexhaustible source of creative inspiration. The ethical universe of Tom Jones arises out of that novel’s complex formal order, which acts as a replacement for – even a secular redemption of – the world’s lost providential order. The residue of providential views of human history sub specie aeternitatis is evident throughout Victorian fiction, where we often detect faint intimations that the shaping hand of the novelist simply makes visible God’s designs in and for the world. In this context Charles Dickens comes readily to mind. That massive novels such as Bleak House (1853), Little Dorrit (1857), and Our Mutual Friend (1865) somehow hang together despite the centrifugal Some Versions of Form 205 force generated by their swirling, heterogeneous materials is due to the energy of Dickens’s imagination. But Dickens himself was haunted by the prospect that his books imposed an order that was not inherent in the world. He thus regularly gestures towards Providential design. At the same time, however, his novels are among the century’s most searching explorations of the idea that the modern world is shaped not by God but the interactions of various impersonal – yet all too human – systems: economic, political, religious, and so on. What we can call a nascent sociological perspective on human affairs runs not just through Dickens’s novels but through much of Victorian fiction.

For many readers, of course, to talk about Dickens’s novels – or indeed about Victorian fiction in general – in terms of formal craft is to miss what is most distinctive about these works, namely the way they strive simply to let the world in, to give it to us without mediation. The essays by Christopher Baldick and Kate Flint elsewhere in this Companion (Chapters 17 and 19) document the now centuries‐long conversation regarding the degree to which the novelist ought to give form to ordinary experience. A strong antiformalist rhetoric runs through the English tradition. “It is not fair to say – I, identically I, am anywhere” in my works, claimed Fielding’s great rival and contemporary Samuel Richardson (1964, 286). The enabling fiction of his three epistolary novels, Pamela (1740), Clarissa (1747), and Sir Charles Grandison (1755), is that an anonymous editor simply presents, in sequence and without intervention or commentary, the letters of individual characters, which give us direct, unmediated access to them and to the world they inhabit. In less categorical ways than Richardson, novelists ever since have hastened to assure us that what we will find within their pages is not art but life itself, given direct and whole. As George Levine has shown, one of the most durable conventions of the nineteenth‐century realist novel is the explicit rejection of the conventions of the realist novel in the name of a “reality that stretched beyond the reach of language” (1981, 11–12). In this view, form falsifies, suffocates: it drains life from the novel rather than conferring it. As Levine goes on to insist, though, no novelist has ever been so naïve as not to recognize that narratives are by definition formed and are therefore mediations of reality. Even the expansive works James famously labeled “loose baggy monsters” – and it is worth remembering that the three examples James mentions are by writers he acknowledged as masters of the genre, William Thackeray, Alexander Dumas, and Leo Tolstoy – have discernable “shapes” despite their heterogeneous abundance (1984, 1107). No matter how loose or baggy, such novels work as much by exclusion as by inclusion. Some things are put in while others are left out, some are marked as part of larger patterns or designs while others are marked as extraneous, random, or inconsequential. A number of recent critics have persuasively argued on behalf of the sophistication and self‐consciousness with which nineteenth‐century novelists arranged – and disar- ranged – their materials.2 According to these critics, Victorian novelists display a keen awareness of the ideological implications of aesthetic form. Even in the most capacious 206 Stephen Arata of novels, they show us that form is a way of filtering out, of keeping certain things out of sight. Yet, by way of their formal arrangements, they manage to call our attention to what is not there in addition to what is.

In 1966 the visual artist Tom Phillips purchased, from a second‐hand dealer, a copy of W. H. Mallock’s 1892 novel A Human Document for threepence. Novelist and novel alike had long since fallen into obscurity, and neither was known to Phillips. He bought the book at random, though with an idea that it might serve some recent “casual experiments” in combining text and image.3 What began as “idle play … at the fringe of my activities” became a career‐long project. Philips treated individual pages of A Human Document by drawing, painting, or collaging over them. The images combine with the remaining visible text to tell a new story that is in conversation – always beguiling, often startling – with Mallock’s tale. By folding over a page of A Human Document and turning it back on the previous page Phillips discovered that he had contracted the running title to A Humument, a chance discovery that gave him the neologic title for his own work. He liked it for being “an earthy word with echoes of humanity and monument as well as a sense of something hewn, or exhumed.” The first edition of A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel appeared in 1970. Subsequent editions, each heavily reworked, were published in 1986, 1998, 2004, and 2012. In one sense, Phillips has taken a novel and turned it into a stunning work of pictorial art. The juxtapositions and interweavings of word and image transform the pages into wondrous, complex visual fields. (Sample pages can be viewed at www.gallery. humument.com.) But A Humument does more than convert narrative into picture. It also cannily explores the question of narrative form itself. A Human Document supplies all the words for A Humument, but by pruning away large swaths of them Phillips brings to light stories and narrative patterns that were latent in his source text but unrealized. Running through what Phillips calls the “dispersed narrative” of A Humument is the melancholy love story of Irma (a character in Mallock’s novel) and Toge (Phillips’s invention, who can only appear on pages on which Mallock has written the word “together”). Woven into their tale are a variety of vignettes illustrative of contemporary London culture, peopled by characters with fanciful postmodern names like Al Plish, Ted Wink, Mrs. Mornspot, and Eve Sardine. A Humument is darkly humorous, shot through with sexual longing and perversity, and filled with a spirit of anarchic playfulness. Nothing could be farther from the sensibility of the buttoned‐ up, deeply conservative, and utterly humorless Mallock. Phillips describes A Humument as a collaboration between himself and his predecessor, though one that has left him with “some apprehension of guilt at having ransacked … his writings, subverting them in such a way as to say things that would have dismayed and disturbed him.” Yet in exploring the ways the same materials can be formed into divergent narratives, Phillips takes his cue from A Human Document itself. Mallock’s novel begins: “The following work, though it has the form of a novel, yet for certain singular reasons hardly deserves the name” (1892, v). The disclaimer is prompted by the heterogeneity of the materials – “mere nondescript fragments,” the Some Versions of Form 207 narrator calls them (x) – from which A Human Document ostensibly is constructed. These include letters, journals, “scraps of poetry,” and “various other documents” full of “baffled and crippled sentences” (viii). These texts have been “ransacked,” to adopt Phillips’s description of his own procedures, in order to construct a narrative that means more than and other than its sources. In a sense, A Humument carries on a project begun in A Human Document. That project has ramified in some surprising ways over the nearly half a century since Phillips first took it up. Pages are continually reworked, and each new version is made to reveal new patterns and repetitions that were always “there” but hidden by surrounding text. As Phillips notes, in its “treated” forms A Human Document has shown itself to be uncannily responsive to contemporary history in its unfolding. A “once inert” – and unnoticed – conjunction of the words “nine” and “eleven” not only was “brought to sad life” in the aftermath of September 2001 but also gave a “dark resonance” to previously unseen repetitions of the word “bush.” For the 2012 edition both “app” and “face book” were exhumed from Mallock’s novel, along with multiple iterations of “net.” Phillips also delights in identifying trace elements of other texts embedded in A Human Document, many of which postdate it. Buried in Mallock’s novel are riffs on Forster (“my little muse was connect connect”), Joyce (“and I said yes – yes, I will yes”), and Beckett (“as years went on, you began to fail better”), among many others. A Humument is a reminder that “form” is both a noun and a verb. In the context of narrative fictions like novels, we tend to use the word to refer to the finished artifact. But forming is also an activity. In his exuberant forming and reforming of Mallock’s novel, Phillips foregrounds the role of “treatment” in the production of narrative meaning. The materials a novelist works with remain “inert” until they are brought to life by being formed, and the same materials can be formed in many ways. Less flam- boyantly than Phillips, novelists have been demonstrating these same truths for the past three centuries. To read deeply in the history of the novel, Henry James wrote in 1909, is to confront “the truth that the forms of wrought things … were, all exquisitely and effectively, the things” (1984, 1227). Forms mean.

Notes

1 For an early, influential essay on “spatial form” 3 All of the quotations from Phillips in this in the novel, see Frank (1994). For more recent section are from the unpaginated afterword to elaborations of this approach, see Smitten and the 5th edition of A Humument (2012). Daghistany (1981). 2 See Buzard (2005), Kucich (2001), and the essays collected in Levine and Ortiz‐Robles (2011).

References

Barbauld, Anna Letitia. 2002 [1810]. “On the Budgen, Frank. 1934. James Joyce and the Making of Origin and Progress of Novel Writing.” In Ulysses. New York: Harrison Smith and Robert Selected Poetry and Prose, edited by William Haas. McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft, 412–413. Buzard, James. 2005. Disorienting Fiction: The Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview. Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth‐Century 208 Stephen Arata

British Novels. Princeton: Princeton University Levine, George. 1981. The Realistic Imagination: Press. English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady Carroll, Lewis. 2000 [1865]. Alice’s Adventures in Chatterley. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wonderland, edited by Richard Kelly. Lubbock, Percy. 1957 [1921]. The Craft of Fiction. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview. New York: Viking. Fielding, Henry. 1996 [1749]. The History of Tom Macksey, Richard. 1962. “The Architecture of Jones, a Foundling, edited by John Bender and Space and Time: Dialectic and Structure.” In Simon Stern. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Proust: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Flaubert, Gustave. 1980. The Letters of Gustave René Girard, 104–121. Englewood Cliffs: Flaubert 1830–1857, edited and translated by Prentice‐Hall. Francis Steegmuller. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Mallock, W. H. 1892. A Human Document. London: University Press. Cassell. Foer, Jonathan Safran. 2010. Tree of Codes. London: Phillips, Tom. 2012. A Humument: A Treated Visual Editions. Victorian Novel. 5th edition. London: Thames & Frank, Joseph. 1945. “Spatial Form in Modern Hudson. Literature.” The Sewanee Review 53: 221–240. Proust, Marcel. 2000 [1913] Swann’s Way, trans- Genette, Gérard. 1997 [1987]. Paratexts: Thresholds lated by Lydia Davis. New York: Penguin. of Interpretation, translated by Jane E. Lewin. Richardson, Samuel. 1964. Selected Letters, edited Cambridge: Cambridge University Press by John Carroll. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Holcroft, Thomas. 1780. Alwyn, or The Gentleman Shklovsky, Victor. 1965 [1921]. “Sterne’s Tristram Comedian. London: Fielding and Walker. Shandy: Stylistic Commentary.” Russian James, Henry. 1984. Literary Criticism: French Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, translated by Lee Writers, Other European Writers, The Prefaces to the T. Lemon and Marion J. Reiss, 25‐60. Lincoln: New York Edition, edited by Leon Edel and Mark University of Nebraska Press. Wilson. New York: Library of America. Smitten, Jeffrey R., and Ann Daghistany, eds. Johnson, B. S. 1964. Albert Angelo. London: 1981. Spatial Form in Narrative. Ithaca: Cornell Constable. University Press. Kucich, John. 2001. “Intellectual Debate in the Sterne, Laurence. 1997 [1759‐67]. The Life and Victorian Novel.” In Cambridge Companion to the Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, edited by Victorian Novel, edited by Deirdre David, 212– Melvyn New. Harmondsworth: Penguin. 233. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Woolf, Virginia. 1978. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Leighton, Angela. 2007. On Form: Poetry, Volume 2: 1925–1930, edited by Anne Olivier Aestheticism, and the Legacy of a Word. Oxford: Bell. San Diego: Harcourt Brace. Oxford University Press. Woolf, Virginia. 1987 [1918]. “Mr. Howells on Lessing, Gottfried. 1853 [1766]. Laocoön: An Essay Form.” In The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Volume 2: on the Limits of Painting and Poetry. Translated by 1912–1918, edited by Andrew McNeillie, 324– E. C. Beasley. London: Longman, Brown, Green, 326. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. and Longmans. Woolf, Virginia. 1994 [1925]. “Modern Fiction.” Levine, Caroline and Mario Ortiz‐Robles, eds. The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Volume 4: 1925– 2011. Narrative Middles: Navigating the 1928, edited by Andrew McNeillie, 157–165. Nineteenth‐Century British Novel. Columbus: San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Ohio State University Press. 14 A Character of Character, in Five Metaphors Deidre Lynch

Characters Wanted, Unwanted, Dead, or Alive

“[T]he characters of a novel principally determine its merit,” wrote Francis Coventry in 1752, prefacing his Pompey the Little, or, The Life and Adventures of a Lapdog (x). This seems self‐condemning on Coventry’s part (without speech or volition – a small dog, he is even carried about – the canine protagonist of Coventry’s fiction more cipher than full‐blown character). But the statement does foretell one of the primary ways in which readers have discussed and valued fiction since the eighteenth century. Character is still seen not only as one of the novel’s building blocks, but as its very reason for existing. When critics have aimed to give the novel form a history, it is accordingly charac ters that they have engaged. Multiple commentators over the course of the nineteenth century charted how in their day the old novel of incident had been transformed, for the better, into the novel of character. Robert Langbaum replayed this argument in the mid‐ twentieth century when he stated that “the victory of character over action” is what “distinguishes the high literature of modern times” (1963, 210). Other schemes for periodizing the novel’s history have centered on measuring characterization’s increasing commitment to individuation or to inwardness. These have presented the novel as rising only when properly individuated, lifelike characters assumed their rightful place at its center. In 1814 an anonymous reviewer of Walter Scott’s Waverley recounted, for instance, how the novel came into its own when writers ceased to base their pic tures of life on their own conceptions of the ideal: when they elected instead, first, to present “specimens of the human race,” and then, later, instructed by “a nearer intercourse” with their fellow human beings, when they learned to copy not “man in

A Companion to the English Novel, First Edition. Edited by Stephen Arata, Madigan Haley, J. Paul Hunter, and Jennifer Wicke. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. 210 Deidre Lynch general, but … men of a peculiar nation, profession, or temper, or – to go a step further – … individuals” (quoted in Lynch 1998, 125). This sort of character talk has been crucial when it comes to establishing the liter ariness and canonical bona fides of an otherwise suspiciously popular genre. Even so, in critical writing fictional characters have not always been welcomed with open arms. They prompt more mixed feelings. Sometimes commentators have wished that char acters were less important to the novel form and that the novel’s fortunes could be separated off from the character’s. In the 1970s Roland Barthes in S/Z even intimated that this desired state of affairs was just over the horizon: “What is obsolescent in today’s novel is not the novelistic, it is the character” (1974, 95). Although F. R. Leavis’s The Great Tradition, the book that in the mid‐twentieth century helped establish the English novel as a fit object for academic study, investi gated characterization as the means by which the novel promoted “human awareness,” Leavis simultaneously deplored how these ethical ambitions for the genre tended to be overlooked by readers who believed the business of the novelist was to give us “lots of life” (1948, 227). Leavis may have been taking his cue from his wife, Q. D. Leavis, who in her Fiction and the Reading Public had earlier complained that “truly valuable fic tions” failed to receive their due because misguided critics habitually compared the merits of novelists by the “size of the portrait gallery each has given to the world” (1932, 60). The Leavises’ contemporary Arnold Kettle took similar exception to how readers who celebrated Dickens as a “creator of juicy characters” were treating him, in fact, as less than a “novelist” (1960, 88). In this line of thought, characters can be excessively engrossing in ways that damage the integrity of the novel as a novel. A novel’s characters may, for instance, nudge that novel away from its novelhood – converting a narrative into a “portrait gallery.” Or its characters can fail to respect the boundaries either of the individual work or of the novel form more generally. (Well into the twentieth century many print makers, manufacturers of china figurines, and exhibitors of waxworks helped the characters of Scott’s and Dickens’s fictions catapult out of Scott’s and Dickens’s texts. By taking these characters’ portraits they bolstered the impression of their freestanding existence.) Provided with prodigal generosity for readers who demand “lots of ‘life,’” characters in the plural – characters massed together to form a various social panorama – may distract from the representation of character in the singular – character as the occasion for novelists’ investigation of individual psychology. These mid‐twentieth‐century critics’ wariness about characters’ potential to run away with and from the works containing them is less remembered than the more forthrightly suspicious account of character outlined in subsequent decades. This assault on the legitimacy of character as a literary construct, which proceeded in tandem with a corrosive interrogation of the novel’s realist past, was launched by a number of European scholars of narratology and structural linguistics, Barthes prominent among them. This group deplored the naïve essentialism of analyses that overlooked characters’ purely verbal conditions of existence – analyses that forgot that characterization belonged to the linguistic rather than the referential domain, that treated mere figures of speech as though they might be possessed of an independent psychological existence, and that granted them the kind of empathetic recognition that by rights should be reserved for “real” people. By way of a corrective, A Character of Character, in Five Metaphors 211 these theorists reduced characters to actants, bundles of plot functions, or (as in the anti‐illusionist aesthetics of S/Z) a combinatory product engendered over the course of a narrative whenever a stable cluster of motifs comes to be grouped around the same proper name (Barthes 1974, 67). Dispelling magic, these critics played up characters’ ontological lack. However, it is not evident that these reiterated death sentences – these propositions about characters’ nonexistence – actually do what they are intended to and dissuade readers from identifying with characters (see Gallagher 2006, 352). And even as non entities the entities of fiction operate as social actors. These chimeras live among us. The relationships that they form with human beings, in accumulating and becoming meaningful over time, help to generate our collective histories. As Ruy Blanes and Diana Espirito Santo assert while promoting an anthropology accountable to “extra material forms of sociality,” even “nonthings” may “carve their own social destinies” (2014, 3, 28). Acknowledging this, however, does not mean that we should underesti mate characters’ capacity to perturb the same commentators who are the novel’s proponents.

Nonthings/Quasi‐Persons/Near‐Humans

Why the perturbation? One answer – and the one that will be pivotal for this essay – is implicit in the recent work of the critic John Frow, for whom characters are first and foremost ontologically hybrid entities (2014, 1). In his helpful account, characters strike a balance between being legible textual effects and being quasi‐persons. It is in the disconcerting play between conventional systems of signification and nonconven tional structures of human nature that they come into being. Successfully taking the measure of this hybridity can be tricky. As we have seen, the narratological/structuralist approach to character has tended to stress one dimension of characters, their writtenness, at the expense of the other, the one that might be summed up as their capacity to strike readers as being as personlike and as alive as themselves. Critics who view characterization as the privileged locus of the novel’s mimetic ambi tions reverse these priorities. But downplaying the textual in favor of the personlike is often in their accounts a prelude to turning from the personlike to the person tout court, a move that also leaves behind character as character. It is not unusual for a critical account that begins as an engagement with character’s literary history to drift from that engagement and end up as a history of selfhood and its successive transformations. Since the nineteenth century, accounts of the novel’s rise into realism have frequently treated characterization as indexing historical trends in the world the novel reflects: the emergence of new desires for social inclusiveness, for example, or, in accounts of a nationalist bent, “the unprecedented freedom of the modern subject within the English national culture” (Warner 1998, 26). Even though they instance fictional minds more often than they instance character, contemporary practitioners of novel studies who draw on the insights of cognitive science in some measure reiterate the referentialist assumptions of these older accounts. They likewise subscribe to the premise, discern ible in many narratives of the genre’s progress, that the novel, defined by its realist claims, is “the privileged medium for the self’s modern utterance” (Warner 1998, 26). 212 Deidre Lynch

Blakey Vermeule, for instance, who questions the salience of the conventional “distinction between fictional and nonfictional characters,” studies characterization in fiction for what it tells us about the evolution of the brain circuitry that enables human beings to ascribe interiority to other people (2010, 17). Similarly, for the reviewer of Waverley cited above, novelists get better at creating characters when through “a closer acquain tance” with the world they augment their knowledge of real persons. To bracket the discontinuities between human selves and novelistic characters quite so thoroughly – to proceed as though character belongs to the field of psychology or of history more than it does to the field of writing – risks simplifying the ontological hybridity of character. It risks leaving unexplored the most interesting questions about character’s particular mode of existence. Neither of the interpretive modes I have ges tured to – the formalism that dissolves characters into language or the mimetic school, in both its older and contemporary forms, that regards characters as their readers’ alter‐ egos and fellow travelers through time – prepares one to consider, for instance, “the cathexis with ontological difference” that Catherine Gallagher identifies as a crucial dimension of novel reading (2006, 357). In Gallagher’s account, even as readers savor the sense that the character’s hidden life is disclosed to them, and with a thoroughness unmatched by their experiences of others in the world beyond the book, they also realize that this preternatural knowability is the very sign of the character’s fictionality: “What we seek in and through characters, therefore, are not surrogate selves but the contradic tory sensations of not being a character” (361). Nor do these critical modes seem especially useful when, say, it comes to assessing the numerous narrative instances that suggest characters’ estrangement from the stories in which they find themselves or the power that authors wield in first putting the characters inside these stories and then, often showily, abbreviating their tenure. Consider the virtuoso demonstration of authorial omnipotence performed by Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), whose narrative discourse is punctuated by passages that pull the rugs out from under the characters’ feet: Spark’s flash‐forwards abruptly divulge the fates that await her fictional population – death by fire or by cancer or the exile from the world that will be Sandy Stranger’s lot in the convent – and then return readers to the unfolding story, leaving them to keep on reading with that foreknowledge. In The Common Reader Virginia Woolf noticed in Austen’s novels something of the same zeal for dispatching her fictional cre ations, but identified the impulse not with the powers of plotting but with a cutting style: “Sometimes it seems as if her creatures were born merely to give Jane Austen the supreme delight of slicing their heads off” (1953, 140). Put otherwise, if you are too confident that you have got character’s number and so too firm in the conviction that character is either (a) a represented person or (b) just a rhetorical effect, then you are likely to simplify the strange semantic games that novelists and novel readers have long played together. These parties habitually agree, for instance, that it will count as a per fectly acceptable and ordinary breakdown of the boundary between history and fiction for a novel’s invented and so previously unknown characters to move about in our actual, previously known world and so turn up in mappable locations like the cities of London or Bath, on Baker Street or in the Pump Room. By contrast, it can still create a stir when actually existing persons appear in a work of fiction as themselves. My desire to keep character’s ontological hybridity in play and in readers’ view informs my strategy in the pages that follow. The rest of this chapter is a minicatalog, A Character of Character, in Five Metaphors 213 far from exhaustive, of the diverse metaphors that some British novelists and some influential commentators on the novel have devised to obtain purchase on – or simply manage – character’s particular mode of existence. With these metaphors they have registered the specific and shifting emotional and ethical programs that acts of character writing and character reading have involved. At particular historical periods some have predominated over others. In what follows I mark where this is the case, though generally I have not been constrained by period boundaries in my selection or arrangement of examples. My catalog begins with the set of metaphors that have suggested that readers’ expe rience of the persons in books is continuous with their experience of the writing in books. In this account characters are like inscribed papers, like documents or letters, in every sense of the latter term – perambulating pieces of text endowed with the power to speak about themselves. I move next to a long‐lived understanding of character that affiliates the novel with natural history and presents the character as the specimen, selected, collected, and displayed in order that the species it typifies might be known in its true colors. Next, and by way of tracing some tensions in characteriza tion’s relationship to such categorical thought, I move to the affinities between the character and the monstrous and misfit: affinities that represent the very source of story, since in novels that adhere to this setup the possession of a story is the symptom that discloses the outlier. Another way to apprehend what makes a character tick involves analogies likening this fictive person to the clockwork automaton and lik ening the textual life of the former to the artificial life of the latter. From considering this account of character, character as a textualized machine or puppet or doll, I turn in my final entry to a set of metaphors that registers another strategy for resolving the conundrum of character’s existential status: metaphors that liken the character to a ghost and cast it as a being whom readers can experience as simultaneously dead and alive.

Letter

The earliest senses of the word character, a term that originates in ancient Greece and which speakers of English only belatedly pressed into service to designate the imaginary personages they wrote into books or brought to life on the stage, actually point away from the mimetic project so often identified as fiction’s raison d’être. They point instead toward writing – the material supports of meaning in a literate culture. That a piece of writing is composed out of strings of characters – in the original sense of the word that denotes a mark, stamp, brand, or letter of the alphabet – is something we still have occasion to remember each time we command our word‐processing programs to execute a “character count.” Whenever that sense of the term comes to the fore, character begins to dance across what may now seem to us firm semantic boundaries, between what is represented – and pre‐dates its textual manifestation – and the means of representation. Far from being exclusive to the skeptical semiologist or narratologist, the materialist account of literary character that decomposes it to the words on the page – and proposes that character is “the anthropomorphic bearer of the largest number of words in the 214 Deidre Lynch text” (Frow 1986, 230) – frequently comes naturally to the medium‐conscious English novelist. “[I]n Anglo‐American culture … broadly, character was a fluid association of selfhood and its representation” (Manning 2013, 27). We are sometimes doing no more than the novelist’s bidding when we cease to think of character as the fictive entity that has a book written about it (in the sense, for example, in which Austen wrote about Elizabeth Bennet) and begin to consider character instead as an element of writing – and so as a synecdoche of the book, the legible, replicable form from which books are made. This account of character was often to the fore in the era of the novel’s begin nings, when writers were eager to highlight their genre’s close association with new communications and media technologies like the post office and the press (see Lynch 1998). “Characters,” wrote Daniel Defoe, using them himself, are “types Impressing their Forms on Paper by Punction and the Work of an Engine”: under the rubric character Defoe draws together alphabet systems, typefaces, and the inscriptions that are stamped on coins in a celebration of the compacts and communications that undergird civil society (1726, 2). With remarkable regularity, the personages furnished us in the printed works of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries carry upon them the labels, the blazonry, that tell us who they are. These characters are in some sense self‐ documenting, and the details identifying them as themselves are telling, literally so. Hence the claim made in Thomas Overbury’s 1622 book of character portraits, in the sketch Overbury dedicates to the Affectate Traveller (a boastful type), that “His attire speaks French or Italian, and his gait cries, ‘behold me’” (2003, 208). The “Very Woman” whom Overbury depicts (foil to his “Good Woman”) “reads over her face every morning, and sometimes blots out pale and writes red”; that face is “hanged about with toys and devices, like the sign of a tavern, to draw strangers” (201). The enthusiasm for eloquent surfaces that, as these examples attest, often propelled the seventeenth‐century satirists’ character catalogs is continued in the narrative fic tions of the next century. Eighteenth‐century novels often conjure a world that is replete with identifying signatures – and whose “sociality” is augmented when, as Laurence Sterne’s protagonist and alter ego Parson Yorick puts it in 1771, observers of character come to master Nature’s “short hand” (1984, 57). (Hence this passage, in which we listen in as Yorick ponders how to win friends and influence people: “See Monsieur Le Duc’s face first – observe what character is written in it” [76].) These early novels frequently create the impression that in their fictive worlds, if not in life, knowing another’s character is really just a matter of seeing a face (or of unmasking the real face) and of reading the signs. This epistemology is literally at issue, in fact, at moments in Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews (1742), which has two of the innkeepers whom Joseph encounters in his journey from London back to the countryside plying their trades under signs that tell readers, if not Joseph, just what they are like before they open their mouths. That the hostess whose inn is known by the sign of the Dragon would rather let Joseph perish than extend him charity comes as no surprise for those fluent in the emblematic tradition lending her sign its meaning (Fielding 1999, 53). Earlier, and at a happier moment in Joseph’s history with the hospitality profession, Joseph meets with an innkeeper named Tim, who, the narrator informs us, fittingly has the Lion “for his Sign, as he doth in Countenance greatly resemble that magnanimous Beast” (43). For Fielding and many of his contemporaries, still uninhib ited by those twentieth‐century axiologies that dictate that character ought to be A Character of Character, in Five Metaphors 215

“round” and not “flat,” less convinced than later generations that the interior life is the only genuine life, characterization is only incidentally an exercise in plumbing the hidden, inner meanings that later writers would present as the very ground of person ality. Instead, many present characterization as a kind of calligraphic exercise. In their scheme, to characterize is to retrace lines that already make the person into reading matter. This is because the truths that matter about characters tend by these writers to be affiliated with, rather than detached from, the exoteric, public information inscribed on surfaces: inn signs, printed pages, coin faces, and human faces, whose lineaments – in this period when the pseudoscience of physiognomy is at the height of its popularity – spell out the persons’ own stories. For some novelists, the conceit that presents character as an animated, talking, and walking text remains compelling long after the eighteenth century. Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) provides an example. In her third chapter, in the episode in which Lockwood narrates his harrowing experience in the deserted chamber to which he is consigned as the Heights’ unwelcome houseguest, Brontë contrives to lay bare the very mechanisms by which mere reading matter comes, through a strange ani mating magic, to appear a scene enacted by (quasi‐) persons. After finding writing scratched on the window ledge in his chamber, writing that he deciphers as “a name repeated in all kinds of characters large and small,” Lockwood recounts how the texts he has been “spell[ing]” over – “Catherine Earnshaw, here and there varied to Catherine Heathcliff, and then again to Catherine Linton” – imprint themselves on his brain. Even as he closes his eyes, a “glare of white letters started from the dark, as vivid as spectres,” and “the air swarmed with Catherines” (Brontë 1995, 17). When Catherine’s ghost appears later that same night, Lockwood soon musters a psychological explanation to explain away the apparition. He declares the specter to be nothing more than “an impression that personified itself, when I had no longer my imagination under con trol” (26). But in addition to explicating the psychology of the ghost seer, this episode positioned at the start of Brontë’s novel might also be read as a staging of the very mental operation that will carry readers through this novel: that operation by which typographic characters imprinted or impressed on the page become animated – “start” into life – so as to become characters in the other sense of the term, that is, entities who seem persons in the way their readers are persons. Commencing in the next chapter, Nelly Dean’s narration to Lockwood will bit by bit continue the work of animation begun in this episode and make the Catherine who begins the story as a series of inscriptions into a fleshed‐out person. The episode’s effect is perhaps also to suggest that the “personification” that Lockwood references may be run in reverse: Brontë might be underlining that those characters who are made from characters may also be unmade, and that the personhood bestowed through acts of personification may also be retracted. In mobilizing such conceits for character, Wuthering Heights alerts us to a potential for dehumanization latent within the novel form. By this means, it floats the possibility that fiction might originate not in the world of human relations and the impulse to represent it, but in something more impersonal and arbitrary – in word play, the arrangement and rearrangement of figures, the movement of chess pieces across a board, or, more simply, in the alphabet. The distinc tion resembles one that Ludwig Wittgenstein sets out in the Blue and Brown Books, between looking at a drawing and construing it as a face and looking at it and seeing 216 Deidre Lynch instead “mere dashes” (Miller 1995, 90). In the episode that sees Catherine’s young daughter entrapped in her dead mother’s former home, and in which she tries to con vince her cousin Linton Heathcliff to play with her, the two light upon a cupboard containing a heap of old toys and in particular two balls, one marked C and the other H. “I wished to have the C., because that stood for Catherine, and the H. might be for Heathcliff, his name” (Brontë 1995, 248). One senses throughout this part of Brontë’s novel that the story of the children’s parents is on the verge of being recapitulated. But with this detail Brontë makes both that recapitulation, and the original story it repeats, appear nothing more than a certain play of letters – the diagram formed by the trajec tories a ball might trace as it is tossed to and fro. A comparable turn to letters and from living beings is glimpsable elsewhere in the novelistic tradition. In Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey (1768), for instance, a tame starling that once belonged to Yorick enters high society and encounters new characters, albeit characters in the most mini malist terms: “my bird,” Yorick reports, got passed from Lord A. to Lord B. to Lord C. and so on “half round the alphabet” (Sterne 1984, 74). Characters are likewise letters, though in a different sense of the term, in the tradi tion of epistolary fiction. Eighteenth‐century novels such as Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1748) and Frances Burney’s Evelina (1778) are compiled exclusively from letters, ones that also serve as stand‐ins for the persons who write them. The plots of such novels sometimes seem to be initiated as much by what befalls these letters in their transits from hand to hand – by their propensity to arrive late or to be intercepted by an unintended addressee – as they are propelled by human motivations. The notion of character as a synecdoche of the book is thus, for this tradition, foundational. So is the contrast epistolary fiction regularly develops between the character of the heroine as it is misrepresented in public – by gossipy talk, by scandalous appearances – and the private truths of character to which her letters bear authentic witness – truths to which, with the heroine’s confidante, we readers have access. This intimate setup closes the distance between readers and characters. It helps make the epistolary method with its firsthand accounts of events a powerful technology for tugging at readers’ heart strings and soliciting their projections. That affective binding‐in is the reason that John Frow presents Clarissa as paradigmatic for his argument that character depends for its existence on readers’ investments – that character happens at the intersection between rhetorical effects and readerly interest (2014, 54–62). The centrality this arrangement has within epistolary fiction also documents an immense confidence in the evidentiary force of the written word – and the genre’s origin in a society enthralled with the new communication styles of its print culture. In a statement in which Richardson touts the advantages of epistolary fiction as opposed to the usual narrative mode, this author, sounding every bit the printer he once was, describes how the “Characters” composing the former would “sink deeper in the Mind of the Reader” and “stamp” on that mind “a perfect Idea of the very Turn of Thought, by which the Originals [i.e., the letter‐writing characters] were actuated, or diversified from each other” (1998, 334). In this draft preface for Clarissa, Richardson extends to his audience outside his book the account of the character as a surface made meaningful by its inscriptions that this section has been examining. Stamped by their reading matter and exposure to Clarissa’s good example, that audience is being reprinted in this paragon’s image. A Character of Character, in Five Metaphors 217

Specimen

The realism at issue in this passage of cheerleading for the epistolary method is distinct from the claims to accurate mimesis that will be center stage in the later history of novels. Like several contemporary letter‐novels, Clarissa presents its central character as an example capable of prompting readers’ imitation. As April Alliston has under lined (1995), the “realism” Richardson touts is thus to some extent a function of the premise that Clarissa’s perceived moral exemplarity will itself generate a new reality. Even in the eighteenth century, though, this account of character as exemplar coexists with another logic of example that is descriptive rather than prescriptive, and which understands the example not as a model for imitation but instead as evidence, a stand‐ in or sample pointing toward a truth involving larger numbers. Where this logic is to the fore, characterization is presented as an enterprise centered on the specimen whose typicality fits it for its exemplary role. Though the details that follow often complicate such pigeonholing, to introduce a character is frequently a matter of describing the sort of person he or she is. It is often a matter of locating him or her within a catalog of sociological and ethical and, in some novels, humoral types: for instance, among the novel tradition’s array of avuncular old gentlemen, impudent servant girls, loquacious lawyers, parvenu(e)s, bossy great ladies, and/or of course the tradition’s key demo graphic sector, bifurcated by gender, namely, the marrying kind. Edward Bulwer‐ Lytton opens the third chapter of his Pelham (1828) by underlining his novel’s compliance with this logic of example: “Sir Lionel Garrett was a character very common in England, and in describing him I describe the whole species” (15). Depicting high society with cartographic exactitude, Pelham goes on to locate on the map the respect able “set” to which this Sir Lionel belongs, as he declares that Sir Lionel is located a cut “above ton” – above the fashionable world. As a locus of pertinent identities and differ ences, character is at once a means of aggregation – it marks out the person’s affinity with others belonging to the same category – and a means of segregation – it differen tiates the person from the membership of some other category. Even so, whenever characterization is governed by the logic of the specimen, when ever, that is, writers mark off the prominent and distinctive qualities that lead them to class a person in this category rather than that one, one sort of boundary will tend to become fuzzy – the line separating human from other sorts of entities. In fictions set up so that the discussions of character feed into discussions of species, we often see the presumptive human exceptionalism of the project of character come under strain (this is a phenomenon readers of this chapter have already witnessed, in that a lapdog, dragon, lion, and starling have already dropped in on the discussion). In zigzagging across the divide between the human and the nonhuman, British writers more or less explicitly followed the example of Theophrastus of Eresus, the student of Aristotle and sometime botanist who has some title to be considered the inventor of the literary character. The static prose portraits of character types – the Coward, the Boor, the Chatterer – that Theophrastus drew up, doing so in a manner that affirmed the proximity of his naturalistic typologies to Aristotle’s ethics, cast a long shadow over the early history of the novel, thanks to their revival by seventeenth‐century authors like Overbury. Even Henry James, at the start of the twentieth century, acknowledges the novel form’s debt to Theophrastus – this despite being famed for promoting an 218 Deidre Lynch expansion and ambiguation of character that seem wholly antithetical to summary judgments that are character sketches’ stock in trade. Reminiscing in the 1908 preface to The Princess Casamassima about how he came to invent Hyacinth, that 1886 work’s protagonist, James evokes Theophrastus’s botanical inquiries when he describes that invention as a matter of culling a flower found growing “from the London pavement” – “a garden bristling with an immense illustrative flora” (1987, 33, 32). In Lord Jim (1900), Joseph Conrad deploys a similar metaphor for the enterprise of characteriza tion: his narrator Marlow declares, prior to retelling Jim’s story, “I came here to describe a specimen”; and to furnish this story with an interlocutor Conrad ushers into his fictional world a “naturalist of some distinction,” encountered amidst the glass display cases of his butterfly cabinet (1999, 177, 170). The language of species, it is worth noting, does not only align characterization with a project of social taxonomizing that assigns population units to their appropriate types. It also calls up that pictorialist episteme that associates character more with external ized, visible information than with the invisible truths of the psychological interior: “species” was first used in English to designate the outward appearance of an object. (James’s “illustrative flora” would seem, or so “illustrative” implies, to comprise “species” in both the earlier and later senses of the term.) Indeed, for much of its history the novel maintains close intertextual relations with surveys of the social field that com bine pictures with their words and that eschew narrative the better to accumulate por traits: in the eighteenth century, with “cries of London,” for instance, that depict people plying their diverse trades in the streets and that use the organizational schemata of the printed page to bring order to the city’s chaos; or, in the nineteenth, with consciously panoramic works like Kenny Meadows’s Heads of the People (1840), a collection of “English faces” and prose sketches written to order to match Meadows’s pictures. The standard narrative of the novel’s history – as the review of Waverley cited above reminded us – backgrounds the novel’s close relationship to these taxonomizing knowledge practices. The novel rises, the old story that runs from the early nineteenth century on affirms, when it learns to reform the relation between the general and the particular, and to bypass groups, the better to depict individuals. But the novel’s rela tion to the individuality of individuals was never quite so straightforward. As Catherine Gallagher points out, the referential claim of the novel, “its stake in the world outside the text,” generally “attaches to classes of persons,” whereas its fictionality inheres in its invention of individuals (2005, 62). When in Joseph Andrews Fielding’s narrator insists that the lawyer with whom Joseph shares a stagecoach journey has been alive “these 4000 years,” he simultaneously warns readers that it would be a category mis take to think of the fiction as libeling actually existing persons (Fielding has no actual money‐grubbing man of law in view) and alerts them to the ontological conundrums they will confront while traversing his new province of writing: “I declare here once for all, I describe not Men but Manners; not an Individual but a Species” (1999, 164).

Monster

When the virtue of Richardson’s Clarissa is put to the test by the libertine Robert Lovelace it is because Lovelace is intent on confirming or disconfirming her member ship in a class. If he is curious about whether there “may be consent in struggle … [or] A Character of Character, in Five Metaphors 219 yielding in [Clarissa’s] resistance” to his sexual assault, it is because Lovelace aspires to know for certain whether she is after all only a woman like any other (whether she is a very woman, to recall Thomas Overbury’s emphatic language, that is, a person who might be said to be a woman – or be dismissed as a woman – in the fullest sense of that term). When discussing his investigation Lovelace has a zoological analogy ready to hand: “were I to go no further … how shall I know the difference between her and another bird?” (Richardson 1962, 2: 245, 247). (Susan Manning’s declaration that “attribution of character to another implied a proprietorial or a patronage relationship, or an assumption of intellectual superiority” [2013, 26] also illuminates this passage, for one way to describe the outcome Lovelace expects his inquiry to yield is to say that he half counts on being able to give Clarissa a bad character.) The cruelty involved in Lovelace’s effort to define “a Clarissa” by defining her relationship to “her sex” under scores an additional dimension of the logic of example we’ve been discussing – which is that the novel, even as it uses character as a “mechanism for scaling up and down between orders of generality” (Frow 2014, 114), frequently calls attention to the conceptual and ethical difficulties inhering in such movement. If the novel has a forte for compound personation – such that Henry James’s Isabel Archer, say, can be at once herself, a metonym of America, and paradigmatically “a lady,” as per James’s title – the novel has also tended, with particular vehemence during the nineteenth century, to insist on the inability of the class to account for the individual and insist on the ten dency that “examples have to exceed that which they are supposed to exemplify” (Gallagher 2005, 65). Readers of The Portrait of a Lady (1881) are also invited, accord ingly, to realize how thoroughly Isabel Archer’s own theory of character and theory of her own character – “Nothing that belongs to me is any measure of me; everything’s on the contrary a limit, a barrier, and a perfectly arbitrary one” (James 1984b, 253) – conflict with the expectations her acquaintance brings to her case. That acquaintance cannot resist seeing Isabel as an embodiment of American wealth, independence, or opportunity, and, by extension, cannot resist equating her with both her belongings and the national collective to which she belongs. The affective compacts that readers make with the heroes and heroines of nineteenth‐ century fiction derive much of their poignancy from narrative arrangements, like these in Portrait, that convince us that these people with whom we sympathize have been misclassified by their peers. We frequently come to deplore, too, how those classifications take no account of these people’s alteration and development over time. “What else allows Elizabeth Bennet, Pip, Jane Eyre, Maggie Tulliver, Michael Henchard, Dorian Gray, and Stephen Dedalus to represent the claims of unacknowl edged individuality in general, if not the fact that they are first and foremost something more than the consequently obsolete place assigned them?” (Armstrong 2006, 349). Nancy Armstrong’s rhetorical question registers how often the British novel pivots on its protagonist’s deviation from the category to which he or she has been assigned, and how often the work of the narrative will be to close the gaps between self and social position or between self and the available forms of fulfillment. The question suggests as well that monster stories do not only belong within the Gothic tradition. Realist fiction depends upon category defiers: hence its statistically remarkable population of socially displaced, unplaced, and/or disinherited figures (bastards, orphans, foundlings, social climbers, and their ilk). Positing a world gov erned by probability, in which, as empiricist philosophers insisted, like causes would 220 Deidre Lynch continue to produce like effects, realist fiction must identify the sources of narrativity as lying within the character who is a monstrous misfit. The realists’ commitment to the average and ordinary coexists, in other words, in some tension with their tacit assumption, one equally significant for the humanist project in which they have enrolled, that only the atypical can generate plot (Gallagher 2005, 66). “Sane people did what their neighbours did,” says “rural opinion” in George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–1872), just after it enumerates the eccentricities separating Dorothea Brooke from the rest of her species (1994, 9). Arguing along similar lines, the chorus of minor characters in Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860) speaks of Maggie Tulliver as though she embodied a kind of genetic abnormality. They maintain that character ought by rights to be transmitted in families along gendered lines, but Maggie in her putative strangeness appears to them the living proof that “the Tulliver blood did not mix well with the Dodson blood” (1979, 116). The heterogeneity that makes Maggie an out sider, though born among them, belies their assumptions about the stability of the genetic type. At that crucial mid‐eighteenth‐century moment for the novel, Tobias Smollett and Laurence Sterne also find in the conceit of character as monster a resource that enables them, while working in a comic vein, to highlight the individuality of the wayward individual. Each writer mobilizes the idea of the monstrous birth – of the lusus naturae, a Nature that turns sportive rather than transmitting the same family likeness across the generations – to account for how characters come to be anomalous and so come to have stories at all. Smollett’s Mrs. Pickle has ludicrous longings during pregnancy that (her in‐laws worry) might affect the unborn Peregrine “with some disagreeable mark or deplorable disease”; and indeed, this hero, when he finally makes an appearance, proves remarkable “from his cradle” for his “oddity of disposition” (1980, 21, 51–52). Unpredictable reproductive accidents run in the Shandy family: Walter predicts rue fully that his son “should neither think nor act like any other man’s child” (Sterne 1965, 37).

Life‐like/Clockwork

The clock that plays so conspicuous a role in the back‐story of Tristram Shandy’s odd ities appears in a new version at the start of David Copperfield (1850), in an opening chapter flatly titled “I am Born.” The timepiece’s second coming is the sign, in part, of Dickens’s desire to look back a century to the novel’s origins and early fictions’ fables of origination. (As if recalling eighteenth‐century narratives’ monstrous births, Dickens also arranges for this protagonist to be born with a caul.) “It was remarked that the clock began to strike, and I began to cry, simultaneously,” David informs us in his narrative’s third sentence as he recounts his entrance into the world (1966, 49). The doubling of the clock’s peals and the infant’s cries exacerbates the doubt already created by David’s first sentence, in which this narrator has left open the question of whether he will “turn out to be the hero of my own life” (49). (If he isn’t the hero, does that mean the clock is?) That doubling also directs attention to one figure that Dickens and others deploy to apprehend the character of character: character as clockwork mechanism. A Character of Character, in Five Metaphors 221

Another timepiece, pocket‐sized, prompted the analogy that Samuel Johnson used to discriminate between Richardson’s and Fielding’s respective ways with character: “there was as great a difference between them as between a man who knew how a watch was made, and a man who could tell the hour by looking on the dial‐plate,” Johnson declared (Boswell 1980, 389). (The opposition is frequently read as prophe sying the trajectory the novel pursues after the eighteenth century. Johnson antici pates, it has been said, the contrast between the Victorians’ emphasis on the detailed description of the observed world and the modernists’ stress on the observing subject’s interior apprehension.) But in Dickens’s opening the clockwork mechanism that springs into life when David Copperfield does – apparently self‐propelled and in this respect dissimilar to the Shandean clock, which famously requires weekly winding – performs a different sort of metafictional work. It serves as a figure for the peculiar conditions of existence of the quasi‐person that is the fictional character. That clock makes apparent the time frame, which is not exactly that of the person, in which the character exists. It underscores, as well, the limits to the animation that makes the character, like automated clockwork, seem but not be real. Something of that identification of character and clock is discernible in Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925). Think of Clarissa Dalloway’s sightings, repeated twice over the course of the novel’s day, of the old lady in the house opposite and her sense that her counterpart’s daily comings and goings are attached somehow to the periodic sound ings of Big Ben. “How extraordinary it was, strange, yes touching, to see the old lady (they had been neighbours ever so many years) move away from the window, as if she were attached to that sound, that string” (2013, 147). James’s The Ambassadors (1903) likewise connects character and clockwork. In the final stage of the narrative recount ing Lambert Strether’s Parisian sojourn (an epoch in which this American has come tantalizingly close to being emancipated into a new, freer world), this character thinks of himself as having resembled “one of the figures of the old clock at Berne”: “They came out, on one side, at their hour, jigged along their little course … and went in on the other side. He too had jigged his little course” (1984a, 509). To his brother, James’s characters seemed preternaturally real. “You expressly restrict yourself … to showing a few external acts and speeches, and by the magic of your art make the reader feel back of these the existence of a body of being of which these are the casual features” (quoted in Manning 2013, 101). The magic at issue in this letter from William James is in part the power of animation – since the eighteenth century heralded as a defining achievement of the novel, the ground of the contrast between it and the static portraits of the Theophrastan tradition, in which personality is never revealed in action. “I have never seen any thing that was so much animated, and as I may say, all alive with characters and manners as the History of Tom Jones,” exclaimed a contemporary reader of Fielding (quoted in Park 2010, 96). The novel incorporates animate life. But when Strether conceives of himself as a figure moving hour by hour round a clock, when time seems to take possession of him, rather than his seizing it, James is considering animation in darker terms. He connects it to compulsion and determination. It gives him the means to query the extent to which character is bound to and by plot. The 1908 preface to The Princess Casamassima, remarkable for the blizzard of terms that James offers up by way of specifying what characters do for fiction – character there is identified, variously, as a “vessel of consciousness,” a “mirror” 222 Deidre Lynch of the novel’s “subject,” and an “intense perceiver” – features an additional designation that is noticed less frequently but is pertinent here (1987, 36, 42). James also refers there to the novel’s central character as “one’s impelled bonhomme,” using the colloquial French reserved for an especially compliant and serviceable guy (41).

Undead/Ghost

These mechanical figures – the eighteenth‐ and nineteenth‐century novel tradition’s puppets, dolls, and automata, the twentieth‐century and twenty‐first‐century novel’s uncanny clones – are central to the self‐reflexive project novels undertake when they probe the difference between life and their artificial life. (Kazuo Ishiguro’s master stroke in his 2005 Never Let Me Go is to have his clones pursue that project while mak ing Victorian fiction and television sitcoms their benchmarks for real families and normal lives.) As suggested above, these figures can also make apprehensible the strange, inhuman time frame that character occupies. When the dignitary who deliv ered the oration at the 1872 unveiling of the statue of Walter Scott that stands in New York’s Central Park imaged the dead novelist’s characters “passing in endless proces sion around the statue of him in whose prolific brain they had their birth” (quoted in Rigney 2012, 151), he appears to have had in his mind’s eye beings that resembled the clockwork figures referenced in The Ambassadors. At the same time, however, he was also evoking the spooky deathlessness of characters, who are “endless” precisely in con tradistinction to the mortal authors who create them. From one vantage point, the animation of these Scott characters is so pronounced as to permit them to step out of the novels altogether. They would even be able to fraternize with their real‐world author, if he were not dead and absent from the scene. But their metaleptic relocation across the boundary delimiting their novels’ diegetic space also registers what these characters, who are at once inside Scott’s books and, it would seem, hovering in the air around his statue, share with ghosts, entities who walk abroad and are likewise able to transcend limitations of space and of time. As the example of Wuthering Heights has suggested to us, novelists turn to appari tions to investigate how the act of reading about characters feels. The ghost is a figure they can use to link their animating power to the miracle of resurrection. But this figure also gauges the character’s ontological deficit, how its not dying (its “endless ness”) goes together with its never living, not really. In equivocally referring to himself in the chapter with which he begins his life‐writing as a “posthumous child” (Dickens 1966, 150), David Copperfield underlines the affinities of character and ghost, which are in fact writ large across Dickens’s writings. David’s narrative is one in which the character who is born, as he tells us, threatens recurrently to lapse into nonentity: the “dead sleepy” state he falls into during his journey to school, for example, in which there is “no David Copperfield, no anything” (128). As first‐person narrator, David cannot recount his death, yet his personhood flickers tenebrously in his narration. In Tristram Shandy, by contrast, Yorick’s death and grave are described by Tristram early in the novel, before Tristram even gets himself born, and yet that description does not prevent Yorick from being repeatedly resurrected or from claiming the novel’s last word. And of course the figure from Hamlet whose namesake this Yorick is, is a A Character of Character, in Five Metaphors 223 character of a peculiar kind: dead long since and known solely through his remains, that Yorick figures both the disappearance of the dead and, since he was/is a fellow of infinite jest, their staying power. The identification of characters with ghosts also underlines one dimension of the affective compact through which, as has been suggested, characters come to be. A ghost solicits onlookers’ belief. Embedded in this figure for character is the proposi tion that belief is incumbent on readers of fiction as well, that we bring character into whatever provisional being it has. What precisely do we believe in when we believe in character? The answer this essay has given does not coincide overmuch with that sup plied by the most zealous of characters’ devotees, the many commentators who have argued that literary culture should return to a moment before the age of suspicion that was ushered in, they say, by narratology, metafictions, and nouveaux romans, an age when writers and readers loved their characters, showed respect for their freedom, allowed themselves to be surprised by them, and/or treated them just as though they were other people. (For one thing, my remarks on eighteenth‐ and nineteenth‐century writers should have called into question the before/after opposition that such commen taries assume.) One reason to eschew such a simple equation between character and person, this essay has argued, is that it fails to do justice to character’s ontological hybridity. It overplays fiction’s referential functions at the expense of fiction’s self‐ reflexivity. That equation also diverts us from considering that the novel’s achievement might lie precisely in how it not only teaches us about other people, but also serves, uniquely, as the delivery platform for lessons from, instead, the near‐human and the person‐like. This chapter has aimed to open up the space for a form of novel studies that might consider more searchingly the content of those lessons specifically – and so trace how as fiction makes people up it can sometimes undo the self‐evidence of the forms of personhood that we think we know.

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Whether the English novel descends from Robinson Crusoe (1719) and nautical tales, or from Pamela (1740) and conduct books, it is clear that it has always depended on the representation and orchestration of emotion. Its characters, our surrogates, are endowed with emotions; and we, its readers, are drawn into their affective world. (Thus in a general sense the novel contributes to the development of interiority in the modern period that is also evident in, for example, the practice of diary keeping.) Sutured together from nouns, adjectives, verbs, and the occasional illustration, fictional characters come to life for us, and we may weep at the death of Clarissa; cry or laugh at the death of Little Nell; suffer agonies of nonetheless pleasurable suspense at the fate of Marian Halcombe, or even Bridget Jones; or be titillated by the adventures of Fanny Hill or Anastasia Steele. Not all novels generate the more deeply felt emotions: one of the most familiar of affects is the warm glow that readers derive from the company of such characters as Dickens’s Pickwick or Alexander McCall Smith’s Precious Ramotswe. Nor does all readerly affect depend on identification with characters, or the reality effects of prose fiction: we may be irritated or delighted by the nonrealist language games of Laurence Sterne or Tom McCarthy; or amused by the narratorial observations of Jane Austen. Even boredom has its place in the emotional repertoire of fiction: as Leah Price (2000) has shown, skipping and skimming have been part of the reading experience of the novel since its beginning. There are, of course, other sorts of emotions attached to novel reading, such as the pleasure we might take in reading a particularly attractive volume, but such pleasures are outside the scope of my discussion here, and can better be discussed as a type of collector’s delight. The affective power of the novel was a commonplace in the eighteenth century, and familiar enough in the nineteenth, before it suffered something of an eclipse in the

A Companion to the English Novel, First Edition. Edited by Stephen Arata, Madigan Haley, J. Paul Hunter, and Jennifer Wicke. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. 226 Nicholas Daly twentieth century. In the years of modernism, and modernist criticism, emotion became increasingly associated with genre fiction and naïve responses to literature. In recent years, however, there has been something of a revival in the fortunes of affect, although, as Emma Mason points out, the use of the academic term affect suggests that critics still worry about getting too close to emotion (2007). Some of the new interest in emotion and reading stems from work in the fields of biology and neuroscience that suggests that, pace René Descartes, the body and mind are not separate systems; that feeling and thinking are not discrete activities; that cognitive decision making is shaped by emotion; and that emotions might be considered as a form of embodied cognition (Damasio 2005; Howard 1999). Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, for example, argues that “emotions and feelings may not be intruders in the bastion of reason at all: they may be enmeshed in its networks for worse and for better (2005, xii). In literary and cultural studies, affect theory has been driven by the work of, among others, D. A. Miller, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank, and Lauren Berlant, all of whom have focused attention on the cultural work that emotion performs. Miller (1988) was something of a pioneer in taking literally the somatic effects of the Victorian “sensation novel,” though his Foucauldian readings suggest that our emotional responses are put to disciplinary use. Sedgwick and Frank’s work on Silvan Tomkins marks an epoch in affect theory, not least because they use Tomkins’s theories of affect (he names nine: shame, contempt, disgust, startle, fear, interest, anger, distress, joy) not only to recon- ceive reading and desire, but to point to the limitations of contemporary literary theory and reading practices that can see nothing but the oscillation between subversion and hegemony. The most complex of texts, and the most polychromatic readerly affects, can be reduced to “256,000 shades of gray” (1995, 517) beneath a skeptical Foucauldian gaze; affects are quickly reduced to Affect, and historicized away. Berlant, on the other hand, reminds us of the often conservative cultural work that affect performs, arguing that “affect‐saturated institutions (like the nation and the family)” can be used to paper over what are really structural problems (1998, 638). These are not the only theories of affect to surface in the last few decades. The rise of trauma theory, inspired by, inter alia, Freud’s account of shock and the repetition compulsion, as well as by clinical work on survivor memory and posttraumatic stress disorders, has also foregrounded issues of affect. Specifically, such work investigates the way in which the most painful events embed themselves in individual or cultural memory: the work of Cathy Caruth (1996) and others suggests that, escaping conscious registration, such traumas lodge in the mind, or text, but their traces can be recovered by the clinician or critic. (For a thoughtful critique of trauma theory, see Radstone [2007].) Working from a different perspective, one attuned to the everyday shocks of modernity rather than specific historical traumas, critics of melodrama have also suggested ways of reading for affect (Daly 2009; Singer 2001). Nonetheless, criticism remains uncomfortable with the emotional dimension of texts. A number of writers in this field suggest that what troubles us most about fictional emotion – especially the tearful kind, as opposed to, say, the horrific or the erotic – is that it threatens to destroy our comfortable critical distance. Our hostile critical vocabulary might suggest some of the reasons for this. “Cloying” literally means suffocating, and our critical hostility to emotional texts might be because they come too close to us, refusing the critical arm’s length to which we are accustomed, rather as texts Affect in the English Novel 227 that disgust us do. It is as if literary form fails to do its work of framing, and we feel ourselves physically affected, moved to tears by scenes that we know are fictional, even when they draw directly on real history. Lauren Berlant notes that the word mawkish, another familiar pejorative for the sentimental, comes from an Old Norse word for maggot, suggesting that there is something deathly about emotional texts (2007, 2). We may recall Aeneas’s famous line about the moving effect of representation: “sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt” (Vergil 1.462), which can be translated very loosely as “there are tears in things, and the weight of life touches us.” If fictional affect makes us uneasy, perhaps it is because it reminds us that life – for other people as well as ourselves – is often hard and always brief. Whether or not this is the case, we still feel more suspicious of texts that try to make us cry than of those that deploy humor, suspense, or terror, or even the erotic.

The Eighteenth Century

In the second half of the eighteenth century the novel’s emotional dimension came to be understood in terms of two distinct sets of ideas. On the one hand, benevolist theories of sentiment suggested that good conduct derives from innate goodness; such feelings as compassion are hard‐wired and are an imprint of the divine. Imaginative literature can help to develop this natural compassion for our fellow human beings, and thus has a valuable social role to play. On the other hand, theories of the sublime suggested a more physiological account of our emotional engagement with the world: our perception of the beautiful gives us a feeling of pleasure; our perception of that which is frightening or overwhelming produces a form of painful astonishment or fear, as Edmund Burke argues in his 1757 essay on the sublime:

Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling … Without all doubt, the torments which we may be made to suffer, are much greater in their effect on the body and mind, than any pleasures which the most learned voluptuary could suggest, or than the liveliest imagination, and the most sound and exquisitely sensible body could enjoy … When danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible; but at certain distances, and with certain modifications, they may be, and they are delightful. (1992, 36–37)

Burke was taking up the idea of the sublime from Longinus and other classical sources, and applying to it the empirical imagination of the age of reason. The theories of benevolism for their part derived from, inter alia, the ideas of the Cambridge Platonists and Lord Shaftesbury (Taylor 1992). Benevolism accompanied the rise of a literature of sensibility, which encompassed the sentimental novels of Laurence Sterne, Oliver Goldsmith, Henry Mackenzie, and others. In such fiction fine feeling, notably compassion for the sufferings of others, marks the central characters. The reader is to be morally improved through the vicarious experience of such emotions. As the contemporary Sentimental Magazine put it, “writing that edifies should arouse the ‘tear of 228 Nicholas Daly compassion’” (Miller 2001, 29). Burke also believed in the power of sympathy, and indeed argued that it is the basis of our enjoyment of literature and art: “It is by this principle chiefly that poetry, painting, and other affecting arts, transfuse their passions from one breast to another, and are often capable of grafting a delight on wretchedness, misery, and death itself” (1992, 41). But we usually consider that the theories of Burke and others on the sublime resonate with a different strain in late eighteenth‐century fiction: the Gothic novel. The protagonists of these novels are, like their sentimental peers, marked by their emotions more than by their intellects, but they are more likely to be suffering solitary terror than enjoying a community of benevolent feeling. In some novels of this stamp the terror springs from things that remain undescribed, as with the experiences of Emily St. Aubert in the rambling Italian castle of Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794): what is behind that black curtain that upsets her so? But elsewhere the physical and mental anguish of the characters depend less on the obscure and the veiled, and more on explicitly realized horrors. In Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), for instance, an escaped prisoner of the Inquisition describes his reaction at seeing the Madrid crowd seize a man from the midst of a religious procession and murder him:

Amid yells like those of a thousand tigers, the victim was seized and dragged forth, grasping in both hands fragments of the robes of those he had clung to in vain, and holding them up in the impotence of despair … The cry was hushed for a moment, as they felt him in their talons, and gazed on him with thirsty eyes. Then it was renewed, and the work of blood began. They dashed him to the earth – tore him up again – flung him into the air – tossed him from hand to hand, as a bull gores the howling mastiff with horns right and left. Bloody, defaced, blackened with earth, and battered with stones, he struggled and roared among them, till a loud cry announced the hope of a termination to a scene alike horrible to humanity, and disgraceful to civilization … I saw, I felt, but I cannot describe, the last moments of this horrible scene. Dragged from the mud and stones, they dashed a mangled lump of flesh right against the door of the house where I was. With his tongue hanging from his lacerated mouth, like that of a baited bull; with one eye torn from the socket, and dangling on his bloody cheek; with a fracture in every limb, and a wound for every pore, he still howled for ‘life—life—life—mercy!’ till a stone, aimed by some pitying hand, struck him down. He fell, trodden in one moment into sanguine and discoloured mud by a thousand feet … It is a fact, Sir, that while witnessing this horrible execution, I felt all the effects vulgarly ascribed to fascination. (1820, 3: 29–31)

It is a passage rich in grand‐guignol detail, but it also offers an account of the fascinating power of violence. Lest we think this grotesque violence is only the stuff of fiction, Maturin inserts a historical footnote that links the gruesome episode to the murder of Arthur Wolfe, Viscount Kilwarden, in Dublin’s Thomas Street during Robert Emmett’s rebellion of 1803. This should remind us that the popularity of Gothic was not due only to its resonance with the theories of Burke: its heyday coincided with the French Revolution and the 1798 rising in Ireland; and, as Karen Halttunen (1998) has suggested, its vogue coincides with the appearance of new attitudes to pain and the body. Affect in the English Novel 229

Victorian Emotion

The literatures of sensibility and of terror declined in critical esteem in the nineteenth century, though the Gothic lived on in popular fiction well into the century in such fare as James Malcolm Rymer’s Varney the Vampire; or, the Feast of Blood (1845–1847). More generally, aspects of the sentimental novel and the Gothic survived in melodrama, which was not only the dominant theatrical form of the period, but also a powerful transgeneric mode that informed fiction as well as poetry and the visual arts. Peter Brooks (1976) suggests that the melodramatic imagination is structured by the figures of antithesis and hyperbole: good is not only opposed to evil, but the good characters are purely good, and the bad are very wicked indeed. In this polarized world the sympathy of the reader is secured by the presentation of “virtue in distress.” That is to say, we are moved to a deep emotional engagement, to the point of tears even, by the plight of the good, innocent, and powerless as they face poverty, hardship, and even physical or mental abuse at the hands of their persecutors. Children, orphans in particular, are thus the perfect centers for the plots of melodrama. The eponymous heroine of Jane Eyre (1847) is a complex version of this friendless orphan figure; mis- treated by her remaining family at Gateshead, she suffers privations and humiliations at Lowood and Thornfield before she finds a family, love, and fortune. A more clear‐cut instance is Dickens’s Oliver Twist, who is starved and flogged in the workhouse, beaten by the Sowerberrys, and preyed upon in London, before the narrative rewards him with modest wealth and a new family. A similar scheme of good versus evil against a backdrop of urban menace informs one of the nineteenth century’s most internationally successful novels, Eugène Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris (1842–1843). In Sue’s novel, the intrepid Duke of Gerolstein fights the career‐criminal Schoolmaster and his associates, and saves the tender‐hearted and much‐abused La Goualeuse from life on the streets. He later finds out that she is his long‐lost daughter and takes her away to a life at court; but unable to shake off her past, she dies young. The novel inspired much of the urban crime fiction of the 1840s, with its anglophone imitators including G. W. M. Reynolds’s long‐running serial The Mysteries of London (1844–1846) and his historical Mysteries of the Court of London (1848–1856), as well as numerous other titles matched to the streets of New York, Philadelphia, and Melbourne. But it is Dickens, lifelong lover of the drama, whose work is most suffused with melodrama, and Oliver is just one of many orphans and vulnerable children who walk and hobble the pages of his novels: Smike, Little Nell, and Jo are a few of the best known of these. Like the dramatists of the day, Dickens aimed to move the reader with various carefully wrought “effects.” As Bethan Carney (2012) has shown, contemporary and posthumous reactions to Dickens and his emotional effects were not always positive, with Trollope mocking him as “Mr. Popular Sentiment” in 1855, and G. H. Lewes dismissing him in 1872 by claiming that “‘the logic of feeling seems the only logic he can manage. Thought is strangely absent from his works” (Carney 2012, 14). But the reading public did not, by and large, share this distaste, and Dickens’s most emotional fare was generally his most successful. One of Dickens’s greatest achievements in this line is his creation in A Christmas Carol (1843) of a seasonal modern legend. The story is remarkable for its shaping of a particular image of Christmas as a time for kindness, family, and feasting, some of 230 Nicholas Daly which he borrows from the American writer Washington Irving’s account of the festivities at Bracebridge Hall in The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819–1820). But its most emotionally powerful passages describe Scrooge’s encounters with himself as a lonely boy, left behind at school while others go home for the holidays, an image inspired, perhaps, by Dickens’s own loneliness when the rest of his family was consigned to the Marshalsea debtors’ prison:

“The school is not quite deserted,” said the Ghost. “A solitary child, neglected by his friends, is left there still.” Scrooge said he knew it. And he sobbed … They went, the Ghost and Scrooge, across the hall, to a door at the back of the house. It opened before them, and disclosed a long, bare, melancholy room, made barer still by lines of plain deal forms and desks. At one of these a lonely boy was reading near a feeble fire; and Scrooge sat down upon a form, and wept to see his poor forgotten self as he used to be … Not a latent echo in the house, not a squeak and scuffle from the mice behind the panelling, not a drip from the half‐thawed water‐spout in the dull yard behind, not a sigh among the leafless boughs of one despondent poplar, not the idle swinging of an empty store‐ house door, no, not a clicking in the fire, but fell upon the heart of Scrooge with a softening influence, and gave a freer passage to his tears. (2003, 58)

Scrooge weeps at his own past, and for some 170 years we have wept with him. Dickens’s conception of Christmas as a sort of emotional time machine has had a deep impact on subsequent popular culture: not only has it inspired numerous adaptations of A Christmas Carol itself, but it also echoes through artifacts as different as James Joyce’s short story “The Dead” (1914) and Frank Capra’s film It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). It is worth remembering, though, that Dickens does not always aim at the tear ducts, and that his first great success was the episodic Pickwick Papers (1836–1837), a novel that aims more at creating a certain pleasant warmth in the reader than any very vivid emotion. Stirring tales are inset within the narrative, but they do not long detain us from the genially comic world of the Pickwickians and Sam Weller. Good humor is, perhaps, one of the more undertheorized aspects of affect, but it is a significant ingre- dient of the novel tradition. In shaping his particular variety of light comedy, Dickens clearly draws on the picaresque work of his eighteenth‐century predecessors, and he in turn is a model for later writers in the genial tradition. Among the more successful narratives to follow in this line of gentle homosocial comedy are Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat (1889) and P. G. Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster novels and stories (1915–1974). More arguably, perhaps, Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford (1851) can be seen as a female alternative to this form of narrative. In the nineteenth century the Brontës carried forward aspects of the Gothic novel, as Dickens, Gaskell and others did aspects of the sentimental, but the books most famous in their day for emotional impact were the “sensation novels” of the 1860s. As their name suggests, the sensation novels of such writers as Wilkie Collins, M. E. Braddon, and Mrs. Henry Wood aimed to produce a direct response in the reader. The label comes to fiction from the “sensation drama” of the same era, in which the audience’s attention was held in a vicelike grip by elaborate and spectacular scenes, often last‐minute rescues. Some sensation novels feature suspenseful set pieces of this kind, but they are also Affect in the English Novel 231 characterized by strong mystery plots, looking forward to the twentieth‐century detective novel as much as to the thriller. Critics at the time described such fiction as “preaching to the nerves,” suggesting that the reader is imagined as an embodied subject (Mansel 1863). To this extent we can see that the response to sensation fiction – perhaps even the conjuring up of such a subgenre from novels that are often quite different – indicates that critics were troubled by issues of class and taste – the embodied, easily moved, “culinary” reader was a figure who seemed too much part of the mob, in a decade in which expansion of the franchise was once again a pressing issue. If we his- toricize the affective component of these novels – the extent to which they operate on the body of the reader – we can see that their attention‐engineering techniques are consonant with a more general interest in attention and distraction in these years, and they are thus very much the fruit of an industrial culture. However, as Beth Palmer (2008) has argued, in the case of Mrs. Henry Wood the emotional punch of her fiction also owes something to the affective dimension of evangelicalism. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, the emotional potential of the novel was put to a new use: creating sympathy with our fellow creatures rather than our fellow human beings. Humanitarian attitudes to animals had gained considerable ground by then, not least through the efforts of the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, founded in 1824. Darwin’s work had also played a role in fostering a recognition of our kinship with animals. An index as well as a source of new attitudes, Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty: His Grooms and Companions: The Autobiography of a Horse (1877), presented as “Translated from the Original Equine,” was a huge bestseller. But the growing prestige of science in the wake of Darwin’s work also led to widespread use of animals in experiments, and in response a new subgenre of antivivisection fiction appeared. Probably the best known of this subgenre now is Wilkie Collins’s Heart and Science (1883), which features Dr. Nathan Benjulia, a prominent vivisectionist who ultimately realizes the error of his ways and releases his lab animals before killing himself. It would be some time before novelistic arguments against cruelty were accompanied by ecological fears for the disappearance of species, though one might argue that H. G. Wells’s thrilling science‐fiction novel The War of the Worlds (1897) is a refracted vision of the destruction of other species by humans. Wells’s work at times also touches on another anxiogenic aspect of post‐Darwinian science, or pseudoscience: discourses of degeneration. It is impossible in short space to do justice to the many facets that degeneration theories exhibited in the late nineteenth century. But one strand at least is pervasive in the novels of the period, the perception that modern city life was producing a degenerate working‐class population, and thus threatening the health of the nation. The anxieties surrounding this underclass appear, for example, in Wells’s representation of the Morlocks in The Time Machine (1895). Some of the novel’s most vivid passages describe the horror that the Time Traveller experiences when he is in danger of being engulfed by the slothlike Morlocks:

In a moment I was clutched by several hands, and there was no mistaking that they were trying to haul me back … You can scarce imagine how nauseatingly inhuman they looked – those pale, chinless faces, and great, lidless, pinkish‐grey eyes! as they stared in their blindness and bewilderment. (1995, 50) 232 Nicholas Daly

Where Wells projects this fear and loathing into the future, the slum novels of the 1890s suggested that the barbarians were already at the gate. Middle‐class hostility to the urban poor was scarcely new, of course, but in the 1890s an earlier discourse of urban criminality mixes with protoeugenicist ideas. Arthur Morrison, himself from a relatively poor background, puts these ideas in the mouth of the unnamed surgeon in A Child of the Jago (1896), a tale of East‐End slum life:

Is there a child in this place that wouldn’t be better dead – still better unborn? … Here lies the Jago, a nest of rats, breeding, breeding as only rats can; and we say it is well. On high moral grounds we uphold the right of rats to multiply their thousands. Sometimes we catch a rat. And we keep it a while, nourish it carefully, and put it back into the nest to propagate its kind … It’s a mighty relief to speak truth with a man who knows – a man not rotted through with sentiment (Morrison 1996, 140)

Thus while the slum novel may have in part been motivated by a desire to shine a light on the deprivations of the urban poor, in places the will to symbolic distance is all too evident, and the dominant affects are fear and disgust rather than sympathy. As John Carey (1992) has traced, even after the star of degeneration theory waned somewhat, a similar revulsion in the face of “the masses” is evident in early‐twentieth‐century literature. Degeneration theory also runs through a number of the novels that, despite their differences, are sometimes seen to comprise something of a late‐Victorian Gothic or Romantic revival, for example Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). If these novels revived some of the terror aesthetic of the Romantic fiction of the start of the century (Stoker’s vampire, for example, dusts off Polidori’s creation of 1819), others of the period went back to Defoe for inspiration for their thrilling novels of exotic adventure: Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883) and H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1886) and She (1887) all belong to this camp. In the first two, in place of courtship narratives, readers are offered treasure hunts and sword- play; male bonding replaces heterosexual romance. She is something else again, since at its heart there is a transhistorical love affair, though the narrative emphasis is decidedly more on adventure than intimacy. Perhaps the most significant thing about the revival of Gothic and adventure fiction at this time is that it represents a turning away from the domestic novel that had held sway for much of the century. Degeneration, again, provides a context for this turn: more suspenseful and visceral fare was to be offered to the reader as a replacement for the supposedly effete materials of the late‐ Victorian domestic novel, or French naturalism. Where the Gothic revival features a number of degenerate monsters (Count Dracula, Mr. Hyde, more arguably Dorian), the adventure novels promise to regenerate the British reader by offering healthy, out- doors, bloodthirsty fare savoring more of epic than introspection. In this period what we now term genre fiction begins to assume more definite shape: the science‐fiction novel in Wells, the horror novel in Stoker, the crime novel in Arthur Conan Doyle, though the marketing of science fiction, horror, and crime, among others, as separate and distinct literary goods comes a little later. An early attempt to effect such marketing is the “shilling shocker,” which became a recognized Affect in the English Novel 233 form targeted at a particular kind of readerly response. Mixing mystery and sensation, such novels as Hugh Conway’s Called Back (1883) and Fergus Hume’s The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (1886) recalled the sensation novels of the 1860s, but were usually shorter and sometimes mixed in more gothic material (arguably, Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde belongs in this group, too). But as with the American dime novel, it was not only crime and horror that sold books. Raphael Tuck and company planned to “dissociate a shilling from a shocker, and to supply rather a series of ‘Shilling Soothers’” (Morton 2005, 118). The result was their Breezy Library series of light fiction. Authors included the prolific Grant Allen, who contributed An Army Doctor’s Romance (1894), and Israel Zangwill, whose Merely Mary Ann (1893) was the first in the series. Here we see recognizable ancestors not only of later romance fiction, but more importantly, perhaps, of the packaging of that fiction as a more or less homogeneous product: by buying a Breezy Library book you were making sure that nothing too disturbing would intrude upon the imaginary world you were entering. Readers of such fiction were looking for sensation as much as the readers of shilling shockers, but it was a different kind of sensation, a pleasant flutter of interest rather than anything more stirring. Grant Allen’s best‐remembered novel, The Woman Who Did (1895), published in a very different series, John Lane and Elkin Mathews’ Keynotes, shocked more than it soothed, notwithstanding its relatively conservative ending. But it should remind us that in these years the emotional range of the English novel was greatly expanded by the advent of “New Woman” fiction. Work by Mona Caird, George Egerton (the pen name of Mary Chavelita Dunne), Sarah Grand, and others placed gender, sex, and sexuality center stage. George Moore’s Esther Waters (1894), more Zola‐inspired naturalism than New Woman novel, also played a part in changing the way in which love and sex were represented in fiction, as did Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891). Both eschew the usual handling of the Victorian “fallen woman” theme, but only Moore can imagine something resembling a happy ending for his resilient heroine. In general terms, the novels of this period paved the way for the more explicit treatment of sexual issues in the modernist novel, as Ann Ardis has argued (1990). Sex often remained a highly charged subject in later fiction, but its treatment was no longer always governed by the absolute moral values of melodrama. Female characters are at times allowed to follow sexual impulses; sex outside of marriage is not always a death sentence for them. Such a shift was not a purely literary one, naturally, but one overdetermined by feminist politics and later by changing contraceptive practices. Initially, the representation of sexual affect outside of the inherited moral frameworks usually meant clashes with obscenity legislation. In this period we see the novel wrestling with new ways of describing sexual and other nonrational forces that act upon the subject, deploying a pre‐Freudian vocabulary of attraction, personal influence, and emotional sway. Such terms as “sex appeal,” for example, originate in this period. On the one hand this tendency manifests itself in the light work of Richard Marsh and Elinor Glyn. In Richard Marsh’s The Magnetic Girl (1903), an unpopular young woman suddenly finds that every man she meets immediately falls in love with her. Elinor Glyn, who had read some Freud, or at least knew of his work, developed a similar idea of “It,” a form of sexual magnetism, possibly borrowing the term from Rudyard Kipling’s “Mrs. Bathurst” (1904). She would 234 Nicholas Daly go on to collaborate with Hollywood in creating the idea of the “It Girl” of the 1920s, a figure who married sexual magnetism to the dynamism of the flapper. But the other allotrope of this new irrational force is a form of personal magnetism that is not necessarily sexual, something resembling the charisma that Max Weber describes around the same time, though also recalling the influence of the mesmerist. This version of magnetism features more in the late‐Victorian Gothic novel: Ayesha possesses such a power in H. Rider Haggard’s She, Lord Henry Wotton has a little of it in The Picture of Dorian Gray, as do Svengali in George Du Maurier’s Trilby (1894), Count Dracula in Bram Stoker’s gory invasion story of 1897, and the shape‐shifting Beetle in Richard Marsh’s chilling novel of the same name, also 1897. John Buchan imagines the political impact of such a charismatic figure in Greenmantle (1916). Some of these novels show a strange prescience about what would become the politics of charisma, and the emotional manipulation of crowds for nationalist ends. But before it reached its apogee the cult of personality would be mercilessly mocked in P. G. Wodehouse’s novels, in which the ludicrous Spode is a version of the British fascist Sir Oswald Mosley, among others.

The Twentieth Century and After

The modernist novel has come to be associated with pleasures more cerebral than emotional, and the criticism that accompanies its rise to prestige is sometimes seen as responsible for the devaluation of emotion in twentieth‐century literature. (Though for an argument for the affective dimension of apparently disengaging modernist techniques, such as repetition, see Ngai 2005, 248–297.) There is clearly some truth in the latter idea; for example, the strictures of W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley in 1949 on the “affective fallacy” cast a long shadow over critical attitudes:

The Affective Fallacy is a confusion between the poem and its results … It begins by trying to derive the standard of criticism from the psychological effects of the poem and ends in impressionism and relativism. (1982, 21) [Objective Criticism] will not talk of tears, prickles or other physiological symptoms, of feeling angry, joyful, hot, cold, or intense, or of vaguer states of emotional disturbance, but of shades of distinction and relation between objects of emotion. (1982, 34)

But the New Critics were only voicing views that had already gained credence in other fields. Ten years earlier, the art critic Clement Greenberg had launched an attack on “kitsch,” which he described as “vicarious experience and fake sensations … the epitome of all that is spurious in the life of our times” (1988, 14). One can trace this suspicion of emotion further back in art criticism, to the work of Roger Fry, say. Among literary movements we can see similar ideas in nascent form in the theories of the Imagists, with their call for images that are hard and clear – though in fact there is plenty of emotion on display in Des Imagistes: An Anthology (1914). James Joyce, whose work appeared in the imagist anthology, likewise claimed to have written Dubliners (1914) in a style of “scrupulous meanness” (1957, 134). But did the modernist novelists actually suppress affect in their fiction? At the level of diegesis the emotional lives of characters are often vividly presented, as one might Affect in the English Novel 235 expect when fiction turns to focus on mental events rather than external action. If we take the work of D. H. Lawrence, for example, we see a detailed attention to the embodied consciousness of his characters, and an attempt to find a new language to describe the shifting nature of emotional relationships, with their attractions and repulsions, aggressive and erotic drives. Women in Love (1920), for instance, is almost completely devoted to this project, deploying the language of electricity and radioac- tivity, among others, to describe the high‐voltage encounters among Birkin, Crich, the Brangwen sisters, and other characters. It may be objected that Lawrence is scarcely typical of international modernism, but in the work of Joyce and Woolf we also see the emotional lives of characters placed center stage. Where Lawrence tends to focus on the experiences of his characters in the present, in Joyce and Woolf inner lives tend to be as much about the past as the present. In Ulysses (1922) Stephen’s thoughts about his dead mother, and Bloom’s memories of his dead father, Rudolf, and dead son, Rudy, are recurring themes. Whether or not we as readers are meant to be emotionally engaged by these thoughts is less easy to establish, perhaps. But the symbolic replacement of Bloom’s dead son with Stephen Dedalus is surely intended to move us at some level, as is the novel’s life‐embracing ending. Likewise, the classical parallels in the structure of Ulysses may suggest a gap between modern city life and the world of epic, but they do not always work to diminish the characters in the present. In his way, Bloom is a heroic figure as well as a semicomic one, heroic in his ordinary human decency. Woolf’s take on a day in the modern city, Mrs. Dalloway (1925), also models the fluctuating affective lives of interconnected characters, and as in Joyce it is the events of the past that are most charged with emotion. In the figure of Septimus Smith we see a man who has been irrevocably scarred by the First World War, not just by the “shell shock” of industrialized warfare, but by the loss of his close friend, Evans. Clarissa for her part is also haunted by the past; for her, being kissed by her friend Sally Seton was a moment of pure bliss that nothing else has ever matched. (We may speculate that Septimus’s friendship with Evans was also erotically charged.) As with Joyce, it is perhaps more difficult to establish whether these scenes of affect are meant to also be “effects.” But I would suggest that they are, and that the welling up of such moments are the modernist equivalents of the restoration of lost characters, and the reconciliation of opposed ones, that produce the emotional crescendos of the nineteenth‐century novel. There is even a more direct echo of such a Victorian moment in the appearance at the climactic party of Clarissa’s (Victorian) aunt, whom the reader might reasonably expect to be long dead: “For Miss Helena Parry was not dead: Miss Parry was alive. She was past eighty. She ascended staircases slowly with a stick” (2000, 151). Even if the modernist novel is not quite as hostile to affect as is sometimes asserted, it might be assumed that the emotional text could not survive the arrival of the playful postmodernism of the postwar period, if that postmodernism can be defined in terms of an aesthetic of reference and pastiche, and a distrust of metanarratives. Where all is pastiche and knowing irony, the emotions of characters can hardly be taken at face value; and high levels of readerly self‐consciousness tend to be incompatible with affective involvement. But playful postmodernism is less a feature of English fiction in this period than it is in the United States, say, where the work of such writers as Robert Coover, John Hawkes, and Richard Brautigan defined a particular kind of break with 236 Nicholas Daly the traditional reading experience through the abandonment or radical reworking of ideas of plot and narration and the embrace of discontinuity, conflicting narratives, and found text. Insofar as this kind of fiction generates an affective response it is likely to be amusement and a delight in playfulness or, just as likely perhaps, readerly frustration and irritation. There were English examples of this kind of postmodernism in, for example, some of the work of J. G. Ballard, whose The Atrocity Exhibition (1969) makes use of similar devices. But as Aleid Fokkema has suggested, the postmodernists of the 1970s and 1980s – Angela Carter and the Scottish writer Alasdair Gray, for example – blended experimental narrative strategies with more familiar materials in ways that ensured that readers were not cast adrift. Gray’s Lanark was published in 1981, though he said in an interview that an early section was written in 1954 while he was still in art school (Gray 2012). It contains a familiar enough Bildungsroman narrative about a young art student, but it also features a parallel – or at least discontinuous – plot in which the central character’s increasingly disturbed emotional life is replayed in a dystopian fantasy city, Unthank. The novel’s metafictional flourishes prevent any simple identification with the central character of the realist narrative, Duncan Thaw, or his other self, Lanark, but the effect is not an emotionally distancing one. In this respect it recalls the Irish writer Flann O’Brien’s At Swim‐Two‐Birds (1939), a metafictional comic novel that also parallels undergraduate life and fantasy sequences on a grander scale, the latter deriving from medieval Irish literature, cowboy stories, and other sources. A similar tendency to blend the experimental with familiar narrative forms, and to marry the fictional to the historical characterizes some of the most successful novels of the last twenty years or so. Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit (1985), for instance, is a novel about growing up gay in a religious household, but the narrative is studded with a series of fairy tales that contain parallels to the life of the young Jeanette. The result is a novel in which we are emotionally engaged by the travails of the narrator’s younger self, but always aware of the constructedness of the text. The novels of the Anglo‐Indian writer Salman Rushdie have likewise displayed an interest in self‐conscious fabulation while also anchoring readers with historical reference. Midnight’s Children (1981) and Shame (1983), for example, both contain elements of magical realism, and highlight the links between history and storytelling, but also evoke the actual (and violent) political history of India and Pakistan. Famously, Rushdie’s aesthetic distancing techniques did not prevent him being sued for libel by the very real Indira Gandhi in 1984 for suggesting that Sanjay Gandhi had accused her of hastening her husband’s death through neglect. The author was forced to remove the passage in question. The powerfully affective dimension of off‐campus history remained a significant component of 1990s English fiction, though it was sometimes a more distant history than Rushdie’s. The futility and horror of the First World War provided the material for both Sebastian Faulks’s Birdsong (1993) and Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy (1991– 1995). In the latter, Barker evokes the physical and psychic damage wrought by industrial warfare, but also uses present‐day conceptions of gender and sexuality to construct the inner lives of her characters. Some of her central characters are based on historical individuals – for example, W. H. R. Rivers and Siegfried Sassoon – and some are not, presenting the reader with a complex reality effect. This also influences our Affect in the English Novel 237 readerly investment in particular figures: our heterodiegetic knowledge tells us that Sassoon will survive the war, but we have no such certainty in the case of the fictional Billy Prior. The impact of industrial warfare on the soft fabric of humanity also provides much of the emotional force for one of the most dazzling novels of recent years, Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001), which was both a critical and a commercial success. The main narrative presents a poignant account of star‐crossed young love against the backdrop of the Second World War. But the novel pulls the emotional rug from under the reader in its last section, when we realize that the happy ending for the story’s lovers, Robbie and Cecilia, has been invented by Cecilia’s younger sister, Briony, whose spiteful intervention at a crucial moment had led to the lovers’ separation in the first place. The atonement of the title has been her subsequent life as a nurse and writer, but also her attempt in fictional form to provide a happy ending to lives she had destroyed. What appears at first to be a moving account of the survival of love in the face of insu- perable odds metamorphoses into a metafictional meditation on our need for happy endings. If the carefully orchestrated emotional effects of Dickens are rarely found now in literary fiction, the novel clearly has not lost its ambition to move us. The work of Rushdie, McEwan, Barker, Winterson, as well as that of Monica Ali, Julian Barnes, William Boyd, A. S. Byatt, Sebastian Faulks, Michael Frayn, Alan Hollinghurst, Hilary Mantel, Timothy Mo, Zadie Smith, Sarah Waters, and many others, suggests that the character‐based, plot‐driven novel is very much the dominant, and even the more knowing and experimental novels of recent years offer a vacillation between estrangement effects and emotional engagement. Outside of that world there is, of course, a vast hinterland of genre fiction in which high emotional impact is pretty much de rigueur for success. To this extent the novels of action and suspense – thrillers and police procedurals, for example – are the heirs to nineteenth‐century melodrama and Gothic. The phenomenal success of E. L. James’s bondage‐themed erotic novels suggests that the Gothic lives on in other ways too. Nor has the Breezy Library disappeared: it is the ancestor of contemporary, light‐hearted “chick lit,” for example. But as to the more tearful pleasures of the past, these now tend to be found in memoirs rather than novels, in the groaning shelves of “misery lit.” We seem to be happier now when we can cry over true stories.

References

Ardis, Ann L. 1990. New Women New Novels: Burke, Edmund. 1992 [1757]. A Philosophical Feminism and Early Modernism. New Brunswick: Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime Rutgers University Press. and Beautiful, edited by Adam Phillips. Oxford: Berlant, Lauren. 1998. “Poor Eliza.” American Oxford University Press. Literature 70: 635–668. Carey, John. 1992. The Intellectuals and the Masses: Berlant, Lauren. 2007. “Hard Feelings: Stephanie Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Brooks.” Criticism 49: 407–419. Intelligentsia, 1880–1939. London: Faber. Brooks, Peter. 1976. The Melodramatic Imagination: Carney, Bethan. 2012. “Introduction: ‘Mr Popular Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Sentiment’: Dickens and Feeling.” 19: Excess. New Haven: Yale University Press. Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth 238 Nicholas Daly

Century 14. http://www.19.bbk.ac.uk/index. Miller, D. A. 1988. The Novel and the Police. php/19/article/view/644/778 (accessed Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of December 14, 2014). California Press. Caruth, Cathy. 1996. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Miller, Stephen. 2001. Three Deaths and Narrative and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Enlightenment Thought: Hume, Johnson, Marat. University Press. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. Daly, Nicholas. 2009. Sensation and Modernity in the Morrison, Arthur. 1996 [1896]. A Child of the Jago. 1860s. Cambridge: Cambridge University London: Everyman. Press. Morton, Peter. 2005. The Busiest Man in England: Damasio, Antonio. 2005. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Grant Allen and the Writing Trade. Houndmills: Reason, and the Human Brain. New York: Basingstoke. Penguin. Ngai, Sianne. 2005. Ugly Feelings. Cambridge, Des Imagistes: An Anthology. 1982 [1914]. New MA: Harvard University Press. York: AMS Press. Palmer, Beth. 2008. “Dangerous and Foolish Dickens, Charles. 2003. A Christmas Carol and Work: Evangelicalism and Sensationalism in Other Christmas Writings, edited by Michael Ellen Wood’s Argosy Magazine.” Women’s Slater. London: Penguin. Writing 15: 187–198. Gray, Alastair. 2012. “Alasdair Gray’s Answers to Price, Leah. 2000. The Anthology and the Rise of the Several Questionnaires,” Alastair Gray inter- Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. viewed by Kathy Acker at the ICA, 1986, Radstone, Susannah. 2007. “Trauma Theory: corrected transcript. http://www.alasdairgray. Contexts, Politics, Ethics.” Paragraph 30: 9–29. co.uk (accessed November 26, 2013). Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, and Adam Frank. 1995. Greenberg, Clement. 1988. “Avant Garde and “Shame in the Cybernetic Fold: Reading Silvan Kitsch.” In Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays Tomkins.” Critical Inquiry 21: 496–522. and Criticism. Volume 1, Perceptions and Judgments, Singer, Ben. 2001. Melodrama and Modernity: Early 1939–44, edited by John O’Brian, 5–23. Sensational Cinema and its Contexts. New York: Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Columbia University Press. Halttunen, Karen. 1998. Murder Most Foul: The Taylor, Charles. 1992. The Sources of the Self: The Killer and the American Gothic Imagination. Making of Modern Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cambridge University Press. Howard, June. 1999. “What is Sentimentality?” Vergil [Publius Vergilius Maro]. Aeneid. The American Literary History 11: 63–81. Vergil Project. http://vergil.classics.upenn.edu Joyce, James. 1957. Letters of James Joyce, edited by (accessed May 27, 2013). Stuart Gilbert. New York: Viking. Wells, H. G. 1995 [1898]. The War of the Worlds. Mansel, H. L. 1863. “Sensation Novels.” Quarterly London: Everyman. Review 113: 481–514. Wimsatt, W. K., and Monroe Beardsley. 1982. Mason, Emma. 2007. “Feeling Dickensian “The Affective Fallacy.” In The Verbal Icon: Feeling.” 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Studies in the Meaning of Poetry. Lexington: Nineteenth Century, 4. http://www.19.bbk.ac.uk/ University of Kentucky Press. index.php/19/article/viewFile/454/314 Woolf, Virginia. 2000 [1925]. Mrs. Dalloway. (accessed December 14, 2014). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Maturin, Charles. 1820. Melmoth the Wanderer. Edinburgh: Constable. Part IV The Novel in Theory

16 The Novel in Theory before 1900 James Eli Adams

As the newest and most protean of major literary forms, the novel has always seemed unusually difficult to capture “in theory” – save as that phrase underscores the sheer variety of particular cases. The challenge is particularly great in the early days of its history in England, when the very term novel jostled with a number of other terms – romance, history, prose epic – to identify what all agreed was a new and momentous kind of writing. Not until Clara Reeve’s The Progress of Romance (1785) did “the novel” secure its common currency. Moreover, the forms of critical commentary changed radically over the period from 1700 to 1900. Initially most criticism appeared in prefaces by authors themselves, or in pamphlet attacks. Only in the second half of the eighteenth century did periodicals emerge to offer substantial, regular reviewing, and reviews carried the main burden of critical reflection for the next century. Apart from a few substantial pamphlets along the line of Reeve’s, the novel received no book‐ length treatment until well into the nineteenth century. All of this militated against the forms of rigorous, systematic treatment of the form we now think of as “theory” – this despite frequent appeals to Aristotle’s Poetics, perhaps the single most influential authority over the first century of this survey. Nonetheless, critical reflection sustained a remarkably persistent set of concerns: the relation of the novel to other genres, most notably romance, epic, and the drama; criteria of plausibility informing character and action; the relation of the novel to the society that produces and consumes it; the moral dimensions of the form; the nature of narrative coherence. One critical consensus emerged very quickly: almost from its first mention, the new form of writing was defined through comparison with “romance,” most broadly as a representation of “familiar” experience and characters set against an idealized, “illus- trious” world of love and martial prowess recounted in elevated prose. As William

Congreve framed it in the preface to his 1691 novel, Incognita, “Romances are generally composed of the Constant Loves and invincible Courages of Hero’s, Heroins, Kings and Queens, Mortals of the First Rank, and so forth; where lofty Language, miraculous Contingencies and impossible Performances, elevate and surprise the Reader into a giddy Delight.” Novels, by contrast, “are of a more familiar nature; Come near us, and represent to us Intrigues in practice, delight us with Accidents and odd Events, but not such as are wholly unusual or unprecedented, such while not being so distant from our Belief bring also the pleasure nearer us” (Williams 1970, 27). Although Congreve presents novel and romance as rival, coexistent forms, critics increasingly evoked a triumphalist history, in which the new form, which was deemed “natural,” plausible, terse, and English, crowded aside the old, which was viewed as artificial, marvelous, extravagant, and French. Thus Delariviere Manley, without using the term “novel,” in 1705 prefaced her Secret History of Queen Zarah by contending, “The little histories of this Kind have taken the place of Romances, whose prodigious Number of Volumes were sufficient to tire and satiate such whose Heads were most fill’d with these Notions” (Williams 1970, 33). These “little histories” are not merely shorter than romances (an association central to the term nouvelle), and so “are much more agreeable to the Brisk and Impetuous Humor of the English,” but they also gratify “good Sense” in presenting characters “which resemble Humanity.” “All the world will find themselves represented in these Descriptions, which ought to be exact, and mark’d by Tracts which express clearly the Character of the Hero.” “Fabulous Adventures” thus yield to a more inclusive yet more individuated representation of experience, in which “all the world” might find images of themselves, represented according to an emergent ideal of naturalistic character (Williams 1970, 33–34, 36). In such accounts, the triumph of the new form recapitulates the conflict of Don Quixote (1605, 1615), and critical histories frequently turn Cervantes into an inaugu- rating figure, himself akin to a hero of romance who, in the words of the Preface to Roderick Random (1748), “by an inimitable piece of ridicule, reformed the taste of mankind, representing chivalry in the right point of view” (Williams 1970, 120). Such tributes underscore the moral burdens of the new fiction, which were intensified by the growing popularity of the form. From the earliest accounts, the new verisimilitude brought both pleasure and danger. The satisfactions of seeing oneself in the mirror might fan the moral suspicions attached to romance, that such reading merely nur- tures vain fantasy. But the representation of a world closer to everyday life might also make the new fictions more dangerous, inasmuch as the pleasures of ready identification with its characters could more easily override moral strictures. This concern reinforced insistence that the narratives offer “instruction” as well as entertainment – as in Samuel Croxall’s preface to A Select Collection of Novels (1720): “the reigning Perfections of this Collection” are “Instruction and Entertainment” (Williams 1970, 71). This moral burden, however, points to inherent tensions within the dynamics of novelistic probability and “truth.” Apologies for the new form stress the appeal of plausibility, of following an action and characters akin to those we might encounter in everyday life. Hence the peculiar insistence, particularly dear to Defoe, that the work of fiction is a barely disguised history. The preface to Roxana (1724) insists “That this Story differs from most of the Modern Performances of this Kind … in this Great and Essential Article, Namely, that the Foundation of This is laid in Truth of Fact; and so The Novel in Theory before 1900 243 the Work is not a Story but a History” (Williams 1970, 80). But of course the stress on historical veracity may conflict with a different form of truth, which Manley evokes: “as the Historian describes his Heroes to his Fancy … he ought with great care observe the Probability of Truth, which consists in saying nothing but what may Morally be believed” (Williams 1970, 34). “Morally” gestures toward Aristotle’s dictum that fiction may give us access to truths more philosophical than history. But a fiction attentive to “accidents” of everyday life may resist the forms of order in “what may Morally be believed.” The pleasures of a plausibly particularized character and action, that is, may be at odds with instruction and large moral maxims – for example, that “Vice and Virtue are set in constant opposition” (Williams 1970, 95). Of course some writers profess to see no tension. Whereas Defoe’s preface to Robinson Crusoe (1719) contends that it is “a just History of Fact; neither is there any Appearance of Fiction in it,” the Preface to The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719) looks back to insist that “the just Application of every Incident, the religious and useful Inferences drawn from every Part, are so many Testimonies to the good Design of making it publick, and must legitimate all the Part that may be call’d Invention or Parable in the story” (Williams 1970, 56, 67). One might argue that this seeming inconsistency reflects a providential view of human affairs, but more skeptical readers might infer that Defoe is ironically underscoring the potential conflicts between entertainment and moral instruction. That suspicion certainly is strengthened by the hyperbolic preface to the picaresque Colonel Jack (1722): “The pleasant and delightful Part speaks for itself; the useful and instructive is so large, and has such a tendency to improve the Mind, and rectify the Manners, that it would employ a Volume, large as itself, to particularize the Instructions that may be drawn from it” (Williams 1970, 73). The moral burdens of storytelling have been an issue since Plato, but they take on renewed urgency in accounts of the novel, not only as an effort to make the form more “useful” than romance, but also as regulating or disarming the desire aroused by its appeal to readerly identification. Early commentary suggests that prose fiction arouses unusually intimate and intense forms of engagement. Manley describes “a certain impatient Desire to see the End of the Accidents, the reading of which causes an Exquisite Pleasure when they are Nicely handled” (Williams 1970, 36). John Dennis (1713) similarly praises (at the expense of Addison’s drama, Cato) the art by which authors “of an entertaining Romance or agreeable Novel … excite our curiosities, and cause those eager Longings in their Readers to know the Events of things, those Longings, which by their pleasing Agitations, at once disturb and delight the mind.” The effect is something distinctive to the new form: as Henry Pye writes in 1786, the drama “neither occupies the time or attention enough to have any great, or permanent energy, on our passions,” whereas novel reading, especially among “romantic young women,” “excites and inflames the passion which is the principal subject of the tale … So far, therefore, is love from being blunted by imitative fiction, that such fiction is often an efficient cause of its being first excited” (Williams 1970, 337). Johnson’s Rambler No. 4 (1750) is the most eloquent early testimony to such mimetic desire and its dangers. Johnson argues that “the comedy of romance,” whose “province it is to bring about natural events by easy means, and to keep up curiosity without the help of wonder,” brings with it a moral potential alien to older romance, “so remote from all that passes among men.” But this very familiarity also instills a 244 James Eli Adams vulnerability in the young reader, for whom “the power of example is so great, as to take possession of the memory by a kind of violence, and produce effects almost without the intervention of the will.” Such identification needs to be regulated by stern moral design. “If the world be promiscuously described, I cannot see of what use it can be to read the account,” Johnson remarks; in a narrative where “historical veracity has no place,” he continues, “I cannot discover why there should not be exhibited the most perfect idea of virtue … the highest and purest that humanity can reach” (Williams 1970, 142–146). Though subsequent moral prescriptions are rarely so dra- conian, worries over “promiscuous” description in the novel will reverberate for more than a century. When commentators in the 1860s liken sensation fiction to the swal- lowing of “a dram or a dose,” they echo Johnson’s sense of the well‐nigh addictive allurements of novel reading. Johnson was writing in the immediate wake of the triumphs of Richardson and Fielding, which had a multifaceted impact on conceptions of the novel. The most immediate was to enhance the moral and imaginative stature of the form, and the range of formal possibility associated with it. “Who could have dreamt,” rhapsodized Aaron Hill of Pamela (1741), “he should find, under the modest Disguise of a Novel, all the Soul of Religion, Good‐breeding, Discretion, Good‐nature, Wit, Fancy, Fine Thought, and Morality?” (Williams 1970, 103). Admirers of Richardson tended to be suspicious of the moral design of Tom Jones (1749), whose protagonist mixed virtue and vice in a manner, however plausible and “natural,” that they feared would blur that very distinction. (Johnson was clearly writing against Fielding’s manifestly promiscuous description.) But celebrants of Tom Jones readily embraced Fielding’s own praise of his “new species of writing,” and the sharp divergence from Richardson’s techniques prompted new attention to novelistic structure. Discussion of structure at mid‐century frequently drew comparisons with drama. That analogue figured centrally in earlier commentary, although primarily as a source of character types. For Congreve, unsurprisingly, “all Traditions indisputably give place to the Drama,” but he was unusual in looking to the stage not merely for character types but for “the Design, Contexture and Result of the Plot.” Though he conceded he could not achieve “Unity of Action,” he aimed at “Unity of Contrivance” (Williams 1970, 27–28). The intricately designed and universally applauded plot of Tom Jones gave renewed vitality to the parallel, appealing to “the great Analogy there is between these Histories and Dramatic Performances,” particularly in the “Dramatis Personae,” but also in “the Progress of his Work,” as a model of connected, rising and falling action broadly indebted to Aristotle (Williams 1970, 152–156). Fielding’s achievement became the epitome of a newly stringent norm of narrative coherence, which occupied a central place in generic classifications like those of Hugh Blair, James Beattie, and Clara Reeve. These taxonomies shifted attention away from the stage, giving new currency to the model of the prose epic. Blair, who generally disdained that “class of writings, known by the name of romances and novels,” was happy to praise “the artful conduct of the fable, and the subserviency of all the incidents to the winding up of the whole” (Williams 1970, 251). Beattie was even more suspicious of the form: “Romances are a dangerous recreation … far the greater part are unskillfully written, and tend to corrupt the heart, and stimulate the passions.” But he applauded Tom Jones as the epitome of “the Epick Comedy”: “Since the days of The Novel in Theory before 1900 245

Homer, the world has not seen a more artful Epick fable” (Williams 1970, 327). Such unity was unavailable, of course, in the epistolary form of Clarissa (1748), the type of “Modern Serious Romance”: “unless the fable be short and simple, this mode of narration can hardly fail to run into an extravagant length, and to be encumbered with repetitions” (Williams 1970, 323). Even Richardson’s admirers conceded the point, but argued that his form represented a “kind of dramatic writing” that ultimately rewarded the reader’s patience “by marking the characters more strongly, and introducing a variety of natural circumstances, that cannot fall under the pen of an historian” (Williams 1970, 234). Ultimately, however, the model of epic (and the traditionally masculine investments attached to it) helped to marginalize the epistolary form. Clara Reeve’s The Progress of Romance (1785) consolidated a good deal of critical reflection on the novel by way of a historical survey designed to show “how the modern Novel sprung up out of [Romance’s] ruins,” and emphasizing that “No writings are more different than the ancient Romance and modern Novel” (Nixon 2009, 351–352). The leading emphases are familiar: the romance trades in elevated language, describing “what never happened or is likely to happen,” while the novel gives a “familiar relation of such things, as pass every day before our eyes,” and its “perfection” is the solicitation of readerly sympathy: “to represent every scene, in so easy and natural a manner, and to make them appear so probable, as to deceive us into thinking (at least while we are reading) that all is real, until we are affected by the joys and distresses, of the persons in the story, as if they were our own” (Nixon 2009, 351–353). But Reeve offers little account of this psychology, or of narrative structure. The predominant frame of reference remains moral influence, associated above all with character and its fortunes; thus Fielding’s “mixed characters” are defended on the grounds that “virtue has always the superiority she ought to have” (Nixon 2009, 355). This moral refrain – basically unchanged across half a century – was energized by the expanding market for novels, the vast majority of which (even apologists conceded) were formulaic hack work, and thus morally dubious at best. Even Frances Burney in 1778, in the preface to Evelina, took the peculiar tack of conceding that the “total extirpation” of novels might be desirable, but “since the distemper they have spread seems incurable … surely all attempts to contribute to the number of those which may be read, if not with advantage, at least without injury, ought rather to be encouraged” (Williams 1970, 302). Since Pamela, a critic remarked in 1791, growth in the popularity of the form has been as rapid as “the extension of the use of tea, to which the novel is almost as general an attendant, as the bread and butter”; the novel itself had become a commodity, and the writer accordingly offered up a “RECEIPT FOR DRESSING UP NOVELS ad libitum” (Williams 1970, 373–374). As this trope might suggest, the form was increasingly aligned with women writers: “Ladies seem to appropriate to themselves an exclusive privilege in this kind of writing” (370), but this same reviewer generously allows for applause from “the harder sex” if the works meet “criteria of excellence”:

The story of a novel should be formed of a variety of interesting incidents; a knowledge of the world, and of mankind, are essential requisites in the writer; the characters should be always natural; the personages should talk, think, and act, as becomes their respective ages, situations, and characters; the sentiments should be moral, chaste, and delicate; the 246 James Eli Adams

language should be easy, correct, and elegant, free from affectation, and unobscured by pedantry; and the narrative should be as little interrupted as possible by digressions and episodes of every kind. (Williams 1970, 370)

This is a conservative view (it could not have accommodated Tristram Shandy [1759– 1767]), but it does suggest the inertia of received wisdom, since the main emphases are little changed since 1740, and narrative structure remains elusive: “a variety of interesting incidents” minimizing “digressions and episodes.” One might have expected the development of Gothic in the latter decades of the century to prompt new reflection on the novel more generally, but in many circles it only intensified resistance to the form. Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800), for example, decried a “degrading thirst after outrageous simulation” fueled by “sickly novels” and other forms of popular entertainment (Wordsworth 1965, 449). Most defenses of the new mode reiterated two longstanding emphases, on verisimilitude and affective power. Radcliffe in particular was praised on these grounds: “within the limits of nature and probability,” wrote one reviewer of The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), “a story so well contrived to hold curiosity in pleasing suspence, and at the same time to agitate the soul with strong emotions of sympathetic terror, has seldom been produced” (Williams 1970, 393). The allure of Gothic sensibility, however, offered a foil to a more skeptical and formally restrained representation of personal identity and social life. In Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1817), a wry treatment of Gothic fantasy occasions one of the most famous of all novelistic celebrations of the novel as a literary form. To the widespread denigration captured in the phrase, “it is only a novel! … It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda,” the narrator rejoins:

… or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language. (Austen 2004, 22)

Austen’s own novels would be praised in just such terms, not merely for combining amusement with moral instruction for the young, but as extending every reader’s knowledge of human nature through an unusually exacting attention to “nature as she really exists in the ordinary walks of life” (Austen 2004, 249). That last phrase, from an 1821 essay by Richard Whatley, Archbishop of Dublin, is familiar praise, but Whatley’s account is remarkable for its attention to narrative form. He expected a clear and effective “moral lesson” from novels, but noted that in Austen these “are not offensively put forward, but spring incidentally from the circumstances of the story” in a mirror of “that unpretending kind of instruction which is furnished by real life.” This implicit moral order emerged from a narrative structure “nearly faultless,” with “all that compactness of plan and unity of action” that generally requires the sacrifice of probability. “There are few, if any writers of fiction,” he concluded, who have more successfully illustrated Aristotle’s precepts. More locally, Whatley praised the “vivid distinctness of description, the minute fidelity of detail, and air of unstudied ease in the scenes represented,” as well as a “dramatic air” in which description was The Novel in Theory before 1900 247 subordinated to a character’s self‐presentation through conversation – a talent in which Whatley likened Austen to Shakespeare (249–251). Such vivid fidelity led another reader to a new appreciation of mimesis itself, “the unaccountable pleasure, which, by a peculiarity in our nature, we derive from a simple imitation of any object, without any reference to the abstract value or importance of the object itself. The fact is notorious in painting” (246). The familiar analogy of novel and painting here gestures towards a question that would take center stage in debates about the nature of realism: can or should the aesthetic pleasure of novelistic representation be isolated from an intrinsic value or “interest” in the object represented? This question took added force from the achievement of Sir Walter Scott. Scott had himself praised Emma in an 1815 review, but remarked that it was read with “pleasure, if not with deep interest,” likening it to a Flemish painting: “The subjects are not often elegant, and certainly never grand; but they are finished up to nature, and with a precision which delights the reader” (Austen 2000, 359). Over the course of the century, Austen became the paradigm of a formal economy won at the expense of relatively trivial subject matter. Thus in the 1850s, G. H. Lewes proclaims her “the greatest artist that has ever written,” using the term to signify the most perfect mastery over the means to her end – while conceding that her subject matter, grounded in a tightly circumscribed social milieu, resisted the larger possibilities of the form: “she never stirs the deeper emotions … she never fills the soul with a nobler aspiration” (Olmstead 1979, 2: 44). Those larger possibilities had been brought home by Scott himself: while his novels were notoriously sprawling, their historical representation of society on a national scale moved the center of narrative interest in the form beyond the familiar confines of domesticity and courtship into a world of dynastic struggle. For all their lack of formal economy, his works thus could be seen to speak to distinctly masculine interests, which raised the dignity of the form. By 1832, the Edinburgh Review marveled that Scott had exalted “a form of composition the least respected in the whole circle of literature” into “a place among the highest productions of the human intellect” (Olmstead 1979, 1: 108). For some critics, Scott was less a novelist than the founder of “the historical romance,” so greatly had he expanded the imaginative horizons of the form. But the impact of his achievement was felt not only in the proliferation of historical novels, but also in a vogue for novels devoted to high and low life – the “Silver Fork” and “Newgate” novels, as they became known; both “schools” offered a quasi‐ethnographic representation of social milieus that, like Scott’s, were exotic to middle‐class readers, although located much closer to home. The new stature accorded the form also encouraged newly exacting attention to its formal dimensions – perhaps most notably in Bulwer‐ Lytton’s 1838 essay, “On Art in Fiction,” which tried to pry the novel away from analogies with drama, but also insisted on something akin to Coleridgean organic form: “we ought to feel that we have read a whole – that there is an harmonious unity in all of its parts – that its close, whether it be pleasing or painful, is that which is essentially appropriate to all that has gone before” (Olmstead 1979, 1: 238). Even as Bulwer‐Lytton was writing, however, his prescription was confounded by the writer whose work more than any other reshaped the English novel, both its material form and critical understandings of it. When Dickens’s Pickwick Papers began appearing in 1836, reviewers were at a loss to categorize it. One called it “a magazine 248 James Eli Adams consisting of only one article”; six months later it was still being referred to as “a series of monthly pamphlets” and “a monthly produced of popular entertainments” (Chittick 1990, 65, 75). An extended narrative appearing in monthly parts, a format rarely used for anything but cheap reprints, seemed “a plan … so altogether anomalous, that it is no easy matter to determine in what class of composition to place them” (Collins 1971, 57). A proper novel was a work published in the material form consolidated by Scott, in three volumes priced at one and a half guineas. Dickens himself underscored that paradigm in a letter of January 1839, where he envisioned a work to be published “as a Novel, and not in portions” (Chittick 1990, 130). But the success of Pickwick aligned the novel with serial publication, whether in magazines or as free‐standing parts. Through its sheer popularity, Dickens’s fiction prompted a fundamental rethinking of the novel. It influenced an abrupt shift in the predominant subject matter of the form, towards representations of modest domesticity. In 1837, Harriet Martineau complained, John Murray rejected her novel drawn from “middle life” because “People liked high life, and low life, and ancient life … but it was not supposed that they would bear a presentment of the familiar life of every day” (Aldburgham 1983, 294). But by 1841, E. C. Grey could write that “novel‐writing has completely changed its character,” “its high‐flown, elaborate style” having given way to “nothing but the hum‐drummeries of reality” (James 1963, 96). Dickens’s achievement also sparked resistance, however. Critics complained that the serial format, “this novel‐writing by scraps against time,” was corrosive of narrative coherence, even of a kind less demanding than Bulwer‐Lytton had proposed (Olmstead 1979, 1: 338). To the end of his life, the “Regius professor of slang” (Olmstead 1979, 1: 286) would remain for some readers an affront to linguistic and social decorum, an intractably vulgar and demotic “Cockney” writer. (Dickens returned the disdain in The Old Curiosity Shop [1840–1841], where Mrs. Darley, champion of the “classical,” finds its archetype in waxworks.) Most pro- vocatively, Dickens’s imagination perplexed traditional appeals to plausibility: “There are no such characters in the world as Pickwick, Snodgrass, or Winkle. The transformations elicited by the magic wand of Harlequin are nothing compared to the transformations which these personages undergo” (Olmstead 1979, 1: 338). These objections converged in responses to Oliver Twist (1838): critics complained of its melodramatic structure, its coarse and “low” subject matter (exacerbated by the foray into politics), and the unreality both of its title character, who seemed to have wandered in from a fairy tale, and of Nancy, who confounded the “reality” of the fallen woman. This last objection, as to the fundamental relations between his fiction and reality, meant most to Dickens, and in defense of his characterization he threw down a gauntlet, declaring that familiar norms of plausibility were irrelevant: “It is useless to discuss whether the conduct of the character seems natural or improbable, right or wrong. IT IS TRUE” (Dickens 2002, 460). One response to such an appeal was a newly elastic standard of probability. Thus, for example, G. H. Lewes’s 1844 article on the novels of Balzac and George Sand: “The truth of a work is not in the probability and consistency of its incidents, but the probability and consistency of the motives, passions, and characters” (Olmstead 1979, 1: 421) – a formulation that reflects the persistent tendency to isolate character from action. But accommodating Dickens’s insistence on a singular integrity of vision unconstrained by plausibility required acknowledging that the novel allowed for radically different strategies of representation. The Novel in Theory before 1900 249

The range of novelistic possibility was brought home by the extraordinary flowering in the late 1840s of major novels in widely varied styles. A period of 20 months in 1847–1848 saw the publication of Dombey and Son, Wuthering Heights, Vanity Fair, Jane Eyre, Mary Barton, Tancred, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. But the focal contrast in organizing the field of novelistic possibility was the pendant of Dickens and Thackeray. From roughly 1850, Dickens became exemplary of a romantic, “ideal” form – his novels depict “a world projected imaginatively beyond the real one” (Stang 1959, 189) – while Thackeray modeled an “easy” and urbane style that was harnessed to greater respect for “the real” of everyday observation, as David Masson put it in his 1851 review of David Copperfield and Pendennis (Tillotson and Hawes 1968, 126). That the life of a novelist seemed a worthy subject for both of these writers reflects the new stature of the form. When Masson complained of writers who “candidly own that they write to make money and amuse people” rather than strive for “artistic perfection,” he captures a level of expectation almost unimaginable a mere 20 years earlier. This division of powers put new pressure on the very concept of “realism,” a category which became central to discussion of the novel from the 1850s. In 1851, Frasers pronounced Thackeray “chief of the realist school” in England (Stang 1959, 148) – again suggesting the contrast with Dickens, but also carrying a hint of the moral suspicion attached to “realism” in French writing. But “realism” enters English critical discourse only in 1853 – tellingly, in a review of Balzac, an author who was a byword for a “realism” understood to be preoccupied with, as even the liberal John Morley could write in 1866, “all of the meanest and nastiest elements in character or conduct” (Stang 1959, 215). But debates over realism soon became associated not merely with subject matter but also with modes of treatment, within which three issues were especially prominent: structures of characterization; narrative coherence; and the role of narrative perspective and “dramatic method.” In each of these realms the new art of photography became a central point of reference. Like the longstanding emblem of Dutch painting, the photograph offered a paradigm of exacting fidelity to everyday life. But the trope also was invoked to criticize representations that seemed superficial, that failed to conjure a sense of psychological depth. Thus Thackeray was criticized as a writer who “exists entirely on the surface of things,” who fails to suggest “the actual interior life and individual character of a living soul” (Stang 1959, 51). Trollope, similarly, was praised for his photographic fidelity to everyday life, so different from that of Dickens, but at the same time damned because, as Henry James put it, his virtues “are all virtues of detail; the virtues of the photograph. The photograph lacks the supreme virtue of possessing a character” (Smalley 1969, 107). Dickens was condemned in similar terms: as George Eliot put it in an early essay, he “scarcely ever passes from the humourous and external to the emotional and tragic, without becoming as transcendent in his unreality as he was a moment before in his artistic truthfulness” (Eliot 1963, 271). The most prominent foil to such criticism is Charlotte Brontë; from its first appearance Jane Eyre was hailed for a “power” that conjoined emotional intensity with an unusual psychological depth, and that sense of interiority increasingly became a norm against which other novelists would be found wanting. Complaints over superficiality of representation also took up the burden of a more encompassing narrative coherence. Thus Lewes complained of a “detailism” at odds 250 James Eli Adams with true realism, because it militated against an informing design (Stang 1959, 174). James’s famous disdain for “loose, baggy monsters” echoes a refrain throughout the career of Dickens, which had become something of a commonplace by the mid‐1850s. It was in this context that Lewes praised Austen as a model of formal economy, and even the French novels so dubious in their morality were praised on formal grounds, because “the texture is so close, that there is not a single superfluous idea in it” (Stang 1959, 115). A notion of the superfluous entails a model of unity and economy, and while the grounds for such structure were rarely enunciated, critics were insistent in complaining of its absence. The criticism often invoked the language of painting against that of photography. Dickens’s novels, one critic objected, were akin to a photograph, which copies “with unfailing but mechanical fidelity … There is no judicious perspective” (Olmstead 1979, 1: 464). “Even in the humblest specimen of imitative painting,” Masson pointed out, the artist can rise above “mere copy” only by supplying an “ideal” element, “some special conception or intention of his own according to which objects may be arranged, and which shall give them effect as a whole” (Olmstead 1979, 2: 14). But the celebration of character – still widely seen as the leading achievement of the novel – tended to resist such expectations, inasmuch as it typically dis- joined appreciation of character from action. Walter Bagehot addressed this issue in an important essay of 1855, where he complains that the “strict‐experience school of fiction” (in which he included both Dickens and Thackeray) is “carrying out its realism to a faulty extreme” by assuming that the novel requires no more than “genial and penetrating observation” of character. This emphasis neglects the relations and mutual influences among characters, which can be adequately captured only by curtailing the focus on any single character: “if we want to see real combinations of men, we can only have partial view of the individuals concerned, since both the nature of the action and the nature of the fellow‐actors, will modify and limit the mental qualities that come into play” (Olmstead 1979, 2: 207). This argument clearly anticipates James’s more famous insistence on the interdependence of character and action: “What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?” (James 1984, 55) But Bagehot’s attention to point of view was rarely taken up before the 1880s, save in skeptical reflection on the limits of omniscience, most famously in Middlemarch (1871–1872) (to which we’ll return). Moreover, critics remained tethered to a notion of coherence confined to plot. Thus, for example, Bleak House (1853), a novel far more intricately ordered than Dickens’s earliest fictions, was widely attacked for “absolute want of construction,” which suggests an inability to appreciate the forms of imagistic and symbolic ordering that would come to the fore in novel theory later in the century (Stang 1959, 119). The illusion of psychological depth and coherence was central to the novel’s power to foster sympathy, which from the 1840s onward became a central burden of the form, particularly as the novel became associated with explicit social analysis and critique. In George Eliot’s view, realism was an essentially reformist undertaking: “The thorough acceptance of this doctrine,” she wrote in praise of Ruskin, “would remould our life” (1856, 626). Of course this broad association stretched back at least as far as William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794), but it was fiercely resisted by critics who feared that the novel would become a vehicle of political unrest. Dickens’s function, James The Novel in Theory before 1900 251

Fitzjames Stephen railed in 1857 (apropos Little Dorrit), was “to make the world grin, not to recreate and rehabilitate society” (Collins 1971, 348). But this was increasingly a minority view of both Dickens and the novel itself. The social upheavals of the “hungry ’40s” prompted increasing attention to a world beyond domestic life, as well as new images of domesticity (pre‐eminently from the Brontës) as a focal point of broader social struggle rather than a refuge from it. This emphasis became especially pronounced in the “social problem” novel from the late 1840s, which gives a larger resonance to Humphry House’s famous remark about Dickens: in the early Victorian novel a bad smell is a bad smell, but by the 1850s a bad smell is a problem (House 1941, 135). This enlarged engagement bolstered a defense of the novel already apparent in the early reception of Dickens, and taken up more explicitly by George Eliot: the novelist had special force to elicit and shape a reader’s understanding of lives seemingly remote from her own. In 1853, Arthur Hugh Clough remarked that the novel was displacing poetry through its power to address “general wants, ordinary feelings, the obvious rather than the rare facts of human nature” (1999, 1255). Ironically, however, this social engagement began to solidify a formal stance that would become a hallmark of high modernist narrative. Even critics sympathetic to the “social problem” novel feared a reduction of the novelist’s function to that of sheer polemic or moral declamation. The “parsonic habit” of Charles Kingsley’s novels was widely denounced, and George Eliot perpetually attacked an appeal that was not “purely aesthetic,” which lapsed “from the picture to the diagram” (Stang 1959, 43–44). Novels dealing with religious questions, one commentator wrote, should begin in “living sympathy” and not in a “theory” (Stang 1959, 72). This might suggest intellectual timidity, but it underwrote an insistence on what G. H. Lewes (echoing Whatley’s early account) praised in Austen: “instead of description … she has the rare and difficult art of dramatic presentation; instead of telling us what her characters are, and what they feel, she presents the people, and they reveal themselves” (Stang 1959, 94). This analogy between novel and theater had pointed implications for narrative perspective, and in this regard a good deal of mid‐century criticism looked forward to modernist precepts emphasizing “showing” rather than “telling.” The dramatic model, which would be installed in high modernist orthodoxy, informed many Victorian attacks on the obtrusive narrators of Trollope and Thackeray. James, for example, complained of Trollope’s “suicidal satisfaction in reminding the reader that the story he was telling was only, after all, a make‐believe” (1984, 1343). Of course one might respond with Leslie Stephen that such a model of illusion was naïve, “really unworthy of work intended for full‐grown readers” (Stang 1959, 97–98). But by the 1860s, “the dramatic principle” had wide currency as a critical norm. The reception of George Eliot offers a particularly telling index of novel theory in the latter half of the century. Even before she became George Eliot, Marian Evans was clearing space for her own achievement in a sympathetic understanding of “psychological character” that Dickens’s more melodramatic art ostensibly neglected. Her early novels were praised in just these terms, for piercing “the social surface” and illuminating “the deeper roots of character” (Stang 1959, 55). Eliot associated this sympathetic power and psychological depth with her own version of “realism,” which she derived most immediately from Ruskin: Modern Painters taught a “truth of infinite value,” “realism – the doctrine that all truth and beauty are to be attained by a humble and faithful study 252 James Eli Adams of nature, not by substituting vague forms, bred by imagination on the mists of feeling, in place of definite, substantial reality” (Eliot 1856, 626). This strenuous fidelity to “nature” and “reality” of course recalls eighteenth‐century attacks on romance, but in Eliot the skeptical energies of realism become a vehicle for extending the subject matter of the novel, pressing beyond comfortable social decorum to discover dignity and moral complexity even in “lowly,” unprepossessing subject matter. Realism thus understood, however, rests on an ideal of objectivity, which can confidently grasp and transmit an image of “definite, substantial reality.” Under the pressures of Victorian psychology and epistemology, such an ambition became an increasingly self‐conscious project, in which realism could pose questions about its own consistency and even possibility. Thus we find some of the most trenchant reflection on the nature of the novel within Victorian novels themselves, as when in Chapter 27 of Middlemarch the narrator affirms the intractable “egoism” in any human perspective, which organizes an out- wardly chaotic world the way a beam of light clarifies the random scratches on a pier glass. Related optical tropes – of painting, photography, spectacles, telescopes, mirrors, microscopes – were invoked throughout the period to capture the ambitions of the novelist and the obstacles confronting her. Early readers of Eliot saw none of these complications. They praised first and foremost a style that conveyed the sense of direct transcription of rural life, on the model of that familiar paradigm, Flemish painting. Her plotting was characteristically weak, critics agreed, but this was redeemed by the power of her characterization. Soon, however, critics found her work set apart and ennobled by a more strenuous burden of moral reflection than most novelists afforded: “The author is attempting not merely to amuse us,” E. S. Dallas wrote of Mill on the Floss (1860), “but, as a preacher, to make us think and feel. The riddle of life as it is here expounded is more like a Greek tragedy than a modern novel” (Carroll 1971, 135). In thus elevating the novel as a speculative vehicle, Eliot made “seriousness” and “thought” more integral to the form, and that emphasis enabled appreciation of more demanding, “difficult” writers such as George Meredith. But a backlash soon set in. Some critics argued that “spiritual doubts and conflicts” were inappropriate subject matter for the novel, and even those sympathetic to this engagement began to complain of the moral “chorus” provided by the narrator, which grew increasingly emphatic and acerbic. The resistance to obtrusive narrators in Thackeray and Trollope was compounded by Eliot’s strenuously allusive prose, notably in Middlemarch: even the admiring R. H. Hutton complained of “the authoress’s excessive, almost morbid intellectual ability” (Carroll 1971, 294). Reviewers looked back wistfully to Adam Bede (1859), in which they imagined they found a “simple, direct description” unmediated by “theory” (Carroll 1971, 351–352). By her death in 1881, these complaints had hardened into the view that Eliot’s novelistic talents had been crushed by her moral agenda – an emphasis that persisted until nearly 1950. This capsule history might seem the triumph of conservative resistance to the novel as anything more than anecdotal amusement. In fact, it captures a profound continuity between mid‐century reviewing and an emergent modernist aesthetic. The criticism of Eliot’s moral design was framed most suggestively by Henry James, who in 1883 complained that for Eliot the novel is “not primarily a picture of life, capable of driving a high value from its form, but a moralized fable, the last word of a philosophy endeav- ouring to teach by example.” The priority attached to moral reflection, he continued, The Novel in Theory before 1900 253 entails “that she proceeds from the abstract to the concrete; that her figures and situations are evolved, as the phrase is, from her moral consciousness, and are only indirectly the product of observations. They are deeply studied and elaborately justified, but they are not seen in the irresponsible plastic way” (Carroll 1971, 497–498). “Reflection,” in short, had crowded aside “perception,” and that verdict affirms the authority of the “dramatic principle” that had been circulating for at least three decades. The novelty in James’s judgment comes with the term “irresponsible,” which at a stroke casts off traditional moral constraints on novelistic subject matter, and instead grounds the novelist’s activity in “free aesthetic life” (Carroll 1971, 497). Debate over the moral burdens of the novel of course had been central to criticism from the beginning of the form, but the issue became increasingly heated from the 1860s. Just as Swinburne was arousing a firestorm with Poems and Ballads (1866), Dickens launched his own attack on moral insularity in the figure of Podsnap in Our Mutual Friend (1865): “The question about everything was, would it bring a blush into the cheek of the young person?” (1999, 129). In the 1880s, as more and more novelists chafed at prescriptive constraints applied by the lending libraries, while conservative commentators in turn recoiled from the influence of Zola’s naturalism, the issue prompted the single most famous Victorian critical exchange about the novel. In his posthumous Autobiography (1883), Anthony Trollope pointedly deflated the artistic pretensions of the novelist – “it would not be more absurd if the shoemaker were to wait for inspiration” – while grounding the value of his work in a familiar moralism: the novelist offers his own “sermons,” but “can make virtue alluring and vice ugly, while he charms his reader instead of wearying him” (Trollope 1980, 121, 223). In the following year, Walter Besant in The Art of Fiction defended the dignity of the craft, but he also declared that the novelist is bound by personal experience, and must write out of “conscious moral purpose” (1884, 29). This exasperated Henry James into responding under the same title, declaring “There is no impression of life, no manner of seeing and feeling it, to which the plan of the novelist may not offer a place.” The novel, James objected, thrives on creative freedom, and its main issues are “questions (in the widest sense) of execution”; the results are “as various as the temper- ament of man,” and “successful in proportion as they reveal a particular mind, different from others” (1984, 62, 49–50). Here is the Paterian note that would become central to the rise of modernism, and to the cultivation of point of view within the novel. While still declaring fidelity to external experience, the finished work is valued less for that correspondence than for its truth to a distinctive creative temper and its “impressions.” Ironically, James’s own brand of realism would be attacked, like Eliot’s, for excessive “analysis,” its “elaborate dissection of motives and characters” (Graham 1963, 107). This complaint gathered force with the resurgent popularity of romance in the 1880s, epitomized in Andrew Lang’s celebration of the form as appealing to “the old Barbarian under our clothes” who could enjoy “a true Zulu love story” (Brantlinger 1988, 232). Robert Louis Stevenson offered a more sophisticated defense of romance in his response to James’s “Art of Fiction,” “A Humble Remonstrance” (1884), where he grounds fiction not in observation but in dream. Ultimately, however, Stevenson’s stance would reinforce James’s own position, since it likewise insisted on a formal appeal distinct 254 James Eli Adams from accuracy of representation. The novel, Stevenson argued, is “not a transcript of life, to be judged by its exactitude, but a simplification of life or point of life, to stand or fall by its significant simplicity” (Barnett 1971, 271). As James himself told the story, the novel in theory did not exist before 1884: “there was a comfortable, good‐humored feeling abroad that a novel is a novel, as a pudding is a pudding” (James 1984, 44). As we’ve seen, however, “The Art of Fiction” is in many ways the culmination of nineteenth‐century reflection on the novel, taking up preoccupations which had been consolidated over decades: the aesthetic appeal and constricting force of a novelist’s personal sensibility, which extended to the representation of points of view within the novel; a “realism” grounded in formal treatment rather than subject matter, with a correspondent resistance to conventional moral decorum; a celebration of formal economy set against the diffuseness nurtured by serial publication; the complex interrelations of character and action; and the importance of “showing” rather than “telling” the story. To be sure, this reflection was a good deal less systematic and more avowedly personal than it would become in the twentieth century. But in its energy and breadth, it was indeed faithful to the new cultural eminence of the form. After all, as the North British Review declared in 1867, if Shakespeare were alive today, he would be writing novels (Stang 1959, 49).

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Deborah Aschkenes for valuable research and conversation on the topics covered in this chapter.

References

Aldburgham, Alison. 1983. Silver Fork Society: and Poetic Theory, edited by Thomas Collins and Fashionable Life and Literature from 1814 to 1840. Vivienne J. Rundle, 582–598. Peterborough, London: Constable. Ontario: Broadview Press. Austen, Jane. 2000 [1815]. Emma, edited by Collins, Philip, ed. 1971. Dickens: The Critical Stephen Parrish. New York: Norton. Heritage. London: Routledge Kegan Paul. Austen, Jane. 2004 [1817]. Northanger Abbey, Dickens, Charles. 2002 [1838]. Oliver Twist, or, The edited by Susan Fraiman. New York: Norton. Parish Boy’s Progress, edited by Philip Horne. Barnett, George L. 1971. Nineteenth‐Century London: Penguin. Novelists on the Novel. New York: Appleton Dickens, Charles. 1999 [1865]. Our Mutual Friend, Century Crofts. edited by Michael Cotsell. Oxford: Oxford Besant, Walter. 1884. The Art of Fiction. Boston: University Press. Cupples, Upham, and Co. Eliot, George. 1963. The Essays of George Eliot, Brantlinger, Patrick. 1988. Rule of Darkness: British edited by Thomas Pinney. New York: Columbia Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914. Ithaca, University Press. NY: Cornell University Press. [Eliot, George]. 1856. “Ruskin’s Modern Carroll, David, ed. 1971. George Eliot: The Critical Painters.” Westminster Review, ns 9 (April 1856): Heritage. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. 625–633. Chittick, Kathryn. 1990. Dickens and the 1830s. Graham, Kenneth. 1963. English Criticism of the Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Novel, 1865–1900. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Clough, Arthur Hugh. 1999. “Recent English House, Humphry. 1941. The Dickens World. Poetry.” In Broadview Anthology of Victorian Poetry Oxford: Oxford University Press. The Novel in Theory before 1900 255

James, Henry. 1984. Literary Criticism: Essays on Stang, Richard, ed. 1959. Theory of the Novel in Literature, American Writers, English Writers, England, 1850–1870. New York: Columbia edited by Leon Edel and Mark Wilson. New University Press. York: Library of America. Tillotson, Geoffrey, and Donald Hawes, eds. 1968. James, Louis. 1963. Fiction for the Working Man, Thackeray: The Critical Heritage. London: 1830–1850. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Routledge & Kegan Paul. Nixon, Cheryl L., ed. 2009. Novel Definitions: An Trollope, Anthony. 1980 [1883]. An Autobiography. Anthology of Commentary on the Novel, 1688– Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1815. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press. Williams, Ioan, ed. 1970. Novel and Romance Olmstead, John Charles, ed. 1979. A Victorian Art 1700–1800: A Documentary Record. New York: of Fiction: Essays on the Novel in English Periodicals, Barnes and Noble. 3 vols. New York: Garland Publishing. Wordsworth, William. 1965. Selected Poems and Smalley, Donald, ed.. 1969. Trollope: The Critical Prefaces, edited by Jack Stillinger. Boston: Heritage. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Houghton Mifflin. 17 The Novel in Theory, 1900–1965 Chris Baldick

Willie Ashenden, the narrator of W. Somerset Maugham’s satirical novel of the literary life, Cakes and Ale (1930), begins to regret having cast his story in the first person, fearing that it might make him look foolish. Having read an article by Evelyn Waugh which deplores novels written in the first‐person voice, he worries even more, so he asks a literary friend to recommend him some works on the art of fiction:

On his advice I read The Craft of Fiction by Mr Percy Lubbock, from which I learned that the only way to write novels was like Henry James; after that I read Aspects of the Novel by Mr E. M. Forster, from which I learned that the only way to write novels was like Mr E. M. Forster; then I read The Structure of the Novel by Mr Edwin Muir, from which I learned nothing at all. In none of them could I discover anything to the point at issue. (2000, 140)

All the works mentioned in this passage are real books which had appeared in the 1920s, and which more than a few of Maugham’s readers in 1930 would even have read recently. Self‐consciousness about narrative voice and method is no novelty in the tradition launched by Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749) and Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–1767), but this moment in Cakes and Ale is unusual, being almost certainly the first occasion on which an English novel could include within itself discussion of a substantial body of recognized novelistic theory. That Ashenden – a scarcely disguised version of Maugham himself – should mention such works only to dismiss them all so unfairly is consistent with the sardonic perspective of Cakes and Ale, in which literary enmities are essential to the entertainment. It also indicates something significant about the story of theories of fiction in the early twentieth century, which is that this story is one of redoubled dissatisfaction: first, of critical dissatisfaction with the legacy of nineteenth‐century novelistic

A Companion to the English Novel, First Edition. Edited by Stephen Arata, Madigan Haley, J. Paul Hunter, and Jennifer Wicke. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. The Novel in Theory, 1900–1965 257 methods and, second, of further dissatisfaction with the diagnoses and remedies proposed in response to it. Maugham’s sideswipe at commentators on the art of the novel belongs to a distinct early‐twentieth‐century phase of novel criticism dominated by practitioners of the art rather than by academics. The authorities he mentions are a leading novelist (Forster), a minor novelist (Lubbock), and a failed novelist better known as a poet and as co‐translator of Kafka (Muir). Up to the date at which Maugham himself published his Great Novelists and Their Novels (1948), most critical arguments about the nature and techniques of the novel form were advanced by practicing novelists: Henry James, H. G. Wells, Ford Madox Ford, Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, Percy Lubbock, Rebecca West, George Orwell. During this phase, the emerging academic discipline of English Studies devoted its attention chiefly to poetry and to Shakespearean drama. Major works of literary theory both within the academy, as with I. A. Richards’s Principles of Literary Criticism (1924), and from beyond its walls, as with T. S. Eliot’s The Sacred Wood (1920), take up important new positions in poetics, but have nothing to say about prose fiction. Accordingly we find, aside from accounts of individual novelists such as Leslie Stephen’s George Eliot (1902), very few notable academic studies of the English novel before about 1945. Among these are George Saintsbury’s literary–historical survey The English Novel (1913), David Cecil’s more specialized Early Victorian Novelists (1934), and Q. D. Leavis’s published doctoral thesis on the modern fiction market, Fiction and the Reading Public (1932). The adoption of novels and of the larger problem of “the Novel” as objects of academic investigation arises quite abruptly and emphatically in the 1940s. The shifting interests of two of the most influential mid‐century critics on either side of the Atlantic illustrate this. At Columbia University, Lionel Trilling had devoted his doctoral work to the poet–critic Matthew Arnold (published as Matthew Arnold, 1938); thereafter, Trilling’s critical work concentrates on the novel. Similarly at Downing College, Cambridge, F. R. Leavis had published two studies of the English poetic tradition, New Bearings in English Poetry (1932) and Revaluation (1936), but in the 1940s and thereafter he became increasingly preoccupied by the novel, notably in the essays collected as The Great Tradition (1948) and in D. H. Lawrence: Novelist (1955). One consequence of this “turn to the novel” in academic criticism is that in striking contrast to the practitioner‐led 1900–1945 phase, postwar novel theory is dominated by critics based in universities: Trilling, the Leavises, Dorothy Van Ghent, Barbara Hardy, Ian Watt, Wayne C. Booth, J. Hillis Miller, W. J. Harvey. On these grounds, we might divide our account of novel theory in this period into two halves, the practitioner phase and the academic. Critical thought, however, is no simple product of its professional substructure, following instead its own vagaries of unfolding debate; so this chapter is arranged in an almost mythic pattern of death‐ and‐rebirth, in three phases. In the first, Henry James’s pursuit of consistency through “point of view” in the construction of novels culminates in the debates of the 1920s provoked by Lubbock’s The Craft of Fiction (1921). In the second, a curious interregnum, questions of novelistic technique are eclipsed by efforts to assimilate fiction to poetry. Finally, the theory of the novel revives, notably in the period’s second landmark study, Wayne C. Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961). 258 Chris Baldick

“The Master”: For and Against

Henry James looms large over early‐twentieth‐century novel criticism, less as a theorist than as an exemplary self‐conscious practitioner of the art. James published various essays on Balzac, Flaubert, and Zola in the first years of the century, and wrote plenti- fully in 1907–1909 on his own novels in a series of prefaces to the collected New York Edition. These writings are more concerned with particular artistic challenges than they are with general precepts, the prefaces in particular revisiting the evolution of each novel and the specific difficulties it had presented in its conception and composition. Occasionally, though, from the fine tissue of Jamesian reminiscence there emerges some observation amounting to a declaration of preference if not of hard principle. The most telling such moment comes in the 1908 preface to The Tragic Muse:

A picture without composition slights its most precious chance for beauty, and is moreover not composed at all unless the painter knows how that principle of health and safety, working as an absolutely premeditated art, has prevailed. There may in its absence be life, incontestably, as [Thackeray’s] The Newcomes has life, as [Dumas’s] Les Trois Mousquetaires, as Tolstoi’s Peace and War [sic] have it; but what do such large loose baggy monsters, with their queer elements of the accidental and the arbitrary, artistically mean? We have heard it maintained, we well remember, that such things are “superior to art”; but we understand least of all what that may mean, and we look in vain for the artist, the divine explanatory genius, who will come to our aid and tell us. There is life and life, and as waste is only life sacrificed and thereby prevented from “counting,” I delight in a deep‐breathing economy and an organic form. (1987, 515)

James wanted novels not merely to accumulate impressions of “life” but to shape those impressions by selection and composition into an artistically consistent “picture” – his metaphors for novelistic art being relentlessly pictorial. Reviewing the state of contemporary fiction in 1914 in “The Younger Generation” (later reprinted as “The New Novel”), James complained that Arnold Bennett and H. G. Wells in particular had fallen into the wasteful Tolstoyan habit of piling up their materials without illuminating them from any “centre of interest” (603). Much discussion of novelistic principles in the early twentieth century resolves itself into a contest between partisans of Art, who tend to invoke the authority of Gustave Flaubert as the novelist’s novelist, and champions of Life, who are more likely to invoke Tolstoy or Dickens. In the first camp we find Henry James, Ford Madox Hueffer (later Ford), and Virginia Woolf; in the second, H. G. Wells, D. H. Lawrence, and E. M. Forster. Those who looked up to Henry James as “The Master” pursued two lines of critical work: the first concentrated upon technical analysis of James’s novels, as in Joseph Warren Beach’s The Method of Henry James (1918) and Lubbock’s The Craft of Fiction; the second more polemically amplified James’s disparagement of the inartistic shapelessness of most English fiction. Ford Madox Hueffer in his book Henry James (1913) deplored, in terms blunter than James’s own, the “botched and amateurish productions of the schools of Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, Reade, Dumas, and George Eliot” (1913, 79). In his more provocative survey, The English Novel (1930), the same The Novel in Theory, 1900–1965 259 novelist–critic, now Ford Madox Ford, engaged in prolonged derision of almost the entire tradition between the 1740s of Henry Fielding and the 1880s of George Meredith as one in which English authors had simply failed to take their craft seriously, Thackeray’s intrusive moralizing about his characters showing a typically English contempt for his own art. Only with the arrival of Henry James and Joseph Conrad had the novel in English lately begun, Ford claimed, to approach artistic integrity. From another quarter, however, had emerged an anti‐Jamesian camp in which the loose bagginess of English fiction that James and Ford disparaged was upheld as a virtue. H. G. Wells had maintained such a position even before James’s criticism of his own work in 1914 provoked him to counterattack. In “The Contemporary Novel” (1911), Wells predicted that the novel would be a central actor in the current ferment of social ideas, at least if it returned to the healthily “lax freedom of form, the rambling discursiveness” of Fielding and Sterne, and ignored those who insisted upon “cramp- ing conceptions of artistic perfection” (1980, 195). Henry James is not mentioned by name here, but when Wells refers to “the assumption that the novel, like the [short] story, aims at a single, concentrated impression” and condemns that as a fallacy, the identity of his antagonist is clear, as James himself noticed. In response to James’s disapproval in “The Younger Generation,” Wells resumed the assault more openly in the fictional dialogues of his book Boon (1915), not only against the Master’s principles (“James has never discovered that a novel isn’t a picture” [1980, 211]) but against his practice: the characters in James’s novels, tamely subordinated to the uniform aesthetic design, are never permitted, Wells complains, to have political or religious opinions, nor to have lusts or whims or dreams (213). So, on Wells’s account, novel writing is for James a pictorial art whose chief principle is omission, whereas for Wells it is a discursive art of expansion, variety, and inclusion, in which personality, controversy, and digression have a rightful place. Students of the novel who have not yet learned to write Wells off entirely may recognize some congruence between his view of the novel and that later developed by the Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, which has become far more respectable: both insist that the novel is not only exempt from aesthetic prescription but also by its nature heterogeneous, hybridized and animated by contending voices and passions. Henry James died a few months after reading Boon, having extracted a partial apology from his former friend for its crueler mockeries. The Wells–James tussle, however, continued vicariously as Jamesians grappled with anti‐Jamesians through the 1920s. E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel (1927) summarizes the original battle, and after admiring the shapely plot of The Ambassadors comes down decisively on Wells’s side, concluding that a novel should not sacrifice the varied richness of life for the unity provided by a “rigid pattern” (1962, 165). Rephrasing Wells’s earlier charges against James’s novels, Forster complains that Jamesian characters are incapable of fun, carnality, or heroism, and can do little other than inspect artworks and each other. “Maimed creatures can alone breathe in Henry James’s pages,” he writes, later adding that “they are gutted of the common stuff that fills characters in other books, and ourselves” (162–163). Forster closes with a Wellsian and anti‐Jamesian slogan: “Expansion. That is the idea the novelist must cling to. Not completion. Not rounding off but opening out” (170). 260 Chris Baldick

Meanwhile D. H. Lawrence and his disciples did battle, upon similar lines, for their conceptions of “life” in fiction against what they regarded as the sterile cult of Form. Curiously, they failed to identify James as their antagonist: the Master goes unmen- tioned in Lawrence’s critical writings, even in his tirade against the decadent triviality of modernist fiction’s preoccupation with consciousness, “Surgery for the Novel – or a Bomb” (1923). Lawrentian criticism instead identifies the source of life‐denying aestheticism as the Master’s Master, Gustave Flaubert. Lawrence’s early essay on Thomas Mann (1913) attributes the modern “craving for form in fiction” to Flaubert’s influence: as the French novelist had “stood away from life as from a leprosy,” his modern followers cultivate a sickly perfectionism (1998, 3, 7–8). Lawrence’s follower John Middleton Murry expanded the attack in his own article “Gustave Flaubert” (1922), in which faint praise for Madame Bovary (1856) is mixed with derision of its author’s alleged retreat into an ivory tower of Art from which he took his revenge upon Life. This essay in turn provoked an exasperated T. S. Eliot to repeated mockery of Murry’s Romantic‐Protestant heresies. In the ensuing debate, it became clear that Murry’s heroes among the novelists were Tolstoy and, above all, Dostoevsky (with Balzac and Dickens not so far behind), whose greatness was found not in Flaubertian aesthetic perfection but in religious profundity of soul and heroic spiritual self‐exploration. Hostility to Flaubert’s supposed aesthetic retreat from “life” re‐echoes too, as we shall see, in the critical works of Murry’s successor in the role of Lawrentian champion, F. R. Leavis. As Henry James himself had said, there is life and life. It is possible to discriminate between senses in which “life” as a value is mobilized by Wells or Forster against the demand for formal consistency of novelistic composition raised by James, and the senses in which it is brandished against Flaubert by Lawrence and Murry. When Wells and Forster reject James’s standards and practice as restrictive, they do so in the name of the complexity of life considered as social and psychological experience and as material for a potentially more expansive art of fiction. With Lawrence and Murry, it is more as though the “life” of a novel is a precious inward quiver of vitality threatened by the blight of Flaubertian perfectionism. A novel, Lawrence insisted, must above all be “quick,” meaning vitally sensitive to the subtle interrelations of all things, resisting imposed philosophies or moralities, even the novelist’s own. Both positions are versions of Protestantism, the Wells–Forster stance showing a distrust of papal – in this context Jamesian – authority, while the more radical Lawrence–Murry view betrays a deeper suspicion of graven images – in this context works of art – as blasphemies against a religiously apprehended life‐principle.

Points of View on Point of View

In 1922, Virginia Woolf defined the importance of Lubbock’s The Craft of Fiction succinctly when reviewing it for the Times Literary Supplement, calling it not just the best but significantly the only book on the subject (1988, 338). Its eminence in those terms soon came to be superseded, but the book nonetheless stands as a landmark on account of its clarification of alternative narrative methods through impartially technical analysis of classic novels. By comparison with the works we have considered so far, The Novel in Theory, 1900–1965 261

The Craft of Fiction is all the more strikingly unpolemical because it is so clearly an exposition of principles derived from the practice of Henry James. Despite his evident discipleship, Lubbock avoids citing James’s critical essays as authoritative, and treats with respect even those novelists such as Tolstoy, Dickens, and Thackeray who must from a Jamesian standpoint be regarded as preartistic primitives. The result is a calmly judicious appraisal of narrative methods in terms of their convincing impression upon the reader. The essential distinction from which Lubbock’s analysis proceeds is between the “pictorial” or “panoramic” method of storytelling, in which the story’s action is clearly being reported to us after the event, and the “dramatic” or “scenic” method, which gives us the illusion of being present at, and contemporaneous with, that action. For Lubbock, it is always preferable for readers to feel that they are facing the action as it unfolds, as they would in a drama, rather than facing the storyteller in the later act of reporting it. His contrasted terms, both being visual, are indeed not best suited to bring out the discrimination he wants to make here, which has later been rephrased in the standard creative‐writing‐class injunction “show, don’t tell.” Lubbock clearly prefers showing to telling, but he concedes that a combination of the two is inevitable, the “don’t tell” admonition being too dogmatic for him. His principal worry is that the relation between the traditional third‐person narrative voice and the events it recounts is awkwardly unaccounted for, and becomes an open embarrassment when it begins to intrude with comments on the action and characters, as in Fielding and Thackeray. First‐person autobiographical narration may have the advantage of situ- ating the narrator credibly and thus dramatically in relation to the events, but because it involves retrospective reminiscence it again forfeits true dramatic vividness. Accordingly, the major technical choice faced by a novelist is not between first‐ and third‐person narration but a matter of who is to witness the story’s events: a remote summarizer, or a participant and thus a character within the story? This is why Lubbock regards the essential problem as one of “point of view”: “The whole intricate question of method, in the craft of fiction, I take to be governed by the question of the point of view – the question of the relation in which the narrator stands to the story” (1926, 251). On this matter, he sets out to show that Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and James’s The Ambassadors (1903) have solved the problem in the best possible fashion, by delegating the point of view to a central character – Emma Bovary, Lambert Strether – through whose eyes the events of the tale appear to be seen as they unfold, while the third‐person voice of the narrative itself still allows us an independent perspective upon this “centre of consciousness,” which first‐person narratives would debar. By comparison with later systems of narratology, Lubbock’s discussion of such points may appear muddled, in that he often employs the term “narrator” for the central witness – what we would now call the focalizer – and thereby confuses seeing with telling. The Craft of Fiction has other curious oversights too: it offers praise for the “scenic” vividness of Bleak House (1853), for example, without even seeming to notice that Dickens’s novel employs two very different points of view, let alone deciding whether its duality of perspective spoils the consistency of impression that Lubbock usually seeks. Lubbock’s work commanded respect, but not much agreement. Virginia Woolf’s review concurs with Lubbock’s evolutionary scheme of advance from Walter Scott’s 262 Chris Baldick primitive methods to the sophistications of Flaubert, but – here for once echoing Wells’s complaints against James – queries his conception of form as a kind of visual design that can be apprehended at once. Woolf suggests that the reader’s experience of a novel, at least on first reading, is sequential and primarily emotional rather than pictorial: “there is nothing to be seen; there is everything to be felt” (1988, 340). E. M. Forster in Aspects of the Novel dissents both from Lubbock’s evolutionary assumptions and from his emphasis on point of view as the leading problem of novelistic form. Although granting that the “confidential” intrusions of Fielding and Thackeray are offenses against fictional illusion, he refuses any notion of progress or even chronology in novelistic art. Forster’s principal objection to Lubbock is that he overstates the importance of point of view as a factor in a novel’s successful engagement of the reader. For Forster, the right combination of characters is a more important consideration, and above all what he calls the novelist’s ability to “bounce” the reader into accepting his story, regardless of inconsistencies in point of view. His prime exhibits in that argument are Bleak House – a weak spot in Lubbock’s account, as we have noted – and War and Peace: in both cases there are inconsistencies in point of view, and yet the effect still “comes off” (1962, 88). Forster does not explain how Dickens and Tolstoy “bounce” us into accepting their fictional worlds, Aspects of the Novel being modestly unambitious in technical analysis. Indeed, Forster’s only significant contribution to novelistic theory is the distinction he makes between flat and round characters. Flat characters stay the same, round ones can surprise us by growing in new directions – which is not to say that flatness is to be avoided, because such characters have their own value, as demonstrated especially by Dickens. Virginia Woolf also reviewed Aspects of the Novel, and in tones of irritation at its relegation of formal questions to near insignificance. At this point Woolf shifted into the Jamesian camp in the old Wells–James quarrel, in response to Forster declaring himself for Wells. She lamented Forster’s failure – a typically English failure which a French or Russian novelist would avoid – to take the artistic possibilities of the novel seriously, in subordinating them to a muddled criterion of “life.” For Woolf, “life” must include appreciation of artistic form, and not be raised as a defensive slogan against it (1994, 457–463). Before proceeding with English novel theories of the 1920s, it is worth taking note of Virginia Woolf’s other contributions to novel criticism in this period. Two of her essays, “Modern Fiction” (1919, revised 1924) and “Character in Fiction” (1924, reprinted as “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” 1925), have been widely cited as canonical statements of modernist aspiration. These essays are not contributions to the theory of fiction, but polemically critical discriminations between her own ambitions for fiction and those of the “Edwardian” group comprising H. G. Wells, John Galsworthy, and Arnold Bennett. Woolf singles out Bennett as the most artistically serious of these, and then finds him guilty of neglecting the study of individual human nature in favor of social–environmental circumstance – a materialistic diversion from the spiritual essentials that should concern the novelist. As indicators of a characteristic modernist turn away from the social to the psychological, these essays have undoubted importance, but they are not quite what the received legends of modernism have made of them. They do not, as is sometimes assumed, amount to a fundamental rejection of realism. The falsity, as Woolf sees it, of the Edwardian materialist novel lay in its The Novel in Theory, 1900–1965 263 failure to be true to Life – and Woolf is certainly not above invoking that essentially realist standard for her own purposes. “Is life like this? Must novels be like this?” she asks in her “Modern Fiction” essay (1994, 160). It is simply that to Woolf “Life” means one thing – the evanescent impressions of one mind – while to Bennett, at least as Woolf chooses to read him, it means another, which is a knowable social world. While in this respect Woolf is less of a radical antirealist than she is often claimed to be, in another she is more radical, precisely because realism as such is not the intended target of her iconoclasm. When Woolf in the same essay imagines a novelist liberating himself from the predictable conventions of novel writing, she predicts that “there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style” (170). The authority imagined as overthrown here is neither Arnold Bennett, nor Guy de Maupassant, nor Jane Austen, nor any representative of the realist novel tradition. It is Aristotle, and along with him the essential components of narrative and dramatic construction that he had enumerated several centuries before realist fiction emerged. The last, and the least influential, response to Lubbock’s Craft of Fiction in the debate that ran through the 1920s was Edwin Muir’s The Structure of the Novel. Dissatisfied both with Lubbock’s concentration upon narrative viewpoint and with Forster’s dis- missal of form in favor of “life” (no novel can be as formless as life, he objects), Muir attempts fresh clarification of the logic by which novels cohere in different ways. Muir advances not a new terminology – plot, character, and setting are his basic terms – but a new analytic emphasis on time and space as coordinates of novel construction. Drawing partly from Gotthold Lessing’s reflections upon spatial and temporal arts in his Laokoon (1766), Muir also proposes a new classification of novels into three broad types: the Novel of Action, which corresponds to the popular adventure–romance; the Character Novel, which surveys an extended social world through fixed or “flat” characters; and the Dramatic Novel, which offers a confined sphere within which we focus upon the destinies of developing or “round” characters. The character novels of Fielding, Dickens, and Thackeray have a variegated sense of social space, but little sense of time, while the dramatic novel, whether comic (Austen) or tragic (the Brontës and Hardy) gives an urgent sense of time but within a restricted space. “The dramatic novel is limited in Space but free in Time, the character novel limited in Time and free in Space,” as Muir summarizes these distinctions (1979, 88). One clear advantage of Muir’s scheme over Lubbock’s evolutionary model is that it exonerates Dickens and Thackeray from the disgrace of failing to become Henry James: working in a distinct novelistic mode, they had never even set themselves such an unlikely goal.

Criticism and the Dissolution of the Novel

While Percy Lubbock and his successive disputants tried to stabilize workable analytic concepts and taxonomies in novelistic theory, the great experimental tendency that we call modernism was busy dissolving them in practice. Not only such familiar technical terms as plot, character, action, setting, and denouement but newer concepts like “point of view” were looking suddenly less relevant as extraordinary prose narratives appeared – Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and Woolf’s The Waves (1931), among others – that seemed to defy description as novels at all, in the once accepted sense. T. S. Eliot 264 Chris Baldick greeted Ulysses as a sign that the time was ripe for replacing old narrative methods with new mythic patterns of symbolic correspondence. Modernist fiction more broadly seemed indeed to be replacing causal chains of plotted events with some new aesthetic configuration in which style and symbol figured more prominently than story. In the context of such challenges it became more than usually tempting to throw away the textbooks of fictional method – such as they were at the time – and to start afresh on the assumption that a novel, and not just the latest experimental kind but any novel, was best understood as a species of extended prose poem. There were early signs of such a notion in the 1920s, as in Virginia Woolf’s essay in The Common Reader (1925) on Jane Eyre (1847) and Wuthering Heights (1848), which approaches the Brontë sisters as poets who happened to write these works in prose. More influential was “A Note on Fiction” (1926) and associated articles by C. H. Rickword in the journal Calendar of Modern Letters, throwing doubt on all analytic concepts and discussions of form or technique in the novel. Plot, character, narrative, and the rest were all, Rickword insisted, just abstractions from the reader’s experience of the novelist’s prose and the “rhythm” of the story. It was upon that basis that Q. D. Leavis suggested six years later in her Fiction and the Reading Public that novels should be read in most respects as poems, although allowing for their more gradually accumulating effects and for the difficulty of quoting truly representative passages. Fiction and the Reading Public is devoted chiefly to lamenting a supposed collapse of literary taste amid the modern tide of popular trash and middlebrow pseudo‐ literature, but it also advances the first coherent theory of the novel “as poem.” In doing so it draws upon three recent developments, the first of these being modernist practice: Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927) is held up as a model of a truly “poetic” novel. Secondly, Leavis invokes as adaptable to the novel the methods of “close reading” of poetry outlined in I. A. Richards’s Principles of Literary Criticism and Practical Criticism (1929), these works being the foundations both of the “Cambridge school” of criticism and eventually of its American counterpart, the “New Criticism.” Finally, she reinforces Rickword’s skepticism about character and plot as analytic concepts by drawing on the spectacular recent turn in Shakespeare criticism, which in the hands of G. Wilson Knight and others had dislodged character and plot in favor of reading the plays as thematic extensions of poetic metaphor, as dramatic poems rather than as verse plays. This likening of novels to poems became the central – indeed the only – contribution made by the Leavises and their journal Scrutiny (1932–1953) to the modern theory of the novel, their emphasis on critical valuation and their horror of abstraction both being notoriously inhospitable to theory. If analytic terms such as plot or point of view were, as Rickword had suggested, mere abstractions, then we were left with the experience of the words on the page, at which level generic distinctions could be disre- garded. “A novel, like a poem, is made of words; there is nothing else one can point to,” wrote F. R. Leavis (1933, 16), and in Leavisian criticism pointing to samples of an author’s writing is more important than analyzing an author’s method or technique. The Leavis group was never concerned with how novels were constructed, only with the quality of the authorial sensibility to which they could be attributed. Despite clearly siding with D. H. Lawrence in his reverence for “life” against Flaubert the sterile partisan of “form,” the Leavises nonetheless claimed the authority of Henry James for this critical emphasis, citing from his “The Art of Fiction” (1884) “the very The Novel in Theory, 1900–1965 265 obvious truth that the deepest quality of a work of art will always be the quality of the mind of the producer” (1987, 205). Technical and indeed generic considerations could be set aside in favor of appreciating the richness of a given work’s written texture and thus approving its author’s moral seriousness and maturity. It was upon this basis that the Scrutiny critics unashamedly approached Victorian and Edwardian novels as though they were Shakespearean plays: the journal launched in the 1940s an irregular series of articles entitled “The Novel as Dramatic Poem,” which was crowned by F. R. Leavis’s approval of Hard Times (1854) – while apparently overlooking the remaining Dickens canon – in his book The Great Tradition:

The final stress may fall on Dickens’s command of word, phrase, rhythm, and image: in ease and range there is surely no greater master of English except Shakespeare. This comes back to saying that Dickens is a great poet: his endless resource in felicitously varied expression is an extraordinary responsiveness to life. (1962, 281)

Rhythm and image are highlighted for praise here, while character, plot, narrative, and indeed “novel” itself are conspicuous by their absence. The Shakespearean comparison was later to be applied to D. H. Lawrence in Leavis’s D. H. Lawrence, Novelist, and it provided the central claim that F. R. and Q. D. Leavis jointly extended through the Dickens canon in Dickens the Novelist (1970). Although similarly rooted in Cambridge poetry criticism of the 1920s, the New Critics who transformed criticism in the United States from the mid‐thirties to the fifties did not follow Leavis’s path from poetry to a re‐evaluation of the novel; and although they sometimes attempted to read Shakespeare plays as if they were poems, they stopped short of reading novels as drama. Allen Tate, a prominent figure in the group, did publish an article called “Techniques of Fiction” (1944), but this does little more than praise Lubbock for his technical analysis and Woolf for her rejection of the Bennett–Wells school. Another leading New Critic, J. C. Ransom, made in his essay “The Understanding of Fiction” (1950) an unconvincing attempt at analyzing the styles of short passages taken from classic novels as if he were reading poems. The nearest equivalent to a New Critical theory of the novel comes in Mark Schorer’s essay “Technique as Discovery” (1948), which offers a simplified modernist opposition to the idea of novels as “slices of life,” his point – derived from T. S. Eliot’s remarks about the poet’s transmutation of experience – being that raw “life” needs to be transformed by artistic treatment (“technique”) if it is to be more than a documentary record. This distinction serves Schorer’s primarily critical purpose of distinguishing bad novels like Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722) or Wells’s Tono‐Bungay (1909) from good novels such as Wuthering Heights and Ulysses. A more influential application of broadly modernist principles to English fiction came from Edmund Wilson in The Wound and the Bow (1941), a semi‐Freudian study of the relationship between trauma and literary talent. The most impressive essay in this collection is “Dickens: The Two Scrooges,” which proceeds from psychobiography to reclamation of Dickens as a great novelist and a great social critic. Wilson compares Dickens not with Shakespeare but with Kafka and Dostoevsky, significantly high- lighting the way in which the English novelist organizes his works around central unifying symbols such as the fog in Bleak House. Without needing to call him a poet, 266 Chris Baldick

Wilson brought Dickens back into full membership of the modern imaginative tradition, thereby launching a renaissance of Dickensian studies in America, in which other landmarks include Dorothy Van Ghent’s essay “The Dickens World: A View from Todgers’s” (1950), Lionel Trilling’s introduction to Little Dorrit (1953), which likens that novel to the Divine Comedy, and J. Hillis Miller’s Charles Dickens: The World of His Novels (1958). From the 1930s to the 1950s, discussion of fiction in the English‐speaking world abandoned formal or technical analysis of the novel as a distinct genre with its own structural and discursive constraints and challenges. Instead it pursued evaluative criticism of a kind that focused upon the “poetic” aspects of prose style and the symbolic or thematic basis of narrative coherence, thereby assimilating the novel to the poem or drama. As we have seen, the Leavis group was the clearest and most extreme case of this development. It earned some notoriety for replacing analysis with valuation of an arbitrarily dismissive kind that devoted most of its energy to sorting sheep from goats, or in Leavisian terms those writers who are “for” life (D. H. Lawrence) from those whose cultivation of form and technique shows that they are “against” life (Flaubert and Joyce). A curious case of Leavisian discipleship shows through in Arnold Kettle’s two‐volume Introduction to the English Novel (1951–1953): although written from the standpoint of the Communist orthodoxy of Socialist Realism, Kettle’s work falls easily into line with Leavisian styles of valuation, for example rejecting Middlemarch (1871–1872) for its historical pessimism and Ulysses for its alleged sterility. Under Leavis’s influence, critics hesitated to analyze how novels work, fearing that the central moral significance of the novel might be compromised by technical pedantry or by aestheticism. F. R. Leavis insisted that the formal‐ aesthetic dimension of a novel was inextricable from – in effect a function of – the novelist’s moral vision, and therefore should not be addressed in isolation. American critics of the period were less anxious about this principle than the British Scrutiny group, although they remained critics foremost, and in their own way expounded a version of moral criticism. Lionel Trilling regarded the novel primarily as a medium of the moral imagination, although in a sense less restrictive than that of F. R. Leavis, with whom he differed in several ways. He rebuked Leavis for excluding Dickens (apart from Hard Times) from his exclusive list of great English novelists, and he was reluctant to read novels as poetic compositions, insisting – like H. G. Wells before him – that there was room in them for ideas, not just symbols, and indeed room for characterization too. Dorothy Van Ghent’s book The English Novel: Form and Function (1953) is significantly subtitled Essays in Analysis, and shows a far stronger sense of form and novelistic technique than most comparable works of the previous 20 years, notably in its much‐admired chapter on Wuthering Heights. The influence of the New Critics and of the Leavises is felt when Van Ghent repeats their principle of the inex- tricability of aesthetic form and moral vision; and The English Novel remains a work of critical evaluation, in which some novels – by Scott and Meredith, for example – are found to be incoherent. Van Ghent demonstrates, however, a fuller understanding than the New Critics of the specific properties of the novel as a genre, and a strikingly more catholic appreciation than F. R. Leavis, finding grounds upon which to praise not only Defoe and Fielding but also Sterne (an irrelevant and nasty trifler, according to Leavis) and Joyce. Her work may be seen as transitional, pointing beyond the mid‐century predominance of criticism to a renewed focus upon novelistic construction. The Novel in Theory, 1900–1965 267

The hegemony of evaluative criticism in the literary culture of the 1930s and 1940s had eclipsed not only novelistic theory as such but also literary history, a discredited academic discipline which the ascendant critics scorned for its focus upon extrinsic facts instead of the intrinsic value of literature. In this context the most important transitional work of the 1950s was Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel (1957), which offers a prehistory of the great nineteenth‐century realist tradition, concentrating upon Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding as its forerunners. Watt’s project, completed in California, had begun in Cambridge in the late 1930s as a study of the eighteenth‐ century English reading public, under the influence of Q. D. Leavis. It traces the emergence of realism to the new cultural conditions of the Protestant bourgeois reading public in England, with its moral individualism and its philosophical skepticism; and then shows how each of the three named novelists develops in unbalanced fashion elements of the sophisticated realism eventually synthesized by Jane Austen. Defoe offers “presentational” realism, for instance in particularized settings, but without a coherent moral vision; Fielding provides the coherence of a sane worldly perspective but without the presentational particularity, his characters being mere types. Meanwhile Richardson achieves coherence through an individual perspective, but thus risks falling into solipsistic fantasy and becoming the father of the modern bestseller and its daydream world. At this stage the influence of Q. D. Leavis is evident, but at others it is Lubbock who guides the account, as when Watt complains of Fielding’s narratorial intrusions as set- backs on the path to true realism. Indeed, Watt’s historical model is, like Lubbock’s, an evolutionary one in which primitive experimenters struggle to become the real thing – Jane Austen here, rather than Henry James.

The Return of Plot and Character

It had often been noticed that the methods of “close” reading employed in the Cambridge school and among the American New Critics were suitable to short lyric poems but had little to offer in understanding novels. The Scrutiny project of treating a novel as a dramatic poem was in one sense an attempt to overcome that deficiency by adopting the latest styles in Shakespeare criticism. Eventually a theoretically cogent resistance to the entire New‐Critical‐Scrutiny way of reading was launched from the University of Chicago by R. S. Crane and his associates, under the banner of a return to Aristotle. The Chicago Critics, as they came to be known, had important points to make about right and wrong ways to read poetry, but since their opponents’ notorious weak point was the novel, they concentrated their heavy guns on that front. The show- case collection of Chicago‐Critical essays, Critics and Criticism, Ancient and Modern (1952) reprints an article by Crane himself, “The Concept of Plot and the Plot of Tom Jones” (1950), which signals a new direction in novel theory, away from linguistic texture and towards generic and formal structure. Crane rejects the idea that the plot of Tom Jones or any novel is a mere mechanical framework serving higher thematic ends; for him it is the synthesis of all other elements such as character and value, and should be analyzed according to its particular kind – a comic plot of action in the case of Tom Jones – and its temporal development. Crane finds himself making the elementary Aristotelian point that this plot has a beginning, a middle, and an end; and he does so 268 Chris Baldick because the New Critical assumption had been that a literary work was a more or less continuous exhibition of linguistic richness, with metaphor, paradox, and ambiguity distinguishing it from the thinness of scientific or practical discourses. The fundamental argument pursued by the Chicago Critics was that the close readers’ insistence upon the distinction between literary and nonliterary language had suppressed all the important distinctions within literary uses of language, treating not only verse satires and tragedies as if they were lyrics, but doing the same thing with novels too. Crane and his colleagues pressed the points that literary language is differentiated according to generic forms and functions, and that a literary work has identifiable components – such as plot and character – that are articulated into wholes. Analysis, then, was required, rather than celebration of undifferentiated linguistic quality. Criticism and literary theory in the 1950s were taking a turn from the small scale of the lyric to the larger scale of the extended narrative, and not only at Chicago. Major critical works of the time, including Eric Auerbach’s Mimesis (1946; in English 1953) and Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism (1957) show a similar tendency. It is still no accident that the next landmark in the theory of the novel should emerge from the Chicago school. This was The Rhetoric of Fiction, by R. S. Crane’s former graduate student Wayne C. Booth, a work that stands with but also supersedes Lubbock’s The Craft of Fiction, at last reviving the technical analysis of narrative after the New Critical interregnum. Booth’s two principal achievements were his deconstruction of the James–Lubbock opposition between showing and telling, and his clarification of distinctions among kinds of narrative voice. The Rhetoric of Fiction persuasively shows – although we might better say “tells” – how the visual metaphors of pictorial, scenic, or dramatic fiction in Jamesian theory mislead us into imagining that novels can “show” us anything. Holding fast to the generic distinction between staged drama and written narrative that his Chicago mentors upheld, Booth insists that all novelistic “showing” is really storytelling in a special disguised form. Although the overt proprietorial manner of narration in Fielding, Thackeray, Dickens, and George Eliot had given way to less visible sources of narrative design in Henry James, James Joyce, and others, there was still always somebody telling us the story, even if this somebody has to be inferred by the reader as a puppeteer who has put in place either a first‐person narrator or the “invisible” kind of third‐person spinner of the tale. This conjectural but logically necessary figure Booth calls the implied author, as distinct from the real‐life mortal who is the actual author. True to his Aristotelian formation, Booth also notices the inadequacy of customary distinctions between first‐ and third‐person narrators, and devotes the rest of his book to a lucid specification of narratorial types, employing analytic criteria such as “privilege” – that is, the power to enter other people’s minds – participation in the story world, distance (between narrator and implied author), dramatization (of narrators as characters, rather than the Jamesian sense of scenic action), and various kinds of reli- ability and unreliability. The “unreliable narrator” is another Boothian concept that has since come to be indispensable to novel theory. The moral overtones of the term itself reflect an important – and again Aristotelian – dimension of Booth’s approach. He acknowledges change and development in the history of the novel but, unlike Lubbock, does not equate that with progress; on the contrary, the modern trend The Novel in Theory, 1900–1965 269 towards unreliable narration, culminating in the recent scandal of Nabokov’s Lolita (1955), is associated with a troublesome moral relativism in which readers are sent unguided through mazes of irony and authorial evasion. Seemingly more comfortable with Fielding and Austen than with the deceptive pseudo‐neutrality of the modernists, Booth struggles with Joyce’s A Portrait in particular, so that his account of its narrative perspective has often been found to be unreliable. While plot and narrative were being reinstated by American theorists of the novel, character, too, was by the early 1960s undergoing rehabilitation in the writings of several British critics who were less neo‐Aristotelian than neo‐Forsterian. John Bayley’s The Characters of Love (1960), for example, argues that the greatest novelists – Dickens and Tolstoy – show a delight in the free individuality of their characters that is lacking in those lesser writers – Proust and D. H. Lawrence, for instance – who use fictional characters as extensions of their own personalities or as illustrations of their own philosophies. Barbara Hardy in The Appropriate Form: An Essay on the Novel (1964) also holds Tolstoy up as the supreme exponent of her preferred “expansive form” of novel, in an argument clearly derived from Forster’s objections to Henry James. Hardy’s similar critical objection is to what she calls “dogmatic form,” which limits the novelist’s truthfulness in presenting the complexity of life by imposing either an aesthetic design, as in Henry James or Virginia Woolf, or ideologically conceived destinies, as in Charlotte Brontë, Thomas Hardy, and indeed Forster himself as a novelist. Among English novels, Eliot’s Middlemarch and Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) illustrate flawed approximations to the Tolstoyan expansive mode. The most cogent critical work of comparable tendency is W. J. Harvey’s Character and the Novel (1965), which mounts a sustained defense of the “loose baggy monsters” of Dickens and Tolstoy on the basis of essential generic distinctions between drama and the novel, and extends Forster’s argument against aesthetic schematism to claim that fullness and variety of character is the mark of the great novel. Forster, who was still alive at this date, might well have been gratified, as he presumably was to see his Aspects of the Novel reissued as a paperback in 1962 and reprinted twice in that decade. In some ways the theory of the novel can make its own kind of progress, as The Rhetoric of Fiction is in terms of analytic clarity an advance upon The Craft of Fiction; but in others it can often seem to be coming full circle.

References

Booth, Wayne, C. 1961. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Leavis, F. R., ed. 1933. Towards Standards of Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Criticism. London: Wishart. Forster, E. M. 1962 [1927]. Aspects of the Novel. Leavis, F. R. 1962. The Great Tradition. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Hueffer, Ford Madox. 1913. Henry James: A Critical Leavis, Q. D. 1979 [1932]. Fiction and the Reading Study. London: Martin Secker. Public. Harmondsworth: Penguin. James, Henry. 1987. The Critical Muse: Selected Lubbock, Percy. 1926. The Craft of Fiction. London: Literary Criticism, edited by Roger Gard. Jonathan Cape. London: Penguin. Maugham, W. Somerset. 2000 [1930]. Cakes and Lawrence, D. H. 1998. Selected Critical Writings, Ale. London: Vintage. edited by Michael Herbert. Oxford: Oxford Muir, Edwin. 1979. The Structure of the Novel. University Press. London: Chatto & Windus. 270 Chris Baldick

Ransom, J. C. 1950. “The Understanding of Wells, H. G. 1980. H. G. Wells’s Literary Criticism, Fiction.” Kenyon Review 12: 189‐218. edited by Patrick Parrinder and Robert M. Rickword, C. H. 1986 [1926]. “A Note on Philmus. Brighton: Harvester. Fiction.” In A Modernist Reader: Modernism in Woolf, Virginia. 1988. The Essays of Virginia Woolf, England 1910–1930, edited by Peter Faulkner. Volume III: 1919–1924, edited by Andrew London: Batsford. McNeillie. London: Hogarth, 1988. Schorer, Mark. 1948. “Technique as Discovery.” Woolf, Virginia. 1994. The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Hudson Review 1: 67–87. Volume IV: 1925–1928, edited by Andrew Tate, Allen. 1944. “Techniques of Fiction.” The McNeillie. London: Hogarth. Sewanee Review 52: 210–225. Van Ghent, Dorothy. 1950. “The Dickens World: The View from Todgers’s.” The Sewanee Review 58: 419–438. 18 The Novel in Theory after 1965 Madigan Haley

The Novel in Theory, Theory in the Novel

This chapter explores how the novel genre increasingly becomes a subject of theory after 1965 and how, in turn, theory becomes a subject of novels. This crossing is figured in the heading above as chiasmus, and since chiasmus is also a trope of mirroring, it is meant to suggest a further dynamic: as the genre sees itself reflected in theory, it responds, and its riposte can be registered in the form of certain novels, but also in the consolidated image they offer of theory. This is a consolidated image, since literary theory comes to a new self‐consciousness in this period, transitioning from a set of rigorous but largely unarticulated approaches to a defined field of transdisciplinary inquiry. Theory, in this sense of the word, is specific to the period in question and, as Emily Apter writes, to an anglophone context:

an imprecise catchall for a welter of postwar movements in the human sciences – existentialism, structural anthropology, sociolinguistics, semiotics, history of mentalités, post‐Freudian psychoanalysis, deconstruction, poststructuralism, critical theory, identity politics, postcolonialism, biopolitics, nonphilosophy, speculative materialism – that has no equivalent in European languages. (2014, vii)

The novelization of theory gives this “welter” distinct contours and helps mediate the series of translations whereby anglophone “theory” becomes global lingua franca. A discussion of the novel in relation to all the theoretical movements quoted above is beyond the purview of any essay. Instead, I will consider major theoretical accounts of the genre during this period through their novelization in English campus fiction.

The English campus novel is not only a prominent subgenre in which theory and theorists are thematized; more importantly, it serves as a form of novel theory in its own right, in a critical landscape often figured as predominantly continental and American. Works by David Lodge, Ian McEwan, and Zadie Smith imagine the campus as theory’s locus. On the one hand, this localization serves as a containment strategy, whereby theory’s account of the novel can be branded as merely academic, and superseded as fiction “graduates” to more serious concerns. Yet, in a deeper sense, the campus in these works becomes a staging ground for reflection on the genre’s form, value, and historical development. If in previous eras this development was framed in debates over “form” and “life” (see Baldick, Chapter 17 in this Companion), the operative term in theory’s era is realism. In tune with postmodern fiction, novel theory from the 1960s onwards reconsidered the genre’s relation to language and the world, in ways often opposed to so‐called “naïve” theories of realism, by drawing upon structural linguistics, Russian formalism, and continental philosophy. In turn, certain critics, philosophers, and novelists sought to reconnect fiction to “real life” by theorizing the ethical nature of the novel’s form, especially point of view. This is a somewhat simplistic overview of a history that comes to complex life in English campus novels and the theories they reference and caricature. The chapter begins with David Lodge’s Changing Places (1975) and Small World (1984), which register the consolidation of theory in a transatlantic and increasingly global academic environment. At the same time, Lodge’s fiction displays ambivalence about theory’s conception of the novel, which on the one hand opens up the genre to play with its conventions and on the other seems to disconnect it from reality. Ian McEwan’s 2001 novel Atonement aims to correct the latter by displacing theory’s campus and setting the genre on the hard road to reconciliation with the real. This impetus is carried forward in Zadie Smith’s On Beauty (2005), which in depicting theory’s reign at an American liberal arts college comes to instruct the reader in a post‐theoretical way of reading. Finally, tracing something of a volte‐face, Smith’s own recent novel criticism reimagines theory as a companion in the genre’s continued evolution. Ending this way, the chapter does not follow the usual narrative of theory’s rise and decline over the past 40 years, but instead is structured around parallel moments in 1968 and 2008 as points of departure for rethinking the novel as a historical form, with theory as one significant mode for such thought.

Theory’s Campus

In Changing Places, the first installment of David Lodge’s campus trilogy, the American professor Morris Zapp, a playful parody of Stanley Fish, ponders his ongoing critical opus:

A series of commentaries on Jane Austen which would work through the whole canon, one novel at a time, saying absolutely everything that could possibly be said about them. The idea was to be absolutely exhaustive, to examine novels from every conceivable angle, historical, biographical, rhetorical, mythical, Freudian, Jungian, existentialist, The Novel in Theory after 1965 273

Marxist, structuralist, Christian‐allegorical, ethical, exponential, linguistic, phenomenological, archetypal, you name it; so that when each commentary was written there would be simply nothing further to say about the novel in question. (2011, 35)

Zapp’s project recalls more than a little the exegetical excess of “The Key to All Mythologies,” the failed masterwork of pedant Edward Casaubon in George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–1872). If the scope of Zapp’s project is just as ludicrous, its command of critical language is sophisticated. A catalog of approaches au courant in the late 1960s when the novel is set, Zapp’s project maps the terrain of novel criticism at a watershed moment. While his Jungian, existentialist, Christian‐allegorical, and mythical “angles” look back to criticism from the 1940s and 50s, an era which reaches its apogee in Northrop Frye’s “archetypal” Anatomy of Criticism (1957), Zapp’s “structuralist” reading might still have been obscure for his colleagues at Euphoria State in the late 1960s, just as baffling as his, alas, unexplored “exponential” approach to Austen. Indeed, a “structural” approach to the novel was barely on Lodge’s radar in the 1960s. Responding in 1967 to Malcolm Bradbury’s essay “Towards a Poetics of Fiction: An Approach through Structure,” Lodge handles the concept of “structure” with kidg- loves and scarequotes, remaining “sceptical of the possibilities of formulating a poetics of the novel analogous to that which Aristotle formulated for the tragic drama of his time” (Lodge 1971, 64). Rather than finding something new in the language of structure, Lodge aligns the structural approach with Percy Lubbock’s rewriting of Jamesian poetics in The Craft of Fiction (1921) — a contextualizing move he will make again as editor of Longman’s 20th‐Century Literary Criticism: A Reader (1972), when the term fits quite modestly in the hodge‐podge subheading of “Formal Criticism – Structural and Rhetorical Analysis – ‘New Criticism’ – Literary Techniques and Conventions.” Yet by the novel’s appearance in 1975, Zapp’s “structural” approach to Austen has acquired a special aura in the American academy, endowed by Fredric Jameson’s The Prison‐House of Language (1972), Robert Scholes’s Structuralism in Literature (1974), and Jonathan Culler’s Structuralist Poetics (1975). And by 1977, Lodge has overcome his skepticism, helped along by linguist Roman Jakobson’s famous distinction between metaphoric and metonymic discourse:

Jakobson’s brief comment on the metonymic character of realistic fiction particularly excited me … Jakobson’s article [“Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances”] proved to be the key that unlocked for me some of the sealed doors of structuralism. Pondering it, I began to grasp the principles of, and see the usefulness of, the binary model of language and communication that underlies the whole structuralist enterprise from de Saussure onwards; Roland Barthes’s criticism began to make more sense; and I was led back to investigate the nouvelle critique in the work of the Russian Formalists and the Czech Linguistic Circle, discovering the highly suggestive concepts of “defamiliarization” and “foregrounding” in the process. (1977, viii)

All of these concepts, movements, and names, save a minor entry from Barthes, are entirely absent from the anthology Lodge edited in 1972 – and all sound very un‐English. 274 Madigan Haley

No longer a continuation of James’s and Lubbock’s ideas, structuralism in the above passage has a continental genealogy. And its interpreters – Jameson, Scholes, Culler – are American. This geographic shift in novel criticism is in part the premise of Changing Places: an academic exchange, in which Zapp, an Austen specialist who offers courses on the theory of fiction (2011, 53), replaces the English Phillip Swallow, a generalist who resembles Lodge save for his ignorance of theory. In temporarily taking up Swallow’s post at the fictional Rummidge, Zapp worries that crossing the pond will mire him in a pretheoretical state of being:

Once he sank into the bottomless morass of English manners, he would never be able to keep the mythic archetypes, the patterns of iterative imagery, the psychological motifs, clear and radiant in his mind. Jane Austen might turn realist on him. (37)

England is realist, it would seem, and realism muddles the theoretical mind by subordinating literature to life. Zapp muses:

The failure to keep the categories of life and literature distinct led to all kinds of heresy and nonsense: to “liking” and “not liking” books for instance … He felt a particularly pressing need to castigate naïve theories of realism because they threatened his masterwork: obviously, if you applied an open‐ended system (life) to a closed one (literature) the possible permutations were endless and the definitive commentary became an impossibility. (38)

At first glance, Zapp’s thoughts seem to rehearse debates over literary form and formless life that earlier occupied writers such as James and Wells, Woolf and Forster. Yet a decisive shift has taken place. No longer is the tension between a novelistic form and the content or life it mediates. Instead, literature is now conceived of as a system, and this fundamentally structuralist insight, as Culler describes, makes meaning reside in systemic relations, not amorphous life: “if human actions or productions have a meaning there must be an underlying system of distinctions and conventions which makes this meaning possible” (1975, 4). What one needs, then, are the terms to describe how a cultural system such as literature works, and from anthropologists to psychoanalysts that “metalanguage” was provided by linguistics, specifically Ferdinand de Saussure’s semiology. Saussure posited fundamental distinctions between language as utterance (parole) and as system (langue), between its synchronic totality and diachronic evolution, between signifier and signified. Meaning is not simply given in the utterance, created by the speaker, or lodged in the world; rather, it emerges from the relations between signifiers within the system of language at a given moment. This is the “binary model” to which Lodge refers in 1977, and which would in turn lead him back to the early‐twentieth‐century writings of the “Russian formalists,” such as Viktor Shklovksy, Boris Eichenbaum, and Vladimir Propp, who sought to account for the specificity of literature, and its genres, by describing their internally constitutive features. As we saw, Lodge was particularly inspired by Jakobson, the mediator between Slavic formalism and Francophone structuralism, and his description of realist fiction as metonymic. Jakobson’s (and Lodge’s) point is not that we recognize realism by tallying its metonyms against its metaphors; rather, realism for both is historically relative (Jakobson 1971; Lodge 1977, 22–27), and it is instantiated in The Novel in Theory after 1965 275 the modern novel as a set of conventions, which linguistic principles allow us to discern. Conventionally produced, the “real” in realism might inhere in metonymic displacement (Jakobson) or a connotative “effect” (Barthes 1989), yet it is above all a matter of textual relations – not the “serious” imitation of everyday life (Auerbach 1953), a fraught historical relationship to totality (Lukács 1950), or an epistemological orientation to the particular (Watt 1957). For the structuralist, these accounts still derive realism from a text’s adequacy to a reality that is extratextual. And to imagine that the realist novel just plain gives us the world would seem, to borrow Zapp’s words, “naïve.” Seeing the realist novel as a set of conventions allows Lodge to frustrate the reader’s expectations for a neat resolution to the romantic mix‐ups in Changing Places: finding his plot too symmetrical he can sub in other “styles of discourse,” ultimately the “conventions of film” (2011, ix). Yet the structuralist Zapp is also the subject of gentle but serious satire, and his fear of a realist Austen is matched by the novelist’s fear of theory. The supposed liabilities of theory are felt in Zapp’s cordoning off of literature not only from “life,” but from our “liking” and “not liking.” And when Zapp becomes impatient with a squirming student’s paper on Austen’s “moral awareness,” which sounds vieux jeu to his American ears, Lodge lets us hear in Zapp’s internal musings all the fine awareness he has nevertheless gleaned from her works: “While the boy drawled on about Jane Austen’s moral awareness, Morris pondered the implications of Hilary’s surprising call. Could she possibly mean what he thought she meant?” (177). And then there is Zapp’s pipedream project. Its ambition to describe a closed Austenian system seems not only like a thinly veiled attempt to dominate Austen and her Austenites, but also a failure of conception: Lodge knows, and we know, that Zapp won’t write it. And he doesn’t. As Zapp himself explains in Lodge’s sequel, Small World, his exhaustive project “couldn’t succeed because it isn’t possible, and it isn’t possible because of the nature of language itself, in which meaning is constantly transferred from one signifier to another and can never be absolutely possessed” (2011, 236). While there is more to be said about Zapp’s “poststructuralist” insight, the failure of his Austen commentary exemplifies in many ways the structuralist moment of novel theory, whose signal genres were the methodological essay and the explanatory monograph, and whose pleasures were not to be found in textual play or reading against the grain, but rather in the austere symmetries of the Saussurian binary and the Greimasian square. Yet structuralism’s legacy was immense. Institutionally, it gave theoretical seriousness to literary studies, while establishing literary analysis as essentially transdisciplinary – the fertile meeting ground of linguistics, anthropology, psychoanalysis, and philosophy. And structuralism’s effect on novel criticism was to make the rift between text and world, explored by novelists since Cervantes, the point of departure for the genre’s theory, and naïve realism its bête noire. Suspicion of realism, of course, pre‐dated theory’s advent. Already in 1969 Lodge would place the contemporary novelist “at the crossroads”: instead of marching confidently ahead on the high road of English realism, he must now consider the paths leading toward the “nonfiction novel” and postmodern “fabulation” (1971, 18–19). Lodge follows the latter road in Small World, in which he draws upon the conventions of romance, realism’s foil, in order to plot a “global campus” of questing scholars 276 Madigan Haley

(2011, 255), whose lingua franca is theory, battleground is the conference, banner is the “school,” and grail is the UNESCO Chair of Literary Criticism. The narrative mode of romance, impelled by desire rather than mired in the “real,” corresponds to Zapp’s “poststructuralism,” in which:

to read is to surrender oneself to an endless displacement of curiosity and desire from one sentence to another, from one action to another, from one level of the text to another. The text unveils itself before us, but never allows itself to be possessed; and instead of striving to possess it we should take pleasure in its teasing. (238)

The critic cannot fully possess the meaning of, say, an Austen novel, since meaning making, as an irreducibly spatiotemporal process, is always a matter of delay and difference (or différance, as philosopher Jacques Derrida put it). Instead of trying to possess the closed work, then, the reader “should” subject herself to the play of the open text, whose reward is not knowledge but rather jouissance. This view is roughly Barthesian, as is Zapp’s persona in the above passage, strutting with cigar in hand. While Roland Barthes never went so far as to fully align the “readerly” work with realism, the gentle pejorative qualifies those “classics” of the nineteenth‐century novel, which, unlike the “writerly” text, can only be consumed, not produced (1977, 163– 164). The paradox of Barthes’s criticism, however, is that his greatest readings were arguably of Balzac and Flaubert, not Sollers and Camus. The discrepancy between the postmodern écriture Barthes advocated and his preferred critical objects is representative of what was a golden age of novel theory. The great theoretical works that followed upon structuralism, and exfoliated its doxa by recon- necting the novel with the dynamics of history, desire, and power, almost invariably took the nineteenth‐century realist novel as their object, while maintaining, even intensifying, the structuralist vigilance against “naïve” realism. Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious (1981) consolidated the canon of “structuralist” theory, from Frye to Lévi‐Strauss, Greimas to Propp, through a reading of the rise and fall of nineteenth‐ century realism. Yet rather than consider realism a rhetorical feature of an essentially closed work, Jameson would influentially argue that every text is structured by an absent cause, the political unconscious of history, which, like the Lacanian Real, can only be discerned through its displacement into textual form. Psychoanalysis, with its model of a conscious and unconscious that are dynamically related, offered a way past the Saussurian dividing line between signifier and signified. And desire came to name those forces within or beyond the text that both crystallize and shatter the illusion of synchronic structure. No longer a closed set of malleable but mappable conventions, narrative, as Peter Brooks would write in Reading for the Plot (1984), is a force; and the realist text can thus be approached, in psychoanalytic terms, as “a system of internal energies and tensions, compulsions, resistances, and desires” (xiv). This description also applies to the disciplinary landscape of “high” theory in Lodge’s novel, whose tensions culminate in a roundtable that pits deconstructionist against humanist, Marxist against formalist for the elusive UNESCO chair. As each of Lodge’s theorists competes for supremacy, a junior scholar from theory’s margins stumps them all: “What follows if everybody agrees with you?” Perse’s question is reinterpreted by the roundtable’s chair as the insight that “what matters in the field of The Novel in Theory after 1965 277 critical practice is not truth but difference” (2011, 509). If the chair’s claim is roughly poststructuralist, the scene registers Lodge’s exhaustion with theoretical dispute. More importantly, Perse’s question points to a conception of discourse, and by extension the novel, as animated by fractious voices: “language not as system, but as social activity, ‘dialogue’” (Lodge 1990, 2). This paradigm shift from system to dialogue, described here in Lodge’s last collection of “academic” essays, was introduced by the Russian philosopher–critic Mikhail Bakhtin. If Perse’s question for the panel, then, is in some sense Lodge’s for theory, an answer that would both satisfy the formal rigor of the poststructuralist age and do justice to the novel as a social genre was provided by the redis- covery of Bakhtin’s work, whose major essays, written in the 1920s and 1930s, began to appear in English during the 1980s. Bakhtin challenged the orthodoxies of his era by asserting that:

the study of verbal art can and must overcome the divorce between an abstract “formal” approach and an equally abstract “ideological” approach. Form and content in discourse are one, once we understand that verbal discourse is a social phenomenon. (1981, 259)

The rift between literary form and social reality that Bakthin addressed in the 1930s had opened again in the 1980s, giving new resonance to his theorization of the novel as essentially “dialogic”: that is, constituted by “social speech types” whose significance emerges from their interplay within a fluid whole (262–263); receptive of other discursive forms and genres, which the novel subjects to parody and hybridization. The “novelistic” could thus be found in Socratic dialogue and medieval carnival, and the antithesis of this dialogism was no longer “naïve” nineteenth‐century realism, but rather monologic, authoritative discourse. Positing the novel as the formally and historically dynamic genre – “a phenomenon multiform in style and variform in speech and voice” (261), “a zone of contact with the present in all its open‐endedness” (7) – Bakthin offered an alternative to accounts of the novel’s eclipse by écriture. For Lodge the critic this meant a “life after post‐structuralism” (1990, 4), while the novelist was provided with “an ideological justification for the novel that will apply to its entire history” (21). Early structuralism had maintained a dynamic relationship with experimental fiction, Lodge contended, but a “scholastic, esoteric, and inward‐looking” poststructuralism had lost touch with imaginative writing, just as postmodern fiction, it follows, had lost touch with “reality.” Thus Bakhtin allowed Lodge as novelist–critic to once again assert, pace Barthes, that his writing “is in some significant sense a representation of the real world” (15). If Bakhtinian thought helped bring social life back within a largely formalist theory of the novel, by the end of the 1980s New Historicist criticism gained ascendance, influenced by the work of Michel Foucault, which approached the genre not as carnival, but rather as the very place where resistance is contained and power made manifest. Nancy Armstrong discovered in the history of female domestic fiction soft forms of discursive power that “constitute subjectivity” and “contain forms of political resistance within liberal discourse” (1987, 25–26). And D. A. Miller, in one of the bravura arguments of the decade, read the lack of police presence in the Victorian novel as the surest sign of the genre’s evolution into a complex form of social surveillance (1988). While these approaches drew upon the resources of the poststructuralist era, 278 Madigan Haley they did not wave the banner of a particular school. And as the days of “high” novel theory gave way to theoretically inflected historicism and cultural studies, it was a body of criticism that was in many ways reacting against Theory (now capitalized) and the “linguistic turn” that carried on the effort of theorizing the genre’s specificity and value.

Displacing Theory

Although an “ethical” approach figured in Zapp’s Austen project, in practice he had no patience for discussions of an author’s “moral awareness.” For in severing the connection between literature and life, structuralism cast doubt on the ethical valency of novels. And the theoretical age that emerged from structuralism, drawing upon Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, the “masters of suspicion” in Paul Ricoeur’s words (1977), largely approached moral life as the sphere of ideology, ressentiment, and repression. Yet in the late 1980s a number of critics began to take up ethical concerns as a blindspot of previous theory and a central concern of the novel. While Ricoeur spearheaded the return to these aspects of narrative (1984–1988), what would later be called the “ethical turn” was largely torqued by theorists of fiction, in works such as J. Hillis Miller’s The Ethics of Reading (1989) and Wayne Booth’s The Company We Keep (1988). While Hillis Miller reinterpreted deconstructive modes of reading as ethical, Booth combined an ethics of reading, which he located in literary theory from the political to the formalist (1988, 5), with a sense of the “ethical value of ‘works in themselves’” (10). Arguing that “ethical criticism attempts to describe the encounters of a storyteller’s ethos with that of the reader or listener” (8), Booth made Zapp’s Rummidge student suddenly appear much less naïve: “The reader – at least this reader – comes away from reading … Jane Austen … emulating that kind of moral sensitivity … that of the author who insists that I see what these people are doing to each other” (287). For Booth, Northanger Abbey (1817) was arguably Austen’s “strongest piece of ethical criticism” (1988, 233), an appraisal which illuminates Ian McEwan’s use of Austen’s novel for the epigraph to Atonement (2001). Not technically a campus novel, Atonement displaces the subgenre. Central characters Cecilia and Robbie have just graduated from 1930s Cambridge and spend their time debating the merits of Fielding and Richardson and musing upon the ideas of F. R. Leavis. Robbie, however, wishes to leave the “parlor game” of literary criticism behind, while still carrying literature’s moral vision into his future vocation:

Rise and fall – this was the doctor’s business, and it was literature’s too. He was thinking of the nineteenth‐century novel. Broad tolerance and the long view, an inconspicuously warm heart and cool judgment; his kind of doctor would be alive to the monstrous patterns of fate, and to the vain and comic denial of the inevitable. (2001a, 87)

In a similar manner, part of the atonement that gives the novel its title obtains in its protagonist–writer Briony’s decision, after falsely accusing Robbie of raping her cousin, to give up study at Cambridge, enrolling instead as a nurse in wartime London, where she learns the body’s lessons. Risking neologism, we might consider Atonement The Novel in Theory after 1965 279 a “novel of graduation”: one that evokes the campus in order to step beyond it. This graduation, however, is not a simple progression, since it entails, plotwise, returning to England of the 1930s and 1940s and, for McEwan, writing what he called “my Jane Austen novel” (Kellaway 2001). If ethics, in Booth’s words, played “at best a minor and often deplored role on the scene of theory” (1988, 25), the turn toward it would entail, in part, a return to another of theory’s deplored terms: nineteenth‐century realism. We find a correlative to this return in Atonement, I am suggesting, which in McEwan’s words, “enter[s] into a conversation with modernism and its dereliction of duty in relation to … the backbone of the plot” (2002). “Backbone,” McEwan elaborates, is the moral courage to tell the story “actually as it happened,” unlike Briony, who attempts to “[bury] her conscience beneath a stream of consciousness” (2002). McEwan is referring to what is described in the novel as Briony’s “evasions”: elevating her interpretations of Robbie and Cecilia’s lovemaking and her cousin’s rape over the actual events; her decision during the war to rewrite the story of that day, leaving out Robbie’s arrest, in a style that “owed a little too much to the techniques of Mrs. Woolf” (2001a, 294); and, finally, concluding the story, when it is published in 1999, with her apology to Cecilia and Robbie after the war, now reunited back in London.1 This apparent acknowledgment is yet another evasion, we learn in Briony’s postscript, since Robbie and Cecilia are never “actually” reunited, both meeting violent ends on opposite sides of the Channel. Yet “who would want to believe that,” Briony offers as a final apology, “except in the service of the bleakest realism?” (2001a, 350). Might Briony have been better served, we are led to wonder, by reading Robbie’s paradigmatic nineteenth‐century novel, which warns of “the monstrous patterns of fate, and the comic denial of the inevitable”? Is correcting “evasion” in the name of “plot,” “conscience,” and the “the bleakest realism” a return to Leavis – for whom Austen initiated the “Great Tradition” of English moral seriousness and who, in a wartime review of Between the Acts (1941), criticized Woolf’s lack of attention to the “world ‘out there’” (1968, 99)? Not entirely. Robbie, for one, is not fully sold on Leavis’s lectures (2001a, 86), and if McEwan’s novel goes behind modernist fiction in the name of ethics, its ethics inhere not in the “author’s moral seriousness” but rather at the level of literary form. In short, Briony fails to apply the lesson of restricted point of view she learns in the morning, as writer, to her interpretation of events in the evening, as witness:

There did not have to be a moral. She need only show separate minds, as alive as her own, struggling with the idea that other minds were equally alive. It wasn’t only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding; above all it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you. And only in a story could you enter these other minds and show how they had an equal value. That was the only moral a story need have. (38)

Briony’s atonement in the novel, McEwan comments, is in part “to enter the minds of those she’s wronged. And she knows, as I know, that the novel is our best art form for entering other people’s minds” (2002). Novels, McEwan elaborates in another interview, are not about “teaching people how to live but about showing the possibility of what it is like to be someone else. It 280 Madigan Haley is the basis of all sympathy, empathy and compassion. Other people are as alive as you are. Cruelty is a failure of imagination” (Kellaway 2001). And months after Atonement’s publication, McEwan would famously interpret the events of 9/11 through this novelistic dialectic between the limitations of point of view and the extensions of sympathy:

If the hijackers had been able to imagine themselves into the thoughts and feelings of the passengers, they would have been unable to proceed … Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself … is the beginning of morality. (2001b)

McEwan’s claim rhymes with philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s roughly contemporaneous argument that the “narrative imagination is an essential preparation for moral interaction.” “This is so,” Nussbaum continues, because “literary imagining both inspires intense concern with the fate of characters and defines those characters as containing a rich inner life, not all of which is open to view” (1997, 90). The novel, for McEwan and Nussbaum, becomes an ethical form to the degree to which it presents characters as partially open yet largely opaque. If this idea seems to rehearse earlier debates about point of view, the re‐evaluation of the novel’s form derives from the notion that it is, in a certain sense, formless: a limited point of view is not a convention of the novel so much as the condition of moral life. Grappling with the reality of others, then, is “the only moral a story need have.” Conceiving of the novel as a moral instruction in itself renders moot arguments against realism, taking us past that specter’s haunting of the genre to a notion of the novel as finely attuned to life. Just as McEwan overcomes modernism by writing his “Austen novel,” Nussbaum overcomes formalism and identity politics – that is, theory – by going back to Lionel Trilling and his account of the Jamesian novel as “committed to liberalism in its very form, in the way in which it shows respect for the individuality and the privacy of each human mind” (1997, 105). And as Dorothy Hale has recently argued, this elevation of Jamesian form as the sine qua non of novelistic ethics is pursued not only by Nussbaum, but also by certain poststructuralist critics (2009). Arresting the development of the novel at a particular conception of Jamesian form protects the genre’s contract with the real from the excesses of Bloomsbury formalism (Nussbaum) and Woolfian technique (McEwan). In turn, McEwan’s novel of graduation revives Leavis’s sense of the genre’s moral seriousness, while rendering its “necessary priesthood” unnecessary (2001a, 86), since the novel’s ethics do not require specialist interpretation, but are rather intrinsic to its form. Thus Briony’s atonement is not simply a personal act, but also a literary–historical performance that aims to atone for modernism’s “dereliction of duty” by placing the postmodernist novel in “the service of the bleakest realism.” This realism is that of other minds, the surface rendering of which attests to untold depth. In reorienting her fiction toward this “reality,” Briony recovers her “conscience,” and the genre’s. Yet she must also make amends in regard to the “plot.” Her “expiation,” McEwan states, consists in writing Robbie’s war experience in Part Two – specifically the way she writes it. McEwan says that he “was at some pains to provide her with the correct authorities” for such writing (2002), sending Briony to the war archive for sources and making her fall in love with the “pointillist approach to verisimilitude, the correction of detail” (339). Incorporating this new material requires her to “change her style” for “the The Novel in Theory after 1965 281 battlefield,” finding a “starker, simpler, stripped down English prose” that will give a sense of “the drumbeat of the march, a retreat … a panicked flight to the coast” (2002). If this process helps explain why McEwan’s literary metaphors are martial – “dereliction of duty,” “in the service of” – we can also read the English military retreat from France in literary terms. The long march to Dunkirk might be seen as an allegory for the English novel, and its criticism, embarking on the road to reconciliation, at‐one‐ment, with the real.

Theory’s Graduate

As McEwan’s comments on 9/11 imply, a rapprochement with the “real” was felt to be all the more urgent in the first decade of the twenty‐first century. And if the novel’s traditional virtues appeared once again lustrous, the line of New Historicist criticism that scrutinized bourgeois realism, and its liberal subject, now itself appeared suspect. McEwan describes the supposed inadequacy of such theory for the post‐9/11 world in a 2005 interview: “When the Enlightenment was being sort of undermined by the theorists in the academies, that was being done with a general sense of security about the ultimate cultural victory of Enlightenment values, and now I think that victory is a lot less assured” (2010, 124). In response to McEwan’s description of a new “medieval” struggle between faiths, his interviewer offered a description of her own recent sojourn in the United States, in which “around all these classic left‐wing intellectuals, the feeling was one of literal despair. They just run through the streets screaming. That’s basically their only reaction to the moment they’re in, as if this moment were unprecedented,” whereas “madness … in truth, has always accompanied progress” (132). McEwan’s interviewer was Zadie Smith, who in the same year would anatomize this milieu of malaise in On Beauty (2005), the most acclaimed campus novel of the decade. Just as McEwan returns to Austen, Smith’s campus novel reworks Forster’s Howards End (1910), directing its imperative to “only connect …” at a Northeastern liberal arts college riven by culture wars. The main warriors are Monty Kipps, a black West‐ Indian conservative on a visiting appointment to Wellington, and Howard Belsey, a white professor of art history whose campaign against Kipps is part politics, part jealousy. As in Lodge’s campus fiction, the scholarly dispute in Smith’s novel refracts a personal one. This disconnect lies between Howard and his wife Kiki, a black Floridian who, after following Howard to Wellington, and living in its stilted milieu, is under- standably upset at his infidelities. Howard’s excuse that men “respond to beauty” appears at odds with his intellectual investments (2005, 207). His lecture course asks students to “imagine prettiness as the mask that power wears. To recast Aesthetics as a rarified language of exclusion” (155) in order to “interrogate” Rembrandt’s art as “part of the seventeenth‐century European movement to … invent the idea of the human” (117). In Wellington undergrad parlance, in which every subject is shorthanded as “tomato,” Howard’s class “is all about never ever saying I like the tomato,” the tomato being art generally and Rembrandt specifically (312). In this way, Howard resembles Zapp, who in separating literature from life aimed to bypass the nonsense of “liking” and “not liking” books. Yet Howard’s methods are not so much structuralist as New 282 Madigan Haley

Historicist, directing a Foucauldian suspicion at Rembrandt’s art as the “clarion call of an Enlightenment not yet arrived” (144). If Smith has learned the lesson that notions like beauty and the human are socially constructed, On Beauty, in Dorothy Hale’s words, “simply refuses to be scandalized by the knowledge that aesthetics and philosophy serve as ideological instruments through their discursive erasure of the social agents who produce them” (2012, 825). And “unlike Foucauldians and Marxists,” Hale continues, Smith “does not chastise the novel for its contribution to the social production of bad political formations like the liberal subject” (826). Smith, in other words, is a graduate of theory’s campus. And she frequently casts herself in the role. In an essay based on a lecture she gave while a Harvard fellow in 2002–2003, Smith describes how as a student at Cambridge she “fell for this ‘new’ French criticism,” Barthes in particular. Yet the thrust of the essay is to take distance from Barthesian claims about the reader as writer, and the “writerly” text, for a more Nabokovian sensibility:

It’s probably for the best that [Nabokov] didn’t live to see the kind of post‐Barthes (and post‐Foucault) campus criticism that flowered on both sides of the pond during the eighties and nineties. Wild analogy; aggressive reading against the grain and across codes and discourses; a fondness for cultural codes over textual particulars. You remember the sort of thing. (2009, 50)

Smith’s prompt is followed by parodic titles of theoretical “readings” of canonical texts, with her comic confession at the end: “I’ve written a lot of essays like this” (50). No longer the idiom of Lodge’s “small world,” theory had its place (the Anglo‐ American campus) and its period (the eighties and nineties), and one can now look back on it as infatuation or pensum. The essays that Smith was then writing were quite different, and at one point she intended to collect them under the title “Fail Better” – with the remarkably un‐ Beckettian subtitle “The Morality of the Novel.” In her 2003 essay “Love, actually,” Smith again describes her disillusionment with theory, specifically its supposed rejection of ethical value. She now feels emboldened to speak up against theory’s doctrine, and for the novel’s ethical style, because Nussbaum has rather heroically “climbed the disputed mountain of literary theory and planted her philosophical flag firmly in the dirt” (2003). Smith joins the philosopher, although she admits that her “flag is rather weak in comparison. It says: ‘When we read with fine attention, we find ourselves caring about people who are various, muddled, uncertain and not quite like us (and this is good).’” Smith’s “muddle” recalls Forster, and the thrust of the essay is to argue for the distinctively ethical nature of his style, pitting it against Austen’s. Austen, in Smith’s words, is a moral “positivist,” and her comic novels merely ask readers to tolerate the foibles of characters. Forster’s ethical comedy, however, demands from the reader the “far stickier” emotion of love – a love for characters who find themselves “in a moral muddle; they don’t feel freely; they can’t seem to develop.” Expanding on Forster’s words, Smith diagnoses this predicament as “the undeveloped heart,” an affliction of characters who live by received ideas rather than their own feelings – whose moral certainties and “enthusiasms” render them “inflexible, one‐dimensional, flat.” The innovation of Forster’s comic novel is to show us “how very difficult an The Novel in Theory after 1965 283 educated heart is to achieve. It is Forster who shows us how hard it is to will oneself into a meaningful relationship with the world.” To Hale’s crucial questions about the closing focalization of On Beauty – “Why does this fecundity [of narrative point of view] narrow down to the white, male academic’s perspective? Why does Smith rewrite Forster’s novel as Howard’s end?” (2012, 836) – one could respond that Howard bears what Smith calls “the undeveloped heart.” Howard as theorist is a figure rendered comic by his certainties. Following ideas not feelings, he is “flat” – in Hale’s words, “the Updikean‐Bellowian‐Rothian male” – but also disconnected from life: “Like many academics,” Smith informs us, “Howard was innocent of the world. He could identity thirty ideological trends in the social sciences, but did not really know what a software engineer was” (2005, 33). In this way, Smith’s campus novel inverts theory’s charge against the novel’s supposedly naïve realism. It is the theorist now who from a position of knowledge is actually “innocent of the world”; the theorist who in following intellectual conventions misses out on the messy reality of others. In Smith’s later essay “Fail Better” the very idea of the realist writer is saddled with scarequotes and set off with a “so‐called” – not to suggest realism’s naïveté, but rather from incredulity that the category bears any meaning at all (2007). In realism’s place Smith substitutes terms such as authenticity and duty – the fidelity of the writer to her particular way of being in the world. Yet realism is nevertheless the “style” at stake in Smith’s campus novel, although its discussion is displaced onto painting through Howard’s ban on “representational art” and his critique of Rembrandt. Howard’s “undeveloped heart” not only keeps him from seeing the human reality within Rembrandt’s works, but also from a “meaningful relationship” with “the real” as it exists around him. The privileged forms that the real takes on in Smith’s novel are the aging body of Howard’s wife Kiki and 9/11. The event that in Smith’s interview with McEwan marked her American sojourn is, on the surface, largely absent from her American novel. Yet this absence is constitutive – the conspicuously missing term on the charm bracelet of “international totems” that Kiki at one point ponders buying: “the Eiffel Tower, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the Statue of Liberty” (2005, 49). Thus a deep narrative logic is at play when at the book’s emotional climax Kiki equates Howard’s infidelity with his theoretically motivated denial of 9/11’s “reality”:

“Don’t do that!” screamed Kiki. “Don’t undermine me like that. God – it’s like … you can’t even … I don’t feel I even know you any more … it’s like after 9/11 when you sent that ridiculous email round to everybody about Baudry, Bodra–” “Baudrillard. He’s a philosopher. His name is Baudrillard.” “About simulated wars or whatever the fuck that was … And I was thinking: What is wrong with this man? … Howard,” she said, reaching out to him but not far enough to touch, “this is real. This life. We’re really here – this is really happening. Suffering is real. When you hurt people, it’s real. When you fuck one of our best friends, that’s a real thing and it hurts me.” (394)

While Howard’s and Kiki’s responses to the “reality” of 9/11 could be approached as divergent viewpoints in a multiperspectival fiction, it is not difficult to see that Smith’s sympathies here do not lie with Howard’s postmodern reading of the event. 284 Madigan Haley

This authorial sensibility is all the more apparent at the end of On Beauty, when Howard begins to “educate his heart” in a better appreciation for Kiki’s fleshy reality through Rembrandt’s art. In the closing scene, Kiki, having previously moved out of their home, shows up at Howard’s tenure‐weighted lecture, the theory‐drenched notes for which he has forgotten in his car. Discovering this mistake, and his wife in the audience, Howard flits to the last slide, “Hendrickje Bathing, 1654,” which depicts a “pretty, blousy Dutch woman” bathing in a “simple white smock”:

Howard made the picture larger … The woman’s fleshiness filled the wall. He looked out into the audience once more and saw Kiki only. He smiled at her. She smiled. She looked away, but she smiled. Howard looked back at the woman on the wall, Rembrandt’s love, Hendrickje. Though her hands were imprecise blurs, paint heaped on paint and roiled with the brush, the rest of her skin had been expertly rendered in all its variety – chalky whites and lively pinks, the underlying blue of her veins and the ever present human hint of yellow, intimation of what is to come. (443)

In the final lines the materiality of paint and color are transcended, offering a glimpse of the human through the aging body’s intimations. Thus the historical and ideological human that Rembrandt “constructs” comes to mediate Kiki and Howard’s reconciliation in the present. The sightlines in the penultimate sentence suggest that this “reading” of the painting is Howard’s, yet its aesthetic language does not register as free indirect discourse. Rather, the novel’s view, as it were, becomes Howard’s. And the novel’s view is surprisingly shaped by another perspective that is intimated here – indeed by the word “intimation.” We encounter this perspective in a four‐page passage in the middle of the novel, focalized through Katie Armstrong, a precocious undergrad in Howard’s Rembrandt course. Looking at the assigned images for class, Katie responds to Rembrandt’s “Seated Nude, 1631,” finding in it layer upon layer of “human information” about “what a woman is: unadorned, after children, and experience.” Overcoming the distance between the painting’s subject and herself, Katie “can even see her own body contained in this body,” and exclaims, by way of conclusion, “all these intimations of mortality from an inkpot!” (251–252). Her enthusiasm never finds expression, however, as it is dissipated by Howard’s lecture the next day, which aims to “interrogate … the mytheme of the artist as autonomous individual with privileged insight into the human” (252). Yet Howard and the novel end by adopting Katie’s view. In this way, the “education” of Howard’s “heart” is an unlearning of the lessons in his lectures. And the close of Smith’s campus novel restores its readers, through modulating the ethical form of point of view, to the pretheoretical “naïveté,” now presented as wisdom, of one who has not yet been to theory’s campus. On Beauty’s concluding image of expansive human “fleshiness,” and Howard’s intimated reconciliation with Kiki and the real, could be described as a moment of “beautiful plenitude.” This phrase, however, does not issue from Katie Armstrong’s absorptive appreciation but rather from Zadie Smith’s critical irony. She employs it in a 2008 essay on Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, a novel which, in Smith’s largely suspicious appraisal, turns away from acknowledging the “tenuous nature of [the] self” and The Novel in Theory after 1965 285

“the possibility that language may not precisely describe the world” in order to ultimately “assure us of our beautiful plenitude” (2009, 81–82). Smith’s essay is collected in the appropriately titled Changing My Mind, the foreword to which pitches the volume as a replacement to “a solemn, theoretical book about writing: Fail Better,” which has yet to appear. The title is appropriate, since the thrust of Smith’s essay is to diagnose O’Neill’s novel as a form of “lyrical realism,” which responds to 9/11 by anxiously searching for authenticity in ethnicity, world events, and, finally, subjectivity: “only the personal offers this possibility of transcendence,” writes Smith, “which is why personal things are so relentlessly aestheticized: this is how their importance is signified, and their depth” (79). A similar critique, of course, could be lodged against On Beauty, which is arguably why in a telling moment, much like the comic confession in her Harvard lecture, Smith inserts her own fictional practice into the discussion: “I have written in this tradition myself and cautiously hope for its survival, but if it’s to survive, lyrical realists will have to push a little harder on their subject” (2009, 81). Pushing a little harder on her essay’s subject, Smith no longer cultivates Nussbaum’s “hard philosophical bent,” but instead quotes Slavoj Žižek, reads O’Neill’s novel “against its own grain,” and references Barthes on how “the random detail confers the authenticity of the Real” (82, 88, 81). Doing so allows the hidden wound of O’Neill’s novel, and the displaced aesthetic of Smith’s previous one, to suddenly appear: “[Netherland] is an anxious novel, unusually so. It is absolutely a post‐catastrophe novel, but the catastrophe isn’t terror, it’s realism” (74). The upshot of Smith’s interpretation is thus a claim both literary‐ and world‐historical: O’Neill’s novel sits at “an anxiety crossroads” where the crisis of post‐9/11 liberalism meets the “long‐term crisis” of the “nineteenth‐century lyrical realism of Balzac and Flaubert.” Those postmodern writers who questioned it are now the “equivalent of the socialists in Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man.” Realism, having weathered theory’s scrutiny, remains “the last‐man standing” because of its “extraordinary persistence.” So if Smith says she “cautiously hopes” for lyrical realism’s “survival,” that hope, arguably more than Netherland, is beset by anxiety: “Is it really the closest model we have to our condition? Or simply the bedtime story that comforts us most?” (74).2 As a foil to this “model” of fiction, Smith’s essay offers Tom McCarthy’s Remainder (2005), which does not aim to transcend “catastrophe” through lyricism, but rather “works by accumulation and repetition, closing in on its subject in ever‐decreasing revolutions, like a trauma victim circling the blank horror of the traumatic event” (2009, 84). So if lyrical realism imagines that literary language can render subjectivity and “the Real,” McCarthy’s work aims “to let matter matter” (91). Doing so makes the novel a record of failed attempts to speak about “the thing itself” – an attendance upon “the void that is not ours, the messy remainder” (92). This notion of failure differs from that in Smith’s earlier essay “Fail Better,” in which writing is “the attempted revelation of [an] elusive, multifaceted self” and the writer’s inability to do so is “a betrayal of one’s deepest, authentic self” (2007). Instead of depth, McCarthy’s fiction gives us surfaces, and “as surface alone,” Smith states, “Remainder is more than sufficient” (2009, 96). Smith’s analysis here bears affinities with recent theory that has moved away from debate over the subject’s presence to describe how the novel opens up 286 Madigan Haley ethical, subjective, or affective “events” (Attridge 2004; Bewes 2010; Ortiz‐Robles 2010). And in finding surface “sufficient,” her essay could be aligned with broader materialist trends, which focus on things (Brown 2004) and whose realisms are “speculative” (Bryant et al. 2011). Smith’s comment also indicates a turn in her own thought: from On Beauty’s ascent toward the human back down to the paint‐heaped canvas. Remarking this trajectory is not to say that Smith abandons the novel’s ethics for its matter – as if these were necessarily opposed – or that she uncritically champions McCarthy’s work. Rather, her essay marks a moment when decades after the “traditional” novel’s knell was rung, its “lyrical realism” remains as the sole survivor. Smith’s analysis can be understood as a call for the novel to assume a new historicity, which explains, in part, her “wild analogy” comparing realism’s crisis‐ridden persistence to Fukuyama’s “end of history.” Yet this new novel need not negate “realism” – a reaction perhaps best understood as autoimmune – so much as reimagine the logics of fictional worlds and their connections to our own. In doing so, it will struggle formally to address “our condition,” taking up the kinds of questions cataloged at the end of Smith’s essay: “How artificial is realism?” “Are we capable of genuine being?” “What’s left of the politics of identity?” “What, and whom, do we exclude, and why?” (2009, 96). These questions, which are theoretical in nature, do not simply emerge from the novel’s history, but also from the moment of global financial crisis when Smith’s essay appeared in November of 2008. And the title of her essay, “Two Paths for the Novel” (2009) returns us to another moment in 1969 when Lodge imagined “The Novelist at the Crossroads.” At that time, Lodge saw realism at a dead end and the novel’s path forking into fabulation and nonfiction – a development that accompanied the emerging age of theory. In a later era of realism’s predominance, Smith’s essay argues that in “healthy times” the novel has “multiple roads” and looks to McCarthy’s Remainder as an opening off the main route: “It clears away a little of the deadwood, offering a glimpse of an alternate road down which the novel might, with difficulty, travel forward” (2009, 94). Taken as a whole, then, the essay suggests a surprising dialectic, whereby if the novel genre is to become once again historical our thinking must become newly theoretical. Theory, in this sense, is not the novel’s enemy, but rather a fellow traveler.

Notes

1 W. G. Sebald offers a different reading of 2 That the “Balzac–Flaubert model” of realism Woolf’s “evasions” in his Bookworm interview indeed aims to represent reality and subjec- six months before McEwan’s. To address only tivity is not beyond dispute. For Jacques obliquely “the main scenes of horror” evinces Rancière, it rather breaks with regimes of rep- for Sebald the narrator’s “conscience.” This is resentation in order to institute “a new distri- exemplified by Woolf’s writing, with its scru- bution of the perceptible” (2011, 13). Rancière’s pulous yet often indirect response to the reading of French realism, which lies beyond horrors of the First World War: “a subject this chapter’s English remit, challenges not which at first glance seems quite far removed only structuralism’s account of realism, but also from the undeclared concern of a book can the historical logic that understands the novel encapsulate that concern” (2001). in realist, modernist, and postmodern phases. The Novel in Theory after 1965 287

References

Apter, Emily. 2014. Preface to Dictionary of Kellaway, Kate. 2001. “At Home with his Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon, edited by Worries.” Guardian September 15. http://www. Barbara Cassin, vii–xvi. Princeton: Princeton theguardian.com/books/2001/sep/16/fiction. University Press. ianmcewan (accessed December 14, 2014). Armstrong, Nancy. 1987. Desire and Domestic Leavis, F. R. 1968. A Selection from Scrutiny, Vol. 2. Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lodge, David. 1971. The Novelist at the Crossroads Attridge, Derek. 2004. J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics and Other Essays on Fiction and Criticism. Ithaca: of Reading: Literature in the Event. Chicago: Cornell University Press. University of Chicago Press. Lodge, David. 1977. The Modes of Modern Writing: Auerbach, Erich. 1953. Mimesis: The Representation Metaphor, Metonymy, and the Typology of Modern of Reality in Western Literature., translated by Literature. London: Edward Arnold. Willard Trask. Princeton: Princeton University Lodge, David. 1990. After Bakhtin: Essays on Fiction Press. and Criticism. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Barthes, Roland. 1977. “From Work to Text.” In Lodge, David. 2011. The Campus Trilogy. New Image Music Text, translated by Stephen Heath, York: Penguin. 155–164. London: Fontana Press. Lukács, Georg. 1950. Studies in European Realism: A Barthes, Roland. 1989. “The Reality Effect.” In Sociological Survey of the Writings of Balzac, The Rustle of Language, translated by Richard Stendhal, Tolstoy, Gorki and Others, translated by Howard, 141–148. Berkeley and Los Angeles: Edith Bone. London: Hillway. University of California Press. McEwan, Ian. 2001a. Atonement. New York: Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Anchor Books. Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, translated by McEwan, Ian. 2001b. “Only Love and Then Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: Oblivion.” Guardian, September 15. http:// University of Texas Press. www.ianmcewan.com/bib/articles/love‐oblivion. Bewes, Timothy. 2010. The Event of Postcolonial html (accessed December 14, 2014). Shame. Princeton: Princeton University Press. McEwan, Ian. 2002. Interview with Michael Booth, Wayne C. 1988. The Company We Keep: An Silverblatt. Bookworm July 11. http://www.kcrw. Ethics of Fiction. Berkeley and Los Angeles: com/news‐culture/shows/bookworm/ian‐ University of California Press. mcewan (accessed December 14, 2014). Brooks, Peter. 1984. Reading for the Plot: Design and McEwan, Ian. 2010. “Zadie Smith Talks with Ian Intention in Narrative. Cambridge, MA: Harvard McEwan.” In Conversations with Ian McEwan, University Press. 108–132. Jackson: University of Mississippi Brown, Bill, ed. 2004. Things. Chicago: University Press. of Chicago Press. Miller, D. A. 1988. The Novel and the Police. Bryant, Levi, et al., eds. 2011. The Speculative Turn: Berkeley: University of California Press. Continental Materialism and Realism. Prahran, Nussbaum, Martha. 1997. Cultivating Humanity: A Victoria: re.press. Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education. Culler, Jonathan. 1975. Structuralist Poetics: Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Ortiz‐Robles, Mario. 2010. The Novel as Event. Literature. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Hale, Dorothy. 2009. “Aesthetics and the New Rancière, Jacques. 2011. The Politics of Literature. Ethics: Theorizing the Novel in the Twenty‐ Translated by Julie Rose. Malden: Polity Press. First Century.” PMLA 124: 896–905. Ricoeur, Paul. 1977. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay Hale, Dorothy. 2012. “On Beauty as Beautiful? on Interpretation. Translated by Denis Savage. The Problem of Novelistic Aesthetics By Way of New Haven: Yale University Press. Zadie Smith.” Contemporary Literature 53: Ricoeur, Paul. 1984–1988. Time and Narrative, 3 814–844. vols. Translated by Kathleen McLaughlin and Jakobson, Roman. 1971. “On Realism in Art.” In David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Readings in Russian Poetics, translated by Ladislav Press. Matejka and Krystyna Pomorska. Cambridge: Sebald, W. G. 2001. Interview with Michael MIT Press. Silverblatt. Bookworm December 6. http://www. 288 Madigan Haley

kcrw.com/news‐culture/shows/bookworm/w‐g‐ Smith, Zadie. 2007. “Fail Better.” The Guardian sebald (accessed December 14, 2014). January 13. Smith, Zadie. 2003. “Love, actually.” The Guard Smith, Zadie. 2009. Changing My Mind: Occasional ian October 31. http://www.theguardian.com/ Essays. New York: Penguin books/2003/nov/01/classics.zadiesmith Watt, Ian. 1957. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in (accessed December 14, 2014). Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. Berkeley and Los Smith, Zadie. 2005. On Beauty. New York: Angeles: University of California. Penguin. Part V The Novel in Circulation

19 Making a Living as an Author Deirdre David

How do you raise the sum of money needed to sit down and concentrate on writing a novel in moderate peace of mind? (J. Maclaren‐Ross, Horizon, September 1946) A book is the Author’s Property, ’tis the Child of his Inventions, the Brat of his Brain; if he sells his Property, it then becomes the Right of the Purchaser; if not, ’tis as much his own, as his Wife and Children are his own – But behold in this Christian Nation, these Children of our Heads are seiz’d, captivated, spirited away, and carry’d into Captivity, and there is none to redeem them. (Daniel Defoe, Review, Vol. VI. Numb. 129. 2 February 1710)

Entering the Marketplace

Writing in the early eighteenth century to advocate parliamentary legislation that would protect authorial property rights, Defoe lamented the abduction of his work by piratical booksellers. The brats of his “Brain,” they become prisoners of nefarious tradesmen, imaginatively enslaved to profit their captor and not their creator. To some extent, those metaphorical children were liberated by the passing of the Act of Anne in 1710, which placed copyright in possession of the author for limited periods of time to be arranged through negotiation with booksellers and publishers. The writer thus became an active participant in the literary marketplace. But this assumption of professional identity came, as it were, with a price: for the next three centuries, or at least until the passing of the 1911 Copyright Act, which gave writers and artists sole ownership of their own work for life, the author became an increasingly contested cultural figure. Should the author, by virtue of the conventional dissociation of creative activity from the shabby business of making money, inhabit a lofty sphere above the commercial world? And if not, how might an author survive? Without a

A Companion to the English Novel, First Edition. Edited by Stephen Arata, Madigan Haley, J. Paul Hunter, and Jennifer Wicke. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. 292 Deirdre David private income or a rich spouse, or without a patron or state support, eighteenth‐ century writers labored on Grub Street, and successful nineteenth‐century novelists such as Walter Scott and Charles Dickens bargained aggressively with powerful publishing houses.1 From the Act of Anne in 1710 until the Copyright Act in 1911, from Daniel Defoe to George Gissing, authors battled for survival in a commercial world necessarily concerned with profit. At the heart of the matter was the question of authorial labor: how it should be assessed, who should assess it, and how it should be compensated. As Mary Poovey observes, all approaches to the problem of literary work “ultimately derived from and eventually addressed the vexed issue of the relationship between this kind of labor and other kinds of professional or waged work” (1988, 102). For Amy Reardon in George Gissing’s New Grub Street (1891), the slide of her husband’s income below £100 {£8400} per annum signals not only his distasteful failure to become a successful novelist, but also his definitive descent into the working class: £150 {£12 000} per year divided the middle from the working class, since incomes below that level were exempt from taxes (Arata 2008, 43).2 However doggedly he labors at finishing a novel, Edwin Reardon’s annual income makes him a wage‐earning drudge, not a professional author. Defoe’s argument in 1710 for authorial copyright also set in motion 200 years of debate about such questions as whether an author may be be said to own something that is not a material object, whether an author should profit from intellectual labor, and whether the state or charitable institutions should support authors if they fail to sell their wares in the marketplace. Copyright remained a central, vexed matter: as Mark Rose observes, in his analysis of this prolonged debate, “the representation of the author as a creator who is entitled to profit from his intellectual labor came into being through a blending of literary and legal discourses in the context of the contest over perpetual copyright” (1993, 6). Before the legal institution of copyright in 1710, authors did, of course, profit from their intellectual labor. Some succeeded brilliantly, others muddled along, and many lurched from one ill‐paying job to another. For the 200 years or so after William Caxton set up his printing press in Westminster in 1476, a moment that marks the beginning of English print culture, most writers relied upon patronage or ancillary employment in a society where writing was not yet a profession. But, as Dustin Griffin notes, the period from 1660 to 1717 witnessed the appearance of a form of “modern authorship,” defined by such phenomena as “widespread identification of the author on the title page, the ‘author by profession,’ bookselling as a commercial enterprise, a literary ‘marketplace,’ the periodical essay and political journalism” (2005, 37). This “modern English author” in the eighteenth century, however, did not enjoy financial security or guaranteed employment: unless he benefited from a healthy secondary income like Henry Fielding as a magistrate or Samuel Richardson as a printer, or unless he profited through handsome subscriptions to his translations as did Alexander Pope, he was either dependent upon a patron or he scrambled for hack work.3 In his well‐known satirical letter to the Earl of Chesterfield written in February 1755, Samuel Johnson recalls his exhausting efforts, as “a retired and uncourtly Scholar,” of attempting to please his patron. Having seven years before visited Chesterfield and having received no encouragement, and now, having brought his Making a Living as an Author 293

Dictionary to the verge of publication “without one Act of assistance, one word of encouragement, or one smile of favour,” Johnson wonders slyly how it is that Chesterfield has recommended the Dictionary to the public. But then, he concludes ironically, “I never had a patron before” (1992, 95–96). A century later, while sympathetic to the plight of the author who must placate a patron, William Makepeace Thackeray objected strongly to eighteenth‐century depictions of the author as grov- eling supplicant or wretched hack: Alexander Pope’s Dunciad (1743), he thundered in 1853, had made generations of readers believe “that author and wretch, author and rags, author and dirt, author and drink, gin, cow‐heel tripe, poverty, duns, bailiffs, squalling children, and clamorous landladies, were always associated together” (quoted in Hack 2005, 128–129). In terms of actually making a living, however, Pope had not been entirely off the mark: as James Raven observes in his discussion of publishing and bookselling between 1660 and 1780, the sale of a manuscript to a bookseller and the usual surrender of all subsequent rights “doomed most writers to a paltry income. A very few distinguished scholars, clerics and essayists did exchange their manuscripts for substantial sums, but such deals were rare … In the early eighteenth century the average sale by an author to a bookseller for a novel manuscript was reckoned at half a guinea {£50}” (2005, 33–34). At the beginning of the nineteenth century, with the growth of a reading public that almost entirely replaced patronage as support for authors, agitation for perpetual copyright began to gather steam. As Robert Southey declaimed vigorously in 1819, the question was a simple one:

Under what pretext of public good, are men of letters deprived of a perpetual property in the produce of their own labours, when all other persons enjoy it as their indefeasible right … Is it because their labour is so light, the endowments which it requires so common, – the attainments so cheaply and easily acquired, and the present remuneration so adequate, so ample and so certain? (quoted in Bonham‐Carter 1978, 44)

An adequate and ample income was by no means certain for Jane Austen, say, whose Sense and Sensibility appeared in 1811 and earned her £140 {£8000} on the basis of a three‐volume edition selling approximately 1000 copies at fifteen shillings each. This was the first money she had earned for herself (Tomalin 1997, 218). The following year, Austen accepted £110 {£5700} for a fourteen‐year copyright for Pride and Prejudice, to be extended for another fourteen years if she were still alive. She did moderately well with the four novels that followed (Mansfield Park [1814], Emma [1816], Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion [both 1818]), and in her will, dated 27 April 1817, calculated how much profit she had made from authorship. Estimating her living expenses from 1811 to 1817, she concluded that the return on her writing career was £84.13s.0d. {£4830} (Tomalin 1997, 263), which comes out to approximately £14 {£837} per novel – an ironically modest living for an author whose novels have generated in our own day multiple television and film adaptations reaping enormous sums for their producers, directors, and stars. Had Jane Austen found herself in truly perilous straits, she could have applied to the Royal Literary Fund, founded in 1790 under the direction of the Reverend David Williams. He invited subscriptions for a fund to relieve authors in distress, and one of 294 Deirdre David the first to chip in was the Prince Regent, who also presented the Fund with a house in Gerrard Street for its offices. From its founding to the present day, the Fund has relied upon subscriptions, donations, and legacies: for instance, it has profited from the estates of Rupert Brooke, A. A. Milne, and Somerset Maugham (among many others). Applications for funding are reviewed by a committee, which assesses literary merit, evaluates the author’s financial position, and reviews letters of support from friends and colleagues. For example, Dickens wrote hoping that the Fund would help his former colleague on Household Words, Richard Horne, who had lost his money in goldfield speculation; Carlyle wrote to support the application of William Maccall (the theologian and translator); and Henry James wrote to plead for funds for the widow of Charles Dickens’s son Charles (Smith [n.d.]). In the first half of the nineteenth century, the novelists who made the most lucrative livings generally wrote for a middle‐class readership, those who could afford an annual subscription of one guinea (21 shillings) to a lending library for the right to borrow an unlimited number of volumes, but who could not afford to buy, say, a Walter Scott three‐volume novel such as Ivanhoe (1819) retailing at 30 shillings. As Simon Eliot observes, Scott’s influence upon nineteenth‐century publishing practices was immense (2001, 37). Waverley was published in three volumes in 1814 and each volume was priced at seven shillings, rather than the usual price of five or six shillings; this raised the cost of a set of three volumes to 21 shillings, an astonishingly high figure: “Scott and his publishers obviously knew their market for, despite the high price, his first novel went through eight editions in seven years (a total of 11,500 copies – a huge number for such an expensive book)” (37). As Eliot sums up the revealing financial picture in comparative terms, “A new Walter Scott novel in the 1820s cost more than most working‐class men earned in a week, and half the gross weekly income of a modest middle‐class family” (38). Later in the century, Scott’s earnings from the three‐ decker became almost mythical: for instance, William Howitt reported in 1856 that Scott cleared some £460 000 {£33 500 000} on his 21 novels: “It appears certain that his works must have produced to the author or his trustees, at the very least, half‐ a‐million of money!” (2: 184). Even if Scott’s legendary financial success led Howitt to exaggerate, the amount is still extraordinary. On the debit side of Scott’s spectacular record of making a living as an author, however, was his equally legendary bankruptcy in 1826 after the collapse of a bookselling and printing business. Later publishers often cited this failure as a cautionary tale for authors ambitious to involve themselves in the financial side of the book trade. For most of the nineteenth century, circulating libraries were, by far, the largest buyers of books, and their order could make or break an author. The most famous of all was Mudie’s Select Library, whose heyday was the mid to late Victorian period; Mudie’s “epithet ‘select’ carried a great burden of meaning to his contemporaries … In filtering out dangerous or corrupting literature, Mudie provided a safe and positive environment for middle‐class women and children, always thought to be the most vulnerable” (Eliot 2001, 40). For an author trying to make a living in Mudie’s heyday, exclusion from the “Select” library could be costly. But in 1894 Mudie’s announced that it would no longer purchase triple‐deckers from publishers, a decision that hastened the replacement of three‐volume editions by the more affordable one‐volume cloth‐bound editions retaining at six shillings, usually followed a few months later by Making a Living as an Author 295 a reprint edition costing two shillings and sixpence, and then reprinted in paperback at sixpence: “Between 1846 and 1916, British publishers quadrupled their production rates while at the same time halving their book prices” (Finkelstein 2012, 16–17). Anthony Trollope made no bones about his desire to make as much money as possible as an author and felt no moral discomfort about operating in the commercial world. Although very few nineteenth‐century writers could hope to match Scott’s fabulous earnings, by 1879 when he finished his memoirs, Trollope had earned nearly £70 000 {£5 550 000}. Shocking some of his more high‐minded contemporaries, he confessed that his “first object” in taking literature as a profession “was that which is common to the barrister when he goes to the Bar, and to the baker when he sets up his oven. I wished to make an income on which I and those belonging to me might live in comfort” (quoted in Hennessy 1971, 163). Given the financial instability of the Trollope household when he was growing up, such an aim seems eminently sensible. And live in comfort Trollope did, thanks in large part to his legendary industry and his untroubled occupation of the literary marketplace. Throughout his long career, Trollope started writing at 5:30 a.m. every morning, produced 250 words every quarter of an hour, and worked for a total of three hours, long enough, he thought, to “produce as much as a man ought to write.” When away from home (usually on assignment for the Post Office, for whom he continued to work as a surveyor and superintendent even after he became a successful novelist), he wrote on a traveling desk on his knee. For the most part entering into arrangements with his publishers in which he sold copyright outright, from 1847 to 1879, he published 43 novels and, as already noted, earned £69 939.17s.5d {£5 550 000}. At the height of his fame, he received £3000 {£238 000} for The Way We Live Now (1875) (Bonham‐ Carter 1978, 116). Counting the books published after his death, his total income from a writing life was £80 000.00 {£6 340 000}. Harriet Martineau’s views about authorship and money differed radically from those of Trollope. Until Charles Fox published her popularizing work Illustrations of Political Economy (1832) she had not made an impressive living as an author. At the beginning of her dealings with Fox, she agreed to unfavorable terms: publication by subscription, profits to be shared, and the bulk of subscriptions to be solicited by the author. With the astonishing popularity of the first Tale, however, Martineau knew that from that moment she “never had any other anxiety about employment than what to choose, nor any real care about money” (1877, 1: 178). Martineau’s financial security is borne out by her account of a day in August 1836 when she negotiated coolly with three different publishers for the rights to a forthcoming travel narrative. When Martineau left for America in 1834 she rejected an advance of £500 {£37 000} from Richard Bentley, and when she returned in 1836, feeling strongly that people “who talk of a book as an ‘article,’ – as the mercer talks of a shawl or a dress, have no understanding of the true aims and temper of authorship” (1877, 2: 94), she embarked on “such a day that I never passed, and hoped at the time never to pass again” (1877, 2: 95). On that November morning, setting up a bidding war for her American book despite her avowed distaste for the vulgar perception that a book is an “article” and her insistence that she never wrote anything “from pecuniary considerations,” she received, in turn, three well‐known Victorian publishers: Richard Bentley, John Saunders, and Henry Colburn. Each was invited to state his best offer. 296 Deirdre David

Well aware they were on notoriously bad terms with each other, she interviewed first Bentley, relegated Saunders to her mother’s parlor, and sent Colburn to cool his heels in a coffee shop. “Looking hard into the fire,” Bentley reminded her of the £500 he had promised before she left England, offered “the most extravagant terms” for the American book, and threw in, “as a bribe,” an offer of £1000 {£73 400} for the first novel she might write. Next, Saunders got right down to business by asking what she wanted for outright copyright. Martineau replied calmly that she wished to hear his terms: “So I sat strenuously looking into the fire, – Mr. Saunders no less strenuously looking at me, till it was all I could do to keep my countenance. He waited for me to speak; but I would not; and I wondered where the matter would end, when he at last opened his lips. ‘What would you think, Ma’am, of £900 for the first edition?’” (1877, 2: 98). Although she realized these were excellent terms, and although she favored Saunders over the other publishers, Martineau still parried. And waited to hear what Mr. Colburn would have to say when he was finally admitted to her study. The interview with her third prospective publisher was highly “disagreeable” since he “pre- tended to believe” she wanted more money. After several rebuffs, he offered £2000 {£147 000}, based on an extravagantly high number of projected sales, and £1000 for the first novel she would write. Knowing full well that the projected book would never sell as many copies as Colburn had stipulated, she told him crisply that the terms were designed solely to bind her to his house. By now, it was almost midnight, and Martineau recalls it was with “great satisfaction” that she heard the house‐door locked for the night, “on the last of the booksellers for that day.” Saunders and Otley published Society in America in three volumes in 1839. Justifying her shrewd strategy, Martineau claimed her intention was “to show how the degradation of literature comes about” in times when speculating publishers try to turn serious authors into squabbling competitors and when the serious function of authorship is turned into “a gambling match”: it reminded her “of the stand and the gesticulating man with the hammer, and the crowding competitors whom I had seen jostling each other in the slave‐markets of the United States” (1877, 2: 100). Martineau had herself, of course, allowed her writing to be put up for auction and had invited three potential publishers to engage in “a gambling match.” That she nowhere acknowledges her complicity in this process suggests the contested position in which many authors, unprotected by perpetual copyright and often forced to accept paltry payment for their work (unlike Martineau), also felt compelled to deny they traded in the literary marketplace. In Martineau’s image, authors become slaves, publishers become slave owners, and, by extension, the reading public beneficiaries of slave labor. What form of labor authors actually perform became a topic of increasing cultural scrutiny during the rest of the Victorian period.

Writing in the Fleet and Writing in the Gin‐Palace

Perhaps the most entertainingly macabre account of making a living as a Victorian author is to be found in Thackeray’s Pendennis (1850). Arthur Pendennis, the son of a prosperous Devonshire apothecary, after an undistinguished undergraduate career goes to London where he shares rooms with George Warrington, a bohemian journalist. Making a Living as an Author 297

Encouraged by Warrington to supplement his meager income by writing hack verse for dubious publications such as the “Spring Annual,” a collection of very poor poems penned by dilettantish aristocrats, Pen embarks on a career as a freelance popular writer. A necessary introduction to this career, Warrington insists, is a visit to one Captain Shandon holed up in the Fleet prison, where, says Thackeray’s narrator, Shandon “could write on any side, and attack himself or another man with equal indifference. He was one of the wittiest, the most amiable, and the most incorrigible of Irishmen” (1986, 347). When Pen and Warrington arrive, the Captain (his title a leftover from service in an Irish militia regiment) is sitting on his bed in a torn dressing gown, with a desk on his knees, “at which he was scribbling as fast as his rapid pen could write. Slip after slip of paper fell off the desk wet to the ground” (346). Shandon is furiously at work writing a prospectus for a new periodical, for which he will receive £5 from a Paternoster Row bookseller, to be spent quickly on beer. Troubled by the sight of Captain Shandon’s downcast wife and young daughter, who are with him in the Fleet, Pen declares that if he had a lot of money he would support authors so they would not have to slave away in such conditions. And who would you choose to support, queries Warrington, adding that there are thousands of “clever fellows in the world who could, if they would turn verses, write articles, read books and deliver a judgment upon them” (354). For Warrington, writing is a trade and the author cannot dissociate himself from commercial transactions: the written text is a commodity, whether Captain Shandon’s brilliant prospectus for a new periodical, Pen’s slick and sentimental poems, or, by imaginative extension, any of Thackeray’s novels. And Thackeray had no qualms about wheeling and dealing in the literary marketplace. Before Bradbury and Evans published Vanity Fair in monthly parts between January 1847 and July 1848, for which he received £60 {£4700} per part, he had written a multitude of pieces in order to keep afloat: principally satirical essays and book and art reviews. For this work he received an average of ten guineas a sheet, and as little as £2 for a book review in The Times. But with Vanity Fair his career took off: lecture tours and serialization of later fiction in The Cornhill, together with £1000 {£83 000} per year for editing this magazine, led to a decent living as an author. From George Eliot’s perspective, no serious writer should pursue her or his vocation with the aim of making money. Shielded from the marketplace by George Henry Lewes’s astute negotiations with her publishers, she ventured some lofty moral prescriptions for “Authorship.” In her posthumously published notes on this topic, she calls for “some regulating principle with regard to the publication of intellectual products which would override the rule of the market: a principle, that is, which should be derived from a fixing of the author’s vocation according to those characteristics in which it differs from the other bread‐winning professions” (1963, 438). Eliot elaborates her views about overriding “the rule of the market” with a parable of two manufacturers of calico: one produces materials “as long and as fast as he can find a market for them; and in obeying this indication of demand he gives his factory its utmost usefulness to the world in general and himself in particular.” The other, lacking the moral delicacy of the first, buys new machinery and new dyes colored with arsenic that harms the factory workers and the purchasers. He produces a “transiently desirable commodity,” makes money, and cares not a jot for the workers and customers most 298 Deirdre David probably getting arsenic poisoning from the dubious dye (1963, 439). Eliot asks her reader: can we place an author on a par with either manufacturer? Her answer suggests how a novelist might make a living as successfully as she, or if not that, then at least keep her head above water: “The author’s capital is his brain‐ power – power of invention, power of writing. The manufacturer’s capital, in fortunate cases, is being continually reproduced and increased” (1963, 439). This is the first great difference between financial capital that is turned into calico and brain capital that is turned into literature. Calico bought from that first decent manufacturer will harm no one, and books written by authors who know they hold “the office of teacher or influencer of the public mind” will only elevate the public taste. But if the author behaves like the unscrupulous second manufacturer who cares nothing about poisonous dyes, then he is on a level with the businessman “who gets rich by fancy‐wares coloured with arsenic green. He really carries on authorship on the principle of the gin‐palace” (1963, 440). How, then, might an author make a living without serving up her written wares as if she were a barmaid? The only way to escape this “social culpability,” Eliot declares, is by “getting a profound sense that literature is good‐for‐nothing, if it is not admirably good.” The author must not pursue literature with a trader’s lust for profit. To be sure, he must try to get as good a price as he can for his work, but he must not hurry his production “for the sake of bringing up his income to the fancy pitch. An author who would keep a pure and noble conscience, and with that a developing instead of degenerating intellect and taste, must cast out of his aims the aim to be rich” (1963, 440–441). Thanks to George Henry Lewes’s success in dealing with publishers whose aim was, in fact, to be “rich,” Eliot rarely needed to engage in weary self‐examination as to whether she was writing to make money: Lewes did that for her. In the process she became quite extraordinarily wealthy by contemporary standards of novelists’ earnings, as is evidenced by her own close record of how much money was coming in. Over a period of 22 years from 1855 to 1877, she logged her literary earnings, which Gordon Haight included in an appendix to his edition of her collected letters (Eliot 1955, 382–383). Written in her own hand, the account records that she earned in total £9362.8.5d. {£699 000}; receipts for Middlemarch alone, which sold 30 959 copies, amounted to £8783.4.0d. {£655 000} (Eliot 1955, 364).4

Laboring to be an Author

Despite her notes in “Authorship” and her careful record of income and expenses, George Eliot never directly confronted the question faced by many Victorian novelists: were they or were they not “unproductive laborers” (Hack 2005, 63)? Were their novels commodities priced by publishers, and hawked by the circulating libraries to their customers? Following Adam Smith’s distinction between one form of labor that “adds to the value of the subject upon which it is bestowed” and “another which has no such effect … whose work perishes in the very instant of its production” (1991, 294), Daniel Hack argues that “The distinction between productive and unproductive labor carries great weight with a broad spectrum of mid‐nineteenth‐century thinkers and writers, including many hostile to the values and policies associated Making a Living as an Author 299 with political economy” (2005, 63). Dickens and Bulwer‐Lytton, for example, in establishing the Guild of Literature and Art in 1851, which they hoped would replace the Royal Literary Fund whose charitable donations were handed out by patrons, aimed to show that authors were, indeed, productive laborers in the British economy. As Hack amply demonstrates, the Guild insisted that it was not a charity, but rather a Guild of Authors willing and able to help those of their fellow laborers in the literary marketplace who might have fallen temporarily on hard times.5 Its goals were sensibly pragmatic: establishment of perpetual copyright, annuities, life insurance plans, and a kind of old‐age home for authors to be established on Bulwer‐Lytton’s country estate in Knebworth, Hertfordshire. But, for lack of funding, the Guild never really took off. One can be sure that Harriet Martineau, had she fallen on poor writing times, would have refused help from the Guild, since she held strong views about the corrupting influence of patronage and pensions. In correspondence with emissaries of Lord Melbourne during her long illness in the mid‐1840s, she declared that if she accepted a pension from the government she “should lose more or less of my freedom of speech, if not of thought.” Never again would she be able to address the public “with freedom and satisfaction” (1877, 2: 502–503). But, she added, if literary property were to be protected by law as was all other property, then she would enjoy a far more valuable advantage than a government pension: “In this direction,” she writes to Lord Melbourne’s emissary, “you may be able to benefit, not me, perhaps, – it may be too late for that, but many authors in a future time, who may be happier in the protection of the laws than literary labourers of this generation” (2: 503). Despite the ineffective urging of her friends to accept a pension as compensation for what she would lose from “the defective protection afforded to literary property,” she declared she would rather put her hand into the fire than “into the public purse” (2: 507). What Martineau refers to here, of course, is the question of copyright, which takes us back to Defoe’s metaphorical “brat,” the book pirated away by unscrupulous booksellers and sold without benefit to its creator. An inexhaustible laborer in the literary marketplace, Charles Dickens vigorously protested literary piracy. Particularly galling was the American appropriation of his novels almost immediately after publication in England, and on his American travels in the early 1840s he lobbied vociferously for international copyright legislation. Throughout his career as novelist and public reader of his own work Dickens also bargained ruthlessly with publishers and tour managers. With the unhappy example of his father’s incarceration in the Marshalsea for debt and the memory of his own dispatch to the bottle factory just off the Strand, he vowed never to be poor. By the age of twenty‐eight, with three novels already published (The Pickwick Papers [1837], Oliver Twist [1837], and Nicholas Nickleby [1839]), married and the father of three children, he already enjoyed a reputation for crafty negotiation. In 1836, for example, with two publishers already under his belt, Macrone for Sketches by Boz (1836) and Chapman and Hall for Pickwick, he had entered into negotiations with Richard Bentley, who offered him £400 {£30 000} for two novels, with a further agreement to contribute to Bentley’s Miscellany for 20 guineas per month, which brought in a further annual income of £500 {£36 000}. Never once did Dickens bother himself with lofty moralizing about the “proper” purpose of authorship. 300 Deirdre David

As Claire Tomalin notes, despite all his early thrilling success, until the publication of the first three numbers of Dombey and Son in 1847, Dickens felt the strain of keeping up the financial pace to meet his considerable financial obligations: “He had no savings, lived from month to month, and worried about money” (Tomalin 2011, xliii). With a rapidly expanding family, the regular importuning of his father and his brother Fred,6 to say nothing of his compulsive need to move house regularly and engage expensive decorators, he was under constant pressure to increase his income. In the mid‐1850s, for example, his expenses were somewhere between £8000 and £9000 per year {£620 000}. But with Dombey he became financially secure: sales for the last three numbers were huge, for which he earned £3800 {£271 000}: “From now on he had no more serious financial worries … It was a turning point in his life, curiously brought to him by the book that took as a central theme the powerlessness of money, whether to save life, to give health, or to win love” (Tomalin 2011, 200). In the profitable Dombey and Son, when Paul wistfully asks his father, “Papa! What’s money? … I mean, Papa, what can it do?” Dombey, unsettled by the “presumptuous atom that propounded such an enquiry,” explains that money can cause people to be honored, feared, respected, courted, and admired and made “powerful and glorious in the eyes of all men” (1950, 93). Allowing for the fact that Dombey remains the most unappealing exemplar of capitalist greed in Dickens’s fiction, despite his sexual and financial humiliation and eventual redemption as he is embraced by Florence’s family, his taxonomy of the power of money may well be applied to Dickens’s life and career. Made “powerful and glorious” in Victorian popular culture by virtue of his extraordinary genius, sheer hard work, and financial acumen, even though he amassed less wealth comparatively than Walter Scott or George Eliot, Dickens’s success in making a living as an author has no equal in the nineteenth century. After Dombey, the most successful return on Dickens’s writing came from Little Dorrit, which sold 35 000 copies of its first number in November 1855, after which sales rose to 40 000 per number, hardly falling below 30 000 throughout the 20 numbers. All in all, Dickens made £600 {£43 700} per month on the serialization (Tomalin 2011, 274), and by the early 1860s he was also earning an average of £190 {£14 000} per night for his readings. Despite his phenomenal financial success as a novelist, he still needed this additional income from his public readings. In addition to maintaining a lavish standard of living – big dinner parties in London, many guests at Gads Hill on the weekends – he had, by the mid‐1850s, established his relationship with Ellen Ternan and bought a house in Mornington Crescent for her, her mother, and her sister. Until his death in 1870, Dickens remained a tough negotiator: for example, his contract with Chapman and Hall for The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870) granted their right to all profits on the first 25 000 copies, but stipulated that subsequent profits were to be shared equally between them.

Literature in the Age of Trade

No more harrowing account of trying to make a living as an author exists than George Gissing’s New Grub Street, published in three volumes by Smith, Elder in 1891. The painful details of surviving (or not) in the literary marketplace owe a good deal to Making a Living as an Author 301

Gissing’s own unhappy struggles. Although he received £150 {£12 700} for the copyright of New Grub Street, compared to the earnings of his contemporaries, his income was insignificant: Margaret Oliphant, for example, usually received between £700 and £800 {£59 000–67 000} for a three‐volume novel (Arata 2008, 42). In the late 1870s and 1880s, Gissing never earned more than £100 in a single year, and he refused requests for occasional essays, reviews, and short fiction, “because he felt that such work was beneath the serious artist” (Arata 2008, 20). Gissing structures New Grub Street around the tragic story of Edwin Reardon. Struggling with a morose inability to accommodate his high standards to a marketplace dominated by the circulating libraries, he must also maintain a shabby‐genteel existence with his wife Amy and their child. His record of publication has rendered him virtually no income since he sold his first novel outright for half of the profits; unfortunately, there were no profits. For his second novel, published in three volumes, he received £25 {£2120}, which is truly paltry when compared to Margaret Oliphant’s customary earnings; and, again, there were no profits. Jasper Milvain, Reardon’s sometime friend and eventual successor as husband to Amy after Reardon’s death from a combination of exhaustion, malnutrition, and consumption, is by far the most animated if unappetizing character in the novel. An unsentimental literary journalist, bent always on the main chance, he becomes engaged (reluctantly and not for long) to Marian Yule, the exploited daughter of Edward Yule, a writer who has tried his fortune in almost all departments of “literary endeavor”: a literary journeyman, “At the age of fifty he was still living in a poor house, in an obscure quarter” (Gissing 2008, 134). Marian spends most days in the British Museum library doing uncompen- sated research for her father, after having groped her way there through what seems to be a perpetually dismal and foggy London. At home, her principal task is to defend her browbeaten working‐class mother from her father’s wounding remarks about accents and manners. Rounding out Gissing’s set of exploited laborers is Harold Biffen, a remarkably cheerful writer given his circumstances: living in a miserable, barely furnished room off the Tottenham Court Road, trudging around town in ragged clothing, and almost per- ishing of hunger as he finishes his novel “Mr. Bailey, Grocer,” he is forced to tutor for sixpence an hour a working‐class man aiming to take the written examination for the Customs Department. His innate good humor finally beaten down by poor reviews of his novel and unrequited love for Reardon’s widow – all say he has failed in the “first duty of novelist … to tell a story” (470) – he takes poison and lies down to die on Putney Heath. Very much alive, and describing himself as “the literary man of 1892,” Jasper Milvain announces to his sisters that literature is “a trade” and that the successful man of letters must think first and foremost of the markets, always have something fresh on offer, and seek out all possible sources of income. Reardon is “behind his age; he sells a manuscript as if he lived in Sam Johnson’s Grub Street. But our Grub Street of to‐day is quite a different place: it is supplied with telegraphic communication, it knows that literary fare is in demand in every part of the world, its inhabitants are men of business, however seedy” (2008, 56–57). This hard‐nosed view, in which we hear an echo of Trollope’s wry confession that he writes merely as a baker tends to his oven or a lawyer to his clients, and which would have horrified George Eliot, is shared by Reardon’s wife, who declares firmly: “Art must be practiced as a trade, at all events in our time. This is the age of trade” (94). 302 Deirdre David

Advising Reardon to abandon the three‐volume novel, Milvain terms it “a triple‐ headed monster, sucking the blood of English novelists” (2008, 226). But, Reardon responds, he cannot afford to abandon the form, quite simply because it is “a question of payment.” A reasonably well‐known author can live on a yearly three‐volume novel, one, say, who gets between £100 and £200 {£8500–17 000} from a publisher. To obtain a similar income, Reardon would need to produce four one‐volume novels a year, a virtual impossibility for someone who works at his woefully slow pace. Justifiably or not, Reardon also attributes his professional failure to social class. Despite having been educated at an excellent local school until the age of eighteen and speaking fluent French, he feels socially inferior to writers who have gone to university. Eating fried ham and eggs with Biffen in a small coffee‐shop, he says excitedly that the successful novelists of the day would turn with “magnificent scorn” from the sight of them and their “squalid feast”: “They have never known struggle; not they. They are public‐school men, University men, club men, society men. An income of less than three or four hundred a year is inconceivable to them” (375). Roughly ten years after Jasper Milvain proclaimed himself “the literary man of 1892,” the prolific and relatively wealthy Arnold Bennett expounded his practical views on how to become an author. His prescriptions for success echo those of Jasper Milvain and would have seemed absurdly insulting to Edwin Reardon. “A slowly‐built reputation as a novelist is nearly indestructible; neither time nor decay of talent nor sheer carelessness will quite kill it; your Mudie subscriber, once well won, is the most faithful adherent in the world” (quoted in Arata 2008, 547). Poor Reardon has never even won a Mudie subscriber, let alone secured one who will remain faithful, and neither does his writing life bear out Bennett’s sunny belief that:

fiction is a lucrative profession: it cannot compare with stock‐broking, or brewing, or practice at the parliamentary bar, but it is tolerably lucrative. Never before, despite the abolition of the three‐volume novel, did so many average painstaking novelists earn such respectable incomes as the present day. (548)

In Arnold Bennett’s prescriptions for making a living as an author we hear echoes of Harriet Martineau’s approach: make a pragmatic assessment of the reader, dedicate yourself steadfastly to the labor of writing, and know how to bargain with your publishers.

Send Fruit and Eggs

In the summer of 1946 Cyril Connolly, the founding editor of Horizon, conducted “an inquiry into the fundamental economic problem of contemporary writers,” an unsur- prising initiative considering the bleak economic problems facing almost everyone in a gutted postwar Britain. Some dozen or so well‐known writers were asked the following questions: How much do you think a writer needs to live on? Can a serious writer earn this sum by writing? Should the state do more for writers? Elizabeth Bowen needed £3500 per year {£113 000}, George Orwell £1000 {£32 500}, and V. S. Pritchett said he would settle for £1400 {£45 000}. The desirable average amount for Making a Living as an Author 303 the authors queried was approximately £1250 {£40 500}. Connolly himself thought close to £2000 {£65 000} per year would do him very nicely, provided he had a rich wife and was guaranteed a year’s holiday with pay. Almost all the authors agreed on two things: that some provision should be made for writers in their old age, and that the state should not support an author trying to make a living, although John Betjeman felt “a decent pension” should be guaranteed for every needy author (“Questionnaire” 1946, 141). Elizabeth Bowen concurred, rather provisionally, by saying that “Writers who have worked hard and shown distinction (in any field, or of any kind) should certainly be entitled to some help, or even a degree of support, in the case of illness or old age” (142). Almost all the writers felt very strongly about the insidious influence of state patronage (not to be touched with a barge‐pole, said Alex Comfort; the state demoral- izes and debases literature, said Herbert Read), with the exception of Robert Kee, the journalist and popular historian: he asserted that since the state was “the instrument of society,” it should make £400 {£13 000} a year available to anyone who wanted to be a writer, to be renewed every year at the option of the recipient. Since we are, he said, “prepared to tolerate several million pounds‐worth of experimental waste to produce a new atom bomb,” surely we can afford “a few thousands to produce a new writer” (“Questionnaire” 1946, 151). In an argument that echoes Harriet Martineau’s when refusing a government pension – if authors were protected by copyright and compensated fairly by publishers for their work, there would be no need for pensions – J. Maclaren‐Ross declared that publishers should be forced to pay advances commen- surate with the rising cost of living, rather than the state supporting writers. His most cogent piece of advice to young writers? “Price your work high and make them pay. Don’t listen to your publisher’s sob‐stories about how little he can afford. He’ll have a country house and polo ponies when you are still borrowing the price of a drink in Fitzrovia” (157). Finally, advised Henry Reed, no writer should live below his income, no writer should eat cheap or irregular meals, “and if he stays on after a party, he should try to insist on a proper bed, not the floor or the sofa” (164). Borrowing the price of a drink in Fitzrovia can hardly be said to present a problem to Ian McEwan, who was ranked 37th in a December 2009 list of authors who sold the most books between 2000 and 2009. His publishers sold 4 040 887 copies of his novels, with a sales value of £27 700 000: although McEwan’s financial arrangements with his publishers are not public knowledge, one can venture a rough guess of, say, 10% royalties, which would mean he could have earned close to £3 000 000 over a nine‐year period (or approximately $533 333 per year). Considered alongside the money made by city and media types, this is not exactly a stunning amount, and comparatively it is certainly less than that accrued by Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot in the nineteenth century. But compared to the miserable sums earned by Gissing’s fictional drudges and all the actual authors who struggled to make a living from the time of Defoe’s haggling with booksellers through Horizon’s questionnaire, McEwan’s healthy income suggests a welcome improvement in the financial life of the English novelist, or at least for those of them fortunate enough to have their bestsellers made into popular films like Atonement. In Cyril Connolly’s own witty list of recommendations for improving the financial life of authors, he lists tax‐free allowances paid by the state for books and works of art, 304 Deirdre David and more strenuous efforts by “Big Business” to aid authors in the form of free travel. Lastly, “Even the general public can send fruit and eggs” (“Questionnaire” 1946, 145). Since in 1946 most British people had seen few bananas since 1939 and eggs were still on the ration, most novelists making a living in 1946 would have welcomed Connolly’s comically proposed contribution from the public. Sending fruit and eggs in 1946, after all, is as effective a metaphor for support of the writer as Daniel Defoe’s in 1710 calling for the metaphorical children of his “Inventions” to be returned to him from captivity. Making a living as an author in postwar Britain still entailed battling with publishers, fighting for readers, worrying about the absence of a pension, and accepting one’s ambiguous place in the literary marketplace as both creative artist and complicit participant in a commercial culture.

Notes

1 The best‐known definition of Grub Street is to Lady Bowyer, Lady Beauclerk, and Charlotte be found in Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the Clayton (2005, 104). English Language (1755): “GRUBSTREET. 4 As Nancy Henry notes, although Haight pub- The name of a street in London, much lishes “the record of every penny earned by Eliot inhabited by writers of small histories, dictio- and Lewes from their published works,” he naries, and temporary poems; whence any failed to include her significant income from mean production is called grubstreet.” investments: “Eliot received £50 for the German 2 Throughout this chapter, the 2012 esti- reprint of The Spanish Gypsy in 1872, but she mated value of any given amount of money earned more, £232.28.6d. from ‘Berlin W.W.’ in a particular year is indicated by the (Water Works) in the same year” (2002, 91). amount in brackets that follows. For these 5 For a full and useful history of the establish- approximate amounts, I have relied on www. ment of the Guild of Literature and Art, and its measuringworth.com. eventual demise, see Hack, 1999. 3 Not all writers were male, of course, and nei- 6 He wrote to Fred in December 1856 declaring ther were patrons. As Paula Backscheider that he had already done more for him “than observes in her discussion of the work of the most dispassionate persons would consider poet Mary Jones (1707–1778), Jones exposed right or reasonable in itself. But, considered the male patronage system “in which with any fair reference to the great expenses I ‘Journeymen of State’ and ‘titled Poor’ contract have sustained for other relations, it becomes with lords who ‘seldom read’ and are driven by little less than monstrous. The possibility of ‘places, pensions, ribbons.’” Backscheider adds your having any further assistance from me, is that these male figures “contrast markedly” absolutely and finally past” (quoted in Tomalin with Jones’s female patrons, figures such as 2011, 275).

References

Arata, Stephen. 2008. Introduction to New Grub Defoe, Daniel. 2008 [1710]. A Review of the State Street, by George Gissing. Ontario: Broadview of the English Nation. Vol.6: 1709–10, edited Editions. by John McVeagh. London: Pickering and Backscheider, Paula R. 2005. Eighteenth‐Century Chatto. Women Poets and Their Poetry. Baltimore: Johns Dickens, Charles. 1950 [1847]. Dealings with the Hopkins University Press. Firm of Dombey and Son: Wholesale, Retail, and Bonham‐Carter, Victor. 1978. Authors by Profession. for Exportation. London: Oxford University London: Society of Authors. Press. Making a Living as an Author 305

Eliot, George. 1955. The George Eliot Letters. Vol. 7: Johnson, Samuel. 1992. The Letters of Samuel 1878–1880, edited by Gordon S. Haight. New Johnson. Vol. 1: 1731–1772, edited by Bruce Haven: Yale University Press. Redford. Princeton: Princeton University Eliot, George. 1963 [1884]. “Authorship: Leaves Press. from a Note‐Book.” In Essays of George Eliot, Martineau, Harriet. 1877. Autobiography, with edited by Thomas Pinney. New York: Columbia Memorials by Maria Weston Chapman, 3 vols. University Press. London: Smith, Elder. Eliot, Simon. 2001. “The Business of Victorian Poovey, Mary. 1988. Uneven Developments: The Publishing.” In The Cambridge Companion to the Ideological Work of Gender in Mid‐Victorian Victorian Novel, edited by Deirdre David, 36–61. England. Chicago: University of Chicago Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Press. Finkelstein, David. 2012. “Publishing and the “Questionnaire: The Cost of Letters.” 1946. In Materiality of the Book.” In The Cambridge History Horizon XIV: 81 (September): 140–175. of Victorian Literature, edited by Kate Flint, 15– Raven, James. 2005. “Publishing and bookselling 33. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1660–1780.” In The Cambridge History of English Gissing, George. 2008 [1891]. New Grub Street, Literature 1660–1780, edited by John Richetti, edited by Stephen Arata. Ontario: Broadview 11–36. Cambridge: Cambridge University Editions. Press. Griffin, Dustin. 2005. “The social world of author- Rose, Mark. 1993. Authors and Owners: The Invention ship 1660–1714.” In The Cambridge History of of Copyright. Cambridge, MA: Harvard English Literature 1660–1780, edited by John University Press. Richetti, 37–60. Cambridge: Cambridge Smith, Adam. 1991 [1776]. The Wealth of Nations. University Press. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Hack, Daniel. 1999. “Literary Paupers and Smith, Janet Adam. [n.d.] “The Royal Literary Professional Authors: The Guild of Literature Fund: A Short History.” http://www.rlf.org.uk/ and Art.” Studies in English Literature 1500– wp‐content/uploads/2013/10/RLFShortHistory. 1900 39: 691–713. pdf (accessed December 14, 2014). Hack, Daniel. 2005. The Material Interests of the Thackeray, William Makepeace. 1986 [1850]. Victorian Novel. Charlottesville: University of The History of Pendennis: His Fortunes and Virginia Press. Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy, Hennessy, James Pope. 1971. Anthony Trollope. edited by Donald Hawes. Harmondsworth: Boston: Little, Brown and Company. Penguin. Henry, Nancy. 2002. George Eliot and the British Tomalin, Claire, 1997. Jane Austen: A Life. New Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. York: Alfred A. Knopf. Howitt, William. 1856. “Sir Walter Scott.” In Tomalin, Claire. 2011. Dickens: A Life. London: Homes and Haunts of the Most Eminent British Viking. Poets. New York: Harper & Brothers. 20 The Network Novel and How It Unsettled Domestic Fiction Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse

In his influential The Rise of the Novel (1957), Ian Watt attributes that rise at least in part to the fact that eighteenth‐century novel readers saw their interests mirrored in the household that forms at the end of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740). The gratification thus afforded explains why, in Watt’s view, “the great majority of novels written since Pamela have continued its basic pattern, and concentrated their main interest upon a courtship leading to marriage” (148–149). Ignoring the countless failed relationships that litter the social landscapes of other novels – including, of course, the rape and abandonment of Richardson’s own Clarissa – Watt claims that Jane Austen “follows Richardson in basing her novels on marriage” (298). On the basis of these claims, he equates the purpose of an Austen novel with that of the genre itself – namely, to form a morally and emotionally refurbished household. No doubt the postwar climate in which he wrote disposed Watt to think that an eighteenth‐century readership saw their world much as he saw his own, as sorely in need of a model of community within which diverse individuals could imagine themselves finding self‐ fulfillment. In writing The Great Tradition (1948), F. R. Leavis also looked to the English novel for an enduring form of Englishness. He found it originating with Austen and continuing in novels that featured individuals no less perplexed and yet as self‐contained as her fictional households. Her novels consequently link these two magisterial accounts in a tradition stretching from Daniel Defoe to Austen and from Austen to Henry James and Joseph Conrad. During the same postwar period, R. W. S. Lewis’s The American Adam (1955), Richard Chase’s The American Novel and its Tradition (1957), and Leslie Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel (1960) sought to create a tradition of American fiction that was as American as Leavis’s and Watt’s were English. In looking for a novelist who

A Companion to the English Novel, First Edition. Edited by Stephen Arata, Madigan Haley, J. Paul Hunter, and Jennifer Wicke. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. The Network Novel and How It Unsettled Domestic Fiction 307 did for the United States what Austen had done for England, American tradition makers looked past the entire body of eighteenth‐century fiction written by and about Americans. Lacking any community with social cohesion comparable to Austen’s, how could these novels be said to launch a distinctively American tradition? The most influential histories of the American novel consequently skipped over the substantial number and wild variety of novels written during the early republic in order to pay a brief visit to Charles Brockden Brown before settling in earnest on James Fenimore Cooper as the novelist “who first fully exemplified and formulated the situation of the novelist in the New World” (Chase 1957, 14). Nor has all the recent scholarly attention to early American novels done much to dislodge the definition of the national novel that allows all but specialists to ignore that substantial body of literature. Thanks to recent scholarship, however, we do know that early American novelists wrote for local readerships well read in English novels. Thoroughly steeped in English taste and well aware of what they had to do in order to write a novel, these novelists presumably sought to reproduce the form of the English novel as they understood it. Their novels thus should give us a reliable idea of how eighteenth‐century readers read the English novel. Whether set in teeming cities like Philadelphia or small villages like Sleepy Hollow, early American fiction presented the reader with an imaginary community whose boundaries were meant to be crossed and enclosures broken open so that their elements could be dispersed and transformed as they established connections between otherwise unconnected persons, places, and things. This was a community in the process of making itself out of disparate materials, not one that began as an organic whole and maintained its continuity over time. Instead of a community that could be reduced to a representative character or characters, the reader experienced the formation of one‐of‐a‐kind conglomerations as various character types converged, broke apart, and recombined. Once one stops looking for an American community with the internal coherence scholars have found in Austen, it is possible to see how an alternative form took hold and grew in importance on both sides of the Atlantic. We call it the network novel. It was to this form, we contend, that early American readers were responding in English novels. If one remembers that the commercial interests driving the rise of the modern middle class in Watt’s account were by definition an international enterprise, his emphasis on Austen’s domestic realism suddenly appears in another light – as the means of suppressing international influences that would surely challenge the ideal of a continuous tradition indigenous to English culture. The international circulation both within and of the novel may well explain why Watt gave Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison (1753) such short shrift, or why he found relatively little to praise in Gothic novels that were in many cases more popular than Austen’s. Leavis is no different. Never mind that Henry James is American by birth, he belongs, according to Leavis, to “the tradition to which what is great in English fiction belongs.” For James could take some “nuance” of “the ideal civilized sensibility” and make it engage “a whole complex moral economy” (1948, 27). His ability to transform a single “perceptive response” into “the index of a major valuation or choice” places James squarely in a tradition from which Leavis excludes James Joyce, despite “the technical devices, the attempts at an exhaustive rendering of consciousness, for which Ulysses is remarkable, and which got it accepted by a cosmopolitan literary world” (37). Leavis’s decision to 308 Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse redact “the Jewish parts” of George Eliot’s antiprovincial last novel, Daniel Deronda (1876) makes it clear that he equated Englishness with a particular form of consciousness whose national character resists international pressures in much the same way that Gwendolyn Harleth’s does. By challenging the autonomy of such a character and community, the English novel was as invested as its early American counterpart in reimagining the nation as an elastic web of connections that facilitated the international circulation of people, goods, and information.

The Network Novel

On June 2, 1824, Sir Walter Scott was at a dinner with Samuel Goodrich, an American publisher, in Edinburgh. In a few brief remarks, Scott made it clear that he preferred Cooper’s novels to those of Brockden Brown. His comments are instructive not only because his judgment anticipated that of the canonizers of the American novel but also because his criteria for the novel’s maturity look ahead to those of Watt and Leavis. Scott reportedly faulted Brockden Brown on four points. He objected to the American novelist’s use of the tale of terror, first, on the grounds that “[i]t is wholly ideal; it is not in nature” (Goodrich 1856, 2: 203). By this, Scott meant that the narrative dealt in abstractions rather than attending to the details of ordinary life. Second, he found Brockden Brown’s characters unsatisfactory on the grounds they were “alien to common experience” and so failed to demand the sympathy that readers owed to members of their community. Third, his narratives kept the reader “constantly on the rack of uncertainty,” because they violated the causal logic of individual intention and agency. Fourth, and for all these reasons, Scott considered Brockden Brown’s “style” imitative of an outdated narrative form. Though granting that Brockden Brown possessed many literary talents and especially excelled in the power of description, Scott concluded that the American had been “led astray by falling under the influence of bad examples” and had consequently sacrificed his originality to the thought of “others” (2: 204). The features distinguishing these “bad examples” come into focus through the lens of Scott’s famous review of Emma. Published nine years before his dinner conversation with Goodrich, this review equated the appearance of Emma (1815) with the maturation of a form which spent its “childhood” as romance (Scott 1968, 227). Scott identified the qualities that made Emma superior by way of contrast to the deficiencies of previous novels, the same deficiencies that he would later find in Brockden Brown. Austen’s characters do not seem “alien to common experience,” because Austen draws them “from the common walks of life,” by which Scott meant the experience of “the middling classes” (230). Her novels consequently offer the reader “a correct and striking representation of that which is daily taking place around him” instead of “the splendid scenes of an imaginary world” offered by her predecessors. Trading in the “splendid” for the “common” would only enhance the novel’s appeal for readers, Scott argued, because the “splendid” scenes of romance had “lost most of their poignancy by their repeated and injudicious use.” Austen, by contrast, had “produced sketches of such spirit and originality that we never miss the excitation which depends upon a narrative of uncommon events, arising from the consideration of minds, manners, and sentiments greatly above our own” (231). The Network Novel and How It Unsettled Domestic Fiction 309

Having praised her for emphasizing the commonplace, how can Scott turn around and proclaim Austen’s work so original? To make the daily life of an eighteenth‐ century shire in the south of England seem both fresh and fascinating, she took the customs “common” to the lower gentry with which she was intimately familiar and made those customs “common” in a wholly new sense. Her local communities observe consistent norms of motivation and behavior and acknowledge only a relatively limited range of deviations from those rules. To engage the novel reader, Scott reasoned, it was not necessary for the reader to have experienced the events depicted so long as those events displayed “the motives and principles which the readers may recognize as ruling their own and most of their acquaintances” (231, our italics). Thus, what Scott applauded as Austen’s “art of copying from nature as she really exists in the common walks of life” was actually Austen’s ability to create the very nature that she seemed to represent: a community of readers who shared the norms that her narrator brought to bear on her characters. Austen made the life of the lower gentry of rural England imaginatively available to a substantial number of readers for whom the customs of that locale were hardly commonplace. The most we can say about the characters populating a novel like Brockden Brown’s Arthur Mervyn (1799) is that they are not only what E. M. Forster in Aspects of the Novel (1927) called “flat characters” but also unlikely to remain consistent as such; their interruptions of and departures from the plot prevent them from forming contractual relationships of much depth or durability. Without positions to maintain, Brockden Brown’s characters engage a wide variety of types and acquire qualities – positive and negative – that allow them to adapt to each new situation as it arises. What distinguishes the character of Mervyn himself is the degree to which he is unencumbered by the very norms that Austen appeared to universalize. His initial meeting with Welbeck shows how Mervyn’s responsiveness shapes his character. As the two men cross paths, Mervyn recalls, “[Welbeck] looked at me and started. For an instant, as it were, and till he had time to dart at me a second glance, he checked his pace. This behaviour decided mine, and he stopped on perceiving tokens of a desire to address him” (Brown 1998, 273). His responsiveness to external contingencies makes Mervyn Brockden Brown’s ideal protagonist. Nothing illustrates this better than the circumstances that first set him loose in the world to launch a network of connections. Mervyn’s father is a “man of slender capacity but of a temper easy and flexible” (244). When his wife dies, that flexibility allows him to take up with a milkmaid in his employ. In observing the new importance of her dress and conduct, it never occurs to Mervyn that his father would actually marry her. Nor does he imagine that he will forfeit his patrimony, given that the former milkmaid is “gross in taste,” has numerous “kindred indigent and hungry,” and was caught “in an illicit intercourse with the son of a neighbor” (247). By dissolving “every tie which had bound” Mervyn to the family farm, however, his stepmother forces Mervyn to follow in the footsteps of his parents: “My father, had been a Scottish emigrant, and had no kindred on this side of the ocean. My mother’s family had lived in New Hampshire, and long separation had extinguished all the rights of relationship in her offspring” (248). The creation of a household “on this side of the ocean” breaks up at least two British families and will continue to dismantle more. 310 Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse

Mervyn is perfectly suited for this job. Being nothing in himself, he proves unable to form lasting bonds based on such inner qualities as honor and fellow feeling. This makes him especially good at adapting to new positions. Give him a suit of clothes, and it will suit him. Put a woman in his way, and Mervyn will be attracted to her. That neither clothes nor women can make the man frees him to provide the means of connecting local communities that would otherwise remain self‐contained. Mervyn is consequently most himself as the bearer of information. By conveying a letter on one occasion, he recovers a misplaced package with his former suit of clothes and the portrait of a man he nursed through a fatal illness. The chance recovery of this package sets off a set of narratives, each of which in turn sends out branches, some of which momentarily loop back while others remain to dangle at the conclusion of the novel. Shaped entirely by his encounters with other characters and their households, Mervyn emerges as nothing but connective tissue and becomes a force in his own right on this basis. Mervyn’s ability to keep the narrative going nowhere in particular is re‐enacted in a style of narration that is unusually open to interruptions and extended digressions. On arriving at the point in his own story where he bursts in on Welbeck “bleeding, ghastly, and still exhibiting the marks of convulsion and agony” (304), Mervyn yields the power of explanation to Welbeck: “Mervyn, said he, you comprehend not this scene. Your youth and inexperience make you a stranger to a deceitful and flagitious world … It is time that this ignorance should vanish” (305). Accordingly, Mervyn breaks off his own story in order to ventriloquize Welbeck’s. This account ends upon Mervyn’s conviction that Welbeck has died, only to resume ten chapters later when Mervyn discovers that Welbeck is actually alive. Nor is this the only interpolated tale in the story of a protagonist who is easily interpellated. Mervyn is neither an especially assertive nor a sensitive storyteller, and this makes his personal account read like a form of gossip, rumor, or conjecture, as Stacey Margolis (2012) has observed. Such information knows no difference between privacy and publicity and cannot be contained within a local community. The network novel is hardly Brockden Brown’s invention, but he does provide an especially good example of what Scott seemed to dislike about most English novels. Of equal importance, Brockden Brown’s version of the network novel flaunted and perhaps could be said to theorize the form of the early American novel. Royall Tyler’s Algerine Captive (1797), Hugh Henry Brackenridge’s Modern Chivalry (1792), Leonore Sansay’s Secret History (1808), Susannah Rowson’s Charlotte Temple (1791), Hannah Webster’s The Coquette (1797), William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy (1789), not to mention most of Brockden Brown – all support this claim. In each, a protagonist pulls up stakes and moves on several times before heading off, if not to Europe then by dying, leaving readers in doubt as to whether they will ever found a household within the boundaries of the new nation. In his Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767), Adam Ferguson, Scott’s countryman and a contemporary of Brockden Brown, offers a persuasive historical explanation as to why no set of local customs, much less a single household, could provide a microcosm of an American community. In comparing French settlements in North America to British settlements, Ferguson anticipates the work of another Scotsman, Adam Smith, in arguing, “One nation lays the refined plan of a settlement on the continent of North America, and trusts little to the conduct of traders and shortsighted men; another leaves men to find their own position in a state The Network Novel and How It Unsettled Domestic Fiction 311 of freedom, and to think for themselves” (2007, 139). American prosperity seemed to demonstrate that the British practice of allowing each local community to pursue its own interests in its own way best served the British colonies as a whole. The network novel allowed such local communities to imagine themselves exchanging people, goods, and information with complete strangers in a vast web of such local exchanges.

The Household as Hub

Although Scott rebuked Brockden Brown for imitating the wrong examples, most of the novels that Scott discussed in his prefaces to Ballantyne’s Novelist’s Library (1821– 1824) and published separately as his Lives of the Novelists (1826) are the very novels that Americans read and imitated. These novels display the qualities that American novelists sought to reproduce. Our claim that the eighteenth‐century English novel was first and foremost a network novel is most obviously supported by Scott’s castiga- tion of Smollett for the discontinuous plots that tend to leave the protagonist at the end of the novel “surrounded by a very different set of associates than those with whom his fortunes [initially] seemed connected” (Scott 1906, 66). In crediting Fielding for his obvious mastery of the novel form, Scott takes away with the one hand what he has given with the other. Fielding’s characters, while occasionally well rounded and admirable, are more often than not reducible to provincial types and ungentlemanly conduct. And though witty, Fielding’s narrator tends to distract from the narrative action and wax pedantic. Scott finds the latter tendency most pronounced in Sterne, whom he accuses of stealing from other writers, behavior absolutely antithetical to “copying from nature” (131). Scott consequently characterized Sterne’s fiction as less a story than “a gothic room” (132). His antagonism to the same qualities we have associated with the network novel – including the dispersal of the family, the collision of inconsistent types, and feelings that are not so much the products of one’s own interiority as the response to external forces – is what prompted Scott to paint three such different novelists with the same critical brush. It may consequently surprise us to find Scott using Gothic fiction to link the early modern romance of Spenser and Shakespeare with Austen’s domestic realism. Coupled with his praise for Pamela and Clarissa (1748) – which he saw as next in line to Austen’s Emma – his relatively effusive praise for Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe should tell us that Scott, a Romantic at heart, favored novels that delineated the emotions of individuals torn from friends and family and taken captive by strangers. What else do these Gothic protagonists share with Richardson’s, if not such occasions for protracted self‐expression? They differ only in terms of the Gothic novel’s heavy‐handed way of fulfilling the pattern of courtship that Richardson had established. Walpole, for example, sets The Castle of Otranto (1764) in motion by famously dropping a gigantic helmet on the heir apparent on the morning of his wedding day. But the extravagant manner of young Conrad’s demise is less important than its side effect, which is to produce an extra woman, a ward of the present Duke. The beautiful and obviously noble Isabella is Walpole’s means of completely dismembering the household that has taken her in. In his desperation to marry her, the Duke initiates divorce proceedings from his Duchess, offers his daughter’s hand 312 Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse to Isabella’s father, and then inadvertently kills her. Theodore, a mysterious shepherd of noble bearing who captivates both Isabella and her surrogate sister Matilda, has a tendency to pop up within the castle and then just as suddenly disappear, his intrusions often coinciding with those of a giant knight. Surely, as Richardson himself had demonstrated, Walpole did not require such outlandish supernatural interventions and a plot worthy of a Jacobean revenge tragedy to bring about the soulful union of Isabella with Theodore. Why, if not to transform the traditional household into a network, did Walpole devote so much artifice to dismantling a version of the aristocratic family and so little to producing a new one? The last few pages of the novel make it clear that the castle has not defined the limits of a community so much as provided the hub of an international network all along, the site where the blood‐related family was dispersed in generations past. Alphonso, whose spirit animates the giant suit of armor, was blown off course on a voyage to the Holy Land, and married and impregnated a Sicilian noblewoman before continuing on his journey. Their daughter married Jerome, a knight now posing as a friar, and they produced Theodore, who arrived at the castle just in time to see the helmet drop on the heir presumptive. The connections among the elements of the story that follows play out the earlier dispersals, conjunctions, substitutions, and recombinations of various noble families. In that the castle of Otranto has been used to arrest and contain connections that extend across the eastern Mediterranean, it is no wonder that the castle architecture heaves and groans at crucial moments in the narrative until its walls collapse like the hide of an overstuffed body politic. That it makes more sense to see Richardson’s Pamela as a naturalized version of Walpole’s household disaster than to see the Gothic novel as a puerile exaggeration of the abuse suffered by Richardson’s captive heroine becomes especially clear in The Mysteries of Udolpho (1764). On her mother’s death, Emily St. Aubert passes from a weak father to the care of his cold‐hearted sister to the heartless villain Montoni who tries to seize her property and trade her to his minion, Count Morano. Radcliffe’s detailed description of the Alpine scenery through which Emily wanders and the terrors of her captivity accomplish what letter writing does in Pamela. Only after these experiences have gradually transformed the material value of this heroine into the personal value of her sensibility, and only after Valancourt has undergone a parallel transformation and can value her accordingly, does Radcliffe allow their paths to cross again. The consensual marriages patched onto the endings of both Otranto and Udolpho are predicated on the destruction of the hereditary family. In crafting such marriages out of the debris of an earlier household, Walpole and Radcliffe distinguished theirs from those Gothic novels that crossed the line from threatened abuse to scenes of rape, adultery, incest, or murder, and eliminated the power of consent. Their version of the Gothic refuses to let their protagonists marry before they have undergone a conversion that gives them control over their impulses and feelings, a conversion that Arthur Mervyn never undergoes. Both Theodore and Emily have previously tumbled too easily into blinding love that precluded self‐reflection. But thanks to the bizarre circumstances to which each was exposed (the death of Matilda in the one case, and the misreported infamy of Valancourt in the other), The Network Novel and How It Unsettled Domestic Fiction 313 they come to marriage by a different route. Here, Walpole describes the tortuous path back to love:

Theodore’s grief was too fresh to admit the thought of another love; and it was not till after frequent discourses with Isabella, of his dear Matilda, that he was persuaded he could know no happiness but in the society of one with whom he could forever indulge the melancholy that had taken possession of his soul. (1998, 115)

Radcliffe has her heroine revisit the scenes of her fairy‐tale courtship and assess her earlier feelings for Valancourt, now all but dead to her: “The lines, … engraved on this tower, she frequently repeated with melancholy enthusiasm, and then would endeavor to check the recollections and the grief they occasioned, and to turn her thoughts to indifferent subjects” (Radcliffe 1998, 665). Only after devoting a full chapter to this emotional hemming and hawing can the narrator “relate, that, after suffering under the oppression of the vicious and the disdain of the weak, they were, at length, restored to each other – to the beloved landscapes of their native country” (672). As they incorporate the bits and pieces of that community through the mourning process, the damaged lovers repair themselves by retracing the intricate pathways of memory together. Loss and isolated suffering provide them with a new and, shall we say, more mature basis for love. Although this effort hardly gives these protagonists the self‐contained multidimen- sionality of Pamela or Clarissa, it is still possible to see Richardson’s novels as protracted versions of the same transformation. What do his heroines’ sequential “removals” and captivities accomplish if not occasions for letter writing that are sure to translate the machinations of their captors into fluctuations of their own sensibilities? The writing of personal letters not only presupposes the dispersal of the writer’s intimates, it also replaces that community with a communication network that spreads along unpredictable and convoluted pathways as the heroine’s letters are mislaid, intercepted, misread, and responded to. Personal letter writing becomes the privileged vehicle of self‐expression insofar as it translates the protagonist’s internal responses to external forces she but half understands into a shared experience that can presumably be shared insofar as it observes certain rules for writing personal letters. As she acquires increasing competence in this respect, the Richardson heroine gradually converts those participating in her network to the normative judgment she exercises first and most harshly on herself. As all correspondence must circulate through her before it triggers responses that can be subjected to such judgment, the letter‐writing heroine serves as the hub of a network that expands to include all those who seriously engage it. Richardson is obviously the master of the sleight of hand by which the novel creates the very sensibility it presupposes. Fielding recognized that it would take not only a thoroughgoing and improbable change of his character to talk a Mr. B into submitting to Pamela’s sensibility but also the equally unlikely transformation of a servant into a letter writer with the verbal skill and sensibility to create a community of sympathetic readers. In rewriting Pamela as Joseph Andrews (1742), he devised a narrator with the experience and erudition to translate Richardson’s codes for written self‐expression into strategies for pursuing forms of gratification that rarely if ever respect the feelings of another. In support of 314 Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse his view, Fielding sets Pamela’s brother, Joseph, adrift in a world of predators impervious to the moral norms he stubbornly lives by. Supplementing the norms his protagonist has bought whole cloth from his sister’s letters and put into action, Fielding uses those norms to reveal Joseph’s naïveté, the rampant hypocrisy of his social superiors, and the lack of animal spirits coupled with self‐importance in Pamela. Though contemptuous of Richardson’s letter‐writing heroine, Fielding has his narrator do much the same thing that her letters do by serving as the hub of a network of heterogeneous types that could not compose a coherent world without him. Fielding makes it clear that such a hub is the means of creating a common culture where the household tends to localize it.

The Nation as Hub

With two brothers serving in the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars, Austen was acutely aware of the turbulence of the world beyond Hampshire. Yet, as a novelist, she decided to keep her protagonists within a day or two’s carriage ride of home. Scott openly acknowledges these limitations in recommending the singular pleasures of reading Emma: “Such is the simple plan of a story which we peruse with pleasure, if not with deep interest and which perhaps we might more willingly resume than one of those narratives where the attention is strongly riveted, during the first perusal, by the powerful excitement of curiosity” (1968, 234–235). We are more willing to give Austen’s novels a second glance, Scott maintains, because they focus on “common incidents” driven by the “motives and principles which the readers may recognize as ruling their own and most of their acquaintances” (235). Emma’s appeal does not rest on Highbury’s seclusion from the turbulence of the surrounding world, we will suggest, but on Austen’s unique ability to bring that turbulence home to rural England, where its ripple effect injects an element of risk into the sedentary habits of daily life. Each of Austen’s novels begins by detaching a family from the property that had supported it. In Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), and Persuasion (1814), financial mismanagement and legal entailments have rendered the daughters of the lower gentry virtually homeless, putting them at the mercy of strangers. In Northanger Abbey (1817) and Mansfield Park (1814), the problem arises from patriarchs whose over‐concern with money will likely leave their estates without an heir. In Emma alone, the world of property seems utterly secure until Austen gives us cause to ponder the empty house with Mr. Woodhouse gone, the rest of Emma’s generation coupled up, and turkey thieves raiding neighborhood poultry sheds. By refusing to relinquish her position within her father’s house and test her value on the marriage market, Emma actually puts that position at risk. In Austen’s world the system of value based on the family’s attachment to land has already eroded. She uses the rituals of courtship to speed up the consequent disintegration of the barriers separating the lower gentry from businessmen, clerics, shopkeepers, and soldiers. By doing so, she also disrupts the vertical relationships between landowners, their dependents, and the townspeople that vary from shire to shire. Scott blithely lumps these different groups together as “the middling classes,” but to those who saw themselves as part of village life, the change that sweeps through every Austen novel to express itself in “common incidents” must The Network Novel and How It Unsettled Domestic Fiction 315 have been enormous (Scott 1968, 231). Mr. Darcy of Pride and Prejudice is terribly uncomfortable even at neighboring Netherfield, leased by his friend, and far more so at Longbourn, home to the Bennett family, where he can only mutter a few obligatory politenesses. These are simply not his people, nor is he theirs. Indeed, Elizabeth finds him a significantly different character and one easy to admire when Darcy is at home at Pemberley. Nor is Darcy’s case unique. Few Austen characters take time to understand the feelings of another, much less extend that person sympathy, and they are most blind – as Emma demonstrates repeatedly – when they think they understand what motivates another’s actions. That true sympathy is hardly a natural impulse is brought home by Emma’s rudeness to Miss Bates at the infamous Box Hill picnic. Emma’s treatment of her social inferior runs so counter to good manners that Mr. Knightley feels obliged to put Emma in her place:

[Miss Bates’s] situation should secure your compassion. It was badly done indeed – You, whom she had known from an infant, whom she had seen grow up from a period when her notice was an honour, to have you now, in thoughtless spirits, and the pride of the moment, laugh at her, humble her – and before her niece, too – and before others of whom (certainly some) would be entirely guided by your treatment of her. (Austen 2001, 273)

Things have changed. Miss Bates is no longer protected from the degradation of impoverishment, nor is her niece safe from the threat of being shipped off to Ireland as a governess. And “others” have infiltrated the community who would be only too eager to emulate Emma’s treatment of Miss Bates. The signs of indifference, hostility, and the tendency of public opinion to affix arbitrary types are ubiquitous in Emma’s world, and it is up to her to decrease the risks that accompany such instability rather than increase them. Austen’s was unquestionably a world in flux. In pointing out the shadow cast on Mansfield Park by the Atlantic slave trade, Edward Said’s landmark 1994 essay called attention to the fact that Austen was only too aware that British colonialism not only funded the world depicted in her fiction but also allowed it to seem detached from the economic exploitation supporting that cozy way of life. In shifting his concern from Mansfield Park to the colonies, however, Mr. Bertram leaves his household open to invasion by a new variety of urban gentry. They may appear familiar, but Henry and Mary Crawford are ruthless adventurers who provide Austen with the means of making the turbulence of the world at large reverberate at the level of provincial life. Where at first glance Emma is miraculously self‐contained, a second reading will reveal how the community at Highbury undergoes a similar transformation. Everything that happens in this novel does so under the rubric of “matchmaking,” which occurs as strangers are not so subtly introduced into a household over‐concerned with maintaining its boundaries. The trouble begins when Miss Taylor, Emma’s governess, moves out to start up a household with Mr. Weston, exposing a gap in the Woodhouse family. When she substitutes Harriett Smith, “the natural daughter of someone” (2001, 16), for Mrs. Weston, Emma sets off a chain reaction that derails Harriett’s relationship with one of Mr. Knightley’s tenants in order to promote a relationship with the new vicar, Mr. Elton, who aims considerably higher. After reaching for Emma’s hand and 316 Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse falling short, Elton imports a wife with a more worldly sense of decorum. This initial set of substitutions triggers a second wave after the arrival on the scene of Frank Churchill, essentially an outsider though Mr. Weston’s son. Emma is drawn into what already seems a rather arbitrary system of exchanges, as young Churchill presents himself as a potential substitute for Mr. Knightley in Emma’s affections and Jane Fairfax, the would‐be governess, threatens to displace Emma as the object of that gentleman landowner’s attention. Scott might be right in calling these disruptions of the traditional gentry culture “common incidents” were it not for the fact that each sets the entire community in motion and transforms both the perceptible qualities of characters and their value relative to one another. To the residents of Highbury the reasons for these changes are as mysterious as the arrival from London of the gift of a pianoforté for Jane Fairfax. To seek out those causes, Austen quietly suggests, one must think in terms of the larger system of social and economic circulation that makes it possible for Frank Churchill to court the humble Jane Fairfax by anonymously sending her a pianoforté as he waits for his wealthy aunt to pass away and free him to marry. Such a system is based on contingency rather than continuity and seeks what is advantageous rather than rational or morally justifiable. It consequently produces temporary fixes rather than securing long‐term stability. Austen may make Emma suffer for playing the matchmaker, but isn’t this exactly what Austen herself does by transforming the traditional exchange of women into the operations of such a network? She uses any number of social rituals – balls, social occasions at the Pump Room, dinners, card parties, walks in the countryside, and visits to various homes in the city and countryside – to set otherwise sedentary characters in motion. According to Leonore Davidoff, the rituals of the social season were supposed to move each generation of women “out” of the home and into “the best circles,” thereby keeping the culture of the community intact, along with its property (1973). Austen suggests there is a flaw in this logic, which is exposed every time one’s children encounter strangers not necessarily moored to any material form of property, strangers who can consequently adapt their behavior to the demands of the occasion. We call this seduction. Under these circumstances, forming a relationship is a risky investment – based as it is on serial encounters, chance compatibilities, and failures that alter one’s destination. The comedic ending of Pride and Prejudice synthesizes Hertfordshire culture with that of Derbyshire only by converting a number of characters to the ways of Hertfordshire and excluding even more. Persuasion offers no such magical reattach- ment of family to household and household to land, as marriage consists of nothing else but a sequence of departures and convergences for the wife of a naval officer. In keeping with the model of the network novel, then, Austen has torn family from land and put its members into circulation. But rather than restoring a community in continuity with the past from which a future can be predicted, her comedic endings install something like a hub or relay station capable of minimizing the risk of cultural devaluation – or what Deidre Lynch calls “image management” (1998, 255). Lynch’s study of “the economy of character” offers the best explanation for what Austen did to “people’s way of knowing and buying culture” in a rapidly expanding book market (27). In making this adjustment, as the ending of Persuasion makes explicit, Austen entered an international arena. The Network Novel and How It Unsettled Domestic Fiction 317

Writing in quite different fields, two of Austen’s contemporaries offered strikingly similar models for dealing imaginatively with the problem of a world whose human populations were detached from the land that supplied their basic needs. We are perhaps so familiar with Thomas Malthus’s formula setting sexual reproduction in exponential imbalance with food production that we overlook the means Malthus offered for solving this problem. Rather than rely on the natural checks of war, famine, disease, and the inevitable migration of populations to right the imbalance, his Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) proposed that men learn to imagine themselves as heads of households who had to meet the needs of their dependents. This may not have been the means of deflating romance that Scott admired in Austen, but it was nevertheless intended to minimize that risk. Malthus pointed out that “the principal states of modern Europe” vary from the principle of population prevailing elsewhere by virtue of the fact that these states take 300 or 400 years to double their population, rather than the expected 25 (2004, 32). To account for this difference, Malthus conjures up a “gentleman” of liberal education but income insufficient to marry and raise a family. This gentleman knows that if he does marry, “he shall be obliged, if he mixes at all in society, to rank himself with moderate farmers and the lower class of tradesmen … Two or three steps of descent in society, particularly at this round of the ladder, where education ends and ignorance begins, will not be considered by the generality of people as fancied and chimerical, but as real and essential” (172). As Malthus detached the household from both land and family and used it to mediate the gap between them, literacy became the distinguishing mark of those capable of providing for a family. Neither a place nor a group of people so much as a figure of speech, the household provided the conceptual architecture by which literate people could assess and minimize risk. When he proposed “the law of hospitality” as an alternative to warfare as the means of maintaining nationhood in a revolutionary age, Immanuel Kant was thinking with the same conceptual architecture. As he put it in his essay on “Perpetual Peace” (1795), freedom of movement “is not a question of philanthropy but of right. Hospitality means the right of a stranger not to be treated as an enemy when he arrives in the land of another … It is only a right of temporary sojourn, a right to associate, which all men have” (7). Kant proposed the universal “law of hospitality” as a means of domesticating “the inhospitable actions of the civilized and especially of the commercial states of our part of the world.” He equated the “injustice which they show to lands and peoples they visit” with “the inhospitality of the inhabitants of coasts … in robbing ships in neighboring seas or enslaving stranded travelers, or the inhospitality of the inhabitants of the deserts … who view contact with nomadic tribes as conferring a right to plunder them” (7). Imagining the citizens and goods of the nation as the property of a household in flux, Kant proposed a law of hospitality to manage the risks of piracy, abduction, political intrigue, and the more subtle forms of shady dealing responsible for the accidental conjunctions and divergences of plot we have identified with the novels of such American writers as Royall Tyler, Susanna Rowson, Leonore Sansay, and of course Brockden Brown. To deal with the opportunities and risks of the new commercial age, Kant revised an older notion of hospitality based on tribal loyalty, the trading of women, and the economy of the gift. His new law of hospitality would outlaw those earlier causes of hostility and economic exploitation by requiring tolerance and 318 Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse legislating exchanges that would ideally benefit both parties and yet have little impact on the national culture of either host or traveler. This revision of the concept of hospitality allowed Kant to reimagine the nation as one among a constellation of such hubs whose interconnections formed a network. Austen does something remarkably similar by revising the traditional notion of romance. Love of the sort that drives romance flourishes in Austen’s fiction as the means of putting the family’s livelihood in doubt. Without the risk personified in the seductive Wickham there would be no relationship between Darcy and Elizabeth Bennett. Nor without the harm done by adventurers like Willoughby and Lucy Steele would the Dashwood sisters secure a position in the respectable world under the careful eye of Colonel Brandon. Need we go on? To move into the marriage market is to give up one’s position within the family and to define one’s value in relation to other eligible young men and women. To court romance is to squander the opportunity for judgment and make an emotional investment that depreciates one’s value – as we see in the cases of Marianne Dashwood, Maria Bertram, and Lydia Bennett. On the other hand, unless a woman takes this risk, she acquires no value at all. So long as she withholds herself from the marriage market, Ann Elliott, though daughter of a baronet, appears to have less currency than the appropriately named Mrs. Clay, and Austen punishes this heroine by rendering her temporarily as unattractive as the unmarriage- able Mary Bennett or the sickly daughter of Lady Catherine de Bourgh. By the same token, Austen rewards Frank Churchill for putting his fortune at risk along with his romantic love object in an attempt to acquire both. Sense and Sensibility demonstrates that the risk of erring on the side of romance is if anything less than erring on the side of security. Without the risk of unsound, even ruinous emotional investments, Austen’s fiction would lack both the means of converting the traditional household into a hub and a reason for doing so. Looking at the principle of love in Austen as parallel to Kant’s law of hospitality, we can understand why, as D. A. Miller observes in Jane Austen or the Secret of Style (2003), the pleasure of disembodiment enables Austen’s narrators to look into the hearts and minds of others and still grant those individuals some autonomy of personhood. This parallel invites us to see how Austen’s ironic adjustments of the narrator’s distance from the cast of characters dramatize a principle quite like the tolerance that Kant made the essential feature of his renovated concept of hospitality. Miller explains how the pleasure drains out of Austen’s novels and descends into melancholy as the heroine nears the point of withdrawing from the vicissitudes of the marriage market into a reproductive body and a landlocked household. With the elimination of romance, there is hardly any cause for the reductive operations of her wit, as the narrator inven- tories future visitors at Pemberley – distinguishing those who always valued the heroine’s judgment from those who were capable of learning to do so, as well as those who were willing to pretend. Elizabeth’s parents, guilty of the crime of mismanagement, receive no mention, and Wickham is explicitly forbidden, as is Lady Catherine until her conviction that Elizabeth is unworthy of Pemberley gives way to “curiosity as to how [Darcy’s] new wife conducted herself … in spite of that pollution which its woods had received, not merely from the presence of such a mistress, but the visits of her uncle and aunt from the city” (Austen 2003, 366). Once her protagonist’s value is no longer at risk from her family connections, the narrator’s occupation is gone. The Network Novel and How It Unsettled Domestic Fiction 319

In Tom Jones, Fielding also characterized his narrator as a risk manager of sorts on those occasions when, for example, he enjoined the reader to

take care, I have unadvisedly led thee to the top of as high a hill as Mr Allworthy’s, and how to get thee down without breaking thy neck, I do not well know. However, let us e’en venture to slide down together; for Miss Bridget rings her bell, and Mr Allworthy is summoned to breakfast, where I must attend, and, if you please, shall be glad of your company. (1996, 37)

But Fielding’s narrator is obviously of no mind to turn over this role to his readers, much less his protagonists, even on the occasions when he allows them to author interpolated tales or personal letters that divulge their hopes, disappointments, and recrim- inations. By contrast, Austen allows her narrative viewpoint to converge with that of her protagonist and the reader in a body of opinion, or common culture, that accom- modates all the subtle variations of meaning that the novel’s opening line has accumulated by the time we arrive at the novel’s end. By completing the transformation of Longbourn into Pemberley, Pride and Prejudice eliminates the source of narrative along with the risk of romance. As we see it, Austen succeeds in winning the hearts of readers because her narratives inject the risk of romance into ordinary life. But she succeeds in winning over the critics, canonizers, and other moralizers for managing that risk with such precision and aplomb. To show what Austen did with the network form, we have conceptualized the novel as a network in its own right, one that brought Austen into relation with Brockden Brown, as well as Walpole, Radcliffe, Richardson, Smollett, and Fielding. In seeing her household as a hub enabling multiple narrative possibilities, we have also established a line of inquiry to connect her work productively with that of Charles Dickens and all the other Victorian novelists who saw the household as a provincial hub in a giant network enabling British people to circulate between metropolitan centers and locations across the globe. In addition to reclaiming “the Jewish parts” of Daniel Deronda, this way of reading the English novel will place Dickens squarely within the great tradition.

References

Austen, Jane. 2001 [1815]. Emma. New York: Davidoff, Leonore. 1973. The Best Circles: Society, Modern Library. Etiquette and the Season. London: Crescent Austen, Jane. 2003 [1830]. Pride and Prejudice, Library. edited by Vivien Jones. London: Penguin. Ferguson, Adam. 2007 [1767]. An Essay on the Brown, Charles Brockden. 1998. Three Gothic Novels: History of Civil Society, edited by Famoa Oz‐ Wieland or, The Transformation; Arthur Mervyn or, Salzberger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Memoirs of the Year 1793; Edgar Huntley or, Memoirs Press. of a Sleep Walker, edited by Sydney J. Krause. New Fielding, Henry. 1996 [1749]. The History of Tom York: The Library of America. Jones, a Foundling, edited by John Bender and Chase, Richard. 1957. The American Novel and Its Simon Stern. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tradition. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Fiedler, Leslie. 1960. Love and Death in the American Press. Novel. New York: Criterion Books. 320 Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse

Forster, E. M. 1927. Aspects of the Novel. New York: Margolis, Stacey. 2012. “Network Theory Circa Harcourt, Brace & World. 1800: Charles Brockden Brown’s Arthur Mervyn. Goodrich, Samuel Griswold. 1856. Recollections of a Novel: A Forum on Fiction 45: 343–367. Lifetime or Men and Things I Have Seen: in a Series Miller, D. A. 2003. Jane Austen or the Secret of Style. of Letters to a Friend, Historical, Biographical, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Anecdotal, and Descriptive, 2 vols. New York: Radcliffe, Ann. 1998 [1794]. The Mysteries of Miller, Orton, and Mulligan. Udolpho, edited by Bonamy Dobrée. Oxford: Kant, Immanuel. [1795]. “Perpetual Peace: A Oxford University Press. Philosophical Sketch.” https://www.mtholyoke. Said, Edward. 1994. “Jane Austen and Empire.” In edu/acad/intrel/kant/kant1.htm (accessed Culture and Imperialism, 80–96. New York: December 14, 2014). Random House. Leavis, F. R. 1948. The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Scott, Walter. 1968. “Emma: a Novel.” In Sir Walter Henry James, Joseph Conrad. London: Faber and Scott: On Novelists and Fiction, edited by Ioan Faber. Williams, 225–236. New York: Barnes and Lewis, R. W. S. 1955. The American Adam, Innocence Noble. and Tragedy in the Nineteenth Century. Chicago: Scott, Walter. 1906 [1825]. Lives of the Novelists. University of Chicago Press. London: Oxford University Press. Lynch, Deidre. 1998. The Economy of Character: Walpole, Horace. 1998 [1764]. The Castle of Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Otranto, A Gothic Story, edited by W. S. Lewis. Meaning. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Malthus, Thomas Robert. 2004 [1798]. An Essay Watt, Ian. 1957. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in on the Principle of Population, edited by Philip Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. Berkeley and Los Appleman. New York: Norton. Angeles: University of California Press. 21 Reading Novels, Alone and in Groups Andrew Elfenbein

Beyond their market cost, novels come with a hefty, invisible price tag. Reading a novel requires either reading it yourself or having someone (or, more recently, some thing) read it to you, and reading requires years of education and practice. Although listening is supposed to be easier than reading, even understanding a story read aloud needs complex skills: following protagonists, settings, times, goals, and motives; mak ing correct inferences and inhibiting wrong ones (however you define “correct” and “wrong”); using background knowledge to fill in what the novel leaves out; storing and retrieving information with no immediate use. Lacking any of these skills makes understanding novels impossible. Beyond purely cognitive processes, novels are inconveniently long compared to other reading material: getting through them takes hours. Theater, television, card games, concerts, an iPod, or chatting are more time‐efficient amusements than slog ging through a novel. Although novels do not have to be read or heard in their entirety in one sitting, you run the risk of forgetting at least some of what happens if you put a novel down or stop listening. The more dispersed your experience, the harder it may be to follow the plot. Beyond problems with time, novels also pose problems for space. They dominate a reader’s visual field and prevent multitasking, unless with routine gestures that need little attention. (A prime reason for the novel’s early success may have been that women could read while they sewed.) If you have complex jobs, such as baking, raising children, tending livestock, farming, or coal mining, novels become challenging, unless you have someone to read to you. Even then, you need to be stationary enough to hear. Novels also do not adapt themselves to just any setting. In ways more evident to earlier novel readers, novels need to be seen to be read. Only some readers can read by

A Companion to the English Novel, First Edition. Edited by Stephen Arata, Madigan Haley, J. Paul Hunter, and Jennifer Wicke. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. 322 Andrew Elfenbein daylight, and indoor illumination, from candles to electric lighting, is expensive. Even in sufficient light, the atmosphere has to be clear enough that you can actually see the novel. If you are just listening, you need sufficient quietness that other noises can be partially blocked out. Novels also need some space for the reader to hold the book still: in crowded conditions, reading becomes impossible. Reading novels is physically demanding. Many were published in small print and assumed good eyesight in periods when few had effective eye care. They require strength to grip for a long time and turn pages. Anyone who has watched a child struggling with a book or who has read with a broken wrist knows the challenges of manipulating the object. These challenges persist in contemporary media, which, despite their “vir tuality,” still often need arms, hands, fingers, and muscles. Novels invite, though they do not require, relative stillness, and being stationary for a long time is not necessarily comfortable, depending on your environment. Though you can read a novel anywhere with light enough to see it, many such places are uncomfortable for sustained reading. Beyond all this, if you have put in the time, effort, and money to learn to read, literacy has seemingly better objects than novels. Throughout its history, the novel has competed with smarter choices: books on how to make more money, improve health, get to heaven, grow better crops, cook better food, among many other topics. All these had a potentially bigger payoff than did even the most entertaining, instructive novel. Moreover, such reading had a cultural prestige that novels did not. Novel reading long faced floods of disapproval from preachers, moralists, and educators. A typical example of antinovelistic writing described what happened to a too‐zealous novel reader:

She could bear nothing, and she could do nothing, that required mental energy; and in all her difficulties she fled for relief to gin. Gin and novels seem mutually to assist each other. Gin makes way for novels, and novels make way for gin; and both together transform the Christian into such a pitiable, petulant, hysterical, and melancholy creature, that life becomes a ceaseless and intolerable vexation. (All‐Sufficiency of Religion 18‐‐, 11)

Although I have suggested that novels require cognitive effort, for this writer, novels do just the opposite. This poor woman could “bear” and “do” nothing “that required mental energy,” as if novels sapped native strength. Even worse, novels pave the road to alcoholism: “gin makes way for novels, and novels make way for gin.” The chiasmus makes the association inescapable, as if gin and novels circled each other endlessly. It is especially damning that the alcohol is “gin,” with its long working‐class associa tions. As this excerpt indicates, the bad novel reader was typically female. Admiral Collingwood, friend of Nelson, spoke for many when he claimed that most novels “might more fitly be used in singeing a capon for the table than in preparing a young lady for the world” (quoted in Oman 1963, 96). When moralists tired of warning women about novels, they just turned to the working classes or youth in general as potential victims of novelistic wickedness. In light of these barriers, novels must have promised a truly special experience for them to be worth the trouble. This chapter is about how readers describe that experi ence. Others have examined such topics as public literacy (Vincent 1989), the state of education (Wardle 1976), readers’ access to books (Colclough and Vincent 2009; St. Clair 2007, Altick 1957), the affordability and availability of material (Eliot 2009), Reading Novels, Alone and in Groups 323 and stereotypes about novels and their readers (Brantlinger 1998; Flint 1993; Pearson 1999). Since such information is available elsewhere, I will focus on what has been given less attention, the feelings that readers had about novels. Examining readers’ reactions is not as easy as it might seem. If we look early in the novel’s history, there is not enough evidence; if we look more recently, there is too much. Early readers did not care that later researchers would be interested in their thoughts, and generally did not record them. Even readers who did often wrote short remarks that give little sense of their experience. More recently, electronic media have made available a fund of information so vast that no one has organized the emails, websites, blogs, vlogs, reading chats, listservs, tweets, and book‐review sites dedicated to reading. These records, from the earliest to the latest, represent not how readers actually felt while reading but how they remembered feeling afterwards. Their mem ories may be accurate, but we have no way to check. In addition, people record not what they remember, but what they believe will interest or impress their audience, even if only the imaginary audience of a diary. Readers’ records are not exhaustive truths, only glimpses of what they thought worth sharing. In addition to the problematic nature of evidence, some groups left more records than others. Those who could read, had time and leisure to pen reactions, and were important enough to have reactions preserved, make it to the archives more than those who listened to novels because they could not read and never had their reactions recorded. The working classes are thus severely under‐represented in the history of readers, at least until the twentieth century. But even in more contemporary media, it is still challenging to know just how representative reactions are. Chatrooms, for example, allow people to mask their identity so that it is hard to generalize about the populations they come from. Given these limitations, the responses that I discuss should be understood as repre senting not all readers, but a privileged group, the novel‐reading sector, that was invested in novels and had time and leisure to read them and then write about them. Unrepresentative though they may be, their evidence is still the best available about how readers felt about reading. I organize their responses into four periods, with the caveat not to fixate on chronology. The history of reading is one of loosely defined, overlapping trends, with older reading practices suddenly being reactivated and some practices persisting even in the face of radical technological change. In this account, I note aspects of reading that have remained constant over time and those that have altered with historical circumstances.

Novel Readers and the Agitations of the Novel, 1700–1820

The early eighteenth‐century literary critic John Dennis captured the allure of novels when he described

that Art and Contrivance, by which their Authors excite our Curiosities, and cause those eager Longings in their Readers to know the Events of things, those Longings, which by their pleasing Agitations, at once disturb and delight the Mind, and cause the prime Satisfaction of all those Readers who read only to be delighted. (1713, 16) 324 Andrew Elfenbein

Dennis knows the pull of good stories, the longing to know what happens next. For Dennis, this pull mixes joy and pain, pleasure and agitation, that “disturb and delight the Mind.” Reading novels is no simple pleasure, but a complex, even decadent, indulgence. For the satisfaction of knowing “the Events of things,” readers surrender to agitation and disturbance. Yet, as an eighteenth‐century reader recognized, the pull of fiction could be unsat isfying. In 1728, Gertrude Savile wrote in her diary:

Made an end of “The Adventures of Abdella.” I can find no morrall or design in it. ’Tis a collection of silly but very entertaining Lyes, of Fairies, Enchantments etc. Such books I read as people take Drams, to support for an hour sinking Spirits, and alas! the more is taken, the more is nessasary. (1997, 144).

For Savile, reading The Adventures of Abdallah (1729), an “oriental” fantasy by Bignon, qualifies the enthusiasm that Dennis expresses. Novels allow Savile, as they would many readers after her, a way out, a means of forgetting themselves: they “support for an hour sinking Spirits.” The critical phrase is “for an hour.” The novel distracts, but only temporarily. Even worse, temporary distraction becomes addictive, so that the cure may be worse than the disease: “the more is taken, the more is nessasary.” The novel’s unsatisfactory distractions become part of its seductiveness, so that readers want more and more (cf. Colclough 2007, 60–63). Although many eighteenth‐century readers responded with great enthusiasm to novels, the more interesting reactions come from those who express versions of Savile’s disappointment:

At candlelight D.D., and I read by turns, and what do you think has been part of our study? – why truly Peregrine Pickle! We never undertook it before, but it is wretched stuff. (Mary Granville 1861, 3: 162, writing in 1752) Finished reading that Emmeline, a Trumpery novel in four volumes. If I can answer for myself I will never again undertake such a tiresome nonsensical piece of business. (Butler 1986, 128–129, writing in 1788) Read the Castle of Otranto; which grievously disappointed my expectations. The tale is, in itself, insipid; and Mrs. Radcliffe, out of possible contingencies, evokes scenes of far more thrilling horror, than are attained by the supernatural and extravagant machinery, which, after all, alone imparts an interest to this Romance. (Green 1810, 23, writing in 1797) Fetched the “Castle of Mowbray” from Lindley’s Library; a very silly Love tale. (Hunter 1798) Windermere: A Novel in 2 vols. This is below Mediocrity; the title induced me to read it; and with the title I am satisfied – and disappointed. (Weeton 1936–1939, 2: 72, writing in 1813)

We should be careful about taking these readers’ irritation too literally. If the novels really had been so bad, they could have stopped reading, and no one mentioned doing so. Instead, like Savile, they complete the novel and then attack it. Novels are a perfect guilty indulgence: the pleasure of reading followed by the pleasure of attack. Although not all eighteenth‐century readers experienced similar ambivalence, such reactions are Reading Novels, Alone and in Groups 325 common enough to suggest, at least for the privileged sector of readers whose reactions survive, that reading novels combined entertainment with doubts about whether or not they were worth the time. These doubts provided their own pleasure, since they gave readers a chance to manifest their critical acumen. Two factors in reactions of eighteenth‐century readers have had a long afterlife in reconciling readers to novels: finding redeeming moral value in them and believing that everyone else was reading them. A good moral could make up for some dull plotting, as James Beattie suggests in his comments about Samuel Richardson:

For my own part, I was often chagrined at his tediousness, and frequently was obliged to turn to the contents of the volume, to relieve my mind a little from the rack of unsatisfied impatience; yet I doubt not, if I were now to read “Clarissa” a second time, I should find these tedious parts not the least useful. Whoever rails at Mr. Richardson’s tediousness should recollect, that his design is more to instruct than to amuse; and that consequently his tediousness is a pardonable fault, as the motive to it is so laudable. (quoted in Forbes 1807, 22–29, writing in 1759)

Reviewers of novels routinely evaluated their good or bad moral tendencies, and, as Leah Price has argued, novels like Clarissa worked for some as anthologies of moral sayings (2000, 17–20). Morality rescued questionable entertainment, although, as debates over Richardson made clear, one reader’s moral entertainment was another’s hypocritical sensationalism (Warner 1998, 176–230). Morality was a useful but never perfect tool for reconciling readers to the novel’s suspect value, and boredom was a high price for respectability. Luckily, morals could be bypassed if enough other people were reading a novel. Especially in fashionable London, people read to keep up with the few hundred best families who controlled Britain’s land and wealth. If a novel was a hit in these circles, then “everyone” made sure to read it, as if reading were a social necessity. In 1726, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu found Gulliver’s Travels to be a book “that all our people of taste run mad about” (1837, 2: 373), while Lady Luxborough noted in 1753, “I think I must read Sir C. Grandison in my own defence; for I hear of him till I am tired. Let us read him here together. I remember I heard so much in Tom Jones’s praise; that when I read him, I hated him” (1775, 369). The Gentleman’s Magazine in 1741 claimed that it was “as great a sign of want of curiosity not to have read PAMELA, as not to have seen the French and Italian dancers” (quoted in Warner 1998, 178), while Elizabeth Carter wrote in 1751 to a friend about Fielding’s Amelia, “Methinks I long to engage you on the side of this poor unfortunate book, which I am told the fine folks are unanimous in pronouncing to be very sad stuff” (1809, 2: 71). As Carter’s comments reveal, part of the fun of reading was sharing reactions with others who had read the same book. Novels were good for friendship, and have remained so until the present: novels provide common experience and a topic for talk. The poet Thomas Gray wrote in 1742 to Richard West, “I have myself, upon your recommenda tion, been reading Joseph Andrews. The incidents are ill laid and without invention; but the characters have a great deal of nature, which always pleases even in her lowest shapes” (1915, 2: 25–26). The Bishop of Gloucester noted in 1760, “I pride myself in having warmly recommended ‘Tristram Shandy’ to all the best company in town” (Garrick 1831, 326 Andrew Elfenbein

1: 116). Although reading is sometimes imagined as a withdrawal from social relationships, for many readers, reading novels sustain friendships and may occasion new ones. By the century’s end, although antinovel sentiment never slackened, embarrassment at novel reading shows signs of lessening, as suggested by Anna Seward when she wrote to Humphry Repton in 1786:

That you have not read the Clarissa does not much excite my wonder. I know the aversion which most sensible people have to novels; and those who, like you, live much in the world, are deterred by the idea of eight volumes closely written. It is but of late years that this work has been considered as amongst the English classics. (1811, 1: 127–128)

Seward begins by giving Repton the upper hand, recognizing that “most sensible” peo ple think novels silly, and anyone “much in the world” has no time for Clarissa. But her next sentence turns the tables by putting him behind the times, since it is “but of late years” that Clarissa has been placed “amongst the English classics.” Though Repton may be in the world, he does not know what Seward knows: novels have become classics. Similarly, when John Davis described meeting a fellow Englishman during his travels in the United States, he found the man’s inability to distinguish the work of Henry Fielding from that of Tobias Smollett to be good proof that he was a fool: “Potpan informed me that he had subscribed to a Circulating Library in London; and asked me very gravely if I had ever read the history of Tom Jones, a Foundling, by the author of Roderic (sic) Random” (1803, 396). During a parliamentary inquiry into the Copyright Acts, the Rev. Lancelot Sharpe claimed, “I conceive it is not at all derogatory to a cler gyman, after having labored through the day, in an hour of relaxation to read a good novel” (quoted in Minutes of Evidence 1818, 125). Likewise, Lieutenant General George Vaughan Hart mentioned to a parliamentary committee that “Innishowen is not worse than other parts of Donegal; but it has been particularly brought into notice, I believe, by Miss Owenson, in one of her novels” (quoted in Second Report from Select Committee 1816, 99). The specifics of his comment are less important than his ability to mention a novel as if his hearers would know what he meant. Rather than being shameful, know ing at least some novels could be taken for granted, at least among the reading classes.

Nineteenth‐Century Readers and Transportation

The novel’s respectability received two boosts at the beginning of the nineteenth century. First, impressive, large‐scale collections of novels appeared, complete with critical apparatus: first, Anna Barbauld’s 50‐volume The British Novelists (1810), followed by Walter Scott’s hugely popular Ballantyne’s Novelist’s Library (1821–1824) (Johnson 2001). Even more, the success of Walter Scott, the nineteenth century’s most widely read novelist, consolidated the novel’s prestige. He lessened the vulgarity still clinging to the novel by combining fiction with the more respectable genre of history. However silly other novels seemed to be, Scott, at least, was safe (Felluga 2005, 40–42). When a clergyman complained about a church library, “I have found some of the younger subscribers to the library difficult to get to church on Sunday, because they were reading Walter Scott’s novels,” the response was, “But is it not better that they Reading Novels, Alone and in Groups 327 should read Walter Scott’s novels than that they should do something worse?” (quoted in Report from the Select Committee on Public Libraries 1849, 134). With the novel’s increased prestige, it becomes harder (though never impossible) to find the embarrassment and irritation displayed by at least some eighteenth‐century readers. Instead, nineteenth‐century readers (though not book reviewers) privilege absorption over critical distance, in ways that would prove an enduring characteristic of novel reading. In 1852, Connop Thirlwall, for example, tells an exemplary story about a man reading Charles Dickens’s Bleak House on a train:

The purchaser [of Bleak House] immediately set to, but I suppose in a critical chapter found the envious light [in the train] failing him … He continued to catch at every gleam of light that permitted him to read another line … While I was waiting with painful curiosity to see when he would acknowledge that his visual powers were unequal to their task, he suddenly raised his eyes to the faint glimmer of the lamps on the opposite side, and instantly sprang up on the seat which was unoccupied, and holding his book close to the glass, remained perched there until we reached Paddington. The most remarkable thing was that when we stopped he observed to me that we had come uncom monly fast – ‘had never gone a better pace.’ … He was totally unconscious that it was the ‘Bleak House’ that had made the time pass so quick! (1881, 203)

Thirlwall observes a psychological case study. Reader absorption plays with the sense of time, so that his fellow traveler does not realize that speed owes nothing to the train but everything to his pleasure in reading. His absorption is almost obsessive as he clings to the last shreds of light in order to read the book, with no awareness of the “painful curiosity” that he incites. Although Thirlwall tells his story with detached amusement, nineteenth‐century readers loved to describe how deeply novels had absorbed them:

I read seventeen hours a day at Clarissa, and held the book so long up leaning on my elbows in an arm‐chair, that I stopped the circulation and could not move. When Lovelace writes, “Dear Belton, it is all over, and Clarissa lives,” I got up in a fury and wept like an infant, and cursed and d—d Lovelace till exhausted. (Haydon 1853, 1: 206, writing in 1813) Finished The Pathfinder; in tears just think! A novel of a thousand that! for “making the heart beat” and taking one out of oneself. (Carlyle 1855). Read a most powerful and extraordinary story by R. L. Stevenson: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In the few days which followed, I read the story seven times over, with as much care as when of old preparing for an examination: watching every clause of every sentence, and its bearing. (Boyd 1892, 2: 246, writing in 1886) The famous lawyer Sir William Maule “was said to devote himself entirely to novel reading, for he declared that there was nothing so well calculated to air the mind as a good novel.” (Robinson 1889, 121)

Other records give us glimpses of absorption even among those who did not leave behind their own accounts. In a late eighteenth‐century court case, a husband was tried for beating his wife savagely while she was in the middle of reading to a friend. The friend’s testimony noted that “she regretted much the entertainment that she had 328 Andrew Elfenbein lost by the discontinuance of the reading of the novel”; luckily, the husband continued reading (Scott 1792, 186). A dry report on boiler explosions notes the sad case of the attendant blown up “neglecting his duties whilst engaged in reading a novel” (Report to the Secretary of the Board of Trade 1894, 15). An emigrant to New South Wales recollected

the exquisite relish with which a huge and very raw Scotch lad – with a face like a great pumpkin – read Pickwick on our voyage out. In ecstasies of delight he used to roll about the deck, like a young leviathan at play; then, snatching up the book, he would pursue the captain, or whomsoever else he could get to listen to him, saying, “D’ye hear what Sam said to the fat boy, and what the fat boy said to Sam?” whereupon he used sometimes to get chastised by those he annoyed too frequently. (Townsend 1849, 261).

The sense that a good novel magically took readers away from their present time and place was everywhere in Victorian memory and remains a common reaction among enthusiastic readers. Even as Victorian readers remembered their pleasure in forgetting themselves, they deeply encoded the physical environment. When they describe reading, they tell as much about where and when they read as what. They may simply note that they read in the evening or before bedtime, but often provide more detail:

By the way, I may tell you that I fell in love with ‘Ivanhoe,’ at thirteen, on a bright July morning in my midsummer holidays … It was lying conveniently at hand; I looked into it, became absorbed, and spent the whole day in the garden reading it … and never stopped till I had finished it! (Greyson 1857, 136) Sixty hours after time my ship arrived, and I had to leave a large dinner‐party at Government House to go on board … It was frightfully cold, and I huddled myself up in my opossum rug and read Miss E’s new novel and Disraeli’s. (North 1892, 2: 176) I read Jane Austen for the first time at Land’s End, years ago. Persuasion was the novel … I remember how, as I read, the Atlantic rains beat against my window, and Cape Cornwall appeared and vanished in the swirling elements. (“N.” 1898, 199) On a day I can still recall, a still November day, when the mist lay on the halmes and the yellow sunshine touched the crags on the moor, Cooper came to me with ‘The Last of the Mohicans,’ and almost persuaded me to be an Indian. (Collyer, quoted in Holmes 1917, 1: 71) Went to bed and read myself to sleep on Dickens’ Great Expectations and dreamed all night of Pip and Orlick. (Jones, quoted in Jones 1910, 2: 119, writing in 1861)

Thus, Victorian readers reveal a paradox that continues to the present: novel readers remember that they enjoy losing track of time and place when they are in a particular time and place. The more they leave the world behind, the more it stays with them in their recollections of reading. Even as novel reading transports readers beyond them selves, it becomes a deeply embodied memory, inseparable from the location of its occurrence. Memory for the reading experience teeters between two polarities, as if surroundings become most vivid, most prone to deep encoding, at the very time that we might presume them to be least important, when readers are interacting not with what’s around them but with the words on the page. Reading Novels, Alone and in Groups 329

Victorians are also typical of later readers in rarely remembering the plot. Instead, they focus on evaluations:

I am greatly indebted to a patient, Mr. Burroughs Lewis, an English gentleman who first introduced me to the delights of Anthony Trollope … This was forty‐five years ago, and I have been reading Trollope ever since … He is not very deep or profound … yet he knew the people and the times in which he lived, and has depicted their salient points so correctly, so vigorously, so charmingly, that one seldom tires even under the prolixity of some of his analytical characterizations. (Rockwell 1920, 279) I was most struck in ‘Mary Barton,’ with its fine constructive power, and the graceful use that it makes of Lancashire dialect. (Mitford 1872, 2: 101, writing in 1849) I have finished ‘Ruth’ and ‘Villette,’ and several of Sir Walter Scott’s, and am much struck by the marked difference between the fiction of his day and ours; the effect pro duced is very opposite. From those of Scott you rise with a vigorous, healthy tone of feeling; from the others, with that sense of exhaustion and weakness which comes from feeling stirred up to end in nothing. (Robertson 1865, 2: 214) ‘Ouida’ … had puzzled, baffled, excited, and sometimes terrified me when, as a young girl, I had read her first serial novel in Colburn’s New Monthly Magazine. (Diehl 1908, 22) What lingers with readers is less the specifics of plot than an overall impression of the atmosphere of a work and their emotional reaction to it. The exception is that, in some cases, a particular character, event, or line in a novel digs deep into readers’ memory, possibly remaining with them even after other aspects of the novel have faded. These pieces of novelistic memory turn into cultural common ground: readers refer to specific novelistic moments in everyday life and assume that their audience understands their reference. For example, throughout the nineteenth century, writers addressing a huge variety of topics threw in “Wellerisms” (a quotation from Sam Weller, a famous character in Charles Dickens’s Pickwick Papers [1837]):

As for Puseyism, sending it amongst us to find a home, is coming it “rather strong,” (as Sam Weller says); for Puseyism claims to be the true (and only true) Church of England. (“Australian Tract Society” 1844, 203) You say that your letter was a very shabby and untidy one; but it didn’t strike me to be so. I thought it just what it ought to be, except that I should have liked it to be a little longer; but, as Sam Weller says, “the perfection of letter writing is to leave off always so as to make the person to whom you write wish for more!” (Young 1902, 249, writing in 1857) Nor were such references confined to Sam Weller. The upholsterer Thomas Broider, testifying before a Select Committee of the House of Lords in 1888 on sweatshops, explained how badly his boss paid him: “It was customary then that he would not allow me to take what are called the best wages in the shop, 50 s. a week, owing to my youth. I was like David Copperfield” (First Report 1888, 440). Broider perceives knowledge of Dickens to be detailed enough that when he says that he was “like David Copperfield,” parliamentarians will select from all that happens to Copperfield the exact moments when Broider is most like him. Similarly, when Karl Pearson’s Cambridge tutors told his parents about his progress, they wrote, “He has fine abilities 330 Andrew Elfenbein

& is most industrious – he is no doubt a little peculiar. We think him somewhat like the character of Kenelm Chillingly in Bulwer’s novel” (quoted in Porter 2004, 24). Once again, writers assume that a fictional character is so well known that further description is unnecessary: invoking the exemplar tells an audience all it needs to know. All in all, Victorian readers provide evidence for many of the qualities of novel reading that remain familiar today, especially the combination of absorption with intense memory of the place of reading, and the strange phenomenon whereby novels are best remembered either as general impressions or small details, with the intermediate level of plot seemingly less vivid.

Battles for the Reader’s Soul, 1880–1960

A series of national Education Acts in the late nineteenth century, however unevenly implemented, dramatically increased access to literacy in Britain and the potential size of the reading public. In time, this increase created what had been unthinkable only a century before, a mass novel‐reading audience (McAleer 1992). Yet for this mass audience to appear, the price of novels, still expensive for most of the nineteenth century, had to fall. First, the triple‐decker gave way to the single‐volume novel, and, even more important, the paperback arose in the early twentieth century. In addition, the Public Libraries Act of 1919 spurred the growth of libraries throughout Britain, although the development was ragged because of cost. At long last, novels had become accessible even to those with small incomes, although it is important not to overstate the suddenness of this development, since cheap periodicals had made fiction available even before paperbacks. New readers and publications posed challenges for the novel’s status. The price of Victorian novels had kept them in the hands of the moderately affluent, or at least those privileged enough to be able to afford a circulating library subscription. But once anybody could buy a novel, and once writers began cashing in on the demand for easy reading, the novel’s hard‐won and never fully stable prestige was threatened (Waller 2006). As Stephen Arata has documented, one response was to put new demands on the reader. Late Victorian guides to reading emphasized that the good reader was not merely a passive consumer but an active worker: “The idea that reading, properly done, constituted a form of labor had passed into the realm of common sense” (2004, 201); such guides continued to be produced throughout the twentieth century, and they still feature in today’s reading pedagogy. Yet the fear remained that most people would read mindlessly. As a doctor wrote to The Times:

As a rule, [people] dislike thinking, they object to taking up a subject to which they are not accustomed which involves attention and consequent fatigue; hence the facility of reading novels which are generally concerned with facts with which people are more or less conversant and which give them no strain. (Shaw 1910, 10)

Attacks on fiction had never died, but whereas earlier attacks were primarily religious and ethical, the new self‐consciousness about reading novels came from psychology, Reading Novels, Alone and in Groups 331 sociology, and education. By the 1930s in Britain and America, these disciplines had found a new object of study, the popular reader. Even the most drily statistical of their studies reproduced an evaluative split between good and bad novel‐reading practices (e.g., Waples 1938). Given the tide of mass readership, how could good reading be guaranteed? The answer was to distinguish good novels from bad and encourage readers to make the right choices. For example, in the mining village of Backworth, the Classical Novel‐Reading Union arose in the 1890s as an outgrowth of university extension courses. Its founders believed that “literature is the science of life; and the great classical novels are among the best text‐books of life. To study these is the true anti dote to trashy and poisonous fiction” (Moulton 1895, 19). Each month, the Union’s members read a “classical” (which, for the most part, meant Victorian) novel, and received topics for discussion, debate, and essay writing from men and women of letters. When they read Dickens’s David Copperfield (1850), for example, “points to be noted” included a discussion of Micawber’s character and the admirable traits of Steerforth, Peggotty, and Traddles; the debate topic was “Does Dickens abuse literary art?”; and the (promising) essay topic was “David Copperfield as a prig” (Moulton 1895, 37). The Union, which numbered around 80, showed that the working classes wanted both classic novels and interpretive independence: although experts provided topics, workers led actual discussions. Jonathan Rose’s extensive work on literacy and education among the working classes in the first half of the twentieth century confirms their investment in “classic” novels (2001, 116–145). For example, a survey of one month of reading from students at a working‐class school showed that 62 boys had read Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883) that month, while 45 girls had read Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1837); classic novels remained popular at the libraries as well (Rose 2001, 232). Repeatedly, working‐ class autobiographers mention loving Victorian novels, while rarely referring to high‐ modernist novels enshrined later by the academy. Yet classics competed with reading matter that, at least to the more educated, looked like garbage. D. W. Harding, a psychology professor (best known to literary scholars for a landmark essay on Jane Austen), surveyed 215 students in adult educa tion classes, most of them members of the working class, and found that “in its most frequent use the term escape was used to describe the whole act of getting entertain ment, so that going to the cinema or reading novels was said to be a way of escaping everyday worries and responsibilities” (“Pursuit of Pleasure” 1936). Far from being the glorified labor that guides to reading promoted, novels persisted in being what they were for Gertrude Savile in the early eighteenth century, an escape from “everyday worries.” The Boots pharmacy chain developed a popular circulating library, which lasted until the 1960s, and instructed its librarians not to interfere with this escapism: “It is no part of our policy to foist upon the public any particular work for any reason” (quoted in Moody 2008, 206). The association between novels and escapism was not new, but such escapism now looked particularly dangerous because it was available to so many. During the Second World War, although the Library Association fought hard to guarantee that servicemen would have improving reading material, their efforts were futile in the face of the men’s desire for the steamy crime novel No Orchids for 332 Andrew Elfenbein

Miss Blandish, supposedly their favorite book (Hung 2008, 174; see also Rose 2001, 237–255; McAleer 1992, 71–99). Recollections of readers reveal that, even as they consumed such novels, they sensed their low cultural status. One reader recalled reading romantic fiction in 1930s women’s magazines: “When I was younger it was always the fiction first. I tried to ration myself a bit … I don’t know why you go for romanticism, perhaps because you are plunged into the world of washing nappies and whatnot … [it] was sheer escapism” (quoted in Hackney 2007, 20). Similarly, another remembered, “I also liked a good love story, and if it was a good love story you couldn’t leave it alone, you just had to read it” (quoted in Hackney 2007, 8). Australian readers reveal a similar pattern, whereby working‐class readers considered popular novels as “rubbish, absolute rubbish” or “all stupid,” even though they read them eagerly (quoted in Lyons and Taksa, 1992, 158, 160). As for highbrow modernist literature, networks of patronage and marketing of such books turned them into rare cultural objects more than actual texts to be read. As Lawrence Rainey has argued, “the publication of Ulysses had the effect not of confirming the importance of discerning readers, but of demonstrating that readers might be super fluous” (1999, 55). Whereas readers of popular novels were so conscious of their low prestige that they hardly considered themselves readers, readers of elite modernist novels were so conscious of their high prestige that reading the novels was hardly necessary.

Novels in an Age of Media Abundance, 1960 to the present

The most important development for the status of the novel in recent history is the emergence of multiple competitors for absorbing narratives. Television is the most prominent, but movies, the radio, and the internet all offer users a form of distraction that, if not identical to novel reading, is close enough. These have dethroned the nov el’s traditional role as the pre‐eminent source of trashy entertainment. Suddenly, when thousands are watching porn on the web, even the fluffiest of novels acquires compar ative nobility. Moreover, newer forms of entertainment offer fewer barriers to con sumption than the novel does. Whereas the novel used to seem like the lazy person’s choice, it now seems heroic next to other media that seemingly need less effort. The novel’s prestige has begun to climb at the moment that its readership has begun to diminish in the face of stiff competition. In ways unimaginable in the eighteenth century, novel reading no longer seduces to evil but spurs moral and cognitive excellence. In 1970, the British novelist Richard Hughes attacked the man who expected praise for not reading novels, asking, “Is he totally unaware that he is thereby confessing an unwillingness to face the essential nature of his fellow‐men and himself?”; for Hughes, disasters of the twentieth century arose from insufficient novel reading: “The archetypal non‐reader of Fiction was Hitler” (1970, 1). While not everyone would go as far as Hughes, the novel’s stature has risen, along with its ability to be taken seriously; the psychologist Raymond Mar and colleagues have argued that “people who predominantly read fiction had better empathy and theory‐of‐mind than those who predominantly read non fiction” (Oatley 2011, 163). Novels have become a standard part of education: even the most deter mined student is unlikely to make it to the end of high school without reading at least Reading Novels, Alone and in Groups 333 one novel for school. So serious have novels become that the Stories Connect program in Britain and the Changing Lives Through Literature program in the United States offer literature courses to convicts as an alternative to jail. A website for prison educa tion notes how powerful reading novels is for the participants: “One of the most exciting outcomes is the way in which participants realise they can understand writers like John Steinbeck and Charles Dickens” (Stephenson 2011). Shadowing and reinforcing this seriousness is an increasing awareness that novel readers are vanishing. Organizations like the National Literacy Trust keep careful tabs on the habits of young readers; a 2010 survey of over 18 000 readers noted that “just under half of young people enjoy reading either very much or quite a lot” (Clark 2011, 6). Such reports also note an achievement gap: although fewer children enjoy reading, those who do tend to be better students – “Enjoyment of reading was related to reading attainment” (6). They also note a gender gap: “More boys than girls agreed that they prefer watching television to reading, that they cannot find things to read that interest them and that they would be embarrassed if their friends saw them read” (9). The US National Endowment for the Arts issued a similar report, Reading at Risk, in 2004, which predicted dire results from the loss of literary reading: “As many Americans lose this capability [for literary reading], our nation becomes less informed, active, and independent‐minded. These are not qualities that a free, innovative, or productive society can afford to lose” (Gioia, quoted in National Endowment for the Arts 2004, vii). The increasing prestige of novels and the fear of their smaller audience has spurred the growth of book clubs. Richard and Judy’s Book Club in the UK (Lang 2010) and Oprah’s Book Club (Farr 2005) in the United States are some of the most visible examples of a larger enthusiasm for such clubs, which have given some novels an unexpectedly large readership. Although book clubs are hardly new, their surge in popularity suggests that they are serving new purposes. While many clubs exist for friends to socialize, others prioritize serious discussion. Ethnographic studies of British book clubs note how members read not merely for entertainment but for what is perceived to be a deeper connection to the material: “You’re seeing things from another person’s point of view, you’re experi encing different sensations and different ideas. It’s difficult to quite put into words, the total satisfaction that one gets” (quoted in Reed 2004, 114). Television might be enough for ordinary entertainment, but for a club, a book needs to hold out the promise of more meaningful results. Book clubs thus have become a forum whereby readers can engage hot‐button topics that in other settings might be considered impolite or inappropriate for casual con versation. In Britain, the Devolving Diasporas project (www.devolvingdiasporas.com) involved reading groups in Scotland, England, Africa, Canada, India, and the Caribbean in reading diasporic English fiction. In these groups, readers tackle issues such as racism and cross‐cultural understanding:

But you know it [discrimination of the kind found in Andrea Levy’s Small Island in the 1950s] still happens. In Peterborough, I used to live in Peterborough and the same thing happened. The people would say “you get one Paki in you’re overrun with them” and this is, you know, ten fifteen years ago so there’s nothing changed all that much. (quoted in Benwell 2009, 310) 334 Andrew Elfenbein

The way in which the first part of the book [Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart] was written helped us to see how the tribal system worked and what the old beliefs were; it made us a part of the village and you saw life through their eyes and their values. It enabled you to accept, for instance, the polygamy, the treatment of women, and the killing of twin children without condemnation. (quoted in Procter 2009, 189; see also Fuller and Procter 2009)

Whereas eighteenth‐century readers wished to find morals, more recent readers, at least those in some book clubs, find a neutral ground that lets them explore otherwise messy topics. It’s important not to overgeneralize. Not all book clubs are as serious as the ones studied by ethnographers, and plenty of people still read novels as they have read them for centuries, as an absorbing form of entertainment. But book clubs repre sent an uncertain moment in the novel’s history, a sign both of its increased pres tige and its changing popularity, at least in its traditional form. Reports stressing the lack of interest among young readers in reading fiction suggests that the mass appeal of the novel, which so worried early twentieth‐century scholars, may give way to the tastes of a more specialized novel‐reading public, with the time and ambition to read what is perceived as better fiction (for an excellent overview, see Griswold et al. 2005). This history of novel reading presents a strange mixture of phenomena that cross period boundaries and others that do not. From the time of Gertrude Savile to the present, readers have braved the inconveniences of the novel because novels offer the promise of absorption in a fictional world. This absorption satisfies a wide range of needs: a relief from boredom, a distraction from unpleasant realities, a way to learn about the world, an intensification and satisfaction of curiosity, and a topic for discussion with friends. Yet other aspects of novel‐reading history seem quite strange, such as the fear that reading Walter Scott or Charles Dickens would damage the development of young boys. Any boy now caught reading Walter Scott would more likely be fast‐tracked to a talented and gifted program than reprimanded for his reading choices. At the same time, the older antinovel rhetoric has not vanished but has found new targets: television, hip‐hop, violent video games, and pornography. Entertainment is still dangerous, but novel reading is not. The future of the novel may blend into a broader future for narrative, in which the satisfactions that were once available largely through the novel become more widely disseminated in differ ent forms. Novels per se will matter less than novelization, the adaptation and trans formation of novelistic satisfactions by media that may barely resemble the traditional novel. Novelistic desires remain widespread, but their satisfaction may no longer come from reading.

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Part VI Geographies of the Novel

22 London Cynthia Wall

London is like a newspaper. Everything is there, and everything is disconnected. (Walter Bagehot, National Review, October 1858)

Walter Bagehot is talking about Charles Dickens, whose “memory is full of instances, of old buildings and curious people and he does not care to piece them together. On the contrary, each scene, to his mind, is a separate scene, – each street a separate street” (1858, 468). Overviewing London and the novel is itself a bit like holding a thousand different scenes and trying to piece them together. Everything is there, and everything is disconnected, but everything is also connected. Each novel is a separate novel, with its own take on the old buildings, the curious people, yet the novels also constellate them selves around similar centers. This essay will offer itself as a microcosm of the Companion as a whole, and approach the topic from several different but intersecting angles. Underlying everything is the obvious premise that, chronologically, London pro vides the setting for long narratives from Chaucer and Bevis of Hampton in the four teenth century, to rogue picaresques in the sixteenth and seventeenth, to the realist novels of Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Frances Burney, and Tobias Smollett in the eighteenth century and of Dickens, George Gissing, and William Thackeray in the nineteenth, to the modernist novels of Virginia Woolf, Evelyn Waugh, and George Orwell in the twentieth, to the contemporary issues addressed by Nick Hornby in the 1990s and Monica Ali in the 2000s. Every major city has its “brand” literature – we can conjure up the New York novel, the Paris novel, the Chicago novel, the Mumbai novel. Like these, the London novel throughout the centuries has had its own particular and unmistakable set of atmospheres and topographies, old buildings and curious people. The first section, London and Its Histories, scans the early appearances of the city in narratives before the novel, shifting into a section on genres that begins with the

A Companion to the English Novel, First Edition. Edited by Stephen Arata, Madigan Haley, J. Paul Hunter, and Jennifer Wicke. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. 342 Cynthia Wall historical novel set in London, moves through mysteries and crime fiction (from the historical to the present), to Gothic and science fiction. London in Pieces shows how London can actually structure the novel, influence its narration, behave something like a character, and create affect. The interconnectedness of these novels through time and space is part of a larger sense of London in Circulation that begins with the emerging ubiquity of the print world in the seventeenth century and influences the plots and themes and narrative patterns of everything from plague to pollution to rumor. All London novels make good use of its geographies: the importance of individual streets, buildings, and neighborhoods resonates with centuries‐old significance in each. All of these novels counterpoise and complicate the public and the private. And throughout its long history, the “London” novel – from Defoe to Dickens to Stoker to Ali – has always been a “world” novel of this “world city.”

London and Its Histories

Although “London and the novel” cannot quite be a concept until “the novel” is invented, and that, in its most general sense of a long prose narrative concerning ordi nary life and recognizable people, happened more or less across the eighteenth century, the idea and image of London shapes older fictional narratives as well. Fictional London is almost always “real” London, using the fixture of its streets to claim the fixture of its types, topography writing typology. From Chaucer to the present, naming a street or parish or neighborhood in London identifies an atmosphere and a character, from the Billingsgate fishwife to the Sloane Ranger, from Brick Lane to Abbey Road. Until the middle of the seventeenth century, the tangled warren of streets in the medieval city were denotative: “Ivie lane, so called of ivy growing on the walls of the prebend houses”; “Warwicke lane, of an ancient house there built by an Earl of Warwicke”; “a large street running west to Newgate [Prison], the first part whereof, from the conduit to the shambles, is of selling bladders there, called Bladder street” (Stow 1987, 306). Until the Great Fire of 1666, the name of the street declared who lived there and what they did for their living. London literature has always capitalized on its topographical denotation. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (1380s) begins with a local London setting with some of the characters defined by their London addresses or predilections. The pilgrims start their journey from the Tabard, a coaching inn in Southwark, just over the Thames at the end of London Bridge. The travelers include the Man of Law, “That often hadde been at the Parvys” (2008, l. 310), or Paul’s Walk, the porch of St. Paul’s Cathedral; the cook, who well knew “a draughte of Londoun ale” (l. 382); the good parson who did not set “his benefice to hyre / And leet his sheep encombred in the myre / And [run] to Londoun unto Seinte Poules / To seken hym a chaunterie for soules” (ll. 507–510); and of course Harry Bailey, the host of this “gentil hostelrye” in “Southwerk,” that “highte the Tabard, faste by the Belle” (ll. 718–719), of whom, they say, “A fairer burgeys was ther noon in Chepe” (l. 754). Locating a building near another recognizable landmark (close by the Bell) and fixing a character by his place (a burgher in the wealthy market district of Cheapside, a lawyer in St. Paul’s, or for that matter a parson anywhere in London) would become a solid tradition from the fifteenth century to the present. Even in the London 343 vastly more populous, more fluid, more multicultural twenty‐first century London, Holborn, Bloomsbury, Knightsbridge, Islington, Mayfair, Hackney, Deptford, Croydon, Greenwich all retain something of a distinctive flavor, a social and cultural identity. Underlying English literature from its earliest days is the sense that London, by the very nature of its streets, can shape a narrative. The medieval romance The Historie of Bevis of Hampton (ca. 1300), rewritten and republished many times through the suc ceeding centuries, and particularly popular in the sixteenth through the eighteenth, includes in its final episode “one of the most striking depictions of London as a contained area” (Hanna 2011, 26). Sir Bevis sails back to Southampton from foreign parts with his many knights, and ends up waging battle in the streets of the commercial district with King Edgar’s scheming steward, Sir Brian: “Then sir Brian forth went he, and made a cry through the Citie, / … Then were the gates lockt, windowes and dores fast stopt, / Chaines drawne in euery stréet, to let sir Beuis you may wéet [know]” (Historie 1620, I2v). Sir Brian employs all the urban techniques to catch and thwart common thieves: putting out the “hue and cry” to alert all street passengers, closing the city gates, and drawing up the chains installed in the streets. Bevis on his horse Arundel is beset, and has little room to maneuver. Nevertheless, he “rode forth to Broad‐stréet, many Lumberds [bankers, money‐changers] did he méete, / They assailed Beuis wondrous fast, on euery side he downe them cast” (I2v), and on to Cheapside, the central market area. Bevis was starting to get the worst of it, when, just in time, his 10 000 trusty knights arrived by boat on the Thames to Ludgate. And then, well, goodness, what a fight: “So many men were dead, that Cheapeside was of blood read,” what with all the hacked heads, shanks, hands, and arms “tumbling aloft” (I3v). This is an adventure determined by its specifically London urban space of merchants, shops, city walls and gates, chained streets, and river access. Chivalric battle gestures are constricted and compressed, until the mercantile compressors are hacked to pieces. “For the author of Bevis of Hamtoun, London is no place for a nobleman, and its citizens are only upstart irritants” (Hanna 2011, 27). The abbreviated and symbolic references in Chaucer and Bevis of Hampton prolifer ated into a kind of urban self‐fascination in the Renaissance, in epigrams, joke books, cony‐catching pamphlets, and Jacobean city comedies that Lawrence Manley argues emerged from and negotiated the “terrifying and unknowable world of material and social profusion” produced by the neofeudal urbanization of sixteenth‐century London (1995, 418). The literature of London continued with the topographically defined character types. The English Rogue (1665) by Richard Head comes straight out of the earlier London literature of John Heywood and Thomas Nashe and Thomas Greene in playing with existing denotative aspects of street names, but it is also a transitional work. Its burst of printing popularity after the Great Fire of 1666, which levelled three‐fourths of the old City in three days, is part of a decades‐long literary investment in recreating the lost London. When the inhabitants returned to rebuild the city, cen turies‐old neighborhoods shifted or evaporated; trades relocated; the medieval street names lost their denotative moorings, and the next 50 years witnessed much new lit erature invested in reviving the street names and familiar buildings in poems, plays, and protonovels (see Wall 1998). The subtitle of The English Rogue promises edification about “the most eminent cheats of both sexes” who work the streets with intimate glee. Its protagonist, Meriton 344 Cynthia Wall

Latroon, comes to London as a young man and practices the arts of begging, conning, and stealing. His fortunes (and misfortunes) are determined – and inflected – by the fixed names of the streets; so long as he reads those names correctly, he’ll do just fine. Begging in the pleasure grounds of Moorfields (Head 1665, 61) becomes just another game in the list of “leaping, dancing, shooting, wrestling, casting the stone, and practicing their shields” (Stow 1987, 85) that scandalized seventeenth‐century min isters. Lincoln’s Inn Fields, home to lawyers (think Mr. Tulkinghorn in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House [1852–1853]), finds Latroon in the “company of Rogues, cheats, Pickpockets, &c.” (Head 1666, 66). Cheapside, the long, prosperous, commercial street that Sir Bevis laid to waste, turns on Latroon for stealing a loin of veal, and kicks him from one end to the other – “the Gantlet from the Standard in Cheapside to the conduit at the lower end thereof” (70). The whole point is to know the city inside out, and as an apparently penitent rogue, Latroon shares his knowledge with the fine upstanding citizens of his city: “[I]f you are robbed in the eastern quarter, pursue them not in the direct Road to London with Hue and Cry, for by some other way they are fled; but haste to the City, and in Westminster, Holborn, the Strand and Covent‐Garden search speedily, for there they are” (52). If we know the streets, their habits, inhabitants, and meanings, the city is ours. The city narratives of London light up the shadowed under world that coexists with the respectable London superimposed upon it.

London and Its Genres

London has stamped itself on a variety of genres, from historical novels to mysteries to Gothic to science fiction and fantasy to the literary bases for the Notting Hill films of the 1990s. From as early as the eighteenth century London’s past has generated plots. Daniel Defoe set A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) in 1665, the year of the Great Plague, and Roxana (1724) in the seventeenth century. In 1848–1849, George Herbert Rodwell, the Director of Music at Covent Garden Theatre, published Old London Bridge: A Romance of the Sixteenth Century, a Dickensian sort of novel (absorbing, funny, sentimental), which tells the famous (and more or less true) story of Anne Hewet and Edward Osborne. William Hewet (or Hewett), clothworker (later Lord Mayor of London and knighted), and his family lived on Old London Bridge. When a servant accidentally drops his little daughter Anne from a window into the Thames, young Edward the apprentice rescues her; they later marry, with her father’s blessing, even though Anne is courted by an earl. (Edward also becomes Lord Mayor in due course.) The characters are intertwined in the turbulent affairs of Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Thomas Cromwell, and the London historian and topographer John Stow. The setting revisits the bridge when it was a village, a street across the Thames flanked by houses and shops, before the houses were torn down between 1757 and 1762. The novel opens under an engraving of the great houses on the bridge, and comes complete with historical footnotes:

In the street of the Bridge – OLD LONDON BRIDGE – upon the afternoon of May‐day, 1536, not a shop door was to be seen without its little knot of gossips, laying their heads together in a vain endeavour to solve some important mystery; every window that would* open was occupied by two or three, or more heads … London 345

* In those days, most of the windows, unless in the houses of the great, were features much to the encouragement of plagues and other fatal diseases. (Rodwell 1888, 1)

The bridge was a microcosm of the city, and the novel cleverly makes use of its particular perspective looking up and down the river:

All London soon became fully aware of the strange scene which had taken place during the tournament at Greenwich [the arrest of Queen Anne Boleyn’s brother and friends], and every house upon the eastern side of the old bridge, had its windows, and in many places its roof also, crowded with persons anxiously awaiting the return of those fatal barges, which seldom left the Tower but to revisit it, bearing some doomed victim of Henry [VIII]’s vengeance. (33)

The novel describes the houses, the streets, the clothes, and the (bloody) temper of the city. The bridge, in being the only entry into London from the south until the eighteenth century, had a major symbolic role. With its views in every direction, the microcosmic city on the bridge provides a central focal point for the city itself. Historical fiction, popularly launched by Walter Scott early in the nineteenth century, flourished in the twentieth, and among the historical London novels, two examples overlap with the genre of detective fiction. In 1944, Lillian de la Torre intro duced Dr. Sam: Johnson, Detector, a series admired by the likes of Julian Symons and Ellery Queen, starring the great eighteenth‐century critic and lexicographer Samuel Johnson and his Watsonian sidekick James Boswell. De la Torre also painstakingly recreated the London of her chosen past. In one episode, Johnson and Boswell visit the famous Vauxhall Gardens, where they “strolled in the verdant allees, admired Roubiliac’s statue of Handel while listening to his musick, took a syllabub, heard the nightingales sing, and came away by moonlight well pleased with [their] entertainment” (1987, 16). More recently, Peter Ackroyd, rather like Dickens and Defoe, has become a London‐ novel industry in himself, with titles such as The Great Fire of London (1982), The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde (1983), Hawksmoor (1985), Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem (1994), The Mystery of Charles Dickens (2000), The Clerkenwell Tales (2003), and The Lambs of London (2004), not to mention his nonfiction on London authors Blake, Dickens, and T. S. Eliot, as well as on London itself: London: The Biography (2000), Illustrated London (2003), Thames: Sacred River (2007), and London Under (2011). Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor is a historical fiction that plays with the conventions of histor ical fiction by its dual setting in the eighteenth and twentieth centuries; it is detective fiction that plays with the conventions of detective fiction by dismantling the temporal sequence of investigation; and it is a sort of postmodern Gothic fiction in its fascina tion with the haunted and the macabre. Nicholas Dyer is an early eighteenth‐century architect who builds seven churches in the East End of London under the direction of Sir Christopher Wren; Nicholas Hawksmoor (who bears the name of an eighteenth‐ century architect who built six churches in London) is a 1980s detective investigating murders around the churches built by Dyer. Dyer’s voice comes straight out of the eighteenth century, including his description of the signs of plague on his mother, “small knobs of flesh as broad as a little silver Peny, which were the Tokens of the Contagion” (Ackroyd 1985, 14) – Defoe’s narrator H. F., in A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), defines the “Tokens” of the plague as “mortified Flesh in small Knobs as broad 346 Cynthia Wall as a silver Peny” (Defoe 2003, 188). (Ackroyd spent six months in the British Library reading eighteenth‐century texts to get the vocabulary and spelling right.) Dyer has had “so many Dwellings” that he “know[s] these Streets as well as a strowling Beggar”: “When first I was with Sir Chris. I found lodgings in Phenix Street off Hogg Lane, close by St Giles and Tottenham Fields, and then in later times I was lodged at the corner of Queen Street and Thames Street, next to the Blew Posts in Cheapside” (Ackroyd 1985, 47). Ackroyd’s first novel, The Great Fire of London, is set in the twen tieth century, around one Spenser Spender’s attempt to film Dickens’s Little Dorrit (a London novel) in and around a London prison, but it ends with a fire, the description of which slides into seventeenth‐century allusion:

It destroyed much that was false and ugly, and much that was splendid or beautiful. Some longed for it to burn everything, but for others a new and disquieting sense of impermanence entered their lives. Eventually, legends were to grow around it. It was popularly believed to have been a visitation, a prophecy of yet more terrible things to come. (1982, 165)

This paragraph encapsulates the response and rhetoric of the Great Fire of 1666, calling up the ghosts of clergymen prophesying doom, of diarists John Evelyn and Samuel Pepys in the concept of rebuilding, of the thousands of inhabitants returning to the city to find the street names no longer reliably denoted a trade or a neighbor hood, but rather a “disquieting sense of impermanence.” Mysteries, crime fiction, and the Gothic almost have a stranglehold on London. A simple search on the website of Foyles (the great London bookshop at Charing Cross Road) offers under “contemporary crime fiction” John Mortimer’s The Rumpole Omnibus (1984), Barbara Vine’s (Ruth Rendell’s) King Solomon’s Carpet (1991), and P. D. James’s The Murder Room (2003); and under “historical London crime fiction,” works by Margery Allingham, Dorothy Sayers, and Arthur Conan Doyle. Throw in Wilkie Collins, Agatha Christie, P. G. Wodehouse, Ngaio Marsh, Christopher Fowler, Peter Lovesey, John Dickson Carr, Julian Symons, Sarah Caudwell, Minette Walters, and Robert Galbraith (aka You Know Who), and we’re still missing dozens of well‐known and well‐loved London mystery writers. Is it the fog? The “London particular” or “London fog” of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries combined the coal smoke from the chimneys with the mists from the Thames. In Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), the narrator describes “the first fog of the season”:

A great chocolate‐coloured pall lowered over heaven, but the wind was continually charging and routing these embattled vapours; so that as the cab crawled from street to street, Mr Utterson beheld a marvellous number of degrees and hues of twilight; for here it would be dark like the back‐end of evening; and there would be a glow of a rich, lurid brown, like the light of some strange conflagration; and here, for a moment, the fog would be quite broken up, and a haggard shaft of daylight would glance in between the swirling wreaths. The dismal quarter of Soho seen under these changing glimpses, with its muddy ways, and slatternly passengers, and its lamps, which had never been extin guished or had been kindled afresh to combat this mournful reinvasion of darkness, seemed, in the lawyer’s eyes, like a district of some city in a nightmare. (2002, 23) London 347

The London of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes is in everyone’s mind swirling with damp fog, but actually there are very few references, and those are rather patchy, as in A Study in Scarlet (1887), where, on a “foggy, cloudy morning” a “dun‐coloured veil hung over the house‐tops, looking like the reflection of the mud‐coloured streets below” (2007, 29). In the case of Sherlock Holmes, the literary London address of 221B Baker Street and the specific but occasional street and building references have been taken over and amplified by London itself (the Bakerloo tube station, the museum, the pubs and plaques); the Abbey National Building Society, which occupied the premises from 1932 until 2002, “still receiv[ed] letters asking Holmes for help with insoluble mysteries” (Weinreb and Hibbert 1983, 34). Fog helps, of course, for the generic atmospheres of crime and horror, but, as we have already seen, the London atmosphere emanates just as much from the particular geo graphy of the city, its warren of lanes and courts in the east, its squares and mansions in the west, the pleasures and perils of Covent Garden and Soho. The Gothic powers of London’s streets are prefigured as early as Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year. When the narrator, H. F., is on one of his gruesome perambulations, checking the pulse of the city, he records the growing, haunting emptiness, where “the great Streets within the City, such as Leaden‐hall‐Street, Bishopgate‐Street, Cornhill, and even the Exchange it self, had Grass growing in them” (2003, 98), and “Doors were left open, Windows stood shattering with the Wind in empty Houses, for want of People to shut them” (164). At the height of the plague, H. F. is particularly struck by the uncanniness of emptiness:

Passing thro’ Token‐House‐Yard in Lothbury, of a sudden a Casement violently opened just over my Head, and a Woman gave three frightful Skreetches, and then cry’d, Oh! Death, Death, Death! in a most inimitable Tone, and which struck me with Horror and a Chilness, in my very Blood. There was no Body to be seen in the whole Street, neither did any other Window open; for People had no Curiosity now in any Case; nor could any Body help one another; so I went on to pass into Bell‐Alley. (79)

Like all of Defoe’s characters, H. F. knows his London well – so well, that the very knownness of the streets makes their changed emptiness more horrifying, turned into the unknown. The network of streets is as critical in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, published in 1897, as it was in The English Rogue of 1665 and A Journal of the Plague Year in 1722. As Gill Davies points out:

the extensive movement that we find in the novel (from the provinces, across Europe, from America) is all to and from London, the “world city” … . Dracula threatens to consume its blood and cut off the circulation of its capital. Although he is linked to the East End and the moral panics associated with it, Dracula is at his most dangerous in the West End. (2004)

From Arthur Holmwood’s hotel in the west (the Albemarle in Piccadilly) to Dr. Seward’s asylum at Purfleet in the east, and Lucy’s move from the address in Chatham Street, Southwark, to Hillingham, the family home near Hampstead Heath in the north, not to mention Harrods and the wolf in Regent’s Park Zoo, London is circumferenced by Dracula’s interest. He knows his London Directory by heart (Stoker 2011, 22). 348 Cynthia Wall

Variations on the formula of narratively turning the known into the unknown characterize the science fiction and fantasy fictions of London. In Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty‐Four, Winston Smith finds himself in Mr. Charrington’s surprising little shop, full of things from a dimly remembered past, including an engraving of a vaguely familiar building – the church of St. Clement Danes. In the middle of the Strand, between Aldwych and the Royal Courts of Justice, St. Clement Danes has always been a prominent London icon, not least because of the nursery rhyme associ ated with it, repeated by Mr. Charrington: “‘Oranges and lemons’, say the bells of St. Clement’s!” (2003, 112). (The rhyme ends in words that will later ricochet back to Winston with a vengeance: “Here comes a candle to light you to bed, Here comes a chopper to chop off your head” [240].) Like a Londoner in the 1670s, Winston is drawn to the rare bits of the past still poking through the grim efficient waste of the present. Anything old suggests difference, and anything different must be better. Hence the government’s relentless campaign to efface the past, either by destroying it or by rewriting it:

Winston wondered vaguely to what century the church belonged. It was always difficult to determine the age of a London building. Anything large and impressive, if it was reasonably new in appearance, was automatically claimed as having been built since the Revolution, while anything that was obviously of earlier dates was ascribed to some dim period called the Middle Ages. (112)

Winston and the shopkeeper go on to talk about other churches – St. Martin in the Fields, for instance – and the song settles into Winston’s mind: “It was curious, but when you said it to yourself you had the illusion of actually hearing bells, the bells of a lost London that still existed somewhere or other, disguised and forgotten. From one ghostly steeple after another he seemed to hear them pealing forth. Yet so far as he could remember he had never in real life heard church bells ringing” (114). He is rather like John Evelyn, walking through the ruins of London, where no one could “have possibly knowne where he was, but by the ruine of some church, or hall, that had some remarkable towre or pinacle remaining” (Evelyn 1955, 3: 461 [September 7, 1666]). Or rather, Nineteen Eighty‐Four creates for the reader a new, unknown London palimpsest, through which is occasionally glimpsed the disconcertingly familiar ruin of a church, a tower, a glass paperweight, a “pinnacle remaining.” John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids (1951) inhabits 1950s London and watches it disintegrate – unfamiliarity taking over – after a strange green meteor shower (“thousands of people … out in the parks and on the Heath [watch] it all” [2000, 6]), while Bill Masen remains in hospital with bandaged eyes and ends up as one of the few remaining sighted people in the world. Millions of blind humans become vulnerable to the triffids – deadly walking plants created originally in a laboratory to solve the world’s oil crisis. Masen has an H. F. moment when in the silent city he hears a girl’s voice singing through an open window:

“Yet we’ll go no more a‐roving / By the light of the moon.” … The song finished. The notes of the piano died away. Then there was a sound of sobbing. … I went quietly back into the street, seeing it only mistily for awhile. (2000, 42) London 349

Masen knows his city well, and, as with any good Defoe character, that knowledge helps him survive. His first choice, when out of the hospital, is to move “Londonwards”: “To this day I cannot say why. Perhaps it was an instinct to seek familiar places, or the feeling that if there were authority anywhere it must be somewhere in that direction” (40). He knows that Clerkenwell is the place to go for anti‐triffid weapons (he used to work with triffids, in their early helpful years) (64–65); he navigates Piccadilly and Soho and Shaftesbury Avenue and locates the new center of authority in “University Building” off Gower Street – the 1930s Senate House of the University of London, which is also the model for the Ministry of Truth in Nineteen Eighty‐Four – “an enormous pyramidal struc ture of glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, three hundred metres into the air” (Orwell 2003, 6). (Senate House is not exactly 300 meters, but it was 1930s moderne, the tallest building in London at the time, and, during the Second World War, the Ministry of Information – or propaganda.) Russell Square becomes for a time the center of the novel, while Westminster, center of government, becomes where “[t]he deadness, the finish of it all, was italicized” (Wyndham 2000, 127). Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, comprising some 40 novels published from 1983 to 2013, features a city named Ankh‐Morpork, sprawling on both sides of the polluted river Ankh (so thick an agnostic could walk over it), founded thousands of years ago by twin brothers raised by a hippopotamus (as Romulus and Remus were raised by a wolf), which was once the center of a sprawling empire and which once had a king who was beheaded by some distinctly Cromwellian sorts, the descendant of whom, Captain Sam Vimes, runs the City Watch, or the local police, headquarters Pseudopolis Yard. It’s a brilliant London, literarily sedimented out of Elizabethan, eighteenth‐century, and Victorian history and culture, with its Cockney (Cut‐Me‐Own‐Throat Dibbler and Gaspode, the dirty little dog) and its aristocracy (Lord Vetinari and Lady Sybil), and its nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century episodes of new technologies (the telegraph, the submarine, the “gonne,” motion pictures, rock music, sexual equality, race relations, and ethnic diversity). Greater Ankh‐Morpork has its Globe Theatre, its pubs, its university (perhaps the Tower of Art is yet another version of Senate House?). And unlike the skyscrapers of New York or the gleaming stone of Paris, Ankh‐Morpork has a skyline rather like that of … nineteenth‐century London, as Carrot Ironfoundersson (six‐foot tall dwarf‐by‐adoption, soon to be a captain in the City Watch) experiences when he first makes his way to the city in Guards! Guards! (1989):

And now Ankh‐Morpork was before him. It was a little disappointing. He’d expected high white towers rearing over the landscape, and flags. Ankh‐Morpork didn’t rear. Rather, it sort of skulked, clinging to the soil as if afraid someone might steal it. There were no flags. (Pratchett 1989, 31)

London in Pieces

This chapter has already flung London in pieces, with bits of streets and buildings and scenes and times and authors and characters and genres flapping all over the place. But just as structure, narration, character, and affect are pieces of the novel, so London can provide structure, shape narration, behave as character, and induce affect inside a novel. 350 Cynthia Wall

In Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722), the usually criminal protagonist is a walking A to Z, a granddaughter of sixteenth‐ and seventeenth‐century rogue narrators. She may not do much in the way of describing buildings or persons (or even giving names to her nearest and dearest), but she can pinpoint her location and route with GPS precision. Moll is a woman thrown on her own resources, and as options are few for single women in the early eighteenth century, in order to avoid starvation she takes, quite successfully in fact, to stealing. For the most part she finds in her exhaustive cartographic knowledge of London’s streets sources of refuge and routes of escape, but in her most memorable topographic chase scene, after she has stolen a gold necklace from a little girl and briefly thinks of killing her, Moll’s horrified run unwittingly describes a semicircle around the place she most dreads – “Newgate; that horrid place!” (2011, 228) – Newgate Prison, where she was born, where her mother died, where thieves are sent before being executed or transported:

I took [the child] by the Hand and led it a long till I came to a pav’d Alley that goes into Bartholomew Close, and I led it in there … [The] Devil put me upon killing the Child in the dark Alley, that it might not Cry; but the very thought frighted me so that I was ready to drop down … and I went thro’ into Bartholomew Close, and then turn’d round to another Passage that goes into Long‐lane, so away into Charterhouse‐Yard and out into St. John’s‐street, then crossing into Smithfield, went down Chick‐lane and into Field‐lane to Holbourne‐bridge, when mixing with the Crowd of People usually passing there, it was not possible to have been found out. (162)

This route describes a path that at its beginning and end is equidistant from Newgate Prison. We are given every detail, corner by corner, invited into a simultaneously temporal and physical line of movement; where Moll runs – where Moll maps her London route – foreshadows where Moll will end up (for a time) – in Newgate Prison. In Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925), London is very much part of the narra tive patterns. The sights and sounds of the London streets reverberate through Clarissa Dalloway’s consciousness and throughout the day, as in the striking of Big Ben: “There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air … [This] was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June” (1981, 4). These leaden circles dissolve in air throughout the minds of the different characters moving in different parts of London at the same time. The large motorcar with the drawn blinds, which might be carrying the Queen, “left a slight ripple which flowed through glove shops and hat shops and tailors’ shops on both sides of Bond Street” (17). The individual instances of a London day – the aeroplane over Buckingham Palace and Green Park and Greenwich and St. Pauls, the cloud over the sun, the flower shop – draw the narration simulta neously through streets and minds and in their “surface agitation” graze “something very profound” (18). The sentences stroll through topographical paragraphs; language itself is a flaneur. London as a whole or in parts can function as a character as well. We’ve seen it skulking, “clinging to the soil as if afraid someone might steal it,” in Pratchett (1989, 31); in Dickens’s Bleak House (which begins with the simple single word: “London”), London 351 the city’s darkest corner, Tom‐all‐alone’s, an evil rookery in St. Giles, is its own living, anthropomorphized darkness:

The blackest nightmare in the infernal stables grazes on Tom‐all‐alone’s, and Tom is fast asleep. Much mighty speech‐making there has been, both in and out of Parliament, concerning Tom, and much wrathful disputation how Tom shall be got right … And in the hopeful meantime, Tom goes to perdition head foremost in his old determined spirit. But he has his revenge. Even the winds are his messengers, and they serve him in these hours of darkness. There is not a drop of Tom’s corrupted blood but propagates infection and contagion somewhere. (Dickens 1996, 654–655)

The poverty and disease virulently represented by Tom‐all‐alone’s infects the rest of the plot, through the vagrant Jo’s testimony at the inquest of Lady Dedlock’s first husband, to his infecting Esther Summerson with smallpox, to his excruciatingly affecting death scene. As Rosemarie Bodenheimer argues, although Dickens’s London is most commonly associated with these “images of dense, sooty fog, or labyrinthine courts and alleys, his narrative strategies were more largely and innovatively connected with his experiences of the city from the perspective of a peripatetic journalist” – pre cisely as Walter Bagehot accused him. “It was Dickens,” says Bodenheimer, “who discovered how to blend his intimate walking knowledge of the city with fictional techniques that would create London on the page from a variety of perspectives” (2011, 142). Or, as Bagehot said, “As we change from the broad leader to the squalid police‐report, we pass a corner and are in a changed world” (1858, 468). The London of Dickens’s novels itself performs the novelistic functions of structure, plot, narra tion, and character. And affect, in the broad sense of the kinds of emotional and physiological responses that novels often seek to evoke in readers, is also something London can produce in its characters. In Frances Burney’s epistolary novel Evelina (1778), for example, the young heroine appeals to her guardian, the venerable and protective Reverend Mr. Villars, to let her go to London with the family she is visiting, the Mirvans, with an artlessly artful rhetoric of may‐I‐please‐but‐only‐if‐you‐really‐mean‐it:

They tell me that London is now in full splendour. Two Play‐houses are open, – the Opera‐ House, – Ranelagh, – the Pantheon. – You see I have learned all their names. However, pray don’t suppose that I make any point of going, for I shall hardly sigh to see them depart without me; though I shall probably never meet with such another opportunity. (2002, 25)

Her first letter after arriving in London is headed “Queen‐Ann‐Street” (an elegant street in Marylebone, built in 1723 and variously inhabited by Edmund Burke, James Boswell, J. M. W. Turner, and Hector Berlioz) and declares how she and her bosom friend Miss Mirvan have not yet had time to “Londonize” themselves (2002, 26; Burney’s coining). She is thrilled to see David Garrick, the celebrated Shakespearean actor, on the stage; and as seeing Garrick is a quintessentially “Londonizing” 352 Cynthia Wall experience, we may say that its affect is captured in the shy, diffident, countrified Evelina’s emblematic response: “I almost wished to have jumped on the stage and joined them” (27). As, indeed, she figuratively does: as the subtitle of this novel announces, this “young lady’s entrance into the world” is defined and structured by her entrance into London. If we think of affect as “grounded in movements or flashes of mental or somatic activity rather than causal narratives of their origins and end points” (Figlerowicz 2012, 4), then I can’t resist going back to the mental and somatic activity of Sam Vimes as he contemplates his city:

[I]t was early morning in Ankh‐Morpork, oldest and greatest and grubbiest of cities. A thin drizzle dripped from the grey sky and punctuated the river mist that coiled among the streets … And drunken Captain Vimes of the Night Watch staggered slowly down the street, folded gently into the gutter outside the Watch House and lay there while, above him, strange letters made of light sizzled in the damp and changed colour … The city wasa, wasa, wasa wossname. Thing. Woman. Thass what it was. Woman. Roaring, ancient, centuries old. Strung you along, let you fall in thingy, love, with her, then kicked you inna, inna, thingy. Thingy, in your mouth. Tongue. Tonsils. Teeth. That’s what it, she, did. She wasa … thing, you know, lady dog. Puppy. Hen. Bitch. And then you hated her, and just when you thought you’d got her, it, out of your, your, whatever, then she opened her great booming rotten heart to you, caught you off bal, bal, bal, thing. Ance. Yeah. Thassit. Never knew where you stood. Lay. Only thing you were sure of, you couldn’t let her go. Because, because she was yours, all you had, even in her gut ters. (Pratchett 1989, 7–8)

We might paraphrase Philip Fisher’s argument on affect (see Figlerowicz 2012, 4) to say that Captain Vimes’s passion for the city is the reason why he finds that social insti tution fulfilling, and that as Captain of the Watch he finds the institution of the city useful because it helps restrain passion’s destructive potential (after all, Lord Vetinari established the Thieves’ and Assassins’ Guilds in order to regulate their activities). Or, as Terry Pratchett might say, we might not.

London in Circulation

Characters walking the streets, stream‐of‐consciousness narration, and fog, all offer some aspect of novelistic circulations in London. We can add the worlds of print, disease, and rumor to the list. As Adrian Johns argues more generally, by the seven teenth century, the world of print – “markets, modes of publishing, genres, audi ences, literary sensibilities, reading practices – all these and more came into being as aspects of London life, and in turn London life was transformed by them” (2011, 50). Defoe deploys the worlds of print genres in A Journal of the Plague Year; self‐described as a “journal,” or a private retrospective memoir of daily life in 1665 London, it opens with a comparative historical glance: “We had no such thing as printed News Papers in those Days, to spread Rumours and Reports of Things” (2003, 3), but the novel gathers everything else it can lay its hands on, from the weekly Bills of London 353

Mortality, that record of who died, where, and of what, to the “ORDERS Conceived and Published by the Lord Mayor and Aldermen of the City of London, concerning the Infection of the Plague. 1665” (38). Official and unofficial forms of print are bound into the narrative as ballast against the swirling rumors – and yet the official docu ments often prove just as unreliable as the quacks’ advertisements. The ebb and flow of rumors and information follows the ebb and flow of the plague, and the circulation of H. F. in tracking the plague and seeking out its horrors in the streets is matched by the circularity of his narration. There is nothing straightforward about the Journal – and that is part of its formal fascination. Like Dickens’s London, every thing is there, and everything is disconnected. H. F. begins one story only to drop it for another, yet he always returns to his first story as he always returns to his own street. This death‐ridden London draws him out into its desolated spaces and sends him scurrying back home. Filth‐ridden London is what dismays Matthew Bramble in Smollett’s 1771 Humphry Clinker – the filth and the various things circulating there: steams, smoke, noise, and corruption. After describing his clean air, clean food, and clean life at Bramble Hall in the countryside, he writes to his friend Dr. Lewes to complain about the noise, the food, the water:

Now mark the contrast at London … If I would drink water, I must quaff the maukish contents of an open aqueduct, exposed to all manner of defilement; or swallow that which comes from the River Thames, impregnated with all the filth of London and Westminster. Human excrement is the least offensive part of the concrete, which is composed of all the drugs, minerals, and poisons, used in mechanicks and manufacture, enriched with the putrefying carcases of beasts and men; and mixed with the scourings of all the wash‐tubs, kennels, and common sewers, within the bills of mortality. (1984, 119–120)

In George Gissing’s novels, such as New Grub Street (1891) and The Odd Women (1893), the endless cycle is Sisyphusian labor. London is “a place where millions of people toil endlessly and hopelessly in an attempt, never realised, to achieve some sort of peace, relief, or pleasure” (Bodenheimer 2011, 155). Print and rumors and dirt circulate in the London of Evelyn Waugh’s satire of modern journalism, Scoop (1938), while traffic stalls:

East wind swept the street, carrying with it the exhaust gas of a hundred motors and coarse particles of Regency stucco from a once decent Nash façade that was being demol ished across the way … From Hyde Park Corner to Piccadilly Circus the line of traffic was continuous and motionless, still as a photograph, unbroken and undisturbed save at a few strategic corners where barricaded navvies, like desperate outposts of some prole tarian defence, were rending the road with mechanical drills, mining for the wires and tubes that controlled the life of the city. (2003, 9–10)

But it is precisely the sensation of moving in London traffic that gives Will Freeman, in Nick Hornby’s About a Boy (1998), the illusion that he is doing something:

He loved driving around London. He loved the traffic, which allowed him to believe he was a man in a hurry and offered him rare opportunities for frustration and anger 354 Cynthia Wall

(other people did things to let off steam, but Will had to do things to build it up); he loved knowing his way around; he loved being swallowed up in the flow of the city’s life. (142)

More than even the fog, the news, the rumors, the dirt, or the vehicles, perhaps the most distinctive feature of the London novel is the way the characters roam the streets – from Meriton Latroon to Moll Flanders to Mr. Hyde to Dracula to Clarissa Dalloway to William Masen to Sam Vines to Will Freeman. They want to turn the corner and find the changed world.

Public and Private

Another constant feature of novelistic London is its particular agility in supplying overlapping public and private spaces, urbanity and domesticity, refuge and betrayal, in the very nature of its streets. In Defoe’s Roxana (1724), the plot often depends on the heroine knowing the streets to achieve publicity or shield herself in privacy; in Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1747–1748), the plot often depends on the heroine not knowing the streets, mistakenly believing the private to be private. In Denis Mackail’s Greenery Street (1925), the blissful young couple Ian and Felicity Foster find a private Eden in the novelistic recreation of Mackail’s own first married home at 23 Walpole Street in Chelsea, while the very self‐deprecating, muddly, but shrewdly satirical nov elist narrator in E. M. Delafield’s The Provincial Lady in London (1933) discovers the peculiarity of its literary, artistic, and social worlds from her flat in Doughty Street. London is a both/and world, if you know where you are. Defoe’s Roxana, an enterprising and entrepreneurial beauty, decides to capitalize on appearances – both of self and of address – to replenish her waning fortunes, after the disappearance and death of various husbands and vice‐husbands. She moves into large apartments in Pall Mall – a very posh and public street – which has “a private Door into the King’s Garden, by the permission of the Chief Gardener, who had liv’d in the House” (1996, 164). She throws a lavish ball, starring herself dancing alone in a sump tuous Turkish dress, which earns her the gasping approval of her audience and the name “Roxana” (173–176). The private back door to the garden proves convenient because the king (as she hints but does not declare), masked, had attended the ball and they begin a three‐year secret liaison in a “most glorious Retreat” (182). But the incon venience of that very public ball is that one of her discarded children, Susan, had been there as well, as one of the servants. Susan begins to suspect Roxana may be her mother, and starts Asking Questions. Roxana, who has no desire to reconnect with her off spring, goes into hiding disguised as a Quaker lady, taking lodgings with a genuine Quaker lady in a “House in a Court in the Minories” (210):

I was now in a perfect Retreat indeed; remote from the Eyes of all that ever had seen me, and as much out of the way of being ever see or heard‐of by any of the Gang that us’d to follow me, as if I had been among the Mountains in Lancashire; for when did a Blue Garter, or a Coach‐and‐Six come into a little narrow passage in the Minories, or Goodman’s‐ Fields? (Defoe 1996, 211) London 355

As Bagehot said of Dickens’s London, “we pass a corner and are in a changed world.” Neighborhoods, for the most part, do not enter other neighborhoods. Or when they do, they are the stuff of London fiction. Richardson’s young, beautiful, dutiful, and unexpectedly strong‐willed Clarissa is also hunted down in the streets – and much more successfully, because of her own extremely limited and limiting knowledge of London. Her suitor Lovelace has spirited her away from her family, who were forcing her to marry a very rich but revolting man. Lovelace pretends he wants to marry her (and sometimes he really does), but what he really wants is to seduce her. The best place for that, he thinks, is in London, but he artfully engineers it so it seems to be her idea – she thinks she will be safe in the crowd. Of the several lodgings his friend “Thomas Doleman” obligingly describes, the embedded description of a house in “Dover Street” is finely calculated to draw her interest:

You may have good accommodations in Dover Street, at a widow’s, the relict of an officer in the guards … She rents two good houses, distant from each other, only joined by a large handsome passage. The inner house is the genteelest, and is very elegantly fur nished; but you may have the use of a very handsome parlour in the outer house, if you choose to look into the street. (1985, 469)

Beware the “inner” house, the secret London; as her friend Anna Howe eventually discovers:

you are certainly in a devilish house! – Be assured that the woman is one of the vilest of women! – nor does she go to you by her right name – Very true – her name is not Sinclair – nor is the street she lives in, Dover Street – Did you never go out by yourself, and discharge the coach or chair, and return by another coach or chair? (744)

But Lovelace intercepts Anna’s letters, and Clarissa is trapped in the inner house, eventually drugged and raped. Then again, the private and public streets of London can behave benevolently as well. Greenery Street is its own smiling, conscious character, and transmits images of its perfect terrace houses to its prospective young married couples – “of two rows of symmetrical doorsteps, of first‐floor French windows which opened on to diminutive balconies, of a sunny little street with scarlet omnibuses roaring past one end and a vista of trees seen facing the other” (Mackail 2009, 42) – until:

[the] inevitable. By hook or by crook, 16, Greenery Street has got to be theirs. [In this case, Ian’s and Felicity’s.] They can’t describe what it is that has attracted them; they would even find some difficulty in describing to a third party how the house is planned. They just know – as thousands of other couples have known in the past and will know in the future – that they have found the place where they are going to live … “It isn’t only that it’s so perfect in itself,” [Felicity] says, “but it’s so frightfully get‐aboutable‐from.” (52–53)

As is the Provincial Lady’s new flat, via bus No. 19, in Doughty Street, 356 Cynthia Wall

where Rose informs me that Charles Dickens once lived. She adds impressively she thinks, but is not sure, that Someone‐or‐other was born at a house in Theobald’s Road, close by. Brisk discussion as to relative merits of pronouncing this as “Theobald” or “Tibbald” brings us to the door of the flat. (42–43)

(Dorothy Sayers lived in nearby Great James Street, 1921–1929.) After a depressing afternoon in a Bloomsbury tea shop, the Provincial Lady consoles herself:

Remember with immense satisfaction that I lunch to‐morrow at Boulestin’s with charm ing Viscountess, and indulge in reflections concerning strange contrasts offered by Life: cold pork and stale bun in Theobald’s Road on Tuesday, and lobster and poire Hélène – (I hope) – at Boulestin’s on Wednesday. Hope and believe with all my heart that similar startling dissimilarity will be observable in nature of company and conversation. (133)

Once again “we pass a corner and are in a changed world.” Hers is a happy, exciting, often uncomfortable, but always vivid London. The Provincial Lady is a middle‐aged Evelina – diffident, rueful, embarrassment‐prone, invariably kind and devastatingly satiric; both need London to effect their Entrance into the World.

World London

According to the 2012 report of the Globalization and World Cities Research Network (GaWC), London and New York are the only two cities rated Alpha++ because they are “vastly more integrated with the global economy than all other cities.” London has always been a world city, in one way or another. As Mr. Spectator put it, in Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s Spectator papers (1711–1712), as he admires the Royal Exchange in London:

There is no Place in the Town which I so much love to frequent as the Royal‐Exchange. It gives me a secret Satisfaction, and, in some measure, gratifies my Vanity, as I am an Englishman, to see so rich an Assembly of Country‐men and Foreigners consulting together upon the private Business of Mankind, and making this Metropolis a kind of Emporium for the whole Earth … Sometimes I am justled among a Body of Armenians: Sometimes I am lost in a crowd of Jews, and sometimes make one in a Groupe of Dutch‐ men. I am a Dane, Swede, or French‐Man at different times, or rather fancy my self like the old Philosopher, who upon being asked what Country‐man he was, replied, That he was a Citizen of the World. (1987, 2: 292–294)

London as an international trading and tourist city in the world naturally appears as a world trading and tourist city in the novel. Its inhabitants are cosmopolitan: Defoe’s Roxana is a naturalized French woman who lives variously in Paris, London, Germany, Italy, and Holland; Burney’s London is full of French persons, much to Captain Mirvan’s disgust (“Monsieur Frog”); Count Dracula brings the mists of central Europe with him; there are varieties of curry in Ankh‐Morpork, including a local favorite with raisins and root vegetables and not to be found in the origin country of Klatch. But all the examples in this chapter so far have been written by and primarily about white London 357

English people. World London also includes a vibrant history of novels about non white, non‐English Londoners. In 1892, for example, Israel Zangwill published the critically and commercially successful Children of the Ghetto: A Study of a Peculiar People, about Jewish immigrant life in Whitechapel in the late nineteenth century. Thomas Burke’s Limehouse Nights came out in 1916 to a shocked reception for portraying relationships between Chinese men and (white) English women in the East End. The Lonely Londoners (1956), by Sam Selvon, begins:

One grim winter evening, when it had a kind of unrealness about London, with a fog sleeping restlessly over the city and the lights showing in the blur as if is not London at all but some strange place on another planet, Moses Aloetta hop on a number 46 bus at the corner of Chepstow Road and Westbourne Grove to go to Waterloo to meet a fellar who was coming from Trinidad on the boat‐train. (1956, 7)

The narrative pattern shifts midsentence from something vaguely Dickensian to something distinctly Barbadian. Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) is set in the 1970s and features seventeen‐year‐old Karim Amir, who is “an Englishman born and bred, almost” (3). Zadie Smith’s very popular debut novel, White Teeth (2000), portrays the friendship of white, working‐class Archie Jones and Bengali immigrant Samad Iqbal. And Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003) evokes the Bangladeshi community inhabiting that market neighborhood in the East End. Eighteen‐year‐old Nazneen comes to Tower Hamlets from East Pakistan on her marriage to the older and faintly repellant Chanu. Not knowing English, and discouraged from learning it, she is cul turally trapped in her apartment, making curry and tidying her husband’s papers; when she steps out on her own for the first time she gets liberatedly lost:

Nazneen walked. She walked to the end of Brick Lane and turned right. Four blocks down she crossed the road (she waited next to a woman and stepped out with her, like a calf with its mother) and took a side street. From there she took every second right and every second left until she realized she was leaving herself a trail. Then she turned off at random, began to run, limped for a while to save her ankle, and thought she had come in a circle … Without a coat, without a suit, without a white face, without a destination. A leafshake of fear – or was it excitement? – passed through her legs. (2004, 55–56)

She does not know the city, she does not know the language, she does not know how to get home. And yet the narrative pops her home “twenty minutes before her husband” (61). It is not until later in the evening, when her husband responds sarcastically to her wish that he go find her lost sister in Dhaka, that we find out how she managed it:

Anything is possible. She wanted to shout it. Do you know what I did today? I went inside a pub. To use the toilet. Did you think I could do that? I walked mile upon mile, prob ably around the whole of London, although I did not see the edge of it. And to get home again I went to a restaurant. I found a Bangladeshi restaurant and asked directions. See what I can do! (62–63)

See what I can do. Anything is possible. For almost every novelist of London, London is the city of worlds, the city of possibilities, the city of new identities. While there are as 358 Cynthia Wall many Londons as there are London novelists and novels about London, they all share the common denominators of the still denotative resonances of its street names, of an urban center in which it remains the case that when “we pass a corner [we] are in a changed world.” The undiminished vigor of the novelistic portrayals of London through the centuries confirms Samuel Johnson’s pronouncement that “[w]hen a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford” (Boswell 1980, 859).

References

Ackroyd, Peter. 1982. The Great Fire of London. De la Torre, Lillian. 1987 [1953]. The Exploits of London: Abacus. Dr. Sam: Johnson Detector. New York: International Ackroyd, Peter. 1985. Hawksmoor. London: Abacus. Polygonics. Addison, Joseph. 1987 [1711]. The Spectator, edited Dickens, Charles. 1996 [1852–1853]. Bleak House, by Donald F. Bond. Oxford: Clarendon Press. edited by Stephen Gill. Oxford: Oxford University Ali, Monica. 2004 [2003]. Brick Lane. London: Press. Black Swan. Doyle, Arthur Conan. 2007 [1887]. A Study in Bagehot, Walter. 1858. National Review, October. Scarlet. London: Penguin Red Classics. London: Chapman and Hall. Evelyn, John. 1955 [1666]. The Diary of John Bodenheimer, Rosemarie. 2011. “London in the Evelyn, 6 vols., edited by E. S. DeBeer. Oxford: Victorian Novel.” In The Cambridge Companion to Clarendon Press. the Literature of London, edited by Lawrence Figlerowicz, Marta. 2012. “Affect Theory Dossier: Manley, 142–159. Cambridge: Cambridge An Introduction.” Qui Parle: Critical Humanities University Press. and Social Sciences 20: 3–18. Boswell, James. 1980 [1791]. Life of Johnson, edited Globalization and World Cities Research Network. by R. W. Chapman. Oxford: Oxford University 2012. “The World According to GaWC 2012.” Press. http://www.lboro.ac.uk/gawc/world2012t.html Burney, Frances. 2002 [1778]. Evelina; or, The (accessed December 14, 2014). History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World, Hanna, Ralph. 2011. “Images of London in edited by Edward A. Bloom and Vivien Jones. Medieval English Literature.” In The Cambridge Oxford: Oxford University Press. Companion to the Literature of London, edited by Chaucer, Geoffrey. 2008 [ca. 1380]. The Canterbury Lawrence Manley, 19–33. Cambridge: Cambridge Tales. In The Riverside Chaucer, edited by Larry University Press. D. Benson. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Head, Richard. 1665. The English Rogue Described, Davies, Gill. 2004. “London in Dracula; Dracula in in the Life of Meriton Latroon. London: Francis London.” In Literary London: Interdisciplinary Kirkman. Studies in the Representation of London 2.1, edited The Historie of Bevis of Hampton. 1620 [ca. 1300]. by Lawrence Phillips. http://www.literarylon London: C. W. for W. Lee. don.org/london‐journal/march2004/davies. Johns, Adrian. 2011. “London and the Early html (accessed December 14, 2014). Modern Book.” In The Cambridge Companion to the Defoe, Daniel. 1996 [1724]. Roxana, The Fortunate Literature of London, edited by Lawrence Manley, Mistress, edited by John Mullen. Oxford: Oxford 50–66. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. University Press. Kureishi, Hanif. 1990. The Buddha of Suburbia. Defoe, Daniel. 2003 [1722a]. A Journal of the London: Faber and Faber. Plague Year, edited by Cynthia Wall. London: Mackail, Denis. 2009 [1925]. Greenery Street, edited Penguin Classics. by Rebecca Cohen. London: Persephone Books. Defoe, Daniel. 2011 [1722b]. Moll Flanders, edited Manley, Lawrence. 1995. Literature and Culture in by G. A. Starr and Linda Bree. Oxford: Oxford Early Modern London. Cambridge: Cambridge World’s Classics. University Press. Delafield, E. M. 1999 [1933]. The Provincial Lady Orwell, George. 2003 [1949]. Nineteen Eighty‐ in London. Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers. Four. London: Penguin. London 359

Pratchett, Terry. 1989. Guards! Guards! London: Stoker, Bram. 2011 [1897]. Dracula, edited by Victor Gollancz. Roger Luckhurst. Oxford: Oxford University Richardson, Samuel. 1985 [1747–1748]. Clarissa; Press. or, The History of a Young Lady, edited by Angus Stow, John. 1987 [1598]. The Survey of London, Ross. London: Penguin. edited by H. B. Wheatley and Valerie Pearl. Rodwell, G. Herbert. 1888 [1848–1849]. Old London: Dent Everyman’s Library. London Bridge: A Romance of the Sixteenth Century. Wall, Cynthia. 1998. The Literary and Cultural Spaces London: George Routledge & Sons. of Restoration London. Cambridge: Cambridge Selvon, Sam. 1956. The Lonely Londoners. London: University Press. Allan Wingate. Waugh, Evelyn. 2003 [1938]. Scoop: A Novel About Smollett, Tobias. 1984 [1771]. The Expedition of Journalism. London: Penguin. Humphry Clinker, edited by Lewis M. Knapp and Weinreb, Ben, and Christopher Hibbert. 1983. Paul‐Gabriel Boucé. Oxford: Oxford University The London Encyclopedia. London: Macmillan. Press. Woolf, Virginia. 1981 [1925]. Mrs. Dalloway. Stevenson, Robert Louis. 2002 [1886]. The Strange New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde, edited by Robert Wyndham, John. 2000 [1951]. The Day of the Mighall. London: Penguin Classics. Triffids. London: Penguin Classics. 23 The Provincial Novel John Plotz

A Taxonomy

When I asked a colleague to name some important Victorian provincial novels, she looked at me as if I were insane: “All of them,” she explained gently, as to a drooling child. What is it, though, that nineteenth‐century writers thought made a novel not simply extra‐urban but downright provincial? In 1824, Mary Russell Mitford offered up a long‐lived answer. She praised Jane Austen’s novels for successfully delineating a knowable and loveable world. In fact a world lovable because knowable:

Even in books I like a confined locality … nothing is so delightful as to sit down in a country village in one of Miss Austen’s delicious novels quite sure before we leave it to become intimate with every spot and every person it contains. (1846, 7)

Readers’ interest in any known place, that is, depends on intimacy predicated on the possibility of reciprocity and connection. Austen’s success is that her readers forget they have a book in hand, and instead imagine they are within a geographically and psychologically compassable world. This sense of readerly security might theoretically arise in a novel not so firmly rooted as Austen’s, but Mitford is skeptical that the form is capable of inducing a sense of placid stability if its subject matter is peripatetic: “Nothing is so tiresome as to be wheeled over half Europe at the chariot wheels of some hero” (7). In praising both the knowability and the secure totality of Austen’s represented worlds, Mitford does more than affirm the famous reading of Austen as a miniaturist, toiling on “the little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush, as produces little effect after much labour” (Austen 1959, 468–469). She initiates the

A Companion to the English Novel, First Edition. Edited by Stephen Arata, Madigan Haley, J. Paul Hunter, and Jennifer Wicke. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. The Provincial Novel 361 tradition of praising the provincial novel for what is left out – troubling aspects of modern life – as much as for what is put in – evocations of a placid, rural, backward‐ looking England. Interestingly, Mitford’s account of a comforting literature based on compassability also indirectly acknowledges the distancing effect of what James Buzard has described as the nineteenth‐century novel’s autoethnographic impulses (2005, 3–18). We are happy in the world of the novel, Mitford explains, because we can contemplate, closely and yet with a consciousness of our own distinction from them, characters who all coexist like “ants in an ant‐hill [or] bees in a hive” (1846, 7). The very features Mitford singles out for praise in the provincial novel are those that Mikhail Bakhtin influentially defines as epitomizing the residual and irrelevant features of both provincial life and provincial novels. Bakhtin emphasizes the importance of the Bildung tradition specifically in contradistinction to the comparative unimportance (and rural placidity) of the “petty‐bourgeois provincial town,” with its “commonplace, philistine, cyclical … viscous and sticky … ancillary time” (1981, 248):

In the provincial novel we witness directly the progress of a family‐labor, agricultural or craft‐work idyll moving into the major form of the novel. The basic significance of pro vinciality in literature – the uninterrupted age‐old link between the life of generations and a strictly delimited locale – replicates the purely idyllic relationship of time to space, the idyllic unity of the place as locus of the entire life process … The provincial novel has the same heroes as does the idyll – peasants, craftsmen, rural clergy, rural schoolteacher. (1981, 229)

Though the taxonomy has been somewhat nuanced and qualified in recent years, Bakhtin’s template, too, has proved surprisingly durable. According to Ian Duncan’s persuasive account, the British provincial novel presents a world that is “compact” (usually traversable on foot or horseback) and “familiar,” yet also “distinctive” (distinct from the metropolis, that is – in the regional novel, an intriguing variant of the pro vincial novel, the world is marked as peculiarly distinct from other provinces as well; Plotz 2008, 93–121). Duncan also notes the provincial setting’s “comparative histor ical backwardness,” which helps account for the “nostalgic mode” through which it is generally viewed (2002, 320–326). To Duncan’s five criteria, we might also add Franco Moretti’s description of the provincial as defined primarily negatively, through the sorts of possibilities and plots that provinciality rules out (2005, 52). Virtually every thing that delineates the provincial novel is included in those cogent criteria: com pactness, familiarity, distinctiveness (usually from the metropole), nostalgia‐inducing comparative backwardness, and negative definition. Consider the opening paragraph of perhaps the most instantly recognizable set of British provincial novels of all, Trollope’s Barchester series:

The Rev. Septimus Harding was, a few years since, a beneficed clergyman residing in the cathedral town of —; let us call it Barchester. Were we to name Wells or Salisbury, Exeter, Hereford, or Gloucester, it might be presumed that something personal was intended; and as this tale will refer mainly to the cathedral dignitaries of the town in question, we are anxious that no personality may be suspected. Let us presume … that the west end of Barchester is the cathedral close. (Trollope 2008b, 1) 362 John Plotz

The disavowal of temporal and geographic specificity, and of personality, is provin cialism at its finest: all six of the Duncan/Moretti criteria are in view by the bottom of the first page. Crucial among those criteria, perhaps, is a special kind of provincial compactness, a curiously portable kind of geographic fixity. John Locke points out that when a chess board moves without disturbing the pieces on it “we say [the pieces] are all in the same place, or unmoved” (1838, 100). Provincial novels similarly are interested not in abso lute location, but in the way that the pieces are situated in relation to one another. Small wonder that many begin with the arrival of a naïve stranger (or better yet a returning native), who must be briefed on everyone’s comparative standing – and address. Moretti argues that “one cannot map provincial novels – you cannot map what is not there” but he also proposes a very helpful distinction: between mapping (of the real geographically knowable world), and diagramming, which simply establishes a differential relationship between locations (three houses down from the corner; next town after Middlemarch, etc.) (2005, 53, 54). Provincial novels are unmappable, but they must be diagrammable – as witness the one drawing George Eliot made of the world of Middlemarch, a relational chart of distances between villages (Kitchel 1950, 2).

Provincial Semi‐Detachment

The importance of this diagram‐logic to the provincial novel should also help draw our attention to another aspect of the genre, equally important, but distinctly unamenable to diagramming. Bakhtin emphasizes the sticky and idyllic qualities of provincial life, but in doing so he overlooks the ways that even the most seemingly sedentary provin cial worlds always contain linkages to a greater world beyond. That greater world crucially discloses itself within the provincial location, even if only by way of the characters’ awareness of their imbrication in an extraterritorial realm: Jane Eyre touch ing Roman history in Miss Temple’s Roman books, Miss Marjoribanks laying Napoleonic plans to conquer Carlingford – but also Maggie Tulliver materializing (in Chapter 1 of The Mill on the Floss [1860]) in the narrator’s cold study. Victorian readers possessed a vast arsenal of terms to describe what it felt like to get lost in a novel. Readers are engaged or enthralled; the novelist is a magician or a time traveler. The annihilation of present space and time often seems a blissful consumma tion (cf., on novelistic reverie, Arata 2004). The highest praise a reviewer can give Dracula (1897) is to admit that “at ten we could not even pause to light our pipe” and by midnight “we listened anxiously for the sound of bats’ wings against the window” (Review of Dracula 1897, 363–364), while Robert Louis Stevenson envies Fyodor Dostoyevsky beyond all writers because “it is not reading a book, it is having a brain fever to read [Crime and Punishment]” (Stevenson 1995, 151). For many readers, then, a novel succeeded if it could engender absorption so complete that actions the work merely represented could trigger “the ‘creepy’ effect, as of pounded ice dropped down the back” (quoted in Sweet 1999, xvi). What of those novels, though, that present themselves neither as brain fevers nor as pounded ice? A wide range of Victorian novels implicitly or explicitly propose self‐ limiting claims about the sorts of power that an aesthetic experience has – or ought to The Provincial Novel 363 have – over its readers. In such works, the reader is imagined as getting lost in a book, but remaining simultaneously aware of the real world from which she or he has become semi‐detached. How does such semi‐detachment shape the Victorian provincial novel? Pervasively. One manifestation is what might be called “phase shift” moments, in which the narrator discovers that what had seemed to be a sensation within an art work’s imagined world is actually a sensation that can be tied to the here‐and‐now as well. The musing narrator whose voice opens The Mill on the Floss, for instance, finds himself located at once in the world of the Tullivers (staring at Maggie by the mill) and in his own readerly space:

It is time the little playfellow went in, I think; and there is a very bright fire to tempt her: the red light shines out under the deepening gray of the sky. It is time, too, for me to leave off resting my arms on the cold stone of this bridge … Ah! my arms are really benumbed. I have been pressing my elbows on the arms of my chair, and dreaming that I was standing on the bridge in front of Dorlcote Mill, as it looked one February afternoon many years ago. (Eliot 2008, 12, ellipsis original)

The reader, like the narrator, is suspended between the world of the mill and the study – Eliot’s peculiar ellipsis marks the moment (of waking, of dizziness?) where that confusion arises (cf. Byerly 2012). What is it that makes Eliot commence a novel that ends up located entirely inside the world of Dorlcote Mill with this antechamber, half bridge and half study armchair, located so oddly between worlds? If a novel sought mainly to immerse its readers in a sensually complete shadow world, a moment like this would be a glaring anomaly, a signal of failed aesthetic effect. Enough similar instances exist, though, for us to think about semi‐detachment not as an inadvertent way station but as a state deliberately sought out. We might for example trace through Victorian realist novels moments when a movement toward pure abstraction gets unavoidably anchored in the physical location from which that flight to abstraction began. Think of the self‐abnegating Jane Eyre (1847), reading for life in a window seat screened from and yet connected to a cold world beyond the glass: she is also cousin Jane, aware that at any moment the red cur tain will be thrown back and her book turned into another weapon in a daily domestic war. The Jane who contemplates the glories of the world of Roman history opened up in the talk (and inside the glowing temples) of Helen Burns and Miss Temple is also the Jane blissfully aware of what it is like to be well‐fed and ensconced within the only “temple” to be found in profane Lowood. The role that semi‐detachment plays in Victorian provincial novels is linked to the way that mid‐Victorian culture increasingly came to be defined by a network of vicar ious attachments. Even the most localized lives (say, those “Amazons” who possess Cranford [1851–1853]) were now increasingly imagined as tied by gossamer threads – green tea, pearls, letters from India – to a greater world of trade, capital exchange, and dispersed kinship networks. The occurrence of semi‐detachment as a thematic concern – and a formal feature – of Victorian novels is also linked to the growing sense of what Elaine Hadley has called “abstract embodiment” (2010, 16) among journal readers of the Victorian era. By her account, such readers find that (much like the paper ballot) signed political articles transform the public realm of letters into anything but an 364 John Plotz impersonal realm of ideas. British provincial novels can be distinguished from their Continental counterparts by the important role that various forms of semi‐detachment plays in novelists ranging from Elizabeth Gaskell and Anthony Trollope to George Eliot and even Thomas Hardy. The doubleness in the moments from The Mill on the Floss and Jane Eyre above (the reader is lost in thought, yet also right inside the room, and vulnerable; see Price 2004 and Gettelman 2007) is exemplary of the paradoxical ways in which local attachments actually end up abetting rather than thwarting moments of detachment. The experience of semi‐detachment that comprises a fully realized provincial life – that is, living a life far away from the seemingly inescapable cen trality of the metropolis, yet still connected to it – is in important ways analogous to the sort of semi‐detached relationship that the reader (half leaning on the stone bridge, half still back at home in an armchair) is meant to have to the text itself. A sense of doubleness characterizes sophisticated novels that thematically reflect on the problem of partial absorption (Middlemarch [1871–1872]) as well as novels that resist such attempts at reflexivity (The Chronicles of Barchester [1855–1867]). At the heart of the provincial novel, then, lies not a triumph of the local over the cosmo politan (Little Englandism), but a fascinating version of magnum in parvo, whereby provincial life is desirable for its capacity to locate its inhabitants at once in a trivial (but chartable) Nowheresville and in a universal (but strangely ephemeral) everywhere. One marker of the logic of semi‐detachment that powers the provincial novel is a recurrent tendency towards generic parody and half‐appropriation of other genres in British provincial novels. Not just the relatively awkward genre parodies in Trollope’s The Warden (1855), but also Gaskell’s gesture towards the fairy tale in “old rigmarole of childhood” in the opening line of Wives and Daughters (1996, 5) – and in_Cranford_, towards the realm of Greek myth: “In the first place, Cranford is in the possession of the Amazons” (Gaskell 2011, 3). Such parody is on display in Emily Eden’s Semi‐ Detached House (1859), for example, in which the suburban langours of Dulwich are animated by a persistent “dropping into quotation” (of ballads and of Shakespeare, principally). In quoting, characters make their lives meaningful by analogizing them to the lives they devour in distinctly nonprovincial (and nonprosaic) artworks. And a fascinating palette of generic parodies is at the core of the (unjustly) neglected pro vincial novels of Margaret Oliphant: especially Miss Marjoribanks (1866). For Oliphant (much like Gaskell in her half‐heroic, half‐mock‐heroic Cranford [1853]) the provincial novel holds its power precisely by simultaneously borrowing and renouncing the seemingly more grandiloquent plots and formal devices of various other genres. If for Bakhtin the provincial novel is defined by the sense that any meaningful event has to happen elsewhere, one of the striking elements of the British provincial novel is how this disjunction is routinely turned on its head. Going up to London, which looks like productive activity, frequently turns out instead to be a misguided, even fatal loss of focus. In the novels of Trollope, Gaskell, and Margaret Oliphant, core and periphery frequently get reversed, so that what matters to the nation’s center happens on its edges: Drumble waits on Cranford’s decisions, and Barchester’s family dramas run back upstream to shape metropolitan politicking. The Provincial Novel 365

We know how little can be expected from the new Bishop in Barchester Towers (1857), for instance, when we read:

Dr. Proudie was, therefore, quite prepared to take a conspicuous part in all theological affairs appertaining to these realms, and having such views, by no means intended to bury himself at Barchester as his predecessor had done. No! London should still be his ground: a comfortable mansion in a provincial city might be well enough for the dead months of the year … The resolution was no doubt a salutary one as regarded the world at large but was not likely to make him popular either with the clergy or the people of Barchester. (Trollope 2008a, 18)

For London to “still be his ground” it is necessary for the Bishop to give up hope of a meaningfully active role in Barchester, or in the novel that takes Barchester as its locus amoenus. The Bishop is instantly judged irrelevant, consigned, structurally, to the very same category as the various London‐based writing forms that Trollope satirizes in The Warden (the blowhard newspaper, the Carlylean prophetic ranter, and the lachrymose Dickensian social‐problem novelist). An 1882 critic summed up Trollope’s ability to center the world on his provincial microcosm nicely: Barchester, writes R. H. Hutton, is “the center of all sorts of crowding interests, of ecclesiastical conflicts, of attacks of the press, of temptations from the great London world” (18). Not a retreat, but the moving center of a moving world.

Comparative Provincialism

A sly remark of Hardy’s rings true: even the sprawling European plot of The Dynasts (1904–1908) is provincial – when viewed from the heavens. Although this is not the place to launch into a full‐bore investigation of the distinctiveness of the British provincial novel in the nineteenth century, this widespread tendency to center fiscal, romantic, and vocational plotting in the hinterlands stands in striking contrast to the role that bucolic interludes play even in provincially inclined Continental novels. In Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1873–1877), for instance, Levin’s remarkable night spent sleeping among his peasant laborers gives us a crucial benchmark. During that blissful night, Levin resolves to give up everything related to his social position, and immerse himself in both rural labor and the contemplation of natural beauty. At the very instant Levin casts his psychic lot with the peasantry, though, he hears a coach flying towards him, and in it he sees “a young girl, apparently just awakened, … Bright and thoughtful, all filled with graceful and complex inner life to which Levin was a stranger, she looked through him at the glowing sunrise” (2003, 277). It is Kitty, his eventual wife, whom Levin has, by pure chance, happened to see speeding by. With her back in mind his purely bucolic interlude ends abruptly – as it generically must. Anna Karenina, no matter how lovable a sidelight Levin’s rural improvement schemes may be, is born from Bildung. It begins with a love affair born on a train and ends with a railway suicide. As Bakhtin’s account of the provincial novel suggests, Levin’s temporary retreat from his classed role offers a compact, familiar, distinctive, historically backward 366 John Plotz domain that serves as the negative space against which the metropolitan world can unfold in all its active, emergent plottedness. With a very few exceptions, in the rest of Europe the appeal of the provincial remained, like the idyll or the eclogue, a possi bility glimpsed on the margins, briefly entertained and then discarded – as in this suggestive moment where Levin half succumbs to the allure of a timeless life he can never fully envision. Or worse: when Flaubert casts a cold eye on the “moeurs de province” in Madame Bovary (1856), the dread provincial mundanity Emma Bovary has married into is embodied in “Charles’s conversation … flat as a sidewalk, … everyone’s ideas walked along it in their ordinary clothes” (2012, 35). Emma’s only refuge from that flat anti‐cosmopolitan ordinariness is a Walter‐Scott‐fuelled Quixotism (“And you were there too, you sultans with long pipes, swooning under arbors in the arms of dancing girls, you Giaours, Turkish sabers, fezzes, and you especially, wan landscapes of dithyrambic countries”) which makes Emma wish (perfect motto of the stranded provincial dreamer) “both to die and to live in Paris” (33, 51). The British provincial novel, by contrast, is willfully centered on out‐of‐the‐way eddies, and the flotsam and jetsam that wash up in them. Life may seem to be elsewhere in Trollope’s novels, but the novel takes place in the very elsewhere where life is. One way to think about the logic is by way of a recent parallel, the Ang Lee film The Ice Storm (1997), set in 1970s suburban Connecticut. The young would‐be protagonist of the film (who thinks he’s in a Bildungsroman) leaves his provincial town for New York in pursuit of a girl and some adventures; twelve hours later, he returns home from a series of disappointments – no girl, no stories. Meanwhile back in his hometown, where he is convinced nothing ever happens, everything – intoxication, sex, love, and death – has.

Provincial Cosmopolitanism

The point driven home by the semi‐detachment that runs through Victorian provincial novels, however, is not simply that great plots happen in small places. Rather, such novels aim to represent what it feels like for characters (and implicitly readers) to be confined to a restricted locale – and yet also, simultaneously, aware of an indirect connection to the currents of a greater world beyond. One way to read the provincial novel’s evident anti‐Londonism is to emphasize that England, unlike France and Russia, has multiple geographical centers of power (Moretti 2005, 52–53). However, there is also something more at play here. If Matthew Arnold warns that the English are in danger of succumbing to provincialism because “we all of us like to go our own way and not to be forced out of the atmosphere of commonplace habitual to most of us” (1865, 46), the British provincial novel pointedly inverts Arnold’s logic: the most far‐flung, least appealing and most seemingly cloistered reaches of the country are its secret weapons not despite but precisely because of their “commonplace” quality. You might think of the characters in provincial novels responding to Arnold’s condemnation of their provinciality not by moving to London, but by hunkering down at home and ordering more books and journals so as to read about how cut off and backward they are. The relationship between provinces and larger realms (the nation, the world) is unmistakably shaped in certain ways by the neat inversion that Benedict Anderson (1983) proposes in understanding how novels make up “imagined communities”: that The Provincial Novel 367 in their depiction of a plurality of multiple locales, novels can create a nation united across vast swaths of space and time. If for Mitford provinces are beautifully self‐ contained worlds, for an Andersonian reading they become potentially metonymic: the part that can also stand in for the whole, as a church stands for churches, a house for the houses of the nation as a whole. What is still missing from Anderson’s account, though, is the doubled sensation that keeps recurring in these novels: the awareness that one is living at once inside a tiny world, a trivial world, caught in the middle of nowhere, and yet one is also located within the larger currents of the day, potentially locatable anywhere. The provincial character, then, is in place to body forth the significantly insignifi cant life, a life worth remarking on because it is invisible, and its channels are, like Dorothea Brooke’s, diffusive. In part this simply underscores Philip Larkin’s maxim: “nothing, like something, happens anywhere” (2004, 82). It is remarkable how well such instances of cloistered worldliness succeed – at least inside the dream world of the Victorian provincial novel. The number of Gaskell characters who manage cosmo politan acts of introspection and abstract cogitation – minutely inspecting leaves (Roger Hamley in Wives and Daughters [1864–1866]) or beetles (Job Legh in Mary Barton [1848]; see Coriale 2008) – is an important reminder that in the Victorian pro vincial novel every place, no matter how common, is defined in part by its uncharted edges – edges understood as trailing undiagrammably off into Belgium and Canada (Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley [1849]) or even into the sky (Thomas Hardy’s Two on a Tower [1882]). Those who travel abroad clutch to their copies of Gilbert White’s Selborne (a book that reached a wider readership only in the mid‐nineteenth century, when it became a common companion for émigrés; Menely 2004) in order to materi alize their “home thoughts from abroad”; those who stay home gaze ruminatively into terraria and Ward’s boxes. Insect contemplation, in fact, is a surprisingly useful figure with which to grasp how Victorian provincial novelists reflexively understand their own project. The era’s new ways of understanding magnum in parvo were, I argued above, crucial for under standing the ways that Victorian provincial novels both acknowledged and worked beyond the way that their characters resembled “sheep in a fold” or “ants in an ant‐ hill.” Accordingly, whenever we come across an instance of the microcosmos in these novels, it is worth considering not just what such a metonym means to readers, but also what it seems to mean to the characters themselves. Thus in Middlemarch, just before her climactic scene with Rosamond, we find Dorothea “dilating with Mr. Farebrother on the possible histories of creatures that converse compendiously with their antennae” (Eliot 2000, 483). The two conversations – Dorothea’s talk with Farebrother while her mind is truly occupied with her coming talk with Rosamond, and the conversation going on between the insects whose little world looms mysteri ously below – resonate curiously with one another. Readers are privy to Dorothea’s effort to divert herself from private miseries by envisioning another world that lies somewhere just beneath the limits of her myopia. If the epigraphs in Middlemarch are hooks that lift characters up out of their narrow neighborhood, allowing readers to reimagine the novel’s social world as if it were a Renaissance play, the compendious conversations of the insects suggest that looking down is another way to shift scales. Both raise the possibility of a life that is 368 John Plotz coterminous with one’s own and yet (as with the narrator’s numbed forearms at the beginning of The Mill on the Floss) phase‐shifted so as to be only semi‐present. A melo dramatic tableau looms for Dorothea: both she and her readers can predict (incorrectly, it turns out) just the sort of well‐worn plot that awaits her. Instead, what she calls the “social spirit” leads her to talk insects with Farebrother and soil conditions with “old Master Bunney” (483). Like lifting our eyes up to the epigraph, these downward glances to earth and insects propose that the affairs of our local world can be reassessed by approaching them from a different sort of perspective altogether. Is it time, then, to reclassify Edwin Abbot’s Flatland (1884), with its satirical account of characters incapable of grasping the truth about the three‐dimensional solid moving through their planar world, as the ultimate Victorian provincial novel? Such glimpses of a different set of axes or a new vantage point on distant worlds, which nonetheless permit characters to continue their old provincial life in some altered way, form a near‐omnipresent element of the Victorian provincial novel. Even at the grimmest moments, these shifts in vision recur: when Tess Durbeyfeld teaches her brother to see the stars as worlds, “most of them splendid and sound – a few blighted,” he has to look up and survey the sky in order to grasp that he and his sister live “on a blighted one” (Hardy 2005, 37). This pattern of looking downward so as not to look in the mirror of one’s own life, or looking upward to abstract ideals in the sky for the same reason, is one that Hardy perfectly captures and anatomizes in that coldest of climaxes to the Victorian provincial novel, Jude the Obscure. That novel anatomizes Jude and Sue’s semi‐detachment: apart or together, the two appear “gliding steadily onward through a dusky landscape of some years later leafage,” always moving on, never arriving (Hardy 2009, 87). Like Father Time himself, who glides wearily over the earth as if no part of it were any different from any other, Jude is afflicted with the modern vice of restlessness. The form that it takes in Jude is, though, peculiarly pathological – he knowingly turns everything about him from a particular space into a general one, and every problem from a unique one to merely a case of a general rule. Faced with the arrival of his son, Jude enunciates a principle rather than acknowledging a blood‐claim: “all the little ones of our time are collectively the children of us adults of the time and entitled to our general care” (324). For Jude to reclassify the boy that way (and for the novel itself to accept the relabel ing, referring to him as Father Time from this moment onwards) is somehow to make his son available as subject matter for ongoing conversations with Sue. These conver sations are poignant in their upstream effort always to strive towards some abstract human realm even at the moments that Jude and Sue’s lives (making baked biscuit replicas of the colleges Jude once longed to enter) are defined by material circum stances straitened almost beyond belief. Hardy is charting what it means to take local exigencies (thwarted education, bad marriage, “too menny” children) and reimagine them as instances of unapproachably distant universal truths. For Hardy to accomplish this – especially within a novel that had initially seemed firmly anchored in the “Wessex” that supplied the frame through which Hardy’s work was nearly inevitably interpreted – requires him, by way of Jude and Sue, to explore what it means to treat one’s own griefs as the property of the universe, making (or at least striving to make) one’s life into a sounding‐board of abstract concerns rather than a painfully contingent and personal set of experiences. The Provincial Novel 369

My claim is not that such novels simply permit the reader to establish a semi‐ detached relationship to this world, but that they insist upon that semi‐detachment by modeling it with the forms of attention and of quasi‐removal that open up for the novels’ own characters. Mitford and Bakhtin both presume that the readers of provin cial novels have a voyeuristic and a detached interest in woes and gladness not their own. In Middlemarch, though, the implicit readerly response is modeled in the charac ters’ own evident awareness of what it means to observe half‐removed worlds. Farebrother not only immerses himself in the parliament of bugs, he also urges Lydgate to immerse himself in the microscopic world of his own work. If we never see a character looking up to the head of a chapter to observe and reflect on the epigraph under which the forthcoming actions have been gathered (though there are moments in Middlemarch when characters seem to quote from a chapter’s epigraph, an unsettling trick), we do find characters looking downward at yet smaller worlds (Henrietta’s invol untary “beaver‐like notes” as she hunts up her “tortoise shell lozenge‐box,” a gift of Will [Eliot 2000, 484]) to find a kind of transient attachment to such microcosms – accompanied by a reflexive semi‐detachment from their own woes.

Significant Insignificance

One way to understand the kind of novelistic reflections about semi‐detachment that I have been tracing is to reconsider Ian Watt’s famous account of the ordinariness, the nobodyness of realist novel characters (1957, 9–34). In ways that resonate with contem porary developments in the fledgling fields of anthropology and philology, nineteenth‐ century provincial novels became chronicles not just of the humdrum and insignificant details of everyday life (a longstanding ambition of the realist novel) but specifically of the significantly insignificant. That is, these novels rely upon a world that matters pre cisely because it does not seem, by any earthly calculus, to matter in any significant way. When Trollope imagines the real politics of the nation as occurring while bishops are busying themselves pointlessly in London, he is participating in an upheaval in notions about the importance, and the representability, of the ordinary and of the insignificant. In a variety of discourses of the mid‐century there emerges the notion that certain sorts of evidence are significant only because they are insignificant. Their interest is in those details that come to light precisely because there is no reason they ought ever come to light, being too ordinary, too incidental, too forgettable. In the work behind the project of the Oxford English Dictionary, for example, Richard Trench describes the unremarkable chitchat of ordinary speech as made up of numberless “flashes of genius” (1852, 33); in Primitive Culture (1871) Edward Tylor argues that children’s rhymes or proverbs, trivial beyond belief and forgotten as soon as uttered, are the only satisfactory clues to what preceded our current culture – clues satisfactory because of their utter triviality. In Walter Scott novels a talisman or amulet long worn casually turns out at a key moment to become evidence that a character is actually the long‐lost heir. Here, the evidentiary basis shifts: the haystack is no longer disguising one true needle; rather, every piece of hay becomes a needle in its own right. In both Tylor and Trench, accreted insignificant details turn out – precisely because of their mundane, ordinary, everyday roles – to be the concrete basis for large claims 370 John Plotz about the past nature of the human institution under study: in Trench’s case, the English language, in Tylor’s, “primitive culture” and its telltale “survivals.” The pro vincial novel is of great interest in the mid‐Victorian era because it is a genre that nicely captures the fact that all significant human activity takes place, precisely, among insignificant people, in places that do not matter in any world‐historical sense. It is only mute inglorious Miltons who are Miltonic, only nameless and unobserved St. Theresa’s who can live truly saintly lives. By this reading, the final page of Middlemarch formulates the distinctive charge of the British provincial novel in a distinctive and innovative way:

We insignificant people with our daily words and acts are preparing the lives of many Dorotheas, some of which may present a far sadder sacrifice than that of the Dorothea whose story we know. Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs. (Eliot 2000, 515)

Readers are asked to envision a curious kind of mimetic relationship to the characters here, as if in Dorothea’s life they can see, but only partially (as witness the unsettling introduction of the notional “many Dorotheas”), the lives around them. It is a version of this boldness about correspondences, along with this palpable hesitation in com pleting the analogy, that makes many Victorian provincial novels notable for their odd mixture of presumption and modesty. Twentieth‐century British provincial novels have an utterly different range of possi bilities. Some of Eliot’s sense for the paradoxical centrality of provincial experience is still preserved in the opening few chapters of D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers (1913), but the absurdity of imagining there could be any true intellectual engagement in rural life becomes the central comic device of E. F. Benson’s Mapp and Lucia series (1920– 1939), in which to quote (or more likely misquote) Nietzsche in the confines of Riseholme is simply to reveal one’s completely risible provincial pretentiousness. A similar refusal to admit the compatibility of the cosmopolitan and the world of the “village green preservation society” shapes the Bovaryisme of William Cooper’s Scenes from Provincial Life (1950; “que je m’ennuie” exclaims its hero to an audience of schoolboys [45]), the parodic exuberance of Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim (1954; the novel’s senile old villain has no higher ambition than making it onto a radio program devoted to “provin cial culture” [2000, 24]), and the genteel resignation of Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Bookshop (1978). That refusal shapes as well the 1963 film Billy Liar, the 1968 concept album The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day (1989; provincialism deconstructed) and a thousand subsequent high‐, middle‐, and low‐brow restagings of what precisely is wrong with the provinces. Dorothea Brooke and her Middlemarch cohort are, by contrast, semi‐detached pro vincials: half engulfed in daily cares yet half aware that their lives are shaped by forces The Provincial Novel 371 at work elsewhere in the great world. If Middlemarch ends with Dorothea’s commitment to the invisible diffusive currents that link her to her neighbors, its other axis – the epigraphs that lift us away from Lowick to an imagined Renaissance scene, the spiritual half‐parallels that make Dorothea simultaneously like and unlike St. Theresa, and the insect kingdoms that open beneath her feet – all work to remind us that the provinces are in fact like the distant world to which their inhabitants aspire. Like that world, that is, precisely in being unlike any other place. In their dislocation, their location; in their provinciality, their cosmopolitanism.

Acknowledgments

I am very grateful to Stephen Arata, Matthew Rowlinson, Ivan Kreilkamp, Rae Greiner, Jonathan Farina, Nick Dames, Alison Byerly, and Adam Grener for helpful advice and for generously sharing relevant portions of their work. A shorter earlier ver sion of this piece appeared as “The Semi‐Detached Provincial Novel” in Victorian Studies 53, 3 (Fall 2011): 405–416.

References

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While the other essays in this section on the Geographies of the Novel pertain to actual or conceptual territories we readily recognize (the metropolis, the provinces, foreign countries), the present one attaches itself to a zone and takes up a concept we may well find difficult to pinpoint. Just where is the zone of the “intranational”? Many who consult this volume may at first imagine they’re confronting a typographical error when they see the term in the table of contents, a slipup for “internationalisms” perhaps. “Intranational” is juicy bait for autocorrect. Even when they realize there has been no error in proofreading, readers may begin to wonder why there should be a chapter devoted to the “intranational” in a companion to the English novel. An especially inquisitive few may go on to ponder what is meant by the “isms” attached to “intranational.” How much conscious ideological commitment to some concept of “the intranational” should we look for when we examine “the English novel” (whatever that is) for traces of “intranationalism”? Which novelists have been dedicated intranationalists? It is beyond the scope of this essay to survey the history of novels by Welsh, Irish, and Scottish writers, and besides, not all of those novels would count as “intranational” in any meaningful sense. The essay will focus instead on the first period in English‐language literature in which something like an intranational perspective came into play; it will set out some of the definitive features of such a perspective; and it will gesture toward some later developments. Let me first describe the context in which an idea it might make sense to call intranationalism arose. For, far from having attained the status of a term of art, “intranationalisms” may nevertheless be of use in the peculiar context of the modern British Isles, where, over the course of several centuries, consolidation of power in the English capital offered repeated opportunities for the categories of nationality and political statehood pointedly to diverge.

And if anything is fundamental to intranationalism, it is the divergence of political power and national culture. When the political entity known as Great Britain (England, Scotland, and Wales) assumed direct control of Ireland near the start of the nineteenth century, the Westminster parliament became the legislative body representing a new United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and in very short order an Irish “National Tale” appeared to enunciate the cultural distinctiveness of the Irish people from their British neighbors. Roughly a century earlier, in 1707, an Act of Union had dissolved the Scottish parliament and assigned Scottish political affairs to London; the English and Scottish monarchies had already merged at the start of the seventeenth century. The eighteenth century would see numerous failed attempts to undo the unequal alliance between England and Scotland and to restore the banished Jacobite dynasty. The most significant of these attempts collapsed disastrously in 1746; about fifteen years later a controversy arose surrounding the supposedly rediscovered work of the epic national bard of the Gaelic peoples of the Scottish Highlands and Islands. About a decade after the emergence of the Irish National Tale, a new form of novel arose in Scotland, the historical novel, which would take on some of the same functions as its Irish precursor. Much further back in time, in the 1530s and 1540s, England’s longstanding overlord- ship in Wales was formalized in a series of parliamentary Acts officially annexing the latter country. (A probably apocryphal tale has it that the custom of conferring upon the direct heir to the British throne the title “Prince of Wales” originated with a rather dirty trick played by the English King Edward I in 1301; what is less in question is that that custom has played its part in weaving the destinies of England and Wales together.) These were the steps by which “the United Kingdom” became the political body made up of four distinct and not very united nations with one political center, London. Ireland, Wales, and Scotland, or at least the Celtic portion of this last, have sometimes been referred to as “internal colonies” pushed to “the Celtic fringe” of the United Kingdom (see Hechter 1975). Up to the time at which I write this, only the Republic of Ireland has broken from the United Kingdom, leaving behind it the six counties that make up Northern Ireland and are still in the Union. This division caused many decades’ turmoil in Ireland and elsewhere, and it has not been resolved, merely tabled by exhausted combatants. Most of the historical developments surveyed here pre‐dated the efflorescence of modern political nationalism that took place throughout the nineteenth century. At the earlier end of that period, a host of colonies in the Western hemisphere wrested themselves from the grasp of their European creators (chiefly Spain and Portugal) and set themselves up as independent states, many of them republics. In the middle – and with concentrated energy during the summer of 1848 – regions within Europe itself rose up against the multiethnic kingdoms or empires that ruled them, seeking to establish themselves as nation‐states defined largely by ethnicity and language. In the 1860s and 1870s, the modern unified states of Italy and Germany came into being. Much of the ideological impetus for these developments arose in the later eighteenth century, originally in a Germany that at that time was merely a notional state, actually an assortment of duchies and principalities stretching from Prussia in the north to the border of the Austro‐Hungarian Empire in the south. Reacting against the French language’s status as the language of Enlightenment elites and intelligentsia across Intranationalisms 375

Europe, German thinkers such as the Brothers Grimm and Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) began to champion their own vernacular tongue as incarnating the distinctive voice or Geist (spirit) that united the otherwise divided German people, and a zeal for locating the supposedly most authentic cultural productions of politically unrealized or even “backward” peoples quickly spread elsewhere, including to the British Isles. Such campaigns turned away from metropolitan forms of culture such as the neo- classicism of “Augustan” English writers and sought out the poetry and legend that supposedly welled up from the deepest roots of indigenous local populations. Before there was a phrase to express it, what we would now call a “cultural nationalism” was born. (The term Nationalismus was in fact coined by Herder, in many ways the source of modern pluralistic conceptions of “culture.”) In 1760, James Macpherson published Fragments of ancient poetry, collected in the Highlands of Scotland, and translated from the Gaelic or Erse language, and he would follow this volume up with others purporting to contain, among other things, an epic poem by the aboriginal Celtic bard Ossian. These volumes ignited a significant controversy, and it ultimately came to appear that Macpherson had written much of the verse himself; but this did not stem the tide of antiquarian philological researches, folktale and ballad collecting that was to flow over succeeding decades (and never entirely to subside). What Katie Trumpener has called a “bardic nationalism” began to emerge, a cultural nationalism for the conquered Celtic peoples grounded in the figure of the inspired oral poet or storyteller (Trumpener 1997). Over the next 200 years, the goal of locating the true voice of these peoples in the ancient legends imperfectly handed down across the centuries would never entirely lose its appeal, and there would be much ink spilt over questions of authenticity, sentimentality, and excessively creative editorship. Scotland, Wales, and Ireland each had its ancient fund of song and story, in various states of fragmentariness and reconstruc- tion, and these would meet their modern publics in such publications as Charlotte Guest’s translations of the Welsh Mabinogion (1838–1849) and Lady Gregory’s dialect versions of Irish myths, such as her Cuchulain of Muirthemne (1902). Perhaps the most important figure to emerge from the late eighteenth‐century antiquarian vogue, Walter Scott, began his literary career as the editor of Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802); he then proceeded to become celebrated throughout Europe for a series of original poems on Scottish history or legend, and then, anonymously, gained a second fame for his innovative use of the historical novel form to explore Scottish and British history and identity. Scott almost singlehandedly made the novel genre into a vehicle for intranationalist sentiment. (It has to be acknowledged that the novel has not always and not even regularly been the chosen form for the expression of intranationalism by writers from the peripheral nations of the United Kingdom; at certain times, as during the Irish Literary Revival of the late nineteenth century, poetry and drama have played much more prominent roles.) But perhaps we still need greater purchase on what such a claim about Scott and the novel might mean. To function as a meaningful descriptor, “intranational” must delineate itself from competing terms for describing subjugated or marginal portions of a spreading multinational state, terms such as “provincial,” “regional,” or “peripheral.” A scene from James Joyce’s story “The Dead,” from his collection Dubliners (1914), dramatizes the competition I refer to. At a Dublin soirée, the protagonist Gabriel Conroy is upbraided 376 James Buzard by his dancing partner Miss Ivors for his willingness to write literary reviews for the Unionist paper The Daily Express, for preferring Continental holidays to instructional excursions to the west of Ireland, and generally for insufficient interest in the history, culture, and traditional language of Ireland. “And haven’t you your own land to visit,” she challenges him, “that you know nothing of, your own people, and your own country?” (1996, 189). The essence of her critique is distilled in the label she applies to Conroy when she taunts him with, “I didn’t think you were a West Briton” (189). We may feel confident that we have entered the zone of intranational thinking when we find one Irish person accusing another of accepting the conqueror’s opinion that his land is nothing but a province or region of the country that annexed it, nothing more than “West Britain.” (Two centuries before Joyce wrote “The Dead,” at the time of the merger of England and Scotland, it became common to refer to the latter realm as “North Britain.”) Province, region, periphery, and intranation are all incarnations of an identity felt to be local and specific, in contrast to the spreading abstraction of a “British” identity, but only the last of these performs the ideological work of shaming that Miss Ivors seeks to perform. Intranational thinking operates as the modern anthropological concept of culture does: it comes into play when, as Walter Benn Michaels has trenchantly put it, the fact of something’s being a part of one’s culture has become an argument for doing it. For if what we meant by “Irish culture” were simply “what Irish people do,” the notion would be impotently descriptive, prescribing nothing. For Miss Ivors, Irish culture is rather “what Irish people should do.” For her, any Irish person who ignores the normative force of the latter definition runs the risk of Anglicization, of devolving into nothing more than a provincial English man or woman. When it operates this way, the concept of culture acquires pathos (see Michaels 1995, 123–142). It becomes capable of functioning in stories about the fate of the peripheral area’s distinctive identity within the modernizing state. As Seamus Deane observes, “if national character is to be altered, renovated so that it will allow the Irish to enter the English world of progress and modernity, the consequence might seem to be that such a renovation might make the Irish indistinguishable from the English. In reforming the national character, national identity might be lost” (1997, 56). A similar logic was at work about a century earlier in Scotland, in 1819, at a time when a proposed “National Monument” in Edinburgh – a Scottish national monument – was under consideration. One writer in favor of the plan argued that “when considered with reference to foreign states, Britain should exhibit an united whole, intent only upon upholding and extending the glory of that empire which her united forces have formed. But,” the writer continued, “it is equally indisputable that [Scotland’s] ancient metropolis should not degenerate into a provincial town; and that an independent nation, once the rival of England, should remember, with pride, the peculiar glories by which her people have been distinguished” (quoted in Duncan 2007, 17). This passage pivots with satisfying efficiency between an outward‐looking perspective (“with reference to foreign states”) and an inward‐looking one (internal to Britain, that is) in which Scotland remains “an independent nation” separate and distinct from England. The delicate balance of the intranational can be sustained only insofar as Scots concur in “converting the foundation of [their] national identity from politics to culture” (Duncan 2007, 17), politics making its claims upon the present and future, culture deriving its force from the past (“should remember”). Scott himself expressed concern about the Intranationalisms 377 potential erosion of Scots’ distinguishing cultural features, and it was probably this concern that led him, in his first novel, Waverley (1814), to create an image of Scottishness based heavily on the strikingly non‐English cultural attributes of Scottish Highlanders, even though he himself was a Lowlander and likely to be suspected by Highlanders as a “Sassenach” (that is, a Saxon like the English, not a Celt). It is hardly an exaggeration to say that Scott did more than anyone else to make the tartan plaid and the bagpipe stereotypes of his nation as a whole, rather than simply of its Highland Celtic portions. Yet it would be a mistake to imagine that the cultural nationalism as advanced by Scott and others consisted of nothing more forceful than local‐color regionalism, even if the intranationalist writer is always liable to that charge. Far less lastingly famous than Scott, but preceding him by a decade or more, were two writers about Ireland who influenced him and subsequent Scottish authors: Maria Edgeworth and Sydney Owenson (eventually known as Lady Morgan). Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl (1806) inaugurated the subgenre of the National Tale and treated Irish rural tradition “as a pure origin that supplies an alternative set of values to those of a corrupt metropolis” (Duncan 2007, 78). It presents traditional Irish culture as “a redemptive premodernity” (79). Edgeworth’s fiction, starting with Castle Rackrent (1800), was ultimately to be more consequential, for it provided a plot pattern that could serve as the fulcrum for the type of delicate balance described above: Edgeworth narrates a process by which old Irish ways must be lost and Irish people alienated from them in order to reclaim Irish cultural identity – “intranationhood” – on a new level on which culture is “conceived of as a domain separate from – undetermined by, indeed transcending – politics and commerce” (49). This was to be the pattern embraced by Scott and those of his Scottish followers, such as John Gibson Lockhart, associated with Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. Intranationalism in Owenson, Edgeworth, and Scott holds together an insistence on distinctive nationality and the acknowledgment that the nationality in question does not possess national sovereignty but is contained within a larger political entity. The case for cultural nationalism may be pressed as part of a larger campaign for regaining political independence, but it need not be. All three authors endorse union with England and see their efforts as aimed at improving communication and cooperation within the multinational whole. In this they follow a model of countering the conqueror’s assumptions, stereotypes, and representations about their peoples earlier enacted by such nonfictional works as Seathrún Céitinn’s [Geoffrey Keating’s] seventeenth‐century Foras Feasa ar Éirinn or A Basis for the Knowledge of Ireland, designed as what Mary Louis Pratt would call an autoethnographic corrective to Englishman Edmund Spenser’s severely biased ethnographic description in his View of the Present State of Ireland (1633; see Pratt 1992, 7). Like the later novelists, Céitinn “took pen in hand to rebut the occupier’s claims. He had been reading those texts which misrepresented him, and he resolved to answer back” (Kiberd 1995, 13). Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl is presented as a series of letters written back home by the young Englishman Mortimer, whose travels in Ireland progressively undermine his anti‐Irish prejudices and ultimately lead to his allegorized marriage to the young Irish woman, the dazzling Glorvina, who has acted as her people’s spokesperson and pled their cause to him. The book lards its narrative with ethnographic and historical information, affording English readers the same transformative intellectual and affective education its protagonist undergoes. As the 378 James Buzard national identities of husband and wife in this new union suggest, the National Tale conducted its defense of Irish cultural particularity and legitimacy on the basis of its acceptance, at least for the foreseeable future, of Ireland’s political subordination – its acceptance of the bride’s role. Possession of a distinctive, non‐English way of life – in the parlance of our day, “a culture of their own” – was either a substitute or a promissory note for independent statehood. Owenson’s novel inspired many imitations and variants, from Charles Maturin’s The Wild Irish Boy (1809) and Christian Johnstone’s Clan‐ Albin: A National Tale (1814) to The Maid of Killarney by the Reverend Patrick Brontë (1818), the Irish father of the famous Charlotte, Emily, and Anne. Sydney Owenson was said to have been born on shipboard between England and Ireland, and she operated very self‐consciously as a mediator between the two peoples, as did Scott in his Highland‐leaning Waverley. Obviously, they could not have offered to play these mediating roles had they not chosen, unlike Céitinn, to write their works in the English language. At the time, they would scarcely have considered doing otherwise, for readerships in Irish or Gaelic scarcely existed (even by 1893, when the Gaelic League was created in Ireland, only six books in the Irish language were in print; Kiberd 1995, 145), and even if they had these writers would not have opted to limit the scope of their address. Like the Irish writers of the later nineteenth century, they “wrote with one eye cocked on the English audience” (Kiberd 1995, 115); in fact, they wrote for a double audience, the English and the “Englished” Irish or Scots. But to counteract the Anglicization that enabled this audience to read them, they employed various devices to harden the epistemological boundaries that supposedly separated England from its sister realms. Scott’s first novel, Waverley, routinely offered experiences of what I elsewhere call “intelligible foreignness,” chiefly through the strategic use of dialogue written in dialect and scenes of translation. The paradox of “intelligible foreignness” became a textual signature for the precariously balanced “intranational,” which must ward off the eradication of difference threatened by Anglicization, must preserve national culture as cherished collective memory (see Buzard 2005, 68–81). At later periods, writers in Wales, Ireland, and Scotland would experiment with resusci- tating nearly defunct vernaculars (as in late‐nineteenth‐century Ireland), invent hybrid dialect forms (as in the so‐called Scottish Renaissance of the early twentieth century), or write in their native tongue as a plank of a deliberate platform aimed at recovering national sovereignty (as in twentieth‐century Wales). Which language to choose would become a classic postcolonial dilemma, each decision affecting the intranational balance. In the late nineteenth‐century debates about the use of Irish that were brought on by the creation and proselytizing of the Gaelic League, some argued that successful restoration of the language would increase Irish marginalization and turn the Irish gaze too much inward (see Kiberd 1995, 158). Cultural nationalism pushed so far would threaten to erase the “intra” element that enabled the pivot between connection to the locus of political and commercial power and connection to national culture as sanctified memory. Centered around the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745–1746, Waverley follows the impressionable title character, an errant young Englishman, as he makes his way north into Scotland and into the “romance” of Highland culture and the Pretender’s cause. The failure of that cause is taken to be the decisive turning point in both the protagonist’s and multinational Britain’s evolution toward maturity and modernity: Edward comes Intranationalisms 379 to feel “that the romance of his life was ended, and that its real history had now commenced” (Chapter 60). As if to underscore the point, he winds up in another allegorical marriage, but not to the Glorvinalike Highlander Flora MacIvor, sister of a leading rebel chieftain; rather, to her steadier Lowland counterpart. The Saxon pair will move into the future together as guardians of an aestheticized, Highlandized (effectively non‐anglicized) Scottish cultural memory. (A racialist discourse that would eventually command widespread adherence as “Teutomania” made Saxon predominance seem inevitable: Saxons were wired for rationality and pragmatism, Celts for unfocused imagination and spiritedness: no wonder the latter always lost and got pushed to the peripheries.) As in Ireland after the quashing of the 1798 rebellion there, the end of any dream of political independence for Scotland appears the prereq- uisite to successful reclamation of the subject people’s distinctive culture. The doubleness of the intranational in Waverley also involves the transformation of naïve and insular Englishness, by way of its dislocating encounter with alien Scottishness, into a Britishness that, now that its internal rifts have been mended, is prepared to look beyond its borders and to extend its reach. Waverley ends with the trope of the once‐ turbulent river of history, now flowing steadily forward with the conjoined, calm force of its Scottish and English peoples. Narrating the emergence of the modern multicultural, multinational state out of the historical conflicts among its subgroups, Scott produced in Waverley “the consummate British novel” (Crawford 1992, 132). Scott followed up the triumphant success of his first novel with a number of other fictions focused on definitive crises in Scotland’s history, many of which would significantly complicate the Waverley formula, before broadening his perspective and reaching further back in time in Ivanhoe (1819), a work of tremendous impact on subsequent thought about the racial composition of English and British populations. Ian Duncan has written convincingly of the complex manner in which subsequent Scott novels upset the template laid down in Waverley, but also about how Scott’s followers such as Lockhart represented Scott as “the incarnation of national tradition” (Duncan 2007, 49). Lockhart’s own Peter’s Letters to his Kinsmen (1819), “the first programmatic account of the ideological formation of a romantic cultural nationalism in Great Britain,” hews to the Waverley plan in “prescrib[ing] a nationalist cultural politics in which culture absorbs politics and an aesthetic investment in tradition constitutes national identity” (Duncan 2007, 47, 48). Lockhart carries on Owenson’s and Scott’s technique of using an outsider figure as protagonist, strikingly enough choosing a Welsh character, Peter Morris, to introduce Scotland and Scottishness to readers. The earlier texts strongly implied that “a culture could only be surveyed and known as such from the outside or, at least, the margins” (Kiberd 1995, 48). Lockhart’s particular displacement involved the adoption, as expositor for Scotland, of the oldest and, it might be thought, best established of the intranational identities. As Duncan writes, “The Welsh Briton typifies an originary ethnicity – a primitive Britishness – that has been so thoroughly colonized that it can now function smoothly as a naturalized representative of the modern United Kingdom” (2007, 59). The institutional and economic conditions that supported substantial publication of fiction in Edinburgh after about 1802 would largely evaporate in the financial crisis that bankrupted the city by 1833. Before this happened, John Galt (1779–1839) continued the treatment of Scottish history in his novels of the 1820s and 1830s, as 380 James Buzard did James Hogg (1770–1835), among others. Galt’s territory was Glasgow and Ayrshire, and in novels such as Annals of the Parish (1821), The Ayrshire Legatees (1821), The Provost (1822), and The Entail (1822), he attempted to take historical fiction in a direction different from Scott’s, “explor[ing] the temporal unevenness of development and the otherwise invisible connections between local occurrences and long‐term processes, local agency and centralizing institutions” (Trumpener 1997, 152). As with the National Tale after Waverley, Galt’s work offered a “critical alternative” to Scott’s “politically quietistic realism”: whereas the more famous author wrote in celebration of an independent Scottish culture but enshrined it in the past, Galt narrated the incorporation of Scotland into the British state by means of violence and economic and ideological coercion, refusing to cordon off Scottish culture from the present (Trumpener 1997, 131, 156). Katie Trumpener finds the enormous disparity in canonical status between Scott and more radical writers such as Galt “of historical and political interest” (131). Once the Edinburgh publishing industry collapsed, Scottish‐ focused fiction nearly dropped from view, kept alive in works increasingly devoted to touristic regionalism. In the 1870s, local‐color novels such as William Black’s A Princess of Thule (1873) and MacLeod of Dare (1878) turned the tables on the Teutomaniacs by championing Highland Celtic heroes and heroines pitted against uncomprehending, materialistic Saxons. The 1890s saw the rise of a “Kailyard,” or cabbage‐patch, school of fiction offering sentimental portraits of Scottish rural life. In the 1880s and 1890s, Robert Louis Stevenson would once again draw upon the lore and legends of the Scottish Highlands in a popular series of Scott‐influenced historical romances that included Kidnapped (1886) and its sequel Catriona (1893), The Master of Ballantrae (1889), and Weir of Hermiston (1896). In the early twentieth century, a Scottish Renaissance rebelled against Kailyard sentimentality and promoted scathingly realist or naturalist works such as George Douglas Brown’s The House with Green Shutters (1910). The movement was primarily associated with poetry, however, in particular with the Scots dialect verse of Hugh MacDiarmid. In Ireland, a number of authors writing in the wake of the National Tale kept Irish topics before English‐language readers for several decades. Significant figures here include John and Michael Banim (1798–1842; 1796–1874), William Carleton (1794– 1869), Samuel Lover (1797–1868), and Charles Lever (1806–1872). By the early 1820s, the Banims were planning a series of fictional works on the model of Scott’s novels. Such texts as the 1825 Tales of the O’Hara Family led John Banim to be known as “the Scott of Ireland.” Carleton’s Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry (1830) and his Fardorougha the Miser (1839), like the Banims’ work, focused on the customary lives of the Catholic Irish peasantry, though Carleton, a Protestant convert, was eventually to alienate his Catholic countrymen with his increasingly critical and antipapal point of view. Whereas the Banims and Carleton often emphasized the grimmer aspects of peasant life, Samuel Lover did much to disseminate the image of the happy‐go‐lucky rural Irishman, in such popular works as Handy Andy, an Irish Tale (1842). The prolific Charles Lever specialized in rogues’ and military tales, some of which, such as The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer (1839) and Jack Hinton The Guardsman (1843), updated the National Tale’s device of the Englishman in Ireland. No less than did Samuel Lover, Lever incurred criticism from some of his countrymen for trading in Hibernian caricatures palatable to the English masters. He would keep at it until his death in Intranationalisms 381

1872, achieving success with such titles as Charles O’Malley (1841) and Tom Burke of Ours (1844), the latter the tale of an Irish adventurer under Napoleon. By mid‐century, however, the Englishman Trollope, who had spent 20 years in Ireland and was to set several unsuccessful novels in that country (among them The Macdermots of Ballycloran [1847], The Kellys and the O’Kellys [1848], and Castle Richmond [1860]), was informed by his reluctant publisher that “Irish stories are very unpopular” (quoted in Hall 1991, 97). The terrible famine of the 1840s restored a political dimension to writing about Ireland and tended to polarize opinion about the country, cooling the interest and sympathy of English readers. It would not be for another half‐century, in the 1890s, that cultural nationalism would be revived in an Irish cultural “Renaissance,” alongside an ultimately stymied movement, if not for full‐bore independence, at least for Home Rule. Douglas Hyde, founder of the Gaelic League, “sensed that a purely economic or political freedom would be hollow, if the country was by the time of its attainment ‘despoiled of the bricks of nationality’ … [and] ‘stript of its Celtic characteristics’” (quoted in Kiberd 1995, 143). The poet William Butler Yeats and the dramatist and patroness Lady Gregory, among others, reached back to the aboriginal myths and retold them in a variety of works, but prose fiction did not figure prominently in the Irish Revival. In Wales, the dynamics of intranationalism gave rise to an “Anglo‐Welsh” novel from about the turn of the twentieth century (the term was first used to describe a literary movement in 1922). The writer O. M. Edwards had as early as 1894 expressed a “strong desire for a literature that will be English in language but Welsh in spirit” (quoted in Hooker 2001, 6). But up to 1900, “Welsh fiction in English was basically a way for English readers to tour Wales without leaving the armchair” (Knight 2004, xi). A tradition of “first‐contact romance” (see Knight 2004, Chapter 1) offered up appealingly alien and quaint renditions of Welshness for the British market, with sometimes a gesture toward the English‐reading Welsh audience as well. In the quasi‐ National Tale The Cambrian Sketch‐Book (1875), R. Rice Davies would write, “if this work deepens the Welshman’s love of country, and induces the English reader to regard us in a more favourable light than that adopted by a class of Saxon critics, I will not have labored in vain” (quoted in Knight 2004, 11). Industrialization in Wales in the first decades of the twentieth century, particularly in the southern coal‐mining dis- tricts, wrought enormous demographic and sociological changes and brought about a new Welsh literature rooted in working‐class experience (as in the fiction of Joseph Keating [1871–1934]) and devoted to the satirical destruction of prettified representations of the country. Caradoc Evans (1878–1945) is especially noteworthy here. His 1915 My People constitutes “the dark reflex of first‐contact romance” (Knight 2004, 32) and is comparable to the fiction associated with the Scottish Renaissance. Yet the notion of Wales as a region redolent of premodernity persisted, notably in the works of the half‐Welsh transplant John Cowper Powys. In novels such as Owen Glendower (1941) and Porius (1951), Powys sacralized the landscape of his adopted land, writing, for example, “The very geography of the land and its climactic peculiarities, the very nature of its mountains and rivers, the very falling and lifting of the mists that waver above them, all lend themselves, to a degree unknown in any other earthly region, to what might be called the mythology of escape” (quoted in Hooker 2001, 16). Ironically, Powys and other Welsh writers devoted to preserving the antique authenticity of 382 James Buzard

Welshness exhibited the influence of the English Victorian critic Matthew Arnold, whose On the Study of Celtic Literature (1867), inspired in part by recent publications on Welsh antiquities and by the recent re‐establishment of the bardic festival known as the Eisteddfod, had enshrined the idea of a Celtic poetical dreaminess to counterbal- ance the dogged pragmatism of the conquering Saxon race. In more recent times, Welsh writers have sought to write about Wales without trafficking in what they regard as a compromised “Welsh style.” The critic and novelist Raymond Williams regarded such a style as “a form of cultural subordination, the only … way the Welsh could present themselves to a London audience” (quoted in Knight 2004, 158). His several published novels employ a strikingly spare idiom; by the time of his death Williams had completed only the first volume of a planned trilogy entitled People of the Black Mountains (1989–1990), intended to be a monumental reclamation of Welsh identity and territory from the characterizations imposed on Wales during the era of modern British national consolidation. Other significant writers, such as Ewyn Humphrey, have attached themselves to cosmopolitan modernism. Humphrey’s Outside the House of Baal (1965) – clearly inspired by James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), and sharing that work’s tendency to yoke hyperlocality and universality – represents “a searching rejection of the colonial impact of English rule on Wales” (Knight 2004, 141). Between 1840 and 1890, the novel became the dominant genre in England, chiefly in the mode of domestic realism pioneered by Jane Austen in the Romantic era, but with plentiful infusions of Gothic and romance as well. I have written elsewhere about the Victorian novel’s paradoxical appropriation of certain aspects of the formula laid down in the National Tale and in Scott’s historical fiction – an appropriation paradoxical because it involved English novelist’s quest for an English culture or “intranation” – that is, an intranational identity that might be claimed even by the people who controlled the multinational state and were most thoroughly identified with the outreaching British Empire (Buzard 2005). English novelists might be driven to undertake this quest, it seems to me, for several reasons, of which I will isolate three. First, defeat of the French at Waterloo had removed the sole remaining rival against the British Empire for global dominance, making it possible to fantasize about that Empire exercising its will without hindrance anywhere at all. Second, a shift in colonial policy began to unfold in the post‐Waterloo years that involved a new emphasis on the exporting of English culture through school curricula and other such means. It was in this period that the Empire came to be seen as having a mission to civilize, and this made “Englishness” imaginable as globally applicable Civilization itself. Third, thanks to the Romantic movement, being Scottish, Irish, or Welsh had come to mean something quite definite, whereas, to exactly the extent that “English” might appear practically synonymous with “civilized,” the dominant force in the United Kingdom might seem to be nothing in particular, culturally vacant and “unmarked.” Such a condition of vacancy is the flipside of the sense that one’s nation has the right, or the obligation, to universalize itself. As a character in Dickens’s Bleak House would succinctly put it, “Anywhere’s nowhere” (1971, 96): to believe that one’s culture belonged everywhere was to deprive it of the right of belonging anywhere in particular. Such are the burdens of colossal success. And so, “[t]o the degree that England becomes the center of the Empire, its own internal sense of culture accordingly fails to develop.” In the first decades of the new Intranationalisms 383

United Kingdom, when “for the first time, the novel becomes a prime genre for the dissemination of nationalist ideas,” the “purely English novel comes to appear quite pallid” (Trumpener 1997, 15–16, 296 n. 39). In response, there arose an autoethnographic or intranational novel in England itself, dedicated to a balancing act comparable though by no means identical to the kind seen in Scott. In the English variant, the intranation had to distinguish itself, not from the mere province, but from the imperial State. Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853) may provide the starkest example of this category competition, and like the Edgeworth model Scott himself took up, it organizes itself around a trope of exile and of a potentially redemptive return. Lucy Snowe’s reticent narrative of her struggle toward fuller life – a narrative that gestures toward but never attains the culmination of an allegorized union – unfolds against the backdrop of another story, a story only implied but of grandiose proportions. This is the tale of John Graham Bretton – of John Great Britain, as we might as well label him, since, as she interweaves him into Lucy’s narrative, Brontë presents his inferable arc of development in terms reminiscent of the National Tale and of Scott. Commencing the novel as a callow youth of Celtic (not Saxon) nature, John Graham Bretton undergoes, as Lucy does herself, a trial by dislocation to Catholic “Labassecour” on the Continent. In his variant of the pattern, he nearly loses himself amidst Jesuitical scheming and the seductions of foreign women, only to emerge at last the reformed and refined British subject capable of advancing the interests of the imperial state. He is the Anglicized Celt of British national fantasy, bearer of that self‐universalizing sense of imperial identity from which a limited, relocatable Englishness must diverge, as Lucy’s history pointedly does from Bretton’s. Bretton’s ultimate marriage to the woman named Polly Home rings the changes upon the familiar allegorical unions of Owenson, Scott, and others, this time suggesting that “home” for the reconstituted Briton might be anywhere at all, since modern Britishness means nothing less than (and nothing more than) a civilization everywhere at home. Bretton’s story, suppressed and kept at bay by Lucy’s, is the epic Bildungsroman or British Aeneid in which exile may be converted into boundless empire. It is by appreciating the massive weight of this tale she silences that we put ourselves in a position to appreciate the tale Lucy actually tells, which involves not only resistance to Continental and Catholic vanities, but a strikingly open exploration of the utmost limits of Protestant Englishness. For a further twist of the intranational screw, we must return – in a way – to Ireland. If the novel played no vital part in the intranational imaginings of the Revival – the cultural nationalism of which would eventually run hard up against the clumsy attempt of the Easter rebels of 1916 to proclaim independence from England – it would be radically reinvented in the next generation, in particular by James Joyce. We return to Ireland “in a way” because Joyce, unswayed by his elders’ enthusiasms and disaffected by a society he regarded as paralyzed, left the country in 1904, returned only once, yet wrote obsessively of Ireland across his entire remarkable career. He did not head to London to try his fortune there, as so many writers from the peripheries had done, but a contest with England and English remained an important feature of all his work. His protagonist Stephen Dedalus, in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), converses with an Englishman and reflects, “My soul frets in the shadow of his language” (2003, 132); but Joyce presents the towering example of a postcolonial writer who, rather than returning to the language of his people (as Miss Ivors might 384 James Buzard recommend), decides to take possession of the conqueror’s language and to reshape it at will. A Portrait is a Bildungsroman that presents the story of its protagonist as an exploration of what it might take to bring a free Irishman into existence. The first chapter of Ulysses features Dedalus’s encounter with the Englishman Haines, in Ireland to study the local culture and indulge in a fair amount of “imperial nostalgia” about the quaint customs of the conquered race (see Rosaldo 1993). Dedalus later undergoes a drubbing at the hands of a British officer. The “Oxen of the Sun” episode proclaims command of English by telling its portion of the novel in an array of styles that enact its evolution from Anglo‐Saxon to contemporary street patois. English is reborn at the mercy of the Irish modernist. Joyce does not re‐enact the contest the previous generation had conducted with British cultural domination; he remains aloof from the appeal of Miss Ivor’s argument. At the end of “The Dead,” his alter ego Conroy resolves, “The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward” (1996, 223) – that is, toward the last portion of Ireland where Irish remained a living tongue. Joyce went the other way, to the Continent, where he spent the rest of his life heading westward in imagination. He refused to be limited to the local contest of Ireland versus Britain; he was mainly satirical toward characters connected to the Irish Revival movement. Little Chandler, in “A Little Cloud” from Dubliners, dreams impotently of becoming a poet and hitching his wagon to the vogue in England for melancholy Irish verse. He and Haines would get along swimmingly. Determined to push her daughter ahead in Dublin musical society, Mrs. Kearney, in the same book’s “A Mother,” makes cynical use of the fact that her daughter bears the same name as the Irish mythic heroine Kathleen ni Houlihan: “When the Irish Revival began to be appreciable, Mrs. Kearney determined to take advantage of her daughter’s name and brought an Irish teacher to the house” (137). In Ulysses, Joyce would immerse recent Anglo‐Irish conflicts in the unfathomably deep bath of a fully universal, even cosmic, perspective. He developed a mythic realism that pushed the idioms of nineteenth‐century domestic realism and of aboriginal legend into the same space, forcing them to cohabit, and then pushed each to its extreme, and beyond. If the original intranationalists of the peripheral United Kingdom needed to hold at bay the prospect of their lands turning into mere localities or provinces, and the English Victorian novelists had to contest the evacuation of all cultural distinctiveness from “English” and deny their nation’s equivalence to the Empire, Joyce’s modernism set the hyperparticular against the cosmic or archetypal, realism and myth each used as a trope of the other and also “as a critique of the other” (Kiberd 1995, 339). Discrete individuality, locatedness in time, and hyperlocality take on the agelessness of myth, and then revert to their topical conditions. In the wee hours of June 17, 1904, Number 7 Eccles Street, Dublin, Ireland becomes the home of “Everyman or Noman” – who has always been the Irish Jew Leopold Bloom, again the outsider or partial outsider as guide to a culture (Joyce 1961, 727). Joyce globalizes the space of the intranational in a manner dialectically counter to the universalizing of Englishness under British Imperialism. His last work, Finnegans Wake (1939) represented another, and his most radical, melding of the universal and historically particular, nowhere more strikingly than in its language. The continual opening‐out of discrete characters and events into their historical and mythic parallels across all history takes place in a medium arising Intranationalisms 385 from the clash of Irish and English. “By the time he wrote Finnegans Wake, Joyce had learned to emphasize the ways in which Irish caused its speakers to rework English, so that the book’s underlying idiom is his own idiolect of Hiberno‐English” (Kiberd 1995, 332). This essay’s incomplete approach to the topic of intranationalism in the “English” novel will close by gesturing toward two subsequent developments bearing meaningful relationship to Joycean modernism. First, consider the evident descendants of Joyce, such as Samuel Beckett and Flann O’Brien. Like Joyce, Beckett expatriated himself to the Continent, where he would craft a postmodern minimalism running exactly contrary to Joyce’s always additive style and take Joyce’s universal frame of reference to yet new lengths. To distance himself still further from Ireland than the miles he traveled had placed him, Beckett took to writing in French, translating his own work back into English but retaining his link to Ireland in what Aijaz Ahmed would call “a nationalism of mourning” (quoted in Kiberd 1995, 531). Beckett’s All that Fall reports “It is suicide to be abroad. But what is it to be at home … ? A lingering dissolution” (quoted in Kiberd 1995, 532). Flann O’Brien bore out the observation. Remaining in Ireland, he struggled to find his voice, dissolved in drink, yet produced at least one breathtaking work, At Swim‐Two‐Birds (1939), that carries hilariously forward Joyce’s merging of mythic and mundane. A second Joycean legacy takes us still further afield. “The modernism of Joyce was not only that of Mann, Proust, or Eliot; even more it anticipated that of Rushdie, Marquez, and the postcolonial artists” (Kiberd 1995, 339). Joyce’s perception of the “split between modernity and underde- velopment” in Ireland, the “almost surreal juxtapositions of affluence and dire poverty, of ancient superstition and contemporary anomie” had led him to develop a fictional mode that could “allow the miraculous and the mundane to coexist at the same level – as the same order of event” (Rushdie, quoted in Kiberd 1995, 339). In Rushdie in particular, intranationalism globalized turns inside out, into the extranationalism of the postcolonial, a perspective that observes, in the words of the stuttering Whiskey Sisodia of The Satanic Verses (1988), “The trouble with the Engenglish is that their hiss hiss history happened overseas, so they dodo don’t know what it means” (343).

References

Buzard, James. 2005. Disorienting Fiction: The Hall, John. 1991. Trollope: A Biography. Oxford: Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth‐Century Clarendon Press. British Novels. Princeton: Princeton University Hechter, Michael. 1975. Internal Colonialism: The Press. Celtic Fringe in British National Development, Crawford, Robert. 1992. Devolving English 1536–1819. Berkeley: University of California Literature. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Press. Deane, Seamus. 1997. Strange Country: Modernity Hooker, Jeremy. 2001. Imagining Wales: A view of and Nationhood in Irish Writing since 1790. Modern Welsh Writing in English. Cardiff: Oxford: Clarendon Press. University of Wales Press. Dickens, Charles. 1971 [1852]. Bleak House. Joyce, James. 1961 [1922]. Ulysses. New York: Harmondsworth: Penguin. Modern Library. Duncan, Ian. 2007. Scott’s Shadow: The Novel in Joyce, James. 1996 [1914]. Dubliners, edited by Romantic Edinburgh. Princeton: Princeton Robert Scholes and A. Walton Litz. New York: University Press. Penguin, 1996. 386 James Buzard

Joyce, James. 2003 [1916]. A Portrait of the Artist Pratt, Mary Louise. 1992. Imperial Eyes: Travel as a Young Man, edited by Seamus Deane. Writing and Transculturation. New York: London: Penguin. Routledge. Kiberd, Declan. 1995. Inventing Ireland: The Rosaldo, Renato. 1993. Culture and Truth: The Literature of the Modern Nation. Cambridge, MA: Remaking of Social Analysis. Boston: Beacon. Harvard University Press. Rushdie, Salman. 1988. The Satanic Verses. London: Knight, Stephen. 2004. A Hundred Years of Fiction: Viking. Writing Wales in English. Cardiff: University of Trumpener, Katie. 1997. Bardic Nationalism: The Wales Press. Romantic Novel and the British Empire. Princeton: Michaels, Walter Benn. 1995. Our America: Princeton University Press. Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism. Durham: Duke University Press. 25 Internationalisms and the Geopolitical Aesthetic Lauren M. E. Goodlad

Let us begin this exploration of Victorian‐era internationalisms with the opening paragraph of an anonymous 1866 article in the Cornhill Magazine, entitled “A Visit to the Suez Canal.”

“Actum est! My holiday is over!” I exclaimed, as I turned my back on Raphael’s St. Cecilia at Bologna, and set my face towards Rimini. But who enjoys a holiday like a returned Sahib after his long absence from home? The invigorating air of England seems to respond to his slightest movement, and breathe around him as it were a strange, deli cious music. As for me … I had turned away from the Paradise of home to look in on the pleasant wickedness of Homburg, and had crossed the rushing Rhine at Basle before I remembered that the dawn of “Black Monday” was already reddening for me in the expectant East … At Brindisi, than which a more heaven‐forsaken hole is nowhere to be found, the light had vanished altogether from my face; but as I stepped on board the Italian steamer bound for Alexandria, the purpose I had formed to make a supplementary holiday of the trip through Egypt, and visit the works in progress through Suez and Port Saeed, threw a last ray of sunshine over my departing joys. (Wyllie 1866, 368)

Written from the standpoint of a British “Sahib” on his way back to India after visiting “home,” the article, published anonymously by John William Shaw Wyllie (1835– 1870), a civil servant born in India but educated in England, appeared during a critical juncture in the history of Victorian global perception.1 On one side of that juncture, the passage harks back to the “free trade” imaginary that dominated the early‐Victorian era. That worldview was epitomized in 1850 when Lord Palmerston, addressing Parliament as Foreign Secretary, declared that, “as the Roman, in days of old, held himself free from indignity, when he could say Civis Romanus sum [I am a Roman

A Companion to the English Novel, First Edition. Edited by Stephen Arata, Madigan Haley, J. Paul Hunter, and Jennifer Wicke. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. 388 Lauren M. E. Goodlad citizen]; so also a British subject, in whatever land he may be, shall feel confident that the watchful eye and the strong arm of England, will protect him against injustice and wrong” (quoted in Hayward 1879, 62). Nine years later, David Masson wrote in Macmillan’s that “wherever over the world British influence penetrates, … there, and not in the mere islands where we have our footing, Great Britain lives” (1859, 4). Both quotations illustrate the homology between British man and British dominion which undergirds the self‐possessed traveler personified in the Cornhill – a British subject whose sovereign dignity extends beyond “the mere islands” of the metropole. In the 1850s, the dominant self‐image of Great Britain was still that of a commercial power spreading the liberalizing benefits of world trade. As Palmerston prophesied in 1842, free trade would usher in “civilization with one hand and peace with another” (quoted in Bourne 1970, 255). So too the emigration of millions of Britons to North America and Australia held out the prospect of a “Greater Britain,” spreading Anglo‐ Saxon blood, culture, and industry to the world’s temperate zones. In the same year that Palmerston urged repeal of the Corn Laws, Herman Merivale’s popular Lectures on Colonization and Colonies (1842) extolled British settlement, anticipating a time when émigrés radiating from “the commercial metropolis of the world,” would have “scat tered thick as stars over the surface of this earth, communities of citizens owning the name of Britons” (293). Yet it is worth remarking that the transnational sublime evoked by Wyllie’s traveler is hardly idyllic. No sooner does he regain the “Paradise” that is “home” than he aban dons it for “the pleasant wickedness of Homburg” – the very den of vice which George Eliot fictionalized in the opening chapter of Daniel Deronda (1876). Then too there is the topsy‐turvy life of a “Sahib” spent vacationing at “home” while inhabiting a non‐ home in South Asia. In India, wrote no less doughty a traveler than Harriet Martineau, the British expatriate “is plunged into bad air” in a climate prone to “zymotic diseases” (1863, 335). That Britain’s dominion over this densely populated subcontinent was hardly assimilable to a relation of trade was a reality that the so‐called mutiny of 1857–1858 had made harder to ignore. As a self‐styled trading empire, British expan sion could be idealized as “Protestant, commercial, maritime, and free” (Armitage 2000, 173). But in India, as Charles Dilke wrote in 1868, “Britannia … becomes a mysterious Oriental despotism, ruling a sixth of the human race, nominally for the natives’ own good, … scheming, annexing, out‐manoeuvring Russia” (1869, 320). Few contemporaries were as clear‐sighted in perceiving that the British Raj had become the kind of territorial empire of conquest which many Britons associated with Continental cultures that lacked a deep‐seated commitment to liberty. In 1866, almost a decade after the rebellion, Britain’s rule over India was still in transition. No longer founded on a contract between the East India Company and the Mughal Dynasty, imperial sovereignty had been refashioned as a quasi‐feudal bond fus ing Indian royals to the British Crown (Cohn 1983; see also Goodlad 2015, chap. 2). Thus, at the other side of the juncture that peaked with Palmerston’s defense of the globetrotting Briton was the neo‐feudal style of rule which Benjamin Disraeli’s Tory party celebrated in 1876 when it made Victoria Empress of India. Wed to the picture of England as a beacon of freedom, British liberals were slow to acknowledge the rise of a formal empire predicated on quasi‐feudal ties and military force. The Liberal ten dency to disavow imperialism in the face of events including the Crimean War (waged Internationalisms and the Geopolitical Aesthetic 389 to control routes to India), the Opium Wars (fought to open China’s markets), the Indian rebellion, and Governor Eyre’s imposition of martial law in Jamaica, helps to explain J. R. Seeley’s notorious claim in The Expansion of England (1883) that Britons seemed to have “conquered … half the world in a fit of absence of mind” (1971, 12). Liberal reaction to the New Imperialism at times took the form of scapegoating Disraeli. As a Jewish convert to Christianity, the Tory prime minister could be figured “as an exotically alien, manipulative mountebank” who had “imperialized England almost beyond recognition” (Voskuil 2004, 142). In reality, Britain’s “liberal” commercial pre‐eminence was inseparable from centuries of imperial violence. England’s “fit of absence of mind” began in the early‐modern era with the conquest of Ireland, the Atlantic slave trade, and the rise of a West Indian sugar plantation com plex that had helped to finance the industrial revolution (see Curtin 1990). The export of Anglo‐Saxon settlers, meanwhile, was predicated on the myth that the inhabitants of “thinly peopled” lands in North America and Australia were obsolete races destined for extinction (see Brantlinger 2003). By the 1850s, Britain’s presence in South Asia had mutated from a mercantilist trading monopoly into a territorial empire sustained by taxation on land. Addressing Parliament less than four years before rebellion broke out in Meerut, Sir Charles Wood described Indians as a “docile” and “tractable” people destined to affirm British tutelage as the gift of “benefactors” rather than “conquerors” (Wood 1853). The Indian rebellion was, thus, the first of a series of mid‐Victorian imperial crises to weaken confidence in the “tractability” of non‐Europeans and, as a result, to bolster the credibility of pseudoscientific theories of race.

Internationalism in Theory and Practice

Deeply embedded as it was in this history, the term internationalism cannot but be marked by its co‐emergence with liberal ideologies at their most tendentious. Coined by Jeremy Bentham in the late eighteenth century to designate “the branch of law which goes under the name of the law of nations” (1996, 296), the nub of this seemingly innocuous idea was the question of who qualified for the status of nationhood. In “A Few Words on Non‐Intervention” (1859) John Stuart Mill laid down the principle that “it is as little justifiable to force our ideas on other people, as to compel them to submit to our will in any other respect” (1984, 118). Yet, he simultaneously made clear that imperial tutelage was the exception to the rule. “[B]arbarian” peoples, Mill wrote (invoking a term from Scottish stadial theory), “have no rights as a nation except a right to such treatment as may, at the earliest period, fit them for becoming one” (118–119). Written shortly after he refused a position in the post‐rebellion regime of Indian gover nance, the essay offers a gloomy retrospect on Mill’s 30 years’ service in the East India Company which can be read against the grain of the imperial worldview it ostensibly sanctions. Nonetheless, the distinction Mill asserts, however ambivalently, between imperial tutelage and the “totally different principles” that prevail when the parties in question form “an equal community of nations, like Christian Europe,” was an incon trovertible feature of the nineteenth century’s internationalist logic (120). To be sure, metropolitan spectacles such as the Great Exhibition of 1851 and the London International Exhibition of 1862 promoted the reassuring idea that British 390 Lauren M. E. Goodlad culture and industry were giving rise to a harmonious global economy. Yet that very notion coincided with a geopolitical imaginary in which major world powers were assumed to operate as sovereign units, defending and extending the territories over which they claimed dominion. Upholding free trade in Parliament, Palmerston pri vately wrote to an Indian official that, since Europe’s manufacturers were “fast excluding” British products from Continental markets, the state’s “unremitting” duty was “to find in other parts of the world new vents for the produce of [British] industry” (quoted in Davison 1992, 28). No wonder that an anonymous article in Blackwood’s described the 1862 Exhibition as a “congress of the nations” for a world depicted as “a stage,” “a mart,” a “battle‐field,” and a backdrop for enduring British “supremacy” (Anon. 1862). Although in theory the status of nation‐state could develop over time, in practice mid‐Victorian internationalists tended to affirm an “empirical” standard that restricted the rights of sovereignty to those strong enough to claim it. Thus Matthew Arnold, writing in the midst of the Italian struggle for independence, put forward national “greatness” as the precondition for nationhood. Whereas the Italians constituted a “great nationality,” he wrote, the Polish, Hungarians, and Irish did not (1953, 17). Articulating a kind of international survival of the fittest, Arnold believed that subal tern nationalities would be subsumed through racial hybridity. In comparable fashion, English “race” combined the blood of Saxons with that of Celts. In the “new people” thus composed, “the stock of the conquerors counts for most, but the stock of the con quered, too, counts for something” (1866, 539). Toward the end of the century, coincident with the “New Liberal” turn toward col lectivism and social welfare, self‐styled liberal internationalists such as J. A. Hobson articulated philosophical alternatives to the Hobbesean vision of anarchic competition. Like Woodrow Wilson, Hobson looked to international federations to ensure a juridical notion of sovereignty like that which the charter of the United Nations grants – in theory – to all member nations. By contrast, socialists took their cue from the European revolutions of 1848 and the First Workingman’s International (founded in London in 1864); their call for worker solidarity and communal ownership of property envisioned the obsolescence of interstate rivalry. This effort to transcend national borders, as Perry Anderson argues, was spearheaded by a cosmopolitan class of skilled artisans who were educated and mobile. But by the 1870s, when the movement stalled, European labor had become proletarianized and working‐class energy was increasingly syphoned into racial pride and inter‐imperial competition (2002, 5–25). Hence, “the overwhelmingly dominant political by‐product” of capitalism’s diffusion across borders, wrote Tom Nairn in the 1980s, has been nationalism (1997, 27). Although the globalization of capital since Marx’s time had produced worldwide economic interdependence and cultural hybridity, it had yet to yield any lasting form of political internationalization. Given the nation’s implication in war, empire‐building, and the disruption of soli darities of many kinds, the state‐centricism that internationalism arguably retains has been an object of longstanding critique. In the 1980s and early 1990s, books such as Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983), Homi Bhabha’s Nation and Narration (1990), and Linda Colley’s Britons: Forging the Nation (1992) put the constitution of national identity at the fore front of many disciplines. But by the end of the 1990s, fueled by the rising attention Internationalisms and the Geopolitical Aesthetic 391 to globalization, scholars moved from historicizing the nation to questioning its predominance as a framework for critical analysis. In Modernity at Large (1996), Arjun Appadurai wrote that “the nation‐state, as a complex modern political form” was “on its last legs” (19). Four years later, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000) hailed the arrival of a world‐scale “Empire” and a politics of the multitude; literary scholars such as Bruce Robbins (1998) and Amanda Anderson (1998) proffered cosmopolitanism as an antidote to chauvinism. The historian Antoinette Burton described how the presumed fixity of the nation‐state excluded diasporic subjects (2000). Such scholarship was not only transnational but also, in varying degrees, antinational insofar as it put forward the idea that the contemporary neoliberal condition was – or should be – either actually or effectively postnational. From this standpoint, internationalism was, by definition, over invested in a category of sovereignty which was already passé, or must become so in the interests of methodological acuity and/or ethicopolitical progress. Writing in 2003, Timothy Brennan countered this reflex to declare the nation dead on arrival. For all its manifold imperfections, he maintained, the nation was still the only site that enabled poor working people to “make limited claims on power” (40). Brennan identified cosmopolitanism with an idealist drive “to erase” differences “juridi cally,” before the “material conditions for doing so equitably” had emerged. By con trast, internationalism, he argued, situates the nation form in “the realities of global interpenetration and homogenization, mass migration and mass culture” (42). As such, it proffers the most workable political framework for the “domestically restricted, the recently relocated, the provisionally exiled and temporarily weak” – in other words, those whose capacities to cultivate “transnational forms of solidarity … have not yet arrived” (42). As Nairn did in the 1980s, Brennan thus emphasized the disparity bet ween capitalism’s ceaseless drive, in Marx and Engels’s words, to “nestle everywhere” and the relative precarity of transnational politics (Marx and Engels 1978, 476). It is all the more noteworthy, then, that Etienne Balibar articulated similar concerns in describing the European Union, the most ambitious supranational body to emerge since the United Nations. In We, the People of Europe? (2003), Balibar worried that the exclusion of “aliens” was creating “the specter of an apartheid” (9). Calling for a “universal right of circulation and residency” to endow working immigrants with the kind of mobility capital enjoyed, Balibar warned that an absolute opening of Europe’s borders would exacerbate a “savage capitalism” that regarded human labor as a dispos able commodity (176–177). A decade later, his concerns about capital have seemed to be more prescient than his vision of a more inclusive citizenship. Under the austerity regimes implemented since the financial crises of 2008, citizens as well as immigrants have become “useless raw materials” whose social welfare must yield to the market’s demand for fiscal discipline (Balibar 2003, 176). Instead of workers’ sovereignty across Europe’s borders, the sovereignty of capital exerts its power to dictate policy for citi zens and noncitizens alike. Authorized by emergency powers, the European Commission’s unelected directorates impose technocratic guidelines that national par liaments have no choice but to enact. While such a modernity is indeed “at large,” it is not the kind of transnational polity anyone had in mind. The actually existing internationalisms since Bentham’s time may thus seem to pre sent a long history of compromised or, at best, unfulfilled aspirations for a transnational commitment to justice and equality. Nonetheless, scholars need not conclude that 392 Lauren M. E. Goodlad concepts of internationalism offer no critical purchase. Working in a normative vein, Brennan calls on critics to embrace a postcolonial internationalism that aspires to “establish global relations of respect and cooperation, based on acceptance of differences in polity as well as culture” (2003, 42). As Goodlad and Wright observe, “the Victorian era’s internationalisms” were “constitutively incapable” of affirming Brennan’s “inclusive vision insofar as they were predicated on the belief that national sovereignty was the self‐evident entitlement of cultural, economic, and military strength” (2007). But in a more open‐ended vein of critical analysis, their 2007 special issue of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net, on “Victorian Internationalisms,” invites the exploration of spaces of ethicopolitical and cultural experiment. While such internationalism may work for the nation (affirming the framework for subaltern politics that Brennan pre scribes), it also bears the potential to recognize modes of interaction which complicate the assumption of national sovereignty and anticipate translocal, transnational, and supranational polities of many kinds. In one of the most compelling theorizations of internationalism to emerge from the field of international relations, Tarak Barkawi and Mark Laffey criticize the convention that constructs the international as a “‘thin’ space of strategic interaction” populated by the representatives of sovereign states (2002, 110). Such paradigms, they suggest, obscure the working of systematic inequalities across, between, and within national borders. Barkawi and Laffey propose a “thick” internationalism – a “set of social rela tions, consisting of social and cultural flows as well as political–military and economic interactions” (110). Their nuanced systemic approach invites scholars of literature and culture to pose a range of complementary questions. For example: What kinds of cultural internationalisms have critics so far advanced? What happens when we explore literary genres, styles, and forms in international rather than national terms? In the remainder of this essay I look at a sampling of the nineteenth century’s diverse interna tional motifs. Along the way, I consider the germinal thesis that a “thick” space of literary internationalism might challenge and enrich the literary histories that we know.

In and Beyond the Literary Channel

In Considerations on Representative Government (1861), Mill offers one of the most inter esting reflections on nationhood in nineteenth‐century political philosophy. Rather than describe a test for greatness, Mill writes that a “portion of mankind may be said to constitute a Nationality if they are united among themselves by sympathies which do not exist between them and any others.” “This feeling of nationality,” as he calls it, might be the effect of shared race, descent, language, religion, or geography. “But the strongest of all” causes is “the possession of a national history, and [the] consequent community of recollections” (1861, 307). As he reflects on the as yet un‐united Germans and the recently unified Italians, Mill notes that both peoples flourished in the absence of the shared political structures that modern nationhood affords. In doing so, he takes for granted that literature helped to nourish that “feeling” that Germans and Italians developed without common governance. Mill’s striking evocation of nationality as, at bottom, an affective bond, borne of particular histories and “recollections,” warrants pause. His theory illuminates a Internationalisms and the Geopolitical Aesthetic 393 comparable observation in Bruce Robbins’s Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress (1999). As he reflects on the challenge of transnational solidarity, Robbins notes that an “internationalist politics” requires the prior formation of “an internationalist ethic or culture” (17). Comparing Robbins’s insight with Mill’s invites a generative question: if Mill’s “feeling of nationality” is rooted in “national history,” might Robbins’s interna tional feeling be spurred by international history of some kind? Moreover, might such history explore that thicker space of internationality which scholars of literature have yet to develop? It is worth pausing to note that the work of at least one prominent Victorianist, Caroline Levine, suggests that, for all the emphasis on cosmopolitanism and transna tionality, the boundaries constituting literary fields remain “autochthonous.” That is, while “postcolonial, transnational, and global approaches have done a great deal to expand the acceptable range of Victorian literary history,” scholarship in the field “con tinues to reproduce the logic of the nation” by relying on “the birth or naturalized birth of the author” (2013, 648). Levine thus follows Wai Chee Dimock’s Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time (2006) in urging literary critics to push against the “unilateralism” of nation‐based literary criticism (2013, 3). At the very least, Levine implies, Victorianists should recognize the many non‐British writ ings, contemporaneous and otherwise, with which British authors themselves were familiar. Levine’s advocacy of the “nation as network” intersects with a wide range of debates surrounding world literature, multilingualism, translation, and comparatism. Among the thornier questions she defers is the degree to which Victorianists should study non‐anglophone literatures and, if so, with what degree of linguistic competence or reliance on translation. Nevertheless, the idea of a less “unilateral” literary criticism is one that no internationalist practice can afford to ignore. In fact, when Dimock’s book appeared in 2006, internationalism had already begun to play a role in describing literature’s transnational dimensions. In The Literary Channel: The Inter‐National Invention of the Novel (2002), Margaret Cohen and Carolyn Dever place the novel’s origins in a “cross‐Channel literary zone,” a space of transcultural exchange between Britain and France which “both vindicate[s] and challenge[s] the imagined contours of the nation‐state” (2–3). Yet, despite this auspicious premise and the intriguing coinage of “inter‐national” to emphasize interstitial space, The Literary Channel is surprisingly invested in discrete bodies of British and French fiction. Rather than exploring a space of social, cultural, or geopolitical transfer, Cohen’s chapter reprises a familiar binary, opposing Victorian realism (in which “characters retreat into their private spheres to practice their ethically sanctioned negative freedoms”) to French realism (which, in refusing to parse virtue, sustains tragic conflict and renders a “con temporary society utterly devoid of ethical force”) (123). Such generalizations obscure the fact that a great deal of Victorian fiction has nothing to do with private retreat and looks precisely at devastated ethics. In a more recent essay, Cohen writes that “the need to … adapt to manners without sacrificing morals, was a constant” for British novelists including George Eliot, Charles Dickens, William Thackeray, and Anthony Trollope (2012, 415). Her analysis follows Franco Moretti’s in opposing the closure of the “English ‘family romance’” to transfor mative French narratives in which “meaning is not the result of a fulfilled teleology but of the total rejection of such a solution” (Moretti 1987, 7). In generalizing 394 Lauren M. E. Goodlad nation‐based canons in order to draw distinctions between them, such comparison evokes a “thin” internationality that stresses national difference over transnational exchange or worlding conditions of possibility. The privileging of French realism which it reflexively affirms extends back to the late nineteenth century, when aspiring novelists like Henry James and George Moore looked to Gustave Flaubert and Honoré de Balzac to burnish their aesthetic credentials. In “The Art of Fiction” (1884), James wrote that the “English novel” has “no air” of “a theory, a conviction, a consciousness of itself … of being the expression of an artistic faith” (1899, 3). In the decades of literary criticism since, many scholars have been quicker to affirm the stereotype of a British realism vitiated by girth, moral earnest ness, and prudery than to ask whether works such as Dombey and Son (1848), Vanity Fair (1848), Barchester Towers (1857), Middlemarch (1871–1872), and Daniel Deronda (1876) actually fail to express artistic conviction. Of course, not all comparative schol arship focuses on nation‐centric generalization. For a worthwhile counterexample one need go no further than Christopher Heywood’s argument for “the mixed origins of Victorian literary thought and expression” including French, American, and Russian influences (1979, 107). In the afterword to The Literary Channel, moreover, Emily Apter points the way to a thicker literary internationalism. Describing the channel as “a zone of mutual refraction where Britain defines itself through its incongruent reflec tion of Frenchness, and vice versa,” Apter imagines a “transnational sequel” that would also “take account of how colonialism and postcolonial theory have altered the shape of European studies” by asking questions that challenge “national traditions” (2002, 286). Thus, in a recent chapter on the business novel, Apter explores the fiction of Balzac, Flaubert, and Émile Zola alongside that of Trollope in order to situate all in a “literary world system of financial novels” (2011, 389). Consider how different George Eliot looks when, instead of James’s “English” novelist, she is discussed as the co‐creator of mid‐Victorian‐era literary currents that crisscrossed the channel and beyond. As John Rignall argues, Eliot was steeped in a “common intellectual culture” encompassing the Continent as well as Britain (2011, 11). Yet, as a “Victorian” author, subject to British mores, Eliot is seldom described, for example, as a novelist of adultery even though the topic shadows all of her works in some form. Indeed, Eliot’s rise to prominence with Adam Bede (1859), a novel acclaimed for pronounced realist style and centered partly on illicit sex, occurred not long after George Meredith hailed Madame Bovary (1856) as the work of a “singularly powerful writer” (1857, 330). Asked by John Blackwood to provide a sketch of Adam Bede, Eliot refused “on the ground that I would not have it judged apart from my treatment, which alone determines the moral quality of art” (quoted in Stang 1957, 956). So far from lacking aesthetic conviction, her reply exemplifies the kind of argument which exonerated Flaubert during the trial of Madame Bovary. In The Victorian Geopolitical Aesthetic: Realism, Sovereignty, and Transnational Experience (Goodlad 2015), I join numerous scholars of France and Britain in exploring the “worldedness” of nineteenth‐century literature. In doing so, I adopt the idea of a “geo political aesthetic” from Fredric Jameson, who, in a 1992 book on cinema, coined the term to describe art’s formal capacity to articulate the “landscapes and forces” of global situations too large, complex, and long‐evolving to be fully accessible to individual experience (3). Although Jameson’s focus is postmodern film, his term nicely captures Internationalisms and the Geopolitical Aesthetic 395 the Victorian affects of imperial disavowal and anxiety over the breaching of cherished sovereignties at multiple scales. As the ideal of stalwart nationhood succumbed to capitalist and imperial flux, realism’s diverse aesthetic registers morphed to include not only rich ethnographies of the “condition of England” (e.g., Dickens’s Bleak House [1853], Eliot’s pastoral fiction, and Trollope’s Barsetshire series), but also striking per ceptions of the thick in‐betweenness of international space (e.g., Dickens’s Little Dorrit [1857], Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, and Trollope’s He Knew He Was Right [1869]). A “geo political” approach to these and many other examples of a “worlded” and “worlding” literary aesthetic resists the centripetal logic of nationality without ignoring the nation‐state’s actually existing power and materiality. On the face of things, for example, Dickens is the most provincial of nineteenth‐ century British novelists. His journal, Household Words, envisioned the nation as an extended family and, in so doing, put London at the center of an international field of “concentric circles” (Clemm 2010, 160). To be sure, though Dickens’s best‐known “translations” entail the speech of working‐class Britons, the author may, nonetheless, have been more “Francophile” than is generally assumed (Hollington 2012, 159). His Tale of Two Cities (1859), as Priti Joshi argues, “provided a way to manage the anxiety, sense of catastrophe, and lack of control that Britons felt” as news of rebellion in India “sunk in” (2007, 85). By and large, however, Dickens has become the exemplar of an “autoethnographic” fiction that – as James Buzard argues in his reading of Bleak House – offers textual “stand‐ins for the boundaries of culture and nation” (2005, 43). It is typically other British novelists to whom scholars turn for examples of mid‐Victorian internationality: for example, to Thackeray, whose disappointment with the French revolution of 1848 inspired him to model Pendennis (1850) on Balzac’s Lost Illusions (1837–1843); to Eliot, who translated German philosophy and met George Henry Lewes in William Jeffs’s London bookshop, which was renowned for disseminating works of French literature and politics (see Atkinson 2012, 247); or to Trollope, whose reputation as “the greatest traveler among mid‐Victorian novelists” prompted Michael Cotsell to take internationality as a Trollopian byword (1990, 243). Nonetheless, from a geopolitical standpoint, such biographical details provide a merely partial set of signposts for nineteenth‐century fiction’s aesthetic engagements with the multifaceted effects of an ongoing globalization of capital. From such a view Dickens’s Dombey and Son is, perhaps, the first British literary expression of the emerg ing world system of financial novels which Apter describes. The same novel finds Edith Dombey stealing away to a French hotel where her husband’s business manager awaits her. While this scandalous flight stops short of a sexual tryst, it connects Dickens’s novel to an adulterous geopolitical aesthetic that includes the fiction of Balzac, George Sand, Flaubert, Eliot, Trollope, James, Leo Tolstoy, and Thomas Hardy. In fact, several features invite us to consider Dealings with the Firm of Dombey and Son: Wholesale, Retail, and for Exportation not only as an acute business novel in which far‐ flung mercantile power provides “a structuring of consciousness” that informs the picture of metropolitan “upheaval” (Stewart 2000, 193), but also as a work that makes broken marriage intrinsic to its addled landscapes and stultified familial bonds. From this perspective, Edith’s simulated adultery with Carker foreshadows Emily Wharton’s disastrous misalliance with a suspected Jew in Trollope’s The Prime Minister (1876), making Carker’s superficial good looks the antecedents of Ferdinand Lopez’s more 396 Lauren M. E. Goodlad emphatic cosmopolitan lack. Both characters are obliterated by oncoming trains (the same fate that Tolstoy chooses for Anna Karenina). We are reminded that Esther, the heroine of Bleak House, is Lady Dedlock’s illegitimate daughter; that Hard Times (1854) centers on the miserable marriage of Stephen Blackpool while staging Louisa’s flight from another unbearable marriage to a businessman; that Little Dorrit pairs financial chicanery with illegitimate birth; that even David Copperfield (1850) includes Little Emily’s ruin. At the same time that Dickens, Flaubert, Eliot, and Trollope fused narratives of adultery and finance, Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon were articulating mid‐Victorian‐era transnationality through new “sensational” styles. The hypermodern mises‐en‐scène of such popular fictions were palpably international. Thus, when Collins’s Basil appeared in 1852, the Athenaeum espied the “unwholesome” influence of the Irish Maturin and the French Eugène Sue (quoted in Dolan and Dougan 2003, 11). Collins, a frequent traveler on the Continent, wrote in 1859 that Balzac was “the deepest and truest observer of human nature whom France has produced since the time of Molière” (1859, 553). Sue, whose influence on G. W. M. Reynolds is well known, was also a significant inspiration for Braddon. In Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), the work that cata pulted Braddon to fame, even Lucy’s maid knows enough French “to be able to dip into the yellow‐paper‐covered novels” – some probably Sue’s – “which my lady ordered from the Burlington Arcade” (Braddon 2012, 94). The London arcade that Braddon cites was the location for the same real‐life bookseller where Eliot met Lewes. An avid reader of French fiction, Braddon published The Doctor’s Wife (1864), a bowdlerized homage to Madame Bovary which blurs the boundaries between realism and sensation. At the peak of Collins’s career, novels such as Armadale (1866) and The Moonstone (1868) brought the suppressed histories of Atlantic slavery and imperial conquest to light through genre‐bending fusions of multi‐voiced narration and mixed‐race subjec tivities. At the end of the century, coincident with the rise of formal empire, Bram Stoker reworked these narrative experiments in Dracula (1897), the groundbreaking novel of Gothic invasion which Stephen Arata has tied to fears of “reverse colonization” (1990, 111). According to Patrick Brantlinger, Stoker’s “imperial Gothic” “combines the seemingly scientific” ideologies of the civilizing mission with an anxious “occultism” (1990, 227). Significantly, the fin‐de‐siècle discourse of degeneration which permeated such fiction was anticipated in an 1871 essay on poems – Robert Buchanan’s pseudonymously published “The Fleshly School of Poetry” – which describes poets such as D. G. Rossetti as “intellectual hermaphrodites” (1871, 32). Moreover, Braddon’s first pub lished book was a collection of poetry, in which the title work, “Garibaldi,” was a long paean to Italy’s liberator. In thus taking Europe’s modern history, especially the Italian Risorgimento, as the occasion for poetry, Braddon followed in the footsteps of renowned Victorian poets such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Arthur Hugh Clough, and Algernon Charles Swinburne. Buchanan’s anxieties notwithstanding, the “fleshly” qualities of such poetry were often imagined to underwrite the vigorous civic demands of a transnational public sphere. As Christopher Keirstead notes, interna tional movements such as the revolutions of 1848 and the Risorgimento became the backdrops for a cosmopolitan “poem of Europe” (2011, 14). Scholars have likewise demonstrated how Victorian enthusiasm for the international sweep of republican Internationalisms and the Geopolitical Aesthetic 397 politics became a key inspiration: not only for Italophiles like the Brownings but also for the Chartist Thomas Cooper and, later, Walt Whitman. In Clough’s verse novel, Amours de Voyage (1849), republican poetics take on a kind of life force: “democracy touches on love, art, natural beauty, a young man’s vocation, international politics, the relation between an individual and his social worlds, the past and the present, and the power of poetic form itself” (Weiner 2005, 132). Swinburne’s “To Walt Whitman in America” (1870), notes Julia Saville, illustrates the kind of “lively translatlantic debate” such poetry incited well into the second half of the decade (2011, 485). A comprehensive history of the nineteenth century’s international literature would thus include genres such as the Bildungsroman, novel of adultery, business novel, detective fiction, verse novel, and imperial romance. Such a history would have much work to do in describing hotspots such as the Anglo‐French channel and the more expansive Euro‐Atlantic networks that poetry and politics helped to forge. Yet such a practice would also be incomplete without embedding these and other zones of aesthetic transfer in the space of capitalist and imperial expansion – the same plural istic web that produced literary hybrids such as Mary Seacole’s Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands (1857), Marcus Clarke’s For the Term of His Natural Life (a novel of transportation serialized in the Australian Journal between 1870 and 1872), Toru Dutt’s Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan (a collection of English‐language adaptations from Sanskrit texts posthumously published in 1882), and Olive Schreiner’s The Story of An African Farm (a fusion of New Woman novel and “South African plaas roman” published in 1883 (Esty 207, 407)).

Suez and the Geopolitical Aesthetic

Perhaps no major British novelist has been dismissed on aesthetic grounds more frequently than Anthony Trollope. Though James was probably the first to identify Trollope with a stolid philistinism that holds it “rather dangerous to be definitely or consciously an artist” (1883, 385), he was not the last. In The Realistic Imagination (1981), George Levine writes that Trollope’s fiction “resists the very radical question ing that some of its elements may seem to provoke” (1881, 202). This is the kind of critique which many scholars have offered since Georg Lukács argued that realism after Balzac subordinated “human values” to “the commodity structure of capitalism” (1950, 63). To be sure, Victorianists have begun to rethink these assumptions about realist form. Yet, for some critics, Trollope remains the exception that proves the rule. I want to conclude this chapter by returning to Suez in order to suggest that Trollope’s art cannot be fully understood until it is considered in light of those global “landscapes and forces” that structure the work of the geopolitical aesthetic. Through two major novel series and diverse contemporary works, Trollope illustrates a range of literary experiments taking place in the decades between the Indian rebellion and the rise of Tory imperialism. His Barsetshire novels elegize an heirloom rootedness in tension with his cosmopolitan travel writings on the West Indies, North America, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. In the 1870s, as capitalism accelerated, speculative bubbles burst, and imperial crises mounted, he developed a more natural istic style. Mature novels such as The Eustace Diamonds (1873), The Way We Live Now 398 Lauren M. E. Goodlad

(1875), and The Prime Minister (1876) dramatize the experience of breached sovereignty through serialized multiplots: an apt narrative form for an experience of globalization elongated in time as well as networked through space. But Trollope also wrote short stories, a genre he chose for some of his most international settings. Published in the second series of Tales of All Countries (1863), “George Walker at Suez,” though older by some years than Wyllie’s Cornhill essay, in a sense picks up where the latter leaves off: in the nineteenth century’s thickest locus of international space. According to Emily A. Haddad, Suez is an “icon of cultural juxtaposition” (2005, 364) – one that E. M. Forster described in A Passage to India (1924) as the point at which “the arrangements of Asia weaken and those of Europe begin to be felt” (quoted in Haddad 2005, 363). Sixty years before Forster, Wyllie’s Sahib conveys a comparable sense of Suez as threshold while he visits the as‐yet‐unfinished canal in the midst of his own passage to India. In the paragraph cited above, the journey from northern to southern Europe and then to “the East” is depicted as a gradual loss of light: “a more heaven‐forsaken hole is nowhere to be found” than Brindisi, he writes of the Adriatic port from which he sails to Egypt (Wyllie 1866, 363). Yet what the Sahib seems inca pable of losing is that self‐possession so vigorously championed by “the strong arm” that Palmerston put forward as the birthright of every Briton. The typical Victorian perception of Egypt was of “a hotbed of intricate diplomatic maneuvering, espionage, and frequent war” – the result of a strategic location connecting Britain to its empire in South Asia (Brantlinger 1990, 136). In the years after Napoleon’s short‐lived occupation between 1798 and 1801, Egypt was restored to Ottoman rule in the form of a quasi‐autonomous suzerainty and target of British vigilance. In 1839, when Egypt’s sultan sought independence with Russia’s help, Palmerston secured French aid in shoring up Ottoman sovereignty. The same “Eastern Question” resurfaced during the Crimean War (1853–1856) when Britain and France allied to defend Ottoman territory against Russian encroachment. This pattern was still in place in 1859 when the decade‐long construction of the Suez Canal began under the auspices of the Compagnie universelle du canal maritime de Suez, a French corpo ration led by the charismatic Ferdinand de Lesseps. When the idea of the canal first arose, Robert Stephenson (whose famous father George had engineered the world’s first passenger railway) assured Parliament that technological obstacles would turn the project into a costly boondoggle. Palmerston – by then a septuagenarian nearing the end of his long career – predictably opposed the plan as a French threat to British interests. Hence, the “most costly and magnificent enterprise of modern times,” as F. A. Eaton put it in 1870, is one to which Britain contributed nothing but “opposition” and “indifference.” Indeed, England “seems to have consoled herself by looking upon it as a chimera which would never come to anything” (Eaton 1870, 82). Wyllie’s Cornhill essay was, thus, one of the earliest accounts to disclose to British readers that the Suez Canal looked to be viable. “While France … regards the canal as a glorious step in the general progress of humanity,” he wrote, “England has no sympathy to spare for a bubble which she is daily expecting to see burst.” But the dire predictions of “our capitalists, engineers, and sailors,” may well be “incorrect” (Wyllie 1866, 383). Although de Lesseps himself was distinguished for his “cosmopolitan professions” (Wyllie 1866, 383), his success in Suez epitomized the difference between a British Internationalisms and the Geopolitical Aesthetic 399 populace that liked to pride itself on private initiative, and a French Empire under Napoleon III which was undertaking a “vast program of infrastructural investment both at home and abroad” (Harvey 2012, 7). The same regime that helped to finance the canal simultaneously enlisted Baron Haussmann to rebuild Paris and create the “new urban way of life” that Walter Benjamin would uphold as the epicenter of nineteenth‐century modernity (Harvey 2012, 7–8). In London, by contrast, “grand buildings and splendid thoroughfares” were regarded as dubious emblems of a pow erful state (Cannadine 1983, 115). Nonetheless, when the canal opened in 1869, anx ious Britons dreaded a loss of “glory.” To avert “the speedy destruction of our commercial interests and of our existence as a great independent nation,” wrote one breathless patriot, Britain must act (quoted in Haddad 2005, 386). Within a few years of this warning, the British government acquired the Egyptian khedive’s shares of the canal. In 1882, the arrival of British troops to put down a nationalist uprising inaugurated a hold over the Suez Canal that lasted through the 1950s. Yet, while the Sahib’s visit took place at this time of uncertainty for British inter ests, he maintains the self‐assured tone so familiar from hundreds of Victorian travel narratives. The tone could be adopted by female travelers in earnest volumes such as Martineau’s Eastern Life Past and Present (1848), its blithe mix of ethnography, social critique, and Orientalism subtended by the sanguine authority of the “monarch of all I survey.” The latter standpoint bespeaks both the fascination and flaws of the object of observation while affirming the clout of the observer (See Pratt 1992). By the mid‐ Victorian decades, the tone was so familiar that it could be satirized in, for example, the opening paragraphs of “The Great Circumbendibus: A Journal of Travel on a Loop‐ Line” (1868), an essay in Belgravia by the well‐known foreign correspondent George Augustus Sala. “I am well out of going to Abyssinia,” Sala begins, “my friend in Mexico is dead; and I owe money in Mauritania … I have burnt all my old letters of introduction to foreign potentates, and torn up my bankers’ letter of advice” (560). This playful posture of embracing a “stay‐at‐homeical” life turns out to be a ruse as Sala devotes the bulk of his article to a journey through Europe taken two years before, which he details with customary aplomb (561). A few years later, Jules Verne immortalized the type of the globe‐trotting Briton in his Le Tour du monde en quatre‐ vingts jours (1872). As an American reviewer wrote, Phileas Fogg is “an eccentric Englishman” who, “with the energy of his race, carries his insular prejudices and his bull‐dog pugnacity with him wherever he goes” (Anon. 1874, 193). It is with a comparable alloy of worldly expertise, unruffleability, and ingrained anglocentrism that Wyllie narrates his tale of French progress in Suez. As in Sala’s essay, each step of the journey provides an occasion for piquant commentary. Surveying passengers on the steamer to Alexandria, the Sahib imagines a “scale of knavery” which measures “how many Jews equal one Armenian, how many Armenians one Maltese, how many Maltese one Greek” (363). “Cairo, as everyone knows, is still essentially Oriental in appearance,” he writes (364), indexing the many travel works that had followed the onset of steam travel to the Middle East. Amusing himself at Cairo, he reads up on earlier attempts “to unite the two seas” and recapitulates this history in detail (366). At the time of Wyllie’s visit, the canal could already accommodate small vessels – an achievement that had begun to prompt jokes at English expense. The Sahib shows his equanimity when he recounts a German cartoon that depicts a triumphant de Lesseps 400 Lauren M. E. Goodlad

“dragging a tiny boat from between the legs of John Bull, who vainly bestrides the new junction of the seas like a Colossus foiled and furious!” In the next breath he tells of an obliging agent who saves the day when his India Office contact turns out to be absent: “I had only to explain who I was” (368), he writes. The impression he gives is that readers need never learn his identity because he is so sure of it. Thanks to the agent’s deference, he is spared the discomfort of a “slow boat, crowded with dirty Arabs” and assured a place on a vessel reserved for an Egyptian governor’s party (372). On board, a French engineer treats him to champagne and pâté‐de‐fois‐gras. Eventually Wyllie turns to sober reportage including the quantity of shipping which has passed through the new port. Despite cholera and the loss of “forced labour,” the “Company’s operations” advance “with rather exceptional vigour,” he avers (378, 376). By the end, international bonhomie gives way to realpolitik as the Sahib recalls Napoleon’s effort to make France “mistress of India” by conquering Egypt (383). Yet, even if France controls the new canal, he reasons, Anglo‐French relations will likely stay peaceful as Britain finds other paths to securing its empire. The essay concludes with a nod to those lost during the Indian rebellion, followed by “proud anticipation” of future work and the closing lines of Tennyson’s “Ulysses”: “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield” (384). Published in the early stages of the canal’s construction and based on real‐life expe riences that pre‐dated the project, Trollope’s “George Walker at Suez” provides a fas cinating contrast to the Cornhill essay and the genre of travel writing more generally. Of course, the author of the story was himself an accomplished travel writer. In 1858 Trollope traveled to Egypt on official business for the post office. Although he never wrote a travel book on any “Eastern” locale, his autobiographical account of the journey evokes the same cosmopolitan self‐assurance as Wyllie’s narrative. Like much else in An Autobiography, Trollope’s official trip to Egypt is framed as background for the story of the author’s evolution as a man of letters. Journeying to London for the trip to Alexandria, Trollope pauses from public service to “demand £400” from Richard Bentley for Doctor Thorne (1858), his third Barsetshire novel (Trollope 1996, 78). When the publisher shows up at the post office with a lower offer, Trollope has “but an hour” to negotiate with Chapman & Hall (79). The next chapter begins with a “rough voyage” to Alexandria during which Trollope continues to write his “allotted number of pages” (79). Here he stops to elaborate what became a fateful revelation. Detailing a daily system of writing which equates authorship with shoe making, Trollope’s remarks on the “business” of writing have haunted his reputation ever since (81). Yet, from an international perspective, two rather different emphases emerge. The first is the significant degree to which Trollope’s identity as novelist developed alongside his far‐flung work as a British official; the second is how these two roles provide the material conditions for a Trollopian variation on the geopolitical aesthetic which is not reducible to either. Like Trollope’s determination to meet his writing quota, the official task in Egypt is a victory for “British firmness”: the author’s negotiations for efficient mail are as tenacious as his resolve to get his price for Doctor Thorne (82–83). Next, Trollope visits “the Holy Land” en route to inspections in Malta and Gibraltar. “I could fill a volume with true tales of my adventures,” he says, adding that his Tales of All Countries are drawn from “such occurrences” (83). He is soon sent to “to revise the Glasgow Post Office” and to “cleanse the Augean stables of our Post Office system” in the West Internationalisms and the Geopolitical Aesthetic 401

Indies (85). The travel book that follows “came hot on to the paper” without the need for notes: “I have written very much as I have travelled,” he explains, and despite some inaccuracies, “I have … I think, drawn my pictures correctly.” By the end of the chapter, he “demands £600” for his next Barsetshire novel, a professional success that anticipates his retirement from the post office (86–87). In his introduction to that novel, Framley Parsonage (1861), David Skilton shows how Trollope’s international settings were discouraged by publishers keen for “English tale[s], on English life” (quoted in Trollope 1984, 9). Yet, despite such lukewarm demand, in addition to his travel books, Trollope wrote a variety of fiction in locales including Australia, Costa Rica, Ireland, Italy, Jamaica, Palestine, Prague, Spain, and the United States. In An Autobiography, he divulges that “John Bull on the Guadalquivir,” from the first series of Tales of All Countries (1861), is based on a real‐life encounter. Readers familiar with this story of a young Briton who mistakes a Spanish aristocrat for a toreador will discern that Trollope has interrupted his narrative of worldly self‐ confidence with an admission of humiliating “ridicule” (Trollope 1996, 84). In the tale itself, the happy resolution of a courtship plot mitigates the incipient critique of English insularity. Thus, while “John Bull” shows the pitfalls of British ethnocen trism, the extent to which it cuts through the presumption of Anglo‐Saxon superiority is open to question. Precisely for that reason, however, it illuminates the more radical geopolitical aesthetic at work in “George Walker at Suez.”Arguably the most “inter national” of Trollope’s many border‐crossing narratives, the story stands out for the thickly evocative space of in‐betweenness it foregrounds. In contrast to the Cornhill’s anonymous Sahib, Trollope’s tale repeats its protagonist’s identity in both title and opening line: “Of all the spots on the world’s surface that I, George Walker of Friday Street, London have ever visited, Suez in Egypt … is by far the vilest.” “I am free to confess that I am not a great man,” he adds, telling readers what they will have guessed from his failure to maintain the stable correspondence bet ween British man and British empire (Trollope 1993, 127). No striding John Bull, proud Sahib, or Phileas Fogg, Walker is in Cairo for an ailing sore throat when he meets a friend who is moving to Australia and agrees to accompany him to Suez. Vexed by this “sandy, hot, and unpleasant” place, punctuated by the noise of travelers “passing between England and her Eastern possessions,” it not so much foreignness that unset tles Walker as the liminal space of Suez (127). Across this threshold, doughtier Britons export Englishness to India and Anglo‐Saxon enterprise to Australia. The name “Walker” thus ironically signifies the limited mobility of a British subject who has little to export. As a multifaceted man of letters, Trollope typified a recurrent liberal ambivalence toward territorial empire. He was both enough of a racialist to disdain the idea of angli cizing Indians, as well as enough of a liberal to dislike the premise of domination without justifiable cause. In The Eustace Diamonds he expresses this ambivalence through the Sawab of Mygawb, a dispossessed Indian prince whose voiceless presence informs multiple plotlines. As the Sawab who does not speak, the prince signals unease over imperial sovereignty – an affect that permeates Trollope’s works from this period (see Goodlad 2015, Chapter 4). What is remarkable about “George Walker,” then, is its unique geopolitical perception: not the penetrated metropole of The Eustace Diamonds or the masterable colony of the travel writings, but, rather, the liminal space in between. 402 Lauren M. E. Goodlad

The tale’s exceptional features include an unreliable narrator who produces comedy at his own expense and a lingering discomfort induced by the invitation to laugh at his abjection. Miserably alone at Suez, Walker is approached by a man in ornate “Eastern costume” (Trollope 1993, 136). Unlike the Sahib’s passing remark on the “Oriental hyperbole” of a high‐ranking Egyptian (Wyllie 1866, 372), Walker’s response is to marvel at how such a “false, cowardly race” can be so “immeasurably” superior in “personal dignity” (137). Though not at all “podgy,” Walker feels his deficiency so keenly that he wonders whether “oriental costume” might be introduced into the City of London (138). In other words, unique among Trollope’s non‐villains, Walker is a Briton who experiences himself as a performative subject; one, moreover, who finds the performance of Englishness to be simultaneously inferior (unable to transform men into larger‐than‐life avatars of regional decorum) and precarious (insufficiently stable to enable him to cross the threshold into the space of white settlement or of civilizing dominion). Walker is, thus, delighted when an unexpected visitor, Mahmoud al Ackbar, singles him out for the kind of recognition he has craved – the kind that cives Romani such as Wyllie, Trollope, and Sala seem to command with ease. The next morning, however, as he awaits a scheduled visit to the Well of Moses, Walker discovers himself abandoned. It turns out that Ackbar has mistaken him for a Sir George Walker who has only just arrived. This second Walker is a bona fide Sahib: not only the incoming Governor of Pegu but also the legendary “hero of Begum” who saved Ackbar’s father “after a terrible siege” (155, 151). Spying his “namesake” from the window, the narrator notes that Sir George is “as fresh as paint”; “How is that these governors … go through such a deal of work without fagging?” he wonders (153). What follows is the most “wretched day” of Walker’s life. Fancying that the very porters are laughing at him, he fears that if he complains about a “dirty Arab,” he will be told that he has misunderstood a local “observance” or “courtesy.” “What can a man do, in a strange country,” he asks, sighing for home, but determined nonetheless to cross into Asia to see the Well of Moses and to return to Africa on a camel. Paying “the best part of £20,” he “boldly” embarks. Unsurprisingly, the well disappoints him and the camel ride mortifies his “poor bones.” To have done this on his way to Pegu, he observes, Sir George must be “made of iron.” He spends the next day in bed, “suffering grievously” (154–155). The end of the tale finds Walker consoling himself through the “terrible days” before his departure by picturing the boasts he will make about his visit to Suez, where he “smoked a pipe of peace with Mahmoud al Ackbar” and “saw the hero of Begum” (155). As the empire is refigured as a space of dolorous humiliation, the “Friday Street, London” to which this walker returns becomes the kind of “stay‐at‐homeical” spot that Sala mocks before regaling readers with his Great Circumbendibus. With its peculiar affect of a story written not in 1863, but in 1973, “George Walker at Suez” peers into the future of international space and glimpses a shrinking Britain disarticu lated from its hyper‐personification in the self‐possessed imperial traveler. From Walker’s abject and faintly paranoid perspective, the “dirty Arabs” the Sahib takes for granted become the agents of a haunting irony. Who can wonder that Trollope’s pub lishers preferred an “English tale”? This oddly searing and deflationary tale may speak more poignantly to present‐day readers than it did to the many Britons who had not yet come to terms with what “free trade” entailed. Internationalisms and the Geopolitical Aesthetic 403

In this chapter, I have suggested that the kind of international literary histories which might explore such questions have yet to be written. Trollope’s worldly tales are but one of the many genres that bear the footprint of nineteenth‐century cultural encounter and exchange – inviting scholars to gather the “communities of recollec tion” which have clustered across cities, nations, and empires as well as the thick spaces in between.

Note

1 Willey, whose authorship is identified in the Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, was a civil servant, born in India but educated in England.

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Masson, David. 1859. “Politics of the Present, Saville, Julia F. 2011. “Swinburne Contra Foreign and Domestic.” Macmillan’s Magazine 1: Whitman: From Cosmopolitan Republican to 1–10. Parochial English Jingo?” ELH 78: 479–505. Meredith, George. 1857. “Belles Lettres and Art.” Seeley, John Robert. 1971 [1883]. The Expansion of Westminster Review 68: 322–331. England, Vol. 2. Chicago: University of Chicago Mill, John Staurt. 1861. Considerations on Press. Representative Government. Amherst, NY: Stang, Richard. 1957. “The Literary Criticism of Prometheus. George Eliot.” PMLA 72: 952–961. Mill, John Stuart. 1984 [1859]. “A Few Words on Stewart, Garrett. 2000. “The Foreign Offices of Non‐Intervention.” In The Collected Works of John British Fiction.” Modern Language Quarterly 61: Stuart Mill. Vol. 21: Essays on Equality, Law, and 181–206. Education, edited by J. M. Robson. Toronto: Trollope, Anthony. 1984 [1861]. Framley University of Toronto Press. Parsonage, edited by David Skilton and Peter Moretti, Franco. 1987. The Way of the World: The Miles. London: Penguin. Bildungsroman in European Culture, translated by Trollope, Anthony. 1993 [1863]. “George Walker Albert Sbragia. New York: Verso. at Suez.” In Tales of All Countries, 2nd series. Nairn, Tom. 1997. Faces of Nationalism: Janus London: Penguin. Revisited. London: Verso. Trollope, Anthony. 1996 [1883]. An Autobiography, Pratt, Mary Louise. 1992. Imperial Eyes: Travel edited by David Skilton. London: Penguin. Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge. Voskuil, Lynn. 2004. Acting Naturally: Victorian Rignall, John. 2011. George Eliot: European Novelist. Theatricality and Authenticity. Charlottesville: Farnham: Ashgate. University of Virginia Press. Robbins, Bruce. 1998. “Actually Existing Weiner, Stephanie Kudik. 2005. Republican Politics Cosmopolitanism.” In Cosmopolitics: Thinking and English Poetry, 1789–1874. Basingstoke: and Feeling Beyond the Nation, edited by Pheng Macmillan. Cheah and Bruce Robbins, 1–19. Minneapolis: Wood, Sir Charles. 1853. “Government of India.” University of Minnesota Press. June 3 speech in Parliament. http://hansard. Robbins, Bruce. 1999. Feeling Global: Internationa millbanksystems.com/commons/1853/jun/03/ lism in Distress. New York: NYU Press. government‐of‐india (accessed December 14, Sala, George Augustus. 1868. “The Great 2014). Circumbendibus: A Journal of Travel on a Loop‐ Wyllie, John William Shaw. 1866. “A Visit to the line.” Belgravia 6: 559–574. Suez Canal.” Cornhill Magazine 13: 363–384.

Part VII The Novel, Public and Private

26 The Novel and the Everyday Kate Flint

The everyday: what is most difficult to discover. (Maurice Blanchot, 1987)

There is something inherently voyeuristic in the idea of the everyday. To explore someone else’s everyday – and this, after all, is what fiction can offer us – is to catch them off guard; to witness the mundanity and associative confusion of their thoughts; to peer into a room that hasn’t been tidied up for visitors. At the same time, to live in the everyday can mean being trapped in routine, compelled endlessly to repeat one’s patterns of existence, gratefully seizing on anything that appears to offer diversion or distraction. Such habituation can form the grounds for rebellion, whether an individual bursts out of a confining social mold or the stultifying conditions of daily life propel political movements predicated on the imperative for change. Yet to remain within the structures of the everyday is far from necessarily an act of cowardice, reconciliation, or resignation. It is precisely from one’s habitation of the everyday that a special kind of heightened attention can develop, whether to the particularities of everyday existence, to the specificities, histories, and associations of material objects, to the engagement of the senses with the world that surrounds one, to sudden, unsought‐for epiphanies and the accidentally miraculous, or to the mind’s ability to travel back to the past, or forward in speculation, giving a temporal flexibility to the presentism and sameness of the ordinary moment. The novel’s potential for capaciousness and inclusivity – whether of domestic detail or of social types – makes it an obvious candidate for treating the everyday, and for making us alert to it. At the same time, though, its arsenal of techniques for engaging the reader’s interest very often ends up working against the quotidian. Here’s the aesthetic paradox: by using language and form to draw our attention towards, and even

A Companion to the English Novel, First Edition. Edited by Stephen Arata, Madigan Haley, J. Paul Hunter, and Jennifer Wicke. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. 410 Kate Flint give shape to, the confusion of objects, experiences, and impressions that constitute the everyday, the novel very readily ends up by calling attention to its own constructedness. If we make noticeable what we take for granted – that central objective of the surrealists – we are very likely, as they did, to create an artifact that most certainly does not blend seamlessly into the fabric of the everyday. There is a tension between the inchoate, incongruous, endlessly proliferating mass of singularities that constitutes the mess of everyday life on the one hand, and the need to select and organize – to bring hierarchy to the democratic confusion – on the other. It is this tension involved in representing the everyday in fictional form, and, indeed, the frequent elusiveness of this representation, that will primarily engage me here. The novel is far from being the only form to engage with the everyday. We may draw connections between its observational practices and realist aesthetics in nineteenth‐ and early twentieth‐century painting, or with the increasingly democratic technologies and subject matter of photography, or, in recent years, with the installations and visual projects of such artists as Annette Messager and Sophie Calle. As Stephen Johnstone makes clear in his very helpful introduction to the volume on the Everyday in the Documents of Contemporary Art series (2008), there has, indeed, been a proliferation of exhibitions and site‐specific installations devoted to the theme of the everyday since the mid‐1990s. And as Johnstone points out, these may be read, in part, as an answer to Georges Perec’s all‐encompassing question:

The banal, the quotidian, the obvious, the common, the ordinary, the infra‐ordinary, the background noise, the habitual … How are we to speak of these “common things,” how to track them down rather, flush them out, wrest them from the dross in which they remain mired, how to give them a meaning, a tongue, to let them, finally, speak of what it is, of what we are. (1999, 210)

In part, this energetic abundance of works referencing the everyday may be also be understood as a reaction against art’s perceived existence in “an autonomous and rare- fied sphere of production and consumption” (Johnstone 2008, 15) and they also reflect and represent a strong interest in memorialization and preservation, often infused with the memory of the losses of the Holocaust. But this abundance also responds to, and is often read through, the shift towards investigating the ordinary that has become such a dominant force in philosophical thought during the last few decades.1 Pre‐eminent among these writers are Henri Lefebvre, showing, in his Critique of Everyday Life (1947–1981) and Everyday Life in the Modern World (1968), how difficult it is to answer the question “what is the everyday” – that which is “left over” when specialist knowledge has been exhausted is one suggestion that he offers up (2008, 97); Michel de Certeau, especially in The Practice of Everyday Life (1980) with its exploration of how people create the everyday through the ways in which they inhabit space and employ language; and Stanley Cavell, who, in In Quest of the Ordinary (1988) and The Senses of Walden (1981; expanded edition 1992), likewise sees the ordinary not as lying “out there” but more as in the individual’s attitude towards experience, their invention of “an angle towards the world” (1992, 61–62) – something that he, in turn, ties in with the insights of Thoreau and Emerson. The Novel and the Everyday 411

Lefebvre’s “left over” is for him, of course, a potential site for critiquing the institutional, for standing outside the framework of organized politics and big economic institutions, and for doing so on grounds highly inflected by the phenomenological and existentialist category of lived experience that he derived from Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Jean‐Paul Sartre, with their destabilization and displacement of the role of reason as the foremost tool of critical thought. If the everyday may be logged in the most unadorned and circumstantial of terms, like Robinson Crusoe taking a careful inventory of his island, responses to the factuality of one’s surroundings and experiences may be anything but uncomplicated. More than that, the informality, randomness, and serendipity that characterizes the everyday is precisely that which escapes formal structures, and that therefore is central to what it means to be human – the most basic political and ethical question of all. Lefebvre’s definition of “everyday life” is extremely helpful for seeing why the novel is such a prime testing ground for its concerns:

Everyday life is profoundly related to all other activities, and encompasses them with all their differences and their conflicts; it is their meeting place, their bond, their common ground. And it is in everyday life that the sum total of relations which make the human – and every human being – a whole takes its shape and form. In it are expressed and fulfilled those relations which bring into play the totality of the real, albeit in a certain manner which is always partial and incomplete: friendship, comradeship, love, the need to communicate, play, etc. … we may say that the critique of everyday life studies human nature in its concreteness. (2008, 97)

Lefebvre’s emphasis on the centrality of the human – one that takes one straight back, in principled spirit, to the Marx of the first volume of Das Kapital (1867) – has made him a particularly good candidate for revival in the critical backlash against (or at least suspicion about) various forms of poststructuralist thought from the mid‐1990s onwards. One should add to this mix of influences the critical interest in popular culture (in relation to the everyday, the work of George Simmel and Siegfried Kracauer has proved especially relevant); the intellectual and poetically suggestive power of Walter Benjamin (not least his expression of the idea that “the nineteenth century’s conception of history … corresponds to a viewpoint according to which the course of the world is an endless series of facts congealed in the form of things” [1999, 14]), and, not unconnected to Benjamin’s own interest, the growth of attention to the material world, especially in relation to what Bill Brown has so influentially termed “thing theory.”2 Georges Perec himself, too (acknowledging, in turn, his debt to Roland Barthes), has been enormously important in his meticulous denotation of the everyday, in texts that themselves radically defy easy categorization – they fall somewhere between essay and autobiography and the circumstantial record keeping of a Mass Observation participant.3 They are at once compellingly individualistic as a form of memory work and personal revelation, and inextricably connect their author to the networks of consumer society and to the incidental detritus of urban life – his childhood street, half boarded up and awaiting demolition, with fragments of conversation dissolving in air, compulsory purchase orders and graffiti and store names transcribed 412 Kate Flint with equal dispassion, just like the details of a garishly painted motor scooter and the dead sparrow in the middle of the street (Perec 1999, 212–221). Looking about one and recording what’s there, recognizing the role of repetition and patterns and the importance of even small deviations from the norm, and using writing to simulate control both over the heterogeneous barrage of things in the world and over the unstoppable flux of time itself – these elements have been strongly present in the novel from its start. If its origins lie in part in texts that chronicle interruptions to, or escapes from, the everyday – broadsheets of murderers’ confessions, short historical or legendary romances – they also lie in the tools for documenting and ordering everyday life, such as journals or letters. Robinson Crusoe’s prose – Daniel Defoe uses his deadpan nonsensationalist voice as a check and balance against the sensational circumstances of being marooned on an island – simulates the need of someone to make a “daily memorandum,” at least so long as his ink lasts (Defoe 2001, 83), rather like the notches that he cuts on the side of a square post in order that days, months, even years do not collapse into undifferentiated time. Robinson Crusoe is a domestic novel, at least in part, given Crusoe’s preoccupations with practical housekeeping. The association of domesticity both with the rise of the novel and with the everyday is unmistakable (Armstrong 1987). It goes hand in hand, too, with the consolidation of the novel as a genre in which readers may immerse themselves, in order to inhabit not a fantasy world, but one that appears contiguous to their own – if not in terms of temporality or location, at least in the ways that language is deployed to create a sense of verisimilitude. This is Roland Barthes’s “reality effect,” his term for the presence, within fiction, of things that work to “reassure readers that the novel is taking place in a realized, or realistic, world” (Barthes 1989; Freedgood 2012, 371). Fiction may be the preferable word to use for eighteenth‐century prose narrative, rather than novel, with what Julie Park has termed its “self‐conscious permutations … that drift rather than march into mixed forms of realism,” and that do not present “as a unified body” (2011, 247). Part of this self‐consciousness, though, involved the development of addressing the reader as though she or he were on a continuum with the narrator and hence sharing an ordinariness against which moral as well as social aberrations could be consciously understood – as Henry Fielding assumes in Tom Jones (1749) – or warning the reader against taking the conventions of fiction as a route map for comprehending one’s daily life. Sometimes, as Catherine Morland mortifyingly discovers in Northanger Abbey (1817), a locked yellow and black japanned cabinet, full of promisingly secretive little drawers, will indeed contain a mysterious roll of manuscript, pushed back well out of sight – by daylight, revealed as a small collection of bills from washer‐woman and farrier, and notes of expenditure on “letters, hair‐powder, shoe‐string, and breeches‐ball” (Austen 2006, 163). Throughout the nineteenth century and beyond, the everyday has continued to serve as a touchstone against which the extraordinary can be measured – even as the reverse logic (assuming that the everyday must contain the sensational) is shown up as a snare and a delusion, or – as in the case of Northanger Abbey – becomes a convention of its own: one that reveals the reader to be smarter – or at least more savvy about the manipulations of fiction – than the protagonist herself. The sensation fiction of the 1860s depended on the minutiae and records of the everyday – on railway timetables and announcements in newspapers, telegrams and inscriptions in gift books – in order The Novel and the Everyday 413 to intensify the thrill of what Henry James, considering Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s fiction, called “those most mysterious of mysteries, the mysteries which are at our own doors” (1865, 593). Similarly, in 1862 Margaret Oliphant praised Wilkie Collins as a writer “who boldly takes in hand the common mechanism of daily life” and who creates characters who might very well be living in the society with which we are familiar. By these means, she explains, Collins “has accomplished a far greater success than he who effects the same results through supernatural agencies, or by means of the fantastic creations of lawless genius or violent horrors of crime” (1862, 566). Furthermore, as George Levine has suggested, this placement of shocking crimes and transgressions against the paraphernalia of highly recognizable everyday life draws attention to the psychic energies that are repressed, or at least usually held in check, in daily existence, and thus sensation fiction has a great deal in common with its less startling contemporary form, the realist novel. For “underneath the surface of every realist novel there is a ‘monster’ waiting to get out,” he tells us, claiming that below “the valued domesticity there are desires and energies restrained by the conventions of Victorian realism and by the developing conventions of Victorian society” (2008, 102; see also Levine 1981). Both novelistic modes, after all, frequently share themes, especially ones that display the deep tensions and power struggles that reverberate around issues of class mobility, personal identity, and the importance of money. In a similar vein, ghost stories and fictions of the supernatural often conventionally demand the cosy setting of a winter’s fireside for the telling of an unsettling tale, or take as their location somewhere apparently unequivocally solid. In the opening chapter of The Little Stranger (2009), Sarah Waters, though subtly self‐conscious in her prose about the fictional conventions that she references, and though from the start allowing for the fact that memory always has the capacity to blur and fade the edges of detail, brings out quite clearly the allure of Hundreds House to the narrator, even as a boy: “the thrill of the house itself … came to me from every surface – from the polish on the floor, the patina on wooden chairs and cabinets, the bevel of a looking‐glass, the scroll of a frame” (3). An astute reader might pick up, of course, on the warning that’s being offered: that surfaces don’t just conceal mysterious depths, but can have the ability to reflect an observer back to him or herself. Just as one may project identities and desires onto one’s settings, so these settings can be arranged, in fiction, to illuminate the desires of both protagonist and reader: to reveal the true depths to be those of the unconscious rather than of the locked cabinet. Nonetheless, the solidity of things is crucial to the construction of the everyday, and I will return to their implacable materiality shortly. Within novels, the presence of things is particularly useful, of course, to place characters within specific environments, and hence, when appropriate, to help establish their plausibility, or to allow readers to apply the same learned skills of interpretation to imaginary scenes that they would have been able to do in actual life. “Mr. Gilfil was a bachelor, then?” asks the narrator in the second of George Eliot’s Scenes of Clerical Life (1858). “That is the conclusion to which you would probably have come if you had entered his sitting room, where the bare tables, the large old‐fashioned horse‐hair chairs, and the threadbare Turkey carpet perpetually fumigated with tobacco, seemed to tell a story of a wifeless existence” (2009, 75). But eyes and nose would not have been able to penetrate to the chamber that was only entered once a year by the housekeeper, where: 414 Kate Flint

On the little dressing‐table there was a dainty looking‐glass in a carved and gilt frame; bits of wax‐candle were still in the branched sockets at the sides, and on one of these branches hung a little black lace kerchief; a faded satin pin‐cushion, with the pins rusted in it, a scent‐bottle, and a large green fan, lay on the table; and on a dressing table by the side of the glass was a work‐basket, and an unfinished baby‐cap, yellow with age, lying in it. (75)

This description – and it continues – establishes the passage of time, a pathetic history, and, as the narrator makes quite explicit (in case the reader has missed the metaphor), it acts “as a sort of visible symbol of the secret chamber in his heart” (76). What is so significant about Eliot’s Scenes of Clerical Life, however, is not her deployment of furnishings and the detritus of a life in order to establish setting and emotion, but the degree to which she makes explicit the democratic foundations of her fictional aesthetic. She famously established these in the review of Wilhelm Riehl’s Natural History of German Life that she published in the Westminster Review in July 1856, writing about the sacred responsibility of the artist – conceived of as both painter and novelist “when he undertakes to paint the life of the People” (2005, 110). For her, an accurate depiction of outward circumstance and of inward being are mutually interdependent, and both are essential to the fulfillment of the true end of Art, “the nearest thing to life … a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow‐ men beyond the bounds of our personal lot” (110). A faithfully observed presentation of someone else’s ordinary life, in other words, is utterly necessary to the development and extension of our imaginative sympathy. Within fiction, as Scenes of Clerical Life makes deliberately, even laboriously, clear, this means choosing as a protagonist “a man whose virtues were not heroic, and who had no undetected crime within his breast.” After all, Amos Barton – the subject of the first story – is probably very like the vast majority of

your adult male fellow‐Britons returned in the last census … neither extraordinarily silly, nor extraordinarily wicked, nor extraordinarily wise … They are simply men of complexions more or less muddy, whose conversation is more or less bald and disjointed. Yet these commonplace people – many of them – bear a conscience, and have felt the sublime prompting to do the painful right; they have their unspoken sorrows, and their sacred joys. (2009, 37)

By inserting the mingled secular and transcendental vocabulary of “sublime” and “sacred,” Eliot establishes her case for recognizing the presence of the extraordinary within the everyday on a quite different basis from that of plot and event, the staples of the sensational novel.4 “Her sympathies,” as Virginia Woolf wrote, “are with the everyday lot, and play most happily in dwelling upon the homespun of ordinary joys and sorrows” (1994, 174; Blair 2007). These sympathies are ones that are frequently revoiced throughout Eliot’s writing career – in her essays and letters, and indeed in her fiction. In fact, the way in which Woolf echoes the older writer in both vocabulary and cadence suggests that they become so habitual as to rub off on the reader. They thereby lose the impact that an early encounter with Scenes from Clerical Life back in the late 1850s may have had, and The Novel and the Everyday 415 become part of her own rhetorical furnishings in which the reader can feel comfortably at home. But perhaps this sense of recurrence is precisely the point. Eliot seeks to make our exercise of sympathy a habit of mind – yet a habit completely unlike the routines and fragmentation of labor that increasingly came to define modern society. In mid‐nineteenth‐century England, habits of action were regularly extolled for the benefits that they would bring the individual. Samuel Smiles advised “We must repeat and again repeat; facility will come with labour” (1859, 51). Sarah Stickney Ellis’s The Women of England advised middle‐class women to focus on “those minor parts of domestic and social intercourse, which strengthen into habit and consequently form the basis of moral character” (1839, vi) – something that is translated into fictional form in the persona of the recently married Bella Wilfer, in Our Mutual Friend (1864–1865):

Such weighing and mixing and chopping and grating, such dusting and washing and polishing, such snipping and weeding and trowelling and other small gardening, such making and mending and folding and airing, such diverse arrangements, and above all such severe study! (Dickens 2008, 681–682)

Eliot’s suggestion that the mind may be trained in the same way that someone was thought to benefit from repeating certain patterns of domestic behavior is supported by the interweaving of physiological with psychological thought at the time: both states, Herbert Spencer argued, can “grow by constant repetition automatic” (1873, 1.450).5 So Eliot’s approach to everyday thinking involves training the mind to recognize, as a matter of course, that we have “each of us an equivalent centre of self” (2003, 211) – one that demands our attention and the exercise of attempting respectful understanding towards the motivations and limitations of a fellow human. She recognizes that the practice of sympathy necessarily involves drawing boundaries before we collapse from an overload of feeling at what is symbolized, in Eliot’s phrase, by the poignant fragility conveyed by each beat of a squirrel’s heart, and, of course, she inevitably practices selectivity in choosing certain characters to dominate the storyline in each of her novels. But it does not follow that the basis for extending sympathy within our own lives should be formed by the same criteria that one uses when shaping a plot, or creating individuals who will grab our attention sufficiently that they will stand for the mass of ordinary people who surround us daily. Rather, repeatedly exercising this faculty is something that we can learn to do, automatically, in relation to our own sphere of contact. The phenomenon of habit, so inextricable from the idea of the everyday, does not always have these positive connotations, however. In part, this is not because of its close connection with developing innate human feelings, as Eliot would have it, but because of its association with the mechanization of modern life. Philip Fisher puts this most pessimistically when he writes “Through all discussions of habit runs the metaphor of industrial production, the relation among raw material (the self), human will, and a designed product (character) intended for a limited use” (1973, 7). He might have added to this list the pressure of regulated time, that in turn leads to the 416 Kate Flint segmentation of the working day, the temporal as well as the quantitative regulation of productivity, and, by the same token, the establishment of the category of leisure as a space that can be consciously subdivided and productively filled. This is the everyday of the factory worker, or the suburban clerk catching the 6:32 home every evening; this is the site for fantasies of escape, of breaking the daily mold. But what might seem like escape to a member of one category can be another person’s reality of repetitive work. In Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1854–1855), Margaret Hale warns Nicholas Higgins, the out‐of‐work mill worker, that in fact life would not be better down south. He would not possess the necessary resignation:

You would not bear the dulness of the life; you don’t know what it is; it would eat you away like rust. Those that have lived there all their lives, are used to soaking in the stag- nant waters. They labour on, from day to day, in the great solitude of steaming fields – never speaking or lifting up their poor, bent, downcast heads. The hard spade‐work robs their brain of life; the sameness of their toil deadens their imagination. (2003, 299)

Yet if Margaret emphasizes the arduous monotony of agricultural work to Higgins, it is in part as a corrective to herself, and her earlier tendency to see rural England as an eminently sketchable, picturesque environment. She has learned to see past the repetitive architecture of Milton – a thinly disguised Manchester – with its “long, straight, hopeless streets of regularly‐built houses, all small and of brick” (60) – and to understand something of the daily life of its inhabitants. This involves, in turn, learning about the specificities of their material lives, such as the lung‐damaging fluff that flies around in the cotton‐carding rooms, or, for that matter, failing to understand the significance of a lavishly burning fire, an out‐of‐the ordinary sign of welcome in a mill worker’s household. But as Gaskell already demonstrated in Mary Barton (1848), the smallest ordinary detail – the rag rug, the blue and white check curtains, the japanned tea tray – that furnishes a humble if carefully maintained dwelling offers up material for the reader to interpret. Such interpretation may bring out the context that lies silently behind each everyday object. The eighteenth‐ and nineteenth‐century genre of telling the biography of things as though they were sentient beings – as in “The Memoirs and Interesting Adventures of an Embroidered Waiscoat” (1751), or Douglas Jerrold’s “The Story of a Feather” (1844) (Blackwell 2007) – developed as both an educational practice and a means of social criticism. More recent scholarship has made ordinary objects speak in a different way: Carolyn Steedman explores how the Bartons’ rag rug “is made from the torn fragments of other things, debris and leavings, the broken and torn things of industrial civilization,” carrying with it “the irreducible traces of an actual history” (2002, 128). Elaine Freedgood explains how although the superficial signifier of those check curtains is the tidy, comfortable working‐class domesticity of the Bartons’ home, their hidden history “unravels the ideological work of domesticity as Gaskell tries to deploy it,” since their purchase has been at the expense of the laborers who make calico in England, and who used to make domestic fabric for export in South Asia (2006, 57). The biography of a thing – as the writers of eighteenth‐century it‐narratives were quick to recognize – ties it to the trade routes and commercial networks of a developing global economy. The Novel and the Everyday 417

This object‐oriented criticism homes in on textual details that one might very easily overlook, as one might, indeed, readily take for granted objects in one’s own everyday. A novelist may single out an ordinary commodity through a judiciously placed adjective or two, and use it to signal the shabby tedium of an everyday life – thus in Henry James’s The Spoils of Poynton (1896–1897), when Fleda Vetch pours herself a cup of tea, “but not to take it; after which, without wanting it, she began to eat a small, stale biscuit” (2006, 163), her nervousness and embarrassment at Owen Gereth’s tea- time visit are expressed not just through gesture, but through the author’s making us aware of the meagerness of her hospitable offerings. But how, if one describes ordinary surroundings in greater detail, can one make them interesting within fiction? This is the problem faced by those late‐nineteenth‐ century novelists who, in part under the influence of French naturalism, saw both the necessity of giving a faithful depiction of contemporary social conditions, and the challenge of giving shape to ordinary life. George Gissing was no stranger to the pressures of daily routine, and at the same time to its necessity for the commercial author. His downbeat journal chronicles how many pages he managed to compose a day (plagued by headaches, dyspepsia, and gloom, he was far more agonized in this respect than Anthony Trollope, who in his 1883 Autobiography writes of his daily page count as though he is a cheerfully self‐regulated writing machine). Having to set a daily schedule, and keeping up to it, is the torture faced by Edwin Reardon, the febrile literary man in New Grub Street (1891). His wife, Amy, reinforces the habit of organizing life, or chronicling it, into repetitive, habit‐forming segments of the depressing sort when we see her counting the “eight flights of stairs, consisting alternately of eight and nine steps” up to their apartment (1985, 76). The shabby author and tutor Harold Biffen is in some ways Gissing’s avatar within this novel. Not chained to the mechanism of literary production, he is nonetheless passionately committed to his fictional project, entitled “Mr Bailey, Grocer.” He is opposed to “novelistic conventionalities” and sees “the art of fiction” – in which Biffen still wants to believe – as “worn out” (176). “What I really aim at,” he claims, in a manifesto‐speech,

is an absolute realism in the sphere of the ignobly decent. The field, as I understand it, is a new one; I don’t know any writer who has treated ordinary vulgar‐life with fidelity and seriousness. Zola writes deliberate tragedies; his vilest figures become heroic from the place they fill in a strongly imagined drama. I want to deal with the essentially unhe- roic, with the day‐to‐day life of that vast majority of people who are at the mercy of paltry circumstance … The result will be something unutterably tedious. Precisely. That is the stamp of the ignobly decent life. If it were anything but tedious it would be untrue. (173–174)

“Mr Bailey” is, of course, a complete failure, although its author achieves a spectacular moment of transcendence as he reclines on the grass of Putney Heath in the moments before he commits suicide, peaceful in the contemplation of current pastoral beauty and of past optimism – “when as yet no mission of literary realism had been imposed on him” (529). As Aaron Matz astutely remarks, Biffen is, effectively, killed by an excess of realism (2010, 103). 418 Kate Flint

The flip side of seeing dailyness as grind, tedium, and repetition, however, is to approach it as a call to attentiveness. If, as William James suggests, “habit diminishes the conscious attention with which our acts are performed” (1902, 1.114), we may counter this by turning conscious attention itself into a habit. This may mean being alert to a temporary epiphany that is created by external happenstance, as when Biffen is stirred into contemplation by “the new‐risen moon, a perfect globe, vast and red” (Gissing 1985, 529), or when Paul Morel, in D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers (1913), is up a tree picking cherries, and is suddenly struck by the transformative magic of the golden sunset. “All shades of red, from a golden vermillion to a rich crimson, glowed and met his eyes under a darkness of leaves,” as if offering a temporary sensuous counterpart to the intensity of his sexual longings (2006, 329). But it also means being attuned to particularities, to give voice to what Susan Stewart has termed “the silence of the ordinary” (1984, 14). To do this demands focalization and concentration, characteristics that are in opposition to the associations of the everyday with sameness and blandness. In other words, paying attention to our surroundings, or being encouraged to do so by a work of fiction, may involve a completely different approach towards a world of things: one that no longer stresses likeness and repetition, but that defamiliarizes, individualizes, and potentially disturbs – or that, looked at from another angle, allows one to “retain this sense of the marvelous suffusing everyday existence” that surrealist Louis Aragon found in the world (1994, 11). Back in 1896, Georg Simmel, in his essay on “Sociological Aesthetics,” wrote how “even the lowest, intrinsically ugly phenomenon can be dissolved into contexts of color and form, feeling and experience which provide it with significance,” so that we may come to involve ourselves, “deeply and lovingly with the even most common product” (1968, 69).6 In Woolf’s hands, we see how recognizing the formal beauty within the everyday – as Mrs. Ramsay appreci- ates the dish of fruit at the dinner table in To the Lighthouse (1927) – is not so much a means, as it was for Simmel, of seeing the “totality of beauty” within the world itself, but is a way of looking that can potentially give creative meaning to any life. Admittedly, to acknowledge the rapture of the epiphany, or to seize on an unexpected instant of beauty, carries repercussions. Ben Highmore, one of today’s most consistent and influential scholars of the everyday, picks up on this when he explains that if “the everyday is seen as a ‘flow,’ then any attempt to arrest it, to apprehend it, to scrutinize it, will be problematic. Simply by extracting some elements from the continuum of the everyday, attention would have transformed the most characteristic aspect of everyday life: its ceaseless‐ness” (2002a, 21; see also Highmore 2002b, 2011). Fiction often does this, of course, not just in its portrayal of epiphanic moments, but in the way in which it relies on incident and suspense, on privileging moments of passion or loss, in regarding one consciousness as somehow more worthy of attention than another. It gives an artificial shape to the everyday, in a way that makes it very tempting to argue that the sketch or occasional essay is a far more suitable genre for representing the shapeless, random jumble that constitutes ordinariness than the novel. Even the short story, with its tendency to open‐endedness, its power to give a stand- alone fragment of a life, might be said to be more powerful when it comes to capturing the everyday.7 Yet the novel’s very length – and its capacity to contain passages of extended description – offers plenty of opportunities to convey both the longeurs of the everyday, and The Novel and the Everyday 419 its interruptions, whether these be genuinely startling in nature – an accident, a murder – or simply, like falling in love, a disruption to the customary world of a protagonist. It can recognize, too, that there may be a kind of comfort in everyday routine – something celebrated in the late‐nineteenth‐ and early‐twentieth‐century genre of suburban fiction by such authors as Keble Howard or William Pett Ridge (Flint 1982; Hapgood 2005), and made explicit by the narrator of Leonard Woolf’s The Wise Virgins (1914). Woolf suggests, however, that the respectability is something of a façade, or at least a safety net, and that the metropolitan sophisticates who exclaim “Oh, these red‐brick villas! All exactly the same, like the people who live in them!” are missing the crucial point. To be sure,

They wear the same straw hats and muslin dresses in summer, and in winter bowlers and dark dresses; they think the same things and in the same way, because the ways of this strange world in which they find themselves wandering are so difficult to understand, and they humbly and gratefully take what is given to them. That is why they go into the builder’s stuccoed villas; for them the stucco and the red brick and the wooden gables and the delicate pink of the almond blossom, that brings spring for a brief week into the front garden of every third house, stands for comfort and cosiness. They have been told these things and therefore they believe them; in that, it is true, they are all the same. But in themselves, in the feelings that no one has taught them, under the painted plaster crust of straw hats and opinions, they burn each of them with a fiery individuality. (2007, 2–3)

Recognizing this Paterian intensity of the individual, interior vision changed the way in which the everyday was written about in fiction. Although the externalities of a life and surroundings might contain little that is, on the surface, exceptional, the representation of someone’s perceptions of the world can give the ordinary a sharp distinctiveness. “The mind,” Virginia Woolf asserted in 1919, “exposed to the ordinary course of life, receives upon its surface a myriad impressions – trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel” (1988, 33).8 In this way, she herself showed how someone who had no special claim to distinction – Clarissa Dalloway, say – may nonetheless be the conduit for understanding a whole range of ways of apprehending the everyday. On the one hand, one may note the most mundane detail – “she went upstairs, paused at the window, came to the bathroom. There was the green linoleum and a tap dripping” – material facts that, as the paragraph develops into a paralleling of a middle‐aged woman’s life with a pristine attic bedroom, are not just banal in themselves but are used to symbolize an overwhelming sense of flatness, of a life already spent (Woolf 1992, 33). Yet this is, like so many fleeting moments in the novel, not a lasting assessment by Clarissa of how she sees the world. Other ordinary sensory experiences are just as likely to provoke happiness and expectation – the sound of the cook whistling, a typewriter clicking, the sight of a telephone message on a pad. Highmore notes that the “special quality” of the everyday might be “its lack of qualities. It might be, precisely, the unnoticed, the inconspicuous, the unobtrusive” (2002a, 1). This applies, certainly, to things – like a dripping tap – but it also applies to people. Rachel Bowlby has remarked how Mrs. Dalloway contains “an exceptionally large population of characters whose existence is marked as minor: characters who teeter on the verge of representational death, but live a small novelistic life all the 420 Kate Flint same in their subordinate, half‐hidden ways,” and she offers us close readings of the barely seen characters of Milly Brush and Ellie Henderson as examples “of these everyday stories that sustain their subordinate tellers in the midst of the larger realities where they themselves fade into the background” (Bowlby 2011, 398, 413).9 Age can render a person all but invisible – in fiction as much as in life – yet in Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf uses one of the more socially invisible demographics, the middle‐ aged, as a vehicle through which to hypothesize that the everyday gains more intensity, more savor, the older one gets. Indeed, a capacity to appreciate the everyday may be a significant compensation for aging. Peter Walsh understands how “life itself, every moment of it, every drop of it, here, this instant, now” was enough: “too much indeed. A whole lifetime was too short to bring out, now that one had acquired the power, the full flavour” (2000, 87). Clarissa herself finds it nothing short of tragic – although Woolf doesn’t use the word, the pain of unbearable loss that is rehearsed every day through the mere fact of time passing lies behind her formulation – “that it must end; and no one in the whole world would know how she had loved it all; how, every instant … ” (134). As Woolf recognized very well, to be female compounds the invisibility of no longer being young. In The Voyage Out (1915), Terence Hewet, who carries avant‐garde ambitions about the kind of novel that he wishes to write, is fascinated by the details that Rachel Vinrace gives him about how she spends a typical day back in Richmond (the location, not un‐coincidentally, of The Wise Virgins) – shopping with one of her aunts, playing the piano, going to walks, exercising and brushing the dogs. “I’ve often walked along the streets where people live all in a row, and one house is exactly like another house, and wondered what on earth the women were doing inside,” Hewet muses aloud. “There it was going on in the background, for all these thousands of years, this curious silent unrepresented life” (2006, 200). By having Rachel die at the end of the novel, Woolf tacitly suggests that Hewet’s literary desire to get to know women’s experience, to possess and represent it, is – symbolically speaking – one of the things that subsumes her, rather than flattering her, and Woolf’s own career as a novelist and critic develops, in part, as a means of giving voice to women’s ordinary experience. But how can one give fictional form to the experience of everyday life, when, as Mrs. Dalloway repeatedly demonstrates, the intensity of being bombarded with the ceaseless impressions of the everyday is thickened by the power of memory and association? The solution in this novel is to contain the everyday within the most readily available of temporal structures: one day. To be sure, since this is the day of Clarissa’s big summer party – a gathering place that’s both realistic and handy as a site where the novel’s different strands may be brought together – it’s not an entirely typical one. Yet the agglomeration of pleasures, fears, anxieties, reminiscences, and speculations that are stimulated by the rooms and streets and parks during this June day in London allow Woolf to display the power of “ordinary affects” – anthropologist Kathleen Stewart’s term for the emotions, responses, and tensions that emanate, unpredictably and fragmentarily, from the surface of everyday life (2007). Choosing one day – or a series of discrete days – was a form to which she returned again and again – in To the Lighthouse, where two separate days are joined by the impersonality of passing time; in the sensorily overloaded amalgam of impressions that constitute The Novel and the Everyday 421 the characters’ different takes on days that are plucked out of the continuum of time between their childhoods and middle age in The Waves (1931); in the fragmentary impressions that fill the day in which the whole swath of English history will be presented in a pageant in Between the Acts (1941). The fact that history itself, despite its major events, is made up of ordinary days and mundane concerns is brought home, too, in The Years (1937). Crosby, the housekeeper, mutters imprecations against the dirty bath that she has to clean, resents that she will have to be jostled in the street as she does her shopping, complains that her feet hurt, as “the guns went on booming and the sirens wailed. The war was over – or so somebody told her as she took her place in the queue at the grocer’s shop” (2009, 289). Woolf was far from alone in recognizing the potential for fiction of taking one isolated day as a framework for displaying what is simultaneously typical and yet, when placed under scrutiny, extraordinary; and for showing the infinite possibility for multiple perspectives on one short segment of time, one scene. Arnold Bennett termed June 16, 1904, the day on which James Joyce’s Ulysses takes place, the “dailiest day possible” (1922, 568).10 Henry Green’s Concluding (1948) depicts how a great deal goes wrong during Founders’ Day at a girls’ school; David Lodge’s The British Museum is Falling Down (1965) offers a day in the life of a graduate student. Its deliberate pastiche of styles both offers homage to Ulysses and suggests the stifling power of the anxiety of influence. If one‐day novels like Beryl Bainbridge’s Injury Time (1977) and Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005) in fact show how an apparently average day can go horribly astray when violent intruders interrupt the everyday, Jon McGregor’s If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things (2002) treats ordinariness in a far more nuanced manner. The narration shifts its focus from house to house in a suburban street on an apparently average Sunday, moving between third and first person, capturing tiny details of one woman hanging out washing, another drinking tea, a man slowly getting dressed. A couple of them are experiencing personal crises, others dwell largely in reminiscences. It’s another day that’s broken into by potential tragedy, as time is suddenly frozen when an out of control car hits a small child, and though he regains consciousness, we learn in the final pages, another character silently and unnoticed suffers a fatal heart attack. But any of these things could be happening in an ordinary street on an ordinary day. Only through a throwaway mention of a date do we learn that this was, in fact, no ordinary day for many, but the day on which Princess Diana died. McGregor’s novel is like W. H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts” brought up to date, confirming his observation that suffering – and even extraordinary happenings like Icarus falling out of the sky – goes on in the midst of everyday life, “while someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along” (Auden 2007, 179). Yet if each of these novels makes the point that whilst any day may seem everyday, each day may, in some way or another, be said to be far from “everyday,” none of them takes on board Woolf’s notion that the unremarkable everyday may especially be the realm of women, nor have they linked this to Henri Lefebvre’s insight that studying the everyday may be a source of political strength.11 By way of counterexample, and in conclusion, I want to turn to one more novel that takes place over the course of a single day, Mollie Panter‐Downes’s One Fine Day (1947) – a text that is unspectacular in style or content, and hence has itself, like so many elements of everyday life, passed largely 422 Kate Flint unexamined. Like a good number of novels and short stories of this date, it deals with the shabbiness and make‐do quality of postwar middle‐class life. It tells of the life of one woman, Laura, on a very average weekday – not just her activities, but her thoughts as well, seeing these, as Woolf did, as inseparable from one’s experience of the material world. The novel examines a peculiarly postwar phenomenon: that along with the version of certitude bestowed by peace came – to the survivors’ surprise – boredom. This was true for men as well as women. The prospect of heading into London on the 8:47 for the next 20 years or so fills Laura’s husband with “dreadful gloom” (1986, 161), whereas his wife feels that she is already “getting grey, dull, fixed in this trivial routine of cooking the dead slab [of fish] and cleaning the dirty bath” (92). Even if “scraps of forgotten brightness, odd bits of purple and gold” float around her mind, they are “hopelessly mixed up with laundry lists and recipes for doing something quick and unconvincingly delicious with dried egg” (126). Panter‐Downes’s novel shares the structure and style of Mrs. Dalloway, exploring the responses, associations, memories that cluster around one relatively ordinary woman throughout one – fine – day. But unlike Clarissa – following the model of her own inhibitionless dog, in fact – Laura breaks out of her enclosure within the dulling effects of “the common round, the horribly trivial task,” the furniture’s importunate demands to “clean me, polish me,” the complacent identification with an outmoded colonial past that still cushions her parents, and the obligation to have dinner waiting for her husband (138, 135). She heads up the nearby Barrow Down, sees a peaceful England spread out in shining beauty beneath her, and falls asleep – leaving her daughter and husband to come back to an empty house, and carry on without her. A short story might have ended with this transcendent, suspended, epiphanic moment. Panter‐Downes, more tidily, has Laura wakened by her dog’s barking, and anxious to run down the hill “to be part of it, to be home,” to find her husband “and say to him – what?” (184). It seems that she has already forgotten her revelation that the pair of them needed to break away, to travel again, to have adventures. Rather, the domestic space of the everyday is reasserted as a form of desirable safety, not a stifling, conventional trap. But the reader may well be left uncomfortable with this return. Laura’s revelation is not one that affirms the preciousness or potential of each moment of ordinariness. It’s as though Laura steps outside daily routine in order to feel her human potential, and then she – or the convention of a tidy fictional ending – muffles her excitement and insights. Yet the reader will have sniffed freedom, too, set against an all too familiar constraining domestic backdrop. In hindsight, we can see that Panter‐Downes is, in fact, establishing the grounds on which second‐wave feminism was to build in future decades. There is much to be said for the ways in which the novel, as a genre, encourages us to be attentive to the surprises and unbidden beauties of the everyday – extending our understanding of the quotidian from the world of things to that of ordinary people, and recognizing the democratic impulse behind such care and attentiveness. At the same time, the everyday can, as we all know, be dully boring, even soul‐destroying. To recognize the importance of the everyday as a category, and as the proper stuff of fiction, is by no means to accept the everyday as we find it. Rather, its representation can be a call to action, whether in terms of the extension of our sympathies, or the transformation of our lives or of our interaction with our environment. As Lefebvre The Novel and the Everyday 423 puts it in the concluding paragraph of the first volume of his Critique of Everyday Life, “the critique of everyday life – critical and positive – must clear the way for a genuine humanism, which believes in the human because it knows it” (2008, 252). This knowledge may be shaped, selected, rearranged; it may be presented through the observation of the material world – whether in the form of commodities or one’s natural surroundings – or through the fluid workings of the perceiving mind. It may be interpreted through narrative commentary or the sententious remarks of characters. The novel, however, with its capacity to draw in the reader so that we believe that its world is coterminous with our own, becomes the ideal ground on which we can start to plan and dream about how our own everyday world may be seen, experienced, and lived a little differently.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank my graduate students at Rutgers University and at the University of Southern California, from whom I’ve gained a great deal when discussing many of the texts that I write about here; Joe Boone, on whose 2009 MLA panel I first tried out some ideas about Mollie Panter‐Downes, the short story, and the everyday; and Alice Echols, whose sharp mind and eye enormously enhanced my thinking about this piece.

NOTES

1 For an important treatment of ideas about the 6 Unlike Woolf, however, Simmel saw his everyday within philosophy, especially – transformational aesthetics as leading to an although not exclusively – within the context apprehension of the world in holistic terms, of French thought, see Sheringham (2006). each small part contributing to “the totality 2 This term was first used in the 2001 special of beauty.” issue of Critical Inquiry (28.1). 7 For thinking about the relationship of sketch 3 For Mass Observation in relation to theorizing to novel, and in particular the relationship of the everyday, see especially Highmore (2002a, plot to plotlessness, see Garcha (2009). 75–112), and (for the post‐1981 period) 8 I quote from the original version of this essay, Sheridan et al. (2000). published in the Times Literary Supplement on 4 All the same, these novellas, especially “Mr. 10 April 1919, rather than from its better Gilfil’s Love Story,” contain, like so much of known, revised version, “Modern Fiction,” in Eliot’s fiction, plenty of examples of sensational order to establish the date of this incidents: her writing demonstrates a contra- formulation. dictory tug between the desire to present the 9 Alex Woloch’s The One vs. the Many. Minor typical and everyday, and a love of the dramatic. Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the 5 For this and the quotations from Smiles and Novel has been very influential in drawing Ellis – in addition to much important attention to the importance of attending to discussion concerning training the senses – I minor characters. am indebted to Ward (2008). Mid‐nineteenth‐ 10 For the everydayness of Ulysses, see Kiberd century physiological theory is supported by (2009). recent developments in cognitive psychology: 11 For women modernists and the everyday, see see Baumeister and Tierney (2011). Randall (2007). 424 Kate Flint

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Levine, George. 2008. How to Read the Victorian History. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Novel. Malden, MA, and Oxford: Blackwell. Press. Matz, Aaron. 2010. Satire in an Age of Realism. Stewart, Kathleen. 2007. Everyday Affects. Durham: Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Duke University Press. [Oliphant, Margaret]. 1862. “Sensation Novels.” Stewart, Susan. 1984. On Longing. Baltimore: Johns Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 91. Hopkins University Press. Panter‐Downes, Mollie. 1986 [1947]. One Fine Ward, Megan. 2008. “Feeling Middle‐Class: Sensory Day. London: Virago. Perception in Mid‐Victorian Literature and Park, Julie. 2011. “Introduction: The Drift of Culture,” PhD dissertation, Rutgers University. Fiction.” The Eighteenth Century 52: 243–248. Waters, Sarah. 2009. The Little Stranger. New York: Perec, Georges. 1999. Species of Spaces and Other Riverhead Books. Pieces, edited and translated by John Sturrock. Woloch, Alex. 2004. The One vs. the Many: Minor London: Penguin. Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Randall, Bryony. 2007. Modernism, Daily Time, and Novel. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Everyday Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Woolf, Leonard. 2007 [1914]. The Wise Virgins. Press. New Haven and London: Yale University Sheridan, Dorothy, Brian Street, and David Press. Bloome. 2000. Writing Ourselves: Mass‐ Woolf, Virginia. 1988. “Modern Novels.” In The Observation and Literary Practices. Cresskill: Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol. III, 1919–1924, Hampton Press. edited by Andrew McNeillie. London: The Sheringham, Michael. 2006. Everyday Life. Theories Hogarth Press. and Practices from Surrealism to the Present. Oxford Woolf, Virginia. 1994. “George Eliot.” In The and New York: Oxford University Press. Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol. IV. 1925–1928, Simmel, Georg. 1968. The Conflict in Modern Culture, edited by Andrew M. McNeillie. London: The and Other Essays, translated by Peter Etzkorn Hogarth Press. Peter. New York: Teachers’ College Press. Woolf, Virginia. 2000 [1925]. Mrs Dalloway, Smiles, Samuel. 1859. Self‐Help; with Illustrations of edited by Elaine Showalter. London: Penguin. Character and Conduct. London: John Murray. Woolf, Virginia. 2006 [1915]. The Voyage Out, Spencer, Herbert. 1873. The Principles of Psychology, edited by Jane Wheare. London: Penguin. 2 vols. New York: D. Appleton and Co. Woolf, Virginia. 2009 [1937]. The Years, edited Steedman, Carolyn. 2002. “What a Rag Rug by Jeri Johnson. Oxford: Oxford University Means.” In Dust: The Archive and Cultural Press. 27 The Public Sphere John Marx

The English novel has not one public but three. Some commentators think of the novel primarily as a means for connecting individuals into communities, whether national, linguistic, or ethnic. Others depict the English novel as a commodity whose sales fig ures make it possible to organize readers into markets. Still others define the novel as a device for administering heterogeneous populations. For all of their differences, what these three competing accounts share is the conviction that fiction does not simply reflect some pre‐existing social unity beyond its covers. Instead, the novel contributes significantly to the changing meanings of varying publics – community, market, and population – that have been labeled “English.” In attending to these changes, this chapter also comments on the use of “English” to designate communities, markets, and populations that have sprawled across the British Empire before transforming into that contemporary notion, “Global English.” Although neither community nor market nor population is unusual to associate with fiction, community is perhaps the most recognizable sort of novelistic public. The novel’s responsibility for preserving nations is baked into literary curricula, both within England and in the former British Empire. The apparent solidity of “Englishness” is at least in part the effect of novelistic representation. The English novel does more than preserve community in amber, however. It depicts communities marginalizing some groups and assimilating others, formulating standards of behavior and judgment, and establishing criteria for social hierarchy. These are dynamics of governance and entail projects in managing the health and welfare of a population as much as imagining the coherence of a people. For the English novel to participate in any of these projects, of course, it has to circulate in a market and prove capable of targeting specific consumer segments. For this reason, it makes sense to consider the novel’s publics together.

Communities

English novels mediate community for their readers. In reading one joins a kind of collective – fans of Jane Eyre (1847), James Joyce devotees – that extends far beyond the limits of face‐to‐face encounter. The scale of such collectivity is bounded: by the reach of the English language, for instance, and by the technology and cost involved in distribution. For scholars including Benedict Anderson and Jürgen Habermas, print’s mediation of community has political limits as well. Both argue that novels helped people to imagine themselves as part of nations. Because novels, whether serial or single‐volume, are highly portable and largely affordable, however, there is good reason to believe that the community of readers they mediate is potentially wider than the nation in scope. Never isomorphic with Great Britain, never entirely detached from it, the community of English fiction has in truth always put pressure upon the presumption of any neat fit between novel and nation. Novelistic mediation is facilitated by narratives that are stylistically engineered to amplify a sense of belonging. Think, for instance, of the way epistolary fiction addresses readers as letter‐sharing intimates, or the way serial fiction generates a public on high alert for the next installment. In their various ways, such formulae enable a feeling of immediacy and identification that allows readers to imagine their own behavior as per haps comparable to that portrayed in fiction. By comparing themselves to characters, readers prepare to learn from novels how to take care of themselves and their fellows. Good readers, ready to absorb the lessons English novels teach, make good communities. The contents of English fiction further facilitates community making. English novels consider test cases drawn from village life, colonial fellowship, and migrant society, among other circumstances. As any reader of George Eliot or Thomas Hardy or D. H. Lawrence well knows, tales of rural drama long have provided English community with a metaphoric center. An array of colonial and postcolonial novels ranging from Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901) to Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter (1948), from Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace (2000) to David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (2010) offer notions about how communities travel. These stories suggest that what readers know as English community was shaped over seas. Extending this thought, immigrant fictions from Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956) to Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988) to Andrea Levy’s Small Island (2004) explain how postimperial community continues to reshape polities within England and without. The idea that novels think of community in primarily national terms endures in part because scholars like Anderson have provided a sociopolitical basis for older claims on behalf of literary nationalism. These were proffered by commentators from Johann Gottfried Herder to F. R. Leavis. “Printing … is equivalent to democracy,” Thomas Carlyle lectured in 1840: “invent writing, democracy is inevitable” (1883, 118). An equation between readers and citizens enabled Anderson’s famous contention in his 1983 book Imagined Communities that “the structure of the old‐fashioned novel” “provided the technical means for ‘re‐presenting’ the kind of imagined community that is the nation” (2006, 25). By “kind of imagined community that is the nation,” Anderson meant a polity bound together by the experience of individual lives 428 John Marx unfolding collectively in “homogeneous, empty time.” In all but the smallest of nations, it is clear that one “will never meet, or even know the names of more than a handful” of compatriots, but national community emerges nevertheless through a gen eral confidence in the ongoing, “steady, anonymous, simultaneous activity” of fellow citizens and fellow readers (26). Members of the nation do not arrange the actions of their comrades hierarchically – as when the affairs of kings took necessary precedence above those of peasants. Instead, Anderson perceives a contrastingly horizontal arrangement, “what one could call seri alization,” with each citizen standing as a provisional representative of many more (184). Novels contribute to national community understood in these terms by behaving as if everyone were possessed of her or his own curious and well‐plotted story. As library shelves fill with such stories, Anderson contends, they provide an extended gloss “upon the word ‘meanwhile’” (25). Novels that play up chance encounters and the intricacies of character interaction assist readers in understanding what their own daily affairs add to a sweeping national saga. As readers learn to recognize the charac ters they find in novels as “ordinary,” furthermore, they learn to think of themselves in such terms. Deidre Lynch explains that by the turn of the nineteenth century novel istic characters effectively served as “imaginative resources on which readers drew to make themselves into individuals” (1998, 126). In the pages of English fiction, readers found stories about individuals they might become and microcosms of national community to which they could belong. Novel reading is not a relation of immediacy, although it may feel like one. Readers read novels in private, but in so doing participate in a collective activity that cuts across time and space. For Michael McKeon, the novel appears designed to hold “in suspension the separation” between public and private “it historically helped enforce” (2005, 53). Publishing, he opines, may be thought of as “an act of depersonalization that abstracts both author and reader from the concrete presence of face‐to‐face exchange.” But it can equally impose “upon the author an unprecedented burden of personal and ethical obligation” to a reader predisposed to glean moral truths from what she reads (53). This tension between depersonalization and ethical obligation abides even among writers and readers separated by time and space. “Since … novels are characteristically readable at any time” and in any place, Jonathan Culler notes, they invite queries not only about “who actually reads them but of whom they address” (1999, 27). Who exactly imagines they become part of something larger than themselves by turning the pages of Pride and Prejudice (1813)? Certainly, readers with no experience of turn‐of‐ the‐nineteenth‐century Derbyshire may feel welcomed into Elizabeth Bennet’s company. Though any novel is capable of generating a community of readers that exceeds national limits, the imperial history of English fiction offers a highly charged setting for such elasticity. Although readers anywhere can learn lessons from Pride and Prejudice, readers of English novels resident in England in the early nineteenth century might appear to have a more intimate relationship to Austen’s fiction. Contrastingly, readers of English novels living in the larger Empire might be expected to appreciate English community without feeling fully part of it. When English novels link personal experience to imagined community, the British Empire makes the politics of that dynamic between private and public into a global concern. The Public Sphere 429

Although it may not have been his primary intention, Ian Watt made Empire difficult to ignore when he focused his study of novelistic publicity and privacy on Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719). As much as Robinson Crusoe details the unfolding of an individual consciousness in time, Watt shows how it equally demonstrates that individuality relies upon interpersonal bonds. “Just as modern study of society only began once individu alism had focused attention on man’s apparent disjunctions from his fellows,” Watt writes, “so the novel could only begin its study of personal relationships once Robinson Crusoe had revealed a solitude that cried aloud for them” (1957, 92). With this term, “society,” Watt links the novel to eighteenth‐century nonfiction prose by the likes of Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson (author of the 1767 Essay on the History of Civil Society). These thinkers were dedicated to finding a post‐aristocratic manner of gluing a public together. On a tropical island, far from the home counties, the society that Crusoe enjoyed was hardly composed of English citizens alone. Crusoe relies on his man Friday, teams up with shipwrecked Spaniards, and leaves his island to the care of formerly muti nous sailors. Self‐governance is bound up with social interaction in this novel, as Crusoe’s attempts to take care of himself on his island lead to a remarkable variety of relation ships. As Srinivas Aravamudan notes, Defoe’s interest in a plurality of social organiza tions extended even to outlaw pirate clans. “Defoe’s fictional pirates are thought experiments,” Aravamudan explains, “transitional and contingent subculture[s]” that test the “unrealized possibilities” of association (1999, 93). Participants in all of these experiments, at least as Crusoe narrates them, share an avidity for exchange. “Crusoe, one feels, is not bound to his country by sentimental ties,” Watt relates; “he is satisfied with people, whatever their nationality, who are good to do business with; and he feels, with Moll Flanders, that ‘with money in the pocket one is at home anywhere’” (1957, 66). Instead of national community à la Anderson, Defoe posits cosmopolitan commerce as the foundation for the public that the English novel connects. Robinson Crusoe’s account of community appears to many readers, including Watt, as in need of a sentimental supplement, which the English novel supplied through the good works of a whole cadre of eighteenth‐ and nineteenth‐century heroines. Among these perhaps most celebrated is the eponymous protagonist of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740). That novel concludes with its leading lady released from captivity to caretake her estate, looking after the “honest and worthy poor,” and in general infusing the place with fellow feeling (1980, 516). Equally capable women were depicted in earlier captivity narratives. Mary Rowlandson’s Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (1682) anticipated Crusoe, according to Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse, in its description of an English subject surrounded by “nothing but wilderness” who “becomes poignantly aware that survival depends on her ties to a community that cannot be experienced directly” (1992, 204). In the early nineteenth century, novels like those of Jane Austen and Fanny Burney solidified the logical con nection between feminine authority and communal belonging. If, as Habermas observed, “the line between private and public sphere extended right through the home,” English novels provided readers with women to guide them through condi tions made possible when the “the family room became a reception room in which private people gather to form a public” (1989, 43). Close reading, careful observation, and sound judgment were the watchwords for characters who brought and kept com munities together. 430 John Marx

Novel heroines strived to establish and elevate communal standards in the process, and in a manner that preserved the kind of self‐regulating individual Watt found in Robinson Crusoe. Lynch shows that fictions like Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (1811) worked hard to get this balance right: Marianne Dashwood regrets at one point that “admiration of landscape scenery has become a mere jargon,” while her sister Elinor endeavors to clarify the method for assessing the uniqueness of a man like Edward Ferrars: “At first sight, his address is certainly not striking; and his person can hardly be called handsome, till the expression of his eyes, which are uncommonly good, and the general sweetness of his countenance, is perceived” (Austen 1811, 227, 43). Marianne’s self‐indulgence and Elinor’s self‐sacrifice yield particular versions of a common problem, namely, how to square one’s own judgments and feelings with those of a larger group. Paradoxically, Lynch observes, it can seem that Austen treats con forming to a sufficiently elevated standard as the guarantee of self‐governing individ uality (1998, 127). To the extent that novels were capable of melding stereotype to self, they helped to generalize criteria of taste across a community of readers as well as to demonstrate how specific individuals could become models of discipline. In the pages of Austen, Eliot, and the Brontës, the cultural capital possessed by characters of good judgment was worth as much, if not more, than gold. Centuries after Austen was cutting edge, readers are still used to self‐governing, tasteful women supplementing capitalism with culture. Novels from Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) to Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003) confirm that such characters organize communities everywhere from modernist tomes to the multicul tural fiction of the present day. Woolf’s eponymous protagonist famously steps out her front door on a commercial venture – to buy flowers – that yields myriad inter personal connections of varying intensity. Having secured the requisite blooms, she spends the rest of her day conspiring to assemble politicians, business types, and old lovers for an evening party. That Clarissa molds her network in a novel that draws attention to its highly distinctive form only confirms that community building remains a literary concern. For its part, Brick Lane describes a network in London’s East End, wherein a Sylheti migrant takes charge of her life by realigning commercial connections. Nazneen and her neighbor Razia become business partners as well as sustaining friends, a simultaneously sentimental and economic enterprise that leaves Nazneen in control of herself and contemplating engaging in local politics. “This is England,” Razia assures her in the novel’s last line. “You can do whatever you like” (Ali 2003, 369). To feel part of local or national community in no way excludes characters in Brick Lane from membership in a Sylheti community that stretches from London to Bangladesh. Like Austen and a host of novelists before her, Ali encourages readers to compare approaches to interpersonal relation by presenting very different sisters. Nazneen’s wary attitude contrasts with her sister Hasina’s eagerness to take on risk. These sisters work and bond in two interconnected wings of the garment industry: Hasina labors in Dhaka sweatshops and Nazneen does piece work in London. A formal conceit makes clear that Brick Lane as much as Mrs. Dalloway considers community to be a literary matter: where the novel presents Nazneen speaking and thinking in an English idiom that many book reviewers found to be artful, the risk‐taking but less successful Hasina writes letters from Dhaka that appear on the page as broken English. The Public Sphere 431

This linguistic difference aligns with the difference between Nazneen’s self‐control and Hasina’s seeming inability to organize her life. Fiction regularly plays up differences among characters as a way of mulling over the limits of community. Novels from Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1819) to Helen Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl (2005) present novelistic heroines working hard to forge connections and preserve bonds across cultures and ethnicities. For a critic like Bruce Robbins, such efforts underscore the novel’s generic capacity to generate transnational fellow feeling. Certainly, Robbins is right that a novel like Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans (2000) renders a world in which “any stranger may turn out to be a member of your family and should be treated as such” (2001, 435). Ishiguro depicts an Englishman from Shanghai whose professional and personal lives so intertwine he cannot distinguish who is and who is not his friend. Few recent novels put greater pressure on the “English” quality of imagined community than Lloyd Jones’s Mister Pip (2006). This book depicts a girl named Matilda and her schoolmates on the island of Bougainville who come to feel part of the public rendered in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1860–1861). Given that English is an official language of governance and business both on Bougainville and in Great Britain, Mister Pip encourages speculation about whether the English novel is particularly well situated to forge community on the scale of globalization. That contemporary fictions in English have an imperial legacy is undeniable. As Gauri Viswanathan argues, “the imperial mission of educating and civilizing colonial subjects in the literature and thought of England” makes it impossible to “regard the uses to which literary works were put … as extraneous to the way these texts are to be read” (1989, 2, 169). English fiction in the colonies disseminated models of self‐ governance and community building just as it did within England, but the social mobility those models promised was clearly limited by the dictates of imperial rule. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s postcolonial response to this heritage was to recommend the abolition of the English Department at the University of Nairobi in favor of a Department of African Literature and Languages devoted to illuminating “the spirit animating a people” formerly colonized, now independent from Britain (1972, 146). Ngũgĩ famously ceased writing fiction in English in favor of publishing in Gikuyu. Chinua Achebe equally famously argued that the only reason African writers were capable of talking about “African unity” was because “when we get together we can have a manageable number of languages to talk in – English, French, Arabic” (1975, 78). English fiction was “part of a package deal which included many other items of doubtful value,” Achebe observed, including the “atrocity of racial arrogance and prej udice which may yet set the world on fire” (78). Rushdie observes that “those people who were … colonized by the language [were also] rapidly remaking it, domesticating it” (1991, 64). That domestication process included Midnight’s Children (1981) with its analogy for imagined community, the telepathically linked “Midnight’s Children’s Conference.” Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), Wilson Harris’s Palace of the Peacock (1960), V. S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River (1979), and J. M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986) rewrote Robinson Crusoe, Jane Eyre, and Heart of Darkness, thereby clarifying the imperial contours of English fiction. Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies (2008) with its shipborne collective of lascars, Anglo‐Indians, and American freedmen experiments with social organiza tion the way Defoe did, but without the presumption that enabled Robinson Crusoe to 432 John Marx place its hero on top. Scholars such as Simon Gikandi explain that postcolonial questioning of “the colonial past is intractably tied to the crisis of securing identity in an age of collapsing boundaries” (1996, 229). Now that the English novel has gone global, it is clearer than ever that novelistic community comes in competing forms.

Markets

Critics often think of markets for novels as divisible into nations, and they further sur mise that some market niches have the coherence of communities. Taste, moreover, is as crucial to the assertion that novels produce markets as to the claim that they model communities with shared mores. Taste means something different in a market, how ever, than it means to an Austen character. Markets are less organized around singu larly “good taste” than a notion of taste that can be classified, so as to make a group (those who like X type of novels) intelligible as a stable demographic. Taste is, as Pierre Bourdieu defines it, “the generative formula of life‐style,” “a unitary set of dis tinctive preferences” that locate a person in a market segment (1984, 173). Taste is also the name for a kind of feedback loop between demographics and particular sorts of novels. As an audience coheres around a genre or subgenre, that type of novel acquires more substance and fixity. To think of the novel’s public as a market, in short, is to imagine an array of specific sorts of readers whose tastes appear increasingly aligned with ever more precisely defined forms of fiction. Critics interested in markets often treat both readers and novels in aggregate. Instead of closely reading individual texts or focusing on the self‐governing behaviors of individual heroines, studying the market means analyzing the features of large numbers of books. For example, Franco Moretti has compiled sales data that allow him to chart the rise of the novel in multiple nations by pinpointing when, exactly, “the graph leaps from five–ten new titles per year, which means one new novel every month or two, to one new novel per week” (2003, 70). In England “the graph leaps” around 1720, in Japan around 1745, Italy around 1820, Spain around 1845, and Nigeria in 1965. “[A]t this point,” Moretti glosses, “the horizon of novel‐reading changes … With a new text every week … the novel becomes that great modern oxymoron of the regular novelty: the unexpected that consumers expect so often and eagerly that they can no longer do without it” (70). In crossing this threshold, both novel and con sumers meaningfully change. The novel takes on the reliable shape of a genre, and the public defines itself through an addiction to such goods. Here is reciprocity to rival that between novel and nation in Anderson’s formulation. The nation remains important to Moretti’s market analysis, however, for his work makes national distinction intelligible as an effect of market behavior. The Chinese novel and its market were radically different from the English market for fiction in the eighteenth century, he recounts. Novels in China were longer than in England – The Story of the Stone clocks in at some 2000 pages – and they appeared with substantial interlineal commentary, marking them as objects of aesthetic and philosophical concentration (Moretti 2008, 118‐23). The result was that fiction in China generated a public with radically different appetites than those of the public emerging in England. Instead of aficionados of literary contemplation, the English market was The Public Sphere 433 composed of “butchers,” Moretti enthuses, engaged in the “slaughter of literature” (2000, 209). Presented with more and more novels to choose from, “the butchers … read novel A (but not B, C, D, E, F, G, H, …) and so keep A ‘alive’ into the next gen eration” but effectively kill the rest (209). The English public that Moretti details actually seems more schizophrenic than rapacious. Even as it slaughters the majority, it keeps novel “A” alive, and thereby begins to form something like a canon. The market can be fickle, which encourages writers to experiment. “In making writers branch out in every direction,” Moretti explains, “the market also pushes them into all sorts of crazy blind alleys; and divergence becomes indeed, as Darwin had seen, inseparable from extinction” (2004, 52). He singles out one instance of push and pull between experiment and canonization in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Then, mysteries were beginning to rely on the literary device of the “clue.” Arthur Conan Doyle is responsible for coming up with what we now recognize as the norm. He used clues that a reader can decode and that have a clear function in the plot. As Moretti explains, however, Doyle did not use this device consistently – it appears in only four of the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Doyle “finds the epoch‐making device” but “does not work it out” (Moretti 2000, 215). Moretti explains that the author was in some sense pitted against the market: “Holmes as Superman needs unintelligible clues to prove his superiority; decodable clues create a potential parity between him and the reader” (216). The market might have a taste for decodable clues, but Doyle worried that they would ruin his master detective. Although much can be gleaned by tracking trends across national markets, it has long been abundantly clear that these publics are anything but uniform. “To speak of a mass market is of course misleading,” Nicholas Daly writes, for one of the most important changes wrought by the expansion of novel publishing “was a new diversity rather than a homogenization, as publishers competed in what was effectively becoming a ‘niche market’” (1999, 21). The social historian Peter Keating observes that the book market became demonstrably busier when single volumes replaced triple‐deckers and book sales replaced library lending. In 1890 the trade periodical Bookseller had to admit that its listings were falling “far short of the total works issued, as scores of works annually escape our efforts to catalogue them” (Keating 1989, 33). Novelists tried to organize this mess. None other than Joseph Conrad sought to designate the market segment for his work by negotiating with Blackwood’s press, which was planning “the inclusion of Lord Jim in our 1/‐ Editions” (Conrad 1958, 192). Conrad protested that Blackwood’s wanted to price his novel like popular fiction and indi cated, “I would much prefer a new edition at 6/‐ leaving the Democracy of the book‐ stalls to cut its teeth on something softer” (193). Linking taste to price in this way suggests a public that is knowable and therefore manipulable. Sarah Brouillette’s recent study of the global literary marketplace suggests that publishers and novelists continue to think this way. Publishers have only become more savvy since Conrad’s day at marketing “‘serious’ literary fiction as a distinct publishing category” and pricing it accordingly for a demographic willing to pay for quality (Brouillette 2007, 55). “Far from reducing its readers to passive consumers,” Leah Price contends, “the novel has relentlessly forced them to choose which audience to identify themselves with, and which rhythm of reading” (2000, 156). Price perceives a market divided between novels that emphasize ideas and those that emphasize story. This distinction 434 John Marx has been variously gendered. In the early decades of the nineteenth century all supposed “women read frivolously for the plot, men seriously for the ideas.” Later on, commen tators were convinced that “feminine moralism [was] opposed at once to the narrative pleasure of masculine romance like Stevenson’s or Kipling’s and to the avant‐garde doctrine of art for art’s sake” (153). Andreas Huyssen is among the scholars to describe another shift during modernism, when “resistance to the seductive lure of mass culture” accompanied a “powerful masculine mystique” for more serious art (1986, 55). Jennifer Wicke offers an alternative to this schematic. Drawing on the novels of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce among others, Wicke describes a modernist novel that imagines its market as a multifarious crew with polymorphous appetites. Scenes from Ulysses depicting Leopold Bloom at a bookstall, shuffling through The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk and Tales of the Ghetto, analogize a market as appreciative of trash as of masterworks. “ – I’ll take this one,” Bloom says when he is done sorting the wares on display. “ – Sweets of Sin, he [the shopman] said, tapping on it. That’s a good one” (Joyce 1986, 194). In this version of the modernist market, Wicke writes, “The high/ low distinction crumbles away, and with it the need to tidy the wagon or purge the bookstall” (2001, 398). Modernism appears as the moment when the market for English fiction became more heterogenous and more cosmopolitan. “What is new today,” writes Pascale Casanova, “is the manufacture and promotion of a certain type of novel aimed at an international market” (2004, 171). Of course, there is nothing new in the sale of novels across borders: the market for English fiction has never been confined to England. What Casanova means is that today novels can address a market niche specifically defined by its taste for “world fiction.” For Casanova, this category is simultaneously various and elitist: “novels of academic life by interna tionally known authors such as Umberto Eco and David Lodge, for example, as well as neocolonial sagas (such as Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy) … are marketed alongside updated versions of mythological fables and ancient classics” (171). Instead of the national bestseller, the global market shapes a niche equally devoted to fictional biog raphies of Thomas Cromwell and what the website Samosapedia calls the “mango opus,” “sweeping, colorful work[s] of fiction about India … more frequently con sumed by visitors than locals” (Samosapedia 2011). Although Brouillette thinks that the rise of postcolonial anglophone fiction has facilitated “the sort of incorporation of niche audiences that allows for global market expansion,” she also notes that extension paradoxically “keeps the locus of production in a few key cities in the developed world” (2007, 56). Editorial and publishing companies in London and Oxford sell fiction in English from across the former British Empire. The Heinemann African Writer’s Series and Longman’s African publishing unit (now both part of the global conglom erate Pearson) were instrumental in creating a global market for what readers every where now know as the canon of African fiction. Global and postcolonial marketing builds on imperial bookselling, as studies like Priya Joshi’s In Another Country (2002) recount. Novels were imported by India “in considerable numbers” through the nineteenth century, and “what did not end up in the classroom found its way into rapidly emerging public libraries throughout the Subcontinent” (Joshi 2002, 41–42). What began as an import became in time an export product. Stephanie Newell tracks this transition in West Africa, where in the 1920s and 1930s a generation of aspirant intellectuals formed such groups as the Gold The Public Sphere 435

Coast “Enthusiastic Literary and Social Club” to debate the relative merits of Dickens and Eliot (2001, 348). The clubs were made up primarily of “young scholars,” Newell notes, “working hard to perfect their English literary accomplishments in order to assert their autonomy from existing power elites” (347–348). Imperial reading leads to anticolonial writing in both Joshi’s and Newell’s studies, suggesting that there may not be so much conceptual distance between market activity and the politics of governance.

Populations

Novels succeed or fail as commodities in the market, and they also provide a medium for commentary on the market. Experts in many disciplines agree that there is no “global market” apart from its representation, and the English novel surely contributes to that process. This is a not unfamiliar observation. If “Dickensian” has meaning detached from any particular Dickens novel, that is in part because the term connotes a polemical account of mid‐nineteenth‐century commercial ethics. To take a more recent example, Tobias Hill’s The Cryptographer (2003) spins a yarn about electronic currencies and global economic collapse that has a certain diagnostic, even predictive value. The proximity between fiction and economic theory is signaled by the name Hill provides his money mogul: John Law, the Scottish enlightenment thinker cred ited with, among other things, inspiring the modern futures exchange and the idea of paper money. By narrating stories of economic actors and their management styles, the English novel moves in networks of exchange and communication that it helps to theorize as such. Following Mikhail Bakhtin, scholars expect novels to facilitate the combination of vernaculars, and to thereby multiply and conjoin interpretations of events. For Timothy Brennan, this is how the novel goes about “objectifying the ‘one, yet many’ of national life … by mimicking the structure of the nation, a clearly bordered jumble of languages and styles” (1990, 49). Objectifying the bordered jumble might sound more like state administration than nation building, however, more like management than imagination. To the extent that fiction links various languages to populations, it does not idealize community so much as organize polyphony. In this, the novel behaves like writing from other disciplines that link governance to expert administration. David Cameron’s February 2011 Munich Security Conference speech deriding “state multiculturalism” is but one recent reminder that community is widely thought of as a governmental effect (Cameron 2011). On the one hand, Michel Foucault argues, contemporary government dreams of a subject who can take care of himself, become “an entrepreneur of himself” (2008, 226). On the other hand, the social scientists Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose explain, contemporary government frequently insists that experts are required to locate entrepreneurial subjects within “‘the community’ as a new territory for the administration of individual and collective existence” (2008, 88). At least since Austen’s characters strived to balance individualism and standards of taste, fiction has been well practiced at thinking through dynamics between self and collective. Instead of modeling self‐governance as the organizational basis of community, however, the 436 John Marx

English novel equally might be thought of as contributing to the expert oversight of populations. To think of the novel as a form invested in government means rethinking the genre’s presentation of privacy and publicity. Few recent novels more aggressively rework those terms than Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), which won the Orange Prize for the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and became a bestseller in Britain and around the world. In this novel set during the Biafran War, the domain once called “private life” is thoroughly politicized, but not because the home is a microcosm for the nation. Instead, Odenigbo and Olanna’s house is a setting for professionalization. When their guests accuse Odenigbo of being a “hopeless tribalist,” they are less concerned with prospects for national unity than with making a conceptual point about the history of such notions as “pan‐Igbo” identity (Adichie 2006, 20–21). Professor Ezeka lectures, “You must see that tribe as it is today is as colonial a product as nation and race” (20). Discussions like this suggest that instead of salvaging the nation, Half of a Yellow Sun reproduces the feel of a seminar when civil war has closed all the universities. The novel explains how expert authority is acquired during war time by telling the story of a houseboy who grows up to write an interdisciplinary study of the fighting. Adichie’s emphasis on the scholarly aspect of domesticity amplifies the decline of what Habermas called “bourgeois representation,” wherein a literate, propertied class “did not equate itself with the public but at most claimed to act as its mouthpiece” (1989, 37). Professional representation involves a different sort of delegation, wherein the knowledge and power to make decisions lies with econo mists and marketers, lobbyists and health experts. Although the “rise of professional society,” as the historian Harold Perkin called it, picked up speed by the turn of the twentieth century, the English novel’s interest in what experts do has precedents in earlier periods. Few novelists more consistently questioned who had the authority to arrange and rearrange populations than Dickens. In a letter to John Forster, Dickens described Household Words as a vehicle for social experiment: “It struck me that it would be a new thing to show people coming together, in a chance way, as fellow‐travelers, and being in the same place, ignorant of one another, as happens in life; and to connect them afterwards, and to make the waiting for that connection a part of the interest” (Reitz 2010, 76). As he examines ways that periodical fiction might sort and connect people, “English identity … becomes less about fixed characteristics,” Caroline Reitz explains, and more about the challenge of the novelist overseeing what Dickens called “a diversity of material” (74–76). Just so, over the course of Bleak House (1853), Esther Summerson observes a variety of tech niques for managing diverse populations as she collaborates in efforts of charitable assistance, disease prevention, and police detection. D. A. Miller’s influential analysis treats such social experiment as part and parcel of how the English novel “localizes the field, exercise, and agents of power, as well as, of course, justifies such power” (1988, 75). Critics like Lauren Goodlad have evaluated Bleak House in light of Dickens’s apparent unwillingness to sanction “a safe means of institutionalizing modern power,” however (2003, 546–547). Certainly Dickens’s skepticism is on full display in this book, which questions the expertise residing in institutions of British law as well as Christian charity. Through such criticism, the novel prods readers to consider alternative methods for social organization. “What The Public Sphere 437 connexion can there have been,” the novel’s third person narrator asks, “between the many people in the innumerable histories of this world, who, from opposite sides of great gulfs, have, nevertheless, been very curiously brought together?” (Dickens 1996, 235). Bleak House is a textual confluence wherein diverse populations can and do meet, and where readers are invited to participate in the challenge of managing them. Instead of modeling self‐governance for readers, it is as if Dickens engaged them in ad hoc administrative training. In novel after novel, the management of groups as they mix and mingle proves as vital for social health as it is potentially dangerous. There is no commerce without contact, but contact also brings with it risks to public security. Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) took the plague town as an example. The novel lays out the case for inculcating in a population, first, the capacity for self‐discipline and, second, the will ingness to self‐sacrifice. “Defoe’s Journal does not yield that inward‐looking, self‐ supervising subject,” Armstrong and Tennenhouse contend, but rather explains the need for it. The novel depicts “a city whose population defies any attempt to classify it empirically, even the sick from the dead” (2009, 168). As the narrator struggles to for mulate a just means for deciding which people should be confined to their homes, either because they are sick or because they are irresponsible, he fantasizes about a population that might be better equipped to makes such judgments. He laments those “utterly careless as to giving the Infection to others,” and further regrets that “it was impossible to beat any thing into the Heads of the Poor, they went on with usual Impetuosity of their Tempers” (Defoe 1990, 199, 209). With such negative examples, Defoe inspires an administrative approach we now take for granted, in which the state sees its job as helping parents to teach their children well, and helping children grow up to be produc tive members of society. Keeping a population active, healthy, and secure at minimum expense is hardly a new problem, but rather an administrative conundrum the English novel has been identifying and seeking to solve for centuries. Defoe introduces his readers to a population that comes and goes as does the plague itself, that follows trade, that lives to engage in commerce despite the risk of contagion. Such a volatile collective “continues to trouble modern thought,” Armstrong and Tennenhouse conclude, “in the figure of an ‘economy’ … susceptible to erratic mood swings” (2009, 170). Contemporary British fiction from Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005) to Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers (2004) demonstrates the novel’s continued investment in depicting a population amenable to expert intervention. Jacqueline Rose is among the commentators who turned to Aslam’s novel for insight concerning British efforts to govern the “ethnicized” practice of “honor killing” (2009). In an English town with a “Park Street … as in Calcutta, a Malabar Hill as in Bombay, and a Naag Tolla Hill as in Dhaka,” Maps for Lost Lovers details the administrative distance between “Muslim divorce” and “British law” (Aslam 2005, 28, 55). McEwan’s tale has been read as a think piece about security that highlights expert skill as well as literary power. A rec itation of “Dover Beach” by the daughter of the novel’s neurosurgeon protagonist Harry Perowne temporarily soothes a tough named Baxter who threatens the Perowne family. Meanwhile, Perowne’s sympathy for his antagonist appears tied to his profes sion, according to Frances Ferguson, who argues that expertise allows him to manage in an insecure world. Ferguson contends that today “emotions move along routes quite different from those that we imagine ourselves to harness when we think of Austen’s 438 John Marx

Emma Woodhouse and George Knightley coming to be able to understand one another” (2007, 49). In Saturday professional competence rather than wit and taste is what enables one to concentrate, to calm, and to take care. Whether a sop to an expert class eager to believe in its capacity to govern or an illuminating description of the human side of professionalism, clearly Saturday is a novel that considers itself equipped to weigh in on such matters. The novel’s historical ambition to participate in the governance of health and wel fare was institutionalized in the academy when F. R. Leavis tied literary scholarship to culture and thereby tried to claim the problem of population for the English novel and for his “English School” at Cambridge. It was against the backdrop of a university designed to massify the professional class that he dreamed of educating readers capable of safeguarding culture and thus pioneered the humanities’ own widely popular management training program. Leavis maintained that novels reveal the core interests of the communities they represent, but that it takes a caste of highly trained literary interpreters to appreciate such revelations. In a 1943 speech at the London School of Economics, Leavis rehearsed his theme about the “inevitable way in which serious literary interest develops towards the sociological” (1943, 6). This theme led inexo rably to its companion: “thinking about political and social matters ought to be done by minds of some real literary education” (11). For Leavis, population ought to be the property and responsibility of that well‐read minority called English majors. Regardless of whether commentators primarily associate the English novel with community, market, or population, they often recognize that fiction does more than merely reflect some pre‐existing public sphere. To think of English fiction as modeling best (and worst) practices for governing such a sphere is to remember that novels have long considered it their writ to testify to what life should be like but is not. Novels interrogate given circumstances and reconfigure future possibilities for social organi zation. Historical novels by authors ranging from Sir Walter Scott to Amitav Ghosh recall worlds that have been destroyed. Domestic fictions by Jane Austen or Charles Dickens imagine pockets of household warmth amidst the urban chill. Tomes by the likes of Martin Amis or Samuel Beckett portray societies so constitutively dysfunc tional that readers must feel the need for an eviscerating critique. Novels including Ian McEwen’s Saturday and Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans render small acts of collegiality that illuminate the dire status of civil strife. It is important to recognize how novels interact with writing from other disciplines in shaping publics conceived of as community, market, or population. Novelists con duct research and read widely outside of their discipline. If this is not news, it none theless merits notice. To take just two recent examples, in the acknowledgments to Brick Lane, Monica Ali thanks Naila Kabeer, a social economist and lead author of the 2009 United Nations World Survey on the Role of Women in Development (Ali 2003, 371). Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie documents her scholarly inspiration even more thoroughly, providing Half of a Yellow Sun (2006) with an “Author’s Note” detailing interviews conducted and a bibliography of works consulted (2006, 433– 436). Fiction is as likely to collaborate with social scientific research as it is keen to distinguish its formal techniques from those of scholarly prose. Such interdisciplinary collaboration might play a bigger part, I conclude, in further consideration of how novels shape their publics. The Public Sphere 439

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To read an English novel is to be pulled in two opposite directions at the same time, simultaneously drawn to imagine experiences and identities abroad and to anchor those in a specifically English national experience and identity. The title characters of many English novels seem to personify this dilemma: Robinson Crusoe, Edward Waverley, Jane Eyre, Dracula, Lord Jim, or Mrs. Dalloway. The nation embodied by their novels – whether England, Britain, Great Britain and Ireland, the British Isles, or the British Empire – escapes their grasp, and all the more so the more that nation defines their characters, experiences, and identity. For characters and readers alike, novel and nation are twinned in a simultaneously inclusive and exclusionary act of the imagination, caught between the contending claims of cosmopolitanism and geopolitics. The difficulty in defining the territorial stretch of the nation itself constitutes only one part of this double bind of novelistic and national identity written into the very names of the novels cited above. Each name marks a double question of identity, simultaneously opening and closing both the novel and the nation to outsiders. Most sensa- tionally on display in Count Dracula’s vampiric act of incorporating his very un‐English body into the English nation, the same contradiction haunts even the most English of Jane Eyre’s autobiographical utterances, and may be traced all the way back to the opening paragraph of Robinson Crusoe (1719), which calls attention to the foreign origin of the name by which the first‐person narrator introduces his own identity: “my father being a foreigner of Bremen who settled first at Hull … and from whom I was called Robinson Kreutznaer; but by the usual corruption of words in England we are now called, nay, we call ourselves, and write our name ‘Crusoe’” (Defoe 1965, 27). This dilemma situates English novel form between the opposed imperatives of

A Companion to the English Novel, First Edition. Edited by Stephen Arata, Madigan Haley, J. Paul Hunter, and Jennifer Wicke. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. 442 Christopher GoGwilt cosmopolitan openness to and geopolitical exclusion from experiences and identities beyond the nation. Looking back on the variety of different kinds of eighteenth‐century English novels since Robinson Crusoe and forward to the consolidation of Victorian novel form in the nineteenth century, Walter Scott’s Waverley (1814) epitomizes this tension between an open, evolving, and cosmopolitan sense of the nation and a geopolitical sense of the nation in its fixed and territorially bound political‐state form. Posted to Scotland as a newly enlisted English army captain, but visiting old family friends just as the 1745 Jacobite rebellion begins, Waverley finds himself caught between the opposing claims to national identity represented by the Hanoverian English King George II and the “Young Pretender” Bonnie Prince Charlie. The novel tracks these divided political, national, and historical loyalties as part of Waverley’s own coming of age, his own sentimental education, or Bildung, in all the various (political, intellectual, sexual, and aesthetic) senses of the German word for “development” or “culture” that inform the genre of the Bildungsroman. Waverley’s story – “the narrative of modernization” as Ian Duncan almost puts it (2006, 173; the emphasis is mine) – is the story of how the romance of Scottish nationalism gets incorporated into – and as – the realism and emerging historical consciousness of the modern British nation‐state. As Georg Lukács famously argues, Scott’s novel, as the “first historical novel,” inaugurates the characteristic nineteenth‐century coordination of historical consciousness with the modern notion of the nation‐state. For Lukács it is the historical consciousness of the British nation‐state (not Scotland) that Scott captures in novel form – “Scott sees and portrays the complex and intricate path to England’s national greatness and to the formation of the national character” (1983, 54). Here already one can see the tension between two rather different conceptions of the “national idea” – the romance of Scottish nationalism and the realism of the English nation‐state. Waverley colorfully and canonically captures this tension in novel form. In the process, the novel leaves for future readers an unresolved (perhaps unresolvable) question as to which of the two – the Scottish or the English – is the more cosmopolitan, or the more worldly, the more open to what Lukács calls “world history.” The name “Waverley” itself prefigures this novelistic balancing act. Commenting on the title in the opening paragraph, the anonymous author notes his inability to choose between “the chivalrous epithets of Howard, Mordaunt, Mortimer, or Stanley” and “the softer and more sentimental sounds of Belmour, Belville, Belfield and Belgrave.” Already suggesting a contrast between two contending sets of English heraldic association – the Anglo‐Saxon versus the Norman English surnames – but pointedly refusing to judge which one might provide “the most sounding and euphonic surname that English history or topography affords,” the author explains that “I have therefore, like a maiden knight with his white shield, assumed for my hero, WAVERLEY, an uncontaminated name” (Scott 2008, 3). Throwing off the old feudal trappings of contending chivalric English names, Scott appeals to a more cosmopolitan fiction, the trope of modern romance embedded in the allusion to Don Quixote’s “blank and white [blanco]” shield (Cervantes 2003, 24). It is not yet clear in what sense the name Waverley will resolve this balance between contending linguistic‐national lineages of feudal English entitlement and a European lineage of novel form suggested The Novel and the Nation 443 by the allusion to Cervantes. Scott here anticipates later critical debates about the rise of the English novel, about the contending claims of realism and romance, consoli- dating in the naming of his title character what Ian Watt famously described as “the custom initiated by Defoe and Richardson of using ordinary contemporary proper names for their characters” (1957, 20). Waverley’s own Quixotic reading habits set him up for a rude awakening from the romance of chivalric tales to the realism of modern warfare. In one sense, then, Waverley’s story will reinscribe the cosmopolitan European novel tradition of Don Quixote within the tradition of English middle‐class realism. In another sense, though, Waverley’s story will open up still further the contending claims on English readers as to what constitutes an “ordinary contemporary proper name,” since Waverley’s adventures – and his concluding marriage to Rose Bradwardine that consolidates the old family alliance between the Waverleys and the Bradwardines – supplement the contending Anglo‐Saxon and Norman names with a further set of Scottish feudal embellishments, most on display in the figure of Cosmo Bradwardine. His comic combination of legal Latin phrases and Lowland Scots might appear to make him the embodiment of a Scottish feudal past, a remnant of an older Scottish social order displaced by the emerging new hegemony of the English middle class. Yet the comic form of his barely intelligible Scots in fact prefigures the legal basis with which Waverley’s story will resolve the contending fictions of landed and moneyed inheritance that make the novel, Waverley, imagine a future fiction of national identity for the united kingdom of Scotland and England. The problem of marriage – that Gordian knot of the nineteenth‐century English novel and nation‐state (as Vlasta Vranjes [2008] has begun to demonstrate) – is conveniently resolved by the “catholic security” Bradwardine’s “Bailie” draws up to secure the terms of Bradwardine’s Scottish estate (Tully‐Veolan) after Waverley’s marriage – “to Rose Bradwardine, alias Waverley, in life‐rent, and the children of the said marriage in fee; and I made up a wee bit minute of an ante‐nuptial contract, intuitu matrimonij, so it cannot be subject to reduction hereafter as a donation, inter virum et uxorem” (Scott 2008, 336). Both linguistically and legally, the comic register of this hybrid Latin–Scots–English captures, in earnest, the different directions in which a reader is pulled – between English law and Scots law, between Protestant and Catholic, between common law and international law. The “wee bit minute of an ante‐nuptial contract” ties together these contending cosmopolitan and geopolitical claims into the knot of Waverley’s marriage, prefiguring the way Victorian marriage will plot both English novel form and the emerging British nation‐ state around the double bind of inclusively cosmopolitan and exclusively English forms of marriage. Lukács’s The Historical Novel begins with the example of Scott, attributing to Waverley (and the Waverley novels as a whole) the ability to realize what is “lacking in the so‐called historical novel before Sir Walter Scott,” namely “the specifically historical” defined as the “derivation of the individuality of characters from the historical peculiarity of their age” (1983, 19). Confirming the significance of Scott for European lineages of novel form, the fragment of Mikhael Bakhtin’s great lost study of the Bildungsroman breaks off with the example of Scott, whose shift from poetry to prose almost “overcomes the closed nature” of the folkloric past – the “national‐historical time” of the Scottish landscape: 444 Christopher GoGwilt

In Scott’s subsequent “novelistic” period, he overcomes this limitation (to be sure, still not completely). The profound chronotopic nature of his artistic thinking and his ability to read time in space remain from the preceding period, as do elements of the folkloric coloring of time (national‐historical time). And all these aspects become extremely productive for the historical novel. (1981, 53)

What is striking about this apparent agreement between these two twentieth‐century theorists of the novel, however, is that they are premised on such radically different notions of novel form. Whereas Lukács sees the “historical novel” unifying the world‐ historical consciousness of a newly hegemonic bourgeois middle class, Bakhtin’s grasp of the timing and spacing of novel form (or “novelization”) looks toward the profound “heteroglossia” he later theorizes as a defining feature of novel form. Though a simplification, one might say that whereas Lukács sees in Scott the crystallization of the modern English nation‐state, Bakhtin points toward those centripetal forces (above all, of language) that do away with any insular sense of national‐historical time. Both readings, nonetheless, are attuned to the contradictory imperatives of cosmopolitanism and geopolitics embedded in Scott’s novelistic balancing act. Both might already be seen at work in a scene of reading Scott at the heart of George Eliot’s multiplot mid‐Victorian novel, Middlemarch (1871–1872). It is, itself, a double scene of reading. At the beginning of Chapter 57, Fred Vincy visits the Garth family to discover the young Jim Garth “reading aloud from that beloved writer who has made a chief part in the happiness of many lives” (1996, 536). The reader will already have guessed that the “beloved writer” is Walter Scott, since the chapter’s epigraph is a fictionalized passage of poetry praising Walter Scott. Both allusions together represent how fully Scott’s novels form the foundation for a national sense of identity instilled through childhood reading. The young Jim Garth is reading Ivanhoe (1820), confirming Lukács’s reading of the entire scope of Scott’s Waverley novels: “Scott sees and portrays the complex and intricate path which led to England’s national greatness and to the formation of the national character” (Lukács 1983, 54). As one of the most famous of those historical novels devoted to tracing the early modern formation of “England’s national greatness,” Ivanhoe is singled out by Patrick Parrinder, in Nation and Novel, as fitting the criterion that allows Scott – and by extension other novels by “non‐English” authors – to be included in his definition of what constitutes an “English novel”:

As it happens, some works that have hugely influenced the idea of English identity were written by non‐English authors: Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe with its portrayal of medieval England torn apart by bitter resentments between Saxons and Normans is perhaps the prime example. (Parrinder 2006, 5)

If Eliot portrays the young Jim Garth reading Ivanhoe to underscore something close to Parrinder’s restrictive, nationalist (and geopolitical) definition of the formative relation between the English novel and the English nation, Eliot’s epigraph points in another direction, emphasizing the inextricable interrelation between Scott’s representation of “England’s national greatness” and the romance of a Scottish national past that gives shape and name to that sense of English national character. All of The Novel and the Nation 445 the allusions in Eliot’s fabricated verse epigraph are to the novel Waverley, evoking the distant Scottish setting evoked by Scott’s name – “His name who told of Evan Dhu, / Of quaint Bradwardine, and Vich Ian Vor” – including the final line’s reference to the estate of “Tully Veolan” (1996, 576). This double scene of reading Scott in some ways reproduces the divided myth of Scott the Scottish poet of romance and Scott the father of the English realist novel, even as both scenes subtly unravel the assumption that the English national character can be separated from its formative attachment to the romance of a distant Scottish past. The generic contrast between the fake quotation from poetry and the fictional space of the novel’s ongoing plot might itself be read as more than a nod to Scott – as, indeed, a critical comment on what the authority of novel form owes to Scott’s Waverley novels. The two sides to this generic contrast between prosaic realism and lyric romance are not reducible to a contrast between Scottish romance and English realism, although such a stereotype goes back to the key turning point in Scott’s own shift from poetry to novel writing. The Scottish landscape provides a romantic, extradiegetic frame for the developing narrative about the novel’s provincial English setting of Middlemarch. The English setting of Ivanhoe might appear more fully to reflect the contending models of Bildung offered by Fred Vincy and Jim Garth, since the developing question of Fred Vincy’s eligibility to marry Mary Garth offers a modern‐day counterpart to the contending Saxon and Norman lineages embedded in that novel. The whole question of landed versus moneyed interests, linked (through the Garths) to the management of English estates, mirrors the governing frame of the novel’s focus on Dorothea Brooke. And it is on this point that the allusion to the estate of Tully Veolan marks something much closer to Eliot’s orchestration of the relation of the novel to the nation: the question of land tenure, land ownership, land entail, and land management. Within Middlemarch, Scott’s Waverley novels form a double enframing point of per- spectival reference. In the diegetic frame, the scene of reading Ivanhoe situates the provincial English setting of Middlemarch within a happy family romance of reading England’s national character – itself doubled in the contrasting class perspectives of young Jim Garth’s lower‐middle‐class education and Fred Vincy’s ascendant‐middle‐ class waste of an education. The extradiegetic frame of the epigraph, rehearsing critical genealogies of the novel form and anticipating those yet to come, reframes the provincial, male scene of national and cultural formation, or Bildung, within the more cosmopolitan perspective suggested by the epigraphs which, from the start, have been associated more closely (although not directly) with Dorothea Brooke’s female Bildung. It is within this latter framing that the Waverley reference – and more especially the concluding evocation of “Tully Veolan” (as the place from which Scott is figured as writing) – embeds within Middlemarch the Gordian knot of marriage left as a legacy by Bailie MacWheeble’s “wee bit minute of an ante‐nuptial contract.” The legal problem of marriage, and especially under English marriage law, helps explain in what ways female consciousness comes to define – as the double bind of inclusive and exclusive novelistic and national imagining – the privileged point of narrative perspective in Victorian novel form. It is perhaps for this reason that the novel provides the critical insight Amanda Anderson credits to Nancy Armstrong, the recognition that “the modern individual is, first and foremost, a woman” (Anderson 2001, 36). In this sense, as Anderson’s reading of nineteenth‐century novels explores, 446 Christopher GoGwilt

Eliot’s critical “detachment” emerges from a sort of testing of the degrees of cosmopolitan consciousness available within the repertoire of the English novel tradition. George Eliot captures this dilemma early in Middlemarch in the comic form of Mr. Brooke’s exasperated comment, provoked by the effort to think through the implications of Dorothea marrying Casaubon, that “a man can only be cosmopolitan up to a certain point” (1996, 50). “Cosmopolitan,” here, signals the limit of Mr. Brooke’s effort to imagine a sense of community beyond his provincial landholding connections (above all, to his neighbor Sir James Chettam). Although Mr. Brooke is here not really concerned with anything outside the “provincial life” of the novel’s fictional English county, the label “cosmopolitan” evokes the political conflict between aristocratic landed and commercial manufacturing interests that characterizes the novel’s historical setting during the events of the First Reform Bill of 1832. The two versions of Dorothea Brooke’s challenge to conventional marriage plotting – her marriage, first, to Casaubon, and then to Ladislaw – might be characterized as Eliot’s experiment in imagining how cosmopolitan a novel’s critical consciousness might become in giving realistic narrative form to an English woman’s Bildung. If the limits of Victorian cosmopolitanism are conceived in terms of the paradigmatic position of women’s consciousness in plotting English novel form (both as characters and as narrators, and usually some complex combination of the two), perhaps this explains the geopolitical significance of women’s consciousness in modernist twentieth‐century English novels premised either on the exclusion or inclusion of such consciousness as a principle of narrative form (Conrad’s Heart of Darkness [1899] or Lord Jim [1900]; Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway [1925] or To the Lighthouse [1927]). To the Lighthouse suggests both of these in its elegiac retrospective vision of Victorian marriage form: Mrs. Ramsay, the organizing central present‐tense stream of consciousness in the first part (“The Window”), becomes the ever‐present absent consciousness of the third part (“The Lighthouse”). In the last chapter of Part 1, Woolf evokes the limits of the Ramsays’ marriage in a scene of reading Scott that might be contrasted to the scene of reading Scott in Middlemarch:

She looked at her husband (taking up her stocking and beginning to knit), and saw that he did not want to be interrupted – that was clear. He was reading something that moved him very much. He was half smiling and then she knew he was controlling his emotion. He was tossing the pages over. He was acting it – perhaps he was thinking himself the person in the book. She wondered what book it was. Oh, it was one of old Sir Walter’s she saw … (2005, 119)

This scene of reading figures “old” Sir Walter Scott as an older, if not entirely eclipsed age of English novel reading, but one that situates the simultaneously isolated and shared experience of reading that characterizes what Victorian marriage comes to signify within the early‐twentieth‐century modernist coordinates of Woolf’s novel. The older novel form, like marriage form itself, suggests a form of empathy that probes limitations of gender and national identity, whether in crossing over or in consoli- dating those limitations. As a group portrait of Victorian reading habits, the scene may be read as representing both versions of English cosmopolitanism that get knot- ted around debates about English marriage law: the pseudo‐cosmopolitanism of an The Novel and the Nation 447

English nationalism premised on a firm gender division that simultaneously includes and excludes non‐English outsiders; and a more “inclusionary cosmopolitanism” (Vranjes 2008, 326) suspicious of both gender and ethnic distinctions in debates about divorce laws. The scene of reading Scott does not itself rehearse those Victorian debates about marriage law. Rather, it probes the limits of identification and intimacy between husband and wife – what is later figured as “the crepuscular walls of their intimacy” (Woolf 2005, 125) – in an elegiac and sympathetic evocation of an idealized maternal consciousness seeking to assert itself within the oppressive patriarchal structure of a middle‐class Victorian family. In this sense Woolf frames the limits of Victorian cosmopolitanism, as she does the scene of sentimental novel reading (Mrs. Ramsay seeing Mr. Ramsay “controlling his emotion”), as part of a contingent consciousness that is, on the one hand, universal and inclusive and, on the other hand, insular and exclusive. Mrs. Ramsay’s reading of Mr. Ramsay’s reading Scott is itself perhaps deliberately turning inside out the imaginative projection implied in the imagined Scottish setting of Woolf’s English novel. In framing the scene of a Victorian family romance of reading Scott’s novels, Woolf reframes the space of novelistic experience, extending George Eliot’s testing of cosmopolitan narrative consciousness beyond the limits of consciousness itself. Erich Auerbach’s celebrated reading of To the Lighthouse in the last chapter of Mimesis famously aligned this modernist technique with a cosmopolitan realism almost “cosmic” in perspective – “a synthesized cosmic view” (1968, 549) – a perspective which, focused on the “random moment,” becomes detached from the “controversial and unstable orders over which men fight and despair,” bringing to light “the elementary things which our lives have in common” (552). Pushing the limits of the “detachment” that Amanda Anderson threads through nineteenth‐century novelistic forms of cosmopolitanism, Woolf’s novelistic realism, according to Auerbach, offers an extreme, ideal cosmopolitan openness:

In this unprejudiced and exploratory type of representation we cannot but see to what an extent – below the surface conflicts – the differences between men’s ways of life and forms of thought have already lessened. The strata of societies and their different ways of life have become inextricably mingled. There are no longer even exotic peoples … It is still a long way to a common life of mankind on earth, but the goal begins to be visible. And it is most concretely visible now in the unprejudiced, precise, interior and exterior representation of the random moment in the lives of different people. (1968, 552)

Auerbach’s extreme idealization of Woolf’s cosmopolitanism belies its own claim to cosmopolitanism, perhaps nowhere more clearly than in the phrase “There are no longer even exotic peoples.” Although that might indeed be precisely the import of the repeated description of Lily Briscoe’s “Chinese eyes,” the phrase nonetheless underscores how readers of To the Lighthouse (and, for that matter, Mrs. Dalloway) are pulled in two different directions, invited to read this either as an excluding, racialized exotic descriptive tag, the stereotype of an “Oriental mystery” (as it’s put in Mrs. Dalloway and as examined by Urmila Seshagiri [2010]), or as a description of cultural affinity, an inclusive affiliation with a Chinese way of looking (as suggested by Patricia Laurence [2003]). The double resonance of the phrase (used in Part 1 as if to capture 448 Christopher GoGwilt

Mrs. Ramsay’s perspective on Lily Briscoe, and used again in Part 3 to suggest the reframing of Mrs. Ramsay’s perspective precisely through the artistic lens of Lily Briscoe’s artistic rendering of Mrs. Ramsay) calls attention to the novel’s own doubling of novelistic and national form. It also captures an underlying ambivalence about Britain’s imperial history that Woolf shares with a range of other English modernists, especially in the later 1920s and 1930s. To the Lighthouse might alternatively be read as part of a general retreat toward a more insular anglocentrism in the face of decoloniza- tion (following Jed Esty’s argument in A Shrinking Island [2004]) or, on the contrary, as part of an accommodation and extension of the globalization of English culture (following John Marx’s argument in The Modernist Novel and the Decline of Empire [2005]). The ambiguity in many ways underlies the title of the novel, as in the adventure tropes of so many of Woolf’s novels (beginning with The Voyage Out [1915]), an ambiguity that informs, too, Lily Briscoe’s “Chinese eyes” and also the scene of reading “old Sir Walter” Scott. Woolf’s novel consolidates, but cannot resolve, the ambiguity posed by the form of the English novel as it emerges from late Victorian and early twentieth‐century British imperialism. Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) and Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim (1900) present complementary and contrasting versions of this ambiguity. Dracula poses the question: how much of the foreign can the nation incorporate? Lord Jim poses the question: how far beyond the nation’s borders might English identity extend? What Dracula and Lord Jim each emphasizes, albeit in very different ways, is the linguistic instability of the Englishness of the English novel, something that tends to be masked in To the Lighthouse (although it is arguably very much there in the Scots of the passage from Scott’s The Antiquary [1816] Mr. Ramsay is reading, in addition to his metaphor of “thought” running “like an alphabet from A to Z” [Woolf 2005, 122]). The un‐ English accent of Count Dracula – and also Van Helsing, enlisted to fend off Dracula’s invasion of England – is part of what makes the text so seductive, beginning with the appeal of the name “Dracula” itself. Lord Jim, by contrast, asserts an English entitlement abroad that also, however, undermines the credibility of English titles and names. The instability of English registered by Dracula and Lord Jim points to something more fundamental than the novelistic appropriation of foreign accents, dialects, and languages that was, all along, a foundational feature of English novel form (evidenced, for example, in Bailie MacWheeble’s “wee bit minute of an ante‐nuptial contract”). Rather, what Dracula’s Transylvanian and Lord Jim’s Malay languages point toward is an altogether other scene of linguistic‐literary scripting of English. This is sensation- alized in Dracula’s ability not only to learn English, but also to appropriate the technologies of modern mass‐communication systems – including, of course, the mass‐produced form of the English sensational novel. Lord Jim, more ironically, premises its reading of Jim’s imperial entitlement abroad on a translation from Malay into English: “They called him Tuan Jim: as one might say – Lord Jim” (Conrad 2002, 4). This non‐English, even un‐English scripting of English points toward a legacy of the English novel that is in many ways contained and suppressed by the scenes of reading Scott in George Eliot and Virginia Woolf. For someone from Eastern Europe, however, Scott is not so much an English (or Scottish) novelist. As Conrad puts it in A Personal Record (1912), Scott was not “one of the English novelists whose works The Novel and the Nation 449

I read for the first time in English” (1926, 71). He was, rather, one of those “men of European reputation” whom he read in Polish translation. Conrad’s entire oeuvre, of course, is premised on a successful crossing over from other languages (French, Polish) into English (what Rebecca Walkowitz [2006] analyzes as his successful cosmopolitanism of style: this, arguably, a European cosmopolitanism attuned to the geopolitics of an early‐twentieth‐century English readership). But that success itself is poised around an ambiguity of literary and linguistic perspective that demands a rethinking of the double bind of the English novel and the nation. The English novel – and Sir Walter Scott, perhaps above all – is transmitted not only through scenes of English readings of English. The English novel is as much, if not more of a European phenomenon as it is an English one. Robinson Crusoe has never ceased to demonstrate this, in its adoption as required reading by Jean‐Jacques Rousseau in the eighteenth century and Karl Marx in the nineteenth century. For nineteenth‐century Europe (in French, Italian, and Russian, for example), it is Scott’s novels that set the template for the double scene of novel reading and national imagining that, generically, Lukács defines as the “historical novel.” Scott’s influence may be felt even (and perhaps especially) at the fringes of the European novel, as illustrated by the Dutch novel Max Havelaar: or The Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company (1860) by Multatuli (pen‐name for the Dutch writer Edward Douwes Dekker). The novel is narrated by the Amsterdam coffee broker, Batavus Droogstoppel, who, according to Benedict Anderson, is “an ingenious mixed borrowing from Walter Scott”: the name drawn from Scott’s antiquarian editor, Dr. Dryasdust, and the “manner and style” drawn from “the business‐obsessed elder Osbaldstone in Rob Roy” (Anderson 2006, 453). In a long “digression on digressions,” Dekker argues for the method of detailed description of places he attributes to “the great master who wrote Waverley” (Multatuli 1987, 185). The place that Multatuli goes on to describe (an East Indies “compound” represented by an oblong rectangle divided into “twenty‐one compartments, three across, seven down” [189]) stands in striking contrast to the examples of depiction (and digression) Dekker gives of Scott (and other European writers of historical novels). This Dutch scene of reading Scott and the nineteenth‐century European historical novel generally is all the more suggestive given its influence beyond the linguistic and literary circuits of the dominant European tradition (in the margins of which it was itself written). It is Multatuli, rather than Scott – and therefore Multatuli’s Dutch rendition of Scott as the “great master” of the English novel – who becomes a touchstone European figure in one of the greatest later‐twentieth‐century historical sequences of novels, Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s Buru tetralogy (1979–1988), which reconfigures the scope of European novel form (both the Bildungsroman and the Lukácsian “historical novel”) to account for the emergence of Indonesian anticolonial nationalism over the turn from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. These non‐English scenes of reading (or ignoring) Scott and the legacy of the “historical novel” in European novels ought to be added to those from Eliot and Woolf. One should include, too, those translations across media by which Scott’s novels entered the mainstream of Italian, French, and Russian culture via opera, Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor (1835) (based on Scott’s The Bride of the Lammermoor [1819]), for example, which provides so important a scene of (mis)reading marriage and culture in 450 Christopher GoGwilt

Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856). As Katie Trumpener (1997) has shown, the significance of Scott’s cosmopolitical influence may be measured in relation to the forms of “bardic nationalism” he adapted from earlier, eighteenth‐century genres (including his own poetry) and that consolidated the wider reputation of his work. Even before Scott’s Waverley helped reframe the romance of his own Scottish poetry and channel the various different genres of the late eighteenth century (“national tale,” “Gothic romance,” “sentimental tale”) into the now‐familiar generic profile of the Lukácsian “historical novel,” Scott’s influence may be felt in a scene of reading Scott equally as decisive for the English novel as Waverley. In Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (published in 1814, the same year Waverley appeared), the heroine Fanny Price knows Scott’s poetry by heart. Early in the novel she expresses her disappointment with the architecture of an English chapel, measuring it against the poetry of Scott’s The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805): “This is not my idea of a chapel. There is nothing awful here, nothing melancholy, nothing grand. Here are no aisles, no arches, no inscriptions, no banners. No banners, cousin, to be ‘blown by the night wind of Heaven.’ No signs that a ‘Scottish monarch sleeps below’” (Austen 1966, 114). The same year Scott himself was anonymously reframing the Scottish romance material of his own poetry into the “historical novel” form of Waverley, Austen was crafting the provincial English coordinates of her novelistic prose in novelistic counterpoint to the poetic lines of Scott’s romantic Scottish verse. Considered as rival novelistic readings of Scott’s poetry, the scene of reading Scott in Austen and Scott himself complicate still more the complex English and non‐English scenes of reading Scott’s legacy embodied in George Eliot and Multatuli. After Woolf, scenes of reading Scott seem to diminish, if not disappear altogether from the canonical works of postcolonial English literature (this, by contrast, for example, to the legacy of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe). Perhaps this absence itself speaks to the impossible alignment of English novel and English nation within the contending claims of cosmopolitical and geopolitical imperatives. As for the English novel’s European heritage, this is perhaps nowhere more evident than in those now canonical theories of the novel we have cited already: Georg Lukács, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Erich Auerbach. To the extent that the literary form of the novel is bound to the form of the nation, as theorists of the novel have argued in various (sometimes quite conflicting) ways, perhaps this is true of all novels, twinning the historical emergence of the novel as a literary form and the nation as a political form. As Franco Moretti succinctly puts it,

[T]he nation‐state … found the novel. And vice versa: the novel found the nation‐state. And being the only symbolic form that could represent it, it became an essential component of our modern culture. (1998, 17)

Moretti’s parallelism draws from Benedict Anderson’s much‐cited definition of the nation as an “imagined community” (1991) and the accompanying insight that the novel functions as an exemplary vehicle for achieving that form of “imagining.” Although Moretti exaggerates Anderson’s pairing of novel and nation (for Anderson the novel is not the “only” symbolic form for representing the nation), the The Novel and the Nation 451 exaggeration usefully sums up the way the novel and the nation each appears, at least by the nineteenth century, as a given (“an essential component”) of “our modern culture.” Pheng Cheah draws attention to the unresolved contradiction expressed in the formulation “nation‐state.” As Cheah puts it,

In the initial moment of its historical emergence, nationalism is a popular movement distinct from the state it seeks to transform in its own image. Thus, before the nation finds its state, before the tightening of the hyphen between nation and state that official nationalism consummates, the ideals of cosmopolitanism and European nationalism in its early stirrings are almost indistinguishable. (2006, 24)

Cheah’s formulation outlines a cosmopolitical premise of earlier European notions of the nation often obscured by later, geopolitical formulations of the nation‐state. The formal political and literary parallelism of Moretti’s formulation thus opens up to a series of questions: Does the novel ever find the nation? Does the nation ever really find the novel? Following the arc of the OED’s changing definition of the term “nation” (which itself follows the shift from nineteenth‐century definitions of “cosmopolitanism” to the twentieth‐century emergence of the word “geopolitics”), the “nation‐ state” is never really a given. It must be found (or founded), as a nation finds its state. So, to adapt Moretti’s formulation, the novel is the genre, par excellence, that keeps trying to find the fit between nation and state. Taken as an active, fluid, and politically open‐ended process, Moretti’s succinct formulation – the novel finds the nation‐state and vice versa – pinpoints in the political form of the nation what characters and readers face in the opposing cosmopolitan and geopolitical imperatives of novelistic form. The novel seeks to imagine in literary form what needs to be resolved in the political form of the nation: the riddle of modern nationalism, nation‐ness or the nation‐state. The form of the novel plots the historical and geographical relation between “nation” and “state.” To read a novel is to be caught up in the timing and spacing of whatever peculiar form of imagined community it is that is expressed in the hyphen- ated political form of the nation‐state. What is characteristic of novel form generally (its simultaneously cosmopolitan and national ambitions), then, seems especially so for the English novel. Robinson Crusoe’s island fantasy simultaneously projects a cosmopolitan model of individual economic freedom applicable to all (in the spirit of Jean‐Jacques Rousseau’s recommendation of it as “the one book that teaches all that books can teach” [cited in Watt 1957, 86]) and a particularly British imperial fantasy of resourceful self‐sufficiency (as parodically illustrated by the way Wilkie Collins makes it the secular scripture for his loyal country house steward Gabriel Betteredge in The Moonstone [1868]). Karl Marx famously makes Robinson Crusoe a touchstone for the combination of both of these (French cosmopolitan and British imperialist) claims in his celebrated critique of political economists’ “Robinsonades” in Das Kapital, Volume I. Prefiguring aspects of the exemplary hero of the English novel (as outlined canonically by Ian Watt’s Rise of the Novel), Robinson Crusoe also embodies the contradictory imperatives shaping the bourgeoisie, World Literature, and the capitalist world market that Marx so succinctly caricatured in The Communist Manifesto (1848) – “The need of a constantly expanding market for its 452 Christopher GoGwilt products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe” – condensing both the caricature and the critique into the one word “cosmopolitan” (weltbürgerlich):

The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world‐market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country … draw[ing] from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. (Marx 1978, 58)

Like Marx’s own choice of focus on the English factory system to illustrate the international reach of capital, the English novel has become an exemplary point of reference for tracking the parallel rise of the novel and capitalism, with Robinson Crusoe itself as a canonical point of reference. Whether the hero (or narrator) of the English novel is a world citizen or a British subject, there is something about the specifically English national experience of class – or rather, something about the way novels represent, imagine, and speak a language of class – that makes the English novel exemplary, and for English and non‐English readers alike. The Marxist analysis of class provides, indeed, as noted above, a key insight into the contradictory imperatives of the bourgeois hero seeking fortune in the world and citizenship in a state. It may no longer be credible to imagine a future able to overcome the crises of the capitalist mode of production as Marx analyzed it, but Marx’s insights into the contradictory class position of the bourgeoisie – chased across the globe by the cosmopolitan imperatives of the world market and simultaneously attached to the guarantees and privileges of national citizenship – remain as pertinent as ever. Those contradictions are as embedded in contemporary debates about the political form of the nation‐state as they are in literary debates about the form of the novel. The whole repertoire of class perspective to emerge from the eighteenth‐century English novel might be seen to hinge on these contradictions, whether it is because the English bourgeois hero is seen as a perfect fit for the classic Marxist paradigm (as with Ian Watt’s foundational account of the “rise of the novel” and novelistic realism from the English smithies of Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding), or whether it is precisely the anomaly of the English class perspective – as is suggested by Margaret Doody’s coun- ternarrative of novel form (“only in the largest sense is the Novel ‘bourgeois’ – it is of the burgh” [1996, 477]). The eighteenth‐century English novel serves as a testing ground for questions of social class – with successive revisions and debates about the variety of different genres converging on the English novel, with renewed attention to the sociological facts concerning book distribution, circulation, and the formation of what Benedict Anderson calls “print capitalism” (1991). Ian Watt’s argument that the formal realism of novelistic convention is evident in the common everyday names that often give novels their titles (Robinson Crusoe, Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones) itself anticipates the kind of revision (evident in the work of Doody, among others) whereby women’s stories (anybody’s – or, in Catherine Gallagher’s formulation, nobody’s [1994]) come to embody the exemplary, modern position of the emerging middle class (as suggested already in the classic novels by Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding – Moll Flanders, Pamela, Clarissa). Marx – himself, after all, a paradigmatic English novel reader, whose works were written and are now read alongside the laborious writing and reading of Victorian novels – captures in his satirical use of the word weltbürgerlich the The Novel and the Nation 453 unresolved problem of class perspective shaping the kind of world (Welt) and the kind of citizen (Bürger) given imaginative shape by the emerging nation‐state of the British Empire. If, for Marx, the problem of class division appears to resolve into the conflict between the cosmopolitan bourgeoisie, scattered across the globe, and the concentration of the working classes in the metropolitan centers of industrialized Europe, this reading of class struggle itself reveals the redoubling of cosmopolitical and geopolitical imperatives along the fault line of the nation‐state. As Eric Hobsbawm has so eloquently put it, describing the “age of empire”: “what, from one point of view, looked like a concentration of men and women in a single ‘working class,’ could be seen from another as a gigantic scattering of the fragments of societies, a diaspora of old and new communities” (1989, 119). The nation‐state provides a focal point for the political staging of this split perspective – in Marxist terms, one might say, as the world market gives a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption at home, working‐class consciousness promises to give a new political expression to those market forces. If, however, Marx’s “workers of the world” represent, rhetorically and politically, the other side of the satirical coinage of weltbürgerlich, the site of this dialectical struggle of class perspective is the nation‐state as simultaneously a fixture of geopolitical struggle and a stage in the future cosmopolitical withering away of both the nation and the state. The political form of these twinned and opposed cosmopolitical and geopolitical imperatives is perhaps nowhere more visibly on display than in the temporal and spatial, historical and geographical coordinates of the changing form of the English nation from the early eighteenth century up to the beginning of the twentieth century, as the English nation formally merges first with the United Kingdom of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland and then with the British Empire. The political formation of this imperial nation‐state (whose dissolution in the twentieth century continues into the twenty‐first century) is imaginatively embodied in the literary form of the English novel from Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders (1722) up to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. Whether or not the English novel can ever unify the splintering divisions of class perspective into something like a “national” perspective (as Lukács would have it), whether or not it can ever achieve a “synthesized cosmic view” beyond the nation (as Auerbach would have it), or whether the English novel contains or is shaped by the decentralizing effects of proliferating languages, dialects, idiolects, or “heteroglossia” (according to Bakhtin), readers (of all nations) seem bound to reproduce the split imperatives of cosmopolitanism and geopolitics that create the double bind of novel reading and nation forming. To the extent that English novel form becomes the vehicle for imagining and con- solidating a collective national identity, the history of the English novel might appear to track the process by which the cosmopolitan possibilities of English novel form are increasingly eclipsed by the geopolitics of England’s nation‐state transformation: from the Act of Union between Scotland and England in 1707, through the Act of Union between Ireland and Great Britain in 1800, and the increasing formalization of the British Empire following the disbanding of the East India Company in 1858 and the Royal Titles Act of 1876 proclaiming Queen Victoria Empress of India. The history of England’s transformation into the British Empire, however, rather than plotting a 454 Christopher GoGwilt single, linear narrative of the relation between the forms of the novel and the nation, re‐enacts in global form (and as a form of globalization) simultaneously an expansion of the English novel throughout the far reaches of the British Empire and an unravel- ing of the identity of the English novel and the English nation. To read an English novel, then, is to be pulled in these two opposite directions at the same time – and this applies as much to “common readers” as to literary critics, theorists, and even the characters and narrators of novels themselves. This or that reader may emphasize this or that extreme, but no reading can ever resolve the ambiguity of perspectives. The English novel leaves us suspended between a theory of the novel as a particular genre with a specific historical, national, and world‐historical trajectory (as Lukács sees it) and the view that there is no such coherent genre as the novel at all, only an ever‐widening decentralization of novel and nation alike (a view closer to Bakhtin’s understanding of the process of “novelization”).

References

Anderson, Amanda. 2001. The Powers of Conrad, Joseph. 1926. A Personal Record. Garden Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation City: Doubleday, Page & Company. of Detachment. Princeton: Princeton University Conrad, Joseph. 2002 [1900]. Lord Jim: A Tale, Press. edited by Jacques Berthoud. New York: Oxford Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities: University Press. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Defoe, Daniel. 1965 [1719]. The Life and Adventures Revised edition. London: Verso. of Robinson Crusoe, edited by Angus Ross. Anderson, Benedict. 2006. “Max Havelaar.” In The New York: Penguin. Novel, Vol. 2, edited by Franco Moretti. Doody, Margaret. 1996. The True Story of the Novel. Princeton: Princeton University Press. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Armstrong, Nancy. 1987. Desire and Domestic Duncan, Ian. 2006. “Waverley.” In The Novel, Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. Oxford: Vol. 2, edited by Franco Moretti. Princeton: Oxford University Press. Princeton University Press. Auerbach, Erich. 1968 [1953]. Mimesis: The Eliot, George. 1996 [1871–1872]. Middlemarch: A Representation of Reality in Western Literature, Study of Provincial Life, edited by Rosemary translated by Willard R. Trask. Princeton: Ashton. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Princeton University Press. Esty, Jed. 2004. A Shrinking Island: Modernism and Austen, Jane. 1966 [1814]. Mansfield Park, edited National Culture. Princeton: Princeton by Tony Tanner. New York: Penguin. University Press. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Gallagher, Catherine. 1994. Nobody’s Story: The Essays, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press. 1670–1820. Oxford: Clarendon Press.. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1986 “The Bildungsroman and Its Hobsbawm, Eric. 1989. The Age of Empire 1875– Significance in the History of Realism (Toward a 1914. New York: Vintage. Historical Typology of the Novel).” In Speech Laurence, Patricia. 2003. Lily Briscoe’s Chinese Eyes: Genres & Other Late Essays, translated by Vern W. Bloomsbury, Modernism, and China. Columbia: McGee. Austin: University of Texas Press. University of South Carolina Press. Cervantes, Miguel de. 2003 [1605, 1615]. Don Lukács, Georg. 1983. The Historical Novel, trans- Quixote, translated by Edith Grossman. lated by Hannah and Stanley Mitchell. Lincoln, New York: Harper Collins. Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press. Cheah, Pheng. 2006. Inhuman Conditions: On Marx, John. 2005. The Modernist Novel and the Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights. Cambridge, Decline of Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. University Press. The Novel and the Nation 455

Marx, Karl.1978. The Marx–Engels Reader, edited Trumpener, Katie. 1997. Bardic Nationalism: The by Robert C. Tucker. New York: Norton, 1978. Romantic Novel and the British Empire. Princeton: Moretti, Franco. 1998. Atlas of the European Novel, Princeton University Press. 1800–1900. London: Verso. Vranjes, Vlasta. 2008. “English Cosmopolitanism Multatuli [Eduard Douwes Dekker]. 1987 [1860]. and/as Nationalism: The Great Exhibition, the Max Havelaar: or The Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Mid‐Victorian Divorce Law Reform, and Trading Company, translated by Roy Edwards. Bronte’s Villette.” Journal of British Studies, 47: New York: Penguin. 324–347. Parrinder, Patrick. 2006. Nation and Novel: The Walkowitz, Rebecca. 2006. Cosmopolitan Style: English Novel from its Origins to the Present Day. Modernism Beyond the Nation. New York: Oxford: Oxford University Press.. Columbia University Press. Scott, Walter. 2008 [1814]. Waverley: or, ’Tis Sixty Watt, Ian. 1957. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Years Since, edited by Claire Lamont. Oxford: Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. Berkeley and Los Oxford University Press. Angeles: University of California Press. Seshagiri, Urmila. 2010. Race and the Modernist Woolf, Virginia. 2005 [1927]. To the Lighthouse. Imagination. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. San Diego: Harcourt, 2005. 29 World English/World Literature Jonathan Arac

World English as a term arose in the late twentieth century to address several interrelated conditions. After the globalization euphoria of the 1990s, this term seemed to keep distance from financial markets while still noting two related circumstances. First, the language with the widest geographical spread of large groups of first‐language and highly capable later‐language speakers is English. Second, excellent literature in English has been produced and continues being produced all over the world. These facts are inseparable from but not identical to the history of the British Empire. In the twenty‐first century, the United Kingdom contains only the fifth‐largest population of highly skilled English users. The United States stands first by far, followed by India, Pakistan, and Nigeria, with the Philippines close behind. British colonialism in North America, South Asia, and Africa produced the possibility of these speakers, to which American imperialism then further contributed. This chapter begins with the movement of British subjects overseas, which brought English into worldwide use, and it concludes with reverse diaspora: writers born elsewhere came to England and, by their work done there, transformed what readers still know as the English novel. Consider one marker of world literary esteem – the Nobel Prize in Literature. The first English writer, and novelist, to win this award was Rudyard Kipling in 1907. He was born in Bombay in 1865, and his greatest achievements are inseparable from his Indian subject matter: innumerable short stories, the Jungle Books, and especially Kim (1901). The most recent English writer to win the prize was Doris Lessing, also a novelist, in 2007. She was born in 1919 in what was then Persia (now Iran), in territory occupied by Britain during the First World War, though her most influential fiction is closely related to almost two decades she spent growing up in colonial East Africa. This

A Companion to the English Novel, First Edition. Edited by Stephen Arata, Madigan Haley, J. Paul Hunter, and Jennifer Wicke. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. World English/World Literature 457 includes many stories, The Grass Is Singing (1950), the five‐volume Children of Violence series (1952–1969), and above all The Golden Notebook (1962). Both Kipling and Lessing figure in the history of the English novel as World English. So do such major recent writers as V. S. Naipaul and Salman Rushdie. Naipaul was born in Trinidad in 1932, descendant of Indians who had immigrated in the later nineteenth century. Rushdie was born in 1947, like Kipling in Bombay. Naipaul is another Nobelist (2001), recognized as a major figure since A House for Mr. Biswas (1961), a novel growing from his father’s life in Trinidad. Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s Children (1981), a formally ingenious, linguistically electric perspective on the history of India in the twentieth century, including its independence in 1947 and the subsequent three decades, won the Booker prize the year it appeared and since then has won the meta‐Bookers for best winner of the first 25 years and first 40 years. Why are these writers “English”? They also take part in a postcolonial literary history. Yet they write in English, each came to university in England (Naipaul to Oxford and Rushdie to Cambridge), and both pursued their careers in England. Perhaps most decisively, each has been knighted by the Queen: Sir Vidia in 1990 and Sir Salman in 2007. One of the most admired younger English novelists, Zadie Smith, was born in England in 1975 of a mother who migrated from Jamaica. Like Rushdie, she now resides in the United States. In thinking about World English and the English novel, it’s hard to keep the United States wholly out of the picture. One of the most important English novelists, Henry James, was born in the United States, has always been included by Americans as part of the history of American literature, and only became a British subject, after more than 40 years of residence, in the last year of his life. It was important evidence for the English acceptance of World English, in the form of American English, when over a few years in the early twentieth century Oxford University awarded honorary degrees to the American novelists William Dean Howells (1904), Mark Twain (1907), and Henry James (1912). From our perspective, the long history of the English novel in relation to World English joins also the issues of World Literature, currently an active topic for debate and exploration among scholars and critics. Among these, some of the most useful are Franco Moretti and David Damrosch. These two approach their subject very differently, but they agree that whatever World Literature is, it is not best understood as a corpus or canon or list of works but rather as a set of relationships. In Distant Reading (2013), Franco Moretti uses Max Weber’s methodology for the sociology of culture. He defines World Literature as a possible object of knowledge, which must be constructed by an act of synthesis subsuming innumerable studies done by scholars of the national literatures. World Literature, then, is general literature, and the national literatures the specific. Moretti elaborates a model derived from “core and periphery” in Immanuel Wallerstein’s comparative historical sociology of the “world system.” Despite Moretti’s own command of several languages, this model tends to privilege English (Arac 2002). In contrast to the spatial model that undergirds Moretti’s arguments, David Damrosch, in What Is World Literature? (2003), works with a model similar to Walter Benjamin’s. Rather than institutional in emphasis, his concerns are more dyadic (whether work to work, or work to reader). The connections seem more arbitrary – that is to say both willed and contingent – than rule‐bound. Above all, Damrosch delineates 458 Jonathan Arac a complex temporality by which World Literature arises from the interaction of what we might call different time zones – not for nothing has he published on Nahuatl poetry and the Epic of Gilgamesh. This model pays crucial attention to translation. From Moretti’s perspective, we can see that so important a work in the history of the English novel as Joseph Andrews (1742) locates itself as peripheral, cued from a more world‐central source. Fielding’s preface defines the novel as a “comic epic in prose, written after the manner of Cervantes,” recalling a world in which the Spanish Empire was the biggest thing going. By a century after Fielding, Britain was peripheral to no one. Despite losing the North American colonies that became the United States, Britain established both its empire in India and also its hegemony in the world economy. Yet even in the years closely following Joseph Andrews, a new genre of prose fiction arose in England and quickly gained circulation around the world: the Gothic originated in Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764). Walpole’s work drew heavily on Shakespeare’s drama, especially Hamlet, and this connection proved important for the joined fortunes of English and World Literature in the next century. German writers took Gothic from England and gave it a new configuration that in turn influenced English‐language writers, and German writers also raised Shakespeare to immense prominence, in contrast to France’s far more limited reception. The conjunction of World English and World Literature takes decisive shape in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. Around 1830 the novel as a genre form gained full institutional coherence in the West. At the same time, Goethe was formulating his conception of Weltliteratur (World Literature) in important dialogue with a British writer, Thomas Carlyle. In 1835 Thomas Babington Macaulay’s “Minute on Indian Education” established the language policy that has made South Asia one of the world’s three most important loci for the use of English. By 1848, the Victorian novel had reached its first peak, and Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, in London, although writing in German, published the Communist Manifesto, which gave World Literature its second major formulation. Let me unpack these telegraphic indicators. The Western notion of World Literature was first articulated by a German, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, in the decade before a first‐language German‐speaker, Victoria, came to the British throne. Goethe’s stabs at characterizing World Literature arose in significant part from his relations with Thomas Carlyle, the Scot who in the 1820s and 1830s formed the major literary bridge between English‐language culture, both in the United Kingdom and the United States, and the literature produced in German. Carlyle met and corresponded with Goethe, and his published contributions included a biography of Friedrich Schiller (1823), his translation Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship: A Novel from the German of Goethe (1824), German Romance (1827), which are translations of Romantic novellas, and many essays. Even before Carlyle, the English–German axis of World Literature had begun. Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister (1796) not only launched the transnational genre of the Bildungsroman, which later so flourished in England, but also contributed greatly to the development of Western literary criticism through its speculative interpretation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. A reissue of Carlyle’s Wilhelm Meister occasioned Henry James’s earliest published piece on European literature (1865), one of his earliest publications overall. Although James never again published on German fiction, his review is strikingly positive, and in terms that resonate with the next 50 years of James’s writing. World English/World Literature 459

Goethe’s early reception of Shakespeare, in dialogue with Johann Gottfried Herder, who formulated the first major German theorization of Shakespeare (1771), helped to launch his career, and his early neo‐Shakespearean history play Goetz von Berlichingen (1771) was translated by Walter Scott as the first extended work over his signature (1799). Scott’s invention of the historical novel redefined possibilities for prose fiction across Europe and contributed to the emergence of many different national literatures, including those of Italy through Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed (I Promessi sposi) (1827) and of the United States, through the “American Scott,” James Fenimore Cooper. The American novelist and critic William Dean Howells, who largely relegated Scott to the Romantic prehistory of the novel, nonetheless gave Scott’s work credit for having “probably … the largest share in establishing fiction as a respectable literary form, and in giving it the primacy which it now enjoys” (1993, 239). Mark Twain had just a few years earlier, in Life on the Mississippi (1883), condemned Scott for undoing the satirical work of Cervantes and causing the Civil War by imbuing Southern culture with chivalric ideals. That’s how important the cultural work done by novels had begun to seem. Goethe formulated his thoughts on World Literature in the same years when the novel in the West took shape as an effective institution. In the famous paragraph about World Literature in the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels do not mention the novel, but it is the genre for which their formulations would hold truest. The power of the press, inseparable from the rise of literature, operates in a complex temporality. In 1831 the French writer Victor Hugo looked back to 1482, from the triumph of print to its earliest days in the West, and wrote into The Hunchback of Notre Dame his prefig- uration of Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong: “This will kill that” (Hugo 1959, 209, my translation). The book, he meant, would supersede the architectural Bible of the cathedral, and it did, but it took a quarter of a millennium to achieve such cocky dominance. Hugo’s writing of such a novel testified to the power of Walter Scott’s work, which had made the Middle Ages sexy. In 1830 Walter Scott was near the end of the fifteen years in which his Waverley novels started to redefine the project of prose fiction. He had already had a career in verse. The Scottish inventor of modern historical romance in prose had been inspired by his early translation of a historical drama written by a German who had learned to write from reading Shakespeare. Scott’s work launched more than a vogue for historical fiction. In the process that Georg Lukács articulates in The Historical Novel (1963), Scott’s work taught others to see the present through eyes shaped by history. The original subtitle for Stendhal’s Red and Black (1830) was “Chronicle of 1830,” treating the past year as if it were no more or less historical than the Middle Ages. Balzac’s writing, too, shows Scott’s impact. In Lost Illusions (1843), Lucien seeks fame through writing a historical novel on “The Archer of Charles the Ninth.” Balzac in addition embraced the fiction of Fenimore Cooper, the first major career in American prose fiction. Institutional density begins here to show the novel as accruing continuity and authority. It goes like this: Balzac, a French novelist with a major career, responds to Cooper, an American novelist with a major career, who was responding to Scott, a British novelist with a major career. Henry James believed the corpus of Balzac’s Human Comedy founded the whole novelistic enterprise. We remember James for his technical refinements and exquisite moral casuistry, but James understood that novel 460 Jonathan Arac writing was above all a combination of representation and imagination, in both of which Balzac excelled. The two powers combine, for James, to produce what novels stand or fall on, the “strange irregular rhythm of life” (1984, 58). This formulation from James seems to me the red thread that F. R. Leavis (1948) pursued through the works of Eliot, Conrad, and Lawrence, and which could be woven further into Lessing, Naipaul, Rushdie, and of course others. The British encounter with South Asia operated in two directions, for the purposes of this chapter. It laid the basis for many millions of English speakers, and it also helped to make possible the crucial conceptions both of national literature and of World Literature, as Aamir Mufti has argued in pathbreaking ongoing work (2010). Britain did not directly rule India until after the so‐called “Mutiny” of 1857. Before then the East India Company conducted British colonial activities, and its highly paid officials often performed important cultural work. Sir William Jones, who was already a linguistic polymath when he came to India, discovered the fascination of Sanskrit, and in 1786 offered a speculative analysis that enabled the idea of “Indo‐European” languages and the philology that for the next 150 years flourished by studying them:

The Sanscrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists; there is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothic and the Celtic, though blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanscrit; and the old Persian might be added to the same family. (Jones 1993, 34)

Fifty years later, through a decision made by Thomas Babington Macaulay, the “Anglicists” triumphed in policy over the “Orientalists,” who had been set into motion by Jones’s work. British Orientalist colonial initiatives crucially furthered the development of vernacular writing in the languages that have come to be known as Hindi and Urdu, both derived from Hindustani, the North‐Indian lingua franca. Macaulay addressed how best to expend finances allocated to the improvement of education in India. Macaulay’s argument, and its effect, has widely been called infamous, yet it contributed massively to creating the constituency that led the struggle for Indian independence and became political leaders in the new nations of India and Pakistan. He put the matter polemically, because he was making a case: “The whole question seems to me to be – which language is the best worth knowing?” He continued:

I have no knowledge of either Sanscrit or Arabic. But I have done what I could to form a correct estimate of their value. I have read translations of the most celebrated Arabic and Sanscrit works. I have conversed, both here and at home, with men distinguished by their proficiency in the Eastern tongues. I am quite ready to take the Oriental learning at the valuation of the Orientalists themselves. I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia. The intrinsic superiority of the Western literature is indeed World English/World Literature 461

fully admitted by those members of the committee who support the oriental plan of education. (Macaulay 1972, 241)

The larger context of Macaulay’s argument, however, shows it not just ethnocentric or racist. He was no English‐onlyist. During the years he worked in India, Macaulay read widely in French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese, as well as rereading the Greek and Roman classics he had studied at Cambridge. He considered English in India as analogous to Latin and Greek in the Renaissance: only the opportunity to study these languages, rather than Old and Middle English, allowed English culture to advance. In any case, Macaulay’s minute happened and it worked. Gauri Viswanathan (1989) and Priya Joshi (2002) have demonstrated the importance both of English colonial school- ing and of Indians’ leisure reading in creating the culture that produced great writing in English by Indians. The imposition of English as the path for advanced education among Indians for over a century until independence, continuing to the present time, was an “enabling violation” (Spivak 1999, 95). Rushdie has even asserted, controver- sially, that “Indo‐Anglian” writing (such as his own) is “stronger and more important” than what has been produced since independence by writers in Indian vernacular languages (1997, viii). In the year before Macaulay’s minute, events laid the ground for V. S. Naipaul’s not only knowing English well but also being born in Trinidad. In 1834 the British abolished slavery in their colonial possessions, the result of long political struggle in which Macaulay played a role (and his father a major one). The continuing desire of British colonial owners, especially of sugar plantations, for cheap and unfree labor, however, soon led to the “coolie” system, in which indentured laborers from Asian colonies replaced enslaved Africans. The indenture system, in turn, and its global diaspora (not only in the Caribbean), has inspired the great ongoing series by the Bengali‐born, English‐educated, American resident Amitav Ghosh, begun with the astonishing language performance of Sea of Poppies (2008) and continuing in River of Smoke (2011). This confluence of events energizes the analysis of Marx and Engels in their 1848 Communist Manifesto, whose most famous phrase in English, “All that is solid melts into air,” comes from Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1609) to translate a term that in German had very different resonances – with allusion to the steam engine, verdampft means evaporates. The key passage begins with “world market” and ends with “world literature.” In between, its abstract references could be filled in with particulars, such as the shift in British textile production from domestic wool to cotton imported from the hot climates of the world, including the American South, and the further shift in British consumer habits that brought to India the cultivation of tea, formerly restricted to China, and that mixed tea with sugar grown in the West Indies. Britain even succeeded in exporting printed cottons to India, the source from which many of the designs were taken.

The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country … All old‐established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries … that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw materials drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at 462 Jonathan Arac

home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the productions of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self‐sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property … and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature. (Marx and Engels 1959b, 11)

So much of the business of this passage is condensed in the single word translated “intercourse”: Verkehr. The related verb, verkehren. means to turn over, with the usual off‐key sense carried by the prefix ver–, so to put it colloquially, to screw up. Die verkeh- rte Welt means the world turned upside down, which in the metahistory of Marx and Engels is just what the bourgeoisie does through its Verkehr. Starting the story of globalization and World Literature with the Communist Manifesto is so familiar that we rarely ask: why is now the global age, not then, back in 1848? The answer is because globalization was then emergent but now dominant. World English is now a banal fact but was then a vision. Even after the disasters of twentieth‐century state Marxism, the Manifesto retains intellectual power. It is both analytic and prophetic; it reads “the seeds of time” (a phrase Fredric Jameson takes from Macbeth [1606]), yet it marches with its age in the power it gives to literature. The Manifesto appeared just as the new conception of literature had come to dominance. World Literature for Goethe arose from new opportunities for communication offered by the newly important print medium of the review journal. Goethe explores his intuitions concerning World Literature in a register of language surprisingly consonant with that of the Manifesto. In a letter to Carlyle, Goethe wrote:

Understanding and study of the German language bring a man to the market where the nations all offer their wares; he acts as an interpreter and grows richer himself … It is the business of every translator, then, to be an active agent in this universal intellectual commerce, and to help the exchange of these goods. Whatever one may say about the inadequacy of translation, it remains one of the most important and praiseworthy activities in the general traffic among nations. (1957, 533)

Goethe could hardly have imagined our world, in which English so predominates that, paradoxically, works are translated from English at a much higher rate than into English. Part of what makes World English an uncomfortable idea is its implication that if something is not (already) in English, then it’s not really in the world at all. The “print capitalism” of Goethe’s age that made nationalism possible also produced transnationalism. Thomas Carlyle’s Heroes and Hero‐Worship (1841) displays both the splendors of literature in “The Hero as Poet” and its miseries in “The Hero as Man of Letters.” His poetic heroes are Shakespeare and Dante, and he concludes by claiming that Dante already unified the Italian nation, which as of 1841 still had not occurred politically:

Yes, truly, it is a great thing for a Nation that it get an articulate voice; that it produce a man who will speak‐forth melodiously what the heart of it means! Italy, for example, poor Italy lies dismembered, scattered asunder, not appearing in any protocol or treaty as World English/World Literature 463

a unity at all; yet the noble Italy is actually one: Italy produced its Dante; Italy can speak! (Carlyle 1901, 131)

Shakespeare, for Carlyle, provides the force that can hold together the wide world of different English‐speaking peoples. What we now see as the work the global novel does, Carlyle attributed to Shakespeare:

[Shakespeare] is the grandest thing we have yet done. For our honour among foreign nations, as an ornament to our English Household, what item is there that we would not surrender rather than him? Consider now, if they asked us, Will you give‐up your Indian Empire or your Shakspeare, you English? … Official persons would answer doubtless in official language; but we, for our part too, should not we be forced to answer: Indian Empire, or no Indian Empire; we cannot do without Shakspeare! Indian Empire will go, at any rate, some day; but this Shakspeare does not go, he lasts forever with us! … [B]efore long, this Island of ours, will hold but a small fraction of the English: in America, in New Holland, east and west to the very Antipodes, there will be a Saxondom covering great spaces of the Globe. And now, what is it that can keep all these together into virtually one Nation, so that they do not fall‐out and fight, but live at peace, in brotherlike intercourse, helping one another? … Acts of Parliament, administrative prime‐ministers cannot. America is parted from us, so far as Parliament could part it. Call it not fantastic, for there is much reality in it: Here, I say, is an English King, whom no time or chance, Parliament or combination of Parliaments, can dethrone! This King Shakspeare, does not he shine, in crowned sovereignty, over us all, as the noblest, gen- tlest, yet strongest of rallying‐signs; indestructible; really more valuable in that point of view than any other means or appliance whatsoever? We can fancy him as radiant aloft over all the Nations of Englishmen, a thousand years hence. (1901, 129–130)

In Carlyle, the figure of Shakespeare incarnates the value of the institution of literature, developed in Romantic criticism and theory and about to enter educated discourse for the next century and more. During that period, in which literature came to replace poetry as the key term of cultural value, the novel occupied an ever‐larger place within what literature embraced (Arac 2010, 2014). In 1948 appeared The Great Tradition by F. R. Leavis of Cambridge University, a century after Carlyle, the year after Indian independence, Rushdie’s crucial hinge of Midnight’s Children. The Great Tradition is the oldest academic study of the English novel at large that is still worth reading in itself, not just as a historical relic. The book’s shortcomings have been widely criticized, especially its refusal to treat Dickens as a major novelist, which Leavis himself corrected a generation later. Yet Leavis pioneered what is still one of the most important techniques for critical writing about novels – detailed analytic attention to the language of selected passages. The major works of novel criticism available in English at the time he wrote do nothing like this: E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel (1927), D. H. Lawrence’s many essays, Percy Lubbock’s The Craft of Fiction (1920), Edwin Muir’s The Structure of the Novel (1928), Woolf’s many essays all reward reading, but they don’t do what Leavis did and what we teach our students to do, and of course neither does Georg Lukács in The Theory of the Novel (1916). In Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, first published in 1946 in German, Erich Auerbach brought a powerful version of philological 464 Jonathan Arac exegesis to criticism, including influential chapters on the novel, but his work was not available for Leavis. The general story about Leavis is that he was a little‐Englander, nationalist, committed to the soil of traditional ways of agricultural life. Yet his canon of the major English novelists – limited as it was – comprised Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and D. H. Lawrence – that is to say, two women, an American, a Pole, and an expatriate. Nor does Leavis try to cover this over. In his introduction he directly addresses the foreign origins of James and Conrad – their importance comes because they chose to join the English tradition of moral seriousness in fiction. World English means, among other things, the attraction that English and its cultural values hold for great minds coming from afar. World English also means the English taking what seems most powerful and generative in other languages, as they become available in English through translation. We have already noted this in relation to German. Starting in the 1890s and continuing into the 1930s, Constance Garnett, through her massive series of translations from the Russian, helped shape the course of the English novel. Thanks to Garnett’s translations, Woolf and Lawrence, for example, recognized new possibilities for their own writing. In 1949, the year after Leavis’s book appeared, Doris Lessing first came to England. Lessing gave a larger world to the “two women” plot so important to Austen, Eliot, and Lawrence. The Golden Notebook (1962) helped inspire and fuel the Women’s Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. What has that to do with World English and World Literature? Lessing places her novel amidst a world in change. Civil rights and women’s rights both advanced, however unevenly. Like Lessing herself, who was raised in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and briefly lived in South Africa before coming to England, her central character, the writer Anna Wulf, has come to England from Africa. There she took part in illegal dissident anticolonial activism, frustrated by the difficulties of relationships between the whites and the blacks: the two races worked together, yet real social equality seemed impossible, even in the movement for liberation. Anna, also like Lessing, became a Communist, only to grow disenchanted with both the large shape of the world movement – cued by Khrushchev’s revelations of Stalin’s crimes at the 1956 party congress – and also the local organization. She turns from the hope of revolution to the “boulder‐pushing” of social work and reform activism, evoking the Western democratic welfare state, which in the 1950s and 1960s seemed a successful alternative to radical change. In this respect, the novel differs from the British New Left around 1960, with which Lessing was closely and critically involved. Her autobiography Walking in the Shade (1998) includes fascinating correspondence with her friend and fellow ex‐ Communist the great historian Edward P. Thompson. While Lessing was writing The Golden Notebook, Thompson was writing his masterpiece The Making of the English Working Class (1963). Even though his father had lived in India and was a major translator of Rabindranath Tagore from Bengali into English, E. P. Thompson is often thought of as insularly English, a fault generally attributed to the “British cultural Marxism” of this period. However, the front‐matter of his work makes clear that his account of England in the nineteenth century hopes to affect the history of the world in the twentieth century. Capitalists and Communists alike, the developed world was telling the newly independent nations of Asia and Africa a story about top‐down World English/World Literature 465

“modernization” and “industrialization.” Against this discourse, Thompson hoped that showing the paths not taken in British history would allow those making a new world to make it differently, not follow the Victorian model in its Cold War form. In India, Thompson’s work sparked debates crucial to forming the Subaltern Studies group of historians, massively influential in setting the terms for what has become postcolonial studies. Lessing too placed her work in a world reaching beyond England and its Empire. Her valuable 1971 introduction to a reissue of The Golden Notebook spells out what had not yet entered the conversation about her work. She maps her work by reference to major French and Russian novels of the nineteenth century that show ideas in action – what Irving Howe, the founding editor of Dissent magazine, had studied in his still‐ valuable Politics and the Novel (1957). (As an independent leftist, she read and wrote for the American journal of arts and politics Partisan Review.) She also locates her novel as part of a European tradition of novels about artists coming to maturity (what Germans call the Künstlerroman but in English is usually assimilated to the Bildungsroman). In its over‐plot, The Golden Notebook tells how a novelist finds her way to writing the book we are reading, just as does Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (1913–1927). Her work also bears comparison to Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus (1945) for coordinating the story of the artist with that of the political world. Anna Wulf cites Mann as being the last novelist with the “philosophical” concern that makes a novel truly worthwhile. Otherwise, “we read novels for information about areas of life we don’t know” (Lessing 1994, 57). Great novels change their contour over time, as readers’ landscapes alter. Seen from the twenty‐first century, The Golden Notebook still lays bare the pains frustrations of love and sex between men and women in the 1950s, although Lessing insisted she was no feminist. Because the novel depicts a woman’s mental breakdown followed by healing reintegration, it came to be seen as postmodern for its resonance with the anti- psychiatry movement of R. D. Laing (The Divided Self [1960]). The novel deliberately embraces much important historical detail of its time, an aspect increasingly important as its era recedes and much that went without saying now needs to be specified. The novel’s action starts in 1957, and it shows a world changing so rapidly and so massively that it’s hard to comprehend. This bafflement leads to the formal structure of The Golden Notebook. The novel is framed by “Free Women,” which focuses on Anna Wulf, a blocked writer. Anna was born Anna Freeman – gender‐twisting the title. Anna has written a successful first novel, based on her youthful experience in Africa. So had Lessing, but Lessing kept writing, while Anna is blocked. Seeking to stabilize her mind and comprehend the world, Anna keeps notebooks. The Black notebook, divided into “source” and “money,” looks to her African experience and the subsequent writing possibilities that derive from it. The Red notebook addresses her experience with Communism. The combination of red and black revises Stendhal’s Red and Black: his colors signaled the alternatives of clerical and military, Lessing’s a twentieth‐ century distinction between the “second” and “third” worlds, as seen in the Cold War. The Yellow notebook contains Anna’s drafts and trials for new works of fiction, and the Blue notebook consists of diary entries. “Free Women” and the four notebooks alternate sequentially through nearly 600 pages, until the Golden Notebook comes just before the end, making possible Anna’s return to writing, as the author of “Free Women.” 466 Jonathan Arac

This elaborate and complex formal structuring makes the novel seem modernist. Lessing emphatically signals her dialogue with important English‐language modernist innovators. In the Yellow notebook Anna’s fictional alter ego Ella develops a character type called “Mrs. Brown” – an allusion to Virginia Woolf’s programmatic manifesto‐essay of 1924, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown.” And in the Blue notebook diary, right in the middle of the novel, Anna decides to record one whole day in its simple and full truth. Embarrassingly, this day’s truth includes the start of her period. She recognizes that this involves “a major problem of literary style, of tact,” and she recalls James Joyce’s intention “to rob words of their power to shock” (1994, 318). Yet the novel’s prose resists the glories of Woolf’s or Joyce’s sentences; it relies on a naturalist register, detailed and rather dull, even though her earlier work had readily followed the lead of Lawrence’s more emotionally vivid prose. This discord between modernist structure and naturalist sentence marks the novel as postmodern. The notebooks contain a great diversity of discourses – not only news clips but also therapy sessions, diary, and much more. It’s like the novel as seen by Mikhail Bakhtin, but, unlike his prized exemplars, there’s no sense of stylistic exuberance – it’s a grey heteroglossia. In the late 1980s V. S. Naipaul and Salman Rushdie each published a major novel about immigration, about coming to England from the outreaches of empire: Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival (1987) and Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988). Despite their shared subject, the books differ immensely: World English in the novel can mean very different things. Naipaul published The Enigma of Arrival some 30 years into his career, and he had long been recognized as a major author. Reviewers originally viewed him as a new kind of local color writer, one of the “calypso novelists” of the 1950s. Already by his fourth novel, A House for Mister Biswas (1961), Naipaul’s mastery of comic eccentricity summoned comparison to Dickens. After that, he played in Joseph Conrad’s league with Guerrillas (1975) – a very different take on Naipaul’s native Trinidad – and A Bend in the River (1979), set in East Africa. His reflective travel writing done for the New York Review of Books brought Naipaul his widest audience. His 1976 series collected as India: A Wounded Civilization captivated readers. This book was spurred by India’s 1975 Declaration of Emergency, which also figures crucially in Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. Naipaul’s work came to divide readers. Metropolitan liberals loved it, but it distressed a new generation of intellectuals from the formerly colonized world. The emergence of “postcolonialism” parallels the resistance to Naipaul’s work. In 1980 Joan Didion noted especially the negative views of Edward W. Said, whose Orientalism (1978) is now considered the start of postcolonial criticism, although it never uses the term. Both Naipaul’s prose and Rushdie’s have been analyzed as linguistically hybrid (Bhatnagar 2011, Chaudhuri 2004). Yet the appearance of Midnight’s Children in 1981 made vivid the contrast between two kinds of writing. One readily wins praise for skill, style, and intelligence, but fits easily within the traditions of English literature; the other kind is far more eclectic and diverse in its connections. Rushdie’s novel was instantly recognized as wonderful and important, but it affiliates outside of English traditions. Struggling to place it, many readers thought it followed the “magic realism” of the Colombian Gabriel García Márquez in One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), while Rushdie himself acknowledged the German Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum World English/World Literature 467

(1959), which like Midnight’s Children connects national political events to the life of a strange youth. Moreover, Rushdie has always admired, and several times written about, the American Thomas Pynchon, whose work shimmers through Rushdie’s. A very different literary practice animates Rushdie’s novel, though both he and Naipaul rejected the current state of Indian politics and leadership. Each in his different way made the India of the 1970s seem a sad, even an atrocious place. Their views of England contrast even more sharply. The Enigma of Arrival is thickly autobiographical, yet distinctly a novel – for instance, the narrator–protagonist makes no reference either to a wife or to a mistress, though Naipaul had both, according to Patrick French’s impressively candid authorized biography (2008). The novel starts with the narrator’s coming to live on an estate in Wiltshire (a locale John Bayley’s 1987 review noted as highly desirable, with the highest property values on the island), after spending nearly two decades in London. This rustic setting seems familiar. Such places resonate in English literature, which he’s been reading since his childhood in a Trinidad village. Yet Wiltshire also feels alien, because he has never lived in such a landscape. The book’s long first movement charts the narrator’s accli- mating. It opens starkly: “For the first four days it rained. I could hardly see where I was.” The book’s “I” opens as a blinded eye. Even when it sees, the eye does not know what it sees: “Then it stopped raining and beyond the lawn and outbuildings in front of my cottage I saw fields.” Later – years later, when the land “had absorbed more of my life than the tropical street where I had grown up” – seeing has become knowing: “I was able to think of the flat wet fields with the ditches as ‘water meadows’ or ‘wet meadows,’ and the low smooth hills in the background beyond the river as ‘downs’.” But on first arriving, even after twenty years in England, “all that I saw … were flat fields and narrow river” (Naipaul 1987, 5). This process of learning what you’re seeing, the proper words to define the conditions of your life, defines acculturation. Naipaul seems to be prepping for knighthood, making sure that he really becomes English. Yet he can’t help bringing also a severe historical understanding to his situation. He recognizes that in this landscape, on this estate, he – a colored ex‐colonial immigrant – embodies the biggest difference between now and then: “I felt that my presence in that old valley was part of something like an upheaval, a change in the course of the history of the country” (15). The house now has passed its peak, but at its prime, “in that perfection, occurring at a time of empire, there would have been no place for me” (52). Yet reflecting on his relationship with his landlord, whom he meets only twice in the narrative’s many years, he realizes also that “This empire … linked us.” Empire discriminates, but it also connects: “This empire explained my birth in the New World, the language I used, the vocation and ambition I had; this empire in the end explained my presence in the valley” (191). Naipaul’s critical analysis of empire, race, and immigration matches that of advanced critical thinking, but his performance in prose seems to belie the difference he proclaims. He fits right in. He writes classic contemporary English, which makes him English literature’s “most important import since Joseph Conrad and Henry James” and joins him with T. S. Eliot as “another expatriate radical of the right” (Ricks 1987). Rushdie enacts the strangeness of immigration to England far differently. The Satanic Verses begins: 468 Jonathan Arac

“To be born again,” sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, “first you have to die. Hi ji! Ho ji! To land upon the bosomy earth, first one needs to fly. Tat‐taa! Taka‐ thun!” … Just before dawn one winter’s morning, New Year’s Day or thereabouts, two real, full‐grown, living men fell from a great height, twenty‐nine thousand and two feet, towards the English Channel, without benefit of parachutes or wings, out of a clear sky. (Rushdie 1988, 3)

What novel has ever before had to start by affirming that its main characters are “real, full‐grown, living men”? Rushdie must because the story sounds fantastic – how can it be real? That the two tumbling Indians are victims of terrorists who have blown up in midair their hijacked plane, that’s real enough, but to survive a plummet from the exact height of Mount Everest, singing rhymes all the way? Storytelling, fantasy, allegory, all these and more make up Rushdie’s resources to render a world in which het- eroglot mixtures fall from the corners of the earth to inhabit London, and produce a mess that is also “newness” (272). Gibreel Farishta begins to experience visions as soon as he lands, as if he were the archangel Gibreel. Before being taken from his life into this new one, he had been a star in Bombay, specializing in a Bollywood genre called “theologicals,” in which he played Hindu deities, despite himself being Muslim. His fellow fallen new‐born Saladin Chamcha is a long‐expatriated Indian who has made a good living in England as an actor, doing voice‐overs. Like Naipaul, he’s got the sounds of English down perfectly. In his new life, however, the natives suspect him of being an illegal immigrant. He assumes a new shape to match his status, growing horns and hooves, like a satyr or devil. The racist slur for a South Asian, “paki,” morphs into “pachy,” leading to a vision of elephants taking over the neighborhood streets (Rushdie 1988, 299). Immigrant London, in this novel, is “A City Visible but Unseen” (the longest and central of the novel’s nine sections). In the sanatorium for mutant aliens, Saladin is awakened at night by a potential comrade, “an entirely human body, but its head was that of a ferocious tiger, with three rows of teeth” (167). This manticore describes the other inmates: “There’s a woman over that way … who is now mostly water‐buffalo. There are businessmen from Nigeria who have grown sturdy tails. There is a group of holidaymakers from Senegal who were doing no more than changing planes when they were turned into slippery snakes” (168). The manticore also tells Saladin how this takes place: “‘They describe us,’ the other whispered solemnly. ‘That’s all. They have the power of description, and we succumb to the pictures they construct.’” It’s just like what Wittgenstein said of language games. This conceit of “aliens” as beings with monstrous physical oddities inspired the recent US TV series Ugly Americans (Comedy Central, 2010–2012). Even more fantastic and terrible than the events it recounts, The Satanic Verses transcended World English and World Literature to become an infamous touchstone in the political life of nations. Within the novel, some of Gibreel’s visions included versions of the life of the Prophet Mohammed; various groups within the United Kingdom and abroad took offense at this free, fictional reimagining of materials that are sacred within Islam. On February 14, 1989, the Ayatollah Khomeini, Supreme Leader of Iran, issued a judicial order, a fatwa, calling for Rushdie’s assassination and offering a large reward to whoever performed this killing. As the philosopher Akeel Bilgrami World English/World Literature 469 put it in one of the first and best essays in response to this situation, “a world religion has been attacked by a writer who was born into the religion and wishes to tell the world about its failure to cope with the world” (1989, 172). Rushdie himself immediately entered police protection and for years had to live underground, never appearing in public. He has so far survived, but the book’s Japanese translator was killed, its Italian translator seriously injured, and its Norwegian publisher survived assassination. The fatwa was never rescinded (and technically never can be, since its author has died). It took years of political maneuver to establish one by one the commitment of various national polities to protect Rushdie and others involved and to win Iran’s tacit consent to letting the death sentence lie inactive. This most global of affairs waxed and then waned, based on national actions. Rushdie’s 600‐page memoir Joseph Anton (2012) details his life in hiding and his efforts to assert his right to live and write freely. The title comes from the alias he used, confected from the names of two writers he greatly admires, the Russian Anton Chekhov (first known in English through translations by Constance Garnett) and the Polish‐Briton Joseph Conrad, an early hero of World English. Some readers may prefer the powerful, concise account of Rushdie’s persecution and resistance by Christopher Hitchens (2010), who devoted a chapter of his memoir to Rushdie and who indefatigably supported free speech and the right to speak freely concerning religion. The world response to Rushdie’s book marked the emergence of a new Islamic public sphere, based on principles different from those of the public sphere that emerged in the eighteenth‐century West (Mufti 1994). That first Western public sphere arose with the novel and the burgeoning of periodicals of opinion, which Goethe later found so important for his conception of World Literature. Aamir Mufti observed in 1994 that the hostile “public responses by Muslims to the publication of this book, written by a writer of Indian origin naturalized and living in Britain, have been registered not only in Britain, India, and Pakistan, but in places as diverse and as remote from the ‘scene’ of the infraction as South Africa, Soviet Central Asia, and Indonesia” (324). This public response gravely distressed many Western writers, scholars, and critics, because it did not adhere to the principles of analytic, detailed reading so integral to our understanding of literature. Mufti argues that understanding this new postcolonial space of exchange requires recognizing that the reception of works may take place through forms of “mass ‘consumption’ other than ‘reading’ in the narrower sense of that word” (309). In other words, Islamic offense did not require reading but could arise from “extracts published in the print media, in English and in translation, commentary in print, on the air- waves, and from the pulpit, fantasticated representation in the popular cinema, rumors and hearsay” (309). Mufti’s analysis of the controversy takes its cue from Rushdie’s novel, which itself fictionally shows the power of these and other new forms of communication. The novel, the controversy, and Mufti’s analysis preceded the Internet. The Rushdie Affair previewed the advent of new modes of cultural circulation that twenty‐first‐ century readers, writers, and scholars must learn to negotiate. It also demonstrated that the novel continues as a powerful form in the world, even as it slips away from the institution of literature that for the past two centuries supported and took strength from it. 470 Jonathan Arac

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Abbott, Edwin, 368 aestheticism, 36, 52–3, 260, 266, 281 Flatland, 368 affect and emotion, 3–4, 11, 28, 92, 94–5, 117, Achebe, Chinua, 334, 431 177, 225–37, 246, 262, 342, 349, 351–2, Things Fall Apart, 334 377–8, 392–3, 420, 437–8 Ackroyd, Peter, 345–6 affective fallacy, 234 The Great Fire of London, 345–6 and benevolist theories of sentiment, 227 Hawksmoor, 345–6 and breakdown of critical distance, 226–7 Ada, the Betrayed (Prest and Rymer), 134 and comedy, 230 Adam Bede (Eliot), 36, 38–40, 42, 100, 164, contemporary theorizing of, 226–7 252, 394 devaluation in twentieth century, 234–5 Addams, Jane, 161 disgust and fear, 231–2 Addison, Joseph, 243, 356 eroticism, 233–5 Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi, 436, 438 and film, 170–171 Half of a Yellow Sun, 436, 438 and melodrama, 229–30 Adorno, Theodor, 135–7, 142 and nationality, 392–3 “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass “ordinary” affects, 420 Deception”, 135–7 in postmodern fiction, 235–7 Adventures of Abdallah, The (Bignon), 324 as vehicle of moral instruction, 227–8 Adventures of a Bank‐Note, The, 145–6, 151 and sensation fiction, 45–6, 230–231 Adventures of David Simple, The (Fielding), 10–11, and the sublime, 227–8 14–16 vicarious experience, 3–4, 11, 92, Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, The (Chabon), 170 227–8, 234 Adventures of Mr. Harley (Austen), 113 afternoon: a story (Joyce), 146 Adventures of a Pin, The, 150–151 Ahmed, Aijaz, 385 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The (Doyle), 433 Akomfrah, John, 74 Adventures of a Silver Penny, The, 155–6 Albert Angelo (Johnson), 198–9 Adventures of a Watch! The, 151–2 Algerine Captive, The (Tyler), 310 Adventures of the Rambler’s Magazine, The, 146 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Carroll), Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The (Twain), 164 163, 170, 193

Ali, Monica, 237, 341, 342, 357–8, 430–431 Araeen, Rashid, 74 Brick Lane, 357–8, 430–431 Aragon, Louis, 418 allegory, 11, 73–4, 95, 106, 377, 379, 383 Arata, Stephen, 330, 362, 396, 410 Allen, Grant, 233 Aravamudan, Srinivas, 429 An Army Doctor’s Romance, 233 Ardis, Ann, 233 The Woman Who Did, 233 Aristotle, 162, 217, 241, 243, 244, 246, 263, Allingham, Margery, 346 267, 268, 273 Alliston, April, 217 Armstrong, Nancy, 162, 219, 277, 429, 437, 445 All that Fall (Beckett), 385 Army Doctor’s Romance, An (Allen), 233 Almodóvar, Pedro, 169 Arnold, Matthew, 34, 73, 257, 366, 382, 390 Alton Locke (Kingsley), 35 “Dover Beach”, 73 Alwyn (Holcroft), 204 On the Study of Celtic Literature, 382 amatory fiction, 92, 96 Arrighi, Giovanni, 81 Ambassadors, The (James), 167–8, 185, 221, 222, Art of Fiction, The (Besant), 253 259 “Art of Fiction, The” (James), 253–4, 264–5, 394 Amelia (Fielding), 97, 100, 325 Arthur Mervyn (Brown), 309–10 America and American literature, 24, 71–2, Ashford, Daisy, 112 80–83, 163–4, 170–171, 219, 221, 230, The Young Visiters, 112 233, 235–6, 264–9, 272–4, 281, 283, Aslam, Nadeem, 437 295–6, 299, 306–11, 317, 331, 333, Maps for Lost Lovers, 437 456–9, 461, 463, 467 Aspects of the Novel (Forster), 256, 259–60, 262, American Adam, The (Lewis), 306 309, 463 American Novel and Its Tradition, The (Chase), Atonement (McEwan), 237, 272, 278–81, 303 306–7 Atrocity Exhibition, The (Ballard), 236 Amis, Kingsley, 370 At Swim‐Two‐Birds (O’Brien), 202, 236, 385 Lucky Jim, 370 Auden, W. H., 421 Amis, Martin, 156, 438 “Musée des Beaux Arts”, 421 Time’s Arrow, 156 Auerbach, Erich, 38, 268, 275, 447, 450, 453, Amours de Voyage (Clough), 397 463–4 Anand, Mulk Raj, 50, 56, 64–6 Mimesis, 38, 268, 275, 447, 463–4 Untouchable, 50, 56, 64–6 “Auguries of Innocence” (Blake), 69 Anatomy of Criticism (Frye), 105, 268, 273 Austen, Jane, 18, 30, 104–14, 146, 186–9, 212, Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan (Dutt), 225, 246, 251, 262, 263, 267, 269, 397 272–6, 278–82, 293–4, 306–9, 311, Anderson, Amanda, 42, 391, 444–5, 447 314–20, 331, 360, 382, 412, 428–30, Anderson, Benedict, 366–7, 427–8, 390, 427, 432, 435, 437–8, 450, 464 429, 432, 449, 450, 452 The Adventures of Mr. Harley, 113 Imagined Communities, 366, 390, 427 The Beautiful Cassandra, 113 Anderson, Perry, 390 Emma, 247, 293, 308, 311, 314–16, 318 Anna Karenina (Tolstoy), 170, 365–6, 396 Henry and Eliza, 113 Annals of the Parish (Galt), 380 The History of England, 110, 114 Anna St. Ives (Holcroft), 23–4 juvenilia, 104–5, 107–14 Anti‐Pamela (Haywood), 3, 11–12, 15, 16 Lesley Castle, 112 Antiquary, The (Scott), 448 Mansfield Park, 293, 314, 315, 450 Antoinette, Marie, 22 Northanger Abbey, 104, 110, 111, 117, 246, Antonioni, Michelangelo, 169 278, 293, 314, 412 Blow‐Up, 169 Persuasion, 109, 293, 314, 316, 318–19, 328 Apology for the Life of Mr. Colley Cibber, An Pride and Prejudice, 111, 293, 314–16, 318, (Cibber), 9, 13 428 Appadurai, Arjun, 391 Sense and Sensibility, 30, 186–91, 293, 314, Modernity at Large, 391 318, 430 Appropriate Form, The (Hardy), 269 Authorship see also copyright; readers and reading Apter, Emily, 271, 394, 395 and earning capacity, 292–303, 400–401 Apuleius, 150–153 implied author, 179–80, 184–7, 189–90, The Golden Ass, 150–153 201, 268 Index 473

as labor, 292, 296, 298–302 Beasley, Jerry C., 8 and patronage, 292–3, 299, 302–4 Beattie, James, 244–5, 325 as profession, 134–6, 291–304 Beautiful Cassandra, The (Austen), 113 Autobiography (Trollope), 253, 400–401, 417 Bechdel, Alison, 145, 170 autobiography and memoir, 13–14, 23, 135, 145, Fun Home, 145 237, 253, 295, 331, 400–401, 411, 417, Beckett, Samuel, 202, 207, 385, 438 464, 469 All that Fall, 385 autobiography and memoir (fictional), 13–14, 25, Molloy, 202 31, 95–6, 129, 170, 180, 182, 231, 261, Beetle, The (Marsh), 234 352–3, 441–2, 467 Behn, Aphra, 92, 96, 148 autoethnography, 42, 361, 377, 383, 395 Oroonoko, 148 Ayrshire Legatees, The (Galt), 380 Bell, Gabrielle, 170–172 Cecil and Jordan in New York, 171 babas del diablo, Las (Cortazar), 169 The Voyeurs, 170–172 Bacon, Francis, 147 When I’m Old, 171 The New Organon, 147 Belsey, Catherine, 29 Bage, Robert, 24–5 Bend in the River, A (Naipaul), 431, 466 Hermsprong, or; Man as He is Not, 24–5 Benjamin, Walter, 165, 167, 399, 411, 457 Bagehot, Walter, 250, 341, 351, 355 “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Bainbridge, Beryl, 421 Reproduction”, 165 Injury Time, 421 Bennett, Arnold, 258, 262–3, 265, 302, 421 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 93–5, 259, 277, 361, 362, Bennett, Louise, 74 364–6, 369, 435, 443–4, 450, 453, Bentham, Jeremy, 389, 391 454, 466 Bentley, Richard, 295–6, 299, 400 Balibar, Etienne, 391 Bentley’s Miscellany, 299 We, the People of Europe?, 391 Berlant, Lauren, 226, 227 Ballard, J. G., 236 Berlioz, Hector, 351 The Atrocity Exhibition, 236 Bernard, Claude, 147 Banim, John, 380 Besant, Walter, 253 Tales of the O’Hara Family, 380 The Art of Fiction, 253 Banim, Michael, 380 Betjeman, John, 303 Barbauld, Anna Laetitia, 195, 326 Betrothed, The (Manzoni), 459 The British Novelists, 326 Between the Acts (Woolf), 279, 421 “On the Origin and Progress of Novel Bhabha, Homi, 76, 390 Writing”, 195 Nation and Narration, 390 Barchester Towers (Trollope), 35, 37, 41, 45–7, Bignon, Jean Paul, 324 365, 394 The Adventures of Abdallah, 324 Barkawi, Tarak, 392 Bildungsroman, 53–6, 236, 366, 383, 384, 397, Barker, Pat, 79, 236–7 442, 443, 449, 458, 465 Regeneration Trilogy, 79, 236–7 Billy Liar (Schlesinger), 370 Barnes, Julian, 237 Birdsong (Faulks), 236 Barrymore, Lionel, 164 Birmingham, Kevin, 56 Barthes, Roland, 210–211, 273–7, 282, 285, “Birthday of the Infanta, The” (Wilde), 131 411, 412 Black Beauty (Sewell), 231 S/Z, 210–211 Black Jacobins, The (James), 78 Bartholomew, Freddie, 164 Blackstone, William, 27 Basil (Collins), 35, 44 Black, William, 380 Baudrillard, Jean, 283 MacLeod of Dare, 380 Bauman, Zygmunt, 83 The Princess of Thule, 380 Bayley, John, 269, 467 Blackwood, John, 394 The Characters of Love, 269 Blackwood’s, 45, 377, 390 Beach, Joseph Warren, 258 Blair, Hugh, 244 The Method of Henry James, 258 Blair, Tony, 71–2 Beach, Sylvia, 57 Blake, William, 69, 117, 345 Beardsley, Monroe, 234 “Auguries of Innocence”, 69 474 Index

Blanchot, Maurice, 409 Brouillette, Sarah, 433, 434 Blanes, Ruy, 211 Brown and Blue Books (Wittgenstein), 215–16 Bleak House (Dickens), 35, 37, 41–5, 163, 177, Brown, Bill, 411 204, 250, 261, 262, 265, 327, 344, Brown, Charles Brockden, 307–11, 317, 319 350–351, 382, 395, 436–7 Arthur Mervyn, 309–10 Blow‐Up (Antonioni), 169 Browne, Hablot Knight, 163 Bodenheimer, Rosemarie, 351, 353 Brown, George Douglas, 380 Bolter, Jay David, 160 The House with Green Shutters, 380 Book of Dave, The (Self), 82–3 Brown, Homer, 106–7 Bookshop, The (Fitzgerald), 370 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 396–7 Boon (Wells), 259 Browning, Robert, 396–7 Booth, Wayne C., 179, 257, 268–9, 278–9 Brownstein, Rachel, 111 The Company We Keep, 278–9 Brown, William Hill, 310 The Rhetoric of Fiction, 257, 268–9 The Power of Sympathy, 310 Boswell, James, 98, 345, 351 Buchanan, Robert, 396 Bourdieu, Pierre, 432 “The Fleshly School of Poetry”, 396 Bowen, Elizabeth, 302–3 Buchan, John, 234 Bowlby, Rachel, 419–20 Greenmantle, 234 Boyle, Robert, 150 Buddha of Suburbia, The (Kureishi), 74, 357 Brackenridge, Hugh Henry, 310 Bulwer‐Lytton, Edward, 217, 247, 248, Modern Chivalry, 310 299, 330 Bradbury, Malcolm, 273 “On Art in Fiction”, 247 “Towards a Poetics of Fiction: An Approach Kenelm Chillingly, 330 through Structure”, 273 Pelham, 217 Braddon, Mary Elizabeth, 122–5, 230, 396, 413 Bunyan, John, 57 The Doctor’s Wife, 396 Burgess, Anthony, 82, 157 “Garibaldi”, 396 A Clockwork Orange, 82, 157 Lady Audley’s Secret, 122–5, 128, 396 Burke, Edmund, 22, 27, 227–8, 351 Brantlinger, Patrick, 396 A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origins of our Ideas Brautigan, Richard, 235 of the Sublime and Beautiful, 227–8 Brennan, Timothy, 391–2, 435 Reflections on the Revolution in France, 22 Brewster, William, 162 Burke, Thomas, 357 Brick Lane (Ali), 357–8, 430–431 Limehouse Nights, 357 Bride of Lammermoor, The (Scott), 449 burlesque, 104–5, 108, 110, 111 British Museum is Falling Down, The (Lodge), 421 Burney, Frances, 100, 113, 216, 245, 341, 351–2, British Novelists, The (Barbauld), 326 356, 429 Britons: Forging the Nation (Colley), 390 Cecilia, 100 Broider, Thomas, 329 Evelina, 100, 216, 245, 351–2 Brontë, Ann, 35, 249 Burn, W. L., 34, 36 The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, 249 Burton, Antoinette, 391 Brontë, Charlotte, 35, 125, 164, 249, 264, 269, Burton, Tim, 170 367, 383 Butler, Marilyn, 22 Jane Eyre, 35, 125, 164, 229, 249, 264, 362–4, Butterfield, Herbert, 106, 108 427, 431 Buzard, James, 42, 361, 395 Shirley, 35, 38, 367 Byatt, A. S., 237 Villette, 35, 37, 41, 44, 329, 383 Byron, Lord (George Gordon), 108–11 Brontë, Emily, 35, 164, 186, 201, 215–16, 264 Hours of Idleness, 110 Wuthering Heights, 164, 186, 201, 215–16, 222, 249, 264–6 Caird, Mona, 233 Brontë, Patrick, 378 Cakes and Ale (Maugham), 256 The Maid of Killarney, 378 Calendar of Modern Letters, 264 Brooke, Rupert, 294 Called Back (Conway), 233 Brooks, Peter, 27, 229, 276 Calle, Sophie, 410 Reading for the Plot, 276 Cambrian Sketch‐Book, The (Davies), 381 Index 475

Cameron, David, 435 Changing Places (Lodge), 272–5 Camus, Albert, 276 characters, 10–13, 19, 23, 54, 58–60, 93, 96, Canning, George, 109–10 178–9, 209–23 Canterbury Tales, The (Chaucer), 342–3 vs.actants or existents, 178–9, 211 Capital (Marx), 411, 451 aligned with novelistic realism, 209–11 Capra, Frank, 230 antithetical critical responses to, 209–11 It’s a Wonderful Life, 230 as clockwork mechanisms, 213, 220–222 Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, as exemplars, 217 Narrative of the (Rowlandson), 429 as ghosts, 213, 222–3 Carbullan Army, The (Hall), 82 “mixed” and “unmixed” characters, 10–12, 91–2 Carey, John, 232 as monsters, 213, 219–20 Carey, Peter, 181 ontological hybridity of, 211–13 Jack Maggs, 181 relation to notions of selfhood, 211–12 Caribbean Artists Movement, 74 relation to textuality and inscription, 213–16 Carleton, William, 380 as simulacra for real people, 89, 209–12 Fardorougha the Miser, 380 as specimens or types, 213, 217–20 Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry, 380 in mass market fiction, 140 Carlyle, Thomas, 78, 138, 181, 294, 365, 427, stock characters, 23 458, 462–3 Character and the Novel (Harvey), 269 Heroes and Hero‐Worship, 462–3 Characters of Love, The (Bayley), 269 Past and Present, 138 Charles Dickens: The World of His Novels (Miller), 266 “Carmilla” (Le Fanu), 121, 122, 127–8 Charles O’Malley (Lever), 380 Carney, Bethan, 229 Charlotte Temple (Rowson), 310 Carr, John Dickson, 346 Chase, Richard, 306–7 Carroll, Lewis, 163, 193 The American Novel and Its Tradition, 306–7 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 163, 170, 193 Chatman, Seymour, 179 Through the Looking‐Glass, 163 Chatterton, Thomas, 109, 114 Carter, Angela, 236 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 341–3 Carter, Elizabeth, 325 The Canterbury Tales, 342–3 Carter, Helena Bonham, 163 Cheah, Pheng, 451 Caruth, Cathy, 226 Chekhov, Anton, 469 Casanova, Pascale, 434 Chesterfield, Earl of, 292–3 Castle of Otranto, The (Walpole), 114, 118, 122, Ch’ien, Evelyn, 157 123, 182, 311–13, 324, 458 Weird English, 157 Castle Rackrent (Edgeworth), 377 Child of the Jago, A (Morrison), 232 Castle Richmond (Trollope), 381 Children of the Ghetto (Zangwill), 357 Catriona (Stevenson), 380 Children of Violence (Lessing), 457 Caudwell, Sarah, 346 Christie, Agatha, 346 Cavell, Stanley, 410 Christmas Carol, A (Dickens), 163, 229–30 In Quest of the Ordinary, 410 Chrysal (Johnstone), 154–6 The Senses of Walden, 410 Cibber, Colley, 9, 13, 14 Caxton, William, 292 An Apology for the Life of Mr. Colley Cibber, 9, 13 Cecil and Jordan in New York (Bell), 171 Clan‐Albin: A National Tale (Johnstone), 378 Cecil, David, 257 Clarissa (Richardson), 3, 6–11, 14–16, 23–4, Early Victorian Novelists, 257 91–2, 98–100, 205, 216, 218–19, 245, Cecilia (Burney), 100 325–7, 354, 355 Céitinn, Seathrún, 377, 378 Clarke, James Stanier, 107–8 Foras Feasa ar Éirinn, 377 Clarke, Marcus, 397 censorship, 45, 56–7, 161 For the Term of His Natural Life, 397 Chabon, Michael, 170 Cleland, John, 13–14, 149 The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, 170 Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, 13–16, 149 Chadwick, Edwin, 34 Clery, Emma, 22 Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, 133 Clockwork Orange, A (Burgess), 82, 157 Changing My Mind (Smith), 285–6 Cloud Atlas (Mitchell), 145 476 Index

Clough, Arthur Hugh, 251, 396–7 Cooper, James Fenimore, 307, 308, 327, 328, 459 Amours de Voyage, 397 The Last of the Mohicans, 328 Clowes, Daniel, 145 The Pathfinder, 327 Ghost World, 145 Cooper, Thomas, 397 Coburn, Alvin, 167 Cooper, William, 370 Coetzee, J. M., 145, 431 Scenes from Provincial Life, 370 Diary of a Bad Year, 145 Coover, Robert, 235 Elizabeth Costello, 145 Copeland, Edward, 112 Foe, 431 copyright, 291–3, 295–6, 299, 303, 326 Cohen, Margaret, 393 Coquette, The (Webster), 310 The Literary Channel, 393, 394 Cornhill, 36, 297, 387, 388, 398, 400, 401 Colburn, Henry, 295–6 Cortazar, Julio, 169 Colet, Louise, 197 Las babas del diablo, 169 Collector Collector, The (Fischer), 149–50 Cotsell, Michael, 395 Collector, The (Fowles), 149 Counterfeit Lady Unveiled, The (Kirkman), 96 Colley, Linda, 41, 390 Cousin Phillis (Gaskell), 186 Britons: Forging the Nation, 390 Coventry, Francis, 209 Collins, Michael, 57 Pompey the Little, or, The Life and Adventures of a Collins, Wilkie, 35, 36, 45–6, 124, 137, 201, Lapdog, 209 230, 231, 346, 396, 413, 451 Crace, Jim, 82 Armadale, 396 The Pesthouse, 82 Basil, 35, 44, 396 Craft of Fiction, The (Lubbock), 168, 195–6, Heart and Science, 231 256–8, 260–263, 268, 273–4, 463 The Moonstone, 124–5, 201, 396, 451 Crane, R. S., 267–8 “The Unknown Public”, 137 “The Concept of Plot and the Plot of The Woman in White, 35, 36, 46, 201 Tom Jones”, 267 Collins, William, 3 Cranford (Gaskell), 186, 230, 363, 364 Colonel Jack (Defoe), 243 Cricket on the Hearth, The (Dickens), 159, 163 Comfort, Alex, 303 crime and detective fiction, 35, 43, 132, 229, Common Reader, The (Woolf), 212, 264 232, 331–2, 345–7, 397, 433 Communist Manifesto (Marx and Engels), 451–2, Crime and Punishment (Dostoevsky), 362 458–61 criminal biography, 26, 96, 182 Company We Keep, The (Booth), 278–9 Critique of Everyday Life (Lefebvre), 410–411, 423 Composition no. 1 (Saporta), 156 Croxall, Samuel, 242 “Concept of Plot and the Plot of Tom Jones, The” A Select Collection of Novels, 242 (Crane), 267 Cruikshank, George, 138, 163 Concluding (Green), 421 Crying of Lot 49, The (Pynchon), 155 Condition of England fiction, 35, 72, 138, 395 Cryptographer, The (Hill), 435 Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, The (Lever), 380 Cuchulain of Muirthemne, 375 Congreve, William, 241–2, 244 Culler, Jonathan, 273–4, 428 Incognita, 242 Structuralist Poetics, 273–4 Connolly, Cyril, 302–4 “Culture Industry, The: Enlightenment as Mass Conrad, Joseph, 42, 51–2, 78, 148, 162, 168, Deception” (Horkheimer and Adorno), 218, 259, 306, 433, 446, 448–9, 460, 135–7 464, 466, 467, 469 Cummings, E. E., 57 Heart of Darkness, 51–3, 60, 68, 431, 446 Cymbeline (Shakespeare), 69 Lord Jim, 218, 433, 446, 448 The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’, 148 Dallas. E. S., 252 A Personal Record, 448–9 Daly, Nicholas, 433 Considerations on Representative Government (Mill), Damasio, Antonio, 226 392–3 Damrosch, David, 457–8 “Contemporary Novel, The” (Wells), 259 What is World Literature?, 457–8 Conway, Hugh, 233 Daniel Deronda (Eliot), 164, 308, 319, 388, Called Back, 233 394, 395 Index 477

Danielewski, Mark, 146 Descartes, René, 226 House of Leaves, 146 Desmond (Smith), 31 Dante, 57, 266, 462 detective fiction see crime and detective fiction Darwin, Charles, 36, 123, 231 Dever, Carolyn, 393 On the Origin of Species, 36, 123 The Literary Channel, 393, 394 David Copperfield (Dickens), 35, 163, 164, Devil on Two Sticks, The (Le Sage), 151 220–222, 249, 329, 331, 396 Dewas, Maharajah of, 61 Davidoff, Leonore, 316 D. H. Lawrence, Novelist (Leavis), 257 David Simple, Volume the Last (Fielding), 11 Diary of a Bad Year (Coetzee), 145 Davies, Gill, 347 Dickens, Charles, 35, 42–4, 46, 57, 132–3, 135, Davies, R. Rice, 381 137, 141, 159–60, 163–4, 167, 180–181, The Cambrian Sketch‐Book, 381 204–5, 210, 220–223, 229–30, 237, Davis, John, 326 247–51, 253, 258, 260–263, 265–6, 268, Davis, Lennard, 103 269, 292, 294, 299–300, 303, 319, Factual Fictions, 103 327–9, 331, 333, 334, 341–2, 344, 345, Day of the Locust, The (West), 164 350–351, 353, 355–7, 365, 382, 393, Day of the Triffids, The (Wyndham), 346 395–6, 415, 431, 435–7 “Dead, The” (Joyce), 230, 375–6, 384 Bleak House, 35, 37, 41–5, 163, 177, 204, 250, Deane, Seamus, 376 261, 262, 265, 327, 344, 350–351, 382, de Balzac, Honoré, 147, 248, 249, 258, 260, 276, 395, 436–8 285, 394–7, 459–60 A Christmas Carol, 163, 229–30 Lost Illusions, 395, 459 The Cricket on the Hearth, 159, 163 de Certeau, Michel, 410 David Copperfield, 35, 163, 164, 220–222, 249, The Practice of Everyday Life, 410 329, 331, 396 de Cervantes, Miguel, 57, 89–90, 96, 242, 275, Dombey and Son, 249, 300, 394, 395 442–3, 458, 459 Great Expectations, 46, 163, 180–181, 185–6, Don Quixote, 89–90, 93, 96, 242, 442–3 328, 431 Defoe, Daniel, 4, 45, 92, 94–6, 148–50, 201, Hard Times, 35, 265, 396 202, 214, 232, 242–3, 265–7, 291, 292, Little Dorrit, 35, 41, 43, 46, 163, 204, 251, 299, 303–4, 306, 341, 342, 344–7, 349, 266, 300, 345, 395 350, 352–4, 356, 412, 429–32, 437, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, 163, 300 441–3, 449–53 Nicholas Nickleby, 163, 299 Colonel Jack, 243 The Old Curiosity Shop, 132, 141, 248 The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, 243 Oliver Twist, 163, 229, 248, 299, 331 A Journal of the Plague Year, 344–7, 352–3, 437 Our Mutual Friend, 204, 253, 415 Moll Flanders, 45, 95–7, 149, 201, 265, 350, The Pickwick Papers, 230, 247–8, 299, 328, 329 429, 452 Sketches by Boz, 299 Robinson Crusoe, 4, 92, 94–6, 148, 149, 177, A Tale of Two Cities, 35, 181, 395 201, 225, 243, 412, 429–32, 441–2, Dickens the Novelist (Leavis and Leavis), 265 449–53 “Dickens World, The: The View from Todgers’s” Roxana, 95, 96, 242–3, 344, 354, 356 (Van Ghent), 266 de Gouges, Olympe, 30 Dictionary of the English Language, A (Johnson), 293 Delafield, E. M., 354–6 Diderot, Denis, 151 The Provincial Lady in London, 354–6 The Indiscreet Jewels, 151 de la Torre, Lillian, 345 Dilke, Charles, 388 Dr. Sam: Johnson, Detector, 345 Dimock, Wai Chee, 393 de Lesseps, Ferdinand, 398–400 Through Other Continents, 393 de Maupassant, Guy, 263 Disraeli, Benjamin, 328, 388–9 Demme, Jonathan, 169 Disraeli, Isaac, 29 Dennis, John, 243, 323–4 Dissent, 465 Derrida, Jacques, 72, 83, 106, 276 Distant Reading (Moretti), 457 “The Law of Genre”, 106 Divided Self, The (Laing), 465 de Sade, Marquis, 23 Dixon, J. Hepworth, 136 La Philosophie dans le boudoir, 23 Doctor Faustus (Mann), 465 478 Index

Doctor’s Wife, The (Braddon), 396 Adam Bede, 36, 38–40, 42, 100, 164, 252, 394 Doctor Thorne (Trollope), 35, 400 Daniel Deronda, 164, 308, 319, 388, 394, 395 Dombey and Son (Dickens), 249, 300, 394, 395 Middlemarch, 162, 182–5, 190, 220, 250, 252, domestic fiction, 29–31, 117, 121, 232, 248, 266, 269, 273, 298, 362, 364, 367–71, 277, 307, 311, 382, 384, 412–13, 394, 444–6 415–16, 422, 436, 438 The Mill on the Floss, 164, 220, 252, 362–3, 368 Don Quixote (Cervantes), 89–90, 93, 96, 242, 442–3 Romola, 164 Doody, Margaret, 108, 452 Scenes of Clerical Life, 164, 413–15 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 260, 265, 362 Silas Marner, 164 Crime and Punishment, 362 Eliot, Simon, 294 “Dover Beach” (Arnold), 73 Eliot, T. S., 118, 257, 260, 263–5, 345, 385, 467 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 232, 346–7, 433 The Sacred Wood, 257 The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, 433 Elizabeth Costello (Coetzee), 145 A Study in Scarlet, 347 Elliott, Kamilla, 163, 165 Dracula (Stoker), 118, 120–128, 182, 201, 232, Ellis, Sarah Stickney, 415 234, 347, 356, 362, 441, 448 The Women of England, 415 drama and theater, 53, 58, 118, 151, 164, 178, Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 410 229, 230, 241, 243–5, 247, 251, 257, 261, Emma (Austen), 247, 293, 308, 311, 314–16, 318 265, 266, 268, 269, 273, 375, 458, 459 Emma Courtney (Hays), 25 dramatic method, 245–7, 249, 251, 253, 261, empiricism, 3, 94–5, 147, 152, 155, 219–20, 227 263, 268 End of History and the Last Man, The (Fukuyama), Dr. Sam: Johnson, Detector (de la Torre), 345 71, 285 Dubliners (Joyce), 64, 234, 375 Englishness, 42, 49–52, 65, 74–6, 78, 79, 306–8, Dumas, Alexander, 205, 258 379, 382–5, 402, 426 The Three Musketeers, 258 English Novel, The (Ford), 258–9 du Maurier, George, 163, 170, 234 English Novel, The (Saintsbury), 257 Trilby, 163, 234 English Novel, The: Form and Function Duncan, Ian, 20, 361–2, 379, 442 (Van Ghent), 266 Dunciad, The (Pope), 3, 293 English Rogue, The (Head), 343–4, 347 Dutt, Toru, 397 Enigma of Arrival, The (Naipaul), 466–7 Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan, 397 Enlightenment, 18, 25, 27, 63, 118–19, 122–3, Dyer, Reginald, 63 135, 281–2, 374–5, 435 Dynasts, The (Hardy), 365 Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, An dystopian fiction, 81–4, 236 (Hume), 4 Entail, The (Galt), 380 Early Victorian Novelists (Cecil), 257 epic, 3, 9, 57, 59, 93–4, 182, 235, 241, 244–5, Eastern Life Past and Present (Martineau), 399 374, 375, 383, 458 Eaton, F. A., 398 Epic of Gilgamesh, 458 Eco, Umberto, 434 epistolary fiction, 10, 23–4, 98–9, 150, 182, 186, Eden, Emily, 364 189, 205, 216–17, 245, 351, 427 The Semi‐Detached House, 364 Ermath, Elizabeth, 43 Edgeworth, Maria, 57, 377, 383 Espirito Santo, Diana, 211 Castle Rackrent, 377 Essay Concerning Human Understanding, An Edinburgh Review, 111, 247 (Locke), 149 Edison, Thomas, 162, 163 Essay on the History of Civil Society, An (Ferguson), Edwards, O. M., 381 310–311, 429 Egerton, George, 233 Essay on the Principle of Population, An (Malthus), 317 Eichenbaum, Boris, 273 Essays and Reviews, 36 Eisenstein, Sergei, 159–60, 165–7, 171–2 Esther Waters (Moore), 233 Ela, the Outcast (Prest and Rymer), 134, 138 Esty, Jed, 76, 78, 448 Eliot, George, 36, 37, 39–40, 42, 45, 60, 100, 162, A Shrinking Island, 448 164, 182–5, 189–90, 220, 249, 250–253, Ethics of Reading, The (Miller), 278 258, 268, 269, 273, 297–8, 300, 301, 303, Eustace Diamonds, The (Trollope), 397, 401 308, 319, 362–4, 367–71, 388, 393–6, Evans, Caradoc, 381 413–15, 430, 435, 444–50, 460, 464 My People, 381 Index 479

Evelina (Burney), 100, 216, 245, 351–2 Fielding, Sarah, 10, 113 Everyday Life in the Modern World (Lefebvre), 410 Adventures of David Simple, The, 10–11, 14–16 everyday life, representation of, 5–6, 19, 35, 37–8, David Simple, Volume the Last, 11 50, 148–9, 178, 205, 220, 242–3, 246, Fields, W. C., 164 249, 308, 329, 369–70, 409–23, 428 film, 81, 118, 135, 153, 159–72, 178, 181, Expansion of England, The (Seeley), 389 230, 275, 293, 303, 344, 346, 366, experimental novel, 35, 50–70, 77, 78, 144–57, 370, 394 199–200, 202, 206, 236–7, 263–4, 277, 433 adaptations of novels, 159, 163–4, 170, 181, hybridization of genre and media, 145–6 293, 303, 346 it‐narrative, 149–53 audiences, 161 metafictional elements in, 146 and culture of visuality, 160, 166–71 and modernism, 50–70, 144 influence on the novel, 164–5 and psychology, 150–153 origins and precursors, 159–61 self‐reflexivity of, 144 Finnegans Wake (Joyce), 157, 384–5 temporality in, 153–7 Firbank, Ronald, 50, 52–3 ties to empirical science, 147–8 Valmouth, 50, 52–3 Experimental Novel, The (Zola), 147–8 Fischer, Tibor, 149–50, 155 The Collector Collector, 149–50 fable, 3, 94, 244–5, 252, 434 Fisher, Caitlin, 146 Factual Fictions (Davis), 103 These Waves of Girls, 146 fairy tale and folk tale, 30, 236, 248, 364, 375, Fisher, Philip, 352, 415–16 443–4 Fish, Stanley, 272 Fardorougha the Miser (Carlton), 380 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 164, 166, 170 Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, The (Defoe), 243 The Great Gatsby, 166, 170 Fast, Howard, 169 The Last Tycoon, 164 Faulkner, William, 164 Fitzgerald, Penelope, 370 Faulks, Sebastian, 236, 237 The Bookshop, 370 Birdsong, 236 Flatland (Abbott), 368 Faust (Goethe), 58 Flaubert, Gustave, 38, 45, 57, 147, 197–8, 258, Feeling Global (Robbins), 393 260–262, 264, 266, 276, 285, 366, 394, Female Quixote, The (Lennox), 100 395, 396, 450 Fénelon, François, 22 Madam Bovary, 260, 261, 366, 394, 396, 450 Fenwick, Eliza, 27 Fleming, Marjory, 108 Secresy; or, The Ruin in the Rock, 27 “Fleshly School of Poetry, The” (Buchanan), 396 Fergus, Jan, 111, 114 Flood, The (Gee), 82 Ferguson, Adam, 310–311, 429 Foe (Coetzee), 431 An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Foer, Jonathan Safran, 146, 199–200 310–311, 429 Tree of Codes, 146, 199–200 “Few Words on Non‐Intervention, A” (Mill), 389 Fokkema, Aleid, 236 Fiction and the Reading Public (Leavis), 210, Foras Feasa ar Éirinn (Céitinn), 377 257, 264 Ford, Ford Madox, 78, 168, 257–9 Fiedler, Leslie, 306 Henry James, 258 Love and Death in the American Novel, 306 The English Novel, 258–9 Fielding, Henry, 3, 4, 9, 15, 18, 91, 92, 96–9, 103, form in the novel, 20–21, 31, 35, 46–7, 56–8, 111, 149, 150, 153–4, 185, 194, 197, 201, 148, 192–207, 247, 249–50, 252–4, 204, 205, 214, 218, 221, 244, 245, 256, 258–69, 273–4, 276–80, 363–4 259, 261–3, 266–9, 278, 292, 311, anti‐formalism, 194, 195, 205–6, 259–60, 313–14, 319, 325, 326, 341, 412, 452, 458 262, 264 Amelia, 97, 100, 325 chapters as formal device, 200–202 Joseph Andrews, 3, 9, 13, 15, 96–7, 99, 111, historicity of, 202–4 201, 214, 218, 313–14, 325, 452, 458 metaphors for, 194 Shamela, 11–12, 16 organic form, 194, 247, 258 Tom Jones, 4, 9, 10, 15–16, 91, 92, 97–100, 109, spatial form, 197–200, 261–2 111, 149, 153–4, 181–2, 194, 197, 201, separate from content, 195–6 204, 244, 256, 267, 319, 325, 326, 412, 452 and temporality, 197–200 480 Index

Forster, Antonia, 22 Gandhi, Sanjay, 236 Forster, E. M., 50, 53, 60–64, 73, 186–7, “Garibaldi” (Braddon), 396 189–91, 207, 256–60, 262, 263, 269, Garnett, Constance, 464, 469 274, 281–3, 309, 398, 463 Garrick, David, 351 Aspects of the Novel, 256, 259–60, 262, 309, 463 Gaskell, Elizabeth, 35, 40, 186, 230, 364, 416 The Hill of Devi, 61 Cousin Phillis, 186 Howards End, 61, 73, 186–7, 189–91, 281–3 Cranford, 186, 230, 363, 364 A Passage to India, 60–64, 66 Mary Barton, 35, 40, 249, 329, 367, 416 Forster, John, 436 North and South, 35, 40–41, 416 For the Term of His Natural Life (Clarke), 397 Ruth, 44, 329 Foucault, Michel, 45, 226, 277, 282, 435 Wives and Daughters, 364, 367 The History of Sexuality, 45 Gee, Maggie, 82 Fowler, Christopher, 346 The Flood, 82 Fowles, John, 146, 149 gender, 23–6, 66, 68, 104, 113, 120–121, 125, The Collector, 149 127, 180, 220, 233, 236–7, 433–4, 446–7 The French Lieutenant’s Woman, 146 Genette, Gérard, 182, 200 Fox, Charles, 295 George Eliot (Stephen), 257 Framley Parsonage (Trollope), 401 “George Walker at Suez” (Trollope), 400–403 France and French literature, 5–6, 18, 21–2, Geraldine; or, The Secret Assassins of the Old Stone 29–31, 38, 41, 49, 57, 118, 122, 130, 144, Cross (Prest), 134, 137–41 181, 228, 232, 242, 249–50, 262, 282, Ghosh, Amitav, 427, 431–2, 438, 461 310–311, 356, 366, 374–5, 382, 385, The Glass Palace, 427 393–400, 417, 449, 451, 458–9, 461 River of Smoke, 461 Frank, Adam, 226 Sea of Poppies, 431–2, 461 Frankenstein (Shelley), 118, 120–122, 128, Ghost World (Clowes), 145 130–131, 148, 182, 201 Gikandi, Simon, 432 Frayn, Michael, 237 Gilbert, Sandra, 110 Freedgood, Elaine, 416 Gilroy, Paul, 72, 79, 80 French Lieutenant’s Woman, The (Fowles), 146 Gish, Lillian, 164 French, Patrick, 467 Gissing, George, 292, 300–301, 303, 341, 353, French Revolution, 18, 21, 24, 25, 27, 29, 31, 417–18 118, 122, 130, 181, 228, 395 New Grub Street, 292, 300–301, 353, 417–18 French Revolution, The: A Novel (Stewart), 146 The Odd Women, 353 Freud, Sigmund, 226, 233, 265, 271, 272, 278 Glass Palace, The (Ghosh), 427 Frow, John, 211, 213–14, 216 global fiction, 50, 52–3, 58–70, 75–6, 356, Frye, Northrup, 103, 105–7, 110, 268, 273, 276 384–5, 390–398, 426, 431–5, 448, 454, Anatomy of Criticism, 105, 268, 273 456–69 Fry, Roger, 234 Glyn, Elinor, 233–4 Fukuyama, Francis, 71, 285–6 Go‐Between, The (Hartley), 39 The End of History and the Last Man, 71, 285 “Goblin Market” (Rossetti), 118, 121, 129 Fun Home (Bechdel), 145 Godard, Jean‐Luc, 165–6, 171 future, novels set in, 81–4 Masculin Féminin, 165–6 Vivre sa vie, 171 Galileo, 162 Godwin, William, 18, 22–5, 31, 130, 250 Gallagher, Catherine, 212, 218, 452 Political Justice, 22, 26 Galperin, William, 104 Things as They Are, or The Adventures of Caleb Galsworthy, John, 262 Williams, 18, 26–7, 31, 250 Galt, John, 379–80 Goetz von Berlichingen (Goethe), 459 Annals of the Parish, 380 Golden Ass, The (Apuleius), 150–153 The Ayrshire Legatees, 380 Golden Bowl, The (James), 167 The Entail, 380 Golden Notebook, The (Lessing), 457, 464–6 The Provost, 380 Goldsmith, Oliver, 227 Gandhi, Indira, 236 Gondry, Roger, 171 Gandhi, Mohandas, 63, 64, 66 Gone With the Wind (Mitchell), 164 Index 481

Goodlad, Lauren, 392, 394, 436 Grenby, M. O., 29 The Victorian Geopolitical Aesthetic, 394 Grey, E. C., 248 Gossip’s Story, A (West), 30 Griffin, Dustin, 292 Gothic fiction, 19, 23, 26–9, 35, 100, 117–31, Griffith, D. W., 159–60, 162–4, 167 145, 182, 228–30, 232–4, 246, 307, Grusin, Richard, 160 311–12, 345–6, 382, 396, 458 Guards! Guards! (Pratchett), 349, 352 as dark pastoral, 119–20, 128 Gubar, Susan, 110 and incest, 121–2 Guerillas (Naipaul), 466 and empire, 123–5, 396 Guest, Charlotte, 375 excess in, 118–20 Gulliver’s Travels (Swift), 92, 145, 148, 325 and gender, 119–25 Gunning, Tom, 159 and history, 122–3 “Gustave Flaubert” (Murry), 260 and the limits of the human, 120–121 migrations among different media, 118 Habermas, Jürgen, 427, 429, 436 as modern myths, 118 Hack, Daniel, 298–9 monsters in, 130–131 Haddad, Emily A., 398 as network novel, 311–12 Hadley, Elaine, 363–4 non‐rational elements in, 119 Haggard, H. Rider, 232, 234 precursors to, 118 King Solomon’s Mines, 232 relation to realism, 117–19, 311–12 She, 232, 234 relation to science fiction, 118 Hale, Dorothy, 280, 282–3 rhetorically stylized, 120, 129 Half of a Yellow Sun (Adichie), 436, 438 and same‐sex desire, 120–122, 127 Hall, Sarah, 82 as social criticism, 119–30 The Carbullen Army, 82 graphic novels, 118, 145, 170–172, 181–2 Hall, Stuart, 74 Gramsci, Antonio, 80 Halperin, John, 114 Grandma’s Reading Glass (Smith), 167 Halttunen, Karen, 228 Grand, Sarah, 233 Hamilton, Elizabeth, 29, 31 Grass, Günter, 466–7 Memoirs of Modern Philosophers, 31 The Tin Drum, 466–7 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 118, 222–3, 458 Grass is Singing, The (Lessing), 457 Handy Andy (Lover), 380 Gray, Alasdair, 236 Harding, D. W., 331 Lanark, 236 Hard Times (Dickens), 35, 265, 396 Gray, Thomas, 325 Hardt, Michael, 391 “Great Circumbendibus, The” (Sala), 399–400 Hardy, Barbara, 257, 269 Great Exhibition (1851), 34, 127, 389 The Appropriate Form, 269 Great Expectations (Dickens), 46, 163, 180–181, Hardy, Thomas (novelist and poet), 60, 202, 263, 185–6, 328, 431 269, 364, 365, 367, 368, 395 Great Fire of London, The (Ackroyd), 345–6 The Dynasts, 365 Great Gatsby, The (Fitzgerald), 168, 170 Jude the Obscure, 368 Great Novelists and Their Novels (Maugham), 257 Tess of the D’Urbervilles, 368 Great Tradition, The (Leavis), 210, 257, 265, Two on a Tower, 367 306–8, 463 Hardy, Thomas (radical), 21 Greatest Plague of Life, The (Mayhew and Mayhew), 138 Harris, Wilson, 431 Greenberg, Clement, 234 Palace of the Peacock, 431 Greene, Graham, 427 Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Rowling), The Heart of the Matter, 427 76–7 Greene, Thomas, 343 Harry Potter series, 76–8, 170 Green, Henry, 421 Hart, George Vaughan, 326 Concluding, 421 Hartley, L. P., 39 Greenery Street (Mackail), 354, 355 The Go‐Between, 39 Greenmantle (Buchan), 234 Harvey, David, 81 Gregory, Augusta, 375, 381 Harvey, W. J., 257, 269 Greimas, A. G., 178, 275, 276 Character and the Novel, 269 482 Index

Hawkes, John, 235 Holcroft, Thomas, 23–4, 31, 204 Hawksmoor (Ackroyd), 345–6 Alwyn, 204 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 40, 164 Anna St. Ives, 23–4 The Scarlet Letter, 164 Hollinghurst, Alan, 237 Hays, Mary, 25, 30, 31 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 162 Emma Courtney, 25 Homer, 57 Victims of Prejudice, 25 Odyssey, 57, 59 Haywood, Eliza, 3, 4, 92, 96, 151 homoerotic desire, representation of, 52–3, Anti‐Pamela, 3, 11–12, 15, 16 121–2, 127, 129, 232 The Invisible Spy, 151 Horkheimer, Max, 135–7, 142 Love in Excess, 4, 92 “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Hazlitt, William, 23 Deception”, 135–7, 142 Head, Richard, 343–4 Hornby, Nick, 341, 353–4 The English Rogue, 343–4, 347 About a Boy, 353–4 Heads of the People (Meadows), 218 Horne, Richard, 294 Heart and Science (Collins), 231 Hours of Idleness (Byron), 110 Heart of Darkness (Conrad), 51–3, 60, 68, 431, 446 House for Mr. Biswas, A (Naipaul), 457, 466 Heart of the Matter, The (Greene), 427 Household Words, 294, 395, 436 Heidegger, Martin, 411 House, Humphry, 251 He Knew He Was Right (Trollope), 395 House Mother Normal (Johnson), 199 Henry and Eliza (Austen), 113 House of Leaves (Danielewski), 146 Henry Esmond (Thackeray), 35, 37, 38, 41, 44, 46 House with Green Shutters, The (Brown), 380 Herbert, Christopher, 42 Howard, Keble, 419 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 375, 427, 459 Howards End (Forster), 61, 73, 186–7, 189–91, Hermsprong, or; Man as He is Not (Bage), 24–5 281–3 Heydt‐Stevenson, Jillian, 113 Howe, Irving, 465 Heywood, Christopher, 394 Howells, William Dean, 457, 459 Heywood, John, 343 Howitt, William, 294 Highmore, Ben, 418, 419 Hughes, Richard, 332 Hill, Aaron, 243 Hughes, Tom, 76 Hill of Devi, The (Forster) 61 Tom Brown’s Schooldays, 76 Hill, Tobias, 435 Hugo, Victor, 459 The Cryptographer, 435 The Hunchback of Notre Dame, 459 Historical Novel, The (Lukács), 38, 42, 443–4, 459 Human Document, A (Mallock), 206–7 Historie of Bevis of Hampton, The, 341, 343–4 “Humble Remonstrance, A” (Stevenson), 253–4 history and the novel, 4, 8, 20–23, 26–7, 38–42, Hume, David, 3, 4, 16 71–2, 75–80, 93, 122–7, 155–7, 181–2, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, An, 4 228, 229, 236–7, 242–5, 247, 286, Treatise of Human Nature, A, 3, 4 326–7, 344–6, 352–3, 374–80, 384–5, Hume, Fergus, 233 421, 438, 442–50, 459, 467 The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, 233 History of a French Louse, The, 156–7 Humphrey, Ewyn, 382 History of England, The (Austen), 110, 114 Outside the House of Baal, 382 History of Sexuality, The (Foucault), 45 Humphry Clinker (Smollett), 353 Hitchcock, Alfred, 160, 167–9 Humument, A (Phillips), 206–7 Psycho, 169 Hunchback of Notre Dame, The (Hugo), 459 Rear Window, 168–9, 171 Hunger Games films, 170 Vertigo, 168–9 Hunter, J. Paul, 92, 93, 100, 161 Hitchens, Christopher, 469 Huntington, Samuel, 72 Hoban, Russell, 82 Hunt, Leigh, 107–9 Riddley Walker, 82 Hurd, Richard, 105 Hobsbawm, Eric, 49, 453 Husserl, Edmund, 411 Hobson, J. A., 390 Hutton, R. H., 252, 365 Hogg, James, 126, 380 Huxley, Aldous, 164 The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Huyssen, Andreas, 433 Sinner, 126 Hyde, Douglas, 381 Index 483

Ibsen, Henrik, 57 James, C. L. R., 78 Icarus Girl, The (Oyeyemi), 431 The Black Jacobins, 78 Ice Storm, The (Lee), 366 James, E. L., 237 If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things James, Henry, 42, 57, 160, 162, 167–9, 171–2, (McGregor), 421 185, 194, 204, 205, 207, 218, 219, illustration, 138, 140, 145, 162–3, 167, 170, 221–2, 249–54, 256–65, 267–9, 273–4, 181–2, 193, 196, 206–7 280, 294, 306, 307, 394, 395, 397, 413, Illustrations of Political Economy (Martineau), 295 417, 457–60, 464, 467 Imagined Communities (Anderson), 366, 390, The Ambassadors, 167–8, 185, 221, 222, 259 427–8 “The Art of Fiction”, 253–4, 264–5, 394 Imagistes, Des: An Anthology, 234 The Golden Bowl, 167 imperialism and narrative fiction, 35–6, 42, The Princess Casamassima, 218, 221–2 51–4, 58–72, 74–6, 79–81, 123–7, The Portrait of a Lady, 219 130–131, 382–5, 388–91, 395–403, The Sacred Fount, 167–8 426–9, 431–5, 448–9, 451–4, 465–7 The Sense of the Past, 167 Importance of Being Earnest, The (Wilde), 53 The Spoils of Poynton, 417 In Another Country (Joshi), 434–5 The Tragic Muse, 258 Inchbald, Elizabeth, 18, 29–30 The Turn of the Screw, 186 Nature and Art, 29–30 What Maisie Knew, 162 Incognita (Congreve), 242 “The Younger Generation”, 258, 259 Inconvenient Truth, An, 81 Jameson, Fredric, 76, 103, 273–4, 276, 394–5, 462 In Quest of the Ordinary (Cavell), 410 The Political Unconscious, 103, 276 In Search of Lost Time (Proust), 194, 465 The Prison‐House of Language, 273 India, 60–66, 68, 123–5, 236, 387–90, 395, James, P. D., 346 397–8, 400, 401, 431–2, 434, 453, James, William, 57, 221, 418 456–8, 460–461, 463–9 Jane Austen or the Secret of Style (Miller), 318 India: A Wounded Civilization (Naipaul), 466 Jane Eyre (Brontë), 35, 125, 164, 229, 249, 264, Indian Mutiny see Rebellion of 1857 362–4, 427, 431 Indiscreet Jewels, The (Diderot), 151 Jeffs, William, 395 Injury Time (Bainbridge), 421 Jenkins, Robert, 5 intellectual property see copyright Jerome, Jerome K., 230 Introduction to the English Novel, An (Kettle), 266 Three Men in a Boat, 230 Invisible Spy, The (Haywood), 151 Jerrold, Douglas, 416 Ireland and Irish literature, 41, 57–60, 123, “The Story of a Feather”, 416 126–7, 228, 236, 297, 374–81, 383–5, Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth (Ware), 145 389, 396, 441, 453 “John Bull on the Guadalquivir” (Trollope), 401 Irving, Washington, 230 John, Juliet, 134 The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., 230 Johns, Adrian, 352 Ishiguro, Kazuo, 83–4, 149, 222, 370, 431, 438 Johnson, B. S., 198–200 Never Let Me Go, 83–4, 149, 222 Albert Angelo, 198–9 The Remains of the Day, 370 House Mother Normal, 199 When We Were Orphans, 431, 438 The Unfortunates, 199 Island of Doctor Moreau, The (Wells), 82, 83 Johnson, Claudia, 26, 27, 29 Italian, The (Radcliffe), 28 Johnson, Samuel, 3, 10, 91, 92, 98, 149, 161, It’s a Wonderful Life (Capra), 230 243–4, 292–3, 301, 358 Ivanhoe (Scott), 294, 328, 379, 431, 444, 445 A Dictionary of the English Language, 293 The Vanity of Human Wishes, 3 Jack Hinton, The Guardsman (Lever), 380 Johnstone, Charles, 154–6 Jack Maggs (Carey), 181 Chrysal, 154–6 Jack the Ripper, 125 Johnstone, Christian, 378 Jacobism and anti‐Jacobism, 5–6, 22, 28–30, Clan‐Albin: A National Tale, 378 154, 374, 378, 442 Johnstone, Stephen, 410 Jacob’s Room (Woolf), 54–6 Jones, Lloyd, 431 Jakobson, Roman, 273–5 Mr. Pip, 431 484 Index

Jones, William, 460 Kipling, Rudyard, 42, 233, 427, 434, 456–7 Joseph Andrews (Fielding), 3, 9, 13, 15, 96–7, 99, The Jungle Books, 456 111, 201, 325, 452, 458 Kim, 427, 456 Joseph Anton (Rushdie), 469 “Mrs. Bathurst”, 233 Joshi, Priya, 395, 434–5, 461 Kirkman, Francis, 96 In Another Country, 434–5 The Counterfeit Lady Unveiled, 96 Journal of the Plague Year, A (Defoe), 344, 345–7, Knight, Charles, 133 352–3, 437 Knight, G. Wilson, 264 Joyce, James, 45, 50, 56–61, 64, 65, 78, 147–8, Kracauer, Siegfried, 411 153, 157, 164–5, 172, 195, 199, 207, Kuleshov, Lev, 160 230, 234, 235, 263–4, 266, 268, 269, Kureishi, Hanif, 74, 357 307, 375–6, 382–5, 421, 427, 434, 466 The Buddha of Suburbia, 74, 357 “The Dead”, 230, 375–6, 384 Kyd, Thomas, 118 Dubliners, 64, 234, 375 The Spanish Tragedy, 118 Finnegans Wake, 157, 384–5 “A Little Cloud”, 384 Lady Audley’s Secret (Braddon), 122–5, 128 “A Mother”, 384 Lady’s Magazine, 112 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 60, 269, Laffey, Mark, 392 383–4 Laing, R. D., 465 Ulysses, 45, 50, 56–60, 64, 66, 147, 153, 157, The Divided Self, 465 165, 195, 199, 202, 235, 263–6, 307, Lanark (Gray), 236 332, 382, 421, 434 Lane, John, 233 Joyce, Michael, 146 Lang, Andrew, 253 afternoon: a story, 146 Langbaum, Robert, 209 Jude the Obscure (Hardy), 368 Laocoön (Lessing), 197, 263 Julien, Isaac, 74 Last Messages, The (Luntiana), 146 Jungle Books, The (Kipling), 456 Last of the Mohicans, The (Cooper), 328 juvenile literature, 104–15, 181–2 Last Tycoon, The (Fitzgerald), 164 Juvenile Magazine, 113 Last Year at Marienbad (Resnais), 170 Laurence, Patricia, 447 Kafka, Franz, 43, 257, 265 “Law of Genre, The” (Derrida), 106 Kant, Immanuel, 317–18 Lawrence, D. H., 45, 235, 257, 258, 260, 264–6, “Perpetual Peace”, 317 269, 370, 418, 460, 463, 464, 466 Kapoor, Anish, 74 Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 269 Kay‐Shuttleworth, James, 34 Sons and Lovers, 45, 370, 418 Keating, Joseph, 381 “Surgery for the Novel—or a Bomb”, 260 Keating, Peter, 433 Women in Love, 235 Keats, John, 108–9, 155 Lay of the Last Minstrel, The (Scott), 450 Kee, Robert, 303 Le Fanu, Sheridan, 121, 127 Keirstead, Christopher, 396 “Carmilla”, 121, 122, 127–8 Kelly, Gary, 23, 29 Le Sage, René, 151 Kellys and the O’Kellys, The (Trollope), 381 The Devil on Two Sticks, 151 Kenelm Chillingly (Bulwer‐Lytton), 330 Lean, David, 163 Kent, Christopher, 106 Leavis, F. R., 210, 257, 260, 264–6, 278–80, Kettle, Arnold, 210, 266 306–8, 427, 438, 460, 463–4 An Introduction to the English Novel, 266 D. H. Lawrence, Novelist, 257, 265 Kidman, Nicole, 171 Dickens the Novelist, 265 Kidnapped (Stevenson), 380 The Great Tradition, 210, 257, 265, 306–8, 463 Kim (Kipling), 427, 456 New Bearings in English Poetry, 257 Kingsley, Charles, 35, 251 Revaluation, 257 Alton Locke, 35 Leavis, Q. D., 210, 257, 264, 267 Yeast, 35 Dickens the Novelist, 265 King Solomon’s Mines (Haggard), 232 Fiction and the Reading Public, 210, 257, 264 Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society, The, 370 Lectures on Colonization and Colonies (Merivale), 388 Index 485

Lee, Ang, 366 Lodge, David, 148, 272–7, 281, 282, 286, The Ice Storm, 366 421, 434 Lefebvre, Henri, 410–411, 421–3 The British Museum is Falling Down, 421 Critique of Everyday Life, 410–411, 423 Changing Places, 272–5 Everyday Life in the Modern World, 410 Small World, 272, 275–7 Leighton, Angela, 194 Loiterer, The, 104, 110, 112–13 On Form, 194 London Corresponding Society, 21 Lennox, Charlotte, 100 London International Exhibition (1862), 389–90 The Female Quixote, 100 London Labour and the London Poor (Mayhew), 141–2 Lesley Castle (Austen), 112 Lonely Londoners, The (Selvon), 74, 79, 357, 427 Lessing, Doris, 456–7, 460, 464–6 Longinus, 227 Children of Violence, 457 Lord Jim (Conrad), 218, 433, 446, 448–9 The Golden Notebook, 457, 464–6 Lord of the Rings, The (Tolkein), 77 The Grass is Singing, 457 Lost Illusions (Balzac), 459 Walking in the Shade, 464 “Love, actually” (Smith), 282–3 Lessing, Gottfried, 197, 263 Love and Death in the American Novel (Fiedler), 306 Laocoön, 197, 263 Love in Excess (Haywood), 4, 92 Lever, Charles, 380–381 Lover, Samuel, 380 Charles O’Malley, 380 Handy Andy, 380 The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, 380 Lovesey, Peter, 346 Jack Hinton The Guardsman, 380 Lubbock, Percy, 168, 195–6, 199, 256–8, Tom Burke of Ours, 380 260–263, 265, 267, 268, 273–4, 463 Levine, Caroline, 393 The Craft of Fiction, 168, 195–6, 256–8, Levine, George, 205, 397, 413 260–263, 268, 273–4, 463 The Realistic Imagination, 397 Lucas, Charles, 29 Lévi‐Strauss, Claude, 276 Lucky Jim (Amis), 370 Levy, Andrea, 79–80, 333, 427 Luhrmann, Baz, 170 Small Island, 79–80, 333, 427 Lukács, Georg, 38, 42, 275, 397, 442–4, 449–50, Lewes, G. H., 229, 247–51, 297–8, 395, 396 453, 454, 459, 463 Lewis, Matthew, 28–9, 114, 117 The Historical Novel, 38, 42, 433–4, 459 The Monk, 28–9, 114, 117, 123–4 The Theory of the Novel, 463 Lewis, R. W. B., 306 Lumière brothers (Auguste and Louis), 159, The American Adam, 306 163, 172 Liberty, On (Mill), 36 Luntiala, Hannu, 146 libraries, 45–6, 294–5, 302, 306, 326, 330–332, The Last Messages, 146 433 Luxborough, Henrietta, 325 Life in a Day, 153, 157 Lynch, Deidre, 316, 428, 430 Life on the Mississippi (Twain), 459 Lyotard, Jean‐François, 155 Limehouse Nights (Burke), 357 The Postmodern Condition, 155 Lindsay, Jack, 78 1649, 78 Mabinogion, 375 Literary Channel, The (Cohen and Dever), 393, 394 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 458, 460–461 Literature at Nurse (Moore), 46 “Minute on Indian Education”, 458, 460–461 Lives of the Novelists (Scott), 311 Macbeth (Shakespeare), 462 “Little Cloud, A” (Joyce), 384 Maccall, William, 294 Little Dorrit (Dickens), 35, 37, 41, 43, 46, 163, Macdermots of Ballycloran, The (Trollope), 381 204, 251, 266, 300, 345, 395 MacDiarmid, Hugh, 380 Little Stranger, The (Waters), 413 Macdonald, Dwight, 135–7 Lloyd, Edward, 133–42 Mackail, Denis, 354, 355 Lloyd’s Penny Weekly, 133, 135, 140 Greenery Street, 354, 355 Locke, John, 148, 149, 152, 362 Mack, Edward, 113 An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 149 Mackenzie, Henry, 24, 227 Lockhart, John Gibson, 181, 377, 379 Maclaren‐Ross, Julian, 291, 303 Peter’s Letters to His Kinsfolk, 379 MacLeod of Dare (Black), 380 486 Index

Macpherson, James, 375 mass‐market fiction see popular and mass‐market Madam Bovary (Flaubert), 260, 261, 366, 394, fiction 396, 450 Masson, David, 249, 250, 388 Magnetic Girl, The (Marsh), 233 Master of Ballantrae, The (Stevenson), 380 Maid of Killarney, The (Brontë), 378 Matthew Arnold (Trilling), 257 Making of the English Working Class, The Matthews, Elkin, 233 (Thompson), 464–5 Maturin, Charles, 126, 228, 378, 396 Mallock, W. H., 206–7 Melmoth the Wanderer, 126, 128, 228 A Human Document, 206–7 The Wild Irish Boy, 378 Malory, Thomas, 77 Matz, Aaron, 417 Le Morte d’Arthur, 77 Maugham, W. Somerset, 256–7, 294 Malthus, Thomas, 317 Cakes and Ale, 256 An Essay on the Principle of Population, 317 Great Novelists and Their Novels, 257 Manley, Delarivier, 96, 242, 243 Max Havelaar (Multatuli), 449 The New Atalantis, 96 Mayhew, Augustus, 138 The Secret History of Queen Zarah, 242 The Greatest Plague of Life, 138 Manley, Lawrence, 343 Mayhew, Henry, 138, 141 Manning, Susan, 219 The Greatest Plague of Life, 138 Mann, Thomas, 260, 385, 465 London Labour and the London Poor, 141–2 Doctor Faustus, 465 Mazzuchelli, David, 170 Mansfield Park (Austen), 293, 314, 315, 450 McCarthy, Tom, 225, 285–6 Mantel, Hilary, 237 Remainder, 285–6 Manzoni, Alessandro, 459 McEwan, Ian, 73–4, 152, 237, 272, 278–81, 283, The Betrothed, 459 303, 421, 437–8 Maps for Lost Lovers (Aslam), 437 Atonement, 237, 272, 278–81, 303 Marcus, Laura, 164, 165 Saturday, 73–4, 76, 152, 421, 437–8 Marcus, Sharon, 46 McGregor, Jon, 421 Marcus, Steven, 45 If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, 421 The Other Victorians, 45 McKeon, Michael, 428 Margolis, Stacey, 310 McLuhan, Marshall, 459 Maria; or, The Wrongs of Women (Wollstonecraft), Meadows, Kenny, 218 26, 27, 31 Heads of the People, 218 Marquez, Gabriel Garcia, 385, 466 Melmoth the Wanderer (Maturin), 126, 128, 228 One Hundred Years of Solitude, 466 melodrama, 38, 92, 99, 138–9, 226, 229–30, Marsh, Joss, 163 233, 237, 248, 251, 368 Marsh, Ngaio, 346 Memoirs and Interesting Adventures of an Embroidered Marsh, Richard, 233, 234 Waistcoat, 416 The Beetle, 234 Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (Cleland), The Magnetic Girl, 233 13–16, 149 Martineau, Harriet, 248, 295–6, 299, 302, 303, Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus, 145 388, 399 Memoirs of Miss Sidney Biddulph (Sheridan), 100 Eastern Life Past and Present, 399 Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (Hamilton), 31 Illustrations of Political Economy, 295 Meredith, George, 35–6, 60, 252, 259, 266, 394 Society in America, 296 The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, 35–6 Martin, Ellen, 113 Merely Mary Ann (Zangwill), 233 Marx, John, 448 Merivale, Herman, 388 The Modernist Novel and the Decline of Empire, 448 Lectures on Colonization and Colonies, 388 Marx, Karl, 278, 282, 391, 411, 449, 451–3, Messager, Annette, 410 458, 459, 461–2 Method of Henry James, The (Beach), 258 Capital, 411, 451 Michaels, Walter Benn, 376 Communist Manifesto, 451–2, 458, 459, 461–2 Microcosm, The, 109–10, 112 Mary Barton (Gaskell), 35, 40, 249, 329, 367, 416 Middlemarch (Eliot), 162, 182–5, 190, 220, 250, Masculin Féminin (Godard), 165–6 252, 266, 269, 273, 298, 362, 364, Mason, Emma, 226 367–71, 394, 444–6 Index 487

Midnight’s Children (Rushdie), 236, 431, 457, Monthly Review, 22, 105 463, 466–7 Moonstone, The (Collins), 124–5, 201, 451 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A (Shakespeare), 128 Moore, George, 46, 233, 394 Miles, Robert, 27, 28 Esther Waters, 233 Miller, Andrew H., 39 Literature at Nurse, 46 Miller, D. A., 226, 277, 318, 436 moral instruction and didacticism, 4–5, 7, 10, 12, Jane Austen or the Secret of Style, 318 14, 19, 23, 27, 30, 91–2, 100, 133, 136, Miller, J. Hillis, 43, 257, 266, 278 204, 217, 227–8, 242–3, 246, 280, Charles Dickens: The World of His Novels, 266 325, 377 The Ethics of Reading, 278 More, Hannah, 132, 142 Miller, Peter, 435 Moretti, Franco, 361–2, 366, 393, 432–3, Mill, John Stuart, 36, 389, 392–3 450–451, 457, 458 Considerations on Representative Government, Distant Reading, 457 392–3 Morley, John, 249 “A Few Words on Non‐Intervention”, 389 Morrison, Arthur, 232 On Liberty, 36 A Child of the Jago, 232 Mill on the Floss, The (Eliot), 164, 220, 252, Morte d’Arthur, Le (Malory), 77 362–3, 368 Mortimer, John, 346 Milne, A. A., 294 Mosley, Sir Oswald, 234 Milton, John, 77 “Mother, A” (Joyce), 384 Paradise Lost, 77 Mo, Timothy, 237 mimesis, 20–21, 38, 61–2, 129, 147–8, Motte, Warren, 144 160–161, 178, 211–13, 217, 243, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” (Woolf), 42, 247, 268, 370, 447, 463 262–3, 466 Mimesis (Auerbach), 38, 268, 275, Mr. Pip (Jones), 431 447, 463–4 “Mrs. Bathurst” (Kipling), 233 Minerva Press, 28 Mrs. Dalloway (Woolf), 54–6, 66–9, 147, 153, Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (Scott), 375 194, 202, 221, 235, 350, 419–20, 422, “Minute on Indian Education” (Macaulay), 458, 430, 446, 447, 453 460–461 Mudie, Charles Edward, 45 Miss Marjoribanks (Oliphant), 362, 364 Mudie’s Select Library, 45, 294–5, 306 Mitchell, David, 145, 427 Mufti, Aamir, 460, 469 Cloud Atlas, 145 Muir, Edwin, 256, 257, 263, 463 The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, 427 The Structure of the Novel, 256, 257, Mitchison, Naomi, 78 263, 463 Mitford, Mary Russell, 360–361, 367, 369 Multatuli, 449, 450 Modern Chivalry (Brackenridge), 310 Max Havelaar, 449 “Modern Fiction” (Woolf), 262–3 Mulvey, Laura, 169 Modernism and modernist literature, 42, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, 169 45–6, 50–70, 76, 78–9, 118, 144, Murray, John, 248 147–8, 152–3, 202, 221, 226, 233–5, Murry, John Middleton, 260 251, 260–265, 269, 279–80, 331, “Gustave Flaubert”, 260 332, 341, 382, 384–5, 430, 434, “Musée des Beaux Arts” (Auden), 421 446–8, 466 Muybridge, Eadweard, 159, 162, 171–2 Modernist Novel and the Decline of Empire, The My People (Evans), 381 (Marx), 448 Mystères de Paris, Les (Sue), 229 Modernity at Large (Appadurai), 391 Mysteries of London, The (Reynolds), 132, 229 Molesworth, Jesse, 96 Mysteries of the Court of London, The Moll Flanders (Defoe), 45, 96, 97, 149, 201, 265, (Reynolds), 229 350, 429, 452, 453 Mysteries of Udolpho, The (Radcliffe), Molloy (Beckett), 202 28, 117, 120, 124, 128, 228, Monk, The (Lewis), 28–9, 114, 117, 123–4 246, 312–13 Montague, Mary Wortley, 325 Mystery of a Hansom Cab, The (Hume), 233 Monthly Magazine, 22 Mystery of Edwin Drood, The (Dickens), 163, 300 488 Index

Nabokov, Vladimir, 145, 282 Negri, Antonio, 391 Pale Fire, 145 Netherland (O’Neill), 284–5 Nagel, Thomas, 150 Nersessian, Anahid, 24 Naipaul, V. S., 431, 457, 460, 461, 466–8 Never Let Me Go (Ishiguro), 83–4, 149, 222 A Bend in the River, 431, 466 New Atalantis, The (Manley), 96 The Enigma of Arrival, 466–7 New Bearings in English Poetry (Leavis), 257 Guerillas, 466 Newcomes, The (Thackeray), 258 A House for Mr. Biswas, 457, 466 Newell, Stephanie, 434–5 India: A Wounded Civilization, 466 New Grub Street (Gissing), 292, 300–301, 353, Nairn, Tom, 390, 391 417–18 narration, 14, 15–16, 25, 26, 28, 31, 43, Newman, John Henry, 41 100–101, 146, 149–53, 177–91, 198, New Organon, The (Bacon), 147 201, 222, 234–5, 260, 268–9, 283–4, newspapers and periodicals, 21, 22, 35, 108, 197 402, 421, 445 New Woman fiction, 233, 397 actants and existents, 178–9, 181, 187, 190, 211 Nicholas Nickleby (Dickens), 163, 299 analepsis, 181, 198 Nichols, Grace, 74 communication model, 178–80 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 278 diegesis, 178, 222, 234–5, 445 Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’, The (Conrad), 148 defining, 178–9 9/11, 71–3, 75–6, 80, 83, 207, 280, 281, focalization, 156–7, 159, 169, 183–4, 187, 283–4, 285 188, 190, 261, 283–4 Nineteen Eighty‐Four (Orwell), 77, 348, 349 free indirect discourse, 78, 167, 184, 188, No Orchids for Miss Blandish (Chase), 331–2 190, 284 Norris, Frank, 164 implied author, 179–80, 184–6, 187, 189–90, The Pit, 164 201, 268 North and South (Gaskell), 35, 40–41, 416 implied reader, 179–80 Northanger Abbey (Austen), 104, 110, 111, 117, narratees, 178–82, 185, 186, 189, 191 246, 278, 293, 314, 412 narrators, 15–16, 28, 31, 43, 146, 149–53, North British Review, 254 178–91 “Note on Fiction, A” (Rickword), 264 first‐person narrators, 14, 25, 26, 100–101, Nussbaum, Martha, 280, 282, 285 150, 180, 184–6, 199, 222, 261, 268, 421 unreliable narrators, 185–6, 190, 268–9, 402 Oath, The; or, The Buried Treasure (Rymer), 134, in non‐fiction, 177–8, 181–2 137, 139–41 pace of, 184–5 O’Brien, Flann, 202, 236, 385 paratext, 181–2, 200–202 At Swim‐Two‐Birds, 202, 236, 385 plot, 16, 19–21, 23, 27, 43–4, 95–6, 104–15, Obscene Publications Act, 45 138–40, 156–7, 220–221, 236, 244, 250, Odd Women, The (Gissing), 353 259, 263–5, 267–9, 275–6, 279–81, Odes (Collins), 3 329–30, 365–6, 377 Odyssey (Homer), 57, 59 prolepsis, 198 Old Curiosity Shop, The (Dickens), 132, 141, 248 psychonarration, 184–5 Old London Bridge (Rodwell), 344–5 as representation of events, 178–82 Oliphant, Margaret, 45–6, 134, 136–8, 141, 301, stream of consciousness narration, 57, 60, 147, 364, 413 152, 153, 202, 279, 352, 446 Miss Marjoribanks, 362, 364 Nashe, Thomas, 343 “Reading for the Millions”, 134, 136–8, 141 Nation and Narration (Bhabha), 390 Oliver Twist (Dickens), 163, 229, 248, 299, 331 Nation and Novel (Parrinder), 444 “On Art in Fiction”, (Bulwer‐Lytton), 247 nationality and the novel, 35–7, 41–2, 72, 74–9, On Beauty (Smith), 272, 281–6 120, 122, 211, 247, 306–8, 310–312, One Fine Day (Panter‐Downes), 421–3 314–18, 366–9, 373–85, 390–403, One Hundred Years of Solitude (Marquez), 466 426–36, 441–54, 457–69 O’Neill, Joseph, 284–5 “Naturalism on the Stage” (Zola), 147–8 Netherland, 284–5 Nature and Art (Inchbald), 29–30 On Form (Leighton), 194 Nava, Mica, 80 Ong, Walter, 459 Index 489

“On the Origin and Progress of Novel Writing” Pendennis (Thackeray), 249, 296–7, 395 (Barbaud), 195 penny serials, 132–42 On the Origin of Species (Darwin), 36, 123 People of the Black Mountains (Williams), 382 On the Study of Celtic Literature (Arnold), 382 Percy, Thomas, 105 Oranges are Not the Only Fruit (Winterson), 236 Perec, Georges, 410–412 Ordeal of Richard Feverel, The (Meredith), 35–6 Peregrine Pickle (Smollett), 220, 324 ordinariness see everyday life periodicals see newspapers and periodicals Orientalism (Said), 466 Perkin, Harold, 436 Oroonoko (Behn), 148 “Perpetual Peace” (Kant), 317 Orwell, George, 77, 257, 302, 341, 348, 349 Personal Record, A (Conrad), 448–9 Nineteen Eighty‐Four, 77, 348, 349 Persuasion (Austen), 109, 293, 314, 316, Ossian, 109, 375 318–19, 328 Other Victorians, The (Marcus), 45 Pesthouse, The (Crace), 82 Ouida, 329 Peter’s Letters to His Kinsfolk (Lockhart), 379 Our Mutual Friend (Dickens), 204, 253 Philander, Joakim, 152–3 Outside the House of Baal (Humphrey), 382 Vitulus Aureus: The Golden Calf, 152–3 Overbury, Thomas, 214, 217, 219 Phillips, Tom, 206–7 Owen Glendower (Powys), 381 A Humument, 206–7 Owenson, Sydney, 326, 377–9, 383 Philosophical Inquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the The Wild Irish Girl, 377–8 Sublime and Beautiful, A (Burke), 227–8 Owen, Wilfrid, 79 philosophical novel, 26–7, 30–31, 465 Oyeyemi, Helen, 431 Philosophie dans la boudoir, La (Sade), 23 The Icarus Girl, 431 picaresque, 19, 26, 96, 230, 243, 341 Pickwick Papers, The (Dickens), 230, 247–8, 299, Paine, Tom, 22, 24 328, 329 The Rights of Man, 22 Picture of Dorian Gray (Wilde), 118, 121, 122, Palace of the Peacock (Harris), 431 127, 128, 232, 234 Pale Fire (Nabokov), 145 Pinch, Adela, 28 Palmer, Beth, 231 Pit, The (Norris), 164 Palmerston, Lord, 387–8, 390, 398 Pitt, William, 21, 26, 30 Paltrow, Gwyneth, 163 Plato, 61–2, 243 Pamela (Richardson), 3, 4, 9, 11–13, 15, 92, 98, Poems and Ballads (Swinburne), 253 149, 205, 225, 244, 245, 306, 311–13, Poetics (Aristotle), 241 325, 429, 452 Polanski, Roman, 171 Panter‐Downes, Mollie, 421–3 Repulsion, 171 One Fine Day, 421–3 Political Justice (Godwin), 22, 26 Paradise Lost (Milton), 77 Political Unconscious, The (Jameson), 103, 276 paratext, 181–2, 200–202 Politics of Aesthetics, The (Rancière), 18 Parenti, Christian, 81 Pompey the Little, or, The Life and Adventures of a Park, Julie, 412 Lapdog (Coventry), 209 parody, 13, 38, 97, 100–101, 112, 117, 145, Pope, Alexander, 3, 292, 293 181, 188, 201, 202, 207, 277, 282, 364, The Dunciad, 3, 293 370, 451 Popular and mass‐market fiction, 89, 92, 94, 96, Parrinder, Patrick, 444 118–19, 132–42, 228–30, 248, 253–4, Nation and Novel, 444 263–4, 331–2, 433 Partisan Review, 465 audiences for, 135–7 Passage to India, A (Forster), 60–64, 66, 398 definitions of, 134–6 “Passage to India, A” (Whitman), 61 and expansion of literacy, 133 Past and Present (Carlyle), 138 formal features of, 137–41 Pathfinder, The (Cooper), 327 immoral effects of, 136 Patmore, Coventry, 45 and “improving” literature, 133 Paul, R. W., 163, 165 sales of, 133–4 Pearson, Karl, 329–30 serialization of, 133–42 Pelham (Bulwer‐Lytton), 217 social classes represented in, 134–5 490 Index

Porius (Powys), 381 Psycho (Hitchcock), 169 pornography, 13–15, 45, 334 publishers and publishing, 4, 22, 77, 133–5, 200, Portrait of a Lady, The (James), 219 291–304, 352, 380, 400–401, 428, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, A (Joyce), 60, 433–4 see also authorship; libraries; 269, 383–4 Mudie’s Select Library postcolonialism and postcolonial fiction, 50, 65, and censorship, 45, 56–7, 161 75–6, 80–81, 83–4, 378, 383–5, 393–4, and mass‐market fiction, 133–5, 141 427, 431–2, 434–5, 450, 457, 464–6, 469 titles published 1700–1750, 4 Postmodern Condition, The (Lyotard), 155 titles published 1770–1800, 22 postmodernism and postmodern fiction, 75, 144, and world literature, 433–4 155, 235–6, 272, 275–7, 280, 283, 285, Pye, Henry, 243 345, 385, 465–6 Pynchon, Thomas, 155, 467 Power of Sympathy, The (Brown), 310 The Crying of Lot 49, 155 Powys, John Cowper, 381–2 Owen Glendower, 381 Queen, Ellery, 345 Porius, 381 Practical Criticism (Richards), 264 race and racial identity, 20, 52–3, 69, 74–6, Practice of Everyday Life, The (Certeau), 410 79–80, 104, 122–3, 125, 379, 384, Pratchett, Terry, 349, 350, 352 389–90, 396, 401–2, 431, 436, 447, Guards! Guards! 349, 352 464, 467 Pratt, Mary Louise, 377 Radcliffe, Ann, 28, 103, 117, 120, 124, 128, Prest, Thomas Prescott, 134, 137, 139 145, 228, 246, 311–13, 319, 324 Ada, the Betrayed, 134 The Italian, 28 Ela, the Outcast, 134, 138 The Mysteries of Udolpho, 28, 117, 120, 124, Geraldine; or, The Secret Assassins of the Old Stone 128, 228, 246, 312–13 Cross, 134, 137–41 The Romance of the Forest, 28 Varney the Vampire, 134, 229 Radway, Janice, 137–8 Price, Leah, 225, 325, 433–4 Ragged‐Trousered Philanthropists, The (Tressell), 135 Pride and Prejudice (Austen), 111, 293, 314–16, Rainey, Lawrence, 332 318, 428 Rancière, Jacques, 18, 19, 26, 30 Prime Minister, The (Trollope), 395–6, 398 Ransom, John Crowe, 265 Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The (Spark), 212 “The Understanding of Fiction”, 265 Primitive Culture (Tylor), 369–70 Raven, James, 22, 293 Prince, Gerald, 178 readers and reading see also moral instruction and Princess Casamassima, The (James), 218, 221–2 didacticism Princess of Thule, The (Black), 380 absorption, 327–8, 360, 362–3 Principles of Literary Criticism (Richards), 257, 264 book clubs, 333–4 Prison‐House of Language, The (Jameson), 273 conditions necessary for reading, 321–2 Pritchett, V. S., 302 empathy, 39, 73, 83–4, 89, 91–2, 95, 210, Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, 332, 446 The (Hogg), 126 “frivolous” reading, 324–6, 330–332 probability and plausibility in fictional narrative, interrupted reading, 138–40 4, 10–11, 19, 31, 37, 52–3, 58, 89–91, literacy, 5, 133, 161, 317, 322, 330–333 96, 150–152, 182, 219–20, 241–4, reading aloud, 5, 178, 321, 444 245–6, 248, 313, 413 receptive fallacy, 135 Progress of Romance, The (Reeve), 105, 241, 245 relation to affect and emotion, 225–37, 323–4 Propp, Vladimir, 274, 276 semi‐detachment, 363–4, 366–70 Proust, Marcel, 194, 198, 269, 385, 465 and social class, 323, 330–331 In Search of Lost Time, 194, 465 sympathy, 25–6, 39–40, 42, 73, 80, 91–2, 149, Swann’s Way, 198 189–90, 280, 308, 313, 414–15, 422 Providence and providential narratives, 5, 95–6, vicarious experience, 3–4, 11, 92, 227–8, 234 99, 204–5, 243 Read, Herbert, 303 Provincial Lady in London, The (Delafield), 354–6 “Reading for the Millions” (Oliphant), 134, Provost, The (Galt), 380 136–8, 141 Index 491

Reading for the Plot (Brooks), 276 Rignall, John, 394 realism, 6, 10, 12, 35–47, 59, 60, 89–101, Riley, Linda, 113 117–19, 129, 144–5, 147–8, 205, Rise of the Novel, The (Watt), 267, 306, 451 210–211, 216–17, 219–20, 247–54, 263, River of Smoke (Ghosh), 461 267, 272–7, 279–83, 285–6, 307, 311, Rivers, W. H. R., 236 363, 369, 380, 382, 384, 393–7, 412–13, Robbe‐Grillet, Alain, 148, 169–70 417, 420, 442–7, 452 Robbins, Bruce, 391, 393, 431 Realistic Imagination, The (Levine), 397 Feeling Global, 393 Rear Window (Hitchcock), 168–9, 171 Robertson, Leslie, 108 Rebellion of 1857, 36, 63, 123, 389, 395, 397, 400 Robespierre, Maximilien, 27 Red and the Black, The (Stendhal), 131, 459, 465 Robinson Crusoe (Defoe), 4, 92, 94–6, 148, 149, 177, Reed, Henry, 303 201, 225, 243, 412, 429–32, 441–2, 449–53 Reeve, Clara, 105, 109, 112, 241, 244, 245 Rob Roy (Scott), 449 The Progress of Romance, 105, 241, 245 Roderick Random (Smollett), 3, 7–8, 10, 14, 15, Reflections on the Revolution in France (Burke), 22 91, 242, 326 Reitz, Caroline, 436 Rodowick, D. N., 170, 171 Regeneration Trilogy (Barker), 79, 236–7 Rodwell, George Herbert, 344–5 Remainder (McCarthy), 285–6 Old London Bridge, 344–5 Remains of the Day, The (Ishiguro), 370 romance (genre), 4–5, 19, 89–90, 92, 99, Rembrandt, 281–4 103–15, 197, 204, 233, 241–5, 247, Rendall, Ruth, 346 252–3, 275–6, 308, 311, 317, 343–4, Repton, Humphry, 326 378–82, 434, 442–3, 450, 459 Repulsion (Polanski), 171 Romance of the Forest, The (Radcliffe), 28 Revaluation (Leavis), 257 Romola (Eliot), 164 Reynolds, G. W. M., 132–4, 136, 229, 396 Rose, Jonathan, 136, 331 The Mysteries of London, 132, 229 Rose, Mark, 292 The Mysteries of the Court of London, 229 Rose, Nikolas, 435 Reynolds, John Hamilton, 109 Rosenman, Ellen Bayuk, 136 Rhetoric of Fiction, The (Booth), 257, 268–9 Rossetti, Christina, 118 Rhys, Jean, 50, 68–70, 431 “Goblin Market”, 118, 121, 129 Voyage in the Dark, 50, 68–70 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 396 Wide Sargasso Sea, 431 Rousseau, Jean‐Jacques, 21, 24, 29, 449, 451 Richards, I. A., 257, 264 Roxana (Defoe), 95, 96, 242–3, 344, 354, 356 Principles of Literary Criticism, 257, 264 Rowlandson, Mary, 429 Practical Criticism, 264 Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Richardson, Alan, 114 Mary Rowlandson, 429 Richardson, Dorothy, 78 Rowling, J. K., 76–8, 346 Richardson, Samuel, 3, 4, 9, 18, 57, 91–2, 96, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, 76–7 98–100, 149, 150, 205, 216–19, 221, Rowson, Susannah, 310, 317 244, 267, 278, 292, 306, 307, 311–14, Charlotte Temple, 317 319, 325, 354, 355, 429, 443, 452 Rushdie, Salman, 64, 74, 75, 236, 237, 385, 427, Clarissa, 3, 6–11, 14–16, 23–4, 91–2, 98–100, 431, 457, 460, 461, 463, 466–70 205, 216, 218–19, 245, 325–7, 354, Joseph Anton, 469 355, 452 Midnight’s Children, 236, 431, 457, 463, 466–7 Pamela, 3, 4, 9, 11–13, 15, 92, 98, 149, 205, The Satanic Verses, 75–6, 385, 427, 466, 467–9 225, 244, 245, 306, 311–13, 325, 429, 452 Shame, 236 Sir Charles Grandison, 205, 307, 325 Ruskin, John, 36, 250, 251 Rickword, C. H., 264 Unto This Last, 36 “A Note on Fiction”, 264 Ruth (Gaskell), 44, 329 Ricouer, Paul, 278 Rymer, James Malcolm, 134, 136, 139 Riddley Walker (Hoban), 82 Ada, the Betrayed, 134 Ridge, William Pett, 419 Ela, the Outcast, 134, 138 Riffaterre, Michael, 90 The Oath; or, The Buried Treasure, 134, 137, Rights of Man, The (Paine), 22 139–41 492 Index

Sabor, Peter, 112 Ivanhoe, 294, 328, 379, 431, 444, 445 Sacred Fount, The (James), 167–8 The Lay of the Last Minstrel, 450 Sacred Wood, The (Eliot), 257 Lives of the Novelists, 314 Said, Edward, 315, 466 Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, 375 Orientalism, 466 Rob Roy, 449 Saintsbury, George, 257 Waverley, 38, 209–10, 212, 294, 377, 378–80, The English Novel, 257 442–5, 449–50 Sala, George Augustus, 399–400 Scrutiny, 264–7 “The Great Circumbendibus”, 399–400, 402 Seacole, Mary, 397 Salomé (Wilde), 118, 121, 123–5, 127 The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Sand, George, 248, 395 Lands, 397 Sanford, Elizabeth Poole, 109 Sea of Poppies (Ghosh), 431–2, 461 Woman, in Her Social and Domestic Character, 109 Seasons, The (Thomson), 3 Sansay, Leonore, 310 Secresy; or, The Ruin in the Rock (Fenwick), 27 Secret History, 310 Secret History (Sansay), 310 Saporta, Marc, 156 Secret History of Queen Zarah, The (Manley), 242 Composition no. 1, 156 Sedan, The, 151–2 Sassoon, Sigfried, 79, 236–7 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 226 Satanic Verses, The (Rushdie), 75–6, 385, 427, Seditious Meetings Act, 21 466–9 Seeley, J. R., 389 satire, 8, 11–13, 97, 104–5, 112–14, 275, 353 The Expansion of England, 389 Sartre, Jean‐Paul, 411 Seidel, Michael, 148 Saturday (McEwan), 73–4, 76, 83, 152, 421, Selbourne (White), 367 437–8 Select Collection of Novels, A (Croxall), 242 Saunders, John, 295–6 Self, Will, 82–3 de Saussure, Ferdinand, 273–4 The Book of Dave, 82–3 Savile, Gertrude, 324, 331, 334 Selvon, Sam, 74, 79, 357, 427 Saville, Julia, 397 The Lonely Londoners, 74, 79, 357, 427 Sayers, Dorothy, 346, 356 Selznich, David, 163, 164 scandal chronicle, 96 Semi‐Detached House, The (Eden), 364 Scarlet Letter, The (Hawthorne), 164 sensation fiction, 35, 36, 45–6, 122, 124, 226, Scenes from Provincial Life (Cooper), 370 230–231, 233, 244, 396, 412–14, 448 Scenes of Clerical Life (Eliot), 164, 413–15 Sense and Sensibility (Austen), 30, 186–91, 293, scenic method see dramatic method 314, 318, 430 Scholes, Robert, 273–4 Sense of the Past, The (James), 167 Structuralism in Literature, 273 Senses of Walden, The (Cavell), 410 school novels, 76–8 sentimental fiction, 19, 23, 26, 27, 100–101, 227–9 Schorer, Mark, 265 Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy, A “Technique as Discovery”, 265 (Sterne), 100, 145, 216 Schreiner, Olive, 42, 397 Sentimental Magazine, 227–8 The Story of an African Farm, 397 serial publication, 35, 45, 133–42, 145–6, Schulz, Bruno, 199–200 182–3, 201, 248, 254, 300, 398, 427 The Street of Crocodiles, 199–200 Seshagiri, Urmila, 447 Scoop (Waugh), 353 Seth, Vikram, 434 Scotland and Scottish literature, 5–6, 21, 108, A Suitable Boy, 434 126, 236, 374–6, 378–82, 389, 435, Seward, Anna, 326 442–5, 447, 450, 453, 459 Sewell, Anna, 231 Scott, Walter, 18, 38, 39, 106–7, 114, 181, Black Beauty, 231 209–10, 222, 247–8, 258, 261–2, 266, sexual desire, representation of, 15, 28, 45–7, 292, 294–5, 300, 303, 308–11, 314–17, 52–3, 55, 97–101, 121–2, 127, 129, 206, 326–7, 329, 334, 345, 366, 369, 375–80, 232–4, 394, 418, 465 382, 383, 431, 442–50, 459 sexual identity, 52–3, 66–7, 233 The Antiquary, 448 sex work and prostitution, 13–15, 26, 31, 58, The Bride of Lammermoor, 449 69, 149 Index 493

Shaftesbury, Lord, 227 Smollett, Tobias, 3, 5, 24, 91, 96, 145, 220, 242, Shail, Andrew, 164, 165 311, 319, 324, 326, 341, 353 Shakespeare, William, 57, 69, 118, 120, 128, Humphry Clinker, 353 247, 254, 257, 311, 458, 459, 461–3 Peregrine Pickle, 220, 324 Cymbeline, 69 Roderick Random, 3, 7–8, 10, 14, 15, 91, Hamlet, 118, 222–3, 458 242, 326 Macbeth, 462 social problem fiction, 251, 365 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 128 Society in America (Martineau), 296 The Tempest, 461 “Sociological Aesthetics” (Simmel), 418 Shame (Rushdie), 236 Sollers, Philippe, 276 Shamela (Fielding), 11–12 Sons and Lovers (Lawrence), 45, 370, 418 Sharpe, Lancelot, 326 Southam, B.C., 112 Shaviro, Steve, 170 Southey, Robert, 293 Shaw, Harry, 38, 39 Spacks, Patricia Meyer, 19 She (Haggard), 232, 234 Spanish Tragedy, The (Kyd), 118 Shelley, Mary, 118, 148, 201 Spark, Muriel, 212 Frankenstein, 118, 120–122, 128, 130–131, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, 212 148, 182, 201 Spectator, 110, 113 Shelley, Percy, 109 Spencer, Herbert, 415 Sheridan, Frances, 100 Spenser, Edmund, 311 Memoirs of Miss Sidney Biddulph, 100 Spoils of Poynton, The (James), 417 Shirley (Brontë), 35, 38, 367 Steedman, Carolyn, 114, 416 Shklovsky, Victor, 148, 149, 193–5, 274 Steele, Richard, 356 Shrinking Island, A (Esty), 448 Steinbeck, John, 333 Silas Marner (Eliot), 164 Stendhal, 131, 147, 459, 465 silver fork novels, 38 The Red and the Black, 131, 459, 465 Simmel, Georg, 411, 418 Stephen, James Fitzjames, 250–251 “Sociological Aesthetics”, 418 Stephen, Leslie, 251, 257 Simple Story, A (Inchbald), 18 George Eliot, 257 Sir Charles Grandison (Richardson), 205, Stephenson, Robert, 398 307, 325 Sterne, Laurence, 24, 100–101, 145, 148, 150, Siskin, Clifford, 104, 107–8, 109 154, 192–5, 202, 214, 216, 220, 225, Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., The 227, 256, 259, 266, 311 (Irving), 230 A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy, Sketches by Boz (Dickens), 299 100, 145 slavery and slave trade, 21, 69, 94, 96, 155, 296, Tristram Shandy, 100–101, 145, 153, 315, 389, 396, 461 192–4, 196, 201, 202, 222, 246, Small Island (Levy), 79–80, 333, 427 256, 325 Small World (Lodge), 272, 275–7 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 42, 121, 127, Smiles, Samuel, 415 232–3, 253–4, 294, 331, 346, 362, Smith, Adam, 298, 310, 429 380, 434 Smith, Alexander McCall, 225 Catriona, 380 Smith, Charlotte, 27, 31 “A Humble Remonstrance”, 253–4 Desmond, 31 Kidnapped, 380 Marchmont, 27 The Master of Ballantrae, 380 The Old Manor House, 27 Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 121–2, Smith, G. A., 163, 167, 171–2 127–9, 232–3, 294, 346 Grandma’s Reading Glass, 167 Treaure Island, 232, 331 A View Through a Telescope, 167 Weir of Hermiston, 380 Smith, Zadie, 74–6, 237, 272, 281–6, 357, 457 Stewart, Garrett, 159 Changing My Mind, 285–6 Stewart, James, 168 “Love, actually”, 282–3 Stewart, Matt, 146 On Beauty, 272, 281–6 The French Revolution: A Novel, 146 White Teeth, 74–6, 357 Stewart, Susan, 418 494 Index

Stoker, Bram, 118, 126, 201, 232, 234, 342, 347, Pendennis, 249, 296–7, 395 396, 448 Vanity Fair, 35, 46, 163, 164, 249, 297, 394 Dracula, 118, 120–128, 182, 201, 232, 234, Thatcher, Margaret, 74, 78, 79 347, 356, 362, 396, 441, 448 theater see drama “Story of a Feather, The” (Jerrold), 416 Thelwall, John, 21 Story of an African Farm, The (Schreiner), 397 Theophrastus of Eresus, 217–18 Story of the Stone, The, 432 theory of the novel see also experimental novel; Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Stevenson), moral instruction and didacticism; readers 121–2, 127–9, 232–3, 346 and reading Street of Crocodiles, The (Schulz), 199–200 affect and emotion, 3–4, 11, 28, 92, 94–5, String of Pearls, The, 132 117, 177, 225–37, 246, 262, 342, 349, Structuralism in Literature (Scholes), 273 351–2, 377–8, 392–3, 420, 437–8 Structuralist Poetics (Culler), 273–4 characters, 10–13, 19, 23, 54, 58–60, 93, 96, Structure of the Novel, The (Muir), 256, 257, 263, 463 178–9, 209–23 Stuart, Charles Edward (King James III), 5–6, 41 form, 20–21, 31, 35, 46–7, 56–8, 148, Study in Scarlet, A (Doyle), 347 192–207, 247, 249–50, 252–4, 258–69, Sue, Eugène, 229, 396 273–4, 276–80, 363–4 Les Mystères de Paris, 229 mimesis, 20–21, 38, 61–2, 129, 147–8, Suitable Boy, A (Seth), 434 160–161, 178, 211–13, 217, 243, 247, Summer Will Show (Warner), 78 268, 370, 447, 463 “Surgery for the Novel—or a Bomb” (Lawrence), 260 narration, 14–16, 25, 26, 28, 31, 43, 100–101, Swann’s Way (Proust), 198 146, 149–53, 177–91, 198, 201, 222, Swift, Jonathan, 92, 145, 148, 325 234–5, 260, 268–9, 283–4, 402, 421, 445 Gulliver’s Travels, 92, 145, 148, 325 probability and plausibility, 4, 10–11, 19, 31, A Tale of a Tub, 145 37, 52–3, 58, 89–91, 96, 150–152, 182, Swinburne, Algernon, 253, 396–7 219–20, 241–6, 248, 313, 413 Poems and Ballads, 253 realism, 6, 10, 12, 35–47, 59, 60, 89–101, “To Walt Whitman in America”, 397 117–19, 129, 144–5, 147–8, 205, Symons, Julian, 345, 346 210–211, 216–17, 219–20, 247–54, 263, S/Z (Barthes), 210–211 267, 272–7, 279–83, 285–6, 307, 311, 363, 369, 380, 382, 384, 393–7, 412–13, Tagore, Rabindranath, 464 417, 420, 442–7, 452 Tale of a Tub, A (Swift), 145 relation of novel to romance, 89–90, 103, Tale of the Times, A (West), 30 105–7, 197, 204, 241–5, 252–3, 276, Tale of Two Cities, A (Dickens), 35, 181, 395 308, 311 Tales of All Countries (Trollope), 398, 400, 401 Theory of the Novel, The (Lukács), 463 Tales of the O’Hara Family (Banim), 380 These Waves of Girls (Fisher), 146 Tancred (Disraeli), 249 Things as They Are, or The Adventures of Caleb Tate, Allen, 265 Williams (Godwin), 18, 26–7, 31, 250 “Techniques of Fiction”, 265 Things Fall Apart (Achebe), 334 “Technique as Discovery” (Schorer), 265 Thiong’o, Ngũgı ̃ wa, 431 “Techniques of Fiction” (Tate), 265 Thirlwall, Connop, 327 Tenant of Wildfell Hall, The (Brontë), 249 Thompson, E. P., 78, 97, 464–5 Tennenhouse, Leonard, 429, 437 The Making of the English Working Class, 464–5 Tenniel, John, 163 Whigs and Hunters, 97 Tennyson, Alfred, 400 Thomson, James, 3 “Ulysses”, 400 Thoreau, Henry David, 410 Ternan, Ellen, 300 Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, The (Mitchell), 427 Tess of the D’Urbervilles (Hardy), 368 1649 (Lindsay), 78 Tempest, The (Shakespeare), 461 Three Men in a Boat (Jerome), 230 Thackeray, William, 35, 36, 46, 163, 164, 205, Three Musketeers, The (Dumas), 258 249–52, 258, 259, 261–3, 268, 293, Through Other Continents (Dimock), 393 296–7, 341, 393, 395 Through the Looking‐Glass (Carroll), 163 Henry Esmond, 35, 37, 38, 41, 44, 46 Tillotson, Kathleen, 39 The Newcomes, 258 Time Machine, The (Wells), 81–2, 148–9, 231–2 Index 495

Time’s Arrow (Amis), 156 The Warden, 35, 361, 364–5 Tin Drum, The (Grass), 466–7 The Way We Live Now, 295, 397 To the Lighthouse (Woolf), 153, 264, 418, Trotter, David, 164 420–421, 446–8, 453 Trumpener, Katie, 375, 380, 383, 450 “To Walt Whitman in America” (Swinburne), 397 Turner, J. M. W., 351 Todorov, Tzvetan, 27–8 Turn of the Screw, The (James), 186 Toer, Pramoedya Ananta, 449 Twain, Mark, 164, 457, 459 Tolkein, J. R. R., 77 Life on the Mississippi, 459 The Lord of the Rings, 77 Twilight films, 170 Tolstoy, Leo, 170, 205, 258, 260–262, 269, Two on a Tower (Hardy), 367 365–6, 395, 396 Tyler, Royall, 310, 317 Anna Karenina, 170, 365–6, 396 The Algerine Captive, 310 War and Peace, 258, 262 Tylor, Edward, 369–70 Tom Burke of Ours (Lever), 380 Primitive Culture, 369–70 Tom Jones (Fielding), 4, 9, 10, 15–16, 91, 92, 97–100, 109, 111, 149, 153–4, 181–2, Ugly Americans, 468 194, 197, 201, 204, 244, 256, 267, 319, Ulysses (Joyce), 45, 50, 54, 56–61, 64, 66, 147, 325, 326, 412, 452 153, 157, 165, 195, 199, 202, 235, Tomkins, Silvan, 226 263–6, 307, 332, 382, 421, 434 Tono‐Bungay (Wells), 265 “Ulysses” (Tennyson), 400 Tooke, John Horne, 21 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe), 164 “Towards a Poetics of Fiction: An Approach “Understanding of Fiction, The” (Ransom), 265 through Structure” (Bradbury), 273 Unfortunates, The (Johnson), 199 Tragic Muse, The (James), 258 Union of Ethical Societies, 61 Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry (Carleton), 380 “Unknown Public, The” (Collins), 137 travel narrative, 96, 182, 295, 388, 397, Unto This Last (Ruskin), 36 399–402, 466 Untouchable (Anand), 50, 56, 64–6 Treasonable Practices Act, 21 Treasure Island (Stevenson), 232, 331 Valmouth (Firbank), 50, 52–3 Treatise of Human Nature, A (Hume), 3, 4 Van Ghent, Dorothy, 257, 266 Tree of Codes (Foer), 146, 199–200 “Dickens’s World: The View from Todgers’s”, 266 Trench, Richard, 369–70 The English Novel: Form and Function, 266 Tressell, Robert, 135 Vanity Fair (Thackeray), 35, 46, 163, 164, 249, The Ragged‐Trousered Philanthropists, 135 297, 394 Trilby (du Maurier), 163, 234 Vanity of Human Wishes, The (Johnson), 3 Trilling, Lionel, 257, 266, 280 van Leeuwenhoek, Antonie, 162 Matthew Arnold, 257 Varney the Vampire (Prest), 134, 229 Tristram Shandy (Sterne), 100–101, 145, 154, Vermeule, Blakey, 15, 212 192–4, 196, 201, 202, 222, 246, 256, 325 Verne, Jules, 399 Trollope, Anthony, 35, 37, 40, 229, 249, 251–3, Vertigo (Hitchcock), 168–9 295, 301, 329, 361, 364–6, 369, 381, Vertov, Dziga, 160 393–8, 400–403, 417 Victims of Prejudice (Hays), 25 Autobiography, 253, 400–401, 417 Victorian Geopolitical Aesthetic, The (Goodlad), 394 Barchester Towers, 35, 37, 41, 45–7, 365, 394 View Through a Telescope, A (Smith), 167 Castle Richmond, 381 Villette (Brontë), 35, 37, 41, 44, 329, 383 Doctor Thorne, 35, 400 Vindication of the Rights of Men, A (Wollstonecraft), 22 The Eustace Diamonds, 397, 401 Vindication of the Rights of Women, A Framley Parsonage, 401 (Wollstonecraft), 21, 23, 25 “George Walker at Suez”, 400–403 Virgil, 57, 227 He Knew He Was Right, 395 “Visit to the Suez Canal, A” (Wyllie), 387–8, “John Bull on the Guadalquivir”, 401 398–402 The Kellys and the O’Kellys, 381 “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” The Macdermots of Ballycloran, 381 (Mulvey), 169 The Prime Minister, 395–6, 398 Viswanathan, Guari, 431, 461 Tales of All Countries, 398, 400, 401 Vitulus Aureus: The Golden Calf (Philander), 152–3 496 Index

Vivre sa vie (Godard), 171 West, Jane, 29, 30 von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 58, 458–9, 462, 469 A Gossip’s Story, 30 Faust, 58 A Tale of the Times, 30 Goetz von Berlichingen, 459 West, Nathanael, 164 Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 458 The Day of the Locust, 164 Voyage in the Dark (Rhys), 50, 68–70 West, Rebecca, 257 Voyage Out, The (Woolf), 53–4, 68, 420, 448 West, Richard, 325 Voyeurs, The (Bell), 170–172 We, the People of Europe? (Balibar), 391 Vranjes, Vlasta, 443, 447 What is World Literature? (Damrosch), 457–8 What Maisie Knew (James), 162 Wales and Welsh literature, 374–5, 378, Wheatstone, Sir Charles, 162 381–2, 453 When I’m Old (Bell), 171 Walking in the Shade (Lessing), 464 When We Were Orphans (Ishiguro), 431, 438 Walkowitz, Rebecca, 449 Whigs and Hunters (Thompson), 97 Walpole, Horace, 103, 114, 118, 126, 182, White, Gilbert, 367 311–13, 319, 458 Selbourne, 367 The Castle of Otranto, 114, 118, 122, 123, 182, White Teeth (Smith), 74–6, 357 311–13, 324, 458 Whitman, Walt, 61, 397 Walters, Minette, 346 “A Passage to India”, 61 War and Peace (Tolstoy), 258, 262 Wicke, Jennifer, 434 Warden, The (Trollope), 35, 361, 364–5 Wide Sargasso Sea (Rhys), 431 Ware, Chris, 145 Wild Irish Boy, The (Maturin), 378 Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, 145 Wild Irish Girl, The (Owenson), 377–8 Warhol, Robyn, 180 Wilde, Oscar, 52, 53, 57, 117, 118, 127, Warner, Sylvia Townsend, 78 131, 232 Summer Will Show, 78 “The Birthday of the Infanta”, 131 Warner, William, 96 The Importance of Being Earnest, 53 War of Austrian Succession, 5 The Picture of Dorian Gray, 118, 121, 122, 127, War of Jenkins’ Ear, 5, 8 232, 234 War of the Worlds, The (Wells), 231 Salomé, 118, 121, 123–5, 127 Waters, Sarah, 237, 413 Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (Goethe), 458 The Little Stranger, 413 Williams, David, 293–4 Watt, Ian, 18, 38, 93, 95, 103–4, 106, 108, 147, Williams, Raymond, 40, 78, 382 257, 267, 275, 306–8, 369, 429–30, 443, People of the Black Mountains, 382 451, 452 Wilson, Edmund, 265–6 The Rise of the Novel, 267, 306, 451 The Wound and the Bow, 265–6 Waugh, Evelyn, 256, 341, 353 Wilson, Woodrow, 390 Scoop, 353 Wimsatt, W. K., 234 Waverley (Scott), 38, 209–10, 212, 377, 378–80, Winterson, Jeanette, 236, 237 442–5, 449–50 Oranges are Not the Only Fruit, 236 Waves, The (Woolf), 194, 202, 263, 421 Wise Virgins, The (Woolf), 419, 420 Way We Live Now, The (Trollope), 295, 397 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 215–16 Weber, Max, 234, 457 Brown and Blue Books, 215–16 Webster, Hannah, 310 Wives and Daughters (Gaskell), 364, 367 The Coquette, 310 Wodehouse, P. G., 230, 234, 346 Weir of Hermiston (Stevenson), 380 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 21, 22–6, 30, 31, 130 Weird English (Ch’ien), 157 Maria; or, The Wrongs of Women, 26, 31 Wells, H. G., 81–2, 148, 164–5, 231–2, 257–60, A Vindication of the Rights of Men, 22 262, 265–6, 274 A Vindication of the Rights of Women, 21, 23, 25 Boon, 259 Woman, in Her Social and Domestic Character “The Contemporary Novel”, 259 (Sanford), 109 The Island of Doctor Moreau, 82, 83 Woman in White, The (Collins), 35, 36, 46, 201 The Time Machine, 81–2, 148–9 Woman Who Did, The (Allen), 233 Tono‐Bungay, 265 Women in Love (Lawrence), 235 The War of the Worlds, 231 Women of England, The (Ellis), 415 Index 497

Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands, World War I, 51, 52, 54–5, 60, 67–8, 79, 118, The (Seacole), 397 122, 187, 236 Wood, Mrs. Henry, 230, 231 World War II, 51, 52, 77–80, 237, 279–81 Wood, Sir Charles, 389 Wound and the Bow, The (Wilson), 265–6 Woolf, Leonard, 419, 420 Wright, Patrick, 77–9 The Wise Virgins, 419, 420 Wuthering Heights (Bronte), 164, 186, 201, Woolf, Virginia, 42, 50, 53–6, 60, 61, 66–8, 78, 215–16, 222, 249, 264–6 147–9, 153, 156, 164–5, 172, 194, Wyllie, John William Shaw, 387–8, 398–402 201–4, 212, 221, 235, 257, 258, “A Visit to the Suez Canal”, 387–8, 398–402 260–265, 269, 274, 279, 280, 341, 350, Wyndham, John, 348–9 414, 418–22, 430, 434, 446–50, 453, The Day of the Triffids, 348–9 463, 464, 466 Between the Acts, 279, 421 Years, The (Woolf), 421 The Common Reader, 212, 264 Yeast (Kingsley), 35 Jacob’s Room, 54–6 Yeats, William Butler, 118, 381 To the Lighthouse, 153, 264, 418, 420–421, “Younger Generation, The” (James), 258, 259 446–8, 453 Young, G. M., 34 “Modern Fiction”, 262–3 Young, Robert, 127 “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown”, 42, 262–3, 466 Young Visiters, The (Ashford), 112 Mrs. Dalloway, 54–56, 66–9, 147, 153, 194, 202, 221, 235, 350, 419–20, 422, 430, Zangwill, Israel, 233, 357 446, 447, 453 Children of the Ghetto, 357 The Voyage Out, 53–4, 68, 420, 448 Merely Mary Ann, 233 The Waves, 194, 202, 263, 421 Žižek, Slavoj, 169, 285 The Years, 421 Zola, Émile, 45, 147–8, 152, 253, 258, Wordsworth, William, 107, 246 394, 417 “Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical The Experimental Novel, 147–8 Reproduction, The” (Benjamin), 165 “Naturalism on the Stage”, 147–8 WILEY END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT Go to www.wiley.com/go/eula to access Wiley’s ebook EULA.