Plotting Friendship: Male Bonds in Early Nineteenth-Century British Fiction
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Plotting Friendship: Male Bonds in Early Nineteenth-Century British Fiction by LaMont L Egle A dissertation in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (English Language and Literature) in the University of Michigan 2009 Doctoral Committee: Professor Martha J. Vicinus, Chair Associate Professor Daniel S. Hack Associate Professor Adela N. Pinch Associate Professor Kali A. K. Israel © LaMont L Egle 2009 To Winifred Johnson ii Acknowledgments I could not have finished this project without the encouragement and support of many people. I want to thank my dissertation committee for their thoughtful input on my chapters, and especially my chair, Martha Vicinus, for her patience and honesty. The project benefited from several generous fellowships provided by the Department of English Language and Literature, Rackham Graduate School, and the Institute for Research on Women and Gender. Thank you to the Nineteenth-Century Forum, who carefully read a chapter in progress and helped to shape its ideas. I want to thank Alzada Tipton, my undergraduate advisor, who turned me on to literary analysis, as well as Kristina Deffenbacher, Mark Olson, and Veena Deo, who, by simply going about their everyday lives, convinced me that I really did want to be a teacher. My longtime friends Carrie Lewis and Renee Roels have supported me no matter what. Mark Tennessen many times has put a free roof over my head. Thank you to those people in my cohort (and my dearest friend Christopher Madson), who still have the ability to make me laugh until my sides hurt. My mom and dad unconditionally helped to support a thirty-five-year old son who wanted to go back to school. And finally, my grandmother, Winifred Johnson, who was always my biggest cheerleader – I hope you would have be proud. iii Table of Contents Dedication........................................................................................................................ ii Acknowledgments........................................................................................................... iii Illustrations .......................................................................................................................v Abstract........................................................................................................................... vi Introduction.......................................................................................................................1 Chapter One. Friend or Fiend in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein......................................24 Chapter Two. Picturing Friends in Pierce Egan’s Life in London ..................................69 Chapter Three. Mixing Genres in Edward Bulwer Lytton’s Paul Clifford and William Ainsworth’s Jack Sheppard ...........................................110 Chapter Four. Finding Friends in Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist...............................154 Conclusion ....................................................................................................................198 Works Cited ..................................................................................................................204 iv Illustrations 2.1 Detail from frontispiece to Life in London .........................................................75 2.2 Tom and Jerry Larking at a Masquerade Supper, at the Opera House........................................................................................................83 2.3 Highest Life in London. Tom & Jerry “Sporting a Toe” among the Corinthians, at Almacks in the West.................................................91 2.4 An Introduction. Gay Moments of Logic, Jerry, Tom and Corinthian Kate ...........................................................................................97 2.5 Lowest “Life in London”. Tom, Jerry and Logic among the Unsophisticated Sons and Daughters of Nature at “All Max” in the East....................................................................................100 2.6 The Wedding Day – All Happiness at Hawthorne Hall – Jerry and Mary Rosebud United ............................................................108 3.1 Jack Visits His Mother in Bedlam ....................................................................119 3.2 The Vindictiveness of Jack Sheppard...............................................................121 3.3 The Audacity of Jack Sheppard ........................................................................126 4.1 Oliver Plucks Up a Spirit ..................................................................................164 4.2 Oliver Introduced to the Respectable Old Gentleman ......................................164 4.3 Master Bates Explains a Professional Technicality..........................................172 4.4 Rose Maylie and Oliver (the hearth plate)........................................................189 4.5 Rose Maylie and Oliver (the Agnes plate)........................................................189 5.1 The Drunkard’s Children. Plate III. ..................................................................201 v Abstract “Plotting Friendship: Male Bonds in Early Nineteenth-Century British Fiction” examines the prevalence of stories about male friendship and all-male community in British popular fiction written in the early nineteenth century. Writers in an exploding literary market created hybrid genres that imitated existing ones, but mixed generic attributes. Most of these novels remain critically neglected because of their so-called undeveloped styles and awkward mixed forms. This dissertation examines forgotten works like Life in London, Finish to Life, Paul Clifford, and Jack Sheppard to provide a fuller picture of the culture, the literary marketplace, and readers’ desires, but it also reads afresh canonized novels like Frankenstein and Oliver Twist. The illustrations by George and Robert Cruikshank bring whole other narratives of male friendship; while they ostensibly confirm the same stories, more often than not the visual possesses its own point of view. The illustrations are valuable for tracing what can and cannot be shown visually, as opposed to verbally. Each chapter traces historically specific types of male protagonists who prioritize friendship over marriage. Each features a different kind of all-male triangle. In Chapter One, it structures a cautionary tale of male friends who love too deeply. In Chapter Two, we find a celebrated trio who instruct young male readers urban life. Chapter Three shows us how authors used all-male triangles to invoke images of rogue story traditions within Regency settings. In Chapter Four, elderly bachelors rescue and adopt a workhouse orphan. The wide variety of homosociality and non- vi connubial heterosexuality represented in these novels, considered in conjunction with their immediate popularity, and their redistribution in subsequent decades, exposes the critical limitations of historical and sexual models based on trajectories of increasing homosocial marginalization and homosexual repression and. Once we recognize the influence of these now mostly forgotten novels as sites for explorations of male homosociality in the period, we can also begin to consider how their novelistic conventions carried over into later literatures. vii Introduction This dissertation is about writers who in the early nineteenth century, in a turbulent and unregulated literary market, filled with opportunity, wrote bestselling novels that explored alternative pictures of desire, affection, and family life. Authors’ job descriptions were changing because publishers were learning that faster and less expensive fiction meant faster and bigger profits (St Clair19). There was a reading public waiting for cheaper fiction. The sharp increase in both the efficiency of publishing technologies and the number of people reading novels produced a rapid proliferation of genre types. Existing professional authors could not keep up with the demand from readers, so publishers’ recruited writers from across gender and class lines. Novice writers fashioned new forms as they imitated previous ones, naively or purposefully, usually mixing the most salient attributes of one existing genre with those of another to help feed a burgeoning mass market. Critics at the time sorted, classified, and made generalizations about the throngs of newly published novels, but they always regarded them as forms of popular entertainment in the end, and not as new art forms. It seems reviewers were ill equipped to handle any critical stance related to the abundance of unique works because they had no traditions to draw from; these novels “‘swallowed all the formulas.’”1 1 I am taking from Tillotson’s Novels of the Eighteen-Forties (17). She is quoting from Virginia Woolf’s The Moment: and Other Essays (1947). 1 Many of these texts remain neglected today because of their seeming awkward forms and underdeveloped writing styles. Pierce Egan’s Life in London; or, The Day and Night Scenes of Jerry Hawthorn, Esq. and his elegant friend Corinthian Tom, accompanied by Bob Logic, The Oxonian, in their Rambles and Sprees through the Metropolis (1820-21) (hereafter Life in London) and its sequel, The Finish to the Adventures of Tom, Jerry and Logic in their Pursuits through Life in and out of London (1827-28) (hereafter Finish to Life), Edward Bulwer Lytton’s Paul Clifford (1830), and William Ainsworth’s Jack Sheppard (1839), tend to keep places in literary history today more for what