Nineteenth-Century Radical Traditions Edited by Joseph Bristow and Josephine Mcdonagh

Nineteenth-Century Radical Traditions Edited by Joseph Bristow and Josephine McDonagh

Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture General Editor: Joseph Bristow Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture

Series Editor

Joseph Bristow Department of English University of California - Los Angeles Los Angeles , California, USA Aim of Series Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture is a new monograph series that aims to represent the most innovative research on literary works that were produced in the English-speaking world from the time of the Napoleonic Wars to the fi n de siècle. Attentive to the historical continuities between ‘Romantic’ and ‘Victorian’, the series will feature studies that help scholarship to reassess the meaning of these terms during a century marked by diverse cultural, literary, and political movements. The main aim of the series is to look at the increasing infl uence of types of historicism on our understanding of literary forms and genres. It refl ects the shift from critical theory to cultural history that has affected not only the period 1800–1900 but also every fi eld within the discipline of English literature. All titles in the series seek to offer fresh critical perspectives and challenging readings of both canonical and non-canonical writings of this era. Editorial Board: Hilary Fraser, Birkbeck College, University of London, UK; Josephine McDonagh, Kings College, London, UK; Yopie Prins, University of Michigan, USA; Lindsay Smith, University of Sussex, UK; Margaret Stetz, University of Delaware, USA; Jenny Bourne Taylor, University of Sussex, UK.

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/14607 Joseph Bristow • Josephine McDonagh Editors Nineteenth-Century

Radical Traditions Editors Joseph Bristow Josephine McDonagh Department of English King’s College London University of California - Los Angeles London , United Kingdom Los Angeles, California, USA

Nineteenth-Century Radical Traditions ISBN 978-1-137-59705-2 ISBN 978-1-137-59706-9 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59706-9

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016942091

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identifi ed as the author(s) of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifi cally the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfi lms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specifi c statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made.

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Springer-Verlag London Ltd. To Jim Porteous and Richard Porteous

PREFACE AND AC KNOWLEDGEMENTS

The present volume is a tribute to the memory of Sally Ledger, a highly respected scholar of nineteenth-century English literature who died at the age of forty-seven on 21 January 2009. As we explain in our Introduction, Ledger had recently been appointed to the Hildred Carlile chair at Royal Holloway, University of London. The eight chapters in this collection address several of the areas that Ledger explored in her critical writing: the New Woman of the 1890s; fi n-de-siècle culture; the history of English radicalism; and the fi ction of Charles Dickens. Each of these studies emerges from the lively debates that Ledger generated among her graduate students and colleagues, especially at Birkbeck, University of London, where she taught from 1995 to 2008, and at the Dickens Universe, home to the annual conferences held at the University of California, Santa Cruz, which she attended on a regular basis. We speak for all of the contributors when we say that the loss of this inspiring colleague has been considerable, particularly when we take into account the achievement of the last book she published, Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination (2007). Throughout her career, Ledger remained unwavering in her belief that the radical traditions to which she dedicated her research had much to teach us in our present moment. Especially important for her was the power of literary works to deepen our awareness of possibilities for cultural, social, and political change. The essays gathered here reveal the signifi cance of Ledger’s legacy, which broadened our knowledge of such transformative nineteenth-century movements as Chartism, socialism, aestheticism, and late Victorian feminism.

vii viii PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Besides expressing gratitude to the contributors for their patient support throughout the editorial process, we wish to thank several individuals and institutions for their assistance. At the University of California, Los Angeles, Joseph Bristow wishes to acknowledge a grant from the Academic Senate’s Council on Research that assisted in preparing this volume. At King’s College London, Josephine McDonagh is grateful to Sarah Gundry and Fariha Shaikh for research assistance. She also acknowledges the generosity of the National Humanities Center, North Carolina, USA, in awarding her the Kent R. Millikin Fellowship held during the period in which the editors prepared the volume, and especially the support provided by the Center Librarians. We thank Chris Reid for sharing with us his correspondence with Sally Ledger. Colin Jones provided advice on certain historical points of information, as well as translations from the French. James Grande kindly advised us on several signifi cant details about William Cobbett’s writings. We remain grateful to Ledger’s spouse Jim Porteous and her son Richard Porteous for their assistance in preparing the volume, and the kindness they have expressed towards the project. Nineteenth-Century Radical Traditions is dedicated to them. CONTENTS

Notes on Contributors xiii

1 Introduction 1 Joseph Bristow and Josephine McDonagh

2 No Laughing Matter: Chartism and the Limits of Satire 21 Mike Sanders

3 ‘Their Deadly Longing’: Paternalism, the Past, and Perversion in Barnaby Rudge 37 Ben Winyard

4 Frederick William Robinson, Charles Dickens, and the Literary Tradition of ‘Low Life’ 63 Anne Schwan

5 Remembering Radicalism on the Midlands Turnpike: George Eliot, Felix Holt, and William Cobbett 85 Ruth Livesey

ix x CONTENTS

6 The Commune in Exile: Urban Insurrection and the Production of International Space 113 Scott McCracken

7 Divorce and the New Woman 137 Anne Humpherys

8 Revolutions in Journalism: W.T. Stead, Indexing, and ‘Searching’ 157 Laurel Brake

9 Towards a Perlocutionary Poetics? 187 Isobel Armstrong

Bibliography 213

Index 233 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Isobel Armstrong is Emeritus Professor of English (Geoffrey Tillotson Chair) at Birkbeck, University of London, a Fellow of the British Academy, Senior Fellow of the Institute of English Studies, and Honorary Foreign Scholar of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She writes mainly on nineteenth-century literature and culture, literary theory, and feminist thought. Her publications include Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (Routledge, 1993), Nineteenth- Century Women Poets (co-edited with Joseph Bristow and Cath Sharrock; Oxford University Press, 1996), and The Radical Aesthetic (Blackwell, 2000). Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the Imagination, 1830–1880 (Oxford University Press, 2008) won the James Russell Lowell Prize from the Modern Language Association. Her poetry has appeared in Carrie Etter, ed., Infi nite Difference: Other Poetries by U.K. Women Poets (Shearsman Books, 2010). Laurel Brake is Professor Emerita of Literature and Print Culture at Birkbeck, University of London . Recent publications include Nineteenth- Century Serials Edition, a digital edition of seven periodicals (www.ncse.ac.uk), and DNCJ ( Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism ) (Academia Press and British Library, 2009), co-edited with Marysa Demoor. She has also co-edited (with Ed King, Roger Luckhurst, and James Mussell) W.T. Stead: Newspaper Revolutionary (British Library, 2012), and is editor of a special issue on W.T. Stead in 19: An Interdisciplinary Journal. She is also co-editor (with Chandrika Kaul and Mark W. Turner) of The News of the World and the British Press: ‘Journalism for the Rich, Journalism for the Poor’ (2015). She is currently completing Ink Work , a biography of Clara Pater and Walter Pater, and the Oxford English Texts edition of Walter Pater’s journalism. Joseph Bristow is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he edited Nineteenth-Century Literature from

xi xii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

1997 to 2007; during this period, Sally Ledger made several contributions to the periodical. His most recent book (co-authored with Rebecca N. Mitchell) is Oscar Wilde’s Chatterton: Literary History, Romanticism, and the Art of Forgery (Yale University Press, 2015). He is currently working on a study of Oscar Wilde’s criminal trials. Anne Humpherys is a Professor Emerita of English at Lehman College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She is the author of Travels in the Poor Man’s Country: The Work of Henry Mayhew (University of Georgia Press, 1977) and co-editor (with Louis James) of G.W.M. Reynolds: Fiction, Politics, and the Press (Ashgate, 2008), as well as articles and chapters on Victorian fi ction, poetry, popular literature, and the press. She is currently working on the impact of the divorce laws on nineteenth-century British literature and a second project on the penny libraries published by John Dicks and the dissemination of high culture to the working classes. Ruth Livesey is Reader in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Thought at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is the author of Socialism, Sex, and the Culture of Aestheticism in Britain, 1880–1914 (Oxford University Press, 2007), and is co-editor of The American Experiment and the Idea of Democracy in British Culture, 1776–1914 (Ashgate, 2013). She has been an editor of Journal of Victorian Culture since 2009. Her next book, Writing the Stagecoach Nation: Locality on the Move in Nineteenth-Century Literature , is due to appear in 2016. Scott McCracken is Professor of Twentieth-Century Literature at Queen Mary University of London. He is the author of Masculinities, Modernist Fiction, and the Urban Public Sphere (Manchester University Press, 2007) and co-author (with Peter Buse, Ken Hirschkop, and Bertrand Taithe) of Benjamin’s Arcades: An (Un) guided Tour (Manchester University Press, 2006). He is currently General Editor of the collected correspondence and fi ction of Dorothy Richardson (forthcoming, Oxford University Press, 2016–2020) and editor of Pilgrimages: A Journal of Dorothy Richardson Studies . He is working on a monograph titled ‘Thinking Through Defeat: Studies in the Literature of Political Failure from the Paris Commune to the Berlin Wall’. Josephine McDonagh is Professor of Nineteenth-Century Literature in the Department of English, King’s College London. She is author of DeQuincey’s Disciplines (Oxford University Press, 1994), George Eliot (Northcote House, 1997), and Child Murder and British Culture 1720–1900 (Cambridge University Press, 2003), and has co-edited several volumes of essays, including with Sally Ledger and Jane Spencer, Political Gender: Texts and Contexts (Harvester- Wheatsheaf, 1994), and with Colin Jones and Jon Mee, Charles Dickens and the French Revolution (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Between 2009 and 2013 she NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xiii directed the international research network ‘Commodities and Culture in the Colonial World’, funded by the Leverhulme Trust. Anne Schwan completed her PhD under Sally Ledger’s supervision at Birkbeck College in 2005. She is Reader in Literary Studies and Cultural Theory at Edinburgh Napier University. She is author of Convict Voices: Women, Class, and Writing about Prison in Nineteenth-Century England (University of New Hampshire Press, 2014) and co-author of How to Read Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (Pluto, 2011). Mike Sanders is Senior Lecturer in English, American Studies & Creative Writing at the University of Manchester. He is the author of The Poetry of Chartism: Aesthetics, Politics, History (Cambridge University Press, 2009). Ben Winyard completed his PhD at Birkbeck, University of London and was a senior editor and postdoctoral researcher on the Dickens Journals Online project (www.djo.org.uk). He has been a co-organizer of Birkbeck’s annual Dickens Day since 2005.

LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 4.1 R. R. Bowker, ‘London as a Literary Centre: Second Paper–The Novelists’, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 77 (1888): 13 64

xv CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Joseph Bristow and Josephine McDonagh

SALLY LEDGER, 1961–2009 The essays in this book commemorate the life and work of Sally Ledger, who died suddenly in January 2009, aged forty-seven. At the time of her death, she was the Hildred Carlile Professor of English at Royal Holloway, University of London. Ledger was a leading scholar of Victorian studies, and died very much mid-career with much work still anticipated. Her students, colleagues, and friends remember her infectious enthusiasm for literature, and her generosity and kindness in supporting others. These qualities live on in the work of those whom she personally infl uenced. More publicly, her legacy resides in an infl uential body of research on topics that have contributed to a remapping of the fi eld of Victorian literary history. This legacy includes her innovative inquiries into the New Woman; her editorial projects with Jane Spencer and Josephine McDonagh on feminist literary criticism, and with Roger Luckhurst and Scott McCracken on fi n-de-siècle culture; her authoritative charting of the cultural transformations of British and Irish writing of the 1880s and 1890s; and, latterly,

J. Bristow () University of California, Los Angeles, USA J. McDonagh () King’s College London, London , UK

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 1 J. Bristow, J. McDonagh (eds.), Nineteenth-Century Radical Traditions, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59706-9_1 2 J. BRISTOW AND J. MCDONAGH her critical discussion of Charles Dickens’s career, which relocated him in the popular and radical traditions of the early nineteenth century. She left unfi nished a study of nineteenth-century melodrama and the politics of the emotions. Ledger’s scholarship is distinctive not only for its critical acuity, but also for its clarity and accessibility. Its sphere of infl uence has been wide, and in part through the fi lter effect of university syllabi on which it is now standard fare, her writing has been drawn quietly into our canonical understandings of the period. Ledger, of course, was not a solitary voice. She worked happily in collaboration with other scholars, but she was also, in another sense, a product of her time and education. In this section of our introduction, we begin by sketching Ledger’s career. We then position her research in the context of changing trends in the study of English literature within the British university system during the past forty years, and assess the particular intervention that she made. Ledger was a benefi ciary of some of the educational changes that mark British social history of the 1960s and 1970s, particularly the powerful belief that fl ourished in some sectors of society that education, and indeed a literary education, could bring about radical social change. Born in East Grinstead, West Sussex, in 1961, she grew up in a working-class family in Crawley, West Sussex. In the 1940s, Crawley had been designated by the government as a ‘new town’, one of a number of urban areas targeted for rapid expansion in response to the London post-war housing crisis and economic depression. By the 1960s, Crawley had grown from a small market town of around 9000 people to an industrial centre with a population of more than 40,000, in a newly built, planned community. Schools were an important element of the new-town ethos, and Crawley was among the fi rst areas to introduce non-selective, comprehensive secondary schools, doing away with the traditional elitist division between grammar schools and secondary modern schools. 1 Academically gifted, Ledger fl ourished and excelled in music and in English. She was inspired in particular by a brilliant young student teacher, Jim Porteous, who had recently graduated from Sussex University, one of a new generation of British universities that had been established in the 1960s. Built on a radical new model of interdisciplinary study, Sussex renovated the study of English literature through introducing students to new historical and theoretical contexts, in a progressive educational environment. Porteous brought the spirit of his university training with him to the sixth form in which Ledger was a student. Although the story of secondary education in this period is a INTRODUCTION 3 mixed one, it was nevertheless a relatively optimistic episode in the history of British education, and it opened up intellectual and academic opportunities for Ledger. 2 It was literature, and especially Victorian literature, that fi red Ledger’s imagination and engaged her mind. After a false start as a music student, she began an English degree in 1982 at Queen Mary College in the University of London. The choice of Queen Mary was signifi cant. On the one hand, it would give her a thorough training in traditional literary history. This was a mode that provided a solid foundation to all her subsequent work. On the other hand, the College’s location in the East End of London, and its history as a Victorian philanthropic institution for the technical education of the London working class, presented an environment in which she felt both at home and in sympathy with its commitment to social advancement through education. 3 The college typically recruited its undergraduates from less privileged backgrounds (especially from the local area) than many of the students attending the other colleges within the federal university. Ledger was an exceptional undergraduate. On grad- uation she was awarded the University of London’s George Smith Prize for the highest fi rst-class degree across all colleges in the University, and the following year she was admitted to Oxford to undertake postgraduate research. The decade of Ledger’s university education was a turbulent time in Britain. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s shift towards neoliberal economic policies meant the withdrawal of public services, dramatic changes to traditional patterns of employment, and widespread social unrest. Besides bitter industrial disputes (notably, the miners’ strike of 1984–1985), there was an intensifi cation of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland and a worsening of race relations across the nation, resulting in riots in Brixton (London), Handsworth (Birmingham), Chapeltown (Leeds), and Toxteth (Liverpool). The same was true of the upheavals in the education system. Throughout Thatcher’s long period in offi ce (1979–1992), post-secondary education underwent several notable transformations stemming from her broader policy initiatives. First of all, the University Grants Committee (1918–1989) imposed severe budgetary cuts (14 % in 1981). There was, too, a marked shift away from traditional principles of university autonomy from government interference towards university accountability to the state. The vast expansion of the university sector largely through the low-cost polytechnics in the 1980s, followed in 1992 by the transformation of polytechnics into fully fl edged universities, 4 J. BRISTOW AND J. MCDONAGH was built on meagre additional resources. 4 In addition, during the 1980s the introduction of the appraisal system of university research, which soon emerged as the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE: 1992, 1996, 2001, 2008) and the Research Excellence Framework (REF: 2014), changed the basis of funding for research and introduced new levels of scrutiny and surveillance within university departments. This unsettled period intersected with some of the most fraught intellectual debates within the humanities and social sciences in modern times, ones in which English studies, together with the newly emerging cultural studies, was in the vanguard. For many critics based in Britain, the arrival of French theory from post-1968 Paris presented new and radical ways of understanding the place and purpose of culture within society. 5 Structuralist linguistics inspired by Ferdinand de Saussure, and its various offshoots within psychoanalysis, anthropology, and the social sciences, provided the fi eld of English literature with a theoretical account of the work of culture. Post-structuralist theory—whether in translations of Jacques Lacan’s Ecrits (1977), Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology (1976), Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge (1977), or Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar’s Reading Capital (1977)—similarly spurred heated academic discussions about method and critical approach, as did English translations of major works of Russian formalism, such as Mikhail Bakhtin’s Dialogic Imagination (1981). In turn, Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron’s anthology, New French Feminisms (1980), for the fi rst time made the works of Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva available to many English readers. These were remarkable shifts that radicalized English studies at a time when the market pressures on the humanities were intensifying as never before. It is hard to overstate the degree to which the advent of critical theory generated controversy throughout the discipline of English in Britain. The emergence of critical theory brought with it challenges to the very constitution of the curriculum and the established English literary canon. These issues hit the headlines in 1981 during the public dispute in Cambridge between, on the one hand, Colin MacCabe, an early advocate for struc- turalism, and, on the other hand, the traditional university, represented by the Edward VII Professor of English, Christopher Ricks, who stood for the conventional critical values of the Cambridge English Faculty. 6 Debates continued throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, often divid- ing English departments across the country. At stake in these discussions were questions of class and privilege. To whom does literature speak? INTRODUCTION 5

And in whose name does literature speak? Although these were academic inquiries, they were nevertheless ones freighted and made urgent by the troubled context of 1980s Britain. Although the federal degree of the University of London, with its cum- bersome regulatory machinery, was notoriously resistant to change, and showed little formal impact of debates going on more widely within the discipline, a bright student such as Ledger had plenty of opportunities for extracurricular reading. She followed the discussions in newspapers and journals, and read works by Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, and others. In conversations with her Queen Mary tutor, Christopher Reid, she thought through––often sceptically––the possibilities that these theoretical works presented. 7 In 1985, when she graduated from Queen Mary and enrolled as a graduate student at Oxford, she was appalled by the social conservatism and misogyny that she encountered there. She joined Oxford English Limited (OEL), a group organized by her friend, a fellow graduate student and Marxist critic, Tony Pinkney. OEL combined reading groups in Marxist and feminist theory with activism, putting pressure on the Oxford English Faculty to reform the curriculum through measures such as the abolition of compulsory Anglo-Saxon, the inclusion of women writers, and the teaching of critical theory on the undergraduate degree. 8 In retrospect, such objectives may seem relatively modest; yet in the context of the time, they accrued serious political signifi cance. Ledger pursued her doctoral research under the supervision of one of the few critical theorists at Oxford. Her supervisor, Terry Eagleton, was at that time the most prominent Marxist literary critic in Britain. His infl uential books from this period include Criticism and Ideology (1976), Walter Benjamin: Towards a Revolutionary Criticism (1981), and the popular Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983). Helen Taylor records that ‘[a]fter reading Literary Theory ’, Ledger found English ‘“suddenly… a controversial, dynamic and exciting fi eld of study rather than a static body of texts”’. ‘It was’, Ledger added, ‘exhilarating, too, to discover that there was space for my politics in “English”’. 9 Yet although critical theory, and the political debates it fed, shaped Ledger’s early intellectual and social context, in her own work she was resistant to abstruse and abstract modes of theoretical argument. Instead, at Oxford she continued to develop a style of research based on her training in historical method at Queen Mary, but broadened it to include a fuller account of the social and political contexts of literary works. This approach allowed her to practise a form of literary criticism that addressed questions of 6 J. BRISTOW AND J. MCDONAGH social exclusion in direct and principled ways. In this regard, Raymond Williams’s socialist criticism, such as Drama, from Ibsen to Eliot (1952) and Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (1958), was highly infl uential in providing a model for interpreting literary texts in their social and political contexts. Ledger’s choice of the little-read late nineteenth-century radical, anti-imperialist, and realist novelist William Hale White as the subject of her doctoral study, refl ected her affi liation with this tradition. Her dissertation set out to understand the intellectual and historical themes in White’s oeuvre, but at the same time to analyze the ways in which powerful works of the imagination might participate in the transformation of society. Even though Ledger did not publish ‘History, Politics and Women: A Contextual Analysis of the Writings of William Hale White (Mark Rutherford)’ (Oxford DPhil, 1991), her dissertation nevertheless established the three pillars of her working method. Based on an archive of published and manuscript sources, including White’s correspondence with intellectuals of the time such as William Morris and Philip Webb, Ledger’s thesis was in equal parts an archaeology of forgotten writers and their works, a social history of the time, and a work of literary interpretation. 10 Ledger was particularly drawn to the later decades of the nineteenth century, the period at which White was active, and this interest resulted in some of her most important subsequent work. The fi n de siècle, which for her embraced both the 1880s and 1890s, was a transitional period when the social norms of the Victorian era came under intense pressure: a time marked by economic depression, the rise of imperialism, and changing modes of economic behaviour. Part of the appeal of the fi n de siècle to Ledger was its resonance with her own times. The impetus behind an important volume of essays that she commissioned with Scott McCracken, Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siècle (1995), was that an understanding of the end of the nineteenth century would shed light on the present historical moment. As Eagleton writes in his contribution to the volume, ‘The Flight to the Real’:‘[The fi n de siècle of the twentieth century] arrived in the 1960s, a period whose structure of feeling uncannily reproduces much of the culture of late Victorian England’. Although Eagleton ends this thought on a pessimistic note––that, unlike in the 1880s and 1890s, the political forces at the end of the twentieth century ‘ha[d] been temporarily scattered and diffused’ 11 —the insistence within Ledger and McCracken’s volume on interrogating the relationship between the then and the now gives a special tone to a collection that did much to shape the critical reassessment of literature and culture of the fi nal two decades of the INTRODUCTION 7 nineteenth century. In order to understand the works of this era, Ledger argued, it was important to appreciate their full intellectual, cultural, and political context. That meant reading widely beyond sources that were strictly literary to materials in contemporary science, politics, and social science, Moreover, Ledger’s research showed the signifi cance of taking into account the ideas and debates that nineteenth-century readers would often have encountered in periodical literature, newspapers, and reviews. Ledger followed Cultural Politics with a further co-edited volume, with Roger Luckhurst, The Fin de Siècle: A Reader in Cultural History c.1880–1900 (2000). This was a selection of primary sources drawn from their broad reading of late nineteenth-century writing. The anthology rapidly became the textbook for syllabi dedicated to the period, and it was important for establishing the fi n de siècle as a multidisciplinary fi eld, one dominated by Darwinian thought, in which works in anthropology and racial science, for instance, are properly seen as part of a nexus of political, social, and cultural ideas. For Ledger, however, it was the New Woman––a term that Sarah Grand (Frances McFall) gave to this fi gure in 1894––who most effectively encapsulated the radical contradictions of the fi n de siècle. Through her research on White, she had become interested in other urban realists of the period, including the socialist New Woman writer Margaret Harkness, whose varied career included the authorship of a series of fi ve ‘slum novels’ published under the pseudonym John Law. Harkness’s works drew Ledger to the phenomenon that became the subject of her fi rst monograph, The New Woman (1997). At the time when Ledger embarked on her research on the ‘New Woman’, there was relatively little published scholarship on the topic. Gail Cunningham’s important 1978 monograph, The New Woman and the Victorian Novel , was a study of fi ctional representations of the New Woman, and later noteworthy studies by Ann L. Ardis (1990), Elaine Showalter (1991), and Lyn Pykett (1992) would give fuller treatment to the work of many New Women writers. Yet none of these scholars situated the phenomenon of the New Woman within the socio-cultural discourses of the time in the way that Ledger undertook. In Ledger’s analysis, gender had a heightened role at the end of the century as ‘arguably the most destabilizing category’ of all, making the New Woman a potent fi gure for symbolizing the ‘social disintegration and the break-up of the cultural boundaries that had been so carefully erected earlier in the century’. 12 This approach allowed Ledger to examine the fi gure of the New Woman as she was represented in the often wildly misogynistic 8 J. BRISTOW AND J. MCDONAGH periodical culture, as well as alongside the complex array of works by a range of writers who identifi ed, or were known as, New Women––writers such as Mona Caird, Isabella Ford, Eleanor Marx, and Olive Schreiner. Whether the New Woman was a writer of Decadent novels, a social-realist playwright, a political activist, a suffrage campaigner, or, for that matter, the pejorative invention of male satirists, Ledger sought to grasp the full range of possibilities that the name evoked, and to understand––in all their complexity––the frequently contradictory positions and ideals that were associated with the New Woman. Such positions included sexual freedom or sexual purity, ‘imperial motherhood’, or anti-imperialist feminism or socialism. For Ledger, the multiple and incompatible politics associated with the New Woman were not problems to be solved but phenomena to be mapped. They embodied the sheer disruptiveness that was associated with women’s cultural production within late Victorian culture. On the one hand, the New Woman exposed the fractured nature of fi n-de-siècle culture. On the other hand, as a political programme for feminists, Ledger argued, the diversity and discord among New Women were the cause of its ineffectiveness: ‘such ideological incompatibility’, she writes, ‘was dis- abling both for the feminist movement of the fi n de siècle and for other radicals’. 13 Ledger’s account of the divergent facets of the New Woman not only presented a compelling and subtle account of political complexity in the culture of the time; it also introduced a wide readership to women writers who had largely been forgotten. It revitalized interest in these works, and inspired a host of studies of New Women writers, many by doctoral students, including some whom Ledger supervised herself. During this period, Ledger accepted a role on the editorial board of the journal Women’s Writing , and played a signifi cant part in sustaining feminist literary scholarship. Related to these initiatives was her introduction to a 2003 edition of short stories by the Irish author George Egerton (Mary Chavelita Dunne Bright), Keynotes (1893) and Discords (1894). In this edition, Ledger presented a scholarly account of George Egerton’s controversial––though chequered––career, and a powerful reassessment of this avant-garde author’s short fi ction. She gives a compelling account of the signifi cance of the short story form for female Decadent writers as an ‘incipient modernism’, one that anticipated that of later authors, notably Virginia Woolf. She traced, too, the origins of George Egerton’s literary style to the Scandinavian writers, especially Knut Hamsun, with whom the author had developed an intimate relationship during a period of her INTRODUCTION 9 life in Norway. The Scandinavian infl uences also included the playwright Henrik Ibsen, who exerted so much infl uence on women at the fi n de siècle, and was the subject of Ledger’s 1999 short study in the British Council’s ‘Writers and Their Works’ series. In both Keynotes and Discords , Ledger argues, George Egerton develops a psychological approach to her characters that is similar to that which Ibsen presents in his late dramas such as Hedda Gabler (1890) and The Master Builder (1892). Throughout this period, Ledger was also a university teacher. She held positions at the University of Exeter, Cheltenham and Gloucester College of Higher Education, the University of the West of England (UWE), and then, for over ten years, at Birkbeck, before moving to her fi nal appointment at Royal Holloway. She was active in the discipline and helped to shape the new directions it took during this transformative period. In 1992, she was one of the organizers of a major academic conference on feminist literary criticism; this event was timed to celebrate the two-hundredth anniversary of the publication of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). The papers from this conference were the basis of her co- edited volume Political Gender (1994). From 2002 onwards, she was the main organizer of the London Nineteenth Century Studies Seminar. She was, moreover, an active member of the British Association of Victorian Studies. Furthermore, Ledger was a committed and inspiring teacher, one who was particularly concerned to widen access to education for working- class, adult, and especially women students. She had trained as a secondary school teacher before beginning her fi rst university post, and she had a stronger grasp of pedagogical methods than most teachers in higher education. Birkbeck, with its mission to meet the needs of students returning to college after a break in their education, was in many ways her ideal institution, and she inspired a cohort of undergraduates there. Her passion for education, literature, and social justice was in evidence in all that she did. Her former secondary schoolteacher, Jim Porteous, whom she married in the 1980s, shared her enthusiasms and encouraged her scholarly work. The second phase of Ledger’s career focused on Charles Dickens. Her admired monograph, Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination , was published in 2007, and an imposing multi-authored textbook, Dickens in Context (2011), was completed posthumously under the editorship of one of her former doctoral students, Holly Furneaux. Although Dickens and the Popular Imagination marked a turn to a more canonical fi gure than she had worked on before, Ledger’s project to reinstate Dickens as a writer immersed in the traditions of popular radicalism maintained her 10 J. BRISTOW AND J. MCDONAGH commitment to a body of works by less well-known and plebeian writers. In this instance, she looked at Regency radicals such as William Hone, Thomas Wooler, and William Cobbett, and mid-century fi gures such as Douglas Jerrold, George W.M. Reynolds, and Ernest Jones. The Dickens that interested Ledger most was the disruptive Dickens: the raucous satirist and melodramatic sentimentalist who spoke directly to his readers and audiences, often through the immediate and visceral responses that his works engendered––laughing, spluttering, weeping. Thinking about these more physical idioms of communication led Ledger to identify Dickens as a novelist who was less compromised by the niceties of the bourgeois literary marketplace than had recently been assumed. Although still committed to the careful labour of historical research (much of Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination situates Dickens in politicized cultures of the early nineteenth century that have often been obscured from view), this project nevertheless differed from her earlier work. This study was less concerned with the complexity of political contexts than was The New Woman . Instead, Ledger adopted a more undiffer- entiated notion of ‘the People’, with whom Dickens was identifi ed and to whom he spoke. For some readers, this perspective signalled a retreat from politics: a too easy elision of the novel with an active political response, and a failure to acknowledge Dickens’s own more compromised position. 14 Nevertheless, in other senses this approach might be viewed as a different form of politics. In her writings on Dickens, Ledger’s two main infl u- ences both came from strands of Marxism, but signifi cantly from an earlier generation of critics than those who had infl uenced her previous research. There was, on the one hand, the Soviet formalist Mikhail Bakhtin, whose many ways of theorizing the grotesque, the obtrusive, and the carni- valesque provided a way of analysing Dickens as a ‘less respectable, more truly disruptive’ writer. On the other hand, and perhaps more surprisingly, there was the English Marxist Arnold Kettle, whose Introduction to the Novel (1951) Ledger credits in the introduction to the book for providing her with an inspiring concept of the ‘popular’. 15 For Kettle, the ‘popular’ is applied not to works that have a wide circulation or readership, but rather to those that ‘involve “an attitude to art in which the audience is seen neither purely as consumer…nor as a superior group of like-minded spirits…but in some sense as collaborator”’. 16 Following Kettle, Ledger aligns this notion of popular literature to a ‘political concept of “the People”…“not as a vague or all-inclusive term…but as a specifi c force in contradistinction to those who rule”’. 17 INTRODUCTION 11

Certainly, Ledger has in mind a more theoretically sophisticated sense of ‘the People’ than Kettle proposes. Her thinking, which draws on the work of Patrick Joyce, views ‘the People’ as a discursive formation ‘cir- cling around key terms such as “democracy” and “freedom” rather than class confl ict’. Nevertheless, her reference to Kettle is instructive, for it evokes the practical democratic critical project with which his name is associated. For Kettle––who distinguished his approach to cultural history from that of his contemporary Raymond Williams, whose work he held to be more abstract in its style and concerns––the popular and the people are trans-historical categories. 18 It was precisely ‘people’ to whom Kettle spoke through his literary criticism: ‘I wanted to write literary criticism’, he observes, ‘which was closely bound up with life, which was compre- hensible to a large number of people, and the part literature could play in making the world progress.’ Kettle, who is something of a forgotten fi gure today, was a lifelong Communist Party member, and he served as the fi rst Professor of English at the Open University. For him, education––especially education through literature––was a means to empower- ment. ‘I’ve always been a very keen educator’, he wrote, ‘wanting to help people improve their lives, to become more conscious.’ 19 In many ways, Ledger shared Kettle’s mission to discover a more democratic form of criticism, and she supported his commitment to the emancipatory aspects of education. Ledger’s work on Dickens opened new trajectories, especially a fresh emphasis on reception and the effects of reading. Through her friend and colleague Regenia Gagnier, she began an affi liation with the Dickens Project (founded at the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1981) and became a regular participant in the annual Dickens Universe conferences that bring university teachers and graduate students together in the study of Dickens and his circle. At the time of her death, Ledger had already embarked on a new work on melodrama and the politics of affect, which took up some of the questions that she had raised in Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination . These were questions about the popular response to literary works and art forms that have long been immured in condescension. Ledger’s project was to understand the registers of emotion evoked by melodrama as a form of hermeneutics: an interpretive method in its own right within a complex economy of manipulation and freedom. Her inquiries were driven by two main questions: Why was melodrama so pleasurable? And what should we make of its pleasures? It 12 J. BRISTOW AND J. MCDONAGH was typical of Ledger that her research should have identifi ed this truly popular, and, in her view, truly disruptive cultural phenomenon.

NINETEENTH-CENTURY RADICAL TRADITIONS The chapters in this present volume take up the themes and issues that Ledger raised in the different phases of her research, and continue several of the discussions that she initiated. The starting point for all of them is the belief, which the authors share with Ledger, that the aesthetic is (bor- rowing from Mike Sanders in this volume) ‘simultaneously and inescapably both politicized and historicized’. 20 Each of the chapters explores this conjunction, adopting different methodologies to do so. The essays are organized in the chronological order of their subject matter, and each of them deals with the themes that Ledger explored at distinct stages of her career. All of the essays have been authored by individuals who were Ledger’s colleagues, collaborators, friends, or former students, and each discussion pursues questions that her scholarship raised or inspired. Taken together, the chapters represent the directions that Ledger’s research might have taken had she survived, just as they suggest the infl uence of her inquiries on the fi eld of nineteenth-century English literary studies. The fi rst four chapters in this collection examine questions around the literary culture of popular radicalism in the mid-nineteenth century. In the fi rst of these, Mike Sanders examines the specifi c genres that radical movements utilized, and he provides an analysis of the shift from satire to melodrama in mid-century radical discourse that Ledger identifi es in Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination. Following her observation that satire recedes from the centre of radical writings in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, Sanders notes that Chartist writers, who drew on the resources of satire relatively infrequently, shared this tendency. He argues that ‘satire depends on a binary structure that is increasingly at odds with Chartism’s own understanding of its historical situation and that Chartist cultural production instead begins to elaborate triadic structures that will eventually issue in melodrama’ (21). Sanders compares the satirical writings of Regency radicals with those of a later generation of Chartists by highlighting differences in the forms of print culture adopted by each, and the styles of address that each of them developed in response to changing political and social situations. This line of argument enables him to claim that, instead of solely refl ecting political or social conditions, genre plays INTRODUCTION 13 an active role in shaping its social context by making possible ‘certain kinds of political activity’ (24). Ben Winyard’s discussion focuses on Dickens’s early novel Barnaby Rudge (1841), one of his two historical novels. Barnaby Rudge is based on the Gordon Riots: the anti-Catholic uprising that took place in London in 1780, which for Dickens resonated with the turbulence following the Great Reform Act in the early 1830s. In Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination , Ledger acknowledges the ambivalence of Barnaby Rudge , especially its excoriating critique of paternalism both in government and in families, combined with representations of ‘indiscriminate mob violence’. 21 Yet, as Winyard points out, Ledger also found in Dickens’s novel ‘a sympathetic portrayal of the grievances of “the People”, its gleeful depiction of riot’ (38). On this basis, Winyard develops a queer reading of the novel, seeing its riotous libidinal energy at the core of the novel’s complex critique of paternal structures. By building on the theories of Leo Bersani and Lee Edelman, Winyard fi nds in the novel a ‘liberatory force that undoes the self and the social’ (41), and he also discovers in Barnaby Rudge a ‘reparative queer radicalism’ that ‘suggests a mode of enduring and surviving the violence of futurity’ (41). As he points out, this kind of radicalism, with its ethical commitment to personal and social relationships over institutional systems, mirrors Ledger’s own private and professional codes. If Winyard explores some of the themes that Ledger was beginning to develop in her last work, Anne Schwan takes up an earlier strand in Ledger’s research––namely, the uncovering of neglected writers who were nevertheless widely read and important in their own time. Schwan is interested in the ways in which specifi c subgenres of popular fi ction enabled writers to critique the social conditions that constrained the Victorian underclass. In this case, Schwan looks at the work of the London-based popular and prolifi c author Frederick William Robinson, which in her view forms a ‘missing link between the socially conscious literary traditions of Daniel Defoe, Charles Dickens and mid-century social problem novels…and the slum fi ction of the 1880s and 1890s’ (63). A commercially successful writer, with an eye to the market, Robinson demonstrated a facility for adapting his style to the requirements of publishers, wrote anonymously or under a female pseudonym, and was able to address diverse readerships. Yet crime, punishment, prison life, and the lives of convicts were consistent themes in Robinson’s oeuvre. He was thereby able to educate his readers, whoever they were, about the experiences of the poor and socially disadvantaged, 14 J. BRISTOW AND J. MCDONAGH creating sympathy for them, while also analysing the conditions that structured their lives. Schwan’s examination of Robinson’s fi ctional prison narratives demonstrates their potency, and makes a case for their signifi - cance as a kind of documentary realism tinged with melodrama that held sway among readers of fi ction in the middle decades of the century. Ruth Livesey’s chapter turns to one of the most pervasive and prestigious of nineteenth-century print genres: the realist novel. Her discussion of George Eliot’s Felix Holt, the Radical (1866) traces the ways in which Eliot appropriates and diverts an earlier tradition of popular radicalism in the complex texture of her realist style. Livesey’s opening vignette is an account of a possible encounter of the radical journalist William Cobbett, on the trail of the Coventry election campaign, and the four-month-old Mary Ann Evans (later to become George Eliot), whose family had just relocated to the area, on the Coventry to Hinckley turnpike road in March 1820. This imaginary encounter sets the scene for a comparison between the popular radicalism of Cobbett in the 1820s and Eliot’s account of radicalism in the run-up to the 1832 Reform Bill, which is the subject of Felix Holt . Livesey’s analysis derives from Ledger the impetus to unravel complex layers of historically specifi c debates and attitudes, in order to understand their continuities and differences. She traces Cobbett’s shadow in Felix Holt , in its presentation of ‘a strongly etymological reading of radicalism, common to those glossing the term in the early nineteenth century’ (86). The presence of Cobbett is evident in the repeated vocabulary of roots and rootedness in Felix Holt , in the localism of the narrative, and in the novel’s commitment to ‘documenting the details of everyday life’ (70). As Livesey points out, for critics such as Raymond Williams it is Cobbett’s radical localism––his protest against the deep dis- ruptions caused by agrarian capitalism––that should be seen in relation to the development of nineteenth-century realism. Taking this point as her cue, Livesey focuses on the turnpike road––the new technology of transportation that dramatically changed both geographical and social landscapes in this period––and she explores its resonances in the works of both writers. In this way, Eliot appropriates and transforms Cobbett’s localism into (in Livesey’s words) a ‘consciously alienated technology of representation’, a ‘hope for the national future through the careful process of replanting roots retrospectively into the local’ (105). In Eliot’s hands, Cobbett’s radicalism thus transforms into ‘a means to inward revolution, local attachment, and individual memory’ (86). INTRODUCTION 15

The following three chapters, by Ledger’s former collaborator Scott McCracken and her colleagues Anne Humpherys and Laurel Brake, revisit themes relating to the fi n de siècle, another important strand of Ledger’s work. McCracken’s discussion focuses on the ways in which the anti-realist fi ction of J.-K. Huysmans, the memoirs of Prosper Lissagaray, the poetry of Paul Verlaine, and the painting of Claude Monet provide us with representations that reveal the emergence of ‘a more abstract and international sense of the urban’ (114). Paris thus comes to stand for a kind of ‘citiness’, which, in McCracken’s account, is intimately connected to its recent history of radicalism. As McCracken points out, Paris––whose appearance and infrastructure transformed through Baron Haussman’s redesign of the main thoroughfares––suffered a violent siege at the hands of Prussian forces from 19 September 1870 to 28 January 1871. After the armistice, the political turmoil in Paris was like no other that any major city in Europe had witnessed in decades. The people’s resistance to the authority of the newly elected administration was so fi erce that the government and its military withdrew to Versailles. In March 1871, a suc- ceeding election enabled the short-lived Commune to set out plans for a secular social democracy that sought to realize feminist as well as socialist goals. Yet in the third week of May 1871, the French army headed by Marshal MacMahon traversed the Communards’ barricades and entered the city, renewing and escalating violent clashes with the Communards. The French army conquered on 28 May. As McCracken observes, in a city that had been famed not long before for the Paris Exhibition of 1867, the Commune stood as ‘a kind of revolutionary Great Exhibition’ (115), one whose spectacle left an impression on participants, commentators, politicians, and of course artists. In McCracken’s view, the art that emerged in light of the Commune radically transformed the ways in which writers and thinkers throughout Europe conceptualized the city: although it was the location of middle-class consumerist splendour, it was now also a zone that the people threatened to reclaim at any time. Anne Humpherys turns to the New Woman and the subject of divorce. Why is it, Humpherys asks, that New Women novelists seem to be unin- terested in the possibility of divorce within their works of fi ction? She points out that divorce, as a legal mechanism, paradoxically appeared to support, rather than weaken, marriage. Thus New Women writers were interested in more radical trajectories for women characters, as independent women or single mothers. As a plot device within a novel, however, divorce in Humpherys’s view nevertheless provided possibilities for 16 J. BRISTOW AND J. MCDONAGH

introducing a narrative ‘wave’ (144)––a new beginning for a character in a context in which she might otherwise seem to be fi nished. With this in mind, Humpherys provides a detailed analysis of a New Woman novel by the little-known Annie Alexander, A Choice of Evils (1894), in which the divorce device enables an exploration of the inequalities under which women lived. Humpherys’s inquiry provides an excellent example of the kind of detailed plot analysis that Ledger developed in her work, following through the stages of the narrative in terms of the novel both as a work of fi ction, and as an analysis of the historical situation of women at the fi n de siècle. Laurel Brake focuses attention on the immense cultural and political signifi cance of W.T. Stead, the author best known for his series of articles, ‘The Maiden Tribute of Babylon’ (1885), that appeared in the Pall Mall Gazette, exposing the sexual exploitation and traffi cking of young girls in London. Stead’s exposé inaugurated what soon became known as the New Journalism: a modern style of investigative reportage that uncovered corruption at the heart of the metropolis. Yet his famous interventions formed only a part of a very long, complicated, and contradictory career, which led him towards spiritualism, campaigns for copyright, and support for women’s suffrage. Brake focuses on Stead as an innovative and talented journalist whose interventions had an unprecedented impact on print journalism that lasted through the twentieth century. She explores one of Stead’s less acknowledged but decisive contributions to modern journalism. Modern scholars, as Brake shows, have paid some attention to Stead’s monthly Review of Reviews , which he founded in 1890 in order to provide a digest of contributions to current periodicals. Yet she also points out that there has been no previous scholarship focusing on the remarkable monthly indexes accompanying this ambitious journal from 1891 onwards. Brake observes that the comprehensive indexing that Stead oversaw ensured for the fi rst time that there was a durable record of the vast array of periodical literature published both at home and abroad, forming a ‘conspectus of world journalism’ (174). Through this seemingly arcane intervention, Stead consolidated journalism’s role in the production of knowledge and as an effective tool in political activism. For Brake, Stead’s achievement fi nds a parallel moment in contemporary media history: the shift to the digital archiving of historical newspapers and the increased access that this brings. As Brake contends, Stead’s example provides a template for considering the dramatic potential of our current media revolution. INTRODUCTION 17

The fi nal essay in this volume turns to the topic that came to preoccupy Ledger in what turned out to be the fi nal phase of her career: the emotions. Towards the end of her career, Ledger deepened her interest in the extraordinary power of literary works to move people, individually and col- lectively, sometimes as far as to provoke collective action. The response that intrigued her was melodrama’s unique ability to arouse intense laughter and intense tears: a register of readerly response traditionally considered to be too demotic to count within the polite discourses of literary criticism. For her, the emotional responses that literary works often knowingly provoked should be seen as a kind of idiolect, a strand of meaning that needs to be unravelled and understood in the same way as the more conventional elements of textual production, such as character, plot, and imagery. The last words in this collection are therefore given to Isobel Armstrong, Ledger’s former Birkbeck colleague, to explore this topic further. ‘Towards a Perlocutionary Poetics?’ is a dazzling rumination on language and feeling, in which Armstrong outlines a bold linguistic account of the emotions. As she observes, the recent turn to the emotions in cultural analysis has more often than not considered affect and feeling as something separate from, or additional to, language itself. In the meantime, Armstrong argues, ‘[t]he affect which seeps from the very form of the words’–– a phrase bor- rowed from the poet Denise Riley––has persistently slipped out of view (188). Armstrong addresses this absence through an exploration of speech act theory. The perlocutionary is one of the three conditions of the speech act that J.L. Austin describes in his celebrated 1955 lectures, How to Do Things with Words . This is the element of language that achieves certain effects, such as persuading someone to take a course of action. Through careful sifting of the various accounts of the perlocutionary, Armstrong constructs a theory of the way in which language moves us to do and to feel something, and especially the ways in which this movement is harnessed in poetic language. As she argues, ‘[a]ffect is not an independent force outside utterance’ (204), even when it is detached from, or in excess of, the performative, or––in Austin’s terms––the ‘illocutionary’ elements of language. Armstrong’s chapter concludes with an analysis of little Jo’s death scene in one of Dickens’s masterpieces, Bleak House (1852–1853). Critics have often dismissed this famous scene for its manipulative sentimentality. Yet by identifying the layers of declamation in the passage––Woodcourt’s recitation of the Lord’s Prayer, Jo’s partial repetition of it, and the narrator’s booming voiceover––Armstrong discloses the complex rhetorical 18 J. BRISTOW AND J. MCDONAGH

techniques at work. She argues that Jo’s death is best understood as an exercise in which ‘the illocutionary and perlocutionary elements are deliberately put at cross-purposes’ (205), in order to combine social critique and the celebration of Christian love. She posits the term ‘thick sentimentality’ (207) as a means of describing its linguistic and affective viscosity. In every way, Armstrong’s essay provides a fi tting fi nale for our collective tribute to Sally Ledger. At her inaugural professorial lecture at Birkbeck in 2007, Ledger developed her thesis on sentimentality in Dickens through her own analysis of Jo’s death scene. She was drawn to and inspired by the excess of feeling within this passage. Whether in tragic or comic mode, she loved literature that spoke directly to its readers’ hearts. It is Ledger’s quest to fi nd a language in which to analyse the capacity of literature not only to move us but also to bring about radical change that is her most signifi cant legacy.

NOTES 1. The editors express thanks to Jim Porteous, Richard Porteous, and Chris Reid for information and advice in the preparation of this essay; and to Patrick Higgins for his very informative emails regarding the history of British secondary education and East Sussex comprehensives in particular. The story of post-war secondary education in Britain is complex and varies by region. For a comparative account across the British regions, see Alan Kerckhoff et al, Going Comprehensive in England and Wales (London: Woburn Press, 1996), and for Crawley in particular see 136– 59. As a new town, Crawley was one of the fi rst areas to embrace comprehensive secondary education. See Brian Simon, Education and the Social Order 1940–1990 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1991), 206, 293. Crawley was the site of the Thomas Bennett School, one of the most successful comprehensive schools in Britain. Ledger, however, went to Ilfi eld Comprehensive until the age of sixteen, and then to Hazelwick Comprehensive until eighteen. 2. On education in post-war Britain, including higher education, see Roy Lowe, ‘Education’, in Paul Addison and Harriet Jones, eds., A Companion to Contemporary Britain, 1939–2000 (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 281–96; on comprehensive schools, see also David Crook, ‘Politics, Politicians, and English Comprehensive Schools’, History of Education , 42.3 (2013), 365–80, and Peter Mandler, ‘Educating the Nation 1: Schools’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , 24 (2014), 5–28. INTRODUCTION 19

3. Originally East London Technical College, the institution changed its name to Queen Mary College in 1834. On its early history and complex relationship to the local population, see Anne Kershan, ‘Higher Education in the London Community’, in Roger Floud and Sean Glynn, eds., London Higher: The Establishment of Higher Education in London (London: Athlone Press, 1998), 77–95. 4. Relevant here are government papers on higher education, including Keith Joseph’s Development of Higher Education into the 1990s , which led to the introduction of vocational courses and planted the seeds for the development of national research assessment; Kenneth Baker’s 1987 White Paper, Higher Education: Meeting the Challenge , which led to the expansion of the polytechnic sector; and the Further and Higher Education Act 1992, which, among other things, changed the nature and sources of higher education funding. 5. For an overview of the arrival of theory in Britain, see Richard Bradford, ed., The State of Theory (London: Routledge, 2005), especially Helen Taylor’s discussion of the ‘crisis in English’ in British higher education, ‘Leaving Parties and Legacies: Refl ections across the Binary Divide on a Decade of Englishes’ (55–64). 6. See Bernard Bergonzi, ‘Bitterness in the Early Eighties’, in Exploding English: Criticism, Theory, Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 10–25, and for the American context, see Philip Lewis, ‘The Post- Structuralist Condition’, Diacritics 12 (1982), 2–24 (especially 2–4). 7. Christopher Reid, unpublished address, delivered at the memorial service for Sally Ledger, Royal Holloway University of London, June 2009. Our thanks to Christopher Reid for sharing his memories. 8. Between 1982 and 1992, OEL produced a journal, News from Nowhere, edited by Pinkney. 9. Cited in Taylor, ‘Leaving Parties’, 62. 10. See, for instance, Ledger’s early published article on the relationship between William Hale White’s relationship with the architect Philip Webb, in ‘William Morris, Philip Webb and “Mark Rutherford”’, Journal of the William Morris Society 10 (1992): 14–20. 11. Eagleton, ‘The Flight to the Real’, in Sally Ledger and Scott McCracken, eds., Cultural Politics at the Fin De Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 11. 12. Ledger, ‘The New Woman and the Crisis of Victorianism’, in Ledger and McCracken, eds., Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siècle , 22. 13. Ledger, ‘The New Woman and the Crisis of Victorianism’, 41. 14. Notably, Sumbudha Sen, reviewing the book in Victorian Studies , criticizes Ledger’s failure to take account of the process by which ‘discourses that come out of active politics are reactivated in the fi ctional economy 20 J. BRISTOW AND J. MCDONAGH

of the novel form’ ( Victorian Studies 50.3 (2008), 499). For a different view, see Andrew McCann, who concurs with Ledger’s evaluation of Dickens as a progressive writer, one who ‘worked tirelessly to popularize progressive ideals’ (‘Ruins, Refuse, and the Politics of Allegory in The Old Curiosity Shop ’, Nineteenth- Century Literature 66.2 (2011):175). 15. Ledger, Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination , 4. 16. Arnold Kettle, ‘Dickens and the Popular Tradition’, in David Craig, ed., Marxists on Literature: An Anthology (1975; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), 220, cited in Ledger, Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination , 4. 17. Ledger, Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination , 4. 18. Asha S. Kanwar, ‘An Interview with Arnold Kettle’, Social Scientist 15.7 (1987): 57, 58. 19. Kanwar, ‘An Interview with Arnold Kettle’, 58, 59. 20. Sanders, ‘No Laughing Matter: Chartism and the Limits of Satire’, in the present volume, 21; subsequent page references to chapters in this book appear in parentheses. 21. Ledger, Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination , 138. CHAPTER 2

No Laughing Matter: Chartism and the Limits of Satire

Mike Sanders

The premise of this chapter is that the relative paucity of satire within Chartist cultural production demands explanation, particularly given the importance and vitality of satire within Regency radicalism. This discussion argues that the answer lies in an intersection of generic and historical factors. It begins by considering the relationship between satire’s formal properties and its political potential, before considering the extent to which cultural forces both intrinsic and extrinsic to Chartism acted as a powerful block on the mobilization of satirical energies. Finally, the chapter returns to the question of the extent to which literary forms encode historical (and thus political) possibilities. It maintains that satire depends on a binary structure that is increasingly at odds with Chartism’s own understanding of its historical situation, and that Chartist cultural production instead begins to elaborate triadic structures that will eventually issue in melodrama. In this respect, my analysis engages with a vital part of Sally Ledger’s work: namely, her understanding of the aesthetic as something that is simultaneously and inescapably both politicized and historicized. In addition, it explores a thesis that is implicit in Ledger’s Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination :

M. Sanders () English, American Studies & Creative Writing, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 21 J. Bristow, J. McDonagh (eds.), Nineteenth-Century Radical Traditions, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59706-9_2 22 M. SANDERS the idea that the movement from Regency radicalism to Chartism is characterized by the movement from satire to melodrama. On the evening of Friday, 12 August 1842, as the clocks struck seven, the Chartist poet and leader of the Leicestershire Shakesperean Chartists, Thomas Cooper, mounted a long bench in Stafford marketplace and prepared to address the assembled crowd. Alongside Cooper on the platform was the local superintendent of police, who was looking for an opportunity to arrest a dangerous agitator. Cooper chose his words and mode of address carefully:

I showed how excellent it was to have a ‘Sweet little silver-voiced lady.’ And pay one million and a quarter yearly to support herself and her establishment. I demonstrated that loyal Chartists knew the land would be ruined if the Civil List were not kept up; and that working men would all weep their eyes sore if Adelaide were to be bereft of her £100,000 a-year. I denounced any ragged shoemaker…as a stupid fellow if he dared to talk about his aged grandmother being in a bastile, and vegetating on skilly, while the Dowager had three palaces to live in. The satire completely blunted the talons of the Blue Bottle: his hard face relaxed, his teeth separated, and at length he grinned outright, while the host of shopmates burst into laughter. 1

As Cooper himself makes clear, his speech made effective use of the subversive potential of satire: ‘Well—what was to be done? I could not be taken up for treason, for my words were ultra-loyal, with a witness!’ Cooper’s speech, however, exploits more than the ironic distance between word and meaning, the necessary gap between signifi er and signifi ed; it also highlights the political possibilities of satire. For Cooper, by rehearsing, and ostensibly affi rming, the arguments in favour of the Civil List (a staple radical target since the days of John Wade’s Black Book , or Corruption Unmasked! Being an Account of Persons , Places , and Sinecures [1820–23]) not only holds them up to ridicule; he also, by appearing to ridicule the radical analysis that sees monarchical luxury and working-class poverty as causally related, succeeds in affi rming the validity of that same radical critique. More than this, as the astute ‘Blue Bottle’ (police offi - cer) recognizes, any attempt to prosecute Cooper for these words would require the authorities to make the Chartists’ case and, perhaps more worryingly, to admit that Cooper’s words had been understood by his audience in their subversive sense. Such a situation would of course have meant that the law would have had to concede that the Chartist analysis NO LAUGHING MATTER: CHARTISM AND THE LIMITS OF SATIRE 23 enjoyed widespread support, and thus to acknowledge the sophisticated nature of the Chartist crowd. The very effectiveness of this satire as a rhetorical strategy makes it all the more surprising that the Chartist movement should have so infrequently used satire. It is not that satire was unknown to Chartism. Feargus O’Connor, owner of the Northern Star , was capable of using it to wither- ing effect, particularly when confronting his opponents (whether within or without the movement), and satirical poetry was not unknown in the newspaper’s poetry column. Yet I would estimate that no more than fi fty poems out of the more than one thousand printed during the column’s lifetime were of a satirical nature. The overwhelming majority of these poems were squibs directed against Chartism’s political opponents, such as the anonymous ‘What is a Peer?’ (“What is a peer? A nation’s curse—/A pauper on the public purse”), or the ironic ‘Huzza for the rule of the Whigs’, with Daniel O’Connell (the leader of the Irish Repeal movement and long-term opponent of Feargus O’Connor) as by far the most popular target of satirical verse. 2 Indeed, poems attacking O’Connell account for approximately one-third of all the satirical verse published in the Northern Star . As the titles of the anti-O’Connell poems suggest—‘Daniel O’Wheedle’, ‘The Devil and Owen O’Connelly’, and ‘A Stave about the Quack Patriot and his Repeal Delusion’—they possess neither political nor poetical subtlety. 3 Moreover, most of the attacks are ad hominem , and, unlike the attacks on the Prince Regent earlier in the century, the criticism of O’Connell does not extend beyond his personal character to indict an institution. Irrespective of its target, Chartist satirical verse seems tired and uninventive. There is certainly no Chartist equivalent to the devastat- ing combination of text and image produced by the collaboration of the radical journalist, bookseller, and publisher William Hone and the illus- trator George Cruikshank. Nor is there a Chartist equivalent to Hone and Cruikshank’s satirical masterpiece The Political House That Jack Built (1819), which, according to Sambudha Sen, became ‘an instant bestseller… precisely by hitching the popular appeal of antiruling class graphic satire to the radical “nursery rhyme.”’ 4 As Sally Ledger notes, with sales in excess of 100,000 copies, The Political House That Jack Built ‘became one of the most infl uential satires to appear in the fi rst three decades of the nineteenth century.’ 5 The pamphlet’s political effectiveness was generated by the cognitive shock produced by the combination of the familiar (the nursery rhyme format), the recognizable (Cruikshank’s caricatures), and the transgressive. This fusion is exemplifi ed in the pamphlet’s representation of the 24 M. SANDERS

Prince Regent as the ‘Dandy of Sixty’, which so alarmed the authorities that they moved swiftly to purchase the copyright to the caricature. 6 Only rarely (as in Cooper’s case) does Chartist satire generate the emancipatory shock of recognition; for the most part, it trades on the stale familiarity of established political and rhetorical positions. How, then, does one account for the diminished role of satire within Chartism? More specifi cally, is this explicable in terms of its formal, or generic, properties? In the discussion that follows, genre is understood as a formal structure that is both generated and generative. By following theorists as ideologically disparate as György Lukács and Northrop Frye, I want to argue for an understanding of genre as an ideological product that encodes a particular view of the world. In addition, by following theorists such as Jacques Rancière and Isobel Armstrong, I want to argue that these same imaginative products also partake of the quality of the imaginary. 7 In other words, I am suggesting that genre does not only manifest a thought relation to the social order, it may also constitute an active thinking-through of that relationship. In both aspects, genre (like the category of the ‘aesthetic’ in Rancière’s thought) makes visible certain features of the social order and, in consequence, enables certain kinds of political activity. However, in this latter aspect (i.e. as thinking rather than thought, process rather than product), genre may transform rather than simply reiterate existing practical consciousness. In this respect, genre, like the ‘aesthetic’ more generally, possesses a radical potential —albeit one that need not necessarily be realized. In order to explore the generic possibilities of satire, I start with Northrop Frye’s identifi cation of the six phases of satire in his Anatomy of Criticism . Frye argues that satire begins with the ‘satire of the low norm… [which] takes for granted a world which is full of anomalies, injustices, follies, and crimes, and yet is permanent and undisplaceable’. 8 From there satire progresses through a ‘Quixotic’ phase, which involves ‘the setting of ideas and generalizations and theories and dogmas over against the life they are supposed to explain’, before arriving at the ‘satire of the high norm’, which—by means of a ‘logical and self-consistent shift of perspective’— enables all of a society’s presuppositions to be questioned. 9 Thereafter, for Frye, satire becomes increasingly associated with tragedy; in its fourth phase, ‘satire begins to recede’ and to assume instead ‘the ironic aspect of tragedy’. 10 In its fi fth or ‘fatalistic’ phase, ‘it is less moral and more generalized and metaphysical in its interest, less melioristic and more stoi- cal and resigned’. 11 Finally, in its sixth phase, satire ‘presents human life NO LAUGHING MATTER: CHARTISM AND THE LIMITS OF SATIRE 25 in terms of largely unrelieved bondage’. 12 ‘Its settings,’ he argues, ‘feature prisons, madhouses, lynching mobs, and places of execution, and it differs from a pure inferno mainly in the fact that in human experience suffering has an end in death’. 13 Frye offers George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) as an example of sixth-phase satire, and notes that ‘on the other side of this blasted world of repulsiveness and idiocy, a world without pity and without hope, satire begins again’. 14 In Frye’s account, satire would appear to be an essentially conservative genre. The fi rst phase of satire—‘the satire of the low norm’—is unmistakeably conservative, while the second, ‘Quixotic’ satire, all too readily lends itself to a conservative anti-intellectualism. The fi nal three phases— ‘ironic tragedy’, the ‘fatalistic’, and the blasted world—evince an ever more fatalistic world-view, in which an increasing despair at the world as it is is accompanied by a growing conviction as to the impossibility of changing it. At fi rst sight, it appears as if only ‘Quixotic’ satire and the ‘satire of the high norm’, which share a sceptical questioning of society’s norms whether in part (‘Quixotic’) or whole (‘high norm’), are at least capable of radical articulation. The Black Dwarf , the radical periodical edited and largely written by Thomas J. Wooler, provides a good example of Regency radicalism operating within this cultural territory. Instead of an editorial, the Black Dwarf offered a series of letters from itself to the ‘Yellow Bonze at Japan’, in which contemporary political events were treated as an exercise in comparative anthropology. For example, in September 1822, the Black Dwarf offered a letter discussing the ‘Difference in the treatment of Great Men by the People’. 15 The Black Dwarf observes that as knowledge advances, the attitude of the people towards those in authority changes from ‘adora- tion ’ to ‘mere curiosity’. The King’s recent visit to Scotland is offered as an example of the latter attitude. The Black Dwarf reports that while onboard the Royal George , the King would appear on deck to show himself to his people. However, his attendants objected to this and instead ‘ingeniously contrived that [the King] should be personated by a jolly man !’ The Black Dwarf affects outrage at this imposture, declaring:

Nay, is it not a species of treason against the “ divinity ” that “doth hedge a King,” to assert that the people went away “ quite as well pleased ” with this “ jolly man ,” as if they had seen the “ real Sovereign !” I am shocked at the substitution of this “jolly man ,” for the Majesty of England! 26 M. SANDERS

Wooler’s satire highlights the performative nature of monarchy; the King really is nothing more than a ‘jolly man’ waving at the crowd from the deck of the Royal Yacht. The claims of monarchy to be hedged by divinity while ostensibly (and literally) affi rmed by the Black Dwarf are, in fact, exposed to ridicule. Later in the same letter, the Black Dwarf comments on the ingratitude of those people who complain of monarchical rule, arguing that such people ‘ought to be grateful that the Monarchs of the earth have not revenged themselves upon the changeful dispositions of the people, by throwing up their high offi ces, and ceasing to labour for ungrateful nations’. The Black Dwarf observes that it must be easier for a man to ‘maintain himself, than govern millions’ and continues:

It struck me as a trait of wisdom in the late monarch of this country, when I was told he once laboured hard to learn the trade of a button-maker : and I dare say it was want of capacity to acquire the art and mystery of button- making, which induced him to retain a sceptre which he wielded with so little satisfaction to himself.

Thus satire allows the Black Dwarf’s readers not only to imagine a social order in which a king might become a button-maker (surely a post- revolutionary world), but also to imagine that it is a man’s inability to master the art of button-making that compels him to become a king (the artisan is more accomplished than the monarch). Cooper’s declaration of ultra-loyal sentiments to undermine the monarchy’s claims to legitimacy clearly belongs to this satirical tradition. Yet despite these examples, satire’s reputation as a largely conservative genre is reinforced by John Strachan’s introduction to his monumental fi ve-volume collection, British Satire 1785–1840 (2003), in which, while allowing that satire can be ‘a promiscuous muse’, he acknowledges that the genre ‘consorted with the Tory establishment during the Romantic Age’. 16 Gary Dyer, in British Satire and the Politics of Style 1789–1832 , argues that the two major satirical modes—the Juvenalian and the Horatian—are, respectively, aggressively conservative, and quietist but conservative. 17 Indeed, Dyer argues that Regency radicalism effectively created a new mode of ‘radical satire’, which possessed more irony than its classical forebears, was polyphonic rather than univocal, and made particularly effective use of parody. 18 Similarly, polyphony and parody are also identifi ed as vital to the practice of what Kyle Grimes calls Hone’s ‘verbal NO LAUGHING MATTER: CHARTISM AND THE LIMITS OF SATIRE 27 jujitsu’, whose effectiveness depends on ‘collaps[ing] the difference between original and secondary discourses’. 19 Thus for critics such as Dyer and Grimes, radicalism had to remake satire in order to turn it into a suitable vehicle for their politics. This insight, in turn, raises the theoretical possibility that Chartism could have either continued to deploy the inherited forms of ‘radical satire’ or made further modifi cations to the genre in order to keep it serviceable. The fact that Chartism, generally speaking, did neither constitutes one of the problems addressed by this chapter. However, as Dyer notes, from the 1820s onwards a combination of historical circumstance and wider cultural forces and pressures led to the increasing marginalization of satire. Dyer instances the collapse in the poetry market, the rise of comic modes (including the increasing popularity of punning), the absorption of satiric energies by the increasingly dominant novel, and, perhaps most important, the hostility of dissenting and evangelical Christianity towards satire. That hostility was further consolidated by the emergence of ‘bourgeois cleanliness’, which objected to the scurrility of satire, particularly its interest in bodily orifi ces and the acts of urination and defecation. 20 Dissenting Christianity certainly plays a key role within Chartism as a cultural formation. As numerous historians have noted, Chartism bor- rowed a number of its key organizational forms such as the ‘class’ and the large outdoor ‘camp’ meeting from Methodism. Moreover, many Chartists derived their claim to political and economic rights from their interpretation and understanding of the Bible. 21 Similarly, if ‘bourgeois cleanliness’ is seen as an aspect of that amorphous (yet potent) phenomenon known as ‘respectability’, it is equally clear that such forces were at work within Chartism (which frequently sought to defi ne itself as a ‘respectable’ movement). A qualifi ed case might also be made for the relative rise of comic modes within Chartism, insofar as ‘comic’ poems outnumber their satirical counterparts in the poetry column of the Northern Star . The collapse of the poetry market, however, would appear to have less purchase within Chartism, insofar as poetry remained the most highly valued and the most widely practised form of cultural expression within the movement. 22 There were, then, powerful cultural forces intrinsic to Chartism (although undeniably related to wider social trends) that militated against the use of satire. This development often took the form of an indirect consequence rather than a direct ban. Consider, for example, the question of visuality. Generally speaking, radical satire is either graphic or else contains a strong visual dimension. In contrast, there is a relative 28 M. SANDERS absence of visual material throughout the Chartist press in particular and Chartist propaganda more generally. Malcolm Chase observes that in the Northern Star there ‘were barely a dozen illustrations of any note in nearly 800 issues of the paper’; of these, half occurred before 1840, and none appeared after 1846. 23 In addition to these illustrations, the Northern Star periodically gave away engraved portraits of Chartist and radical leaders in an attempt to boost circulation. The visual style of these portraits was eminently ‘respectable’. As Chase comments:

The Star turned its back on the satirical tradition that had been so central to the graphical dimension of British radicalism: only very rarely did the Northern Star use graphic satire in its pages. Conspicuously substituting conventional portraiture in satire’s place, the Star made important claims for Chartism to be seen as respectable, disassociating it from anything that smacked of frivolity, gratuitous insult or libertinism. 24

The Northern Star was not alone in this respect. Other Chartist journals such as the Red Republican , Friend of the People , Democratic Review , and Notes to the People are also devoid of visual images. In part the non-visual nature of the Chartist press owed something to the technical diffi culty (and cost) of incorporating images into broadsheet newspapers (a problem fi rst solved by the Illustrated London News in 1842). Technological determinism, however, is not the complete answer here, since it is clear that the Chartist press (like the movement it served) invested heavily in the cultural capital attached to literacy and ‘respectability’. Separately and in combination, these factors either militated against the use of satire, or diminished its effectiveness. For it is evidently the case that the impact of radical satires, such as Hone’s Political House That Jack Built (1817), depended on the interplay between image and text, which the Chartist press was either unable or unwilling to replicate. Yet as the presence of periodicals such as the Penny Satirist (which ran from 1837 to 1846, and was issued by a Chartist publisher) reminds us, a market for graphic satire persisted into the 1840s and beyond. That soon-to-be eminently Victorian institution, the satirical journal Punch , fi rst appeared in 1841, and its early history throws a helpful sidelight on some of the issues with which this chapter is concerned. For, in the early 1840s in particular, Punch was a bourgeois-radical journal and, in keeping with other forms of middle-class radicalism of this period (such as the Anti-Corn-Law League and the Complete Suffrage Union), was actively NO LAUGHING MATTER: CHARTISM AND THE LIMITS OF SATIRE 29 seeking to reconstruct the ‘popular’ as precisely an alliance of the middle and working classes under middle-class hegemony. As Sambudha Sen has shown, the condition of Punch is even more complex: the struggle among its contributors over the tone and direction of the magazine refl ects the political divisions within a middle class uncertain whether to ‘stick’ or ‘twist’ on the matter of further political and economic reform. 25 This confl ict is exemplifi ed by the tensions between Douglas Jerrold and William Makepeace Thackeray, which can also be seen as a contest between two types of satire: the Juvenalian satire of Jerrold confronting the Horatian one of Thackeray. In this scenario, Chartism’s abandonment of satire could be seen not only as a tacit acknowledgement of Punch ’s pre-eminence in the satirical fi eld, but also a recognition that satire was now uncomfortably (possibly inextricably) associated either with middle-class claims to lead the radical movement or with their accommodation with the aristocracy. In either case, satire is no longer a genre amenable to the expression of working-class demands. The satirical reticence of Chartism might also owe something to the genre’s formal inability to express the movement’s understanding of the world in which it operated. In other words, it is the disparity, perhaps even the incongruity, between the generic properties of satire and Chartism’s historical situation that leads to the abandonment of satire. Early nineteenth-century radicalism, as Kevin Gilmartin observes, was wedded to the principle of ‘[s]trict polarisation’. 26 This polarization is clearly visible in the satire produced by Regency radicals, which is con- tinually organized around binary oppositions such as the People versus the Aristocracy, Truth versus Falsehood/Error, and Liberty versus Tyranny. Traces of this binary thinking remain in Cooper’s satire, particularly the contrast between the luxury of the royal establishment and the impoverished condition of the working classes, and the implicit suggestion of a causal relationship between these two conditions. Some aspects of Cooper’s satire, however, appear to be rather more puzzling. For the contrast here is achieved through a focus on individual states: the ‘Sweet little silver-voiced lady’ with her ‘three palaces’ is posited against the ‘aged grandmother…in a bastile, and vegetating on skilly’. 27 This comparison has a pleasing balance: the dowager and the grandmother belong to the same generation, and the implicit suggestion that the latter deserves the same consideration as the former is unmistakeably radical in intent. However, the comparison is individual, and thus strikingly different from the contrast between the Prince Regent and the ‘People’ that Hone 30 M. SANDERS posits in The Political House That Jack Built , where the satire assumes an immediate identifi cation with a collective identity. Furthermore, the binary structure of The Political House That Jack Built is interrupted by the presence of the ‘ragged shoemaker’ in Cooper’s satire. 28 Moreover, it is this shoemaker who protests against the treatment of his ‘aged grandmother’. Political agency therefore is ascribed to an actor who is located ‘outside’ the antagonistic binary presented by the satire. Admittedly, the shoemaker can be brought within the terms of the original binary on two counts. He himself is ‘ragged’ and thus economi- cally impoverished like his grandmother. Secondly, there are ties of blood between them; or, to put it another way, shoemaker and grandmother are metonymic fi gures for the working-class family. However, in terms of the satire, his raggedness is apparently insuffi cient to justify protest. His protest is satirically justifi ed because it is made on behalf of another. More precisely, it is made on behalf of a woman. The imaginative structures that underpin the satire speak of a signifi cant shift in the imaginary structures that enable political action. For example, making the claim to speak on behalf of another, the basis for engaging in political action suggests that political discourse is becoming increasingly moralized. A politician cannot stand for self-interest, but must represent the interests of others. In addition, pathos plays a key role in Cooper’s rhetorical strategy: his auditors are invited, initially, to feel that the plight of the aged grandmother is wrong—sympathy thus precedes analysis here. Finally, Cooper’s ventrilo- quism repeats (and reinforces) the masculinization of the political realm; his speech depends on the presence of a silent, female fi gure. Furthermore, the turning of the original binary into a triadic structure indicates the extent to which the political sphere is governed by mediating and mediated relationships. In part, this is the result of the changing defi nition of the ‘popular’ and changes to the political system between the Regency and Victorian periods. Radical satire in the Regency period could, for the most part, operate with a category of ‘the people’, which included both the middling and the working classes, and, equally confi - dently, it could identify the ‘aristocracy’ as the political antagonist of the people. Similarly, it explained popular distress and discontent as the result of political misgovernment, which it variously described as ‘old corruption’, ‘aristocracy’, or, in William Cobbett’s resonant phrase, ‘the thing’. 29 In this account, the fracturing of the middle-class/working-class alliance (especially in the aftermath of the great betrayals of 1832 and 1834), together with an emergent sense of the middle class as yet another enemy NO LAUGHING MATTER: CHARTISM AND THE LIMITS OF SATIRE 31 of the working class, destabilizes the People/Aristocracy binary that gave point and purpose to radical satire. In other respects, Cooper’s speech also reveals the strain that Chartist content exerted on satirical form. According to Frye, ‘[t]wo things, then, are essential to satire; one is wit or humour founded on fantasy or a sense of the grotesque or absurd, the other is an object of attack’. 30 In Cooper’s case, the ‘object of attack’ is reasonably clear: it is the system of government that provides Princess Adelaide with her £100,000 a year and the aged grandmother with the workhouse. However, the question of the fantastic or grotesque element is rather more opaque. The grotesque element is partly provided by Cooper’s account of a society that considers it perfectly appropriate to require that millions starve in order that a few might live in luxury. Cooper knows that this is, in effect, the attitude of the dominant groups within society, so he is also satirizing those attitudes. Thus, at this point the satire is simultaneously grotesque and realistic, and, as Frye suggests in his discussion of Swift’s A Modest Proposal (1729):

[satire] breaks down when its content is too oppressively real to permit the maintaining of the fantastic or hypothetical tone. Hence satire is irony which is structurally close to the comic: the comic struggle of two societies, one normal and the other absurd, is refl ected in its double focus of morality and fantasy. 31

In Cooper’s satire, the struggle between normality and the absurd occurs within the same society (which is the social order experienced by his listeners). Moreover, the absurd element of Chartist satire (unlike its Regency counterpart) cannot be so readily personalized: it is the system, not Adelaide herself, which is represented here. Whereas the Prince Regent could serve as an emblem of that same system, and thus as a clear focus for popular anger and mistrust, Adelaide functions metonymically as a representative of the system, and is not the focus for anger. Rather, attention is directed to the contrast between Adelaide and the aged grandmother. In other words, the focus is on the structural relationship, not the individual placeholder. This degree of conceptual abstraction marks a signifi cant advance in terms of an underlying political analysis, even as it marks a diminution in the comic force of the satire. Regency radicals frequently used satire to undermine ruling-class claims to legitimacy and authority, or, to rephrase it in their own moralistic terms, 32 M. SANDERS to replace ‘Error’ with ‘Truth’. They believed that once popular consciousness had been transformed, the existing political and social structures would have to follow: ‘Truth’ would accomplish the Revolution. Chartism effectively inherits some of the cultural work performed by Regency radicalism, and, as a result, the element of ‘fantasy’ recedes in Chartist satire, because it has less need of that view from elsewhere that serves to defamil- iarize the existing social order. Chartism can and does repeat the modes of the ‘Quixotic’ and ‘high norm satires’, but the Chartist versions provide a diminishing political return. The limit enacted in Cooper’s satire concerns the vexed question between practical consciousness and political change. For embedded in the laughter that Cooper generates is the recognition that a transformed consciousness does not necessarily issue in political change. The laughter of ‘the shopmates’ emanates from their already transformed consciousness that rejects the literal meaning of Cooper’s words. Yet Adelaide remains in possession of her £100,000 a year and her three palaces. The relaxed grin of the police superintendent indicates not only his appreciation of Cooper’s wit, but also the recognition that these words are not by themselves capable of changing the facts on the ground. In terms of effect, satire provides Chartist writers with a diminishing political yield. Finally, Cooper’s invocation of the ‘aged grandmother…vegetating on skilly’ in the workhouse, with its tableau of the blameless, victimized female patiently awaiting her male deliverer, contains more than a whiff of melodrama. As I suggested earlier, implicit in Ledger’s Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination is the displacement of satire by melodrama as the dominant genre within radicalism. Although it was not central to Ledger’s project to trace the causes of this shift, such was the fecundity of her critical imagination that her monograph nonetheless offers three intriguing observations in this respect. First, there is her insistence on melodrama’s capacity to enact a critique of existing gender relations. 32 Secondly, she claims that melodrama could produce a ‘realism of affect’ despite its violation of the codes of ‘representational realism’. 33 Finally, and most tantaliz- ingly, there is Ledger’s suggestion that melodrama ‘is the anti-utilitarian aesthetic’. 34 Drawn together, these insights constitute a nexus of gender, affect, and anti-utilitarianism. For me, such a triad suggests a fourth term, which can be seen as a concentration of all three: namely, working-class domesticity. In short, it is the emergence of working-class domesticity as an economic, political, and social issue in the 1840s that blunts the effectiveness of satire as a genre fi t for Chartist purposes. NO LAUGHING MATTER: CHARTISM AND THE LIMITS OF SATIRE 33

NOTES 1. Thomas Cooper, ‘To the Shakesperean Brigade of Leicester Chartists’, Northern Star , 20 August 1842: 4; further reference is taken from this page. The Northern Star and Leeds General Advertiser (1837– 52), owned by former Irish MP Feargus O’Connor, was the leading Chartist newspaper. 2. Anon, ‘What is a Peer?’ Northern Star , 7 May 1842, 3; [Anon.,] ‘Huzza for the Rule of the Whigs’, Northern Star , 29 July 1848: 3; this poem originally appeared in the Tory Blackwood ’ s Edinburgh Magazine 64 (1848): 112–13. 3. See ‘Argus’, ‘Daniel O’Wheedle: A Portrait Drawn from Real Life’, Northern Star , 5 September 1840: 3; [Anon.,] ‘The Devil and Owen O’Connelly, or the New Irish Chancellor: A Romantic Ballad’, Northern Star , 19 December 1840: 3; ‘Tom Pen’, ‘Song for the People, XXXII: A Stave about the Quack Patriot and His Repeal Delusion’, Northern Star , 10 October 1846: 3. 4. Sambudha Sen, London , Radical Culture , and the Making of the Dickensian Aesthetic (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 2012), 4. 5. Sally Ledger, Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 14. 6. Ledger, Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination , 16–18. 7. See, for example, Jacques Rancière, The Aesthetic Unconscious , trans. Debra Keates and James Swenson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009), and Isobel Armstrong, The Radical Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000). 8. Northrop Frye. Anatomy of Criticism : Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 226. As the language of ‘phases’ suggests, Frye regards satire as a genre that develops over time (although he sees the overall movement as cyclical rather than linear). I would, however, like to suggest the decoupling of Frye’s taxonomy from his history and the substitution of ‘modes’ rather than ‘phases’ of satire. In this revised model, not only are all six forms of satire theoretically available to a writer at any given time, but different modes can also inhabit the same historical time. This model preserves Frye’s most valuable insight, which is that the various types of satire register the differences between differing world-views, with a remarkable degree of subtlety. 9. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism , 230, 234. 34 M. SANDERS

10. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism , 236. 11. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism , 237. 12. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism , 238. 13. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism , 238. 14. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism , 239. 15. ‘The Black Dwarf’ [Thomas J. Wooler], ‘Letters of the Black Dwarf. From the Black Dwarf in London to the Yellow Bonze, at Japan. Difference in the Treatment of Great Men by the People’, Black Dwarf , 9.2 (1822): 361–76. Further reference is taken from this article. Wooler edited the satirical and radical Black Dwarf from 1817 to 1824. 16. John Strachan, ed. British Satire 1785–1840 , 5 vols. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2003), 1.xviii. 17. Gary Dyer, British Satire and the Politics of Style 1789–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 40–41. 18. See Dyer, British Satire and the Politics of Style , 1, 68–71, 75. 19. Kyle Grimes, ‘Verbal Jujitsu: William Hone and the Tactics of Satirical Confl ict’, in Steven E. Jones ed., The Satiric Eye : Forms of Satire in the Romantic Period (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 181. 20. Dyer, British Satire and the Politics of Style , 98. 21. See, for example, Malcolm Chase, Chartism : A New History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 141–42; and Michael Sanders, ‘“God is Our Guide! Our Cause Is Just!”: The National Chartist Hymn Book and Victorian Hymnody’, Victorian Studies , 54.4 (2012): 679–705. 22. For the importance of poetry to the Chartist movement, see Michael Sanders, The Poetry of Chartism : Politics , Aesthetics , History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 23. Malcolm Chase, ‘Building Identity, Building Circulation: Engraved Portraiture and the Northern Star ’, in Joan Allen & Owen R. Ashton eds., Papers for the People : A Study of the Chartist Press (London: Merlin Press, 2005), 25. 24. Chase, ‘Building Identity’, 26–27. 25. Sambudha Sen, ‘Radical Satire and Respectability: Comic Imagination in Hone, Jerrold, and Dickens’, in Aruna Krishnamurthy ed., The Working-Class Intellectual in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 143–66. 26. Kevin Gilmartin, Print Politics : The Press and Radical Opposition in Early Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 5. NO LAUGHING MATTER: CHARTISM AND THE LIMITS OF SATIRE 35

27. Cooper, ‘To the Shakesperean Brigade of Leicester Chartists’, 4. 28. Cooper, ‘To the Shakesperean Brigade of Leicester Chartists’, 4. 29. For a discussion of the ways in which Cobbett uses ‘the thing’ as a way of representing a corrupt political process, see Chapter 6 of Gilmartin’s Print Politics. 30. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism , 224 31. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism , 224. 32. See Ledger, Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination , 160. 33. Ledger, Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination , 164. 34. Ledger, Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination , 180; emphasis in original. CHAPTER 3

‘Their Deadly Longing’: Paternalism, the Past, and Perversion in Barnaby Rudge

Ben Winyard

Perversion is everywhere apparent in Charles Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge (1841). The novel evidences an impressive array of perverse desires, relationships, and subject positions. Barnaby Rudge abounds with a sexual- ized excess that lends itself almost irresistibly to a range of psychoanalytic and queer modes of interpretation. With its melodramatically infl ected depictions of violent interfamilial confl ict, father–son rivalry, mob violence, mass psychosis, and social collapse, Barnaby Rudge can be aligned with several key elements of Sigmund Freud’s account of psychosexual development, including Oedipal rivalry, polymorphous perversity, and civilization’s unintentional intensifi cation of perverse desires. In particular, the novel exemplifi es Freud’s observation, in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), that perversity is not external and anathema to normality, but is actually fashioned and strengthened by it. For Dickens, as for Freud, the family is the crucible of our perversions, primarily through its functional failures and its counterproductive repression of sexual desire. Dickens depicts desire as potentially disruptive, violent, and anti-social, particularly if left unchecked or, conversely, overly repressed; like Freud, he prescribes the sublimation—not the repression—of libidinal energy,

B. Winyard ( ) Digital Publications, Birkbeck, University of London, Bloomsbury, London, UK

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 37 J. Bristow, J. McDonagh (eds.), Nineteenth-Century Radical Traditions, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59706-9_3 38 B. WINYARD and he regards the bourgeois, heteronormative family and ‘civilization’ as safe containers of erotic excess. 1 Dickens confl ates the familial and the political, depicting an interwoven private and public paternalism that violently prohibits sexuality and, thus, ironically generates the libidinal excesses it labours to contain. Barnaby Rudge centres on the 1780 Gordon Riots, when Londoners, incensed by the easing of legal restrictions against Roman Catholics, rioted for several days. The riots were an expression of nationalistic and religious hostility towards Catholicism, which was broadly perceived as reactionary, absolutist, and morally dubious—anathema to the liberty, virtue, and providential prosperity of Protestant Britain. Historians tend to foreground as causes the socio-economic diffi culties of the 1770s, the badly faring war against America, and declining living and working conditions for Londoners. Dickens himself foreshadows these accounts, giving short shrift to the rioters’ religious motivations, which he depicts as a fi g leaf for other grievances; he focuses instead on socio-economic discontent and the criminal negligence and misgovernment of the Augustan ruling class. Dickens evidently saw this riotous event of sixty years ago as refl ecting his own contemporary moment. The reforming optimism of the early 1830s had given way to frustration at the limited franchise and the exhausted zeal of the Whig government; the 1841 re-election of the newly christened Conservative party inspired angry despair in radicals, including Dickens; economic travails and a concomitant retraction of living conditions signalled the beginning of the ‘hungry forties’; and anti-Poor Law, Chartist, and other socio-political and popular agitation raised the spectre of riot and even revolution. As Sally Ledger observes, Barnaby Rudge ‘bears the ideological scars of the troubled moment in British history when it came into print’. 2 With its gloomy pessimism and ‘political ambivalence’, Barnaby Rudge presented a challenge to Ledger, complicating yet ultimately enriching her argument about Dickensian radicalism. Ledger concludes that Barnaby Rudge ‘cannot be recuperated…to a paternalistic structure of feeling’. 3 Rather, she locates the novel’s radicalism in its sympathetic portrayal of the grievances of ‘the People’, its gleeful depiction of riot, and its equation of domestic with political tyranny, but she also acknowledges it as a ‘dark, troubling and troubled novel’. 4 With its stinging depiction of domestic and political paternalism as brutally myopic and self-serving, Barnaby Rudge encouraged Ledger to chart Dickens’s growing disaffection with modes of governance and political reforms posited on benevolent fatherly care. ‘THEIR DEADLY LONGING’ 39

The novel is thematically, structurally, and narratively similar to the later, far more successful A Tale of Two Cities (1859), which similarly offers a retrospect on the eighteenth century, intertwines the private and domestic with violent public tumult, lambasts the upper classes while defending the poor and oppressed, and juxtaposes two geographical locations. Barnaby Rudge opens in 1775 at the Maypole Inn in Essex, east of London, owned by the dim, dictatorial, and reactionary John Willet, who dominates and infantilizes his son Joe and the inn’s ‘savage’ ostler, Hugh. Similarly teem- ing with repressed energies is the London home of the benevolent lock- smith Gabriel Varden, who is assailed by his shrewish, evangelical wife and her maid, Miggs. The Vardens’ daughter Dolly is loved by Joe Willet and by the Vardens’ apprentice Sim Tappertit, both of whom are frustrated in their desires by overbearing father fi gures. Mirroring this frustration is the relationship between Edward Chester and Emma Haredale, which is opposed by his aristocratic father Sir John Chester, the epitome of Augustan egotism, shallowness, and cynicism, and by her gloomy Roman Catholic uncle Geoffrey Haredale. Emma Haredale’s father, Reuben, was murdered twenty-two years before by his steward, Rudge Senior, who returns, ghost-like, to torment his guilt-stricken wife who has single- handedly raised their ‘idiot’ son, the eponymous Barnaby. Barnaby’s mental defi ciencies are vaguely but dramatically attributed to his father’s crime. Both Joe Willet and Edward Chester quarrel with their respective fathers; the former enlists in the army, while the latter leaves for the West Indies. The narrative swiftly moves forward fi ve years, introducing the historical fi gure of Lord George Gordon, whose incendiary anti-Catholic rhetoric fomented the riots that bear his name, and who is depicted as a weak- willed fanatic. The bulk of the novel details the riots, with the exultantly anarchic Hugh and the easily misled Barnaby partaking in the most dramatic events, accompanied by the rebellious apprentice Sim Tappertit and the hangman Dennis. The set pieces are the historical burning of Newgate prison and the fi ctionalized burning of the Haredales’ Essex home, the Warren, and the destruction of the Maypole Inn. Emma Haredale and Dolly Varden are kidnapped by Dennis, Hugh, and Sim, but are rescued by their returned paramours, Edward Chester and Joe Willet. The novel concludes with a typical Dickensian restoration of domestic harmony: the murderous elder Rudge is immolated during the burning of the Warren, the sparring Vardens are reunited, Miggs is cast out, and Sim is physically maimed, while Hugh and Dennis are hanged for their riotous behaviour. It is revealed that Hugh is the bastard son of the dastardly aristocrat 40 B. WINYARD

Chester, who is killed by Haredale in a duel. Barnaby is sentenced to hang, but is reprieved through the efforts of Gabriel Varden. Dolly Varden and Joe Willet marry, inherit the Maypole, produce a troop of progeny, and care for the now imbecilic John Willet and the much-altered Barnaby. As Ledger observes, in several key elements of its plot Barnaby Rudge utilizes and extends the tropes of theatrical melodrama, including familial discord, sexual violence against women, oppressive and murderous father fi gures, Manichean divisions between good and evil, bastardy, the heroic return of men from colonial and military adventures abroad, and the reimposition of domestic order and happiness. For a writer famed for his panoply of grotesque characters, in Barnaby Rudge Dickens depicts some of his most repulsive, monstrous, and perverse creations. Dennis, the ‘ghastly’, ‘strange’, and ‘dismal’ hangman (330), exhibits potent homosocial desires for his male companions and openly indulges his fetishistic penchant for asphyxiation. Dennis admires Hugh as a ‘powerful fellow’ (317), describes him having ‘a neck for stretching’ (317), and strokes Hugh’s throat, ‘as if he were studying the anatomical development of that part of his frame’ (328). The effeminate apprentice Sim Tappertit vents his desires through pantomimic acts of suppressed masturbatory rage, before blunderingly and unsuccessfully enact- ing his fantasies of kidnapping and forcibly marrying Dolly. Thus, when trying to communicate his desire to Dolly, ‘he began to screw and twist his face…into such extraordinary, hideous, and unparalleled contortions, that Gabriel…was stricken with amazement’ (45). Hugh is similarly aroused by fantasises of intimidating, kidnapping, and raping women—‘I love all the ladies ma’am’, he tells the appalled Mrs Varden—and he fi nds intense satisfaction in riotous anarchy. 5 Additionally, the ‘shrewish’ and ‘sharp’ (64) Miggs humorously represses her desires for Sim through enraged fantasies of self-immolating violence—‘she would, to spite mankind, hang, drown, stab, or poison herself, with a joy past all expression’ (64)—and through the service of a hypocritical evangelicalism. Besides them is an entire mob of socially and sexually frustrated plebeians who destroy great swathes of London, as well as themselves, with an indelible, eroticized rage characteristic of infantile polymorphous perversity and the death drive. The novel is suffused with perverse energies that explode from behind the fl imsy veneer of a restrictive, stagnating ‘civilization’. There is, then, at the heart of Barnaby Rudge a surfeit that I identify here as sexual—and queer. This excess has aroused annoyance, embarrass- ment, and even disgust in critics and readers. John Ruskin, for example, ‘THEIR DEADLY LONGING’ 41 roundly criticized the novel’s ‘diseased extravagance’. 6 The work’s dense interconnections between violence, perversion, and the fragility of individual psychic formation and social futurity also resonate with similar concerns in radical queer theories. I consider some of the overlaps and dissonances between the novel’s queer excess and theorizations that cat- egorize queerness as a surplus that can strain, undo, subvert, and break social and subjective norms. Yet, while these theories of queer radical- ness—posited most forcefully by Leo Bersani and Lee Edelman—proffer a compelling means of alerting us to the novel’s sexually insurgent energies, I also address the ways in which Barnaby Rudge evades and complicates such analytical models and suggests the limitations of a queer radicalism founded on the notion of ‘sex-as-death’—a liberatory force that undoes the self and the social. I end by discussing how Dickens’s radicalism might be matched by queering Barnaby Rudge in a different, more reparative mode that focuses less on the deathly, shattering effects of desire and more on the fi gure of Barnaby as a queer child, one who remains ill at ease in the world, yet surviving and surmounting violence. Like many of Dickens’s early works, Barnaby Rudge disregards generic stability and, in its appropriation of various literary genres (historical novel, theatrical melodrama, religious polemic, radical satire, and Gothic horror story), it refuses the restrictions of a particular mode of (re)presentation, a refusal that has troubled and exasperated readers and critics alike. Popularly neglected and underappreciated on publication, Dickens saw the weekly circulation of his short-lived journal Master Humphrey ’ s Clock (in which Barnaby Rudge was serialized) fall from 70,000 to 30,000, while the work was scarcely reviewed. 7 The novel, on which Dickens expended considerable time and effort, was his fi rst dud and stalled ‘the triumphal procession’ of his early career. 8 Modern critics seem as unsure as their Victorian predecessors about where to place the work: most readings obligingly warn of the novel’s shortcomings, and it has been variously described as a ‘comparative failure’, the ‘least satisfactory of all Dickens’s full-length books’, and ‘the most untimely of historical novels’. 9 It is apt that a writer with such a ‘riotous imagination’ should have turned his attention to the depiction of an actual riot; yet it is intriguing how this material overwhelmed Dickens, violently dramatizing his contradictory attitudes towards order and transgression, law and criminality, normality and perversion. 10 As John Carey succinctly puts it: ‘Dickens, who saw himself as the great prophet of cosy, domestic virtue, purveyor of improving literature to the middle classes, never seems to have quite 42 B. WINYARD reconciled himself to the fact that violence and destruction were the most powerful stimulants to his imagination’. 11 If mob violence is contagious, then the narrator himself seems to have caught the fever; the unruly vitality of the riots seems to surprise and enthral him as much as the rebellious Londoners he describes. Dickens’s authorial voice is noticeably dimmed by the clamour of his material: ‘more men still—more, more, more—swarm- ing on like insects: noise, smoke, light, darkness, frolic, anger, laughter, groans, plunder, fear, and ruin!’ (450). The narrative attempts, in Kim Ian Michasiw’s words, ‘to fi x a point of view to grasp and display the embodied totality of the events’, while simultaneously dissipating—as Steven Connor observes—that ‘point of view in the intensely inhabited body of riot’. 12 Dickens was well aware of these diffi culties of perspective and representation: ‘my object has been to convey an idea of multitudes, violence, and fury; and even to lose my own dramatis personae in the throng’. 13 The Dickens who is ‘imaginatively on the side of the rioters and wreckers’ depicts the riotous, the perverse, and the grotesque with obvious relish, and ‘the novel is energised by the frisson of representing familiar places torn apart by confl ict, with…the very anatomy of the city transformed by riot’. 14 Dickens’s pleasure is evident in the energy of his writing, as we can see in a letter to John Forster in which he gleefully announced: ‘I have let all the prisoners out of Newgate, burnt down Lord Mansfi eld’s, and played the very devil’. 15 The discomfort induced by Barnaby Rudge derives partly from Dickens’s unresolved ambivalence towards the rioters, who invoke both his horror and his fascination. 16 Dickens’s enjoyment often turns to po- faced expressions of disapproval or outright horror as he aligns himself with the forces of order at key narrative moments. The mob is ‘composed for the most part of the very scum and refuse of London’ and compared to ‘a mad monster’ (407, 408). The rioters are ‘wild and savage, like beasts at the sight of prey’, ‘hideous madmen [and a] dream of demon heads and savage eyes’, while Hugh and Dennis are described as ‘wallowing, like some obscene animals, in their squalor and wickedness’ (408, 419, 432). The narrator insists that ‘[t]he great mass never reasoned or thought at all, but were stimulated by their own headlong passions, by poverty, by ignorance, by the love of mischief, and the hope of plunder’ (438). He also exhibits his habitual respect for military order: when arrested, Barnaby senses ‘something particularly impressive’ about the soldiers, accustomed as he is ‘to the noise and tumult of an undisciplined mob’ (477). Equally, the burning of Lord Mansfi eld’s home is described in muted, tragic terms: ‘THEIR DEADLY LONGING’ 43

‘nothing could replace…the great Law Library, on almost every page of which were notes in the Judge’s own hand, of inestimable value’ (551). Yet, if Barnaby Rudge hints towards an annihilating death drive threat- eningly present in all social relationships, it also examines human anger, aggression, and deathliness as products of interpsychic confl ict. Thus, Dickens identifi es a justifi able rage originating in the multiple frustrations and injustices borne by ‘the People’. He expresses sympathy for those hanged as ‘the weakest, meanest, and most miserable’ of the rioters (649), and, with its reproachful attacks on civic authority, Dickens was convinced of the novel’s radical credentials—‘[b]y Jove how radical I am getting!’ he wrote to Forster. 17 Dickens distinguishes misguided individuals from the frenzied mass, but he also describes ‘sober workmen going home from their day’s labour’ succumbing to the ‘dread fever’ and ‘infectious madness’ of riot (438). The riot leaders are, tellingly, idiots and psycho- paths, but Gordon is a manipulated simpleton while Hugh and Barnaby are warped by perverse relationships with state and domestic paternalism. Similarly, although representing the destruction of the Maypole as a sac- rilegious transgression, it is telling that this ‘this veritable temple of snug- ness and security’ should be the target of one of Dickens’s most blatant scenes of domestic evisceration. 18

PERVERSION Perversion can be construed as an act of psychic rebellion. In the words of Jonathan Dollimore, it is ‘a refusal or attempted subversion of those organizing principles of culture which are secured psychosexually, principles which include sexual difference, the law of the father, and heterosexuality’. 19 Perversion ‘operates vis-à-vis the Oedipus complex, trying to elude its fatal character, rebelling against its universal law, and its correlative, the threat of castration’. 20 Thus, there is ‘a deeply saturated perversity’ at the very heart of Barnaby Rudge , not only in the depiction of the riots with their giddying contravention of boundaries and the re-emergence of disruptive infantile perversity, but also in several characters who (temporarily) evade the castrating authority of paternalism and whose multi- farious libidinal drives are not restricted to procreative heterosexuality. 21 When the Warren is torched, frenzy erupts, with psychotic rioters attacking fl owers and ‘paddling’ in fl ames ‘to gratify their deadly longing’ (462). Similarly, the rioters who attack a vintner’s dance, ‘half in a mad triumph, and half in the agony of suffocation’, become ‘the dust and ashes of the 44 B. WINYARD fl ames they had kindled’ (569, 571). Dickens’s rioters dissolve all familial, social, and historical bonds; they escape the bounds of ‘normal’ psychosexual development; and they either regress to polymorphous perversity or ‘merge into an unconscious mass the basic end of which is the temporary, and later the permanent, erasure of consciousness’. 22 Like Freud, Dickens identifi es an aggressive death drive (Thanatos) as constituent of sexuality (Eros). 23 Similar to Dollimore’s championing of perversion as a strategy of resistance, Edelman, working in a Lacanian register, has urged a constant queer repudiation of the law of the Symbolic. In No Future (2004), which aligns queerness with the death drive’s brutal anti-sociality, Edelman dismisses what he regards as the complacent, assimilationist politics of the global gay rights movement, neutered by its limited emphasis on monogamy and matrimony, and reproductive, employment, and property rights. For Edelman, queerness must reject politics itself, which is structured around maintaining a social order via anodyne exhortations to build a better future ‘for our children’: the ‘Child remains the perpetual horizon of every acknowledged politics, the fantasmatic benefi ciary of every political intervention’. 24 Edelman instead urges queers to embrace the death drive, to inhabit fully our demonized selves—child-threatening, socially destructive reprobates—and to articulate and embody ‘a constant no in response to the law of the Symbolic’. 25 Edelman attempts to move queerness into a more radical economy of meaning, reinvigorating it with a socially and politically disruptive potentiality tied to the lack at the centre of the Symbolic. The death drive is ‘the inarticulate surplus that dismantles the subject from within’ and it ‘names what the queer, in the order of the social, is called forth to fi gure: the negativity opposed to every form of social viability’. 26 Politics, Edelman sardonically asserts, is a fantasy, ‘the fantasy, precisely, of form as such, of an order, an organization, that assures the stability of our identities as subjects’, which attempts ‘to install as reality itself, one libidi- nally subtended fantasy or another intended to screen out the emptiness that the signifi er embeds at the core of the Symbolic’. 27 Consuming and undoing subjectivity from the inside out, the death drive is, in the order of the social, aligned with queerness and represents the ‘negativity opposed to every form of social viability’. 28 ‘[Q]ueerness’, Edelman insists, ‘can never defi ne an identity; it can only ever disturb one’. 29 Barnaby Rudge ’s climactic scenes of frenzied destruction and self-immolation—‘a bewilder- ing horror’ (419)—might be seen as a queer denial of the viability of the ‘THEIR DEADLY LONGING’ 45 political and the social—a repudiation of futurity itself. Thus, when the mob attacks London’s Catholic chapels, Dickens describes

some with great wooden fragments, on which they spent their rage as if they had been alive, rending them limb from limb, and hurling the scattered morsels high into the air; some…unconscious of the hurts they had received from falling bricks, and stones, and beams; one borne upon a shutter, in the very midst, covered with a dingy cloth, a senseless, ghastly heap. (419)

As a radical, Dickens is sympathetic towards the weak and miserable, whose lives are consumed by the punitive machinations of the paternalistic state, and he presents Hugh and others as the warped children of a perverse socialization. Hugh perhaps embodies Edelman’s ‘sinthomosexual’, a non-subject who ‘forsakes all cause, all social action, all responsibility for a better tomorrow or for the perfection of social forms’. 30 His savagery is born of paternalism’s failure to establish social and familial ties for him, enabling him to reject the ‘compulsory compassion’ that Edelman scorns as an element of the fantasy of politics—‘what do I risk! What do I stand a chance of losing, master? Friends, home? A fi g for ’em all; I have none; they are nothing to me’ (336, original emphasis). It is not insignifi cant that Hugh disrespectfully climbs the phallic maypole that is later ‘crudely thrust through the shattered window’ of the inn—an aggressive, sexually symbolic act of rebellion against paternal authority. 31 However, Hugh’s anarchic ferociousness ironically translates into a politics of sorts: as Michasiw observes, he ‘transforms an utterly valueless call [“No Popery!”] into an authentic political programme [“No Property!”]’. 32 The gallows is the ultimate phallic symbol in the novel, representing a disciplinary system of repression and castration that, unlike the maypole, is not brought down. 33 Hugh’s mother is dispatched by an unforgiving paternalist state and he is consequently raised like an ‘animal’—‘they hung my mother up at Tyburn for a couple of thousand men to stare at’ (98, 200). Dickens’s radical comment still contains a disturbing frisson of perverse eroticism as he evokes the crowd leering at the woman’s corpse. In 1849, he similarly described the hanged body of Marie Manning as ‘a fi ne shape, so elaborately corseted and artfully dressed, that it was quite unchanged in its trim appearance as it slowly swung from side to side’. 34 Before succumbing to the sadistic violence of the revengeful state, Hugh, ‘looking upward like a savage prophet’, curses a diseased paternalism— ‘that black tree, of which I am the ripened fruit’ (646)—that sentences 46 B. WINYARD the innocent Barnaby to hang. 35 However, by presenting madness, dissolution, and death as the only alternatives to heteronormative authority, Barnaby Rudge ironically reaffi rms the necessity of punitive systems of repression alongside civilized sublimation. 36 Although Edelman and Bersani deploy, in Tim Dean’s words, ‘subtly different concepts’ of the death drive, by reading Barnaby Rudge via their work we can grasp that the frenzied urge of the Gordon rioters to destroy represents a refusal of politics, subjectivity, and intelligibility; it is an ecstatic embrace, and a collective manifestation, of the death drive, offering a loud, irrefutable no to the Symbolic. 37 The rioters’ self-destruction thus suggests that sex-as-death is an ecstatic release from domination, and the novel offers a pessimistic, apocalyptic account of the intrinsic violence, excess, and anti-sociality of human psychic life. For Bersani, sexual pleasure overpowers the ego in a manner that aligns sexuality with the death drive and makes masochism ‘a tautology for sexuality.’ 38 In Bersani’s account, what he terms the ‘productive masochism’ of sex-as-death offers (as Michael Snediker puts it) ‘a temporary fi gurative suicide, a moment’s disorganization within a fi eld of otherwise intense regulation; or oppo- sitely, an internalization of the destructive, shattering energies otherwise directed outward’. 39 It thus appears that Dickens’s novel prefi gures or cleverly anticipates modern psychosexual accounts of human desire and psychic life. Arguably, though, Barnaby Rudge demonstrates the deep roots of psychoanalysis in nineteenth-century sexual science, particularly the centrality of the repressive hypothesis and the reiterated insistence that sexual desire is a powerful, anti-social force, constantly threatening to burst hydraulically through barriers of censorship and repression to overwhelm individual subjectivity and dissolve familial and social bonds. Dickens imagines and represents sexuality as, in Foucault’s words, ‘a stubborn drive, by nature alien and of necessity disobedient to a power which exhausts itself trying to subdue it and often fails to control it entirely’. 40 Barnaby Rudge illustrates the ‘putative mechanics of power’ that Foucault sketches, operating ‘according to the simple and endlessly reproduced mechanisms of law, taboo, and censorship: from state to family, from prince to father, from the tribunal to the small change of everyday punishments, from the agencies of social domination to the structures that constitute the subject’. 41 In its gothic depiction of Georgian juridical power as mindlessly violent, repressive, and repetitive, the novel represents power as, in Foucault’s words, ‘poor in resources, sparing of its methods, monotonous in the tactics it utilizes, ‘THEIR DEADLY LONGING’ 47 incapable of invention, and seemingly doomed always to repeat itself’. 42 Guy Hocquenghem similarly argues that especially homosexual perversions have been understood as hydraulic excess—the threatening, explo- sive waste product of social and moral order:

[Homosexuality]…represent[s] the detritus of a well-oiled social machine…; it is what remains of the unclassifi able and unserviceable libido, the non- sexual as opposed to a strictly defi ned sexuality. In its desiring form, it has no place in the social structure.…But ‘moral pollution’…seems to have the same kind of staying power as industrial pollution: the machine produces a constantly rising fl ow of detritus, which it is increasingly incapable of bringing under control. 43

Ironically, as Lynne Huffer argues, much queer theory maintains an ongoing and specifi c investment in the psychoanalytic alignment of sex with death and its supposed ability to overwhelm normative subjectivi- ties and social structures. Arguably, queer theorists such as Bersani and Edelman have structured their queer critiques around a Victorian understanding of sexual desire in which subjective, familial, and social coher- ence are easily overwhelmed by the brute power of sex-as-death. Thus, for Edelman, the death drive is the ‘excess embedded within the Symbolic’, a hydraulic surplus that constantly threatens to destabilize, undo, and shatter. 44 If, as Foucault observed, ‘sex is indeed traversed by the death instinct’, Huffer suggests that we ‘unravel that history of sex-as-death’ via a ‘retraversal, a retracing of historical steps’ to understand when, how, and why this conceptual Gordian knot formed. As Huffer argues, ‘Foucault tells a story about sexual subjectivation with no way out’:

Even when we replace psychoanalytic desire with ‘bodies and pleasures,’ we hardly dismantle the discursive moral universe that imagines sexuality as a kind of Jack-in-the-box: a libidinal force which, once unleashed, will free us (like death!) from those norms…In our politics, our writing, and our lovemaking we can only discursively reproduce the structures that have been used to marginalize us as sexual deviants in the fi rst place…Indeed, that attempt to escape the specifi cally sexual ruse of identity that the repressive hypothesis describes has, to a large extent, been queer theory’s purpose. 45

It is easy to read Barnaby Rudge via Edelman because both texts are underpinned by a historically contingent notion of sex-as-death—an inherent force, a liberating Jack-in-the-box—somehow beyond discourse, 48 B. WINYARD power, and knowledge. What Barnaby Rudge demonstrates, however, is how easily desire is recaptured by normative psychic, familial, and social structures, and the novel represents, reproduces, and extends an Oedipal logic, whereby perversion is actually central to the circulation of desire within heteronormative social and familial structures. Edelman’s strong theory is similarly suffocating in its inescapable circuitry, offering bleak, binarized options: ‘futurity and positivity in opposition to nihilism and negation’, as Judith Halberstam observes. 46 Jeff Nunokawa detects a ‘fervor we can fairly call apocalyptic’ in such accounts of ‘the spectacular explosion of the self’ via sex-as-death, and he despairs of the apocalyptic tone of such queer work:

[I]t’s been my aim in the last few years to develop a less eschatological picture of the self’s escape from society, a picture undarkened by the vision of a self that is nothing more than the scar tissue of the violence done to it by a culture that is itself nothing more than the sum of this violence. What to call the point of view from which I have sought to take leave? Manichaeanism comes to mind. 47

Edelman’s and others’ strong theories, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick would term them, imagine the world in terms of ‘a univocal entity (call it what you will, or what wills you: ideology, power, violence, language)’ from which subjects can only escape via the self-shattering of sex-as-death. 48 Tim Dean has similarly criticized Edelman for his muddled delineation of the death drive and his ‘extraordinarily reductive’ and ‘distinctly melodramatic’ radicalism, which is bifurcated by strict divisions between the social and the anti-social, the queer and the normative, and the present and the future. 49 We might espy some interesting overlaps here between queer and Dickensian radicalism; the latter was, as Ledger shows, heavily infl ected by a melodramatic aesthetics that emphasized a Manichean struggle between right and wrong, and such a mode of representation is certainly traceable in the queer radicalism of Edelman. 50

THE PAST AND PATERNALISM Consciously emulating the historical narratives of Walter Scott, Dickens takes the historical novel and blends it with other genres to produce something radically protean. Just as Barnaby Rudge is concerned with the struggle of sons against fathers, so too does it challenge the models established ‘THEIR DEADLY LONGING’ 49 by its literary precursor, Walter Scott. 51 Dickens, as John Bowen observes, perverts the historical novel with his use of ‘Gothic motifs to tell a tale full of haunting, trauma, and uncanny repetition, dramatized through a heavily melodramatic excess’. 52 Dickens is not interested in historical cause and effect or displaying fi delity to historical events. Rather, he ‘takes witnesses, participants, narrators, and readers of historical events to places and states of mind not able to be assimilated to the orthodoxies of historical fi c- tion and its criticism’. 53 On this view, Dickens underexplores the socio- economic causality of the riots, and his refusal to assign ‘the dignity of an ideology’ to the rioters has been a source of particular discomfort and annoyance to literary critics. 54 ‘A spectre is haunting Europe’ wrote Marx and Engels in the opening line of The Communist Manifesto (1848), and in Barnaby Rudge it is often history itself that does the haunting. Dickens offers a particularly Gothic view of history as nightmare, a ghostly visitor bringing disruption and trauma just as the repressed haunts the unconscious, represented by the ghoulish Rudge who haunts Barnaby and is himself haunted by his crime. Rudge is consistently described as ‘a spectre’, ‘a shadow’, ‘a ghost’, and he melodramatically declares, ‘I, that in the form of a man live the life of a hunted beast; that in the body am a spirit, a ghost upon the earth, a thing from which all creatures shrink’ (141, 145). The trauma of history manifests itself symptomatically as uncanny repetition; Rudge is mechani- cally and irresistibly drawn back to the scene of his crime—‘I was urged to go there, by something stronger than my own will’ (512). 55 Haredale is also haunted by history; described as ‘grim and ghostly’, he is gripped by ‘a mania for revenge’ and obsessively awaits the return of the murderer (173). 56 Haredale, moreover, represents Dickens’s notion of a perverse Catholicism that, since it refuses to embrace the historical and doctrinal progress of Protestantism, lingers in past error and haunts the present. Barnaby is marked, literally and metaphorically, by history: the blood- stain on his wrist, and his ‘idiocy’ attesting to his father’s crimes. In Barnaby’s ‘wild eyes, there were terrible images of that guilty night; with his unearthly aspect, and his half-formed mind, he seemed to the murderer, a creature who had sprung into existence from his victim’s blood’ (574). Barnaby, like his father, is haunted by the murder: ‘the strange imaginings he had; his terror of certain senseless things—familiar objects he endowed with life; the slow and gradual breaking out of that one horror, in which, before his birth, his darkened intellect began’ (209). In Lacanian terms, Barnaby has not fully entered the Symbolic order: ‘deprived of the naming 50 B. WINYARD function of the father, Barnaby has no centre about which to order his chaotic perceptions, no capacity to adopt what Foucault glosses as “the scansion of presences and absences” necessary to language, law, and identity’. 57 Barnaby’s fragmentary perceptions resemble the intrusion of the Real into the Symbolic in the form of psychotic hallucinations and prefi gure Dickens’s depiction of the riots. As Patrick Brantlinger observes, Rudge’s act of pseudo-patricide thus ‘serves as the private, originary trauma foreshadowing the public violence of the Gordon Riots’. 58 Dickens makes explicit connections between his vision of history as trauma and the stagnant, oppressive authority of paternalism. Mocking simplistic conceptions of the ‘good old days’, his Examiner squib on Tory paternalism, the ‘Fine Old English Gentleman’ (1841), is replicated when Barnaby and his mother encounter a loathsome squire. This is not just for comic effect: Barnaby is sentenced to hang after the squire’s intervention (622). Here the notion of history as a lost Arcadia is simply reactionary rhetoric expediently bolstering a brutal paternalism. Barnaby Rudge is about the failure of paternalism on all levels—domestic, social, and political. Private domestic confl icts between father and son prefi gure the riotous overthrow of the established order. 59 The modes of injustice and repression in the fi rst half of the novel—fathers obstructing the ascension of youth to adulthood and the exclusion of the majority from property and power—lead to an explosion of frustration during the Gordon Riots and, Michasiw says, ‘Dickens employs his principal rioters to interrogate the vexed connections between personal grievances and social action’. 60 John Chester most fully represents the nexus of self-interested state paternalism and domestic tyranny: under a veneer of Augustan sophis- tication, the MP cynically manipulates his legitimate son Edward, while Hugh, his illegitimate lumpenproletariat son, is kept in place with the gallows. Moreover, John Chester surreptitiously foments and directs the riots for his own ends. He represents ‘that class of aristocracy which Dickens despised, those who used their power as license for self-centred amorality and ignored the responsibility attendant upon their position’. 61 Dickens scorns eighteenth-century paternalist government, attacking its affected sentimentalism, its polished and urbane posturing, and its callous maintenance of order through a bloody penal code. John Chester also neglects his familial duties, ridiculing domesticity (‘family affairs…are only fi t for plebeian Christmas days’) and refusing the title of father (‘don’t call me by that obsolete and ancient name’, 133, 267). Edward Chester is sexually frustrated by his father’s refusal to sanction his betrothal to Emma ‘THEIR DEADLY LONGING’ 51

Haredale. When he surreptitiously visits her at the Warren, he transgresses boundaries, contravenes paternal authority, and penetrates the sealed house (‘this is well done of you, sir, to…enter my house unbidden and in secret, like a thief!’, 124). Hugh’s angry question of his neglectful parent, ‘[w]hat do you ask me to come for, and keep me out when I do come?’ (194; emphasis in original), encapsulates the novel’s frustrated father–son relationships. Initially praised for ‘the ruddy gleam’ of its fi re and ‘the cheerful glow’ of its ‘bright pewter fl agons’, the nostalgic security represented by the ancient and venerable Maypole rests on John Willet’s tyrannical rule and is actually illusory. Dickens quickly hints at the rebellious forces that cir- culate within the ‘gloomy, ruinous and empty’ inn (29). 62 Similarly, the Warren is ‘an old and gloomy hall, whose walls were ornamented with rusty suits of armour, antlers, weapons of the chase, and suchlike garni- ture’ (123). Willet supports retaliatory state paternalism, declaring ‘it’s a blessed thing to think how many people are hung in batches…as show- ing how wide awake our government is’ and is mockingly described as ‘a father of the good old English sort’ (100, 251). Like the country squire, Willet is ‘deeply attached to a frozen past for…egotistical reasons’. 63 In his stubborn resistance to change, he comically ignores coaches as the quintessence of ‘gadding about’ (216), but in Willet ‘imperturbabil- ity has become imbecility, and liberation from the passage of time has become a means of exercising tyrannical power’. 64 He sustains paternal rule by emasculating and infantilizing his son, insisting that Joe is a ‘boy’ and stifl ing his articulate attempts at self-expression (252). 65 Regarding women as ‘a kind of nonsensical mistake on the part of Nature’, Willet, like Chester, prohibits the free expression of youthful sexuality: ‘We want no love-making here’ (181, 242). He restricts Joe’s identity and sexuality, denying his movement and speech as ‘violation[s] of the stasis man- dated by paternity’. 66 ‘Will he never think me man enough to take care of myself!’ exclaims an anguished Joe (185). Similar to Freud’s account of the curbing of the infant’s sexually transgressive drives through fear of the castrating father, the narrator offers a description of Willet ‘trim- ming’ and ‘shearing’ at Joe’s freedom (250). Guilt and fear of a punitive, castrating force haunt Joe’s sexual desire for Dolly: ‘[i]f there had been an executioner behind him with an uplifted axe ready to chop off his head if he touched that hand, Joe couldn’t have helped doing it’ (184–85). 67 Joe, like the novel itself, invests the hand with excessive sexual signifi cance. Keeping ‘his hands in his pockets when they were not otherwise engaged’, 52 B. WINYARD

Joe’s struggle to control his fi lial rage also suggests repressed sexuality and, perhaps, frustrated masturbation (251). Barnaby Rudge encrypts sexuality ‘in its margins, at the seemingly incidental moments of its fi gurative language, where, paradoxically, it is so starkly obvious as to be invisible’. 68 In a pre-Freudian era, Dickens was able to use explicit sexual symbolism with what Steven Marcus calls ‘shameless brilliance’. 69 The unspeakability of sexuality in the novel does not silence erotic desire but instead allows it, in William A. Cohen’s words, to operate through ‘an elaborate discourse—richly ambiguous, subtly coded, prolix and polyvalent’. 70 A ‘sexual pulse can be felt beating subcutaneously in a novel that does not overtly represent sex’ and there is ‘a contest between the overtly heterosexual…tale that is told and the frenzied non- normative sexual thematics inscribed in the narrative voice’. 71 As Cohen argues, Dickens ‘relegates sexual sensations’ to non-sexual bodily parts, particularly hands, which become ‘a site of sexual signifi cation’ and a metonymy for masturbation. 72 The inscription of sexuality in ostensibly non-erotic parts of the body means it takes on perverse forms if perversion is defi ned as sexual attachment to objects extrinsic to the reproductive function. Dickens also establishes a connection between Simon Tappertit’s aggrieved sense of emasculation and riotous behaviour. 73 Sim is sexually and socially frustrated by Varden’s exercise of paternal authority and incomprehension of youthful sexuality: Varden’s forging of the great lock of Newgate symbolizes his pivotal role in state and domestic paternalism. Yet, his inability to contain the psychosexual energies that are circulating and fermenting within his own household suggests that paternalism actually incites perversion. 74 Sim hopelessly lusts after Dolly, her ‘cruel little muff’ (and the double entendre is clear), exciting in him ‘impulses… to decoy her into the chaise and drive off like mad’ (166). Stagg comically mocks Sim’s perverse fantasies of transgression and abduction by describing his scraggy legs as ‘twin invaders of domestic peace’ (73). Sim is reduced to venting his frustrations on a grindstone, the entire sequence taking on a masturbatory quality as he resentfully grinds his ‘“tools”’ and hopes that ‘“human gore”’ won’t be the result (49). To escape the household, Sim forges a ‘clumsy large-sized key’, which he keeps in the ‘right leg pocket of his smalls’, a phallic symbol of his Oedipal struggle to supplant Varden (69). 75 Furthermore, Mrs Varden and Miggs often break out in incoherent frenzies of hysteria: ‘Mrs Varden wept, and laughed, and sobbed, and shivered, and hiccoughed’ (164). Sexually and socially ‘THEIR DEADLY LONGING’ 53 frustrated, Miggs jealously calls Dolly ‘fat-faced’ and describes herself as an ‘abject slave…toiling, moiling, constant-working, always-being-found- fault-with, never-giving-satisfactions’ (82, 592). By sublimating her sexual desires to the Protestant cause, she speaks longingly of Gordon’s ‘eyes, then of his nose, then of his legs, and lastly of his fi gure generally, which she looked upon as fi t for any statue, prince, or angel’ (343). Although sympathetic towards the sexual frustration of ‘manly’ Edward and Joe, Miggs’s erotic needs provoke Dickens to what Michael Slater describes as ‘ecstasies of masculine jeering’. 76 Gleefully violating ‘the sanctity of her chamber’, Dickens lampoons her half-suppressed desires for Sim: ‘“Oh! what a Providence it is as I am bolted in!”—which, owing doubtless to her alarm, was a confusion of ideas on her part between a bolt and its use; for though there was one on the door, it was not fastened’ (81). Dickens relishes his depiction of the eighteenth century as a nightmare in which the gallows haunt ‘the street like a spectre’ (640). Dennis, the hangman ‘who had been bred and nurtured in the good old school, and had administered the good old laws on the good old plan’, dispenses a castigatory paternalism and is another vehicle for Dickens’s satire on the ‘good old days’ of capricious justice (543). Hanging is derided as a ‘Universal Medicine applicable to men, women, and children, of every age and variety’, stressing Dickens’s Carlylean argument that Augustan paternalism failed in its responsibilities and met the resulting challenges to its authority with sadistic violence (615). Dennis insists that he respects the law but is, paradoxically, ‘willing to hang anyone and everyone’ to preserve ‘the constitootion’, suggesting an ironic similarity between the nihilistic, deathly aggression of the mob and the punitive violence of the state (545). 77 The devouring violence of the autocratic paternal state is memorably suggested during Varden’s nightmare about being eaten alive by ‘the Great Mogul’ (33). The spectacle of an execution allows authority to assert itself while controlling and channelling the mob’s deathly desire for violence and annihilation into preserving the status quo. 78 Wearing the clothes of the hanged (‘his faded dress…seemed discoloured by the earth from graves’, 330), Dennis, like Rudge, represents a venge- ful, ostensibly dead past. Helping people out of the world, as opposed to into it, Dennis is also a perverse father fi gure. 79 Furthermore, uncovering Hugh’s parentage makes him the perverse ‘midwife’ of Hugh’s true identity; in anticipation of this role, Dennis declares: ‘I’d stand godfather to him, if he was to be christened in a bonfi re, made of the ruins of the Bank of England’ (316). 80 54 B. WINYARD

Hugh, erotically described as ‘muscular’, ‘handsome’, and ‘swarthy’, shares a powerful homosocial bond with the smitten Dennis and the equally infatuated Barnaby: ‘“I’m a Turk if he don’t give me a warmer welcome always than any man of sense,” said Hugh, shaking hands with him with a kind of ferocious friendship, strange enough to see’ (98, 439). Dennis, like Willet, objects ‘to women altogether, as being unsafe and slippery persons’ and he questions Barnaby, ‘You an’t in love I hope, brother? That an’t the sort of thing for us, you know. We mustn’t have no love here’, thus indicating a jealous erotic bond at the heart of male homosociality (433, 405). Dennis has a ‘horrible kind of admiration’ for Hugh, describing him as ‘a fi ne-built chap’, and asking: ‘did you ever…see such a throat as his?’ (317). He leers over Hugh as ‘a can- nibal might regard his intimate friend, when hungry’; again, Dickens associates sadism, authority, sexuality, and incorporation (317). Dennis later puts ‘his fi ngers with an absent air on Hugh’s throat’ and ‘actually shed tears’, suggesting his homoerotic attachment to Hugh, his fetish for asphyxiation, and his perverse erotic attachment to the neck (328, 329). Dennis’s euphemism for hanging (‘working them off’) shares obvious but grotesque parallels to masturbation, with hands again per- versely indicating sexuality: ‘Look at that hand of mine—many and many a job that hand has done, with a neatness and dex-terity’ (328). Dennis’s offer to ‘work…off’ Varden ‘with a deal of pleasure’ manages to suggest, simultaneously, masturbation and a sadistic fetish for asphyxiation (526). Furthermore, as Cohen observes, ‘at its most explicit moment of heterosexual pursuit…the novel’s erotic language modulates into the defi nitionally male and homosocial’. 81 Thus, during the abduction of Emma and Dolly, Sim asks Dennis: ‘[t]here’s no young woman you want to carry off, is there?’ (499, original emphasis). To this he replies: ‘“N— no…[n]one in partickler, I think”’ (499). He also insists: ‘I an’t much of a lady’s man myself, nor am I a party in the present business further than lending a willing hand to my friends’ (495). Dennis, it seems, cannot resist getting his hands dirty for the sake of his male friends. Dolly’s vulnerability to sexual violation exorbitantly thrills Dickens. By describing her ‘whole self a hundred times more beautiful’ as she struggles against her would-be rapists, he adds another layer of sadistic eroticism to the episode (491). 82 The failure of Sim to enact his fantasises of sexual domination and violence, despite ample opportunities, exemplifi es his impotent effeminacy and presages his literal emasculation at the close of the novel. ‘THEIR DEADLY LONGING’ 55

CONCLUSION: BARNABY, THE QUEER CHILD The pessimistic, depressed, and deathly radicalism of some queer scholars is, obviously, very different from Dickens’s optimistic, sympathetic, and generous radicalism, which championed enfranchisement in a broader sense than that sought by most, socio-economic opportunity and justice for the poor and dispossessed, respect and dignity for ‘the People’, reform of hidebound institutions including the legal system and government, and the vital importance of familial and communal bonds to individual and political wellbeing and progress. Ledger not only adroitly delineated Dickens’s radicalism, but also actively articulated, embodied, and enacted many aspects of it in her own political, personal, and academic engage- ments and relationships. In conclusion, I want briefl y to identify a relocated, more reparative queer radicalism within the text, which, in some respects, dovetails more closely with both Dickens’s and Ledger’s politics and suggests a mode of enduring and surviving the violence of futurity. This queerness is embodied by Barnaby, whose mental debilities, physical clumsiness, and general ambiguity are a source of discomfort and embar- rassment both within and without the novel. 83 Barnaby is repetitiously described in terms that emphasize his difference: when he fi rst appears, he is ‘fl uttered and confused’ and ‘eager and unsettled’, with a ‘disorder of his mind’ and ‘wildness’ in his face (35). Barnaby is a queer child, upsetting the narrative of happy heterosexuality that depends on the production of happily heterosexual children who go on to have happily heterosexual children ad nauseam . For Kathryn Bond Stockton, the queer child is surrounded by a ‘kind of ghostliness’: ‘[t]he phrase “gay child” is a gravestone marker for where or when one’s straight life died’, as the queer adult births her- or himself backwards, retrospectively designating thoughts, feelings, desires, and behaviours in childhood as the markers or roots of an indelible sexuality. 84 Barnaby is similarly surrounded by ghostliness, particularly after his reprieve from the gallows:

Passive and timid, scared, pale, and wondering, and gazing at the throng as if he were newly risen from the dead, and felt himself a ghost among the living, Barnaby—not Barnaby in the spirit, but in fl esh and blood, with pulses, sinews, nerves, and beating heart, and strong affections. (662)

As Sara Ahmed observes, the queer child ‘is an unhappy object for many parents’. 85 Thus, Barnaby’s mother regards him as a stunted dependant 56 B. WINYARD and the mournful embodiment of her failed erotic and domestic ambitions, praying:

Oh Thou…who hast taught me such deep love for this one remnant of the promise of a happy life, out of whose affl iction, even, perhaps the comfort springs that he is ever a relying, loving child to me—never growing old or cold at heart, but needing my care and duty in his manly strength as in his cradle-time—help him, in his darkened walk through this sad world, or he is doomed, and my poor heart is broken! (154)

Ahmed offers a persuasive account of how the queer child upsets the narrative of heterosexual maturation and futurity that saturates our culture and literature:

heterosexual happiness is overrepresented in public culture, often through an anxious repetition of threats and obstacles to its proper achievement. Heterosexual love becomes about the possibility of a happy ending; about what life is aimed toward, as being what gives life direction of purpose, or as what drives a story. It is diffi cult to separate out narrative as such from the reproduction of happy heterosexuality. As Julie Abraham points out, the ‘desire of literature’ rests not only on ‘the fi ction of desire’ but on the ‘fi c- tion of heterosexuality’. 86

Ahmed’s observations are particularly borne out by melodramatic narratives, such as Barnaby Rudge , in which thrilling, stylized set pieces of danger and threat to the heterosexual family are victoriously resolved via the narrative triumph of happy heterosexuality. Dickens works hard to re-enclose the perverse and violent libidinal energies he has incited by laboriously describing Varden as ‘the rosiest, cosiest, merriest, heartiest, best-contented old buck’ (664). The Varden family, however, can only function normally, like the paternalist social system it represents in minia- ture, by violently repudiating perverse elements within it: fractious female sexuality is silenced with Dolly married off, Mrs Varden subdued, and Miggs cast out; and the uncontainable sexual and social ambitions of youth are, like Sim, crushed. Having ‘risen against the father and his sym- bols’, Joe and Edward are, in the words of Michasiw, ‘plagued with guilt that only self-sacrifi cing imitation will allay. Their fanatic…adherence to the established order originates in transgression, and they become more like fathers than their fathers.’ 87 Thus Joe symbolically takes the place of John, churning out a ‘troop’ of offspring and bringing the novel back ‘THEIR DEADLY LONGING’ 57 to its beginning—the Maypole (685). 88 Joe and Edward’s sublimation of polymorphous perversity to reproductive heterosexuality and the established social order thus exemplifi es ‘normal’ psychosexual development. Society reasserts itself, as Dollimore observes, ‘against the anarchic nature of the perversions while at the same time tapping them as a source of ordering energy’. 89 The novel thus bears out that perversions are intrinsic to normality itself. If, as Michasiw has claimed, ‘[t]he father remains the antithetical principle within, binding the son to time, genealogy, and language’ and keeping at bay ‘the drive to formless, self-annihilating excess’, Barnaby Rudge depicts characters such as Hugh and the rioters who resist or evade this ‘oppressive anterior’. 90 The novel thus represents both society and subjectivity ‘as deeply and negatively confl icted’ and suggests an interminable dialectic dance between fathers and sons, order and disorder, normality and perversion. 91 However, Barnaby, the child-like ‘idiot’, psychically maimed by patri- archal futurity, represents a queer excess that escapes the circuitry of this Oedipal narrative and suggests a reparative route out of the annihilating narrative of sex-as-death. Barnaby does not submit to the violent dictates of generationality, but instead survives and endures while crucially retaining his ability to love despite being damaged: ‘his love of freedom and interest in all that moved or grew, or had its being in the elements, remained to him unimpaired’ (687). The psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott famously posited the idea of the ‘transitional’, described by David E. Scharff as a space ‘between inner and outer worlds, which is also the space between people—the transitional space—[in which] intimate relationships and creativity occur’. 92 This is a space that is simultaneously internal and external, symbolic and literal, part and whole—an in-between space, which, Winnicott claimed, underpinned the personal and social life of adults. 93 For Snediker, transitional phenomena offer an alternative, optimistic trajectory within queer thinking, away from an emphasis on sex-as-death. Thus, he posits a reparative model in which threats of violence, annihilation, and dissolution are mediated by transitional phenomena and become something from which recovery is possible. 94 On this view, destructiveness itself becomes a condition for love, rather than its more powerful Manichean opposite, as the object endures attempts to destroy it and secures the love of its aggressor. 95 As someone who survives obliteration, Barnaby suggests a radical queerness that not only endures vulnerability, weakness, rejection, and annihilation, but also thrives—and loves. 58 B. WINYARD

NOTES 1. This piece was fi rst developed with the guidance and support of Sally Ledger. It has also benefi ted from the ideas and encouragement of Holly Furneaux. See Natalie McKnight, ‘The Erotics of Barnaby Rudge ’, Dickens Studies Annual 40 (2009): 34. 2. Sally Ledger, Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 132. 3. Ledger, Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination , 123. 4. Ledger, Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination , 140. 5. Charles Dickens, Barnaby Rudge : A Tale of the Riots of ’Eighty , ed. by John Bowen (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003), 182; subsequent page references appear in parentheses. 6. Quoted in Ledger, Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination , 133. 7. Kathryn Chittick, Dickens and the 1830s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 176. Master Humphrey ’ s Clock (1840–1844) was Dickens’s fi rst attempt—after a frustrating, short-lived, and less- than- successful stint as editor of Bentley ’ s Miscellany (1837–1839)— to found and manage his own journal. This monthly miscellany, which fi rst serialized The Old Curiosity Shop and Barnaby Rudge , faltered due to a declining readership and the strain on Dickens of single- handedly producing all of the content. 8. Ian Duncan, Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel : The Gothic, Scott , Dickens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 221–22. 9. Chittick, Dickens and the 1830s , 176; Edgar Johnson, quoted in James K. Gottshall, ‘Devils Abroad: The Unity and Signifi cance of Barnaby Rudge ’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction 16 (1961): 133; John Bowen, ‘Introduction’, in Dickens, Barnaby Rudge : A Tale of the Riots of Eighty (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003), xiii. 10. Steven Connor, ‘Space, Place and the Body of Riot in Barnaby Rudge ’, in Steven Connor, ed. Charles Dickens : Longman Critical Readers (London: Longman, 1996), 211. 11. John Carey, The Violent Effi gy : A Study of Dickens ’ Imagination (London: Faber, 1979), 16. 12. Kim Ian Michasiw, ‘Barnaby Rudge : The Since of the Fathers’, ELH 56.3 (1989): 582; and Connor, ‘Space, Place and the Body of Riot in Barnaby Rudge ’, 228. ‘THEIR DEADLY LONGING’ 59

13. Dickens, ‘To John Landseer’, 5 November 1841, in The Letters of Charles Dickens , ed. Madeline House, Graham Storey, and others, 12 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965–2002), 2.418. 14. Carey, The Violent Effi gy , 13; and Connor, ‘Space, Place and the Body of Riot in Barnaby Rudge ’, 211–12 (emphasis in original). 15. Dickens, ‘To John Forster’, [18 September 1841], Letters , 2.385. 16. Connor, ‘Space, Place and the Body of Riot in Barnaby Rudge ’, 228. 17. Dickens, ‘To John Forster’, [13 August 1841], Letters , 2.357. 18. Connor, ‘Space, Place and the Body of Riot in Barnaby Rudge ’, 221. See also Carey, The Violent Effi gy , 17. 19. Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence : Augustine to Wilde , Freud to Foucault (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 198. 20. Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence , 200. 21. William A. Cohen, Sex Scandal : The Private Parts of Victorian Fiction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 31. See also Connor, ‘Space, Place and the Body of Riot in Barnaby Rudge ’, 214. 22. Michasiw, ‘Barnaby Rudge : The Since of the Fathers’, 582. 23. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents , ed. Leo Bersani and trans. David McLintock (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2002), xvi. 24. Lee Edelman, No Future : Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 3. 25. Edelman, No Future , 5; emphasis in original. 26. Edelman, No Future , 9. 27. Edelman, No Future , 7–8. 28. Edelman, No Future , 9. 29. Edelman, No Future , 17. 30. Edelman, No Future , 101; emphases in original. 31. Connor, ‘Space, Place and the Body of Riot in Barnaby Rudge ’, 221. 32. Michasiw, ‘Barnaby Rudge : The Since of the Fathers’, p. 587. 33. Jeremy Tambling, Dickens , Violence and the Modern State : Dreams of the Scaffold (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995), 134. 34. Quoted in Carey, The Violent Effi gy , p. 21. 35. Marcus, Dickens from Pickwick to Dombey (London: Chatto and Windus, 1965), 202. 36. In Queer Dickens : Erotics , Families , Masculinities (Oxford University Press, 2009), Holly Furneaux proffers a more optimistic queer reading of Dickens, focused on the less destructive means by which he rewrites heteronormativity including voluntary kinship, bachelor parenting, male nursing, and alternative families. Although Barnaby Rudge lacks 60 B. WINYARD

these specifi c modes, I identify Barnaby as the novel’s source of reparative queerness. 37. Tim Dean, ‘An Impossible Embrace: Queerness, Futurity, and the Death Drive’, in James Joseph Bono, Tim Dean, and Ewa Pionowska Ziarek, eds., A Time for the Humanities : Futurity and the Limits of Autonomy (Bronx, NY: Fordham University Press, 2008), 125. 38. Dean, ‘An Impossible Embrace’, 124. 39. ‘A Conversation with Leo Bersani’ [1997], in Is the Rectum a Grave and Other Essays , by Leo Bersani (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 171–86 (174); Michael Snediker, Queer Optimism : Lyrical Personhood and Other Felicitous Persuasions (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 10. This is Snediker’s pithy response to Bersani: ‘One doesn’t really shatter when one is fucked’ (12). 40. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume 1 : The Will to Knowledge [1976], trans. Robert Hurley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998), 103. 41. Foucault, History of Sexuality Volume 1 , 84–85. 42. Foucault, History of Sexuality Volume 1 , 85. 43. Guy Hocquenghem, Homosexual Desire , trans. Daniella Dangoor (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 71–72. 44. Edelman, No Future , 9. 45. Lynne Huffer, Mad for Foucault : Rethinking the Foundations of Queer Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 95. 46. Judith Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 120. 47. Jeff Nunokawa, ‘Queer Theory: Postmortem’, in After Sex ? On Writing since Queer Theory , ed. Janet Halley and Andrew Parker (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 249–50. 48. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You’, in Sedgwick, Touching Feeling : Affect , Pedagogy , Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 131, 133–36; Nunokawa, ‘Queer Theory: Postmortem’, 250. 49. Dean, ‘An Impossible Embrace’, 127, 129. 50. Ledger, Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination , 107–08. 51. Duncan, Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel , 231. 52. John Bowen, Other Dickens : Pickwick to Chuzzlewit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 160–61. ‘THEIR DEADLY LONGING’ 61

53. Bowen, Other Dickens , 159. 54. Chittick, Dickens and the 1830s , 173. 55. Bowen, Other Dickens , 172. 56. Marcus, Dickens from Pickwick to Dombey, 177. 57. Michasiw, ‘Barnaby Rudge : The Since of the Fathers’, 584. 58. Patrick Brantlinger, ‘Did Dickens Have a Philosophy of History? The Case of Barnaby Rudge ’, Dickens Studies Annual 30 (2001): 60. 59. Michael Hollington, Dickens and the Grotesque (Beckenham: Croom Helm, 1984), 101. 60. Hollington, Dickens and the Grotesque , 107; Michasiw, ‘Barnaby Rudge : The Since of the Fathers’, 587. 61. James K. Gottshall, ‘Devils Abroad’, 138. 62. Hollington, Dickens and the Grotesque , 100. 63. James Kincaid, Dickens and the Rhetoric of Laughter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 118. 64. Marcus, Dickens from Pickwick to Dombey , 176. 65. Marcus, Dickens from Pickwick to Dombey , 176. 66. Michasiw, ‘Barnaby Rudge : The Since of the Fathers’, 580. 67. Bowen, Other Dickens , 170–71. 68. Cohen, Sex Scandal , 32. 69. Marcus, Dickens from Pickwick to Dombey , 186. 70. Cohen, Sex Scandal , 3. 71. Cohen, Sex Scandal , 23. 72. Cohen, Sex Scandal , 29, 34. 73. Marcus, Dickens from Pickwick to Dombey , 185. 74. Duncan, Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel , 223. 75. Marcus, Dickens from Pickwick to Dombey , 186. 76. Michael Slater, Dickens and Women (London: Dent, 1983), 233. 77. Marcus, Dickens from Pickwick to Dombey, 179. 78. Marcus, Dickens from Pickwick to Dombey, 183. 79. John P. McGowan, ‘Mystery and History in Barnaby Rudge’, Dickens Studies Annual 9 (1981): 46. 80. Goldie Morgentaler, Dickens and Heredity : When Like Begets Like (London: Macmillan, 2000), 119. 81. Cohen, Sex Scandal , 56. 82. Carey, The Violent Effi gy , 23. 83. McKnight, ‘The Erotics of Barnaby Rudge ’, 34. 84. Kathryn Bond Stockton, The Queer Child : or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century (Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 2009), 6, 7. 62 B. WINYARD

85. Sarah Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 92. 86. Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness , 90. Julie Abraham writes: ‘The “desiderata of fi ction” rely not on any “fi ction of desire” but on the fi ction of heterosexual desire’ (Are Girls Necessary ? Lesbian Writing and Modern Histories (New York: Routledge, 1996), 3). 87. Michasiw, ‘Barnaby Rudge : The Since of the Fathers’, 583. 88. Michasiw, ‘Barnaby Rudge : The Since of the Fathers’, 583. 89. Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence , 176. 90. Michasiw, ‘Barnaby Rudge : The Since of the Fathers’, 588–89. 91. Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence , 188. 92. David E. Scharff, ed., Object Relations Theory and Practice : An Introduction (Oxford: Rowman and Littlefi eld, 1996), 197. 93. D. W. Winnicott, The Family and Individual Development (London: Tavistock Publications, 1965), 13, 143–45. 94. Snediker 9–10; D. W. Winnicott, ‘The Use of an Object and Relating through Identifi cations’, in Playing and Reality (London: Tavistock Publications, 1971), 89–90. See also Winnicott, ‘Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena: A Study of the First Not-Me Possession’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis 34 (1953): 90–91. 95. As Winnicott puts it: ‘The subject says to the object: “I destroyed you”, and the object is there to receive the communication. From now on the subject says: “Hullo object!” “I destroyed you.” “I love you.” “You have value for me because of your survival of my destruction of you.” “While I am loving you I am all the time destroying you in (unconscious) fantasy ”’ (‘The Use of an Object’, 90; emphasis in original). CHAPTER 4

Frederick William Robinson, Charles Dickens, and the Literary Tradition of ‘Low Life’

Anne Schwan

Frederick William Robinson, London-based journalist and author of over fi fty titles of popular fi ction, is easily dismissed as a hack writer who bowed to genre conventions and, under the pressure of commercial publishing, wrote too fast for his own good. The present chapter makes the case that Robinson’s largely forgotten fi ction of ‘low life’, avidly read by his contemporaries and reviewed by writer colleagues such as Margaret Oliphant, deserves a closer look and critical reassessment similar to that recently bestowed on writers like Charles Reade. 1 Contemporary reviews of Robinson’s novels about social problems, including his tales of street children, former thieves, and their long road to social ascent— Owen : A Waif (1862), Mattie : A Stray (1864), and Christie ’ s Faith (1867)—praised the author for his originality, if not his writing skills. 2 Placed in a wider context of cultural and literary infl uences, Robinson’s oeuvre emerges as a missing link between the socially conscious literary traditions of Daniel Defoe, Charles Dickens, and mid-century social-problem novels, studies of working-class lives in investigations of urban poverty, British naturalism, and the slum fi ction of the 1880s and 1890s. 3 After an overview of Robinson’s work, method, and infl uences, my discussion will offer a case

A. Schwan ( ) Reader in Literary Studies and Cultural Theory, Edinburgh Napier University, Edinburgh, Scotland

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 63 J. Bristow, J. McDonagh (eds.), Nineteenth-Century Radical Traditions, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59706-9_4 64 A. SCHWAN study of Owen : A Waif , illustrating this eclectic writer’s vision of class and family relations, working-class communities, and ideals of masculinity.

‘[A] PIONEER IN NOVELS OF LOW LIFE’: WORK, AUDIENCES, AND FICTIONS OF AUTHORSHIP 4 Born into a well-to-do family in Spitalfi elds in 1830, Robinson started writing before the age of eighteen and published his fi rst novel in 1855 (Fig. 4.1 ). 5 Graham Law identifi es Robinson as part of a group of ‘established metropolitan authors’ and as a ‘newspaper novelist’ with ‘early metropolitan newspaper experience’. 6 As a drama critic for newspapers such as the Daily News and the Observer , Robinson was fully immersed in London’s cultural scene, with friends such as fellow writers Algernon Charles Swinburne, Ford Madox Brown, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Successful from the beginning, he produced short stories and over fi fty novels, mainly in the three-volume format, until well into the 1890s. An article on ‘London as a Literary Centre’ in the American Harper ’ s New Monthly

Fig. 4.1 R. R. Bowker, ‘London as a Literary Centre: Second Paper–The Novelists’, Harper ’ s New Monthly Magazine 77 (1888): 13 FREDERICK WILLIAM ROBINSON, CHARLES DICKENS, AND ‘LOW LIFE’ 65

Magazine acknowledged Robinson’s contributions as a hard-working and ‘rapid’ writer who embodied ‘practical proof of how much persistent application can accomplish’. 7 He enjoyed great popularity in the USA, where his success may, according to some accounts, even have exceeded that in Britain. 8 He was one of the British authors published in cheap reprints by the American publisher Beadle and Adams. 9 Thus accessible to a wider audience, Robinson’s work appeared in series alongside sensation writers like Mary Elizabeth Braddon, J.S. LeFanu, Rhoda Broughton, and Wilkie Collins, as well as Charles Dickens, W.M. Thackeray, George Eliot, Margaret Oliphant, Eliza Lynn Linton, and Charles Reade. A number of his novels were translated into foreign languages. 10 Robinson also contributed to several periodicals over the years—the Family Herald and Cassell ’ s Magazine , or the New York-based Harper ’ s Bazar —eventually running his own magazine, Home Chimes (1884–1893), whose contributors included Jerome K. Jerome, Swinburne, and Israel Zangwill. In an obituary in the Athenæum following Robinson’s death in 1901, fellow writer Theodore Watts-Dunton, by his own account a friend of the deceased for over thirty years, called the author ‘the last great builder of that vanished “three-decker” which for generations dominated the vast ocean of English fi ction’. 11 Robinson’s main publishers Hurst and Blackett—who also published Margaret Oliphant—were, in Nigel Cross’s words, ‘the middle of the road, unadventurous successors to Colburn, [who] were well established as the fi rst resort of second-division authors’, and they mostly produced three-deckers and had to rely on lending libraries for circulation. 12 Despite his prolifi c contributions to the metropolitan writing scene over several decades, Robinson’s career suffered as the three-volume model began to decline in the 1890s, so that his star descended towards the end of his life. Watts-Dunton quipped that his friend’s death had only been given eleven lines in two principal newspapers, while the biography of the elder brother of an ex-jockey had been awarded twenty-one. 13 Such relative obscurity at the moment of Robinson’s death is mirrored by the lack of any substantial criticism on him during the remainder of the twentieth and the early twenty-fi rst centuries. Although Watts-Dunton contended that Robinson was less ‘commercially inclined’ than some of his friends, it is obvious that Robinson employed authorship and narrative voice tactically, to interesting effects. Many of his novels were issued anonymously, even if they typically specifi ed a list of previously published titles (‘By the author of…’), suggesting that Robinson and his publishers marketed each novel towards a particular audience. 14 In these anonymous publications, the author’s gender was 66 A. SCHWAN not immediately identifi able, but it is possible that female authorship was implied, at least for some of the titles, especially since most of the works contained romance plots. As Gaye Tuchman has shown in her studies on the Macmillan Archives, many male authors in the mid-nineteenth century ‘masqueraded as women’, and ‘[a]lthough pseudonymous submis- sions in general were rare, in the 1860s and 1870s men submitting fi ction were more likely to assume a female name than women were to use either a male or a neuter name’. 15 Tuchman illustrates this pattern’s relationship to ‘cultural expectations’ and the gendering of the profession, which, she argues, shifted again in the fi nal two decades of the century. 16 Such considerations may have contributed to Robinson’s decision not to write under his own name and, in the case of his three successful narratives of women’s imprisonment—Female Life in Prison (1862), Memoirs of Jane Cameron , Female Convict (1863), and Prison Characters Drawn from Life with Suggestions for Prison Government (1866)—to adopt the female ano- nym of ‘A Prison Matron’. 17 Although there is evidence suggesting that these prison tales were read by men and women—the Athenæum commended Female Life to ‘our social reformers of both sexes’—the later serialized story ‘Daisy March, the Prison Flower’ (1881), also presented as the work of the ‘Prison Matron’, was certainly published with primarily female readers in mind. 18 It appeared as part of the Crystal Stories , an illustrated supplement to the British Workwoman sold for one penny and, across the Atlantic, in the weekly Harper ’ s Bazar , a ‘Repository of Fashion, Pleasure, and Instruction’ for well-to-do women that, from 1867 onwards, presented a mix of serialized fi ction and reportage on topical issues. 19 Under the editorship of Mary Louise Booth, a women’s rights activist and acquaintance of abolition- ist and women’s suffrage campaigner Susan B. Anthony, Harper ’ s Bazar emerged in the context of a late nineteenth-century print culture where roles for women were undergoing signifi cant legal and social transformations. 20 Articles in the fi rst issue endorsed women’s right to earn money and addressed other gender-specifi c matters such as female alcoholism. Later contributors also included Eliza Lynn Linton, whose infamous essay, ‘The Girl of the Period’ (1868), had attacked what would much later become known as the ‘New Woman’. 21 Harper ’ s Bazar thus sent out mixed messages over the decades, providing a platform for the discussion of new opportunities for women while also holding on to established models of femininity and domesticity. Robinson’s ideologically ambivalent writing evidently suited the magazine well; his ‘Women Are Strange’, for FREDERICK WILLIAM ROBINSON, CHARLES DICKENS, AND ‘LOW LIFE’ 67 example, which appears alongside Linton’s ‘My Love’ in 1881, follows the achievements of an independent actress, only to see her give up her career for marriage after a reunion with her divorced parents—with her decrepit actress mother serving as a warning to the younger woman. Aside from his prison trilogy and ‘Daisy March’, crime, punishment, and reformation occur in many of Robinson’s writings, which typically feature protagonists of humble origin. Christie ’ s Faith , as the Pall Mall Gazette ’s reviewer noted, draws most of its characters from ‘the criminal or the working classes’, in this case organized around villain Fernwell and his two sons Zach and Teddy, who ultimately escape a life of crime. 22 Robinson rewards many of his reformed offenders, including Teddy, with marriage, which allows the author to combine social problems and their resolution with romance plots, satisfying audience demand for entertainment. Such plot developments are especially transgressive when they involve female convicts, whom many nineteenth-century commentators regarded as more depraved than criminal men, with particular anxieties clustered around female (ex-)prisoners’ maternal bodies and their potentially polluting infl uence over future generations. 23 Although in some of his earlier fi ction Robinson gives in to social and generic convention—his eponymous heroine Jane Cameron dies the expected death of the ‘fallen’ woman after successful reclamation—some of his later works hint at the possibility of happy endings for the formerly depraved. For instance, Poor Humanity (1868; also adapted into a play) is the story of convict George Carr, returned from transportation, and his daughter Nella, imprisoned a second time after breaking out of a Reformatory. Both characters are shown as repentant, with the novel’s ending foreshadowing Nella’s bliss- ful future as wife and mother. Similarly, ‘Daisy March’ concludes with the prospect of a happy marriage for reformed prisoner Daisy. 24 Such a move would not have been uncontroversial, with the desirability of marriage for formerly imprisoned women a matter of debate across the nineteenth century. Dickens, for example, had welcomed marriage for reformed inmates of his ‘Home for Homeless Women’ (Urania Cottage) as possible and desirable, whereas others, including his sponsor, the wealthy philanthro- pist Angela Burdett-Coutts, did not. 25 Robinson usually pairs his lowly heroes and heroines with some middle- and upper-class characters for dramatic effect and to suggest models of successful cross-class relations. In Jane Cameron , the ex-convict is ultimately rescued by Mrs Evans, an ‘energetic’ and ‘Christian woman, with a great and undying interest in the progress of the weak and the erring to 68 A. SCHWAN repentance’, who offers Jane a second chance after a relapse, re-employing her as a servant when the family emigrates to America. 26 Characters like Evans serve as role models for wealthier readers, who are invited to emu- late such practical examples of Christian philanthropy. Robinson, through the narrative voice of the ‘Prison Matron’, makes his philanthropic agenda quite explicit, appealing to ‘thoughtful men with power’—politicians and journalists—and ‘a noble army of volunteers’ with money to fi ght poverty, poor housing conditions, ignorance, crime, and sin. 27 While these examples suggest that Robinson promoted a model of middle- and upper- class paternalism, his overall vision is more complex; in some of his narratives, it is in fact characters from more humble backgrounds, as well as working-class communities, who emerge as the tale’s moral centre. Such an interesting reversal takes place in Owen : A Waif , as my later case study will illustrate. This short publication history indicates Robinson’s ability to cater for diverse audiences, across the boundaries of gender, class, and nation, while also illustrating his penchant for women’s issues and his idiosyncratic mix of liberal reformist, even radical, thinking, combined with a streak of conservatism, not unlike that of more eminent contemporaries such as Dickens. Like the older novelist, Robinson wrote for commercial reasons, to enter- tain, while simultaneously educating readers about social conditions.

THE ‘DISCIPLE OF DEFOE AND DICKENS’: LITERARY METHOD AND INFLUENCES 28 Robinson’s prison trilogy in particular is rich in intertextual references; echoes of other novelists can be found throughout his work, suggesting an author who was alert to his cultural and social environment, and one who actively entered into a conversation with selected fellow writers. Aside from open or unacknowledged engagement with literary sources, Robinson’s prison tales explicitly draw on other contemporaneous writings on the penal system, thus situating these stories within a larger cultural context of discourses on crime, including offi cial reports of prison authorities, governors, physicians, surgeons, and chaplains of Brixton and Millbank to the Secretary of State between 1855 and 1860; Henry Mayhew’s Great World of London ; prison governor George Laval Chesterton’s Revelations of Prison Life ; reformer Mary Carpenter’s Our Convicts ; and newspapers. 29 We may speculate that Charles Reade’s three- volume novel, It Is Never Too Late to Mend (1856), a mix of sensationalism FREDERICK WILLIAM ROBINSON, CHARLES DICKENS, AND ‘LOW LIFE’ 69 and social advocacy with a prison plot designed to generate penal reform, also served as a source of inspiration and encouragement. Reade combined fi ction with documentary journalism and had conducted research into conditions at several English prisons. 30 Robinson must have taken heart from Reade’s critical acclaim and popular success with It Is Never Too Late , while counting on the extra attention an added female perspective would bring. Richard Fantina, challenging the kinds of post-Fou- cauldian readings most famously espoused by D.A. Miller in The Novel and the Police , reads Reade’s work ‘as an alternative discourse that runs counter to the affi rmations of a prevailing bourgeois hegemony in many nineteenth-century novels’. 31 As I have argued elsewhere, Robinson’s prison trilogy pursued a similar project, at least to some extent, reinscrib- ing the submerged perspectives of female prisoners and matrons, who typically came from modest backgrounds too. 32 The author expanded this agenda with Owen and Mattie . Similar to contemporary sensation writers including Reade, Robinson engages with topical themes and sources, combining a fi ctional, and at times melodramatic, style with that of documentary journalism. Commenting on Mattie —a female Bildungsroman charting the progress of abandoned child Mattie who steals, repents, and works her way up, raising herself from street urchin to costermonger, errand-girl and shop assistant, before eventually emigrating to the ‘new world’ where she fi nds happiness—the Morning Post felt that the author was more of an ‘essayist’ than a ‘novelist’, who ‘has looked upon human life with the eye of a keen and questioning observer, not with that of an artist’. 33 Despite such concerns over the lack of artistry in writing style, the Saturday Review commended the characterization of Mattie as ‘no slight achievement, either ethical or aesthetic’. 34 Regardless of his interest in documenting real-life problems such as poverty and abandonment, Robinson chose fi ction as the genre most suited to his agenda, not least after drawing inspiration from an older generation of writers. Watts-Dunton’s death notice recorded how the ‘genius of Charles Dickens’ had captured the interest of the young Robinson and enthused him to become a writer himself. Although Dickens had remained Robinson’s ‘fi rst and last love’, the obituary also noted affi nities with the work of Daniel Defoe. 35 We could indeed read Memoirs of Jane Cameron as an attempt to update the fi ctional life narrative of Moll Flanders (1722) for the mid-nineteenth century—with noticeable differences, such as substitution of the fi rst person with the third-person 70 A. SCHWAN narrator of the ‘Prison Matron’ (although free indirect discourse is occasionally deployed to enter Jane’s train of thought), and toning down of allusions to sexual relationships. More strikingly, Robinson’s use of the local thieves’ dialect, and the description of Croiley’s Land in the New Vennel, the poorest, most densely populated section of Glasgow where Jane Cameron grows up, is reminiscent of Dickens’s rendering of delinquent communities, inner-city spaces, and Jacob’s Island in Oliver Twist . 36 Oliphant’s review of Robinson’s Owen : A Waif alongside Great Expectations also suggests at least an indirect relationship between the two authors’ work, as both shared an interest in what Oliphant calls ‘the lowest levels of society’. 37 While Robinson, like Dickens, used realist strategies in his characterization and setting, he was similarly committed to harnessing the power of the imagination in order to bring social problems to the attention of a wider audience, despite the complaint of some of his reviewers that the books lacked artistic skill. In Female Life in Prison , the ‘Prison Matron’ vows to offer a more effective alternative to the professed truthfulness of offi cial documentation such as parliamentary reports, promising to turn ‘dry volumes of facts and fi gures,—skeletons of prison life’ into accounts of ‘fl esh and blood to make them living, breathing truths’. 38 Contemporary appraisals, such as the Morning Post ’ s review of Mattie , acknowledged the success of the author’s self-proclaimed method, noting that ‘[i]n little Mattie’s dialogue with the policeman there is a volume such as all the reports of the offi cial investigations into the condition of such as she, if such investigations be indeed made, could not set open before the reader’. 39 Robinson’s approach shares features with the social-problem fi ction of the 1840s and 1850s in its attempt to present, in Mary Poovey’s words, ‘an explicit alternative to the abstract aggregations with which political economists appealed to readers’ rational judgment,…in order to engage [their] readers’ sympathy’. 40 Robinson’s motto to supersede ‘dry volumes of facts and fi gures’ is reminiscent of Dickens’s efforts, a few years earlier, to challenge the Utilitarian model of ‘“[f]act, fact, fact!”’ in Hard Times (1854), with both writers celebrating fi ction as a more valid perspective on human reality. 41 Dickens, in turn, would have been aware of the ‘Prison Matron’s’ publications and recognized these affi nities—his journal All the Year Round gave Female Life in Prison an extensive review, applauding the work as ‘extremely interesting to any student of human history, anxious to know the truths of human life’. 42 FREDERICK WILLIAM ROBINSON, CHARLES DICKENS, AND ‘LOW LIFE’ 71

The tone of the introductory chapter to Memoirs of Jane Cameron also recalls Dickens’s impassionate defence of his socially committed project in the preface to the third edition of Oliver Twist , where, in the midst of anxieties around the Newgate school of fi ction, he replied to those who had criticized his portrayal of the lives of prostitute Nancy and her criminal associates as a glamorization of delinquency. Dickens, in response, fi rst asserted that moral lessons could be drawn from representations of crime, invoking the great literary heritage of Fielding, Defoe, and others who had ‘brought upon the scene the very scum and refuse of the land’. 43 Secondly, with regard to Nancy, he insisted that her story ‘needed to be told’, contending that ‘[i]t is useless to discuss whether the conduct and character of the girl seems natural or unnatural, probable or improbable, right or wrong. IT IS TRUE.’ 44 In Prison Characters , Robinson belatedly rushed to his colleague’s defence by having the ‘Prison Matron’ side with Dickens against a letter in The Times attributing the schools of crime described in Oliver Twist to the novelist’s imagination rather than factual existence. 45 Jane Cameron shares many of Nancy’s traits, including a fi erce sense of loyalty to her violent robber boyfriend. Echoing Dickens’s emphatic claim to veri- similitude, the ‘Prison Matron’ writes: ‘I claim the story to be considered as a true relation of a criminal career—a story that makes no attempt to render “things pleasant”, but, with a useful purpose ever in view, unsparingly exhibits the truth, and aims to be a faithful chronicle of a woman’s fall and rescue.’ 46 The narrative voice of the ‘Prison Matron’ explicitly aligns itself with Dickens and his representations of poor, offending women at other moments. In Female Life in Prison , the ‘Matron’ references the ‘Christmas works’ and the fellow writer’s conviction that even fallen women retain a better self and need sympathy, probably with The Chimes (1844) in mind, which had alluded to the Mary Furley child murder case. 47 Although Robinson loses much of Dickens’s political critique—The Chimes was an attack on the New Poor Law—his narratives, like Dickens’s, uphold the vision of potential redemption for the fallen through help and sympathy, despite occasional misgivings that such women might be ‘creatures of another mould and race, born with no idea of God’s truth, and destined to die in their own benighted ignorance’. 48 Robinson’s novels of ‘low life’ clearly mirror Dickens’s desire to bring to public attention the lives of ‘the very scum and refuse of the land’, as well as extending a longer literary tradition from Fielding to Defoe already evoked by the famous novelist. 72 A. SCHWAN

‘“I AM OF THE LOWER ORDERS”’: CLASS, MASCULINITY, AND FAMILY RELATIONS IN OWEN : A WAIF 49 Owen : A Waif , published in the same year as Female Life in Prison , traces the trials and tribulations of Owen—an illegitimate child left to his own devices by his alcoholic mother—from the age of nine to manhood. Owen is taken in by costermonger Tarby Chickney and his wife, who live in Hannah Street in the Lower Marsh area of south London, ‘a poor, struggling, hand-to-mouth neighbourhood’, and works his way up from costermonger’s assistant to clerk in a factory’s counting house. 50 With a nod to the popular radical poetry of Thomas Hood, and potential inspiration from Mayhew’s London Labour (an edition of which appeared in 1861– 1862), Robinson introduces the setting for his protagonist’s progress by outlining the material living and working conditions of the urban poor:

Here plies incessantly the double thread of which Tom Hood sang; here live the shirt-makers, the shoe-binders, the working tailors to the grand empo- riums, where goods are ticketed so cheap that there’s a fragment of a life in every article; the costermongers, the showmen and street acrobats—the supernumeraries of the minor theatres; the crossing-sweepers, the beggars that meet you in the broader thoroughfares and clamour for your charity; the tribes of children who shame you with their nakedness and squalor, and are older in their knowledge of the world than half the well-dressed whom they revile or lie to. 51

In these surroundings, Tarby’s costermonger’s business is struggling also, not least because he is ‘fond of drink’ and ‘quarrelsome’. 52 Although he hits his wife on occasion when he is drunk, she remains ‘faithful and honest and true to him’, a ‘true poor man’s wife’. 53 Despite these character traits, Tarby is not portrayed as an unkind man, and he grows fond of Owen and temporarily overcomes his ‘improvident’ habits following the birth of a baby girl. 54 After a relapse, Tarby is transported to Australia for beating a policeman to death, leaving his wife to the solidarity of her working-class community, whose members Robinson celebrates as ‘well-meaning, humble friends in Hannah Street, who, in a spirit of self-abnegation that richer folk might imitate, would lose half-a-day’s work, a day’s dinner, to keep her company and comfort her’. 55 When Mrs Chickney, a new mother to Owen, dies shortly thereafter, the young man becomes guardian to their only daughter Mary. Haunted by his own past as a young delinquent—he FREDERICK WILLIAM ROBINSON, CHARLES DICKENS, AND ‘LOW LIFE’ 73 is unjustly suspected by his employer Isaac Cherbury when there is an error in the account books—and suffering from a disappointment in love, Owen also sails to Australia, leaving Mary in the care of an elderly woman. The latter is subsequently replaced by his former employer’s mother, Mrs Cherbury, a benign Miss Havisham, who seeks a companion in the young girl and offers her a lady’s education. Robinson interweaves these principal events with subplots to explore class and gender relations, the meaning of family, community, religion, and love. Signifi cant other characters include Owen’s paternal friend John Dell—later also his business partner—and his brother, retired policeman ‘92’, who knew Owen as a young thief and, like John, started life as a ragged boy himself. There is also 92’s daughter Ruth, who lives with John and with whom Owen falls in love, and Arthur Glindon, a young doctor who becomes Owen’s rival when he woos and ultimately marries Ruth. Robinson draws on melodramatic and sensation devices as secrets from the past are eventually revealed, ‘stage villain’ Arthur dies in a railway accident, and children are reunited with their parents: Mary with her returned convict father Tarby, whom she had believed to be dead, and Owen with his biological father and former employer Isaac Cherbury. 56 Despite these generic conventions, reviewers such as the Examiner found the book ‘above the average quality of the novels of the day’ and, paired with a title by Mrs Henry Wood, ‘as well intended as The Channings , and in parts superior’. 57 The Morning Post conceded that this was the work of a writer with ‘ambitious’ purpose and a mind that was ‘philanthropic, in the real, not the cant, sense of that term’, who should therefore be singled out from ‘the ephemeral crowd’. 58 John Bull remarked: ‘The touching picture of Tarby’s life and family has, we think, never been surpassed by Dickens.’ 59 Margaret Oliphant, who dedicated an extensive review to Owen , The Woman in White , and Great Expectations in Blackwood ’ s Magazine , similarly drew parallels to Dickens’s fi ction, although she admitted that it was a ‘bold’ move to discuss the work of ‘a comparatively recent writer’ alongside his much more eminent contemporary. While Oliphant granted that ‘we will not attempt to claim for “Owen” any such place as that held even by the most unsatisfactory of Mr. Dickens’s works’, she attributed ‘high qualities of its own’ to the novel. Invoking a literary lineage between the two writers, she suggested that Owen ‘belongs to a class which possibly never might have come into existence but for the labours of Mr Dickens’. 60 74 A. SCHWAN

In spite of such praise, there is some sense of discomfort with the subject matter and social strata at the heart of Robinson’s novel when Oliphant, who may well be pandering to a respectable readership, asks:

How far it is wise, or how far it is expedient, for art to forsake the educated world, and betake itself in search of fresh nature and unsophisticated character to the lowest levels of society, and there to the farthest fringe which divides social guiltlessness (for we cannot say innocence) from crime, is, to our own thinking, a very doubtful question. 61

As if to pre-empt such criticism and plead with the audience for forbear- ance, the voice of an intrusive third-person narrator occasionally emerges in Owen , with meta-commentary on appropriate content and selection of character in the novel:

in this waif there were noble qualities, from which heroes have sprung. May there not arise, even from these shapeless materials with which we work, as good a hero for a story-book as a Mayfair novelist creates? Surely all the virtues, noble sacrifi ces, and honest manliness of heart have not gone West yet, and may fi nd room to live even in such a place as Hannah Street. 62

With his choice of an unlikely protagonist, Robinson makes a social as much as a literary statement, turning his readership’s attention to boys like Owen, typically ‘disregarded by the philosopher in the crowd’. 63 Astute commentators such as Oliphant picked up on a seeming ideological incongruity since Owen, much like Oliver Twist before him, turns out to be the son of a gentleman after all—a critique echoed by the Morning Post , which found Owen’s ‘assured position’ at the end of the novel ‘need- less and contradictory’. 64 In her complaint, Oliphant, somewhat troubled by the improbability of Owen’s ascent, and possibly the idea of social mobility itself, identifi ed inconsistency in the author’s approach, including Pip’s rise in Great Expectations:

Poor boys rarely become comfortable gentlemen, and it is a petty result enough of the research which goes down, enlightened and candid, to show us what noble lives and pure hearts are among the poorest poor, when the same hand which throws that light upon the masses makes haste to detach its special protégé from among them, and elevate him to a higher standing, that his virtues may have breathing room. 65 FREDERICK WILLIAM ROBINSON, CHARLES DICKENS, AND ‘LOW LIFE’ 75

More recently, P.J. Keating has classifi ed Owen (and Mattie ) as a ‘rags to riches’ tale, a category of writing where ‘[a]part from an occasional, sen- timentally presented exemplary working man, the poor are shown to be morally and physically inferior to other classes, their way of life something to escape from as soon as possible’. 66 However, Robinson’s novel overall indicates a more nuanced negotiation of working-class identity—including a positive affi rmation of mutually supportive lower-class communities (former policeman ‘92’ and ex-convict Tarby open a tobacconist together, for instance)—as well as Owen’s habitus and class position. Although the young man is ultimately reconciled with his gentleman father, himself depicted as a morally ambiguous character whom Owen had instinctively disliked, the book as a whole does not suggest that Owen will disavow his upbringing as one ‘of the lower orders’, and he runs a shelter to help the abject poor alongside his regular job at the foundry that he now heads with John Dell. 67 Owen retains a sense of identifi cation with the socially disadvantaged, because, as a former ‘waif’, he ‘can guess the struggles of the children of the streets’. 68 With Owen, Robinson celebrates a model of masculinity based on self- reliance, hard work, and moral support from wider community and elective families, illustrated by the initially ‘childless’ Mrs Tarby’s bond with the ‘motherless’ boy. 69 Owen’s practical mind, perseverance, and decency outshine the dubious behaviour of his biological father, a ‘hypochondria- cal gentleman’. 70 When Isaac falls in love with Mary and, on her request, asks guardian Owen for permission to marry her, Robinson evokes a reversal in generational and class-based power relations: ‘the man of wealth thinking timidly of an anxious conference with the youth he had suspected of dishonesty—the youth to have the power, by a word, to mar his future hopes’. 71 Beyond this individual encounter, the novel covertly suggests the potential for wider social transformation and the ascendancy of the young and formally subordinate, with a pun on the word ‘revolution’: ‘Round goes the world and the pigmies on its surface, and every revolution makes a change. Here was the master coming to the servant to ask permission to marry—the master who was more than fi fty years of age!’ 72 Although Owen himself is in love with Mary, who broke off their engagement because she mistakenly assumed that he would prefer to marry Ruth, now a widow, he grants Isaac permission to wed his ward, before it is revealed that Isaac is the man who brought Owen’s mother to shame. After this disclosure, and when misunderstandings between the young lovers are 76 A. SCHWAN cleared, Owen and Mary are reunited and marry, surrounded by family and friends. The triangular relationship between Owen, Mary, and Isaac is one of the subtly transgressive aspects of the book. The Morning Post grum- bled about the ‘rivalry in love, albeit unconscious, between father and son, which is one of those unpleasant “situations” always wisely avoided by the taste and discretion of a judicious novelist’. 73 Aside from such Oedipal competition between the men, Mary and Owen’s relationship encroaches on potentially dangerous territory with its undercurrents of incest. Although the two are foster rather than biological siblings, the lines between sister/ brother or ward/guardian and lovers are repeatedly blurred and explicitly problematized. In the wake of their original engagement’s dissolution, Robinson uses internal focalization to have Owen refl ect on the nature of their bond: ‘He fancied that the woman’s thoughts were at variance with the child’s, and she had awakened to the true knowledge of her affections. A sister’s love was different from a wife’s, and she had only loved him like a sister, as was natural, considering her youth.’ 74 The novel’s ending, though, suggests that a sister’s and a wife’s love are not dissimilar after all, celebrating the ‘brotherly husband’ ideal that Valerie Sanders has identifi ed in many Victorian novels. 75 Owen here engages with the sibling-incest theme that was a popular device in Gothic novels and retained its importance into the nineteenth century, ‘gaining in complexity as it lost the more obvious erotic overtones associated with its Gothic/Romantic phase’. 76 While Robinson, similar to Dickens with Florence and Walter in Dombey and Son , affi rms a tender model of masculinity and stresses the purity of love between Mary and Owen, who ‘had held her in his arms a baby’, this pairing brings him perilously close to the incest theme that was also a key ingredient of contemporaneous sensation novels, which reviewers rejected as ‘unhealthy stimulants’. 77 Through a carefully judged balancing act, Robinson manages to titillate in subtle and safe ways while avoiding the kinds of critiques meted out to some of his fellow writers. The novel’s negotiation of family ties and masculinity is extended through Owen’s relationship with his mother, whose appearances at various points of the boy’s life, like the return of the repressed, and eventual death become a catalyst for his character development, as ‘the upright and high-principled man’ learns to recognize the signifi cance of Christian forgiveness and religious faith. 78 With the portrayal of the mother—simply called ‘Mrs Owen’ to indicate that the birth of her illegitimate child has wholly defi ned her—Robinson draws on the conventional representation of the fallen woman, including the trope of drowning as she constantly FREDERICK WILLIAM ROBINSON, CHARLES DICKENS, AND ‘LOW LIFE’ 77 threatens to kill herself. 79 The crisis point comes when Mrs Owen, who had agreed to reform and accompany her son to Australia, falters the night before the voyage and realizes that she is too used to the life of a vagrant. Robinson employs free indirect discourse to illustrate this woman’s internal struggle:

And after all, for what?—to make her live better, show a clean dress and face to the society she hated—render her a servant and a slave—take her to foreign parts, which she did not believe for a moment would agree with her. What did it all amount to?—misery! She was to be sober, and think eternally of those many sins which had multiplied upon her since her fi rst step from right—and thinking of them was horror!…With Owen was captivity, and in the streets freedom and life. 80

Oliphant found this portrait ‘singularly powerful’, concluding:

We cannot call to our recollection any similar sketch so little exaggerated, yet so effective, in recent fi ction. It is as sad as it is true, yet refrains from all unnecessary horrors. A little more detail might have made the picture disgusting. As it is, it is almost solemn in its brooding silence, yet restless activity of thought, and in the stealthy resolution and silent guilty joy of the escape. We have had many pictures of reformed lives, but few of the terrible satisfaction with which such a poor sinner escapes out of the restraints of virtue, and has ‘her will’ again. 81

Through Mrs Owen, Robinson harks back to the tradition of social- problem fi ction with its rich depiction of fallen woman characters, from Elizabeth Gaskell’s Esther in Mary Barton (1848) to the eponymous heroine in Ruth (1853), while his choice of internal focalization to offer an insight into the moral dilemmas the woman faces anticipates techniques used in naturalist novels such as George Moore’s Esther Waters (1894), whose protagonist becomes the central consciousness. 82 Whereas Mrs Owen still meets the conventional death of the fallen woman, bastard child Owen is ultimately rewarded with a good life. Robinson’s writing here shares much with sensation novels by Collins and Reade, where, as Fantina notes, ‘illegitimate children are presented positively or non-judgmentally’. 83 The radicalism of Owen consists not simply in its choice of a humble protagonist, but precisely in the fact that this ‘hero’ and former thief is allowed to claim a happy life for himself. Whereas earlier parts of the novel present a less hopeful vision for Owen, 78 A. SCHWAN who fl ees the country of his birth as ‘the theatre of his early disgrace, and of all his disappointments’, the utopian ending fi rmly locates him and returned convict Tarby at the heart of an English community. 84 Between the eighteenth-century tradition of ‘low life’, Dickensian melodrama and sentiment, and late nineteenth-century writings about the urban poor, Robinson inhabits the place of a writer original enough to be recognized by his contemporaries, and whose extensive oeuvre still offers much to those of us interested in popular fi ction’s ability to interrogate social relations.

NOTES 1. For recent reappraisals of Reade, see Tom Bragg, ‘Charles Reade’, in Pamela K. Gilbert, ed., A Companion to Sensation Fiction . (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 293–305; and Richard Fantina, Victorian Sensational Fiction : The Daring Work of Charles Reade (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 2. [Anon.], ‘Mattie: A Stray’. Morning Post , 2 August 1864, 2; [Anon.], ‘Christie’s Faith’, Pall Mall Gazette , 26 December 1866, 12. 3. For an overview of writings about the urban poor in the second half of the century, see Ian Haywood, Working-Class Fiction (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1997); P. J. Keating, The Working Classes in Victorian Fiction (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971); and Seth Koven, Slumming : Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). 4. The quotation is taken from Gerald Le Grys Norgate, revised by Sayoni Basu, ‘Robinson, Frederick William (1830–1901)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography , Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn. May 2013 http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/35791 (accessed 19 Feb 2015). 5. Biographical information is taken from Norgate’s article on Robinson (revised by Basu) in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography , unless otherwise indicated. See also [Anon.], ‘The Late F. W. Robinson’, The Bookman : A Magazine of Literature and Life [New York] 14 (1902): 555. 6. Graham Law, Serializing Fiction in the Victorian Press (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), 77, 264. 7. R. R. Bowker, ‘London as a Literary Centre—Second Paper: The Novelists’, Harper ’ s New Monthly Magazine [New York] 77 (1888): 17. FREDERICK WILLIAM ROBINSON, CHARLES DICKENS, AND ‘LOW LIFE’ 79

8. See Theodore Watts-Dunton, ‘A Great Builder of the Old Three- Decker: F. W. Robinson’, Athenæum , 14 December 1901’: 812–13. S. Austin Allibone lists some, if not all, of Robinson’s works, specify- ing dates of publication in both the UK and the USA; see A Critical Dictionary of English Literature and British and American Authors Living and Deceased from the Earliest Accounts to the Latter Half of the Nineteenth Century , 3 vols. (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1859–71), 2. 1836. 9. See Albert Johannsen, The House of Beadle and Adams and Its Dime and Nickel Novels : The Story of a Vanished Literature , 3 vols. (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1950), 1.189, 192, 309. 10. See ‘The Late F. W. Robinson’, 555. Several of Robinson’s novels were translated into German, for example. 11. Watts-Dunton, ‘A Great Builder of the Old Three-Decker’, 812. 12. Nigel Cross, The Common Writer : Life in Nineteenth-Century Grub Street (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 189. See also John Sutherland, in Victorian Novelists and Publishers (London: Athlone Press, 1976), 221, who calls Hurst and Blackett one of the ‘less substantial houses’ in the nineteenth-century metropolitan printing business. 13. Watts-Dunton, ‘A Great Builder of the Old Three-Decker’, 812. A short obituary reference with a portrait also appeared in ‘The Passing Hour: The March of the World in Picture and Pen’, Black and White 22 (1901): 831. 14. Watts-Dunton relates how Robinson published High Church (1860) anonymously because he feared that ‘he was producing at too rapid a rate for his market’, and that this novel brought him ‘an entirely new class of readers’ (813). Similarly, Grandmother ’ s Money (1860) and Carry ’ s Confession (1865), for instance, did not originally provide the author’s name on the cover page (although some of the front pages of Robinson’s later novels—published by Sampson Low, Son, and Marston or, again, Hurst and Blackett—identify him as the writer of Grandmother ’ s Money ). 15. Gaye Tuchman with Nina E. Fortin, Edging Women Out : Victorian Novelists , Publishers and Social Change (London: Routledge, 1989), 53. 16. Tuchman, Edging Women Out, 54. 17. For a more detailed discussion of these prison narratives see Anne Schwan, ‘“From Dry Volumes of Facts and Figures” to Stories of “Flesh and Blood”: The Prison Narratives of Frederick William 80 A. SCHWAN

Robinson’, in Jan Alber and Frank Lauterbach, eds., Stones of Law , Bricks of Shame : Narrating Imprisonment in the Victorian Age (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009),191–212; and Chapter 2, ‘The Lives of Which “There are No Records Kept”: Convicts and Matrons in the Prison Narratives of Frederick William Robinson (“A Prison Matron”)’ in Anne Schwan, Convict Voices : Women , Class , and Writing about Prison in Nineteenth-Century England (Durham, NH: University of New Hampshire Press, 2014), 41–69. 18. ‘Advertisement’ [Female Life in Prison ], Athenæum , 6 September 1862, 294. 19. For a brief account of the British Workwoman ’ s profi le, see Margaret Beetham, ‘ British Workwoman ’, in Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor, eds., Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism in Great Britain and Ireland (Gent: Academia Press; and London: British Library, 2009), 80. On the aims and readership of Harper ’ s Bazar —the spelling changed to Bazaar in the twentieth century— see Jane Trahey, ed. Harper ’ s Bazaar : 100 Years of the American Female (New York: Random House, 1967). Digitized versions of the nineteenth-century issues of the magazine are available from the Albert R. Mann Library, Home Economics Archive: Research, Tradition and History (HEARTH), Cornell University http:// hearth.library.cornell.edu/h/hearth/browse/title/4732809.html (accessed 9 August 2012). 20. On Booth, see Madeleine B. Stern’s entry in Notable American Women : 1607–1950 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), Credo Reference . http://search.credoreference.com/content/entry/hupnawi/booth_mary_louise_apr_19_1831_ mar_5_1889/0 (accessed 13 August 2012). 21. For a more detailed discussion of Linton, see Sally Ledger, The New Woman : Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siècle (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 16–17. 22. ‘Christie’s Faith’, Pall Mall Gazette , 26 December 1866: 12. 23. For an example of such views, see Mary Carpenter, Our Convicts , 2 vols. (London: Longman, 1864), 1.31–2, 2.266. For a critical discussion of Carpenter, see Anne Schwan, ‘“Dreadful Beyond Description”: Mary Carpenter’s Prison Reform Writings and Female Convicts in Britain and India’, European Journal of English Studies 14.2 (2010): 107–20. For a more general overview of attitudes towards female offenders in the second half of the nineteenth and FREDERICK WILLIAM ROBINSON, CHARLES DICKENS, AND ‘LOW LIFE’ 81

early twentieth centuries, see Lucia Zedner, Women , Crime , and Custody in Victorian England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). 24. For a more detailed reading of ‘Daisy March’, see Schwan, Convict Voices , 41–69. 25. Claire Tomalin, The Invisible Woman : The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), 86. For a detailed discussion of Dickens’s work with the women of Urania Cottage, see Jenny Hartley, Charles Dickens and the House of Fallen Women (London: Methuen, 2008). 26. ‘A Prison Matron’ [F. W. Robinson], Memoirs of Jane Cameron , 2 vols. (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1864), 2.291. 27. ‘A Prison Matron’ [F. W. Robinson], Female Life in Prison . 2 vols. (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1862), 2.293; Memoirs of Jane Cameron , 1.325. 28. The phrase is Norgate’s in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography . 29. The Great World of London refers to Mayhew’s series of essays on crime for the Morning Chronicle published in 1856, later collected in The Criminal Prisons of London and Scenes of Prison Life (1862). 30. Fantina, Victorian Sensational Fiction , 55. 31. Fantina, Victorian Sensational Fiction , 46. 32. See Schwan, ‘“From Dry Volumes of Facts and Figures”’, and Convict Voices . 33. ‘The Author of “High Church”, “No Church” and “Owen:-A Waif”’ [F. W. Robinson], Mattie : A Stray . 3 vols. (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1864), 3.317; [Anon.], ‘Mattie: A Stray’. Morning Post , 2 August 1864, 2. 34. [Anon.], ‘Mattie-A Stray’, Saturday Review of Politics , Literature , Science and Art , 30 July 1864: 160. 35. Watts-Dunton, ‘A Great Builder of the Old Three-Decker’, 813. 36. See [Robinson], Memoirs of Jane Cameron , 1.10–12. 37. [Margaret Oliphant], ‘Sensation Novels’, Blackwood ’ s Edinburgh Magazine 91 (1862): 581. 38. [Robinson], Female Life in Prison , 1.40. 39. ‘Mattie: A Stray’, Morning Post , 2 August 1864: 2. 40. Poovey, Making a Social Body : British Cultural Formation 1830–1864 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 133. 41. Charles Dickens, Hard Times , 3rd edn., ed. Fred Kaplan and Sylvère Monod (New York: Norton, 2001), 9. 82 A. SCHWAN

42. ‘Gone to Jail’. All the Year Round 7 (2 August 1862): 488. The University of Buckingham’s Dickens Journals Online site attributes this anonymous review to Eliza Lynn Linton, who was a regular contributor to Dickens’s journals. See http://www.djo.org.uk/indexes/ articles.html (accessed 13 April 2013). 43. Dickens, Oliver Twist , ed. Kathleen Tillotson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), lvi. 44. Dickens, Oliver Twist , lvii. 45. ‘A Prison Matron’ [F. W. Robinson], Prison Characters Drawn from Life with Suggestions for Prison Government , 2 vols. (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1866), 2. 233. 46. Robinson, Memoirs of Jane Cameron , 1.4–5. 47. [Robinson], Female Life in Prison , 1.45. Mary Furley was a poor nee- dlewoman who, in 1844, tried to drown herself and her illegitimate baby, rather than go to the workhouse. While she was saved, the child died and Furley was subsequently sentenced to death, before obtain- ing a commutation to transportation. For brief explanations of the Furley case and its relationship to The Chimes , see Michael Slater’s note 18, in Dickens, The Christmas Books , Volume 1 : A Christmas Carol / The Chimes , ed. Michael Slater (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), 264; Barbara T. Gates, Victorian Suicide : Mad Crimes and Sad Histories (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 50–51; and Josephine McDonagh, ‘Child-Murder Narratives in George Eliot’s Adam Bede : Embedded Histories and Fictional Representation’, Nineteenth-Century Literature , 56:2 (2001): 255. 48. [Robinson], Female Life in Prison , 1.45. 49. ‘The Author of “No Church”, and “High Church”’ [F. W. Robinson], Owen : A Waif , 3 vols. (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1862), 3.95. 50. [Robinson], Owen : A Waif , 1.68. 51. [Robinson], Owen : A Waif , 1.69–70. 52. [Robinson], Owen : A Waif , 1.52. 53. [Robinson], Owen : A Waif , 1.51, 52. 54. [Robinson], Owen : A Waif , 1.52. 55. [Robinson], Owen : A Waif , 1.165. 56. [Robinson], Owen : A Waif , 2.227. 57. [Anon.], ‘New Novels’, Examiner , 10 May 1862: 294. 58. [Anon.] ‘Owen: A Waif’, Morning Post , 9 June 1862: 3. 59. Quoted in ‘Cabmen’s Dodges’, Morning Post , 6 May 1862: 6. FREDERICK WILLIAM ROBINSON, CHARLES DICKENS, AND ‘LOW LIFE’ 83

60. [Oliphant], ‘Sensation Novels’, 580. Oliphant also reviewed Robinson’s Church and Chapel (1863). See ‘Novels’, Blackwood ’ s Edinburgh Magazine , 94 (1863): 168–83. Joanne Shattock suggests that Robinson might have come to Oliphant’s attention because Hurst and Blackett were also among her publishers (The Selected Works of Margaret Oliphant : Part I – Literary Criticism and Literary History , Volume 1: Literary Criticism, 1854–69, ed. Shattock [London: Pickering and Chatto, 2011], 245). She argues that Robinson’s work on religion and society would have been of particular interest to Oliphant, who wrote on similar themes. She also speculates that Oliphant’s reviews of these books—like other reviews—may have informed the female author’s own fi ction (316). I thank Joanne Shattock for drawing my attention to these reviews. 61. [Oliphant], ‘Sensation Novels’, 581. The implied readers of Owen were ‘respectable sirs and madams’, as suggested in a direct address by the third-person narrator (1.42). 62. [Robinson], Owen : A Waif , 1.176–77. 63. [Robinson], Owen : A Waif , 1.43. 64. [Anon.], ‘Owen: A Waif’, Morning Post , 9 June 1862: 3. 65. [Oliphant], ‘Sensation Novels’, 582; emphasis in original. 66. Keating, The Working Classes in Victorian Fiction , 24. 67. [Robinson], Owen : A Waif , 3.95. 68. [Robinson], Owen : A Waif , 3.95. 69. [Robinson], Owen : A Waif , 1.85. 70. [Robinson], Owen : A Waif , 3.53. 71. [Robinson], Owen : A Waif , 3.282. 72. [Robinson], Owen : A Waif , 3.286. 73. [Anon.], ‘Owen: A Waif’, Morning Post , 9 June 1862, 3. 74. [Robinson], Owen : A Waif , 3.232. 75. Valerie Sanders, The Brother-Sister Culture in Nineteenth-Century Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), 105. 76. Sanders, The Brother-Sister Culture , 8. 77. [Robinson], Owen : A Waif , 3.65. [Anon.], ‘Mattie-A Stray’, Saturday Review , 30 July 1864: 160. This review contrasts Robinson’s novel Mattie —‘a story so thoroughly clean and wholesome’—with the ‘sensational romance’ (160). 78. [Robinson], Owen : A Waif , 3.208. 79. [Robinson], Owen : A Waif , 3.140. 80. [Robinson], Owen : A Waif , 2.178–79, 183. 84 A. SCHWAN

81. [Oliphant], ‘Sensation Novels’, 584. 82. For a more detailed discussion of focalization and point of view in Esther Waters , see Siobhan Chapman, ‘“From Their Point of View”: Voice and Speech in George Moore’s Esther Waters ’, Language and Literature 11.4 (2002): 307–23. 83. Fantina, Victorian Sensational Fiction , 23. 84. [Robinson], Owen : A Waif , 2.69. CHAPTER 5

Remembering Radicalism on the Midlands Turnpike: George Eliot, Felix Holt , and William Cobbett

Ruth Livesey

On 1 March 1820, William Cobbett drove up the Coventry to Hinckley turnpike road in a hired post-chaise, past Griff House and then on through the village of Chilvers Coton (where he must have stopped to pay a toll) into Nuneaton. 1 In these same weeks of March 1820, the surveyor and land agent Robert Evans moved his family—complete with his four-month-old daughter Mary Ann (known later as novelist George Eliot)—into Griff House, which overlooks the same turnpike road, travelled several times a day by the long-distance stage and mail coaches from Birmingham and Warwick to Leicester and back. Here the Evans family would remain for the next twenty years. 2 In this chapter I take that chance passing in the middle of a road as the opening encounter between two writers who stand at either end of an eighty-year period in which turnpike roads, and the coaches that rolled along them, became a site of political struggle in defi ning the nation and its relation to non-metropolitan locality. For the radical journalist Cobbett, the history of transport development, along with the Coventry

R. Livesey ( ) Department of English, Royal Holloway, University of London, London, UK

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 85 J. Bristow, J. McDonagh (eds.), Nineteenth-Century Radical Traditions, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59706-9_5 86 R. LIVESEY election campaign that brought him to the Chilvers Coton toll gate in 1820, epitomised three decades of corrupt centralizing government, stripping rural workers of livelihood and customary communications. By the height of the railway age in the mid-1860s, when Eliot wrote her most explicitly political novel, Felix Holt , the Radical (1866), set just after the passing of the 1832 Reform Act, evocations of the past glory of the mail coach and turnpike era had become, by contrast, a commonplace means to celebrate steam-powered modernity while gently regretting a past within living memory: a past on the cusp of the political reforms that had reshaped Britain from the late 1820s. 3 Remembering this local crossing of the political journalist and future novelist at Griff back in 1820 provides a way into thinking what it is that Eliot does with the idea of radicalism in Felix Holt . The novel looks back down the road to the politics of the Midlands in the 1820s and 1830s and presents a strongly etymological reading of radicalism, common to those glossing the term in the early nineteenth century. 4 The narrative is preoccupied by contrasting ideas of roots and uprooting; of settled local belonging and mobility—terms, as we shall see, that are central to Cobbett’s radical arguments in that period. But while Cobbett’s journey up the road after 1820 looked forward to the formation of a mass opposition to corrupt government, reclaiming lost historical popular rights, Eliot’s backward glance from the reform debates of the 1860s provides a conservative reading of radicalism as a means to inward revolution, local attachment, and individual memory. 5 By the 1860s the rapid development of communication from stagecoach to rail had become a stock fi gure for progress in accounts of the emergence of a liberal—and potentially democratic—public sphere prior to the passing of the second Reform Act in 1867. 6 It is, however, this fi gure just hardening into cliché that Eliot adopts and disrupts at the opening of her novel, marking its setting in 1832. Far from a gentle glow of nostalgia or a smug sense of liberal progress, the evocation of the departed ‘glory’ of the old turnpike road and its stagecoaches and mail coaches in the ‘Author’s Introduction’ to Felix Holt unsettles the past as a place of recu- perative return or a means to understand a collective destiny. 7 The novel’s journey back down the Midlands turnpike road to the early decades of the nineteenth century plots a national history for its implied reader in the late 1860s, in which the recent past and seemingly rapid onward sweep of progress and reform are revealed, on closer inspection, to be part of a punctuated and endless recursive sequence. The initial contrast between the rich memories of slow coach travel and the ‘barren’ modern experi- REMEMBERING RADICALISM ON THE MIDLANDS TURNPIKE 87 ence of shooting past landscape by train unravels to question any sense that this vaunted transport revolution—and, by extension, any other sort of revolution—is epoch making or new (5). Elderly ‘gentlemen in pony- chaises’ regard the ‘rolling swinging swiftness’ of the stagecoach nervously as a novelty, remembering the slower era of the packhorse; the coachman, on the other hand, is embittered by the near prospect of the expansion of railways and full of information about the negotiation of local landowners with canal companies over the previous decades (5, 9–10). In a similar fashion, the author’s suggestion that the ‘departed evils’ of the past she evokes included ‘pocket boroughs, [and] a Birmingham unrepresented in Parliament’ would be rich with irony to contemporary readers (5). The campaign for further parliamentary reform in the 1860s publicized the continued existence of a number of corrupt ‘pocket boroughs’, each with only a handful entitled to vote and willing to bring in whoever the local patron nominated, while Birmingham still had merely a tiny proportion of enfranchised voters compared to its size. 8 Change, in Eliot’s conservative organicist account, results only from an interaction between individual and environment, enabling the passenger on the box to pass through a spatialized temporality, moving ‘rapidly from one phase of English life to another’, from sleepy fi eld to pit village full of unrest (8). The hope that the past might be a stable place of retreat and national unity for readers in the 1860s is quite carefully picked apart. Yet so, too, is the idea that any single uprising or reform—whether during the ‘heroic’ period of early nineteenth-century radicalism, or in the mass pressure groups of the 1850s and 1860s—has an enduring effect on national life. 9 That fi gure of communication by road brings to the surface what Eliot’s work shares with Cobbett’s: a belief in local attachment and custom as a centre of being; a radical commitment to documenting the detail of everyday rural life, which, for Raymond Williams, earns Cobbett a central place in the later emergence of the realist novel; an entanglement between a retrospective organic view of national history and a commitment to change that makes both diffi cult to place in relation to ideas of ‘left’ and ‘right’. 10 However, the road is also what separates them, and not just in terms of their distinct historical epochs marked by the transition from stagecoach to rail. George Eliot might share a conservative anti-modernism with Cobbett, but his sense of the national past as a mass resource for recovering a lost collective destiny—the popular constitution of freeborn Englishmen and women—is a political analysis inimical to Eliot writing in the 1860s, for all that it later re-emerged within the socialism of the 1880s. 11 Returning 88 R. LIVESEY to the past in order to understand—and perhaps to shape—the present is, in Eliot’s works, an individualized matter of affect and feeling: a conscious effort to return to a spatialized and local site of memory on the part of one stranded in the present. 12

COBBETT AND ELIOT ON THE MIDLANDS TURNPIKE The narrator of Felix Holt informs readers early in the novel that the Midlands town of Treby Magna, pictured just after the passing of the First Reform Act of 1832, ‘saw little in Mr Cobbett’s “Weekly Register” except that he held eccentric views about potatoes’ prior to the stirring agitations of the Catholic Emancipation debates of the later 1820s (44). That is, the inhabitants of the town (widely agreed to be modelled on Nuneaton) are reading Cobbett’s extraordinarily popular radical weekly, but it seems that only his strongly held views on ‘cottage economy’ and agriculture leave a trace in their consciousness, while his tirades against corruption and taxation leave no mark. Cobbett’s actual election campaign along the roadside inns and turnpike roads between Coventry and Nuneaton in 1820 was a riotous affair that endured in local memory for some time: a memoranda book of notable occurrences at Nuneaton records that he was mobbed and barracked ‘by certain persons in respectable stations of life’ on his way into and out of that town. 13 Much to Cobbett’s frustration, he lost his voice during a wet journey to the Midlands and most of his harangue to the enfranchised freemen of the neighbourhood was inaudible when he ‘stoped [sic ] near to the Mile Stone’ outside Griff on ‘leaving the Town for Coventry’. 14 He thanked the ‘great numbers’ who had followed him out of Nuneaton ‘assur[in]g them that he should ever remember [their] kind resception [sic ]’, though at least he did not have to resort to fi ghting off attackers with the corner of his snuffbox, as he did at the polls in Coventry ten days later. 15 Cobbett, with his usual marvellous lack of modesty, predicted that his subsequent defeat in the Coventry elections would ‘form an important epoch, not only in my political career, but that of this corrupting, corroding and destroying system of sway’. 16 Cobbett was wrong in the sense that the Coventry elections remained a byword for corruption and violence throughout Mary Ann Evans’s youth and right past the 1832 Reform Act, while other examples of vote rig- ging and manipulation were an enduring part of British electoral politics featured in the debates that preceded the 1867 Act. Yet he was also right in that his defeat in Coventry in 1820 formed an epoch in his politi- REMEMBERING RADICALISM ON THE MIDLANDS TURNPIKE 89 cal career. This was the moment, Kevin Gilmartin persuasively argues, at which Cobbett rejected the abstract representational politics of the ballot and the power of the national government, for a form of popular, localized acclamation and an intense focus on those agricultural regions in the south of England that, unlike the Midlands, he knew intimately. It also left its mark on the Midlands. 17 In her research for Felix Holt , Eliot spent some time reading the 1835 Report of the Select Commission into Bribery at Elections, which contained pages of evidence relating to the conduct of elections in Coventry in the early nineteenth century. 18 The copious accounts of treating, drunken riots, manipulated handloom weavers, and tenants ferried to the polls in coaches laid on by landlords’ agents—like Eliot’s father—are all carefully evoked in the polling scenes of Felix Holt . However, in his evidence the electoral agent Thomas Ball Troughton recalled only one occasion on which the candidate leading the poll on the fi rst day of voting had been displaced by later voters coming into Coventry from further up the road, swayed, he implied, by local threats and interests; that ‘exception’ to the system of the power of landlords, employers, and the City Corporation was ‘Mr Cobbett’. 19 The exceptional quality of Cobbett’s presence in Eliot’s Felix Holt is slyly indicated in the seemingly dismissive reference to his views on potatoes in the novel’s potted history of life in Treby Magna between the French Revolution and the First Reform Act. The trace that Cobbett leaves in this fi ctional Midlands locality is not a legend of political riot, of heroic radicalism, of attempts to uproot old corruption. What Eliot’s novel gleans from Cobbett, I suggest, is a sense of an early nineteenth- century radical politics that grounded itself in intense, possessive localism: a politics in which potatoes, tea, banknotes, and turnpike roads were the common objects out of which an oppositional consciousness could grow. Samuel Bamford’s Passages in the Life of a Radical (2 vols, 1841–3), a preeminent source for Eliot’s research for Felix Holt , opens with a ‘hom- age’ to Cobbett for inspiring ‘deliberate and systematic…proceedings’ at the level of careful cottage discussions and village meetings of reform clubs; for a politics grounded in a specifi c material locality, rather than the more diffuse and mobile Luddism and rioting of the 1810s. 20 The detailed, tactile experience of everyday life is, in Cobbett’s hands, the stuff of consciousness raising; it is also intimately connected to the early emergence of a style of realist representation that Eliot was to do so much to develop later in the century. The things once so familiar—holding a hunk of bread and bacon in hand, the fl itch of bacon overhead, the sight of 90 R. LIVESEY yeast rising, walking and driving freely down an old route—were, Cobbett argued, experiences slipping away into memory in a new era of poverty and dispossession. The cheapness of the interloping root vegetable, the potato, according to Cobbett, enabled landlords to reduce wages dramatically during the agricultural depression that followed Waterloo, depriv- ing labourers of their accustomed daily bread. Readers of the Political Register , he asserted, should realize week after week their dispossession of these customary goods of a disappearing cottage economy: kitchen gardens, pigs, home-brewed beer, gleanings from pastures, coppiced fi re- wood from commons and hedgerows, free travel along roads without toll gates. Item by item, the ‘Author’s Introduction’ to Felix Holt alludes to these everyday sources of potential rural labouring discontent commonly identifi ed in the Political Register in the 1820s and carefully negates them in the local context of the Midlands. The shepherd watching the mail coach and stagecoaches pass is eating bread and bacon, rather than making do with tea and potatoes; his homestead has its own kitchen garden; it stands in an unimproved landscape shaped by ‘bushy hedgerows’ that ‘wasted the land with their straggling beauty’; corn-ricks stand without threat of burning by Captain Swing thanks to local arrangements over farmers’ rent and leases (6–7). 21 The antithesis of Cobbett’s acute fi eld labourer, aware of a singular system of government corruption that spread tentacles (and taxation) from the turnpike road to what came to hand for dinner, Eliot’s shepherd sees the mail coach as belonging to ‘that mysterious distant system of things called “Gover’ment”, which, whatever it might be, was no business of his, any more than the most out-lying nebula’ (6). The coach on the turnpike road is a symbol of the nation, but it is not a nation to which this rural labourer is consciously connected; unlike the young William Cobbett, who, according to his mythology, walked out of the fi eld on impulse to climb aboard the stagecoach from Farnham to London in the early 1780s, to fi nd himself shortly afterwards fi ghting for colonial possessions in North America. For Cobbett’s more recent critical champions, like Ian Dyck and Raymond Williams, Eliot’s seemingly placid shepherd is evidence of the author’s culpable retreat from the politics of her contemporary industrial present into an idyll populated by rustic ‘Hodge’ stock characters. 22 Yet as I hope to show, Eliot’s novel attempts to forge a dynamic connection between such local beings and the cosmopolitan mobility of her implied readers in the 1860s: a process of radical REMEMBERING RADICALISM ON THE MIDLANDS TURNPIKE 91 revision to which the opening fi gure of the stagecoach and the turnpike road is central. It is this difference in relation to mobility and communication that is key to Eliot’s revisioning of early nineteenth-century radicalism in Felix Holt . Writing in the fi rst decades of the nineteenth century, Cobbett insisted that living off the main road, down a muddy track and never moving more than a few miles, was no bar to becoming part of a larger, rational, and consciously oppositional collective to the network of corruption and exploitation that was, for him, government. From the launch of the two-penny Register in 1816, Cobbett had linked distribution by mail coach, the Post Offi ce, and broad turnpike roads as part of a single oppressive system of surveillance and control and had begun to search for alternative means of local distribution. 23 His sequence of rural rides and ‘Rustic Harangues’ during the 1820s equally made a local virtue of necessity, after the passing of the Six Acts in 1819 in the wake of Peterloo had outlawed mass meetings and limited those present at political discussions to those resident in the parish where the address took place. 24 Avoiding the mail coach and the turnpike and circulating by alternative byways was therefore a decided political gesture in the 1820s, but one that is virtually illegible without Cobbett’s help. For Cobbett and many of his early nineteenth-century radical peers, turnpike roads were part of the sprawling system of tax gathering, fi nancial speculation, and political corruption that Cobbett eventually named, with a Gothic fl our- ish, the ‘THING ’. 25 From the end of the Napoleonic Wars through to the mid- 1820s there was a boom in fi nancial speculation on roads, with a great increase in the number of turnpike trusts formed not only to improve and maintain roads, but also to profi t from tolls. 26 In 1825, for example, the long-distance turnpike road from Stratford and Warwick to Leicester via Coventry, Nuneaton, and Hinckley—the road that ran outside the Evans family’s Griff House—was separated into two new trusts. Along with all of the local Justices of the Peace, Sir Francis Newdigate and his son, Francis Newdigate the younger, were appointed as trustees, responsible for dis- charging the old debts of the road, appointing surveyors, and maintaining its future. 27 This increasingly common connection between local authority and tolls was to make turnpikes a fl ashpoint for popular insurrection in the Rebecca Riots in South Wales from 1839. 28 As a surveyor and as agent for the Newdigates, Eliot’s father, Robert Evans, was intimately involved in the early nineteenth-century transport revolution. He designed schemes to improve the roads in Nuneaton and, in 1833, proposed that 92 R. LIVESEY

Francis Newdigate develop an existing byway past the family’s colliery to enable wagons travelling west to the pit from Wolvey, Attleborough, Smockington, and Claybrook to cut out Nuneaton and thus avoid two tollgates. 29 The development of what is now Gipsy Lane, running from Griff, over Wem Brook, to the white stone (now Whitestone) on the Nuneaton to Lutterworth turnpike road, offered a competitive edge for the pit to attract hauliers from Leicestershire along the improved cross- road: each passage through a turnpike gate would have added 1s . 4 d . to the cost of a load of coal on the largest of wagons, 4d . for smaller wains. It is this jostling proximity of agrarian south Warwickshire, prosperous pro- vincial Coventry, the new pits of Bedworth and Griff, and the emerging industries of Nuneaton, all at the very gates of the hereditary estate, that is so sharply outlined in the plot of Eliot’s Felix Holt and knitted together by the stagecoach journey of its opening. For Cobbett, such improvements during the fi rst decades of the nineteenth century spoke of a continual displacement of labouring rural peoples from customary communications. The fi rst of Cobbett’s series of ‘Rural Rides’ in 1822 makes a clear distinction between a national landscape of ‘inns and turnpike-roads’ and the locality of ‘the country ’ of farmers at home and labourers in the fi eld. This local territory could only be communicated with ‘on foot or on horse-back’: ‘With a gig you cannot get about amongst bye-lanes and across fi elds , through bridle-ways and hunting-gates.’ 30 One of his chief targets in Rural Rides was the 1822 Turnpike Act, which, following the advice given to a Royal Commission by Thomas Telford, stipulated that the wheels of all traffi c on turnpike roads must be wide, smooth, and cylindrical to preserve the hard surface, or face steeply increased tolls for failing to meet the new standards. 31 Cobbett raged at this as a blatant preference for metropolitan communications at the expense of rural wellbeing:

The wheels which this law orders to be used on turnpike roads, on pain of enormous toll, cannot be used on the cross-roads throughout more than nine-tenths of the kingdom. To make these roads and the drove-lanes (the private roads of farms) fi t for the cylindrical wheels described in this Bill, would cost a pound an acre, upon an average, upon all the land in England… And this is enacted, too, at a time, when the wagons, the carts, and all the dead stock of a farm; when the whole is falling into a state of irrepair; when all is actually perishing for want of means in the farmer to keep it in repair! This is the time that the Lord Johns and the Lord Henries and the rest of REMEMBERING RADICALISM ON THE MIDLANDS TURNPIKE 93

that honourable body have thought proper to enact that the whole of the farmers in England shall have new wheels to their wagons and carts, or, that they shall be punished by the payment of heavier tolls! 32

The immediate effect of macadamized roads and transport engineering during the 1820s, according to Cobbett, was an England in which customary independent rural livelihoods lay in disrepair down muddy crossroads, while wealthy tax gatherers and speculative fi nanciers rolled smoothly along the turnpikes. 33 In an age when turnpike trusts represented major fi nancial institutions backed by local landowners, a whole superstructure of ‘innkeepers, ostlers, and post-boys’ worked to keep the traveller on these routes between larger towns, paying tolls—and hence the dividends of investors. They ‘think you mad if you express your wish to avoid turnpike roads ; and a great deal more than half mad if you talk of going, even from necessity, by any other road. They think you a strange fellow if you will not ride six miles on a turnpike road rather than two on any other road.’ 34 The local landscape of George Eliot’s youth in the 1820s can be mapped through such milestones of transport development. The fl ows of horse-drawn traffi c on the Coventry to Hinckley turnpike road outside Griff House, and Robert Evans’s own ‘improving’ interest in such matters, write in little the national signifi cance of road engineering in developing rapid communication in the early nineteenth century: a boom in road investment peaking during this decade. The countryside surrounding Griff House was already crosscut by a network of canals and sophisticated locks, which is testament to the late eighteenth-century technological vision of Sir Roger Newdigate and his development of the Arbury estate, which was Robert Evans’s primary employer. Although many of the outlying canal branches had fallen into disuse by the 1830s and 1840s, the main arteries remained essential in the development of the collieries that reshaped this part of North Warwickshire. Even though the fi rst public railway, from Stockton to Darlington, had opened in 1825, the development of a national network took at least another twenty years, most of it focused on connecting major industrial cities. It is worth remembering that, although Coventry was part of a national rail transport system by 1838 (and surveys had been undertaken for it in 1829), a line to Nuneaton, with a stop near Griff, did not open until 1850. George Eliot weaves the association of turnpike roads together with the march of national ‘improvement’ into the historical settings of Scenes of Clerical Life (1858) and Silas Marner (1861). In ‘Mr Gilfi l’s Love Story’, 94 R. LIVESEY for example, each village community is carefully mapped in relation to turnpikes, crossroads, and byways. The lively critical spirit of the inhabitants of Shepperton (instantly identifi ed with Chilvers Coton on the Coventry to Hinckley turnpike on the publication of Scenes ) is contrasted with the resigned grumbling in the neighbouring parish of Knebley (reputedly modelled on the village of Astley, well to the west of the old turnpike and still lying in a tangle of minor roads). 35 The former settlement has ‘turnpike roads and a public opinion, whereas, in…Knebley, men’s minds and wagons alike moved in the deepest of ruts’. 36 National transport by road is the making of public opinion (and also the route to radicalism) in this version of the fi rst half of the nineteenth century, although there is a heavy irony about what informed ‘public opinion’ might be in Shepperton. The village of Raveloe, in Silas Marner , is also located ‘quite an hour’s journey on horseback from any turnpike, where it was never reached by the vibra- tions of the coach-horn, or of public opinion’. 37 Silas is a mobile fi gure in this static landscape. Not only a reverse migrant to a Midlands village from an unnamed northern town, he is also a pack-carrying pedestrian, wandering between households to collect spun yarn and deliver the woven goods. 38 Handloom weavers have an almost iconic status in histories of radicalism, so frequently were ones like Samuel Bamford at the centre of activism. Yet far from being one of those travellers who might tuck copies of Cobbett’s Political Register in his pack, Marner brings from the town the sort of knowledge that only serves to disorientate him in the customary rural community of Raveloe. There is persistent scepticism about the value of ‘useful knowledge’ and ‘public opinion’ leaching out from the fl ows of information running up and down the turnpike roads in George Eliot’s early works. An intuitive understanding, like that of Dolly Winthrop in Silas Marner , for example, grows from what is nearest to the eye to have an affective depth entirely lacking in Marner’s literate dissenting education. At fi rst, this intuition might seem to be doubled by Cobbett’s refl ections in 1826 on encounter- ing a thirty-year-old woman who had never been further than two and a half miles from her rural cottage: ‘It is a great error to suppose, that people are rendered stupid by remaining always in the same place. This was a very acute woman, and as well behaved as need be.’ 39 For Cobbett, such ‘ facilities , which now exist of moving human bodies from place to place , are amongst the curses of the country, the destroyers of industry, of morals, and, of course, of happiness’. 40 However in his imagining, the Political Register and other writings form an alternative means of community and REMEMBERING RADICALISM ON THE MIDLANDS TURNPIKE 95 communications for the labouring classes off the main roads, down crossroads and footpaths. Bodies can remain local, but minds are connected and alert to a common national cause, as he details in the case of a labourer from Preston who had travelled on foot and on his own to Rouen in France earlier that year, fi nding a friendly series of Cobbett readers wher- ever he went. 41 To live down a rutted track does not mean you are stuck there, so long as someone can read you Cobbett. The turnpike road journey that opens Felix Holt emphasizes, by contrast, how Eliot’s representations of rural labouring life serve as sites of rootedness and individualized memory, not interconnecting routes to a collective, active consciousness. For both writers, standing at either end of a period so often characterized as a rapid sweep of technological progress and reform, writing of—and recalling to consciousness—what lay off track, down overgrown byways, remained crucial. Yet while Cobbett, writing in the 1820s, sought to construct alternative routes through which labourers in remote localities could form an oppositional, but increasingly rational, reading class, Eliot’s retrospective writing of such local communities into a national history frames them as objects of imaginative investment; sites of memory to fortify the individual that, as in the case of her protagonist Felix Holt, can only be returned to by a fi lter of conscious deracination. Writing of Wilhelm Riehl’s conservative and organicist account of German peasant life in 1856 as a form of ‘ incarnate history ’, Eliot concluded that ‘[t]he nature of European men has its roots inter- twined with the past, and can only be developed by allowing those roots to remain undisturbed while the process of development is going on’. 42 The German peasant, Riehl insisted, might have taken part in local insurrections and pulled down local grievances, like toll houses, in the 1830s, but he could never suddenly move to the abstract national level of critique, for all social change was governed by ‘the gradual operation of necessary laws’ in specifi c topographical localities. 43 In England, Eliot pointed out, however, Protestantism and commerce had by contrast ‘modernized the face of the land and the aspects of society’ to such a degree that this ‘vital connection with the past’ in the form of the peasantry is much less ‘vividly felt’. 44 The shifting face of a gentle landscape that had been, like Eliot’s native Midlands, scored across by transport and industrialism meant that the thriving natural roots of German peasant life needed a kind of prosthetic narrative replacement in England: ‘an effort of memory and refl ection’, rather than organic feeling. 45 Felix Holt the novel, I argue here, is part of Eliot’s particular prescription of literary realism in the essay on 96 R. LIVESEY

Riehl: a form of prosthetic memory making that reads a place and its people back into organic relations within a landscape ruptured by modernity. 46 If William Cobbett, writing in the 1820s, could seek to repossess rural routes by riding down neglected bridleways—simply asking his local guides, ‘Do people go it?’—Eliot looking back from the 1860s sought to replant connections between local belonging and national destiny through writing portable roots, building collective memory of place from afar in an era of displacement. 47

REMEMBERING RADICALISM: WRITING ROOTS As parliamentary reform debates during the 1850s and 1860s edged towards the abstraction of manhood suffrage, as opposed to the old Whig tradition of indirect representation of differing national interests, Eliot’s novel returns to the context of early nineteenth-century radicalism to emphasize its sense of the local and the domestic. It is striking to note how the source of much of Eliot’s sense of radical politics in Felix Holt , Bamford’s Passages , works to distance that author’s experience of the 1810s and 1820s from the mass national political movements of the later nineteenth century. Bamford himself had converted Cobbett to the cause of universal manhood suffrage in 1817, marking a signifi cant last step on the latter’s route from loyalist propagandist to radical reformer, and in Passages Bamford opposes the patriotic radical politics they shared to later Chartism and abstract Republicanism, for all his distrust of Cobbett’s interest in mass populism. 48 Like Eliot’s novel, Bamford’s narrative is an attempt to reshape the political present through a memory of radicalism past, and insists on reform of the domestic life of the labourer fi rst of all. 49 It maps out a series of events in which scenes of mass mobility and protest, away from Bamford’s Lancashire home of Middleton, end in violent disarray and mutual distrust—whether in the shape of the London-bound march of the northern Blanketeers, or in the Peterloo Massacre itself. ‘[E]arly affectionate joy in our native landscape’, Eliot wrote late in her life, ‘is one deep root of our national life and language’. 50 Her radicalism, like that of her protagonist Felix Holt, is of this etymological sort: a return to roots in a specifi c landscape. Looking backwards from the 1860s, Eliot’s novel holds out an ideal of national regeneration through regrowth of a sense of local attachment, not the mass oppositional consciousness that Cobbett sought to rouse by breaking open old byways and connecting remote cottagers. Yet from the very inscription to Felix Holt , drawn REMEMBERING RADICALISM ON THE MIDLANDS TURNPIKE 97 from Drayton’s Poly-Olbion , to its anti-climatic ending, the idea of any simple return to place is rendered problematic in the novel. In the verse of the opening inscription, hymning her Midlands homeland, all the displaced author can trace of the remaining virtues ‘bred’st’ in her by the Warwickshire earth is her own song as the ‘unworthiest’ of a ‘later brood’ (2); and the narrator ends the novel by claiming that she no longer ‘has correspondence’ with the town of Treby Magna (399). This is a historical novel that opens and closes with the impossibility of travelling backwards; all we can ever do is look across from here to there and reconstruct a sense of belonging from memory of place. 51 Eliot emphasizes the contemporary political implications of attempts simply to resurrect the past in her essay the ‘Natural History of German Life’ (1856). There Eliot mocks the ‘aristocratic dilettantism’ of the Disraelian Young England movement, mid-century Romantic Tories who sought to ‘restore the “good old times” by a sort of idyllic masquerad- ing, and to grow feudal fi delity and veneration as we grow prize turnips, by an artifi cial system of culture’. 52 Yet despite such scepticism about that current of conservatism, both the essay and Felix Holt make clear that Eliot is deeply invested in cultivating a sense of national cohesion across classes and orders. The difference between her means to growth and the ‘artifi cial’ fertilization of those treasuring a lost golden age of feudalism is apparent in Eliot’s sketch of the eventual destiny of Philip Debarry, the highly intellectual and proto-Disraelian ‘modern conservative’ election candidate and heir to the arch-Tory Debarry estate in Felix Holt . For all his fi nely drawn intentions to improve relations between the landed estate and the local town, Debarry dies in ‘Rome…fi fteen years later, a convert to Catholicism’ (136). Debarry’s attempts to regrow pre-Reformation feudal relations lead him away from England altogether under the aus- pices of the Oxford Movement, framed here as a retreat from the needs of the national present back in pursuit of a vanished past. Debarry’s odd absence from Treby Magna and the local action of the novel—given that he is the eventual successful election candidate—underscores the resistance to abstract representations and static Tory historical ideals in favour of a pedestrian retracing of landscape and belonging through the detail of literary realism. 53 Eliot’s politics—one echoed in the very narrative form of Felix Holt —is a conservatism that must move and change, and that must move forwards; but its route is shaped by a locally variable territory, formed by survivals from the past that make smooth progress to an 98 R. LIVESEY abstract idea of national unity beyond the bounds of representation in the context of the 1860s. The plot of Felix Holt contrasts two self-declared radicals who return home to the Midlands after pursuing careers and self-improvement in distant places. Harold Transome returns from a merchant’s career in Smyrna after the death of his elder brother to the family estate that he believes he is now entitled to inherit in due course. Felix Holt, by contrast, gives up a medical apprenticeship and later study at Glasgow, with the chance of the social rise of becoming ‘a doctor on horseback’, in favour of returning to his ‘heritage’ (‘an order I belong to’) and working as a watchmaker in Treby Magna (224). The differing versions of radicalism espoused by these characters are most carefully delineated in relation to their sense of place, both the Midlands locality to which they return and their conscious insight into how they fi t into changing social and national orders. Harold Transome’s politics, the Dissenting minister’s daughter Esther Lyon per- ceives, is of a piece with his attitude to his personal life and his treatment of the estate he is due to inherit: a pursuit of pleasure, personal value, and the ‘utmost enjoyment of his own advantages’ (344–45). The radical politics of the disenfranchised Felix Holt is, by contrast, sketched in the language of popular constitutionalism common to Bamford and Cobbett (he is ‘against privilege, monopoly, and oppression’), and he seems well versed in the organic etymology of this affi liation (160). Felix declares that he is ‘[a] Radical—yes’, but he continues, ‘I want to go to some roots a good deal lower down than the franchise’ (226). Felix Holt’s radicalism intends to replant roots in contrast to Harold Transome’s single-minded clearance of obstacles to his own present pleasure, ignoring what might be thrown up along the way. Shortly after he has stunned his arch-Tory mother with his intention of standing as Radical candidate for Treby Magna, Harold Transome glances across the estate that he stands to inherit and muses: ‘I often thought, when I was at Smyrna, that I would buy a park with a river through it as much like the Lapp as possible. Gad, what fi ne oaks those are opposite! Some of them must come down, though’ (20). Horrifi ed, Mrs Transome replies: ‘I’ve held every tree sacred on the demesne, as I told you, Harold. I trusted to your getting the estate some time, and releasing it; and I determined to keep it worth releasing’ (20). The archaic language of the ‘demesne’ here conjures a train of associations of landscape and belonging, stretching back to the feudalism of Norman baronies and their pro- prietary rights to serf labour: a world in which different social orders were REMEMBERING RADICALISM ON THE MIDLANDS TURNPIKE 99 legally bound together by place. In the nineteenth-century context, this conjunction of politics and estate management speaks to a longstanding association of ‘improvement’ with a disregard of Tory respect for custom and tradition familiar to readers of Austen’s Mansfi eld Park (1814) and then still current in legal debate over enclosure and inheritance. 54 Such was the passionate belief in the value of transmitting woodland intact that the two branches of the Newdigate family were in Chancery throughout the 1820s and into the 1830s over claims that the younger Francis Newdigate and his agent had unlawfully felled estate woodlands, depriv- ing the entailed heir of Arbury Park, Charles Newdigate Newdegate, of his birthright under the terms of a will written decades earlier. 55 For Harold, the hereditary estate could have been replicated anywhere on his proceeds from international trade—it is endlessly portable, not specifi cally local, and linked to the affective train of landscape, duty, and belonging encapsulated in the hereditary ‘demesne’: the ‘Tory oaks are rot- ting’ and dead wood (of whatever sort: constitutional, social, political) is asking to be uprooted (21). Transome’s plans for estate improvement and effi ciency over customary relations with long-standing tenants mark him out as precisely the sort of progressive gentlemanly radical whom Cobbett viewed with suspicion. 56 The contrast with the estate management of the old Tory peer Sir Maximus Debarry, who snarls at the household accounts while accepting a little corruption on the part of his domestic staff as a personal inconvenience necessary ‘in order to keep up the institutions of the country’, could not be clearer (87). Although Transome aims initially at uprooting ancient Tory oaks, and the ‘impositions’ of Lawyer Jermyn, his intentions are subverted when he comes to understand the complexities of his own roots and those of the entail on the estate that he stands to inherit. Mr Sampson, the stagecoach driver plying the Midlands turnpike road, knows that ‘Lawyer Jermyn had had his picking out of the estate. Not a door in his big house but what was the fi nest polished oak’ all got off the estate for free (10). Yet Harold Transome is carefully framed as a stranger to the thick accretions of the customary world of Transome Court, Treby Magna, and, by implication, the England that he seeks to represent in Parliament. His mother caus- tically comments on his ability to remember ‘some things about home wonderfully well’, but his memory of ‘places and people’ is limited to his own point of view: ‘how they look and what can be done with them’ (21). Again and again the narrative reinforces his sense of locality as a landscape from which pleasure and use value can be abstracted. ‘All the country 100 R. LIVESEY round here lies like a map in my brain’, he comments; yet his is pre- eminently the perspective from the country-house terrace over a territory made by other people’s movement and labour (21). For him that presence of others is invisible. He lacks the affective tie to a sense of place populated by rooted stories, memories, and labours necessary to equip him in representing the life of the nation. If Transome believes himself to be a singular individual, freed by his birth and experience to set about progressive radical reform, the narrative insists that this is a sad illusion in a man ‘ignorant of what many yesterdays had determined for him beforehand’ (162): ignorant of his own birth as result of the long-past affair between his mother and Jermyn that makes him a hybrid offshoot of landed aristocracy and urban Cockney professional. Unlike Transome, Felix is consistently represented as a pedestrian moving through the countryside; a countryside that he, like the narrator, reads in terms of the human acts that produce it. The place where Felix announces to his future wife, Esther Lyon, his intention to return to his ‘heritage’ rather than pursue a social rise is an important example of this. Felix holds forth while sitting on an old felled tree trunk that ‘they have not thought worth carrying away’ in a plantation of young birches reached by an old cart-track right of way (222). The preserved fallen tree supports a supple new growth, just as the fallen branch of Esther’s once noble family line will support Felix in their eventual marriage. She in turn commits herself to a customary pedestrian life ‘walking’ with Felix, despite all the sensuous attractions that she experiences while being ‘bowled along’ in the ‘soft cushions’ of the Transome family carriage (313). In Catherine Gallagher’s seminal reading of Felix Holt in the context of the reform debates of the 1860s, Felix himself is nothing but abstraction and ideal: he ‘represents a pure, disinterested politics and a pure, disinterested culture’. 57 Yet for all that Gallagher and others have done to show Eliot’s increasing engagement with Matthew Arnold’s idea of the realm of disinterested culture as a means to national regeneration in the 1860s, both novel and protagonist return to the detailed and the pedestrian. Where the process of cultivation is shown in this novel, it is not an abstract. Laying down the roots of a cultured future—roots that never seem to have a hope of spreading beyond a few particular houses or hamlets—involves tramp- ing dirty boots from footpaths and canal towpaths across Mrs Holt’s best carpet and spending evenings slowly sipping a pint in a grotty pub. Felix, like William Cobbett in the 1820s, embraces his ancestry, happily strides off-road, across commons, and hereditary estates alike, laying REMEMBERING RADICALISM ON THE MIDLANDS TURNPIKE 101 claim to place step by step along near-forgotten footpaths to fi nd the miners of Sproxton on their home grounds. Yet one key to the conservative political infl ection of Eliot’s narrative in the context of the manhood suffrage debates of the 1860s is its thoroughgoing rejection of the oppositional language of class and the consciousness of collective structural oppression visible in Cobbett’s writings of the 1810s and 1820s. Far from constructing a radical counter-public sphere that networks together rural communities, Felix’s cross-country walks emphasize a journey inwards: his own return to his artisanal ‘heritage’; his rejection of the abstract ideals of Glasgow University for the local education of a few boys in a hamlet; his ill-fated attempts to disperse the polling-day riot mob back down the backstreets and lanes of Treby Magna. Felix asserts: ‘I am a working man myself, and I don’t want to be anything else’ (249). In contrast to Eliot’s earlier works, however, this expression of class affi nity has become a conscious choice to return on the part of one who is already removed from a sense of continuity with his roots by natural abilities and later education. Felix returns to his ‘heritage’ and order through that individual ‘effort of memory and refl ection’ that Eliot posits as a necessary part of reconstruct- ing an organic social body in her essay on Riehl. 58 He chooses to represent a class of which he is shown to be entirely unrepresentative, remembering and refl ecting on its characteristics like one returning from elsewhere as a stranger. In the context of a novel written in the midst of debates over manhood suffrage and the nature of representative government, Felix’s elective choice to remember this local belonging, rather than pursuing a progressive destiny elsewhere, is indicative of the narrative’s internalization of radicalism and the novel’s dramatization of the active processes of memory in planting individual roots. The tension between the determinism of birth and social circumstances and a more active choice of destiny places the work of memory at the fore in Eliot’s novel. Memory, in Felix Holt , is an ever-active recreative force that allows for conscious acts of preservation while moving forwards: it provides the keynote of Eliot’s mobile conservatism, mediating social stasis and change. In the personalized politics of the novel, the danger of clinging too close to a static version of the past is dramatized in the arch- Tory preservationist, Mrs Transome, as trapped in ‘marble…immobility’ by the fi xed memory of her affair with Jermyn as she is entangled with her pride in her genealogy (46, 562). For all Mrs Transome’s association with memory as a motionless, ‘distinct record’ of the past, however, the novel brings into play a series of contrasts that establish the plasticity of 102 R. LIVESEY individual memory work and its continual reshaping of the past within the present across a range of characters. From the skewed recollection of witnesses at Felix’s trial, infl uenced by the political agent Johnson, to epi- graphs from Tennyson’s In Memoriam , to that opening evocation of the stagecoach journey still just within implied readers’ memories, to Esther’s crucial response to her adoptive father’s memories of lost love and her own ‘embalmed’ love for Felix despite her physical relocation to Transome Court—this novel displaces deterministic history with elective memory, just as it tends to enfold a struggle for national political reform within one for local personal, ‘inward revolution’ on the part of Esther (301, 389). It is the recreative power of this individual memory work that is vital to the dynamic conservatism that Eliot’s novel envisages: characters in the novel, and by inference readers of the 1860s, can, like Esther, produce new memories, new senses of attachment to locality, through acts of conscious refl ection on the past; rituals of ‘perpetual repetition’ to sustain better choices for the future (302). The very plurality of recollections of the past within the novel and the way it puts into play differing levels of attachment and preservation through memory work therefore dramatize what Eliot recognizes as the problem and potential solution to England’s lack of rooted ‘incarnate history’. If a fractured, commercial, and Protestant nation, crosscut by new national lines of communication, is a tissue of shifting memories rather than a steady, uninterrupted, predictable growth, then this leaves room for the future to be rewritten through the past. A simple return to the localized past, this novel reminds us, is impossible: the market town of Treby Magna, formerly the ‘heart of a great rural district’, has already taken on the ‘more complex life brought by mines and manufactures, which belong more directly to the great circulating system of the nation than to the local system to which they have been superadded’ by the time the action of the novel opens (43). The stagecoach and turnpike road are already running past uneven local temporalities in pursuit of national communications. Yet by inviting implied readers from the 1860s aboard this vehicle, the novel itself serves a form of prosthetic memory, writing a recreative account of radicalism as a choice to pursue rooted belonging, rather than national mass mobility. It is what we elect to remember, the novel suggests, that shapes our future: ‘Our fi nest hope is fi nest memory’, the closing Epigraph insists; and memory, unlike history or deterministic inheritance, is a matter of elective choice and practice in this novel (398). Esther is, thanks to her ‘inward revolution’, free to choose Felix and a REMEMBERING RADICALISM ON THE MIDLANDS TURNPIKE 103 humble life and thus make ‘memory a temple’ for her future; but Harold Transome is also free to rebel against his discovery of his cockney paternity and, with ‘proud insurrection’ against determinism, to choose to represent his ‘character of gentleman’ all the more strongly ‘in his conduct’, remaking his roots through daily practice (360, 383). 59

DRIVING BACK WITH GEORGE ELIOT: A LOCAL HISTORY A brief look at Eliot’s research material for Felix Holt suggests how the composition of the novel itself enacts something of such an inward journey from national history to elective local memory; an internalization that has led readers from the nineteenth century onwards to question its relation to any recognizable form of radical politics. 60 Both the Annual Register and The Times (two of the sources for the novel’s setting) contain extensive coverage of riots by ribbon weavers and petitions concern- ing the industrial distress in Coventry, Nuneaton, and the surrounding area, worsened by a relaxation of import duties on silk from 1826. 61 In November 1831, Nuneaton operatives memorialized the Board of Trade, stating that 2700 unemployed weavers, winders, and warpers were receiv- ing parochial relief and soup. 62 By the late 1830s, Mary Ann Evans herself visited outworkers in Chilvers Coton, who were suffering as a result of a decline in trade and the renegotiation of long-standing rates for piece- work, and recommended worthy cases to the Arbury Poor Fund administered by Lady Maria Newdigate Newdegate. 63 Meanwhile, the moderate and socially mixed Coventry Political Union held large outdoor meetings addressed by notable radicals like Henry Hunt during 1831, and mass radical movements affi liated with national campaigns were active in both towns. 64 Such narratives of industrial hardship and collective unrest, feed- ing into national reform movements, are the staple of social histories of nineteenth-century radicalism, class formation, and the emergence of Chartism, yet Eliot’s narrative stages a continuous inward retreat from such collective history into the practices of place-bound memory. 65 In her most extensive account of locality and memory, The Impressions of Theophrastus Such , Eliot’s narrative persona smiles ‘at my consciousness that certain conservative prepossessions have mingled themselves for me with the infl uences of our midland scenery’. 66 The narrator of Theophrastus is supremely conscious that the political context of growing up in a Tory household in the 1820s, venerating steady government and deploring radicalism, shapes his memory of the local landscape and its 104 R. LIVESEY part in creating a sense of national belonging. As agent to the high Tory Newdigates until 1841, when his son Isaac succeeded him, Eliot’s father Robert Evans was at the centre of such preservationist politics on the road between Coventry and Nuneaton, organizing polling-day breakfasts, transport for tenant voters, and other means to ensure the promotion of the Tory Newdigate political interests in the 1820s and 1830s. 67 In the reports in The Times of the December 1832 electoral riot in Nuneaton, which Eliot read in her research for Felix Holt , a former neighbour in Chilvers Coton, George Morris, recounted how he was accordingly identifi ed as ‘“one of old Newdigate’s men: you may be sure who he has voted for: he is a Dugdale [i.e. a Tory]”’ and attacked by the opposition mob. 68 If this sense of personal implication in the narrative of Tory politics on the road between Coventry and Nuneaton hovers behind—and is indeed embraced in—the local landscape of Felix Holt , then the narrative itself sets aside the possibilities of more abstract liberal histories of the nation. By the time Eliot composed Felix Holt its opening image of the stagecoach journey had, as I have suggested, become a rather clichéd shorthand for a progressive Whig and liberal history of the nation. In print satires from the later 1820s surrounding the passing of Catholic Emancipation and the later Reform Act, the headlong rush of the ‘Reform Coach’, boarded by various politicians, became a stock fi gure of print satire: a fi gure of national progress adopted by Jermyn in Eliot’s novel (163) to justify the unstoppable corruption of the Treby election. 69 Two decades later, Thomas Babington Macaulay’s History of England (1849) engrained this association of the coach on the turnpike road with the smooth emergence of a modern nation since 1688. Such means of communication, Macaulay argues, did away with local antipathies and confl ict: the unevenness that might stoke revolutionary tendencies. The progressive national present, in his view, is the inevitable outcome of this ever-speedier nation. John Stuart Mill went one step further than Macaulay in framing ever-speedier communications as the symbol of harmonious national development. In his review of the second volume of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America in 1840, Mill argued that rapid developments in communication and the circulation of print culture were making universal suffrage in Britain inevitable:

The newspapers and the railroads are solving the problem of bringing the democracy of England to vote, like that of Athens, simultaneously in one agora ; and the same agencies are rapidly effacing those local distinctions which rendered one part of our population strangers to another; and are REMEMBERING RADICALISM ON THE MIDLANDS TURNPIKE 105

making us more than ever (what is the fi rst condition of a powerful public opinion) a homogeneous people…they are the masters; and, except by their permission, no government can any longer exist. 70

Mill’s vision of a democratic nation is one of a perfectly regular abstract space in which bodies and minds fi gure as even numbers accumulating smoothly towards a homogeneous totality that obliterates the local. At the end of the turnpike road, the mail coach rolls onto the rails, and speeds up its arrival at the inevitable destination: democracy and the rule of the mass. Mill’s progressive philosophical radicalism works with a linear model of history, from stasis and disaggregation to mobility and unity. Progress, from this perspective, is the antithesis of local customary culture; democracy is a move forward, rather than a tracing of popular constitutional roots down crossroads and byways in the manner of Cobbett. In contrast to such liberal narratives of nationalized homogeneity, at the end of Eliot’s novel Felix Holt confesses that he is unable to ‘make a new era’: his politics, like that of the novel itself, is a micro-politics of locality—one of ‘very small things, such as never will be known beyond a few garrets and work- shops’ (364). The novel’s epilogue moves Felix and his new wife Esther away from the connected community of Treby Magna with its fl ows of people and ideas up and down the turnpike to a place the narrator determines to keep ‘secret’, where their work can go on untroubled by visitors (399). For Felix, mobility and visibility on the turnpike road between Treby Magna, Sproxton, and Duffi eld lead to his identifi cation as a political agitator in the aftermath of the election riot. His jumping up to address the crowd from the fi ngerpost at the edge of Treby has as ambivalent an effect as Cobbett’s hoarse address to the ‘hired Savages of Warwickshire’ at the Griff milestone in 1820: both men subsequently turn away from the turnpike and return to radical locality down scarce-travelled crossroads. 71 What scores a line of difference between Eliot’s fi ctional view back down the turnpike road from the 1860s and Cobbett’s journey up towards a radical future in the 1820s is Cobbett’s utter belief, unlike that of Felix and Eliot, that working from small, local, material things could bring in a new era and map a fresh historical destiny for the populace: one that his representations, his journeys, his writings, his abused, footsore, bullish self on the move, could bring into being for his readers. In William Hazlitt’s delicious phrase, Cobbett’s prose delivered a world of ideas in detail ‘like pancakes, hot and hot’ with the urgent presentism of direct representation speaking from a specifi c place and to its labouring inhabitants. 72 Yet that highly detailed, resolutely anti-romantic evocation of place (not landscape) that is Cobbett’s great gift to a tradition of realist writing reappears in Eliot’s 106 R. LIVESEY work in the form of a consciously alienated technology of representation. Eliot’s historical narrative offers her implied readers in the democratizing 1860s hope for the national future through the careful process of replanting roots retrospectively into the local. Yet this can only result in and from individual efforts of ‘memory and refl ection’: the prosthesis that is realist prose itself. Mass national transportation to modernity, by contrast, risks a future that is ‘as barren as an exclamatory O!’ (5).

NOTES 1. For Cobbett’s reception in Nuneaton, see the anonymous manuscript, ‘Memorandum Book of Occurrences at Nuneaton’ (1810– 1845), Nuneaton & Bedworth Library; excerpts are reprinted in Kathryn Hughes, ed., George Eliot : Family History 5 vols. (London: Routledge, 2000-continuing), 1.6. 2. George Eliot’s biographers do not give a date in March, but the most likely is Lady Day (25 March), the traditional date for rural rents and contracts to be paid and renewed. 3. See, for example, William Makepeace Thackeray, ‘De Juventute’, in Roundabout Papers (New York: Harper, 1863), 96–97; fi rst published in Cornhill Magazine 2 (1860): 501–12. 4. For the varied understandings of radicalism in the 1820s, see Sally Ledger, Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 27–38; Iain McCalman, Radical Underworld : Prophets , Revolutionaries and Pornographers in London , 1795–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 152–203; and, in an invaluable broader survey, Ella Dzelzainis, ‘Radicalism and Reform’, in John Kucich and Jenny Bourne Taylor, eds., The Oxford History of the Novel in English : Volume 3 : The Nineteenth-Century Novel 1820–1880 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 427–43. 5. For an evaluation of Eliot’s shortcomings in evoking ‘collective memory’ in the novel, see Hao Li, Memory and History in George Eliot : Transfi guring the Past (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), 97–120. 6. On the use of the fi gure by T.B. Macaulay and J.S. Mill, see later discussion. 7. George Eliot, Felix Holt , the Radical , ed. by Fred C. Thomson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980), 5; subsequent references to this edition appear in parentheses. REMEMBERING RADICALISM ON THE MIDLANDS TURNPIKE 107

8. See Miles Taylor, The Decline of British Radicalism , 1847–1860 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), 173. 9. On the ‘heroic period of popular radicalism’ ending around 1820, see E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1963; London: Penguin, 1992), 691; on the context of the 1867 Reform Act, see Catherine Hall, Keith McClelland, and Jane Rendall, Defi ning the Victorian Nation : Class , Race , Gender and the Reform Act of 1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 10. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (1973; London: Hogarth, 1993), p. 108. My thanks to James Grande for reminding me of Williams’s observation. On the confl icting political positioning of Cobbett, see Ian Dyck, William Cobbett and Rural Popular Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 5–10; Kim Lawes, Paternalism and Politics : The Revival of Paternalism in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), 7–29; Peter Spence, The Birth of Romantic Radicalism : War , Popular Politics and English Radical Reformism , 1800–1815 (Aldershot: Scolar, 1996), 26–40. On Eliot and Cobbett, see Williams, The Country and the City , 108–119, 165–181; Nancy Henry, ‘George Eliot and Politics’ in The Cambridge Companion to George Eliot, ed. George Levine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 138–58; for Eliot’s conservative organicism, Suzanne Graver, George Eliot and Community : A Study in Social Theory and Fictional Form (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). 11. John Belchem, ‘Republicanism, Popular Constitutionalism, and the Radical Platform in Early Nineteenth-Century England’, Social History 6:1 (1981): 1–32; James Epstein, Radical Expression : Political Language , Ritual , and Symbol in Nineteenth-Century Britain , 1790– 1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 3–28. 12. See Peter Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present : Modern Time and the Melancholy of History (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2004); and also Ann Rigney, The Afterlives of Walter Scott : Memory on the Move (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). For another recent reread- ing of the fi gure of transport in the novel, see David Kurnick, ‘Felix Holt: Love in the Time of Politics’, in Amanda Anderson and Harry E. Shaw, eds., A Companion to George Eliot (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2013), 141–52. 13. ‘Occurrences’, 1 March 1820, in George Eliot : Family History , ed. Hughes, 1.6. Prior to 1832, those who had served out an indentured 108 R. LIVESEY

apprenticeship in Coventry were enfranchised freemen with voting rights in the borough, whether or not they were resident in the city. 14. ‘Occurrences’, 1 March 1820, in George Eliot : Family History , 1.6. 15. William Cobbett, ‘History of the Coventry Elections’, Political Register 36 (25 Mar. 1820): 82–130; ‘Occurrences’, 1 March 1820, in George Eliot : Family History , 1.6. 16. Cobbett, Political Register , 25 March 1820: 82. 17. Kevin Gilmartin, Print Politics : The Press and Radical Opposition in Early Nineteenth Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 32–33; Dyck, William Cobbett , 5–10. 18. On Eliot’s research for the novel see Fred C. Thomson, ‘The Genesis of Felix Holt’, PMLA 74.5 (1959): 576–84. 19. ‘Report of Select Committee on Bribery at Elections’, 1835, 109–10. Proquest Houses of Parliament Parliamentary Papers Online. Minutes of Evidence, 68 [1232] http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ ver=Z39.88-2004&res_dat=xri:hcpp&rft_dat=xri:hcpp:fullt ext:1835-015566:72 . 20. Samuel Bamford, Passages in the Life of a Radical , 2 vols., 2nd edn (London: Simpkin and Marshall, 1844), 1.7. 21. For verifi cation of the accuracy of Eliot’s history, see Eric Richards, ‘“Captain Swing” in the West Midlands’, International Review of Social History 19.1 (1974): 86–99. 22. Dyck, William Cobbett , 190; Williams, Country and City , 165–181. 23. On Cobbett’s attempts to evade the Stamp Duties, see Gilmartin, Print Politics , 100–06; Dyck, Cobbett , 80–86. For Cobbett’s scorn of the mail tampering and surveillance of radicalism recommended to postmasters by Francis Freeling, Secretary to the GPO, see William Cobbett, ‘To The Reformers In General …’, Political Register 31(26 October 1816): 513–44. 24. Gilmartin, Print Politics , 52. 25. Cobbett refers to the term in the Political Register , fi rst using it in italics on 28 March 1818; in capitals on 10 November 1821, and again on 24 November 1822 and 7 November 1825. The latter are included by Cobbett in the 1830 collection of Rural Rides ; see William Cobbett, Rural Rides , ed. by Ian Dyck (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2001), 57, 231. 26. P. J. Ransom, The Archaeology of the Transport Revolution (Tadworth: World’s Work, 1984), 101–04; Philip Bagwell, The Transport REMEMBERING RADICALISM ON THE MIDLANDS TURNPIKE 109

Revolution (London: Routledge, 1988), 27. During the fi rst thirty years of the nineteenth century 2,450 Turnpike Acts were formed. The post-war collapse in agrarian prices led to a perception of increased demand from labourers for parish assistance under the pre-1834 Poor Law system. Parishes frequently put labourers to work in stone breaking and road maintenance. Cobbett argued that this diverted necessary labour from the fi elds. 27. 6 Geo. 4 c. 10. ‘An Act For Repairing the Road from Hinckley in the County of Leicestershire to Nuneaton in the County of Warwick and from thence to Bishop’s Gate in the City of Coventry’. 23 March 1825. 28. The Rebecca Riots (1839–1843), in which men disguised as women attacked and destroyed toll gates in southwest Wales, were a response to the effects of the implementation of the 1834 Poor Law, the man- datory payment of church tithes in a largely non-conformist area, and new turnpike tolls that added great cost to tenant farmers trying to transport lime to fertilize their lands. The toll gates were the visible local symbol of the landed gentry, trustees of the new turnpike trusts. 29. Robert Evans, ‘To Francis Newdigate Esq.’, 28 October 1833; reprinted in Hughes ed. George Eliot : Family History , 1.2. 30. Cobbett, Rural Rides , 3. 31. 3 Geo. 4 c. 126, ‘An Act to Amend the General Laws now in being, for Regulating Turnpike Roads in that Part of Britain, called England’. 8 August 1822. Light vehicles for private passenger carriage—transport for country gentlefolk—were exempted from the regulations; the Act instituted a series of increasing charges over the decade for wagons with wheels that failed to meet the new requirements: those vehicles possessing cylindrical 6-inch wheels were immediately able to pay one-third less on all tolls. 32. Cobbett, Rural Rides , 69. 33. Cobbett, Rural Rides , 55–57. 34. Cobbett, Rural Rides , 88. 35. On the mapping of Midlands places to Eliot’s fi ction, see Kathleen McCormack, George Eliot ’ s English Travels : Composite Characters and Coded Communications (London: Routledge, 2005), and the George Eliot Fellowship’s 150th anniversary edition of Scenes of Clerical Life , ed. Graham Handley (Ware: Wordsworth, 2007). 36. George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life , ed. Thomas Noble (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 70. 110 R. LIVESEY

37. George Eliot, Silas Marner , ed. David Carroll (London: Penguin, 1996), 7. 38. Josephine McDonagh, ‘Space, Mobility, and the Novel: “The Spirit of Place is a Great Reality”’, in Matthew Beaumont, ed., Adventures in Realism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 50–67. 39. Cobbett, Rural Rides , 270. 40. Cobbett, Rural Rides , 270. 41. Cobbett, Rural Rides , 270. 42. George Eliot, ‘The Natural History of German Life’ (1856), reprinted in Selected Essays , Poems and Other Writings , ed. A.S. Byatt and Nicholas Warren (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), 127, 128. 43. Eliot, ‘Natural History’, 123, 127. 44. Eliot, ‘Natural History’, 129. 45. Eliot, ‘Natural History’, 129. 46. I am indebted to Rigney’s Afterlives of Walter Scott (8–13) for the understanding of prosthetic memory, a concept drawn from work by Alison Landsberg in fi lm studies. 47. Cobbett, Rural Rides , 53. 48. Bamford, Passages , 1.18–20; Dyck, Cobbett , 13. 49. See ‘Self-reform should precede all others’, in Bamford, Passages , 1.276–81. 50. George Eliot, ‘Looking Backwards’, in Impressions of Theophrastus Such , ed. Nancy Henry (1879; London: Pickering Chatto, 1994), 22. 51. The epigraph to the novel’s Epilogue makes this plain: ‘Our fi nest hope is fi nest memory;/And those who love in age think youth is happy, /Because it has a life to fi ll with love’ (398). 52. Eliot, ‘Natural History’, 112. 53. Sally Shuttleworth observes that the novel makes explicit the conservative implications of Spencerian organicism, but her conclusion that Debarry therefore embodies Felix’s political goals and that the novel is invested in nostalgic lament underplays the local dynamic of the text: see Sally Shuttleworth, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science : The Make-Believe of a Beginning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 115, 126. 54. See Nigel Everett, The Tory View of Landscape (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994); Alastair Duckworth, The Improvement of the Estate : A Study of Jane Austen ’ s Novels (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971). REMEMBERING RADICALISM ON THE MIDLANDS TURNPIKE 111

55. See ‘Occurrences’, 27 June 1825 in Hughes ed. George Eliot : Family History , 1.10. Depositions were taken in Chilvers Coton in relation to the case: see Newdigate v. Newdegate Depositions 1825 (National Archives C13/1502/21). 56. See, for example, Cobbett, Rural Rides , 70 (2 December 1822) on the failed attempts of the improving farmer and Whig MP Charles Burrell to take his farms directly in hand himself. 57. Catherine Gallagher, The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction : Social Discourse and Narrative Form , 1832–1867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 245. 58. Eliot, ‘Natural History’, 129. 59. For a broader reading of this, see Rosemary Bodenheimer, The Politics of Story in Victorian Social Fiction (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 219–29. 60. Radicals such as Joseph Jacobs believed that the language of class in this novel meant that ‘Felix Holt the Radical is rather Felix Holt the Conservative; he is not even a Tory-Democrat’; George Eliot’s high Tory publisher, John Blackwood, famously decided that the novel’s ‘politics are excellent and will attract to all parties…[and Eliot’s] sayings would be invaluable in the present debate’ on further political reform in the late 1860s. Joseph Jacobs, Literary Studies (1895), quoted in Hilda Hollis, ‘Felix Holt: Independent Spokesman or Eliot’s Mouthpiece’, ELH , 68.1 (2001): 155–177, 157; John Blackwood, ‘To Joseph Munt Langford’, 26 April 1866, in The George Eliot Letters , ed. Gordon Haight, 9 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959–1978), 4.247. 61. The Journals of George Eliot ed. Margaret Harris and Judith Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 125. 62. ‘Occurrences’, December 1831, in George Eliot : Family History , ed. Hughes, 1.14. 63. ‘Applications for Charity’, Warwickshire Record Offi ce CR1841/47. 64. Peter Searby, ‘Paternalism, Disturbance and Parliamentary Reform: Society and Politics in Coventry, 1819–32’, International Review of Social History 22.2 (1977): 198–225; Nancy Lopatin, ‘Popular Politics in the Midlands: The Coventry Political Union and the Great Reform Act’, Midland History 20 (1995): 103–18. 65. For an alternative reading of such ‘wilful forgetting of periods of popular discontent and uprising’ in Eliot’s work in relation to a Burkean idea of history as organic evolution, see Josephine McDonagh, Child 112 R. LIVESEY

Murder and British Culture , 1720–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 132. On the meaning of this forgetting in Middlemarch , see Carolyn Steedman, ‘To Middlemarch—without Benefi t of an Archive’, in Steedman, Dust (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 89–111. A version that Steedman delivered as an inaugural lecture at the University of Warwick in 1996 did most to plant the seeds of the present chapter. 66. Impressions , ed. Henry, 22–23. 67. Kathryn Hughes, George Eliot : Last Victorian (London: Fourth Estate, 1998), 21; Gordon Haight, George Eliot : A Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), 33. 68. ‘Trial of the Nuneaton Rioters’, The Times , 9 April 1833, p. 7. 69. Dorothy George, English Political Caricature : A Study of Opinion and Propaganda 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1959), 2.225. 70. John Stuart Mill, ‘Democracy in America II’ (1840), in Mill, Collected Works , ed. John M. Robson, 33 vols. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963–1991), 18.165. See also Lucy Hartley, ‘Democracy at the Crossroads: Tocqueville, Mill, and the Confl ict of Interests’, in Ella Dzelzainis and Ruth Livesey, eds., The American Experiment and the Idea of Democracy in British Culture , 1776–1914 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2013), 61–78. 71. Political Register 36 (25 March 1820): 111. 72. William Hazlitt, ‘Character of Cobbett’ (1821), reprinted in The Fight and Other Writings , ed. Tom Paulin and David Chandler (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000), 137. CHAPTER 6

The Commune in Exile: Urban Insurrection and the Production of International Space

Scott McCracken

In Chapter 11 of J.-K. Huysmans’s A Rebours (1884; usually translated as Against Nature ), Des Esseintes, its reclusive hero, inspired by reading Charles Dickens, leaves home with the intention of visiting London. He never arrives. Instead, he succeeds in experiencing the whole of London, England, and English culture in Paris, without even getting on the train. Wearing a suit made in London and placing ‘a small bowler on his head’, he envelops himself in a ‘fl ax-blue Inverness cape’ and sets off in grey, wet (typically English) weather. 1 He buys a guidebook and calls into a restau- rant that serves English food and drink. Surrounded by English men and women, he starts to think he is in a novel by Dickens. With time before his train leaves, he moves on to an English-style tavern, where he eats a meal of haddock, stilton, and rhubarb tart, washed down with two pints of ale, followed by coffee laced with gin. 2 Satiated, he starts to lose his desire to travel: ‘What was the point of moving, when one could travel so splendidly just sitting in a chair. Wasn’t he in London now, surrounded by London’s smells, atmosphere, inhabitants, food, utensils?’ He decides: ‘In fact, I’ve experienced and I’ve seen what I wanted to experience and see. Ever since leaving home I’ve been steeped in English life.’ 3 Returning to Fontenay

S. McCracken ( ) Professor of Twentieth-Century Literature, Queen Mary University of London, UK

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 113 J. Bristow, J. McDonagh (eds.), Nineteenth-Century Radical Traditions, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59706-9_6 114 S. MCCRACKEN

‘with his trunks, packages, suitcases, rugs, umbrellas, and walking sticks’, he feels ‘as physically exhausted and morally spent as a man who comes home after a long and hazardous journey’. 4 Des Esseintes’s trip is normally seen as a classic example of aestheticism, just one example of many where the self-obsessed hero values sensation over the real. As the book that supposedly corrupts Dorian Gray, A Rebours is usually read as a novel in which life imitates art, but it might also be read otherwise. Des Esseintes’s strange encounter with ‘an instalment of England that he was being paid in Paris; a rain-swept, gigantic, measureless London’, is a telling moment in a gradual process where the particularity of the individual nineteenth-century city was displaced by a more abstract and international sense of the urban: not a city, but citiness . 5 Paris, as ‘Capital of Modernity’ or ‘Capital of the Nineteenth Century’, played a leading role in this process of transformation, and Huysmans’s tale can be related more closely to that city’s history than might be expected. 6 Fourteen years before the publication of A Rebours , Paris had been subject to two sieges. In 1870, the Prussians had sealed off the city for one hundred and thirty-fi ve days. All experience of the outside world had become virtual, as Parisians sought to survive on the dwindling resources that remained within the city’s walls. In the spring of 1871, the Paris Commune held out in defi ance of both the Prussians and the French national government. Des Esseintes’s inward turn seems to offer a sur- real reinvention of an exclusively urban existence, but his aborted trip also suggests something else: that there was no longer any need to travel to London, because Paris, with its new ‘anti-Parisian’, ‘commercial character’, no longer was Paris. 7 Instead, urban experience had been interna- tionalized. All cities had become one city. Paris was already London, and London itself an unnecessary destination, because it too was Paris—even the ‘dreadful weather’ was the same. 8 This transformation of urban space is often explained in terms of the internationalization of capital; and there is no doubt that this was a key factor. The Great Exhibitions of the period marked important chapters in the development of cities as nodes in networks of economic relations. The two Paris Exhibitions that preceded A Rebours in 1867 and 1878 were signifi cant moments in the development of such urban spaces and, as cultural historians have shown, ‘exhibition space’ rapidly became part of the ordinary experience of shops, restaurants, cafés, and street life in big cities. 9 Yet the internationalization of capital was only one side of the story. As Des Esseintes’s inspiration, Dickens, already knew, and as Sally THE COMMUNE IN EXILE 115

Ledger makes clear in her remarkable work of criticism, Dickens and the Popular Imagination , the history of large cities was also the history of the majority of their inhabitants, the urban poor. 10 The nineteenth-century city was haunted by the ever-present threat of popular insurrection, and this threat, no less than its actuality, shaped the imagination of what the city was and what it might become. In a volume dedicated to a scholar whose work insisted on giving urban popular radicalism the attention it deserved, it only seems appropriate to devote a chapter to the impact of urban insurrection on late nineteenth-century culture. In what follows, I look at the work of three Frenchmen who did escape to London, exiles from reaction and war: the historian Prosper Lissagaray, the poet Paul Verlaine, and the artist Claude Monet. Although using different forms and media, the impact of the Commune can be seen in the work of all three. Together, their works register the extent to which the threat of insurrection infl uenced the nineteenth- and subsequently the twentieth-century urban imagination. The Commune took place only four years after the Paris Exhibition of 1867. In The Arcades Project , Walter Benjamin cites sources that show that even such international showcases of capitalist wealth involved workers’ delegations. 11 Following shortly after the Paris Exhibition of 1867, the Commune was an international event in itself: a kind of revolutionary Great Exhibition. It drew to its defence Italian and Polish nationalists and Hungarian, Russian, and English socialists. Algerian militiamen, unwill- ingly co-opted into the Franco-Prussian War, decided to throw in their lot with the Parisians rather than their colonial masters. Unlike the Prussian siege, Paris was not completely cut off. The Commune briefl y attracted an international community of radicals, then, when it fell, a reverse process of internationalization occurred. During la semaine sanglante —the last ‘Bloody Week’ of May 1871—more than 20,000 men, women, and children were killed as the French government’s troops moved across Paris, closing in on the working-class strongholds of Bellevue and Montmartre. Thousands more Parisians and their supporters were imprisoned or transported to the Pacifi c. Those who escaped were scattered across Europe to Brussels, Geneva, and London, unable to return until Léon Gambetta’s amnesty of 1880. In a few short months, large numbers of people had had been drawn into Paris. Just as quickly, they and a large share of its original inhabitants had been expelled. Three key themes can be identifi ed in the history, literature, and art of exile, written and painted in Geneva, Brussels, and London after the 116 S. MCCRACKEN

Commune. First, writers and artists cultivated an aesthetic of distance. Seen from afar, it was possible to gain new perspectives on the city’s size and complexity. Second, there was a kind of mirroring effect, where Paris was refl ected in the city of exile, producing a kind of urban kaleido- scope. In the case of London and Paris, the particularity of each capital was blurred, creating a new, more abstract sense of the urban. Finally, there was a process of temporal juxtaposition, where the joyful spring days before la semaine sanglante were compared with its tragic aftermath. Here the act of memorialization had two functions: to remember the dead; but also to remember the potential in what had been lost, and with it the possibility of a future utopian city, in which the hopes of the Commune might yet be fulfi lled.

PROSPER LISSAGARAY, H ISTORY OF THE COMMUNE 1871 Prosper Olivier Lissagaray was reputed to be the last man on the barricades when the Commune fell. He describes the moment in his History of the Commune 1871 , but perhaps out of modesty does not name himself:

The last barricade of the days of May was in the Rue Ramponeau. For a quarter of an hour a single Federal defended it. Thrice he broke the staff of the Versaillese fl ag hoisted on the barricade of the Rue de Paris. As a reward for his courage, this last soldier of the Commune succeeded in escaping. 12

After eluding French government forces, ‘les Versaillais ’ (so called because the French government had fl ed to Versailles after the uprising), Lissagaray fl ed into exile in London, where he began work on his history. First published in French in Brussels in 1876, History of the Commune 1871 is in most respects a standard nineteenth-century narrative history, but it shares important elements of its production and form with other examples of the literature of exile. The history was a product of an engagement with the city of exile as well as the city that was its ostensible subject. In Lissagaray’s case, it was also the product of another kind of engagement, with the young Eleanor Marx, who had promised to marry him. She worked with him on the history, helping Lissagaray to source documents and distribute the book, although she was not a named author. 13 Collaboration continued with her translation and introduction published in London in 1886. 14 Thus, both texts, French and English, were the result of a process of movement, distance, and dialogue, and, in the case of the 1886 version, THE COMMUNE IN EXILE 117 translation. As we shall see, some of these conditions of production are brought to representation in the text. Although Lissagaray’s history is written in a romantic style, it is scrupu- lous, not to say cautious, with the facts, careful not to record anything that cannot be documented. Lissagaray continued to research and update it for twenty-fi ve years. 15 The fi rst editions cover the period from the declaration of the Third Republic to the massacres, imprisonment, and deporta- tions that followed the Commune’s fall. From the perspective of a work of exile, perhaps the most striking chapter is ‘Paris on the Eve of Death’, which describes the evening of Sunday, 21 May 1871, the night before la semaine sanglante . The situation of the narrator is clearly that of a participant, but at the same time, the chapter’s grandiloquent opening paragraph addresses an international audience, specifi cally the reader situated at a distance, outside Paris, seeking to draw him or her into the city, which, thanks to the revolution, has become the focus of the world:

The Paris of the Commune has but three days more to live; let us engrave upon our memory her luminous physiognomy. He who has breathed in thy life that fi ery fever of contemporaneous history, who has panted on thy boulevards and wept in thy faubourgs, who has sung to the morns of thy revolutions and a few weeks after bathed his hands in powder behind thy barricades, he who can hear from beneath thy stones the voices of the martyrs of sublime ideas and read in every one of thy streets a date of human progress, even he does less justice to thy original grandeur than the stranger, though a Philistine, who came to glance at thee during the days of the Commune. The attraction of rebellious Paris was so strong that men hurried thither from America to behold this spectacle unprecedented in the world’s history—the greatest town of the European continent in the hands of the proletarians. Even the pusillanimous were drawn towards her. 16

It is typical of this double view of Paris, both from within and from outside the city, that the perspective of the ‘stranger’ is more valid than that of the native Parisian. This ‘external’ perspective is not only that of the revised and translated version. The point is made as strongly and somewhat dif- ferently in the French of the 1876 edition: ‘celui pour qui chacune de tes artères est un rameau nerveux , celui-là ne te rend pas justice encore , ô grand Paris , s ’ il ne t ’ a pas vu du dehors ’ (‘he for whom each of thy arteries is part of his nervous system, even he does not do thee justice, oh great Paris, until he has seen thee from the outside’). 17 ‘ Paris rebelle ’, revolutionary 118 S. MCCRACKEN

Paris, is more than itself. It is, to borrow Huysmans on London, ‘a gigantic measureless’ Paris, which requires an external view to register its transformation into something new. This double perspective of the insider/outsider is continued in the next paragraph, using the device of a visitor from the provinces who asks to be shown the truth of the city:

In the fi rst days of May one of our friends arrived—one of the most timid men of the timid provinces. His kith and kin had escorted him on his departure, tears in their eyes, as though he were descending into the infernal regions. He said to us, ‘What is true in all the rumours bruited about?’ ‘Well, come and search all the recesses of the den.’ 18

There follows a tour, where the reader, following the timid visitor, is given a panoramic, or more precisely a dioramic (because we move through the city, rather than it revolving around us), sweep through the city. The tour begins at the Bastille and ends at the Palais des Tuileries, both symbolic locations in French revolutionary history. We are plunged into the hub- bub of the streets, where newsboys hawking pro- and anti-Communard papers and the kiosks selling political caricatures are experienced up close. The viewpoint is then pulled back to survey the funeral processions of those who have fallen in the Commune’s defence: ‘Let us follow those catafalques that are being taken up the Rue de la Roquette, and enter with them into the Père Lachaise cemetery’, before focusing again on the widow of lieutenant Châtelet of the 61st, who ‘presses her children in her arms, and says to them, “Remember and cry with me, ‘Vive la République! Vive la Commune!’”’ 19 The reader is then taken on a circular journey, past the Mairie of the Eleventh Arrondissement in the heart of working-class Paris, back through the Place de la Bastille, ‘gay, animated by the gingerbread fair’, past a dem- onstration for peace, past the Opéra and the Bourse, ‘surmounted by the red fl ag’, past the Louvre, open and undamaged, despite the accusations from ‘Versaillese journals’ that ‘the Commune is selling the national collections to foreigners’, into ‘the zone of battle’, via the Champs-Elysées to where Dombrowski, the Polish nationalist general, is directing the defence under fi re. 20 Then back again, past cooperative enterprises and, as the afternoon becomes evening, through crowds going to the theatre, churches put to new uses where ‘the Revolution mounts the pulpits’, and feminist speakers at a women’s club, to a public concert in the Palais des Tuileries in aid of the widows and orphans of the Commune. 21 THE COMMUNE IN EXILE 119

The text’s double perspective is temporal as well as spatial. A proleptic commemoration of those who are about to fall in the massacres of the week to come is fi gured in the funeral procession to the Père Lachaise cemetery, which was to be the site of one of the Communards’ last stands and the location of a mass grave. The wall in the cemetery against which Communards were shot is now known as ‘le mur des fédérés ’, a plain, unadorned memorial to the Commune, featuring a lone plaque: ‘Aux Morts de la Commune 21–28 Mai 1871’. Thus, the concert in aid of bereaved families anticipates the work of memorialization to come, of which Lissagaray’s history was an early example. However, this temporality of before and after is situated within a perspective that uses distance to encompass the Paris Commune as a whole, in all its political, social, and economic complexity. There was nothing new in 1876 in the use of perspective to bring the growing and unruly nineteenth-century city to representation. What is new in the texts produced by Lissagaray and Eleanor Marx, despite their overblown language of romantic Jacobinism, is a sense of something closer to the modernism that comes after the Paris Commune: the notion that space and time have to be compressed and then expanded to capture not just a particular city, but a new concept of the urban: not a city, but citi ness . The idea of commemoration, which, with its Victorian ‘widows and orphans’, might seem oversentimental in the context of later ‘impersonal’ modernisms, was important, since the Commune was subject to what Colette Wilson calls ‘the politics of forgetting’: the strict censorship in the years that followed of any reminders of its memory. 22 However, Lissagaray’s History of the Commune 1871 also registers something beyond the concrete: an abstract concept of the city as it might be. This promise (or threat, depending on one’s political perspective) persisted despite the destruction of the Commune. The violent compression of space and time through war and revolution had opened up the future.

PAUL VERLAINE, R OMANCES SANS PAROLES When Paul Verlaine’s fourth collection of poems, Romances sans paroles , was published in 1874, he asked his friend Edmond Lepelletier to send a copy to Lissagaray in London. 23 Like Lissagaray, Verlaine had been a supporter of the Commune and had spent time in the community of political exiles in London. Although there is a world of difference between the romantic style of History of the Commune 1871 and the lyricism of Romances sans paroles , the change in Verlaine’s poetry after 1871, like 120 S. MCCRACKEN

Lissagaray’s history, was a product of the turmoil of the Commune and its aftermath, which for Verlaine involved the fear of persecution by the victorious Versaillais , a passionate affair, and an often frantic oscillation between cities. Both works were produced in fl ight, and both incorporate some of the themes that characterized the Communard writing of exile. Verlaine was working at the Hôtel de Ville, Paris’s town hall, when the Commune was declared on 18 March 1871. At that point, he had written three collections of poetry, two of which had been published and one of which was to come out in 1872, but had not achieved the distinctive style that was to mark him out from his contemporaries. After the Commune’s declaration, he refused to decamp to Versailles with the supporters of the national government, accepting instead the job of chief censor of anti- Communard newspapers, a policy that, as we have seen from Lissagaray’s description of Paris, was less than successful. He managed to escape la semaine sanglante , fl eeing fi rst to the Pas-de-Calais, but then returning to Paris, where he took refuge with his wife’s family. The next four years of Verlaine’s life were spent moving in and out of France, Belgium, and England. The threat of persecution for his Communard sympathies was just one of the reasons he never returned to Paris for long. He was also escaping an unhappy marriage. From September 1871, he was involved in a relationship with the poet and fellow support of the Commune, Arthur Rimbaud. 24 The affair with Rimbaud was turbulent, characterized by the alcoholism and violence that had been the hallmark of all Verlaine’s previous personal relationships, but there is no doubt about the infl uence the two poets had on each other’s work. Rimbaud’s biographer, Graham Robb, claims that even their handwriting started to become indistinguishable. Although biographical readings of Verlaine’s work are not unusual, even were we to accept them as the last word it would be diffi cult to dis- entangle the personal and the political. The relationship with Rimbaud, for example, meant diverse things to Verlaine. Rimbaud identifi ed strongly with the Commune, although he considered it to have been too cautious, and included same-sex love as part of a more general revolt against bourgeois values. 25 Verlaine’s passion for Rimbaud was as a lover, an artist, and a fellow radical. In July 1872, the couple eloped to Belgium. There they socialized with the exiled Communards associated with the newspaper La Bombe in Brussels. 26 Verlaine even seems to have considered writing his own history of the Commune. 27 In September they travelled to London, the other great centre of exile. Here, they quickly moved into a fl at vacated by the Communard journalist Eugène Vermersch, thus entering directly THE COMMUNE IN EXILE 121 into a network of exiles and pro-Communards that extended to all of radical London, including Lissagaray and the Marx circle. It is from this period and these journeys that Romance sans paroles emerges. The collection is in four sections. The fi rst nine poems, ‘Ariettes oubliées’, date from the period before Verlaine left Paris. The second section, ‘Paysages Belges’, dates from the time spent in Belgium. The poem ‘Birds in the Night’ is given a section of its own and is the fi rst of a series of poems with English titles, the rest of which, in the section ‘Aquarelles’ (‘Watercolours’), were written in London. The last poem, ‘Beams’, was apparently written on the Dover to Ostend ferry on 4 April 1873. Verlaine’s movements and border crossings, however, were in fact even more frequent than this four-part division suggests. He left Paris with Rimbaud on 18 July 1872 and went to Charleroi in Belgium, then to Brussels. On 22 July, his wife Mathilde came to fi nd him, and he went back with her as far as the Belgian–French border, when he suddenly abandoned her to rejoin Rimbaud and return to Brussels. On 7 September both poets embarked for Dover from Ostend. In December Rimbaud went back to France, but Verlaine stayed in London. Rimbaud returned to London in January 1873, and they travelled to Ostend in April. Verlaine stayed in Belgium until May, when Rimbaud rejoined him, and they both went back to London. Verlaine left London again on 3 July and went to Brussels. On 10 July Verlaine shot Rimbaud during a drunken argument and in August was condemned to two years in prison. Romances sans paroles was published in 1874 while he was still incarcerated at Mons in Belgium. The London poems were therefore the product of a period of frenetic activity, and Yves-Alain Favre argues that Romances sans paroles marked a ‘decisive rupture’ with Verlaine’s earlier work. 28 As the title, ‘Romances without words’, implies, the poems’ musicality is as important as their meaning. None is overtly political, but the formal ‘rupture’ is associated with a new uncertainty about identity. The fi rst of the ‘English’ (i.e., written in French with English titles) poems, ‘Birds in the Night’, locates itself at the end as written on the way to London in international waters: ‘Bruxelles, Londres, septembre-octobre 72’. Although critics usually assume that the poem was addressed to Verlaine’s wife Mathilde, since it is set on the Belgian–French border where he left her, the more general relationship to place is also an important theme. At the time of writing Verlaine had to choose between French and German nationality, since he had been born in Lorraine, annexed in the Franco-Prussian War, and the poem features an uncertain sense of national identity. The narrator describes himself as: 122 S. MCCRACKEN

un bon soldat Blessé qui s ’ en va dormir à jamais Plein d ’ amour pour quelque pays ingrat.

a good soldier Wounded who will go to sleep for ever Full of love for some ungrateful country.

He compares the addressee to ‘ma Patrie’:

N ’ êtes vous donc pas toujours ma Patrie , Aussi jeune , aussi folle que la France ?

Are you not therefore always my fatherland, As young, as mad as France?

And imagines himself drowning at sea:

je suis le pauvre navire Qui court démâté parmi la tempête Et , ne voyant pas Notre-Dame luire Pour l ’engouffrement en priant s ’apprête

I am the poor ship Which runs without its mast amidst the tempest And, not seeing Notre-Dame shine Praying, prepares himself to be engulfed. 29

Rejected by his lover and his country, who become one in the poem’s imagery, the poet situates himself not inside or outside ‘la Patrie’, but on the border between languages, countries, and nationality, as well as between marriage and ‘sinful’ (same-sex) desires. The English title seems to position the text in London, but the French verse suggests a valediction from a distance. The images of drowning put the narrator between ports. The unconfessed sinner is threatened with hell, but the narrator-poet is defi ant, fi nding a political, sexual, and religious ‘red ecstasy’ in his situation:

Par instants je meurs la mort du pécheur 30 Qui se sait damné , s ’ il n ’est confessé Et , perdant l ’ espoir de nul confesseur Se tord dans l ’ Enfer , qu ’il a devancé. THE COMMUNE IN EXILE 123

Ô mais! par instants , j ’ai l ’ extase rouge Du premier chrétien , sous la dent rapace. Qui rit à Jésus temoin , sans que bouge Un poil de sa chair , un nerf de sa face!

At times I die the death of the sinner Who knows himself damned if he does not confess And losing hope of any confessor Writhes in the hell he has already reached.

O but! At other times, I experience the red ecstasy Of the fi rst Christian, about to be torn to pieces. Who laughs with Jesus, without turning A hair, without moving a muscle of his face. 31

‘Birds in the Night’ can be read as a transitional poem in several senses. It marks the passage between Belgium and England, but also the deep waters where identity becomes uncertain. The next section of Romance sans paroles , ‘Aquarelles’, opens with two impressionist poems, ‘Green’ and ‘Spleen’, which have also been read as addressed to Mathilde, but this interpretation is too narrowly biographical. Exile might as well be the theme. The third poem, ‘Streets’, is quite different. The fi rst of its two parts, located in Soho where the French community in London was concentrated, consists of four tercets, each preceded and then followed by the refrain ‘Dansons la gigue!’

STREETS

Dansons la gigue!

J ’ aimais surtout ses jolis yeux , Plus clairs que l ’étoile des cieux , J ’ aimais ses yeux malicieux.

Dansons la gigue!

Elle avait des façons vraiment De désoler un pauvre amant , Que c ’ en était vraiment charmant! 124 S. MCCRACKEN

Dansons la gigue!

Mais je trouve encore meilleur Le baiser de sa bouche en fl eur , Depuis qu ’elle est morte à mon coeur.

Dansons la gigue!

Je me souviens , je me souviens Des heures et des entretiens , Et c ’est le meilleur de mes biens.

Dansons la gigue! Soho.

Let’s dance the jig!

I used to love her pretty eyes, Brighter than the star of the skies, I used to love her mischievous eyes.

Let’s dance the jig!

She really had ways To distress a poor lover How charming that was!

Let’s dance the jig!

But I fi nd still better The kiss of her blossoming mouth Since she has been dead in my heart.

Let’s dance the jig!

I remember, I remember The moments and the conversations, And this is the best of my possessions.

Let’s dance the jig!

Soho 32 THE COMMUNE IN EXILE 125

Contrasted with the tercets’ theme of lost love, the refrain indicates a kind of forced gaiety, a contrast emphasized by the triple rhyme, which gives the mournful subject a somewhat fl ippant, cynical tone. The double perspective of the city discussed in relation to Lissagaray’s History is again present here. The streets of the poem’s title and the dance, the jig (an English popular form), are clearly placed in London, specifi cally in Soho; but the contrast between dancing in the streets and she who ‘is dead in my heart’ suggests a double perspective on Paris: before and after the Commune; before the wild joy of insurrection and after the pain of loss. The combination implies not so much joy as a desperate desire to forget, thwarted by reminders that appear spontaneously in the city streets. This political reading certainly illuminates the fantastical second part of the poem, which is located in Paddington:

Ô la rivière dans la rue! Fantastiquement apparue Derrière un mur haut de cinq pieds , Elle roule sans un murmure Son onde opaque et pourtant pure , Par les faubourgs pacifi és.

La chaussée est très large , en sorte Que l ’eau jaune comme une morte Dévale ample et sans nuls espoirs De rien refl éter que la brume , Même alors que l ’aurore allume Les cottages jaune et noirs.

Paddington

O the river in the road! Which appeared fantastically Behind a wall, fi ve feet high, It rolls without a murmur Its opaque and yet pure wave, Through the pacifi ed faubourgs.

The road is very broad, such That the water, yellow like a dead woman Hurtles full and without any hope of 126 S. MCCRACKEN

Refl ecting anything but the fog, Even as dawn lights up The yellow and black cottages.

Paddington 33

Once again, the poem’s vocabulary signifi es a double perspective: London’s ‘streets’ contrast with ‘la chaussée ’ and Parisian ‘faubourgs ’, the ‘cottages’ and English fog with French verse. The politics are not overt, but it is interesting to read ‘Streets II’ against another poem, ‘Des Morts’, which was written in London at the same time, but published in Eugène Vermersch’s London-based Communard newspaper L ’ Avenir on 13 November 1872. 34 ‘Des Morts’ (‘Of the Dead’) is a pointed elegy to those who died in the insurrections of 1832 and 1834. In the poem, the martyrs of the revolution die ‘contents , le drapeau rouge au poing ’ (‘happy, clutching the red fl ag’). 35 The historical parallel with the Commune’s dead is unmistakeable and certainly would not have been lost on L ’ Avenir ’s audience. However, as a historical poem, ‘Des Morts’ would have been out of place in the Romances sans paroles and in any case, its politics would have led to the collection’s censorship in France. 36 Nonetheless, it offers a useful intertext to the collection. In ‘Streets II’, while ‘la brume ’ is clearly London fog and the location the basin of the Regent’s canal, the deathly course of the river, with its ‘yellow water’, also recalls la semaine sanglante . The words ‘ comme une morte ’ (‘like a dead woman’) pun on ‘ commune morte ’ (‘dead commune’). The use of ‘ faubourgs ’, a word that has no exact English equivalent, 37 in ‘faubourgs pacifi és ’ is more appropriate to the crushed Parisian neighbourhoods, the working-class districts of Montmartre and Belleville, than to Paddington, with its ‘yellow and black cottages’. In this context, the ‘mur haut de cinq pieds ’ (‘wall, fi ve feet high’) takes on a more sinister meaning. Again, ‘Des Morts’ provides a useful reference point. That poem opens with locations of the massacres of the 1830s: the Cloître Saint-Merry, and the rue Transnonain (subject of a famous picture by Honoré Daumier), where the wall has been washed and replastered to cover up its use in the reprisals after the insurrection of June 1832.

Ô Cloître Saint-Merry funèbre! sombres rues! Je ne foule jamais votre morne pavé Sans frissonner devant les affres apparues. THE COMMUNE IN EXILE 127

Toujours ton mur en vain recrépit et lavé , Ô maison Transnonain , coin maudit , angle infâme , Saignera , monstrueux , dans mon coeur soulevé.

O funereal Cloister Saint-Merry! Sombre streets! I never tread your dismal cobbles Without shuddering before the torments conjured up.

Your wall is still replastered and washed in vain O house of Transonain, accursed spot, infamous corner, Which will bleed dreadfully in my leaping heart. 38

Although in his communications with Lepelletier Verlaine recalled a specifi c wall in Paddington, 39 read against ‘Des Morts’ the wall in ‘Streets’ recalls ‘le mur des fédérés ’ and the massacre in Père Lachaise cemetery alluded to by Lissagaray. The two parts of ‘Streets’ oscillate between joy and death, Paris and London. The poems collected in Romances sans paroles explore new forms that are able to engage with a new experience of the city as an international space. Although the production of such spaces is one of the results of the internationalization of capital and its markets, the Paris Commune was a dramatic example of the role that urban insurrection played in new, modernist ways of seeing the city. The threat of insurrection embodied in the memory of the Commune persists as an idea of what the city might become, and, as an idea of the possible rather than the actual, this idea necessarily exceeds the reality of any one city.

CLAUDE MONET, I MPRESSION , S UNRISE The fi nal poem in Romances sans paroles , ‘Beams’, is located onboard a specifi c ferry, the Comtesse-de-Flandre , on which Verlaine travelled back to Ostend from Dover on 4 April 1873. Through the image of a woman, who is perhaps the ship, the Comtesse, the poem relates the experience of movement with the play of light of sea and sun:

Elle voulut aller sur les fl ots de la mer , Et comme un vent bénin souffl ait une embellie Nous nous prêtames tous à sa belle folie , Et nous voilà marchant par le chemin amer. 128 S. MCCRACKEN

Le soleil luisait haut dans le ciel calme et lisse , Et dans ses cheveux blond c ’étaient des rayons d ’or , Si bien que nous suivons son pas plus calme encor Que le déroulement des vagues , ô delice!

Des oiseaux blancs volaient alentour mollement Et des voiles au loin s ’inclinaient toute blanches

She wanted to go on the waves of the sea And like a benign wind that parts the clouds We all embrace her beautiful madness And we are there, walking along the bitter path.

The sun was shining high in the smooth, calm sky And there were rays of gold in her blonde hair, So that we followed her step, still more calm Than the rolling of the waves, o delight!

White birds fl ew around listlessly And the all-white sails tilted in the distance. 40

Verlaine’s poems, particularly in the ‘watercolours’ section of the volume, are often described as ‘impressionist’. Although the word had not yet been coined when he wrote them, there are grounds for connecting Verlaine’s experience of fl ight and exile with Impressionism. Two key fi gures in what was to become the Impressionist movement also spent time in London in the early 1870s, then travelled back to France when peace returned. Camille Pissarro and Claude Monet left France for London not because of the Commune, although Pissarro, who was a committed anarchist, sym- pathized with it, but because of the Franco-Prussian war. In that city they worked on the techniques that were to become famous in the following decades. It is interesting to compare Verlaine’s poem ‘Green’, written in London in 1872, with Monet’s Green Park , painted in London 1870–1871. 41

Voici des fruits , des fl eurs , des feuilles et des branches , Et puis voici mon coeur qui ne bat que pour vous.

Here are the fruits, the fl owers, the leaves and the branches, And then here is my heart, which only beats for you. 42 THE COMMUNE IN EXILE 129

In Verlaine’s verse, the ‘voici ’ (here is/here are) presents natural objects alongside his heart, which ‘only beats for you’. In Monet’s painting, the perspective of green grass and sky, with the city in the distance, is compa- rable to his later ‘impressions’ of Paris. In fact, without the title it would be diffi cult to guess which city is being represented. Poet and painter present an impression where if the location can be deduced, the technique is trans- ferable. The ‘impression’ blurs the boundaries between places and nations. Yet, while Verlaine’s Communard sympathies can be read into his poetry, Monet’s sympathies were less militant and his art has usually been seen as, at best, apolitical. 43 The urban pastoral of Green Park seems far removed and unconcerned with the bloodletting in Paris, yet it was painted in exile from war and revolution and it seems fair to ask to what extent events in France between 1870 and 1871, including the Commune, had an impact on its creation. In retrospect, the emergence of Impressionism as a named movement has more often been seen as an example of cultural conservatism in the Paris of the Third Republic than as a revolutionary movement. The critic T.J. Clark uses a rather complex double negative to express this view (which he does not share) about Green Park :

A critic unfriendly to that painting, and particularly to its claim of strict optic neutrality, might be disposed to put the connection thus: It seems that only when the city had been systematically occupied by the bourgeoisie, and made quite ruthlessly to represent that class’s rule, can it be taken by paint- ers to be an appropriate and purely visual subject for their art. 44

However, as another art critic, Albert Boime, has pointed out, there is a strange absence in Clark’s formulation. Despite his military imagery, Clark only mentions the Commune in passing, focusing his comments instead on the relationship between the Impressionists and the modern- ization of Paris during the Second Empire by Baron Haussmann. 45 During the 1850s and 1860s, Haussmann had built grand boulevards, instituted street lighting as standard, and evicted the insurrection-inclined Parisian working class from the centre to the Eastern part of the city. His modern- ization represented an earlier and less bloody bourgeois ‘occupation’ than that which followed the fall of the Commune, when Paris was systematically re -occupied by French government forces from West to East. Boime, in his book on art and the Commune, takes the position of Clark’s putative critic, ‘unfriendly to that painting’, to argue that the 130 S. MCCRACKEN

Impressionists acted as a kind of cleansing agent for the Third Republic, producing light, airy paintings that not only adopt an ‘optical neutrality’, but also carefully sideline visible reminders of the Commune: the ruined buildings, the bullet-ridden walls, and the disappearance by fi ring squad, imprisonment, transportation, and exile of the skilled working class. Boime’s prime example is one of Monet’s studies of the gardens of the Tuileries, painted in 1876. 46 As we have seen from Lissagaray’s tour of the Commune, the Palais des Tuileries, formerly the seat of Napoleon III, had become under the Commune a venue for patriotic concerts. 47 During la semaine sanglante the palace had been burned down by the Communards, ostensibly to impede the advance of les Versaillais , although the act was as much about the symbolic destruction of the home of the monarchy in the centre of Paris as a military decision. 48 In Monet’s studies, which were painted from a room above the park on the rue de Rivoli, the ruins of the central part of the palace are barely visible. The perspective, although more elevated, is similar to that of Green Park , with the gardens themselves in the foreground, peopled by ‘impressions’ of people, and the Left Bank in the distance beyond the Seine. The vision of a green space in the city is the same in both paintings, creating a similar concept of the modern urban, which can apply to London or Paris. In the Paris painting, however, we can see the corner of the palace, the Pavillon de Flore, which still stands, but only a small portion of the burnt-out central section that had closed off the cour du Carrousel, which was left an eyesore and an object of great political debates until it was demolished and removed in 1883. 49 Boime proposes that Monet sanitizes the view: ‘Monet clearly avoided displaying the ruins by relegating them to a remote corner and focusing on the vast garden area between the old palace and the place de la Concorde.’ 50 In cleaning up for the bourgeoisie, ‘Monet’s task, like that of the gardener, was to rake over the traces of the hated insurgents’. 51 There is an obvious riposte to this contention. If Monet wanted to get on with the ‘house-cleaning necessary to re-establish order’, why did he include the controversial building at all? 52 He could have angled the perspective slightly to the right so that only the gardens were visible. Instead, he includes not just the building, but also a small section of the ruins in the middle of the right-hand side of the painting. This register of at least a hint of the destruction provoked by the fall of the Commune suggests a deliberate visual provocation, at least to those who know what they are looking for, which invites interpretation. Offering an alternative defence of Impressionism, T.J. Clark (to counter the critic THE COMMUNE IN EXILE 131

‘unfriendly’ to Impressionism) points out that far from being attracted to Haussmannite perspectives, the pre-Commune ‘Impressionists’ were drawn to spaces that exemplifi ed what he calls the ‘the city’s arbitrary and unfi nished character’. 53 In this context, Boime’s argument seems, if not entirely wrong, then lacking in nuance. Monet’s inclusion of the ruins should be read in relation to the idea of the city as a work in process. The perspective that consigns those ruins to the edge of the painting relates to the same techniques of distancing and juxtaposition found in Histoire de la Commune 1871 and Romance sans paroles . As for the revolutionary Lissagaray, Paris is best conceived from a distance. As for the poet, Verlaine, Monet’s technique invites the viewer to see not one city, but two. If Monet’s London paintings appear indistinguishable in style from his paintings of Paris, it is because the comparison is not between particular cities, but between different examples of the urban as a new and distinct idea. Thus, to fi nd the Commune in that idea we need to look not at individual cities nor at individual paintings, but across cities and across paintings. For example, Monet’s fi rst studies of the Palace of Westminster, painted during his exile, 54 might be read not just as innovative studies of atmosphere and light, but as a silent commentary on the insurrection in the French capital, which pits London, as bourgeois, Parliamentary, democratic, and peaceful, against war-torn, insurrectionary France. With this new angle in mind, we can turn to what is perhaps Monet’s most famous painting, Impression , sunrise ( Impression , soleil levant ). 55 One of two studies of the harbour at Le Havre painted on his return to France in 1872, the painting of the Channel port (which was also Monet’s home town) depicts a crossing point between Paris and London and therefore a perfect place to represent the point at which they meet. Impression , sunrise has a special place in the history of visual Impressionism. It is usually identifi ed as the picture exhibited in 1874 that triggered Louis Leroy’s satirical article in Le Charivari , which used the term ‘impressionism’ for the fi rst time. 56 More abstract than anything Monet had painted up to this point, the painting depicts a fi ery sun rising through a smoky fog, leaving a bloody stain on the water. Given its date and location, it is diffi cult not to interpret the painting in relation to the war and revolution from which Monet had fl ed. The orange sun is sug- gestive of the fi res that burnt across Paris, including the confl agration that engulfed the Palais des Tuileries. The black outlines of the ships suggest the burnt-out ruins, while the refl ection of the rising sun courses like a river of 132 S. MCCRACKEN blood towards the viewer. 57 At the same time, the painting is an exercise in visual abstraction located at a point between cities, so that it cannot be easily tied to either Paris or London. Instead, Monet’s most experimental painting to date is best understood not as an impression of one place, but as a glimpse that takes its inspiration from the relationship between two cities, at the point where both cities are in dialogue with one another. This dialogue makes it diffi cult to read either Monet’s London paintings or his post-exile paintings of Paris as straightforward representations of bourgeois life. The politics of visual Impressionism are complex, but if Monet was, as Boime suggests, attempting to clear up after the Commune, he was also engaging with an abstract idea of the urban as an evolving concept, one that saw urban life not just as it is, but as it might be. The Commune played a key role in this new urban imaginary. Both the threat of insurrection during the Second Empire and the visual reminders of revolution that lingered in the 1870s provoked the image of an alternative city as well as an alternative world. The idea of revolution was more present in the modernist city than we normally assume. 58

CONCLUSION If we return to A Rebours , it is worth reminding ourselves that its author was not at all in sympathy with the Commune, and in fact moved with the national government to Versailles at its declaration. Nevertheless, des Esseintes’s experience of the modern city’s capacity to produce international spaces, even taken at the level of a jeu d ’esprit , is not without its antecedents. In the examples in this chapter, Lissagaray reaches towards a new sense of perspective that allows him to capture the city at the very instant before catastrophe and yet to preserve some of that moment’s hope. Through the experience of exile, Verlaine’s poetry fi nds a new distinctive form at the fractures between nationalities, languages, and sexualities. The emergence of something new in Monet’s painting occurs in the context of an enforced movement between cities. Even if the new sense of space found in all three can be interpreted in terms of a developing and inevitable process of internationalization, the shock of the Commune had an impact. Hidden in A Rebours , where the experience of international space is internalized, apparently abolishing the need for travel, there is more than a consumerist imaginary. The secret of the modernist city as transformational space lies in a concentration not just of goods, but of an increasing and increasingly cosmopolitan urban THE COMMUNE IN EXILE 133 population, ‘the People’, whom Ledger puts centre stage in Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination . 59 As the author to whom Des Esseintes owed his vision of London already knew, present in the urban imaginary is a richer, darker vision: a foreboding, sometimes hopeful, sometimes fearful, that the People might (and at any moment) reclaim those spaces for themselves.

NOTES 1. Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature , ed. Nicholas White, trans. Margaret Mauldon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 104. 2. Huysmans, Against Nature , 108–12. 3. Huysmans, Against Nature , 114. 4. Huysmans, Against Nature , 114. 5. Huysmans, Against Nature , 106. For a survey of this process see Scott McCracken, ‘Imagining the Modernist City’, in The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms , ed. Peter Brooker et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 637–54. 6. See David Harvey, Paris , Capital of Modernity (London: Routledge, 2003); Walter Benjamin, ‘Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century’, in Walter Benjamin : Selected Writings 1935–38 , ed. Howard Eiland et al., trans. Edmund Jephcott and Howard Eiland, 4 vols. (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), volume 3. 7. Huysmans, Against Nature , 107. 8. Huysmans, Against Nature , 106. 9. On the impact of the great exhibitions, see Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England : Advertising and Spectacle 1851–1914 (London: Verso, 1991). For the impact of exhibition culture on the city street, see Scott McCracken, Masculinities , Modernist Fiction , and the Urban Public Sphere (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 89–144. 10. See Sally Ledger, Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). On Dickens’s response to the Great Exhibition of 1851 and his discursive construction of an alternative sense of ‘the People’, see, in particular, 193–94. On Dickens and Paris, see Colin Jones, ‘French Crossings I: A Tale of Two Cities’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 20 (2010): 1–26. 134 S. MCCRACKEN

11. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project , trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 182. 12. Prosper Olivier Lissagaray, History of the Commune of 1871 , trans. Eleanor Marx (London: Reeves and Turner, 1886), 379. 13. Lissagaray became engaged to Eleanor in 1872 when she was seventeen and he was thirty-four. The Marx family never really approved of the relationship, which eventually ended after nine years. See Yvonne Kapp, Eleanor Marx : Family Life (1855–1883 ), vol. 1 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1972), 144; and René Bidouze, Lissagaray , La Plume et L ’ épeé (Paris: Les Éditions Ouvrières, 1991), 119. 14. A later English edition incorporating Lissagaray’s revisions appeared in 1898. See Kapp, Eleanor Marx , 1.159. 15. See Kapp, Eleanor Marx , 1.159. 16. Lissagaray, History of the Commune of 1871 , 293. 17. Prosper Lissagaray, Histoire de la Commune de Paris (Brussels: Librarie Contemporaine de Henri Kistemaeckers, 1876), 322; my translation. 18. Lissagaray, History of the Commune of 1871 , 293. 19. Lissagaray, History of the Commune of 1871 , 294–95. 20. Lissagaray, History of the Commune of 1871 , 295–99. 21. Lissagaray, History of the Commune of 1871 , 301–02. 22. Colette E. Wilson, Paris and the Commune , 1871–78 : The Politics of Forgetting (Manchester University Press, 2007). 23. Edmond Lepelletier, Paul Verlaine His Life — His Work , trans. E. M. Lang (London: Laurie, 1909), 315. The other recipients were to be ‘[Camille] Barrère…Swinburne, and…Barjau, French newsagent, Frith Street, Soho’. 24. For an account of the relationship between Rimbaud’s poetry and the Commune, see Kristin Ross’s superb study, The Emergence of Social Space (London: Verso, 2008). 25. Graham Robb, Rimbaud (London: Picador, 2000), 138–43. 26. Robb, Rimbaud , 174. 27. Robb, Rimbaud , 175. 28. Paul Verlaine, Oeuvres Poétiques Complètes , ed. Yves-Alain Favre (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1992), v. 29. Verlaine, Oeuvres Poétiques Complètes , 90–91; my translation. 30. ‘[ P ] écheur ’ (sinner) puns on pêcheur (fi sherman), also liable to be drowned. THE COMMUNE IN EXILE 135

31. Verlaine, Oeuvres Poétiques Complètes , 91; my translation. 32. Verlaine, Oeuvres Poétiques Complètes , 92; my translation. 33. Verlaine, Oeuvres Poétiques Complètes , 92–93; my translation. 34. Verlaine, Oeuvres Poétiques Complètes , 868. 35. Verlaine, Oeuvres Poétiques Complètes , 600. 36. In the same letter to Lepelletier already cited, Verlaine also asks for a letter from Camille Barrère, but asks that he ‘avoid carefully any Communist allusion or any compromising name’ (Lepelletier, Paul Verlaine , 315). 37. Eleanor Marx for example used the French word rather than attempting to translate it. 38. Verlaine, Oeuvres Poétiques Complètes , 600; my translation. 39. Lepelletier, Paul Verlaine , 314. 40. Verlaine, Oeuvres Poétiques Complètes , 94; my translation. 41. Claude Monet, Green Park (1870–71), Philadelphia Museum of Art, http://www.philamuseum.org/collections/permanent/104454. html (accessed 3 September 2013) 42. Verlaine, Oeuvres Poétiques Complètes , 91; my translation. 43. Albert Boime cites Monet’s only recorded comment on the Commune, a note to Pissarro about a mistaken report on the execution of Gustave Courbet: ‘You have doubtless learned of the death of poor Courbet shot without a trial. What shameful conduct, that of Versailles, it is frightful and makes me ill. I don’t have a heart for anything. It’s all heartbreaking’ (Art and the French Commune (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 50). 44. T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life : Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers (London: Thames and Hudson, 1984), 23. 45. Boime, Art and the French Commune , 3. 46. Claude Monet, Les Tuileries , Musée Marmottan, Paris. 47. For a comprehensive history of the palace, see Guillaume Fonkenell, Le Palais Des Tuileries (Arles: Honoré Clair, 2010). 48. According to the historian Jean-Pierre Babelon, ‘le palais disparaît précisément parce qu ’ il est reconnu comme un lieu de la mémoire ’ (‘the palace disappeared precisely because it is recognized as a place of memory’) (Babelon, ‘Le Louvre’, in Les Lieux De Mémoire , 7 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 2. 194). 49. Fonkenell, Le Palais Des Tuileries , 201–212. 50. Boime, Art and the French Commune , 68. 51. Boime, Art and the French Commune , 68. 136 S. MCCRACKEN

52. Boime, Art and the French Commune , 73. 53. T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life , 24. 54. It is of course a subject to which he returns later in his career. 55. Monet, Impression , Sunrise ( Impression , soleil levant ), Musée Marmottan Monet, http://www.marmottan.fr/uk/claude_monet_- musee-2517 (accessed 3 September 2013). 56. For an account of the exhibition, see Paul Tucker, ‘The First Impressionist Exhibition and Monet’s Impression , Sunrise : a Tale of Timing, Commerce, and Patriotism’, Art History 7.4 (1984), 465– 76. As the catalogue for the exhibition is unclear, we cannot be abso- lutely certain whether Leroy’s article was sparked by the painting usually known as Impression , Sunrise or a less well-known painting of the harbour, completed at the same time. I follow convention and treat the better-known picture, Impression , sunrise in the Musée Marmottan, as the key work. The less well-known painting is in a private collection in Paris and is seldom reproduced. Reproductions of both paintings can be found in John Rewald’s history of Impressionism, but Rewald reverses the titles, calling the famous painting in the Marmottan Impression , Setting Sun and giving the name ‘Impression, Sunrise’ to the other, less well-known study. See Rewald, The History of Impressionism , 4th edn. (London: Secker and Warburg, 1980), 339, n. 23. 57. Tucker agrees that the painting makes reference to the war, but sees it as a patriotic statement. See ‘The First Impressionist Exhibition and Monet’s Impression , Sunrise ’. 58. See Matthew Beaumont’s fi ne study for an account of the utopian and dystopian visions that the Commune inspired in England (Utopia Ltd. : Ideologies of Social Dreaming in England , 1870–1900 (Leiden: Brill, 2005)). 59. See Sally Ledger, Dickens , passim. A sense of the centrality of the aspirations of working-class people to nineteenth-century culture is no less present in Ledger’s work on Mark Rutherford, the New Woman, and Ibsen. CHAPTER 7

Divorce and the New Woman

Anne Humpherys

For most New Women writers, the ‘marriage question’ was central, although there was no one position on it, even if the popular impression was that New Women were ‘anti-marriage’, as stated by Margaret Oliphant in her article ‘The Anti-Marriage League’, and as two famous novels, Grant Allen’s The Woman Who Did (1895) and Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895), appeared to confi rm. 1 As Sally Ledger observes: ‘The preoccupation with the institution of marriage…constituted a major part of the dominant discourse on the New Woman at the fi n de siècle , [and it] was a preoccupation shared by the New Women writers themselves.’ 2 Certainly, many New Women fi ctions did portray stifl ing, even deadly marriages. However, although some New Women authors were divorced (George Egerton and Menie Muriel Dowie) and others separated from their spouses (Dowie again, her second husband), very few of the bad-marriage fi ction written by New Women authors offer divorce as a solution. Made more available through the 1857 Matrimonial Causes bill, why does divorce not enter the New Woman discussions? The answer inevitably is overdetermined, but it begins in the circumstances surrounding

A. Humpherys () Professor Emerita of English, Lehman College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 137 J. Bristow, J. McDonagh (eds.), Nineteenth-Century Radical Traditions, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59706-9_7 138 A. HUMPHERYS divorce in the second half of the nineteenth century. Two kinds of divorce were made possible by the 1857 bill. The fi rst was a legal separation from ‘bed and board’ (or divorce a mensa et thoro ), which allowed the wife and husband to separate, and the issues of support and child care to be regularized in a legal agreement. In this type of divorce, neither party could marry. 3 Second, a ‘full’ divorce (or divorce a vinculo matrimonii ) allowed the two parties to marry again. In fact, the functional purpose of a full divorce was to make possible a second marriage, since a legal separation could solve most other issues. Thus, somewhat ironically, a full divorce was really an affi rmation of marriage, as I have argued elsewhere. 4 As G.K. Chesterton stated as late as 1920: ‘the divorce controversy is not really a controversy about divorce. It is a controversy about re-marriage; or rather about whether it is marriage at all.’ 5 If a full divorce is an affi rmation of marriage, it is perhaps not surprising that New Women writers were not tempted to use it as a plot device to end a bad marriage. Yet there were additional issues in divorce that made its use to the New Woman problematic. For one thing, the only ground for either kind of divorce was the scandalous charge of adultery; even worse, for women suing for divorce the husband’s adultery had to be com- pounded by bigamy, desertion for two years, incest, or excessive cruelty. 6 Marital misery, such as Louisa’s in Charles Dickens’s Hard Times , was not grounds for divorce. More important in my view, however, was a cultural uneasiness about the very thing a full divorce made possible—a second marriage while the fi rst spouse was still alive, as hinted by Chesterton in the earlier quotation. This uneasiness was the result of an uncertainty about the status of marriage that was introduced in 1836 by the Act for Marriages in England, which legalized civil marriages. Prior to that point, marriage was only possible in a church service, and, in the Anglican as in the Roman Catholic Church, as a sacrament marriage was indissoluble. As the Revd W.H. Shawcross said in 1896: ‘We may not forget that Holy Matrimony is a state, not a contract; inscrutable, a great mystery; Divinely appointed, GOD making the union; unalterable, subject only to His laws; indissoluble, a type of CHRIST’S union with His Church.’ 7 Thus, the legality of civil marriages introduced a seemingly irreconcil- able confl ict into the understanding of the status of marriage, expressed by the following question: Is marriage a civil contract that can be abrogated by another legal contract (i.e., divorce), or is it a religious sacrament that cannot be broken, as stated in the church’s marriage service—‘What God has joined together let no man rend asunder’? If it is the latter, the second DIVORCE AND THE NEW WOMAN 139 marriage enabled by divorce is bigamous, the couple engaged in adultery, and any children illegitimate. 8 In Ellen Wood’s East Lynne (1861), this confusion is overt. Archibald Carlyle goes to court for a divorce when his wife Isobel runs away with a scoundrel, but, hedging his spiritual bets, Carlyle refuses to marry again until he learns (erroneously) that she is dead. Even more startling in this sensation novel, on her deathbed the fi rst divorced wife, Isobel, asserts to her ex-husband while his second wife looks on that he will join her, his fi rst wife, in heaven with their children. An extreme representation of this confusion is Lily Dale’s refusal in Anthony Trollope’s The Small House at Allington (1864) even to consider marrying Johnny Eames after her fi ancé, Adolphus Crosbie, has jilted her. ‘Why should he not be mine as well as hers when that for ever comes?’ she asks Johnny. ‘It is to me almost as though I had married him.’ 9 Further, in that seemingly anti-marriage novel Jude the Obscure , the religious version of marriage as forever is what Sue Bridehead reverts to after the death of her children: ‘I have made up my mind that I am not your wife! I belong to him [Phillotson]—I sacramentally joined myself to him for life. Nothing can alter it.’ 10 Hardy as author would appear to have rejected this ‘sacramental’ view of marriage, given the miserable outcome for both Sue and Jude when they return to their divorced spouses. In fact, during the revived interest in revising the divorce laws at the beginning of the twentieth century, Hardy wrote that ‘marriage should be dissolvable at the wish of either party, if that party prove it to be a cruelty to him or her, provided (probably) that the maintenance of the children, if any, should be borne by the bread winner’. 11 The inevitable scandal attached to divorce, which depended on evidence of adultery and, in the case of wives wanting to divorce, additional male bad behaviour, and the residual religious unease about the status of the second marriage made possible by divorce were amplifi ed by the inevitable and extensive public coverage of the divorce court in the daily and weekly press. At the end of the century, many newspapers had reporters whose specifi c job was to cover divorce court proceedings and to write them up in full for the regular back-of-the-paper column of ‘Court News’. As the tabloid press developed in the 1880s and 1890s, the divorce court proceedings shifted to the front sections of some newspapers like News of the World and were frequently illustrated with portraits of the plaintiff and defendant that were done in court by specially hired illustrators. Thus, divorce resulted in ugly public exposure, especially for the woman involved, whether she was the defendant or the plaintiff. 140 A. HUMPHERYS

Generally in novels of the period women considering divorce are stopped by the fear of this exposure to public prurience. In Annie Alexander’s Choice of Evils (1894), for example, when the divorce is underway the narrator refuses to ‘take the readers through the dreary painful details of a divorce case’ because it ‘is but to repeat a species of literature with which they are but too familiar in the daily papers’. 12 By comparison, in Emilia Aylmer Blake’s An Unruly Spirit (1890), the second attachment, in this case a man, says: ‘there is no divorce without disgrace such as I could not bring upon a lady like you. To the man it may be a feather in his cap; to the woman it means the loss of all—honour, children, everything.’ 13 In a version of this reluctance to face scandal, the female protagonist of George Paston’s A Writer of Books (1899) cannot get a divorce or a judicial separation on the basis of love letters her husband has written to another woman. When she declares ‘[i]f the law doesn’t allow me to dissolve my marriage, why then, I’ll be a law unto myself. No woman ever had a voice in making the laws, and therefore no woman is bound to obey them’, her second attachment refuses to be involved with her because such an ‘act’ will be social ruin to her. 14 It is perhaps little wonder, then, that New Women fi ction writers made little use of divorce as a resolution of marriage problems. They had no desire to taint their heroines with scandal. Instead, the women could infor- mally separate from their husbands and remain unmarried, even if there was an appropriate second partner available; see, for example, Millicent Garrett Fawcett, Janet Doncaster (1875), the story of the independent career of a woman within a disastrous marriage; or Sarah Grand, Ideala (1889) and The Beth Book (1898). Or else she could die (The Woman Who Did ). In Mona Caird’s Daughters of Danaus (1894), the heroine returns to her husband and family, but, unlike a similar closure in George Egerton’s ‘A Cross Line’ in Keynotes (1893), it is not a happy ending. Even more crucial, though, is that allowing escape from bad marriages by divorce could derail New Woman criticism of marriage by sidelining the call for reform of marriage—that is, the removal of the inequalities for women in marriage. 15 For some New Women writers, it pushed to the margins the reform of male behaviour in general. 16 Even reform of the divorce law to eliminate the double standard (one law for men, another for women) would leave the inequalities in marriage intact. So for many New Women writers (and others including Ouida) ‘who were’, as Ann L. Ardis says, interested in ‘expos[ing] the contradiction of romantic love as they question the plausibilities of the marriage plot’, 17 divorce’s putative DIVORCE AND THE NEW WOMAN 141 support of marriage might have made such a solution a counterproductive answer to ‘the marriage question’. Perhaps this is why Sarah Grand, who is frequently credited with creating the term ‘New Woman’, did not see divorce as a way to resolve the problem of destructive marriages. She wanted the inequality in the divorce law removed, but insisted that the sole justifi cation for divorce should remain adultery. One reason was that ‘[t]he position of women in middle life and old age would be very sad and desolate [if divorce were made easier], whereas with binding marriage the majority have an honoured position and a fair share of happiness’. 18 The desire for reform of the legal status of women in marriage was not the only item on the agenda for marriage reform of the New Women writers, although it was probably one on which all agreed. There were other aspects of the reform of marriage that individual writers stressed, and none of these would be achieved by divorce. Grand wanted a more chaste ‘New Man’ to evolve to match the New Woman. Meanwhile, Caird wanted a marriage that was a perfectly equal relationship and one subject to dissolution if either party stopped loving. This view of marriage came closer to integrating divorce into a reform platform, but Caird was not really interested in divorce reform, assuming in her ideal world that divorce would be unnecessary. 19 None of her heroines in her ‘marriage problem’ novels divorced. Another explanation for the New Women’s lack of interest in divorce might be that returning the wife to the husband could keep the focus on the need for reform of marriage as an institution by portraying this return as a tragedy, as in Caird’s Daughters of Danaus . Further, in works where there is a successful second marriage, it is frequently achieved, as in George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–72), through a narrative substitution for a divorce, the gratuitous death of the unsatisfactory partner, or what John Sutherland calls ‘divorce Victorian-style’ and what I have called ‘death by narrative’. 20 Coterminous with the New Woman writers, there was also a small number of ‘sex radicals’ who were opposed to marriage on principle, usually because, growing out of the agitation for repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts, they saw state- or church-sanctioned marriage as an unwarranted interference in the private lives of individuals. As Hermione in Allen’s The Woman Who Did says, ‘Even though you go to a registry offi ce and get rid as far as you can of every relic of the sacerdotal and sacramental idea, yet the marriage itself is still an assertion of man’s supremacy over women.’ 21 These sentiments were argued and affi rmed by the group involved with 142 A. HUMPHERYS the journal The Adult : The Journal of Sex (1897–1899), 22 which grew out of the Legitimation League that agitated for legal rights for ‘illegitimate’ children. Mostly the members of this group advocated ‘free love’ or some version of serial monogamy without legal strings, but they also debated whether the maternal instinct was (or should be) primary for women, and whether motherhood was women’s social responsibility to assure the survival of the race. George Egerton’s ‘A Cross Line’ is an interesting example of this aspect of the ‘woman’, ‘marriage’, and New Woman debates, for it could be argued that the story is about a contemplated divorce (although never named as such) that is disrupted by pregnancy. The wife does not leave her husband for an apparently more compatible partner, but instead turns all of her attention, joyfully, to the coming child with her husband. A less nuanced version of this is at the end of Lucas Cleeve’s The Woman Who Wouldn ’ t (1895):

After a night of anguish, when her fi rstborn was placed in her arms and Alan stooped to kiss her, she realized that all the degradation, all the expiation, all the suffering [of marriage] was wiped out, and that, in His infi nite pity for the horrors of womanhood, God had provided a compensating joy, the exquisite, incomparable joy of maternity. 23

While none of the major New Women novelists was a committed member of the group of sex radicals associated with The Adult , and some, like Grant Allen, were thoroughly opposed to their agenda, the fi ctional characters of the New Women writers, especially Sue and Jude as well as Hermione, became icons in the sex radicals’ arguments for a world free of the institution of marriage. The editor of The Adult tried to link the authors of these texts (including also Mona Caird) to the anti-marriage agenda. Yet even the sex radicals were not particularly interested in arguing about divorce; they supported it in theory, but, as they did not believe in marriage, they did not see any reason to waste ink or energy on arguing for divorce reform. Nonetheless, ‘divorce’ does appear covertly in some New Woman fi ction, as I have already suggested about ‘A Cross Line’ by George Egerton. 24 There are some works in which the protagonist separates from her husband and tries to begin a new life—sometimes successfully (Janet Doncaster , Ideala , and A Writer of Books ). There are also several literary tropes in New Women (and other) fi ction that can be seen as DIVORCE AND THE NEW WOMAN 143 displacements for divorce. One is the bigamy plot, very popular in the 1860s and 1870s, which some critics have argued was a plot device used in part as a response to the opening up of divorce through the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857. 25 Another is that of the ‘Fatal Return’, in which a fi rst spouse is thought dead but returns after the other spouse has remarried. 26 The ‘death-by-narrative’ device is sometimes invoked to allow a second marriage. Either the undesired spouse dies, which allows a more or less guilt-free second marriage—Middlemarch or George Meredith’s Diana of the Crossways (1885)—or the protagonist dies, which leads to a tragic and reformist text—The Woman Who Did or Olive Schreiner’s Story of an African Farm (1883). Sometimes divorce is actually discussed or thought about only to be rejected, as in An Unruly Spirit (1890), and sometimes there actually is a character who is divorced, as in Jude the Obscure or in Annie Alexander’s A Choice of Evils (1894). What might happen if an actual divorce is introduced into a New Woman novel? In an essay on the role of divorce in the earlier nineteenth-century British novel, I argued that introducing divorce into the marriage plot presented a way in which the story could avoid closure and instead open up and begin again, even as divorce enables a character to begin again. 27 This narrative structure, which develops in a wave-like movement of action and in which the climax (sometimes there is more than one) leads not to a resolution but to a new beginning and a new story, can unsettle the conventional marriage plot and leave the closure somewhat open. 28 This is the case in East Lynne , for example. Most of the issues surrounding divorce and the New Woman, as well as a kind of resolution, can be seen in a minor but important novel, Annie Alexander’s A Choice of Evils (1894), to which I will turn after a brief biographical sketch of the author, for Alexander’s biography itself is a ‘New Woman’ story. She was born Annie French on 23 June 1825. She became a prolifi c writer and later in life a very popular one. She wrote over fi fty novels. During her early years in London she was part of a lively literary scene in which she formed life-long friendships with Eliza Lynn (later Linton) and W.H. Wills, Dickens’s subeditor on Household Words , in which journal she made her literary debut. In 1858, she married Alexander Hector, an explorer (in 1875 after his death she took her nom de plume from her husband’s fi rst name). The marriage was not a happy one; the portrait of Randal Palliser in A Choice of Evils contains elements of her husband’s erratic temper and stinginess, although all, including the heroine of that 144 A. HUMPHERYS novel, agree that he ‘was not a bad husband as husbands go’; ironic praise since husbands as a group are not admirable in this novel. 29 In 1870, Annie and Hector were legally separated. (Even though her husband had openly taken a mistress, she did not have the necessary secondary cause that would have allowed her to divorce him.) He died in 1875, leaving her with four children and a father to support, at which point she began writing in earnest. Most of Alexander’s work would not be called ‘New Woman’ fi ction, but A Choice of Evils is clearly conceived as a New Woman novel and is based not only on the New Woman debates of the late 1880s and 1890s, but also on the author’s experience of marriage and divorce. A Choice of Evils contains a ‘Fatal Return’, a divorce, and a separation. While the separation and divorce in this novel solve the immediate problem of a ‘failed marriage’, as Kelly Hager calls it in Dickens and Divorce , the wave structure introduced by the divorce enables the novel to add a section that can investigate the aftermath of divorce. One of the nice ironies in the novel that the divorce produces is that, while the legal action of divorce ‘frees’ the husband, it also ‘frees’ his second wife, Janet, to make an independent decision not to be married but instead to live independently or, as she repeatedly puts it, to live ‘free’. Thus the divorce can open up another possibility of a different ending for this story of a destructive marriage; a utopian one perhaps, but one that would have been impossible without divorce. The plot concerns an intelligent girl, Janet Rowley, daughter of a sea captain, who marries Randal Palliser, a high-class man whose fi rst marriage was not happy, but who has been freed to marry again by his wife’s supposed death. Palliser’s marriage with Janet begins well, but soon the strains between the two and what we might now call the mental cruelty of Palliser towards Janet create tensions: he has a foul temper, is constantly critical of her, belittles her efforts at writing, and eventually becomes the prototypical abusive husband. Janet’s ‘failure’ to produce a son and heir is his justifi cation for his abuse of his wife. During this deterioration of her marriage, Janet tries her utmost to be a good wife (‘She would do her best to be good and loving’), but she begins to have New Woman types of thoughts. 30 She focuses on the disadvantages of being completely dependent on a husband: ‘she was but a pensioner on his bounty, and the eternal materialism of things forbids belief in the fable of equality when it does not stand fi rmly on the solid basis of £.s.d. or equivalent advantages’. 31 Yet she keeps her heroine status, because DIVORCE AND THE NEW WOMAN 145 the most severe critique of marriage is delivered by her husband’s sister, Lady Saville, a cynic about male and female relationships, who herself suf- fers from a ‘desperately jealous and-unforgiving’ husband. ‘“[L]ove and understanding” never affect the everlasting struggle for the upper hand between men and women’, Lady Saville tells Janet, although she adds, ‘or rather between human beings’. 32 That this latter qualifi cation—namely, that all human life is a struggle for power—comes from the most disil- lusioned character in the novel suggests the subtlety that Alexander introduces into the New Woman debates. Alexander further complicates these negative sentiments, since both Lady Saville and her husband are adulter- ers, although in a fi nal twist, like Helen Huntingdon in Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), Lady Saville ends up nursing her crotchety husband and at his death sees him ‘only as the handsome debonair love of her youth’. 33 Nonetheless, as potentially weakened as her opinions are by both her own infi delity and her boomerang plot, 34 they shadow Janet’s experience and decisions about her own marriage. Inserting Lady Saville into Janet’s story enables Alexander to have it both ways at the beginning of the novel, before Janet starts acting and speaking for herself. The novel can critique both marriage and men, but protect its heroine from acting on these opinions. That condition does not last in the second and third volumes, however, because the divorce in the second volume starts the narrative again. While Volume I develops the deterioration of Janet’s marriage, Volume II introduces the crisis: Palliser’s fi rst wife Isobel, like another Isobel in East Lynne , is not dead after all, and she returns to extort money from Palliser, erroneously believing that he has sons who would be bastardized if she revealed the truth. 35 Janet, in relief, leaves her husband and returns to her father’s house. Eventually, Palliser divorces his fi rst wife, and then comes the surprising part of the novel. Janet now has a chance to legitimize her status as a married woman and Palliser is anxious for her to do so. Yet Janet refuses; instead, she chooses ‘to be free’ of marriage and not to return to Palliser and marry him, legally this time. 36 Her thoughts about this freedom are enabled by the divorce. As she tells Palliser, ‘it would be madness not to grasp this chance of freedom!’ 37 And she does this despite the threatened scandal both to her (‘everyone will believe you have a lover’ her father, Lady Saville, and her friend Lady Darrell all tell her, and ‘they’ do) and to her ‘husband’ (‘think of the reports that will be spread abroad of Palliser’s vil- lainy!’ her father says). 38 Janet’s brother rejects her for refusing to remarry Palliser. However, her father, although he does not understand or approve 146 A. HUMPHERYS of her decision not to return to Palliser after the divorce, remains faithful to her while also remaining critical of her behaviour. Janet discards all the warnings; she insists that the scandal will blow over in twelve months and, moreover, feels herself ‘blameless, and it could not touch her’. 39 She insists to her father: ‘I neither see nor feel the disgrace of it.’ 40 Further, she denies the sacramental view of marriage. When Palliser asks her ‘don’t you, as a religious woman, feel yourself bound by those solemn words, “Whom God hath joined together let not man put asunder?”’ she responds, ‘Accident has played sad havoc with the holiness of the tie which bound us.’ 41 ‘I think my reputation will survive’, she adds. 42 The title of the fi rst chapter in Volume III of A Choice of Evils is ‘A Fresh Start’, which refl ects the wave-like structure of the divorce novel. That is, the resolution after the climax of the husband’s divorce and the wife’s initiated separation is not a working-through of the confl icts that led up to the crisis—the bad marriage of Palliser and Janet—but rather the beginning of a more or less completely new story. This new story is about how Janet acts on her ‘freedom’ and how, in her own unusual version of the boomerang ending, she becomes a harbinger of a new future for a New Woman and the New Man, a future made possible by divorce and the experience and wisdom it has brought the heroine. 43 We arrive at the utopian conclusion through a series of encounters that encapsulate the previous two and a half volumes. First, in her freedom she meets an old fl ame of hers, Maurice Winyard, who thinks she has treated Palliser badly and for whom the idea of ‘independent women’ or a ‘self- respecting, self-sustaining woman, with heart and conscience at rest’ was ‘inexpressively repugnant’. 44 Despite these ideas and his conclusions that the only explanation for her persistence in refusing to remarry Palliser is that she has a lover, Maurice begins to fall in love with Janet again, and he fi nally proposes. She refuses him, saying he needs a girl with no past who will defer to him. Then, in a second encounter, she unexpectedly meets Palliser, and she tells him: ‘You ought to thank me for having had the courage to break the chains—chains which galled us both so cruelly. You reap more benefi t from my action than I do.’ 45 Yet Palliser cannot forgive her for ‘the greatest affront ever put upon a man!’—almost seeming to suggest that Janet has divorced him, which in a way she has. 46 In a third encounter, she reconciles with her brother, telling him that ‘never for an instant did she regret the step she had taken’. 47 Thus Janet has seemingly conquered all the obstacles to her strike for ‘freedom’ by the force of her confi dence in her own innocence, DIVORCE AND THE NEW WOMAN 147 will, and abilities. As she tells Lady Saville, ‘believe me, I am not only a happier, but a better woman since I gained my freedom’. 48 Another novelist might have left her there, as Jessie Fothergill did for her heroine in Kith and Kin (1881). However, this is not the end of Janet’s ‘Fresh Start’. The title of the last chapter suggests what is to come: ‘Friendship’. What develops in this fi nal part of the novel is a kind of utopian vision. Having been married for four years, and separated and divorced for several more years, Janet has learned what she wants from life, even what it means to live ‘free’. What she wants and what she gets form a positive kind of New Woman boomerang ending. Travelling in Sicily with Lady Darrell (Lady Saville’s sister in law), she again meets her fi rst love, Maurice, now married and with a child, and tells him: ‘Hereafter, when my wounds are quite healed, I may meet some friendly, congenial, elderly man who needs a companion and a partner, and we might marry in deference to the opinions of society’, adding: ‘love is a dangerous delight! For the future I will only seek and cultivate friendship—there is no treachery, no cruelty in steady, temperate liking.’ 49 She gets even more than that. At the end, Lady Darrell’s son, who has made a number of minor appearances in earlier parts of the novel, comes to Sicily. Earlier, when Janet was fi rst separated from Palliser, Darrell told her: ‘You made a bold stroke for peace and liberty’, and she answered: ‘there is no staying power, except in friendship’. 50 In kind, he now proposes to her: ‘I am not going to talk nonsense and swear I cannot live without you—of course I could—but I would much rather live with you!’ 51 Her father had warned him, he said, ‘to be cautious, and not to scare you, for you had been sickened of love. So be it! Let us try a marriage of esteem and friendship…Our tastes are suffi ciently alike to make us enjoy things together, and not so much the same as to create monotony!’ 52 And, more important for a heroine who has given all, not for love but for freedom, ‘You shall do whatever you like, for never had man more unbounded confi dence in woman than I have in you.’ 53 The novel ends as Janet replies ‘I think we might enjoy life together gloriously! We are such good comrades!’ and accepts Darrell’s proposal. 54 It is a marriage that Caird, with her desire for marriages of equals, would have sanctioned, as perhaps would have George Egerton and maybe even Sarah Grand, with her desire for a New Man to match the New Woman. And it is a marriage whose newly articulated aspirations for freedom and equality in marriage have been made possible by a divorce. 55 148 A. HUMPHERYS

Given this ending, what are we to make of the title of this New Woman novel— A Choice of Evils ? What is the choice and what are the evils? Is Janet’s fi rst marriage a choice between the evil of marriage to an unworthy partner, a subject on which Sarah Grand elaborates in The Heavenly Twins (1893), and the evil of no marriage at all, the choice that Rhoda Nunn makes in George Gissing’s The Odd Women (1893)? Alexander’s novel certainly suggests that the fi rst is evil, although there is nothing to suggest that for a woman never to marry at all is either a good or a bad thing. Is it the choice that Janet must make between returning to marry her unworthy husband once he has divorced his fi rst wife in order to salvage her own reputation versus the choice that she actually makes to face scandal, opprobrium, and ostracism to live ‘free’? The novel certainly does not suggest that we think this last choice an ‘evil’ one. In fact, we are meant to admire it. Is it then the choice that Janet makes at the end of the novel to marry ‘in deference to society’ and live in friendship with Lord Darrell versus the choice of remaining unattached and free? Again, the narrative does not imply that her choice of Lord Darrell is evil, but on the contrary a reward. Nor does it suggest that living free without attachment would be ‘evil’. So what is the title referring to? Perhaps the evil is the requirement to see any of these choices as evils. After all, Janet’s fi rst husband was ‘not a bad husband as husbands go’, and her fi rst love Maurice does indeed fi nd ‘a girl who has no history and no fi xed opinions’ and who ‘defer[s]’ to him. 56 The narrator and Janet as well refuse to judge any of these choices as ‘evil’, and so must the reader. Moths (1880) by Ouida (Marie Louise de la Ramée) makes an interesting comparison with Alexander’s novel. Ouida, too, is not known as a New Woman writer, but Moths has a very interesting ending when looked at through the lens of divorce. The heroine, Vere, who has been tricked into a very bad marriage by her even worse mother, refuses even to contemplate a divorce, despite her husband’s open liaison with another woman: ‘I may leave his roof if he try me too far, I have thought of it; but I will never ask the law to set me free from him. What could the law do for me? It cannot undo what is done. A woman who divorces her husband is a prostitute legalised by a form; that is all.’ 57 Yet then, when a faithful old love of hers is wounded in a duel with her husband, she runs away to be with the old fl ame: ‘You have lost all for me’, she says. ‘If it comfort you—I am here.’ 58 After Vere goes to her friend, her husband is able to divorce her and marry his mistress. However, even though divorce by her husband would DIVORCE AND THE NEW WOMAN 149 enable Vere to marry her love, she refuses because she does not believe in divorce. She retreats with her love (and a dog) to a lonely Alpine cottage, where the text leaves them, although the novel closes on one of its most telling ironies in terms of its critique of a vapid and vicious society. Vere’s adulterous, abusive mother remarks that she cannot possibly ever visit her daughter now—‘how can she know her, you know?—divorced, and living out of the world with Corrèze!’ 59 The irony is so sharp that the reader would be forgiven for thinking at the end that the novel is in support of free love. Thus, in this conventional novel the conclusion seems signifi - cantly unconventional, as it appears to support the situation made possible by divorce—namely, a wife with two living ‘husbands’. The New Woman movement died out at the turn of the twentieth century. The agitation for further divorce reform, however, picked up at the same time, although it lasted for only a few years. In 1911, a group under the chairmanship of Arthur Conan Doyle formed the Divorce Law Reform Union to argue for simplifi cation of the causes for divorce and a reduction in the costs to it make more accessible. (Incidentally, the Union opposed judicial separation because it prevented remarriage, a sign that the sacramental view of marriage had waned.) Several novels and plays centring on divorce resulted from these efforts at reform, although none of them was a New Woman novel. 60 In 1912, a Royal Commission was established to examine the issues surrounding the divorce laws, but while it issued a report that recommended increasing access by lowering costs, providing less restrictive grounds, and, most important, eliminating the double standard, all came to nothing. In fact, serious reform of the divorce laws did not occur until after the First World War, when the impact of the war on marriage put serious strain on the institution. 61 Yet even then, the double standard in divorce law that forced women who wanted a divorce to prove not only adultery but an additional charge of bigamy, incest, desertion, or cruelty was not eliminated until the late 1920s, and adultery as the sole cause for divorce was broadened only in the late 1930s. 62 It was only after another world war that comprehensive divorce reform was brought about in 1969.

NOTES 1. The article appeared in Blackwood’s in January 1896. Ironically, as Valerie Sanders points out, the ‘antifeminists’ such as Eliza Lynn Linton, Charlotte M. Yonge, and Margaret Oliphant (who, although 150 A. HUMPHERYS

a widow, did not remarry because she did not believe in remarriage) were in favour of easier divorce laws. She states further that ‘Linton at least recognized that the divorce laws were too infl exible, and that human nature (always, to her, “a sadly rickety kind of thing”) required more sensitive legislative machinery to handle its emotional vagaries’. See Sanders, ‘Marriage and the Antifeminist Woman Novelist’, Nicola Diane Thompson, ed., Victorian Women Writers and the Woman Question (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 36. Linton went so far, in ‘The Philosophy of Marriage’, as to argue for full divorce over judicial separation, calling the latter ‘a senseless and cruel compromise’. See Harry Quilter, ed., Is Marriage a Failure ? (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1888), 200. See also Linton, ‘The Judicial Shock to Marriage’, Nineteenth Century 29(May 1891), 691–700. 2. Sally Ledger, New Women : Fact and Fiction at the Fin de Siècle (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 20. 3. Kelly Hager discusses Edith Dombey’s ‘request’ that there be an agreement with Dombey about their living separately, which somehow ‘marks a crucial moment in the history of the novel as it begins to develop strategies for plotting the soon-to-be-legalized institution of divorce’. Dickens and the Rise of Divorce : The Failed Marriage Plot and the Novel Tradition (Farnham Surrey: Ashgate, 2010), 107. This might also be said of Gradgrind’s suggestion to Bounderby after Louisa has returned to her home of some ‘visiting proposition’, as Bounderby contemptuously calls it, which would allow her to stay with her father; see Charles Dickens, Hard Times , ed. Fred Kaplan and Sylvère Monod, 3rd edn. (1854; New York: Norton, 2001), 182. 4. Anne Humpherys, ‘Coming Apart: The British Newspaper Press and the Divorce Court’, in Laurel Brake, Bill Bell, and David Finkelstein, eds., Nineteenth-Century Media and the Construction of Identities (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), 229. 5. G. K. Chesterton, Superstition of Divorce (London: Chatto and Windus, 1920), 124. 6. What actions constituted ‘cruelty’ as a cause for divorce were gradually defi ned by case law throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. 7. William Henry Shawcross, Divorce and Re-Marriage : A Paper Read Before the Vale of Evesham Clerical Society at Birlingham Rectory , 23rd July , 1896 (London: Church Printing Co., [1897]), 12. DIVORCE AND THE NEW WOMAN 151

8. The Bishop of Exeter considered the idea of women marrying after a divorce a ‘notorious violation of the marriage vow…little better than one continued life-long adultery’. ‘The Bishop of Exeter on Divorce’, The Times , 2 December 1857: 12. 9. Antony Trollope, The Small House at Allington , ed. by Julian Thompson (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1991), 596. 10. Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure , ed. Norman Page (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999), 275. 11. Thomas Hardy, ‘Laws the Cause of Misery’, in ‘How Shall We Solve the Divorce Problem’, Nash ’ s Magazine , 5.6 (1912): 683. 12. Annie Alexander, Choice of Evils , 3 vols. (London: F.V. White), 2.179. 13. Emilia Aylmer Blake, An Unruly Spirit , 3 vols. (London: F.V. White, 1890), 2.229. 14. George Paston [Emily Morse Symonds], A Writer of Books (Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers, 1999), 242. The protagonist, Cosima, says later: ‘I divorce myself by my own law, and I shall marry again by my own law if it seems good to me’ (245). 15. First among these was the law of coverture, which denied wives the right to own property, to sign contracts, or to have control over their own earnings. The agitation that resulted in the Married Women’s Property Acts (1870, 1874, and especially 1882) addressed this issue. Further, if there was a marital separation, either a legal (meno a thoro ) or a private one, reformers wanted women to have the right to custody of their children. The child custody laws of 1881 addressed that in part. In 1884, the law that enabled husbands to force wives to return to them and also made refusing to have sex with one’s spouse a crime was revoked. However, there were no calls for reform of the divorce laws to expand the legal causes for divorce until the fi rst decade of the twentieth century. At that time George Bernard Shaw stated: ‘Divorce, in fact, is not the destruction of marriage, but the fi rst condition of its maintenance.’ Quoted in Helge Rubenstein, ed. Oxford Book of Marriage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 295. 16. Ledger notes: ‘The article [Sarah Grand’s ‘The New Aspect of the Woman Question’, North American Review 158 (1894), 270–76] which sparked off the fi n-de-siècle debate on the New Woman had sought not to undermine the institution of marriage but rather to reform it’ (The New Woman , 20). 152 A. HUMPHERYS

17. Ann L. Ardis, New Women , New Novels : Feminism and Early Modernism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 61. 18. Sarah Grand, ‘The Woman’s Question: An Interview with Madame Sarah Grand’, Humanitarian , 8.3 (1896) 161–69, reprinted in Carolyn Christensen Nelson, ed., A New Woman Reader : Fiction , Articles , Drama of the 1890s (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2001), 166. 19. Caird says, ‘The ideal marriage then, despite all dangers and diffi culties, should be free . So long as love and trust and friendship remain, no bonds are necessary to bind two people together…but whenever these cease the tie becomes false and iniquitous, and no one ought to have power to enforce it…The idea of a perfectly free marriage would imply the possibility of any form of contract being entered into between the two persons, the State and society standing aside, and recognizing the entirely private character of the transaction.’ See ‘Marriage,’ Westminster Review 130 (August 1888): 186–201, reprinted in Carolyn Christensen Nelson, ed., A New Woman Reader , 196. About divorce, Caird adds: ‘If the number of divorces did not actually decrease there would be the certainty that no couple remained united against their will, and that no lives were sacrifi ced to a mere convention.’ A New Woman Reader , 198. 20. John Sutherland, The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), 493. Humpherys, ‘The Three of Them: The Scene of “Divorce” in Nineteenth-Century English Fiction’, in Karl Leydecker and Nicholas White, eds., After Intimacy : The Culture of Divorce in the West since 1789 (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007), 129. 21. Grant Allen, The Woman Who Did , ed. Sarah Wintle (1895; Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 43. 22. See Anne Humpherys, ‘The Journal that Did: Form and Content in The Adult (1897–1899)’, Media History 9 (2003): 63–78. 23. Lucas Cleeve, The Woman Who Wouldn ’ t (London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent, 1895), 225. Earlier in the novel, the heroine Opalia, who has been struggling to fi nd a way for men, whom she argues are by nature barbaric, and women, by nature sensitive, to live together, says: ‘Oh, if some wonderful third way out could be discovered—neither love nor passion—would she not seize hold of it?’ (42). Grant Allen argued that for the good of the race most women should marry and have a moderate number of children: ‘Whether we have wives or DIVORCE AND THE NEW WOMAN 153

not—and that is a minor point about which I, for one, am supremely unprejudiced—we must at least have mothers.’ ‘Plain Words on the Woman Question’, Fortnightly Review 46 (1889): 458. 24. Karen Chase and Michael Levenson argue that ‘the eruption of divorce into domestic discourse…appeared as an epochal event but arrived with no conventions for its representation’ (The Spectacle of Intimacy : A Public Life for the Victorian Family (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 190). 25. See, for example, Jeanne Fahnestock, ‘Bigamy: The Rise and Fall of a Convention’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction 36 (1981): 66. 26. Anne Humpherys, ‘Enoch Arden , the Fatal Return, and the Silence of Annie’, Victorian Poetry ,30 (1992): 331–42. 27. Anne Humpherys, ‘Breaking Apart: The Early Victorian Divorce Novel’, in Thompson, ed., Victorian Women Writers and the Woman Question , 42–59. 28. Barbara Leckie argues that divorce court journalism, with its depiction of the unreliability of circumstantial evidence, had an impact on the novel by stressing ‘the unreliable representation more closely associated with modernism’ and frustrating narrative closure. See ‘“One of the Greatest Social Revolutions of Our Time”: The Matrimonial Causes Act, Divorce Court Journalism, and the Victorian Novel’, in Leydecker and White, eds., After Intimacy , 55 and 46. Leckie presents useful readings of Caroline Norton’s semi- autobiographical novel Stuart of Dunleath (1851), Trollope’s He Knew He Was Right (1869), and Meredith’s Diana of the Crossways . 29. Alexander, A Choice of Evils , 3.10; emphasis in original. 30. Alexander, A Choice of Evils , 2.88. 31. Alexander, A Choice of Evils , 2.23. 32. Alexander, A Choice of Evils , 1.186–87. Later, she tells Janet: ‘The chief point is not to let your husband see that you cannot exist without him, or you go down twenty per cent. at once’ (2: 40). 33. Alexander, A Choice of Evils , 3.128. 34. Ardis coined the term ‘boomerang plot’ in order to describe the movement at the end of many New Woman novels where rebellious heroines return to conventional marriages. See New Women , New Novels , 140–56. 35. The parallels between these two ‘Fatal Return’ novels are close. In Ellen Wood’s East Lynne , after running away to France with another man and having his child, Isobel is in a train wreck that kills the child 154 A. HUMPHERYS

and disfi gures her beyond recognition, allowing her to take on a position as governess to her own children. In A Choice of Evils , Palliser’s fi rst wife Isobel changed identities with a Frenchwoman for two weeks in order to spend the time with an old lover. She is disfi gured by a fi re, but it is the Frenchwoman, thought to be Isobel, who dies. After her lover dies, Isobel returns, and, discovering that her husband has remarried, plans to blackmail him. 36. Alexander, A Choice of Evils , 2.227. 37. Alexander, A Choice of Evils , 2.234. 38. Alexander, A Choice of Evils , 2.220. 39. Alexander, A Choice of Evils , 2: 146. 40. Alexander, A Choice of Evils , 2.223. 41. Alexander, A Choice of Evils , 2.232–33. 42. Alexander, A Choice of Evils , 2.235. 43. Since most New Women novels end either tragically or with the heroine doing good work but without a male partner, it would seem that only in a utopian novel or one projecting the ending into the future can there be a completely satisfactory second marriage. There is perhaps no realist plot line for a second marriage. Janice Hubbard Harrison summarizes Jane Eldridge Miller’s observation that ‘to den- igrate old plots and exhausted structures [i.e., courtship and marriage plots] is one thing; to write beyond them is something else’. Harrison, Edwardian Stories of Divorce (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 108. Hardy realized this point: Jude says ‘the time was not ripe for us! Our ideas were fi fty years too soon to be any good to us.’ Jude the Obscure , 315. In her section on the New Woman novel, Kristin Kalsem discusses three novels ‘that explore the topic of marriage but offer some hope for further revision of what was still a defi n- ing social text for women [i.e., marriage]’. In Contempt : Nineteenth-century Women , Law and Literature (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2011), 148. The three novels end with two unfulfi lled second attachments (Sarah Grand’s The Beth Book and George Paston’s A Writer of Books ) and one Utopian relationship in Florence Dixie’s Gloriana and the Revolution of 1900 (1890), a novel that portrays not only a future world of equal partnership between men and women, but also one achieved when a woman masquerades as a man and ultimately becomes Prime Minister. 44. Alexander, A Choice of Evils , 3.48 and 3.34. Cf. ‘It was their [wives’] business to be sweet, angelic creatures lifted above the sins and DIVORCE AND THE NEW WOMAN 155

iniquities of the world through ignorance of evil rather than choice of good’ (3.34). 45. Alexander, A Choice of Evils , 3.176. 46. Alexander, A Choice of Evils , 3.176. 47. Alexander, A Choice of Evils , 3: 209. 48. Alexander, A Choice of Evils , 3.169. 49. Alexander, A Choice of Evils , 3.233 and 3.241. 50. Alexander, A Choice of Evils , 3.124–25. 51. Alexander, A Choice of Evils , 3.245. 52. Alexander, A Choice of Evils , 3.246. 53. Alexander, A Choice of Evils , 3.246. 54. Alexander, A Choice of Evils , 3.247. 55. The novel is silent about whether or not this arrangement will involve a sexual relationship. In nineteenth-century novels, sex in marriage is usually suggested by the appearance of children soon after the wedding. Yet A Choice of Evils does not close Janet’s story with the presentation of a child, and thus leaves the reader to speculate about the exact nature of the intimacy suggested by ‘friendship’ in this text. 56. Alexander, A Choice of Evils , 3.10 and 3.232. 57. Ouida, Moths , 3 vols. (London: Chatto and Windus, 1880), 3.114. 58. Ouida, Moths , 3.387. 59. Ouida, Moths , 3.397. 60. Among the more prominent novels at the beginning of the century that argued for divorce reform are Albert Kinross, The Love Brokers (1910), and George Bernard Shaw, Getting Married (1911). 61. A play by Clemence Dane, A Bill of Divorcement (1921), articulates some of the diffi culties of marriage for a man who returned from the war suffering shell shock and for his family. 62. One of the leaders in the divorce reform act of 1937, A.J. Herbert, published a novel, Holy Deadlock , to support the reform cause in 1934. CHAPTER 8

Revolutions in Journalism: W.T. Stead, Indexing, and ‘Searching’

Laurel Brake

A recent moment to remember in media history: the coincidence of the centenary of the death of W.T. Stead, a shaper of the newspaper revolution at the end of the nineteenth century and the turn of the twentieth, with events at the British Library in London that are revolutionizing our access to print journalism. 1 These events comprise the closure in 2013 of Colindale, the newspaper library building in North London where newspapers were housed, conserved, and read; the removal of most of them to a silo in Yorkshire for storage, improved preservation, and robot retrieval when necessary; and the opening of a newspaper and media reading room in the main British Library building at St Pancras, in the heart of London, where digital and microfi lm surrogates of historical newspapers are con- sulted where they exist, and print versions where they do not. This is not simply a relocation of resources, but a strategic move that refl ects the historicizing of print journalism, and its new place in media history. The revolutionary dimension of the changes lies not only in the shift of the default mode of access from paper to surrogate, but in the new context of print journalism in its designated reading room, where the historical press is accessible along with newly collected British Library holdings of

L. Brake () Professor Emerita of Literature and Print Culture, Birkbeck, University of London, London , UK

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 157 J. Bristow, J. McDonagh (eds.), Nineteenth-Century Radical Traditions, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59706-9_8 158 L. BRAKE contemporary news sources such as digital editions of newspapers, fi lm, video, television, audio, and blogs. Linking these moments are two indexing projects: Stead’s single-minded programme (1890–1912) of mapping what he called ‘the mighty maze’ of press contents in print indexes, and the current digitization of historical serials and development of indexing software for searching their contents. 2 The present chapter has three parts: the fi rst attempts to provide an overview of Stead’s impact on the media of his day; the second discusses his indexing projects and their close relation to his belief in the press itself as the best form of democracy, education, and governance; and the third considers Stead’s legacy and the impact of the continuing digital revolution on our study of historical newspapers and periodicals.

W.T. STEAD (1849–1912): TAKING STOCK When Stead died on the Titanic in 1912, the press in Britain—irrespective of its divergent politics—was united in its tribute to him as an outstanding professional journalist. The liberal dailies acclaimed him as ‘the Father of British Journalism’ and ‘the greatest journalist of his time’. 3 They praised him as well for his ‘fertility of resource’, his ‘originality of ideas’, his ‘controversial dexterity’, his ‘power of vivid presentment’, and his ‘instinct for what is interesting’. 4 Certainly, the London Times allowed that he was ‘[i]mpulsive, reckless, and careless of his own reputation’, 5 but, in concluding, its overall evaluation was almost ungrudging:

The infl uence of W. T. Stead on daily journalism in England was great. He struck the personal note. He acclimatized the ‘interview’. He developed the ‘crossheads’. He extended the scope of the special article and the signed contribution. He introduced pictorial illustration. All these were the outward signs of the current of fresh vigour and greater vividness of presentment which were an expression of his personality. His taste was not impeccable, but he had at command a wealth of allusion, and he was a master of nervous, vivid language. He had a most ingenious and fertile mind…. He was accessible to all-comers. 6

Similarly, the Westminster Gazette , a Tory evening paper, averred that in the 1880s Stead ‘had invented a new style of journalism, swayed the decisions of Cabinets, [and] almost made himself a party in the country’; ‘[t]here was no movement or cause to which his mind was not accessible’. 7 REVOLUTIONS IN JOURNALISM: W.T. STEAD, INDEXING, AND ‘SEARCHING’ 159

As the Westminster Gazette recognized, Stead’s radicalism permeated the public sphere, and not only its journalism; his radicalism was not confi ned to a single aspect of his career—his work as a print journalist. His spiritual beliefs were fl exible in their ideological content and their institutional and discursive locations. Since his religious affi liations moved from nonconformist Congregationalist Christianity to more radical and self-fashioned forms of a secular (or what he called a ‘Civic’) church, his evangelical practice was not compartmentalized, nor did it honour the usual conventions. His controversial social campaigns—against traffi cking of children in ‘The Maiden Tribute of Babylon’ (1885), and his exposure of organized brothels in Chicago in If Christ Came to Chicago (1894)— were consistently disruptive. Meanwhile, his political campaigns—on the governance of New York, on colonialism in Southern Africa, on the redis- tribution of wealth, and on the creation of an English-speaking union between all parts of the empire—were idiosyncratic, imperialist, abrasive, visionary, reckless, and, on occasion, racist. In the early twentieth century, he single-mindedly pursued international peace and the potential of the Berne Convention on copyright. A similarly energetic and probing commitment to spiritualism and psychic research culminated in the radical experiment of Julia’s Bureau: a news agency dedicated to the circulation of psychic and spiritualist information. His promulgation of women’s rights—in education, in employment, and in battles for the suffrage—was grounded in practice throughout his life. Stead’s active professional career therefore extended well beyond journalism, although most of his other activities surfaced in it, variously originating there in campaigns or news, or bobbing up regularly as the subject of reports, reviews, and illustrations. Stead kept his journalism at the centre of this vortex of swirling activities. For example, while he organized institutions and groups, such as Julia’s Bureau and the ‘Helpers’ (dedicated to social work), both were brought into the cultural industry of the press, as well as into the infrastructure of his wider publishing domain. These interests of Stead’s—spiritualism and community work—resulted in short-lived quarterlies, respectively Borderland (1893–97) and Help (1891–92). He routinely transformed lecture trips into investigative and sensational annuals and conference attendance into civic institutions and interventions, on which he duly reported. Like his near contemporary, the American press magnate William Randolph Hearst, Stead made news as well as recorded it, becoming a founder and publisher of magazines, pamphlets, reference works, books, and popular series of novels and poetry. 160 L. BRAKE

He also wrote books: novels, romances, and prose tracts. Insofar as the present discussion focuses on Stead’s journalism, it situates journalism as an aspect of the cluster of his publications and undertakings. Stead was an exceptionally talented journalist; his ineradicable instinct for anything that might be made into ‘news’ is unmistakeable as one scru- tinizes the copy, the titles, and his public campaigns. His restlessness, on which his peers often remarked, has struck recent critics as an indication of his constitutional state of receptivity, not unlike a radio band that is always open to signals of the appropriate frequency. 8 His formidable writing skills were also those of a journalist, above all in reporting, accretion, explanation, analysis, digestion, and persuasion, as well as in producing content of squibs and short pieces, often dramatic and sometimes sensationalist. However, it is just these qualities of his writing that have made it and him diffi cult to assimilate into the purview of ‘English literature’. A loose phrase, long in use, has recently been appropriated to defi ne formally a subgenre of journalism that arguably facilitates its assimilation into the discipline of ‘English’. The phrase that has morphed into a ‘fi eld’ of its own is ‘literary journalism’. 9 Signifi cantly, our twenty-fi rst-century unease about the status of journalism and its relation to literature is also a late nineteenth-century phenomenon, in a period when both the study of the vernacular (English) literature is fi rst making its way in schools and universities, and journalism is organizing itself as a profession. Stead shows himself to be concerned about the status of journalism in diverse ways: he propounds his own changing vision of journalism in a regular stream of articles from the mid-1880s until his death in 1912, with those appearing in 1886 in the Contemporary Review the most well known. 10 Taken together, they amount to a wholehearted defence of journalism and its various discourses. Moreover, when he begins to index the periodical press from 1890, he identifi es the contents of journals as ‘periodical literature ’. 11 This usage of ‘literature’ was common at the time, before its narrower meaning became dominant. The title of the Times Literary Supplement , founded in 1902, uses the word in Stead’s sense: it was deemed to review ‘literature’ in general—history, archaeology, music, cultural criticism, and biography, together with fi ction, poetry, and drama—and this usage has survived to our own period, when scientists and social scientists refer professionally to ‘literature reviews’. However, now the term ‘literary journalism’ does not possess the same kind of descriptive neutrality. It can refer to non-news material or feature writing, when it is used by academics who wish to elevate this type of journalism; or for REVOLUTIONS IN JOURNALISM: W.T. STEAD, INDEXING, AND ‘SEARCHING’ 161 journalists it can refer to ‘reviewing’ that they, inside the news and news- related feature writing world, tend to situate separately and pejoratively. A less interested defi nition is different from and wider than either of these. While it may be detected in what used to be called ‘feature writing’, it also extends across a broad spectrum, from the sketch/interview to an essay- like analysis or perambulation of a single topical subject, which may or may not be news related. Most readily located in magazines and blogs rather than newspapers, it is one of the miscellany of narrative modes that coexist in journalism, and is no more necessarily well written. So, while ‘literary journalism’ warrants defi nition and study, defi ning it remains problematic. I focus on the confusions that exist when ‘literary journalism’ is discussed because they can obscure what remains signifi cant about Stead’s abilities to excel in divergent kinds of journalism. His strengths were those of an all-rounder, one who wrote powerfully in several distinct styles, including more obviously literary ones such as fi ctional narrative, but his forte was the effective delivery of information, even in his fi ction. All of his writing tended to be driven by an evangelical zeal for doing the work of the Lord, whom he called, in his business-like manner, ‘the Senior Partner’. 12 He was interested in journalism and absorbed by it, just as Charles Dickens was in the world and language of fi ction. If literary and journalistic styles of writing were increasingly distinguishable in the 1890s, they nonetheless remained linked and often overlapping during the fi n de siècle. 13 In my discussion of Stead’s career, I want to broaden critics’ familiar understanding of his highly visible involvement in journalism beyond the 1880s, when he was co-editing and then editing the Pall Mall Gazette (PMG ), a remarkable metropolitan daily newspaper, where his polemical ‘Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’ caused such a furore. My aim here is to consider his last stint, as an accomplished London-based publisher and editor between 1890 and 1912. In this second half of his career, he shifted his endeavours from the newspaper to the periodical press, reviewing it and indexing it, as well as publishing quarterlies, monthlies, and annuals. A decade into this phase of his professional life, he refl ected on the relationships between newspapers and periodicals as distinct kinds of publication:

In many senses the value of an article in a review is infi nitely greater than that of the newspaper article, which has often to be written at short notice, and with very imperfect information. The contributor to the reviews writes his articles under more favourable conditions. He has more time to get 162 L. BRAKE

together his facts, and he is allowed more space in which to deal with his subject than is usually given to the journalist. He, too, has great advantages over the writer of books. 14

Notably, the effl orescence and diversity of his journalism practice follow his release from the burden of daily editing of the PMG after 1889. Stead’s new enterprises benefi ted from forethought, which was evident in his increasing propensity from the mid-1880s to refl ect on journalism and to theorize it. Outstanding in this regard are the visionary and hortatory articles that he wrote at the height of his power at the PMG , ‘Government by Journalism’ and ‘The Future of Journalism’, both of which appeared in the Contemporary Review in 1886. That their composition immediately followed his successful campaign in ‘The Maiden Tribute’ series for Parliament to raise the age of consent, and overlapped with his subsequent imprisonment for procurement of a young girl during the course of the campaign, may account for their ambitions for journalism, and for the confi dence, even cocky mischievousness, with which he identifi es journalism as a more direct form of democracy than government. In the eyes of Stead’s admirers and supporters, and perhaps in his self-esteem, Stead’s imprisonment served as testimony of his commitment to doing God’s work. His fellow campaigners included William Booth of the Salvation Army and Josephine Butler. His time in jail also spoke to radical modes of reform to which the press might be harnessed. Regarded by his critics as utopian or dystopian, these pieces nevertheless strongly resemble the cultural criticism of his critical predecessors and contemporaries: Matthew Arnold, George Eliot, Margaret Oliphant, and Thomas Carlyle. Stead’s pronouncements of the mid-1880s invoke the common man as the justifi cation for the press and as the basis for his insistence as a journalist on its responsibility to educate the democracy well. His ostensible embrace of this readership might be seen as a riposte to Wilkie Collins’s memorable warning about such an audience that appeared in Household Words in 1858. Writing nearly thirty years earlier than Stead and in the pages of and on behalf of a respectable and cheap literary weekly that rivals the journals he denounces, Collins claims to have discovered ‘an Unknown Public…to be counted by millions; the mysterious, the unfathomable, the universal public of the penny- novel Journals’, although by his own admission their reading matter is already well established and immensely popular. 15 Collins’s low opinion of them and their reading is unmistakeable: they are ‘the impenetrable Three Millions’ who are ‘in a literary sense, hardly beginning, as yet, to learn to REVOLUTIONS IN JOURNALISM: W.T. STEAD, INDEXING, AND ‘SEARCHING’ 163 read’. 16 Stead’s orientation to this readership similarly refl ects his roots (in evangelicalism), his location (in newspaper journalism where literary reading skills are not a prerequisite), and his historical moment (at the height of the New Journalism that is aimed at just those millions):

Such a newspaper would indeed be a great secular or civic church and democratic university…the very soul of our national unity; and its great central idea would be the self-sacrifi ce of the individual for the salvation of the community, the practical realization of the religious idea in national politics and social reform. 17

If Matthew Arnold saw poetry and then ‘Culture’ as intimately bound up with the ‘salvation’ of the polity, then Stead positioned journalism as the ‘soul’ of the nation. In their distinct ways, Stead and Arnold envisaged different ‘cultures’ as the replacement for religion and the vehicle of ‘salvation’. Where Arnold promulgated high literary culture, Stead advocated journalism. It is unsurprising, then, that after 1890—the year that marked his turn to the periodical press—Stead called the monthly reviews (as a periodical genre in their own right) ‘the Forum of Civilisation’. 18 For the most part, modern scholars have looked closely at this phase of Stead’s later career in relation to his innovative monthly, the Review of Reviews (1890–1936), which, as its title suggests, provided a digest of current periodical literature. 19 The Review of Reviews developed out of the generation of monthlies, like the Fortnightly and Contemporary , which broke with the established practice of anonymous reviewing and boldly published signed articles from the mid-1860s onwards. By 1890, these review monthlies were so well established, fl ourishing, and prominent that they justifi ed Stead’s decision to create his own guide to all types of periodicals that called themselves a review—the most prestigious genre among the divergent forms of print journalism in late Victorian Britain. I want to draw attention as well to his concurrent periodical indexes, which are seldom studied, and through them identify his ambient creative focus on journalism in this period after the repeal of the newspaper taxes in 1855, when a new generation of newspapers and periodicals fl ourished. Over the course of a dozen years, Stead’s annual periodical indexes appeared alongside the Review of Reviews as a related project that extended the cultural work of the Review. Sometimes—when for a short period the indexes also appeared monthly—they were described and distributed as Supplements to the Review of Reviews. 20 164 L. BRAKE

There are striking links between the journalism that Stead shaped and the twenty-fi rst-century press. Born in 1849, Stead joined the nascent profession in 1870, when its potential seemed unlimited, after the repeal of newspaper taxes and the second Reform Act, and as the Education Act was poised to improve literacy. As an evangelical, Stead often saw the press as a pilgrim, and its function as campaigning for ‘Truth’—as the London Times ’s foreign correspondent Marie Colvin averred in 2012, just before her death in war-torn Syria, ‘To speak truth to power.’ 21 The type of investigative, sensational journalism that Stead helped to develop, he deemed fi t for respectable dailies, and not just for popular papers such as the Sundays—for example, News of the World (1843–2011)—or the radical papers. We might say, in contemporary terms, that Stead appropriated ‘tabloid’ journalism for the ‘broadsheet’ press, and that his practices lie behind the London Daily Telegraph ’s 2009 exposure of MPs’ expenses or the Guardian ’s and the New York Times ’s decision to publish WikiLeaks, which began in 2008. Stead’s introduction of the techniques of ‘New Journalism’, some of which he imported from America, meant that when the Daily Mail appeared in 1896, more than twenty-fi ve years after Stead entered journalism at the Northern Echo , certain ‘New Journalism’ conventions became a staple part of the newspaper and periodical industry: tiered headlines, popular contents such as puzzles and competitions, newspaper graphics. larger fonts, and forms of ‘personal’ journalism such as interviews and ‘columns’. Less well known than his ‘New Journalism’ is Stead’s notion of ‘newspaper fi ction’, with its topics taken from ‘today’s’ news, which BBC Radio 4 recently adopted in a series of plays, From Fact to Fiction . Devised by Stead to increase readership of his projected Daily Paper (1893 and 1904), newspaper fi ction aimed to justify the introduction of fi ction into the pages of a newspaper. In November 1893, in an interview about the fi rst Daily Paper , Stead noted that ‘no fi rst-class newspaper demeans its columns by the publication of a novel in instalments’, before going on to outline his hybrid form. 22 At about the same time, he approached this through fi ction in the Review of Reviews Christmas annual, ‘Two and Two Makes Four’. A stand-alone form that is traditionally fi ction, this annual exemplifi es journalistic fi ction, but outside the pages of a daily newspaper. ‘Two and Two Makes Four’ devotes specifi c chapters to ‘The Daily Paper’ and ‘The Romance of the World’, but the new paper pervades the whole of the annual’s narrative. 23 Resisted by both novelists and journalists, Stead’s newspaper fi ction only materialized twice in a daily newspaper setting, in REVOLUTIONS IN JOURNALISM: W.T. STEAD, INDEXING, AND ‘SEARCHING’ 165

1893 and in 1903, and he probably helped pen both of these pieces. 24 In December 1893, a one-off short story appeared as ‘The Romance of the World from Day to Day’ in a sample Daily Paper , 25 and from January 1903, ‘To Be Continued in Our Next’ was published as twelve illustrated monthly, rather than daily, instalments in the Review of Reviews. The Daily Paper appeared subsequent to its completion for a single month only, with a serialized reprint of The Black Tulip , by Alexandre Dumas père . 26 Stead’s foresight about the industry becomes clear in other areas of his writings on different types of newspapers. Between 1893 and 1900, he presciently envisaged a model for media owners and the industry that soon became familiar to subsequent generations: a range of newspaper titles that covers multiple market niches. In an 1893 sample advertisement for ‘The Daily Paper Publications’ appearing in the Daily Paper specimen itself, 27 Stead envisages, in addition to the daily itself, the following types of publications in the Daily Paper project: a weekly, a (separate) Sunday paper, a newspaper-fi ction paper, a weekly tract, and occasional ‘Extras’, all of which should be derived from the copy in the daily itself. By comparison, in ‘Mr. Carnegie’s Conundrum. £40,000,000. What Shall I Do With It’ (in his 1900 Annual), in a chapter on ‘The Endowed Newspaper’, Stead proposes a three-tier model of a newspaper cluster. 28 First, he posits a daily Twopenny Times , whose losses would be paid for by a more popular halfpenny newspaper, the Daily Paper . Such a daily, he believed, would be modelled on the British Daily Mail and the New York Journal . It would have the run of all the copy of its ‘twopenny contemporary [the Twopenny Times ], but would be independently edited with a view to circulation’. 29 Lastly, a free newssheet, the Daily Visitor , would be distributed door to door and ‘depend for its profi ts upon the advertisements’. 30 This tripartite infrastructure also comprised a network of reporters embedded all over the world. A local component of neighbourhood newspaper resource centres stocked with newspapers and a telephone to the editor provided for citizen journalists. Lastly, there was an alternative news agency:

[H]aving affi liated journals in every town in the land [the imprint could] organise a news service of its own, which it would share with newspapers in all parts of the world, who would co-operate with it in the pursuit of the ideals of peace, fraternity, and progress. What Reuter and the Associated Press supply as a mere matter of business indifferently to all papers, the new papers which I am discussing would supply solely to journals which co-operate with them in the dissemination of sound principles and the combating of the war spirit in the nations. 31 166 L. BRAKE

There is without doubt a considerable element of self-conscious fantasy in Stead’s limning of this grandiose, if visionary, blueprint for an alternative press by a press baron, late in a life of modest wealth and of poor fi nancial management. In any case, neither the new Twopenny Times nor the free newssheet nor an alternative press agency materialized when Stead launched the Daily Paper in 1903. Yet the farsightedness of the plan remains undeniable, since it occurred at the beginning of a century that was to see the consolidation of press ownership of multiple titles. Commensurate with his involvement with the ‘Truth’ of the journalist’s near-divine ‘Word’, Stead conceptualized the power of the press in terms of the editor and the editorial, rather than the proprietor and his or her business interests. For Stead, the editor was at the imperial centre of information, and its distribution. Located between the people and legislation, Stead saw the editor in 1886 as an infl uential fi gure and a powerful shaper of policy. In Stead’s expression of his highest hopes for the press, he parallels his vision of the editor with the role of the Prime Minister, during a period when party politics and the press were conspicuously interdependent:

[T]he personality of the editor is the essential centre-point of my whole idea of the true journalism of the governing and guiding order, as distinguished from journalism of the mere critical or paragraph-quilting species. Where there is the combination of the two elements, the distinct personality of a competent editor and the varied interests and infl uences of an ably conducted paper, it is not diffi cult to see that such an editor might, if he wished it, become far the most permanently infl uential Englishman in the Empire. 32

From Stead’s perspective, the model was quite different from that we know today, and typical of what Mark Hampton treats as characteristic of an earlier period: journalism as part of the march of intellect. 33 For Stead, journalism remained predicated on the same adversarial relationship between an enlightened editor, who stood as the head of a civic or secular Church that directly represented the interests of the people, and a government more distant from the people, whose interests were less informed and less ethical. Nevertheless, through his hyperbole Stead articulated and theorized what was taken for granted in his day: namely, close links between the press and government that he confl ated into government by journalism. REVOLUTIONS IN JOURNALISM: W.T. STEAD, INDEXING, AND ‘SEARCHING’ 167

STEAD AND PERIODICAL LITERATURE: THE REVIEW OF REVIEWS AND ITS INDEXES In several ways, Stead’s career trajectory as a journalist was typical of his day. The accessibility of journalism as employment is demonstrated in his mode of entry, as a moonlighting, youthful, unpaid ‘correspondent’. Having learned on the job what became his profession, over the ensuing decade he made a typical move from regional journalism—in his case, a local daily paper, the Northern Echo , in Darlington—to a London daily, the Pall Mall Gazette. (Less usual was his appointment in his early twenties as editor of the northern daily.) As a nonconformist, with strong religious convictions, Stead was also emblematic of late nineteenth-century journalists of the campaigning and investigative type. In his writing, his biblically based training and sermon-imprinted intellect are clear in a number of features: his morality-dominated approach; the discourses of journalism that he developed; the tenor of his language, which is exemplifi ed in both If Christ Came to Chicago and ‘The Maiden Tribute’; and the techniques of education and access that he pioneers and adopts, later dubbed the ‘New Journalism’. Another lifelong orientation of Stead’s—to the governed as well as the governors—is similarly infl ected. All of these characteristics, which date from his nonconformist and regional habitus, are clear from the commencement of the fi rst phase of his career on the Northern Echo . Stead’s early professional life gives a welcome fi llip to research on the scope and roles of the regional press, and on the close relations between non- conformism and journalism in the second half of the nineteenth century. Stead’s next period, at the PMG , was fortuitous, in that it gave him three solid years in which to learn the craft of metropolitan daily journalism as an assistant before its editor, John Morley, departed and Stead replaced him. Like Morley, who consequently became an MP, Stead retained a decided orientation of the paper to Parliament and national governance. His notable campaigns—on the state of the Navy, on raising the age of consent, and on Britain’s deployment of its forces in the Sudan—stemmed from his notion of the function of the press as an infl uential participant in the forging of national policy. His proprietor’s reservations about the ‘fi t’ between the upper-class readers of the PMG and Stead’s conviction politics and sensationalist language resulted in a growing mutual dissatis- faction between proprietor and editor that led to Stead’s leaving the paper after a decade. 168 L. BRAKE

From 1890, when he was forty-one, Stead was free to develop various organs for his diverse interests. Besides Borderland , Help , and the Review of Reviews , there was the publishing list that he developed around his monthly. Moreover, during this period Stead freed himself from the single occupation of an editor under a proprietor like Henry Yates Thompson (who took over ownership of the PMG in 1878), and expanded his professional range to publisher and proprietor, twin roles that he united, just as Dickens had done thirty years earlier, when he served as both editor and proprietor of All the Year Round (1859–70). Another earlier example of publisher, proprietor, and editor from the Victorian period, whom Dickens consciously rivalled in his two weeklies, lay with the Chambers brothers, who built a publishing empire around their core organ, Chambers ’ Edinburgh Journal (1832 onwards). 34 Like with Dickens and the Chambers brothers, Stead’s ownership and editorship of the Review of Reviews ensured that it had unique elements. He ingeniously developed the two main aspects of George Newnes’s wildly successful weekly, Tit–Bits (1881–1984), by creating a digest of other papers. Stead’s Review of Reviews presented direct nuggets of articles that could be easily read and, what is more, at a cheap price. Yet while entertainment of the kind that Tit Bits offered was part of Stead’s plan for the new title, it was the case that the topics of education and reform took precedence, which Newnes, who was Stead’s original partner in editing this monthly, wryly regretted and resisted. Quickly departing to found the immensely popular Strand Magazine (1891 onwards), Newnes fi lled it with fi ction and other belles lettres entertainments, which Stead gingerly avoided, as well as generous illustrations that Stead only eventually embraced. Stead’s overriding plan for the Review of Reviews , however, was to bring the distilled wisdom of the expensive quarterlies and monthlies to ‘busy’ men and women who lacked both the time and the income to keep abreast of the best cultural journalism of their day. In other words, the Review of Reviews was a magazine about journalism, dedicated to recirculating the delights to be found in other reviews. Each Review of Reviews number opened with a leader, ‘The Progress of the World’, where Stead laid out his carefully weighed assessment of the social and political events of the past month. His designs on his readers were undisguised. For example, since he was not content with his trawl for politically informed women journalists as employees, and perhaps as readers, Stead quickly staged a competition based on their reading of his leaders over a six-month period, on which they would be examined. And what REVOLUTIONS IN JOURNALISM: W.T. STEAD, INDEXING, AND ‘SEARCHING’ 169 was the reward? It was a three-year bursary for higher education to study political economy. Digests of the contents of other monthlies followed the leader, organised diversely, by topic, by journal issue, and then by cherry- picked articles. For instance, among the alluring article titles appearing in the table of contents for March 1890, which listed ten departments, in department ‘5’, headed ‘Notable Articles From the Reviews’, are the following mixture of current events, human interest, and educational topics: ‘The Parnell Commission’, ‘John Ruskin of Brantwood’, ‘How to Read Books’, ‘My Ideal of Marriage’, ‘Mr Grant Allen’, ‘The Secret of Mesmerism’, and ‘Universal Suffrage’. Moreover, the attribution in the table of contents to some of the original authors of these reviewed articles (such as Mona Caird and Annie Besant) also heightened readers’ interest in Stead’s journal, although Caird and Besant were not writing for it. Occupying eight of the ten departments, these discursively augmented lists with their headline topics precede the last two listing sections of the issue, ‘New Books of the Month’ and ‘Indexes’. The innovative result was a bustling miscellany, whose contents were unifi ed by the voice of the digesting editor and its organization into regular departments, to which readers could turn with familiarity. Each issue of the Review of Reviews had monthly indexes that served as a guide both to its own contents and to those of the journals it digested. At sixpence, it was a bargain, not unlike its predecessors, the new shilling monthlies of the 1860s (such as the Cornhill Magazine and Macmillan ’ s Magazine ) that were packed with instalments of one or more novels at the price of a single title part-issue. In this sense, the Review of Reviews was an information- based alternative to the popular fi ction-based monthlies and the new generation of reviews (such as the Fortnightly and the Nineteenth Century ), but its kinship to the annual indexes to come, pared down to bibliography, is also detectable. Undoubtedly, Stead’s major innovation in the Review of Reviews was its indexing, month by month, of a cross-section of the contents of the periodical press. Signifi cantly for Stead, the former newspaper man, one of his models was the Times , the only newspaper that took itself suffi ciently seriously as a journal of record to issue an Index to its contents, although these were quarterly rather than the monthly frequency Stead chose for his wider coverage of multiple titles. Other periodical reviews and magazines issued annual or perhaps semi-annual indexes, but only for their own titles. Stead combined this drilled-down index function with a second innovative feature: review-like discursive digests of selected articles and issues, the likes of which only appeared elsewhere, haphazardly, in 170 L. BRAKE odd journals at the time, when an issue or article caught their interest. Furthermore, the Review of Reviews contained a separate section that Stead called the ‘Guide’, initially to British and then to foreign periodical titles. This feature of Stead’s followed the earlier example of various Newspaper Directories , which expanded to include periodicals in 1860, when A Dictionary of Magazines , Reviews and Periodicals fi rst appeared in Charles Mitchell’s Newspaper Press Directory . By 1890, these newspaper directory lists of periodical titles were accompanied by explanatory paragraphs for each title (from 1860), the lists gradually expanding to include foreign titles at about the time Stead founded the Review of Reviews in 1890. 35 Stead’s attention to foreign titles in the periodicals is also evident in the early years of his annual indexes, which began to appear a year after the Review of Reviews . His routine inclusion of European and other so-called foreign journals in most departments in the Review of Reviews and the annual indexes, then, was part of a current trend to refl ect the international scope of journalism by detailing information about the overseas press. For example, in the Review of Reviews issue for February 1892, most of the seventeen journals covered in the ‘Reviews Reviewed’ department are selected from British higher journalism, but in the discursive paragraphs, three French titles and an American one are listed. In March, the selection of reviews reviewed is different, and includes The Prussian Year Book , its editor, and two French magazines. Beginning with ‘The New Books of the Month’, the indexes in the Review of Reviews continue with ‘Photographs of the Month’ and ‘The Contents of Reviews and Magazines at Home and Abroad’, which are listed alphabetically by journal, with selected articles named under each title. Additional headings for ‘Poetry’, ‘Music’, and ‘Art’ journals are followed by annotated lists of the ‘Contents of the Leading Foreign Periodicals’, which are organized in categories in an order that may refl ect status: ‘German’, ‘French’, ‘Italian’, ‘Spanish’, ‘Dutch’, ‘Scandinavian’, and then ‘Military’ periodicals. 36 The index section at the back of this particular issue comprises 21 pages out of 126 (roughly a sixth of the contents). Its readership, too, extends from the new category of ‘the busy man’ and ‘the busy woman’ (thus the digests) to journalists, who might use the indexes for their writing about contemporary issues, and to librarians who could better answer their readers’ queries, as well as to students. While the busy man and woman constitute the market niche of new journalism more generally, for whose custom Stead was in competition with a plethora of titles, the narrower, more specialized readerships of journalists and librarians exemplify Stead’s capacity to identify a REVOLUTIONS IN JOURNALISM: W.T. STEAD, INDEXING, AND ‘SEARCHING’ 171 fresh group of readers in specifi c new professions that were forming at this time, 37 and to analyze the potential breadth of the consumption of print. Stead was aiming at a crossover publication, for consumption by both the general public and specialists. In addition, aspects of Stead’s support of the women’s movement were innovative: his readiness to employ women in his fi rm and his promotion of the development of woman journalists in the profession more generally. In the fi rst year of the Review of Reviews , he had already hired a female indexer, Elizabeth Hetherington, who eventually led a team to produce the annual that appeared during the next twelve years. On several occasions, Stead writes enthusiastically about the new science of indexing, its processes and its functions: ‘For it [the Annual Index] is no mere alphabetical arrangement of titles or of catchwords in titles; it is a series of carefully classifi ed bibliographical monographs on all the more important subjects of human interest that have cropped up in the course of the twelvemonth.’ 38 Later on, he associates his annual index with the delivery of factual news in daily newspapers: ‘Year by year it falls to my lot to chronicle the births, marriages, and deaths of the periodical literature of our time’, 39 and he repeatedly, if irregularly, credits Hetherington with her work; he is the publisher here, and she the editor. She is to be found in the 1911 census, where she lists her occupation as a ‘literary indexer’, perhaps one of the earliest professionals of this kind. 40 Stead’s commitment to indexing and his choice of the type of documents indexed are indicative of his identifi cation of journalism itself as both a subject (to be indexed) and a market (of journalist practitioners). In the indexes of both the periodical and the annual, Stead was providing a tool for his fellow journalists and a technology for better, more informed journalism. The indexes are testimony to Stead’s broader commitment to the profession, and his continued active interest in the organization of journalism. Moreover, Stead’s indexing projects tell us something about the status of periodical journalism at the time. The indexes are related to journalism not as ephemera, but as a durable record, in the bound annual or semi-annual Library Editions , produced from the early nineteenth century, for those readers who collected runs of periodicals for their private or club libraries. These bound collections of quarterly, monthly, or weekly issues translated ephemeral issues into a volume format aimed at a future in the institutions of stored knowledge. This is the form in which we are accustomed to read Victorian periodicals, but we should remember that it is only one form in which they were issued. 41 Stead’s indexes implicitly 172 L. BRAKE substantiated his claims that the periodical press made a serious and last- ing contribution to culture, as access points to educational knowledge, as ‘literature’ (‘periodical literature’), and as powerful political analysis and critique, which deserved to be collected for posterity and to be indexed. Like the journalists who were already familiar with The Times index, the librarians, readers, and researchers in public libraries (the second specialist readership that Stead targets) were provided for by an earlier reference work, Poole’s series of indexes. 42 Yet the differences between Stead’s indexes and Poole’s were considerable, and point to Stead’s roots in journalism and his orientation to journalists and to the current reading public, the buyers and readers of his monthly review. Unlike Poole, Stead’s primary engagement is with currency, and the present takes precedence over his concern for the future of journals once they have become historical. In this sense, Stead’s indexing is an ingenious embellishment of the publishers’ notion of the library edition, which had prolonged the market and lives of individual periodical titles for nearly a century. Stead’s plan was to exploit in his indexes every iteration of a journal’s production: the periodic issues of the journals over the year, but across the board, col- lectively, to provide a representative monthly profi le of the breadth of the periodical press; and their annual volumes, each separate title with its own index, for which Stead again was to provide a collective index across titles. Indeed, Stead’s annual indexes coincided annually with the publication of the journals’ library editions, supplanting their single-title indexes in a swoop. Poole’s indexes had no such currency, or link to the rhythms of the industry. William Frederick Poole was a librarian. Nevertheless, Stead may have identifi ed the libraries as a source of sales for his indexes, by taking his lead from Poole and his indexes, which Stead set out to supplant and overtake. Inevitably, Stead places his own indexes, in relation to Poole’s, in one of the fascinating prefaces or introductions that he contributes to each annual volume:

Our ‘Annual Index’ came a long time after Dr. Poole’s, but it also fi lls a useful mission … In this country it is more indispensable than ‘Poole’, fi rst, because it indexes a large number of English periodicals not included in the American work; secondly, because its fundamental idea is bibliographical; and, last, but not least, it gives a second reference in all cases where the articles have been summarised or otherwise noticed in the London edition of the Review of Reviews. In America, for similar reasons, the ‘Annual Index’ is a valuable supplement to ‘Poole’. Its classifi cation enables a student to REVOLUTIONS IN JOURNALISM: W.T. STEAD, INDEXING, AND ‘SEARCHING’ 173

see together in one place all the articles on any subject he wishes to get up, with cross-references to almost every kindred topic…When the articles [in Review of Reviews ] are bound together in the same sequences as that in which they appear in the Index, it will be seen that historical subjects are treated chronologically whenever possible; controversies are given as they take place in the reviews, with due note taken of replies and rejoinders; synonymous headings are avoided; ambiguous titles are amended; and the whole work is arranged in the most convenient form in one alphabet of subject-headings. 43

That the cultural location (in journalism and librarianship) of these two indexing projects differs is clear from the material outcomes: Stead’s plan of indexing the representation of the recent present annually, and Poole’s more historical scheme of a retrospective compendium of many years at a time. In Stead’s annual indexes, ‘news’ and currency are still uppermost. Stead begins now , disregarding the past except as it is represented in the present. He is not aiming at historians of the past, but at journalists and other writers of contemporary history. It is a journalist’s view of history, an editor-proprietor’s alertness to sales, and the identifi cation of journalists, librarians, and students as a group of potential consumers.

The need for an Index of the more important articles in the periodicals of the world is recognized by all students, but the general public is not given to study. Hence this year I have abandoned the attempt to publish the Annual Index at the low fi gure [of two shillings], which could only be justifi ed by a very wide circulation. Librarians, journalists, and students fi nd the Index indispensable, but as hardly one per cent of readers bind their magazines into volumes, subscribers to such an index must necessarily be few. 44

This bid of Stead’s for a wide readership for his annual index is evident in his prescient attempt, in the fi rst volume of the annual only, to index photographs as well as periodicals and periodical articles. Illustrated journalism inevitably counted by the early 1890s among the most popular of genres, and the presence of photography, rare in newspapers, increasingly distinguished periodicals from the more austere dailies. Stead’s idea of introducing a visual element to his potentially drab annual index of texts is another indication of his alertness to the power of the new in journalism, but, as he notes, it did not attract enough of the ‘general public’ as he had hoped. 45 By contrast, Stead persisted tenaciously with his policy of inclusion of international journalism in the annual and monthly indexes, struggling to 174 L. BRAKE continue it despite a shortage of cash. The conspectus of world journalism—largely but not exclusively in English—recorded in these indexes is a testimony to the global reach of the nineteenth-century press, evident in the networks visible in newspapers of the day. Stead’s insistence on retaining the international periodicals in the ‘Guide’ and listings of his annual indexes is a legacy of his decades as an editor of daily papers, where interna- tionalism is pervasive. Still, the overview in the indexes of named journals with editor, price, and type of contents, as well as notes on specifi c articles, remains an invaluable resource to researchers today. The second volume of the annual index for 1891 offers the best coverage of the European press in the series, and the breadth of titles is considerable: under ‘Foreign Magazines and Reviews’ there are seven pages of German titles, each with a descriptive paragraph, seven pages of French titles, one page of Italian titles (more than twenty-fi ve titles), one page of Russian titles, one page of Dutch titles, and less than one page each for Spanish, Portuguese, Polish, Scandinavian, and Armenian. 46 A shortage of revenue continued to infl u- ence Stead’s publishing fi rm and policies after 1890; so too did the equally familiar and persistent problems of an oversupply of contents, a shortage of space, and pressing deadlines. Stead, in keeping with his personal style of (new) journalism, often addressed readers directly with his troubles. These matters weighed on him throughout the run of the Review of Reviews. Writing in the fi rst issue, he explains its ‘improvised’ character on the basis that ‘[i]t is less than a month since the publication of the REVIEW was decided upon’. 47 As the Review of Reviews developed a routine production mode and schedule, this problem took the form not of improvisation, but of timely publication. Five months later, when he discusses the progress of the Review of Reviews after Newnes’s departure, he laments the slippage of publication date, attributing it to the proliferation of material, its late arrival, and the labour to index it:

There has been much delay and irregularity in the publication of the REVIEW. It has gone to press on the 1st or the 2nd, but owing to the fact that the circulation has never fallen below 50,000, and that we are now printing 60,000, it has not been issued to the public until the 8th, the 10th, or even the 12th. In future…I hope it will always be out by the 6th at the latest. 48

In the same early issue, he also announced his desire (already!) to double the frequency of publication from monthly to fortnightly, in the course REVOLUTIONS IN JOURNALISM: W.T. STEAD, INDEXING, AND ‘SEARCHING’ 175 of explaining the expansion of pagination of issues from seventy-two to ninety-six:

It is simply impossible to cope with the periodicals of the world in a Review appearing only once a month. The enlargement already announced has already proved inadequate. Nothing short of the publication of a real Fortnightly Review will enable me to do more than touch with the tip of my fi ngers the constantly increasing mass of the periodical literature of the world. 49

Similar accounts of the pressure of time on editors appear regularly in Stead’s representation of the experience of editing all three indexing titles. Refl ecting twenty years of daily journalism, his consciousness of deadlines, his interest in the production process, and his willingness to share them with readers are closely related. If he has a tendency to boast as he divulges changes—in publication date, in contents, in price—his is not unique among nineteenth-century editors. What is distinctive is that Stead regularly turns such announcements of business or journalism processes into lengthy, chatty copy, a mode of sharing his thoughts and of intimacy with readers, an instance of his advocacy of personal journalism. Such accounts provide impetus for Stead’s many prefaces, his introductions, his addresses to the reader, and his headnotes in the review and the indexes. We may view the subsequent proliferation of Stead’s titles and projects as his diverse strategies for dealing with the problems of deadlines, frequency, and abundance of material: multi-purposing of both the research (the basic task in the offi ce of the indexing) and copy recycling or replicat- ing the monthly indexes by incorporating them into an annual index; by using them as the basis for articles in the Review of Reviews , or to spark one of his pamphlets, annuals, or standalone titles; or, alternatively, by narrow- ing the focus of the journal—through hiving off specialist areas of reviewing and niche readerships into separate publications, such as Borderland or Help , and the monthly indexes. 50 Thus Stead used the monthly magazine as the centrepiece of his publishing list, slimming it on the birth of new titles and adjusting it to their return. These various efforts to organize the indexes over thirteen years indicate a high degree of interaction among these titles. The interchange of topics, articles, and entire departments is observable. Like other publishers with multiple projects, Stead moved material among them. The monthly review, the annuals, and the indexes were demonstrably from the same stable. 176 L. BRAKE

TODAY: STEAD AND THE NEWSPAPER REVOLUTION The anniversary of Stead’s centenary in April 2012 was celebrated in London in the midst of an investigation of phone hacking by journalists on a Sunday newspaper in the UK, which involved networking between members of the press, journalists and editors, the metropolitan police, and government, including government ministers. Issues also arose around the basic (and normal) processes of news gathering in tabloid journalism, where stories are aggressively investigative, and often made and constructed rather than ‘found’ and reported. Stead’s development of sensationalist journalism, his interest in Pulitzer’s and Hearst’s notions of making news, his own practice in ‘The Maiden Tribute’ story, and his persistent commentary on relations between press and government all resonate in this environment. In response to the widespread castigation of the News of the World ’s methods of research, Roy Greenslade, a journalist and academic, spelt out what he claims is obvious to journalists and the police. In his view, the relationship is a circular one. Journalists, by invoking ‘public interest’, are freer to hack phones and emails than the police, who require court orders and can instead use journalists’ fi ndings to help convict a criminal, on which the journalists can then report. 51 Such hacking transfers the private to the public sphere in a combination of journalism with technology, policing, the law, and the nexus of politicians and newspaper publishers. While the courts have yet to decide on many of these charges, a large number of victims have settled for large sums from News International for the invasion of their privacy. In the late nineteenth century, the alleged violation of privacy was a key element of the disapproval of the new journalism, personal as it was. Not only were readers vouchsafed the journalist’s personal views; the private lives of celebrities were also explored—some felt they were inappropri- ately exposed—in the new format of interviews, advocated and pioneered by Stead. The events of 2011–2013 touch on Stead’s legacy. They also sit uncomfortably with the perceived demise of print journalism. In the immediate aftermath of the hacking allegations, the News of the World was summarily shut, and the 168-year-old title lost—perhaps more easily done under pressure of the encroaching digital future. The implication of these unsavoury practices of the press, government, and the police was initially taken very seriously in Britain; a report by a respected judge, Mr Justice Leveson, was commissioned by government and debate about a new form of more effective press regulation has ensued. A measure of where we are REVOLUTIONS IN JOURNALISM: W.T. STEAD, INDEXING, AND ‘SEARCHING’ 177 at, however, may be the remarks of a media blogger, Fleet Street Fox, who has dismissed Leveson’s report as irrelevant—an old man’s rant about an outmoded medium. 52 Her irreverent hyperbole jars us into understanding that Stead’s initiatives in the heyday of new (print) journalism and its indexing are coming to a close. Print journalism is no longer the main source of news for most of the population in the UK and USA, and is certainly not the fi rst source. ‘News now is not the newspaper’ insists another contemporary journalist, Lionel Barber, editor of the Financial Times , in an interview with Greenslade. 53 What is its remaining value? ‘It is still a vital form of advertising’ and ‘a fashion accessory, a marketing device’. Since Barber is certain ‘that [the future] will be digital’, he is revamping the FT ’s production process to ini- tiate a ‘digital fi rst’ workplace ‘in this period of transition’. He is content to ride ‘the seesaw’ between print and digital, in a stealthy management plan for extinction: ‘Let it drift down without calling up a storm.’ Avoiding the storm is not an option for libraries. We are in the midst of a radical revolution in library delivery, conservation, and storage of the historical press. In a common environment of digital technology, developments in access to current and historical newspapers and periodicals have converged and overlap. Although remediation of print has a separate history in library management that involves the capture of many (particularly newspaper) titles on microfi lm from the 1950s, what we experience in media research closely mirrors current serial production and access: when newsprint was the dominant medium, retrospectively we normally read bound copies where titles were held by a library, or, where titles were not on the shelves, microfi lm surrogates. Now a small proportion of these bound library editions are selectively remediated to digital surrogates. The success of this digitization policy lies in its appeal to both libraries and researchers, the former because it helps solve the shortage of shelf space and the latter because digital formats offer distinctive fi nding technology. As a result, retention of print newspapers and periodicals and access to them are disappearing at many libraries, as they are out-housed, or scrapped, in the mistaken belief that digital surrogates replace print copies because they are one and the same. An extreme example of difference between historical and digital texts is the assimilation of the ‘information’ element of Stead’s annual indexes into the Masterfi le database, without visibility of the historical volumes, their prefaces, announcements, notes, index categories, or system. A more common format of database, which offers ‘facsimiles’ of issues for browsing as well as search functions 178 L. BRAKE to fi nd ‘information’, is better in that it represents the historical issue and allows the user to read it as well as search it, sometimes in complex ways. However, the digital edition has its own materiality. It is not the same as print, which has a different colour, size, texture, bulk, view of the page, and page turning; and often paratextual elements, such as covers and advertisements, which may be found in print copies where they are absent in the one copy of the run that has been digitized or microfi lmed. At the moment, when current challenges by digital media to the advertising revenue and timeliness of print have resulted in a sharp diminution of the print sector, the breadth and variety of Stead’s career should, in principle, offer an unparalleled view of late nineteenth-century print journalism. Modern researchers’ encounters with digital surrogates of historical newspapers have intriguingly alerted us to the special qualities of print. We are now more aware than ever of the normalized formats of the book or codex on which the newspaper is based. Whenever we encounter print, we note with new awareness the pleasures of the eye span of pages, page turning, and the ease of browsing. We become responsive as well to both the tactility of paper and the material newspaper: its rustling sound, its folded form, the ways we manage it between the fi ngers, its non-uniform size, its lightness, and its disposability. Not to be overlooked are its comfort functions—to sit on, to keep warm or dry—and its variety of other uses—to line trunks and the cat tray, to wrap chips, light the fi re, and cover exercise books. How shall we live without the tangibility and useful- ness of such paper? Stead’s commitment to print as the most democratic form of communication prompts us to consider his claim, its properties and assumptions, when the technology and material culture have changed: the ostensibly indissoluble link between paper and communication has broken; it is replaced by other portable communication devices, all tech- nologically digital. Even if we rue the loss of physical contact with print, we appreciate the many pleasures of the virtual text. For historical newspapers, they include, above all, improved (although not universal) access and the power to search, which, for students of the press, has a particular force, given the cascading bulk of the text. 54 Still, the amount of searchable digitized text remains limited. If we look at the nineteenth-century historical serials online from the British Library, ProQuest, and Gale Cengage, we can see that these providers have issued only a very small proportion of the runs of the 75,000 distinct titles that John North lists in the Waterloo Directory . 55 So far we have approximately 400 titles potentially available REVOLUTIONS IN JOURNALISM: W.T. STEAD, INDEXING, AND ‘SEARCHING’ 179 in digital format, which is about 0.5 % of the total number. These fi gures necessarily expose the degree of selection that publishers exercise. As a consequence, scholars need to scrutinize publishers’ criteria for selecting some of these titles and not others. We can witness the power of these providers to infl uence research for the good in the former 19th Century British Library Newspapers database (now incorporated in http://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/ ), which, as the product of a national library, made it policy from the start to include titles from across the UK, thus identifying the prodigious population of the regional press, and establishing it in parallel with the metropolitan press, normally represented in libraries by the London Times. The fi rst phase of this project issued a map of Great Britain, which showed geographically the selection of titles. The map shows that 19th Century British Library Newspapers gave us access to Stead’s fi rst paper, the Darlington daily, the Northern Echo , as well as the PMG . Under different criteria of selection, and through an entirely different database, the Review of Reviews appears in ProQuest’s British Periodicals. Both the British Library Newspaper Archive and the ProQuest site include a range of the national press in which these titles operated; that is, part of their context is ‘nearby’, within the same database, digitally available, and probably accessible, on the assumption that if you have access to one title in a database, you may have access to them all. Better research, however, is bound to result for those who have access to the databases and the patience to ‘turn the pages’ of print copies as well. This availability of runs of some of Stead’s serials is a signifi cant factor in the likelihood of more as well as improved scholarship. Yet even in the case of a fi gure as well known as Stead, these digital resources have shortcomings. We need to remember that the invisible majority of titles listed in the Waterloo Directory are intellectually dangerous to ignore. Stead’s Help , for example, has not been digitized and, following the incorporation of information from the annual indexes into Masterfi le (see earlier), the full text and contents of the annual index volumes themselves came online in 2013 from ProQuest in C19. Moreover, Stead also counts among the still small population of named nineteenth-century journalists whose careers modern scholars understand in what was a growing profession. Most journalists have yet to be identifi ed and profi led. Although Stead’s fame owes much to his journalism practices, it is also attributable to a combination of his early association with key institutions and people—the Liberal party, John Morley, and the PMG —whose political signifi cance has long been of interest to historians of late Victorian Britain. 56 180 L. BRAKE

I have focused on Stead the journalist, not the man. There are many contemporary accounts in the archive as well as his journalism that attest to his complexity and fallibility as well as his strengths. He was notably, even alarmingly, unfashionable in his dress. His contemporaries experienced his manners as abrupt and idiosyncratic, and they associated his behaviour with northern rather than southern mores. Moreover, he claimed never to have been to the theatre well beyond his fortieth birthday. At one and the same time, Stead seemed to be both evangelical and prurient, as in ‘The Maiden Tribute’ series of events. He was both clearly imperialist and a campaigner for international peace. He was a man who put trust in fact, while he was also a psychic. Furthermore, he unapologetically changed his mind and positions: from a defender of Christianity to a member of what he called a Secular Church; from supporting and being supported by Cecil Rhodes to objecting to the second Anglo-Boer War; and from extolling and imitating Hearst to castigating him. It is unsurprising, then, that some modern commentators on Stead approach him predominantly as a man, from one or other of these confl icting perspectives—as an unblemished Christian, as sexually predatory, as an imperialist, or as a ‘hypocrite’. Over his career, Stead emerged as a driven and impassioned but unpredictable iconoclast, capable of performing all of these roles, content with the swagger of the ‘Stead’ brand being what he made it, as he and politics and conditions changed. For me, what is most clear and of most moment is the extent to which Stead was a radical journalist, fl ourishing in a formative period of the growth of journalism as a profession and medium; along with George Newnes, Alfred Harmsworth, John Lane, and William Randolph Hearst, Stead’s publishing practices were part of his vision or ‘big plan’ for the future of print journalism. Not only a pioneer of the ‘New Journalism’ for which he is recognized, Stead located journalism in the larger matrix of publishing infrastructure, and developed indexing as a tool for the trade. His nose for news, his alertness to the developments of journalism around him and abroad, his alacrity in experimentation with journalism models and forms, the breadth of his experience: all these are everywhere apparent in his work. His fascination with the profession, his consciousness of what he was part of, and his attempts to fashion its tools—layout, design, journalism fi ction, model structures for the industry, and indexes to back issues—invite more attention. Moreover, his numerous articles on the theory of the press, its functions and its responsibilities, have yet to be located alongside nineteenth-century literary and cultural criticism and journalism by fi gures such as Matthew Arnold, Walter Bagehot, George Eliot, and George Henry Lewes. REVOLUTIONS IN JOURNALISM: W.T. STEAD, INDEXING, AND ‘SEARCHING’ 181

NOTES 1. W.T. Stead died in May 1912, and the British Library Newspaper Library at Colindale closed on 8 November 2013. 2. W. T. Stead, ‘Programme’, Review of Reviews 1 (1890): 14. For more about Stead and the ‘mighty maze’, see James Mussell and Suzanne Paylor, ‘Mapping the “Mighty Maze”: The Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition’ 19 : Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century : 1 (2005). http:// www.19.bbk.ac.uk/article/view/ntn.437 (accessed 29 March 2015). 3. [Anon.,] ‘Mr. Stead—“Songs of a Navvy”’, Star , 20 April 1912: 2f. 4. [Anon.,] ‘W. T. Stead’, Daily Chronicle , 19 April 1912: 6c. 5. [Anon.,] ‘On the Sinking of the Titanic: Some Notable Victims’, The Times , 18 April 1912: 12b. 6. Anon, ‘On the Sinking of the Titanic: Some Notable Victims’, The Times , 18 April 1912: 12c 7. ‘S’, ‘W. T. Stead’, Westminster Gazette , 17 April 1912: 1c, 2a. 8. See John Durham Peters, ‘Discourse Network 1912’, in Roger Luckhurst et al. eds., W. T. Stead : Newspaper Revolutionary (London: British Library, 2012), 166–80. 9. I note the formation of an organization—the International Association for Literary Journalism Studies—with a mission statement that sponsors conferences. ‘Mission Statement’. 7 December 2014. http://ialjs.org/mission- statement ) (accessed 5 September 2013). Recent debate about the category and its meaning may be found at Mark Athitakis, ‘NBCC Reads: Norman Sims on Literary Journalism,’ http://bookcritics.org/blog/archive/nbcc- reads-a-last-word-on-literary-journalism-from-norman-sims (accessed 5 September 2013). 10. The Contemporary Review belonged to the new generation of monthly reviews established in the mid-1860s. Its distinctive note was Christian, a characteristic reaffi rmed in 1877 when its editor and many of its contributors left to start a more liberal journal, unconstrained by evangelical proprietors. 11. Early volumes (1892–1894) of the annual index carried variants of the title Index to Periodical Literature of the World. 12. Stead’s evangelicalism is most visible in two famous pieces: fi rst, his series on child prostitution and the campaign to raise the age of consent in ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’, published in the PMG in July 1885; and second, in his book If Christ Came to Chicago (1894), in which he named the rich public men who were landlords of brothels in downtown Chicago. However, this strain of Stead’s writing is pervasive, and evident in his fi ction and his book reviews as well as his investigative articles. 182 L. BRAKE

13. For a contrary view, see Dallas Liddle, The Dynamics of Genre : Journalism and the Practice of Literature in Mid-Victorian Britain (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2009). 14. Stead, ‘Preface’, Index to the Periodicals of 1900 (London: Editorial Offi ce, 1901), iii–iv. 15. [Wilkie Collins], “The Unknown Public’, Household Words 18 (21 August 1858): 217 16. [Collins], ‘The Unknown Public’, 222. 17. W. T. Stead, ‘The Future of Journalism’, Contemporary Review 50 (1886): 678. 18. For this motto see the epigraph ‘The Monthly Review has become the Forum of Civilisation’ on the title page of Stead’s fi rst annual index, Annual Index of Periodicals and Photographs (London: Editorial Offi ce, 1891), and on the title pages of the subsequent volumes in this annual series. For more on the indexes, see pp. 152–155 below. 19. For example, see Joseph Baylen, ‘W. T. Stead as Publisher and Editor of the Review of Reviews’, Victorian Periodicals Review 12.2 (1979), 70–84; Laurel Brake, ‘“Fiction of Another Sort”: News and the Novel in W.T. Stead’s Journalism’, in Marie-Françoise Cachin and Claire Parfait, eds., Au Bonheur du feuilleton (Paris: CREAPHIS, 2007), 179–92; Gowan Dawson, ‘The Review of Reviews and the New Journalism in Late-Victorian Britain’, in Geoffey Cantor et al. eds., Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 172–95; Alexis Easley, ‘W. T. Stead, Late Victorian Feminism, and the Review of Review ’, in W. T. Stead Newspaper Revolutionary , 37–58. 20. For more on supplements and their multiple purposes, see ‘Supplements’, a special issue of Victorian Periodicals Review , ed. Marysa Demoor and K. McDonald, 43.2 (2010). 21. Marie Colvin was a foreign correspondent working for the London Sunday Times when she was killed in Syria in February 2012. At the time of her death, her courageous journalism was characterized by this phrase, which originated in a Quaker pamphlet published in the 1950s. 22. W. T. Stead, Interview, Sunday Tribune [Chicago] (November 1893), quoted in Frederic Whyte, The Life of W. T. Stead , 2 vols.(New York: Houghton Miffl in and Jonathan Cape, 1925), 1.332. 23. Chapters 2 and 10, respectively. Typically, Stead deploys a number of different platforms to advertise his new project. 24. Heading the fi rst instalment of ‘To be Continued in our Next’ is an explanatory note, in which reference is made several times to the authors of the serial, in the plural, as ‘the story-tellers’ and ‘all our story-tellers’. See ‘To Be Continued in Our Next’, Review of Reviews 27 (January 1903): 79. For the daily issues of the Daily Paper that followed a year later, it proved diffi cult REVOLUTIONS IN JOURNALISM: W.T. STEAD, INDEXING, AND ‘SEARCHING’ 183

to fi nd willing novelist-journalists, and Stead resorted to an existing story by Alexandre Dumas, The Black Tulip , which was translated and published in serial instalments daily. 25. Daily Paper , 4 October 1893, 20–22. 26. For Stead’s newspaper fi ction, see Brake, ‘“Fiction of Another Sort”: News and the Novel in W.T. Stead’s Journalism’, in Cachin and Parfait, eds., Au Bonheur du Feuilleton , 179–92. 27. Daily Paper , 4 October 1893: 32. 28. W. T. Stead, Mr. Carnegie ’s Conundrum , Review of Reviews Annual for 1900 (London: Review of Reviews Offi ce, 1900), 146–58. 29. Stead, Mr. Carnegie ’s Conundrum , 153 30. Stead, Mr. Carnegie ’s Conundrum , 154 31. Stead, Mr. Carnegie ’s Conundrum , 157. 32. W. T. Stead, ‘The Future of Journalism’, Contemporary Review 50 (1886): 663–64. 33. Mark Hampton, Visions of the Press in Britain , 1850–1950 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2004). 34. For more on Chambers ’ Edinburgh Journal , see Aileen Fyfe, Steam- Powered Knowledge : William Chambers and the Business of Publishing , 1820–1860 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), and Bill Bell, ed. The Edinburgh History of the Book in Scotland , Volume 3 : Ambition and Industry , 1800–1880 . 4 vols. (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2007), which contains a chapter on ‘The Popular Weekly’, inter alia . 35. Mitchell’s began to include foreign titles in 1877; between that year and 1886, it began indexing them; Sell’s added them in 1885; and by 1890 they appear in May’s. 36. The order of these national listings corresponds with the comparative number of titles for each country; the German periodicals are most numerous. This itself may refl ect a cultural hierarchy of Stead’s or, more broadly, of the time. 37. Public libraries increased in number signifi cantly in the USA and UK during the 1890s, and the fi rst two decades of the twentieth century saw a remarkable rate of growth in the ‘Carnegie Libraries’, the fi rst of which appeared in Scotland in 1883 and in the USA in 1889. 38. Stead, ‘Preface’, Index to the Periodicals of 1894 (London: Editorial Offi ce, 1895), iv. 39. Stead, ‘Introduction’, Index to the Periodicals of 1895 (London: Editorial Offi ce, 1896), v. 40. Nearly two decades after Hetherington surfaced as the Review of Reviews indexer, Janet Hogarth (later Courtney) joined the Encyclopaedia Britannica , to serve as the chief indexer of the eleventh edition (1910–11), where she directed a large group of women. See Gillian Thomas, A Position 184 L. BRAKE

to Command Respect : Women and the Eleventh Britannica (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1992). 41. See the special issue of Media History on ‘Ephemera’, 18.1 (2012), ed. by Matthew Rubery and Harry Cocks, specifi cally ‘The Longevity of Ephemera’, 7–20, which discusses the Library Editions. 42. Poole ’s Index to Periodical Literature appeared under various titles from 1848, and under this familiar title from 1882. Eventually, it covered the century retrospectively in two parts of Volume 1 and fi ve supplementary volumes, the last of which appeared in 1907. Poole’s indexed entries by a combination of subject and article title, in which titles were used as the basis for subject headings, under which other related titles were grouped. 43. Stead, ‘Preface’, Index to the Periodicals of 1897 (London: Editorial Offi ce, 1898), [iii]. 44. Stead, ‘Preface’, Index to the Periodical Literature of the World (Covering the Year 1891 ) (London: Editorial Offi ce, 1892), 6. 45. For more on Stead and photography, see Laurel Brake, ‘Stead Alone: Journalist, Proprietor and Publisher, 1890–1903’, in W.T. Stead. Newspaper Revolutionary , 86, 93. 46. ‘Foreign Magazines and Reviews’, Index to the Periodical Literature of the World ( Covering the Year 1892 ) (London: Review of Reviews Offi ce, 1893), 50–68. 47. Stead, ‘The Reviews Reviewed’, Review of Reviews 1.1(January 1890): 54. 48. Stead, W. T., ‘To My Readers’, Review of Reviews 1.5 (May 1890): xxiii. 49. Stead, W. T., ‘To My Readers’, Review of Reviews , 1.5 (May 1890): xxiii. 50. For details of Stead’s eviction and incorporation of kinds of material from and into the Review of Reviews , see Brake, ‘Stead Alone’, 77–97 51. Roy Greenslade, ‘Media Analysis: Public Interest, phone hacking, and the Murdochs’, Evening Standard , 11 April 2012. http://www.standard.co. uk/business/markets/media-analysis-the-public-interest-sometimes- needs-a-mucky-approach-7636652.html (accessed 11 April 2013). 52. ‘Fleet Street Fox’ has been ‘outed’ as Susie Boniface, as a columnist for the tabloid Sunday Mirror. She made her passing remark on Leveson in an interview with Kirsty Wark, BBC2, ‘Newsnight’, 21 February 2013. For more about the closure of the News of the World and the hacking scandal, see The News of the World. Journalism for the Rich , Journalism for the Poor , ed Laurel Brake, C. Kaul, and Mark Turner. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. 53. Roy Greenslade, ‘News is not the Newspaper’, Guardian , 11 February 2013, 31; subsequent quotations appear on this page. 54. Browsing and reading full text tend to be more clumsy online than in the codex. Website software often obscures the access—where it is on offer at all—to read through issues, and may even list the contents of the library REVOLUTIONS IN JOURNALISM: W.T. STEAD, INDEXING, AND ‘SEARCHING’ 185

edition volume alphabetically, rather than in the sequence appearing in issues or in the volume. Page turning is often time consuming and awkward, and since websites are geared to items—individual articles or pieces—it is particularly diffi cult to move between items if access to the issue is not easily found or even available. 55. The Waterloo Directory of English Newspapers and Periodicals , 1800–1900 (Waterloo, ON: North Waterloo Academic Press, 1997–continuing) was founded by John North, who still edits and publishes ongoing paper and online editions. It has attempted to include bibliographical entries for all discrete newspaper and periodical titles in the period. Its entry template is very ambitious, and includes photographs of title pages, as well as changes in title, names of editors, contributors, publishers, printers, affi liations, locations, size, price, etc., as well as lists of histories and critical commentary. 56. The best research on Stead makes his changing and numerous networks very clear. There are good twentieth-century studies by journalists who knew him: a fi ne two-volume biography by Frederic Whyte in 1925, and detailed accounts of Stead and the PMG in J.W. Robertson Scott, Account of the Temperaments , Perturbations and Achievements of John Morley , W.T. Stead , E.T. Cook , Harry Cust , J.L. Garvin , and Three Other Editors of the Pall Mall Gazette (London: Methuen, 1952) . There is, too, an excellent modern perspective on Scott’s topic by Raymond Schults, Crusader in Babylon : W. T. Stead and the Pall Mall Gazette (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1972). The late twentieth century was dominated by Joseph Baylen’s suc- cession of articles, on whose shoulders contemporary Stead scholarship rests. Baylen lived long enough to write the entry for Oxford Dictionary of National Biography , but not long enough to see the centenary. Grace Eckley, author of a recent biography, Maiden Tribute : A Life of W. T. Stead (London: Xlibris, 2007), was quick to establish a Stead journal, ‘NewsStead’ (1992– 2004). This has been superseded by Owen Mulpetre’s website, ‘Attacking the Devil’, which has been recently renamed the ‘W. T. Stead Resource Site’ ( www.attackingthedevil.co.uk/ ; accessed 29 March 2015). At the time of Stead’s centenary in 2012, there was a new crop of books: Owen Mulpetre’s Stead and the New Journalism (Kindle Edition, 2012); Gavin Weightman’s Secrets of a Titanic Victim : The Story of the Real My Fair Lady (London: Backstory, 2012); and W. Sydney Robinson’s Muckraker : The Scandalous Life of W. T. Stead , Britain ’s First Investigative Journalist (London: Robson, 2012). In late 2012 (as noted in the text), the British Library published a collection of articles, W. T. Stead : Newspaper Revolutionary , and in the spring of 2013 a special issue on Stead appeared in 19 , a free online journal from Birkbeck, University of London (19.bbk.ac.uk). CHAPTER 9

Towards a Perlocutionary Poetics?

Isobel Armstrong

Sally Ledger had begun to think about the history of affect and of sentimentality in particular. The present chapter, which is an exploration of the emotions and language, crosses some of her concerns. The fi nal section springs from her work on Charles Dickens. I think she would have agreed that the turn to the emotions and passions as an important category in literary study is a fascinating development in our discipline. Certainly, the emotions have come to be seen as one of the ‘goods’ of literature. They are no longer bracketed off, and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s familiar dic- tum, ‘what we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence’, no longer holds. 1 Yet what is this ‘good’, and how do we defi ne it? In a 2005 essay entitled ‘Performative and Passionate Utterance’, Stanley Cavell makes an important contribution to the ever-growing literature on the emotions. By returning to How to Do Things with Words , the William James Lectures that J.L. Austin delivered at Harvard in 1955, which Cavell heard, he argues that Austin had fatally overlooked one of his own terms. This is the ‘perlocutionary’ speech act and its implications.

I. Armstrong () Department of English, Birkbeck University of London, Bloomsbury, London, UK

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 187 J. Bristow, J. McDonagh (eds.), Nineteenth-Century Radical Traditions, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59706-9_9 188 I. ARMSTRONG

Austin, Cavell contends, failed to see a ‘crisis’ of interpretation emerging in his categories and occludes the perlocutionary, leaving it undeveloped. 2 A theory of ‘passionate utterance’ can be elicited from Austin’s own terms in spite of Austin himself, however, and used to expand these terms to include within them a passionate speech act. For Cavell cannot doubt that it was Austin’s work that served to motivate ‘the recession of interest’ in the emotive. 3 The rest of Cavell’s essay explores what a perlocutionary utterance might be, and establishes not only its interpersonal status, but also its radical public and social importance. In the same year, 2005, Denise Riley wrote in her Impersonal Passion , another book that opens out the question of affect, that despite ‘the affect which seeps from the very form of words—in short, unexamined rhetoricity is at stake—we still seem not to own much of a descriptive vocabulary to characterise this relative autonomy of language, or have let slip what vocabulary there once was’. 4 She is right about this. Because the language of emotion appears to be ineffable, people have resorted to a number of strategies of analysis that are often very serious and interesting, but do not arrive at a linguistic account of emotion. They consider, for instance, historical theories of emotion, a route that has had outstanding recent success in the work of William M. Reddy ( The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of the Emotions , 2001) and Thomas Dixon, who, in From Passions to Emotions (2006), has charted the emergence of the emotions as a distinct modern category. They may historicize metaphors for the emotions, such as the vehicle in sentimental discourse of the Enlightenment. 5 Or they work to a model of pre-existing unverbalized feeling that is projected into language (the expressive theory). 6 Alternatively, they see emotion as a kind of add-on to an originary emotion-free fact, the view represented by A.J. Ayer in a pre-Austinian book, Language , Truth and Logic (1936), with which Cavell takes issue as a fact/value dichotomy like ‘slapping on a funny hat’. 7 Cavell is doing none of these things. He is attempting to explore what emotional demands speech acts make, as and when they create a number of linguistic situations. His point is that emotion is intrinsic to the individual speech act and indivisible from it. So, as I intend to demonstrate here, through Cavell’s work we might arrive at a poetic theory that postulates emotion as indivisibly an aspect of language, not a special category of its own or an aberration of a norm. This theory would mean that we could think of poetic language as an aspect of our language use, not a special category separated from the language we use. On this view, affect seeps from the very form of language, but not by accident. I begin by examining Cavell’s TOWARDS A PERLOCUTIONARY POETICS? 189 argument, and then attempt to take his perlocutionary theory into the activity of poetic language. Can we establish a perlocutionary poetics that makes the emotions intrinsic to poetic language? I think that Cavell provides the descriptive vocabulary for which Riley asks—indeed, this is less a descriptive than a structural account of language. However, before I explore his ideas, some clearing of the ground is necessary and some caveats need to be made. Although I believe that Cavell’s account of the perlocutionary is the most promising for establishing an account of the emotions in poetry, he was not the fi rst writer to consider the perlocutionary, and some aspects of his interpretation of Austin’s How to Do Things with Words require interrogation. First, how does Austin represent the perlocutionary? His aim, in formu- lating the triune conditions of the speech act—the locution, the illocution, and the perlocution—was to move away from the notion of statements as descriptions that are true or false to an understanding of the performative utterance as an utterance that does something. In his fi rst lecture, he says, after offering examples of the performative:

In these examples it seems clear that to utter the sentence…is not to describe my doing of what I should be said in so uttering to be doing or to state that I am doing it: it is to do it. None of the utterances cited is either true or false…When I say, before the registrar or altar, &c., ‘I do’, I am not reporting on a marriage: I am indulging in it. 8

He has given several other examples of such ‘doing’: the naming of a ship, bequeathing in a will, and betting. All of them are performative utterances. Later, in the eleventh lecture, he characterizes these in two ways:

(1) the performative should be doing something as opposed to just saying something; and (2) the performative is happy or unhappy as opposed to true or false. 9

The performative utterance consists of a triple act:

(1) the act of saying (the locution); (2) the illocution (the act performed in saying something; to say something is to do something that acquires the force of an action); and (3) the act performed by saying something (the consequences or effects of the act of doing). 190 I. ARMSTRONG

As Austin puts it in the tenth lecture: ‘Thus we distinguished the locutionary act (and within it the phonetic, the phatic, and the rhetic acts) which has a meaning ; the illocutionary act which has a certain force in saying something; the perlocutionary act which is the achieving of certain effects by saying something.’ 10 To use the examples of Ted Cohen (to whose work I will turn shortly), an illocutionary speech act might be that of threatening, while the perlocutionary effect of the force of threatening would be intimidation; similarly, the illocutionary act of urging would have its perlocutionary effect of persuasion. Austin describes a number of conditions without which the performative speech act cannot take place. These are essentially contractual, intentional, and social, and they presuppose the double presence of speaker and other. If one keeps in mind the formal transaction of marriage, these conditions will become apparent. Performative acts have as context (1) ‘ an accepted conventional procedure having a certain conventional effect ’ that is tied to the ritual of particular words. 11 (2) ‘The particular persons and circumstances in a given case must be appropriate ’ for the initiation of the procedure—for instance, a legally authenticated persona to conduct the marriage. 12 (3) ‘ The procedure must be executed by all participants correctly. ’ 13 (4) ‘ The procedure must be executed by all participants completely. ’ 14 Finally, for Austin the conduct of the procedure to be ‘legal’ must mean (5) that people participating in it must intend to carry it out, and (6) behave so subsequently, with the feelings appropriate to the procedure. Thus both legality and sincerity are components of performative acts. That is why for Austin an illocutionary act takes place in the fi rst-person present tense. ‘I’ is central to illocution. Cavell cuts through the immense discussion and the critical hermeneutics that have grown around Austin’s book. He mentions the critiques of Austin by Jacques Derrida and subsequently of Derrida by John Searle (a dispute that stretched from 1977 to 1988), but says little about this controversy except to observe that it is to the side of his concerns. 15 Thus, Derrida’s claim, in ‘Signature Event Context’ (1972), that writing, and indeed speech itself, which does not depend on the presence of an inter- locutor overturns the speech act. Requiring the empirical presence of speaker and listener as Austin conceives it, is not of central importance to Cavell. Likewise, Derrida’s insistence that the escape of signifi cation that outruns intention invalidates Austin’s tight control of meaning is not central to him either. However, although Derrida is intent on undermin- ing the very conditions of the speech act as an empirical encounter with TOWARDS A PERLOCUTIONARY POETICS? 191 an agreed determinate context, his critique, as so often with the texts that Derrida chooses to deconstruct, discloses an inward understanding of Austin’s thought that is salutary. For our purposes, Derrida’s recognition of the performative as ‘nothing less than Nietzschean’ in its capacity not to ‘essentially limit itself to transporting an already constituted semantic content guarded by its own aiming at truth’ is an important reading of Austin. 16 Nevertheless, Derrida argues that Austin’s account of utterance is teleological despite Austin’s avoidance of this fact. His observation that ‘the conscious and intentional presence’ of the speakers necessitated in the speech act means that ‘no remainder escapes the present totalization’ is a recognition of the polyvalence of language and the working of the unconscious in the production of meaning that Austin wishes to avoid: ‘No remainder, whether in the defi nition of the requisite conventions, or the internal and linguistic context, or the grammatical form and semantic determination of the words used; no irreducible polysemia, that is no “dissemination” escaping the horizon of the unity of meaning.’ 17 He accepts the idea that, as Riley puts it, ‘How Words Do Things with Us’—as well as to us—is the paramount consideration. 18 His critique of Austin’s nar- rowness of exclusion, with its rejection in particular of ‘parasitic’ speech acts, is powerful because he points to a fundamental problem with speech act theory: its exclusion of art. Austin appears to reject the force of poetic statement and indeed all literary language. Derrida quotes Austin, italiciz- ing the suspect terms:

[A] performative utterance will, for example, be in a peculiar way hollow or void if said by an actor on the stage, or if introduced in a poem, or spoken in soliloquy. This applies in a similar manner to any and every utterance—a sea- change in special circumstances. Language in such circumstances is in special ways—intelligibly—used not seriously , but in ways parasitic on its normal use—ways which fall under the doctrine of the etiolations of language. All this we are excluding from consideration. 19

It is a major exclusion. Derrida fi nds Austin’s remorseless intentionality the most fundamental exclusion of all. Derrida himself does not exclude ‘the category of intention’, but insists that it should ‘no longer be able to govern the entire scene and the entire system of utterances’. 20 Austin’s absolute refusal of the possibility of signifying marks divorced from epis- temic intention comes into confl ict with Derrida’s understanding that 192 I. ARMSTRONG citation, grafting, and extraction, producing ‘infi nitely new contexts’ independent of speaker and listener, are the life of language. 21 Derrida’s refusal to accept that poetic language may be parasitic is more pertinent to Cavell’s argument than he seems to realize. In his drive to investigate perlocution, Cavell does not mention Jürgen Habermas’s On the Pragmatics of Communication (1998), which takes a directly opposite view of perlocution to his own. For Habermas, the perlocutionary speech act is parasitic on the illocutionary act, not in the sense that it appears in works of art, but in the sense that it is a disguised teleological and instrumental strategy for manipulating others. 22 It does not involve coming to an open ‘understanding’ between individuals as true communicative action does, but tries to win , achieve success, through deceptive rhetoric (implicitly by exploiting emotion). For Cavell, on the contrary, the perlocutionary act brings about certain consequential effects on the feelings, thoughts, or actions of the audience or of the speaker her- or himself, or on others both in life and in art. 23 It is not an agent of manipulation or deceptive feeling, but a freeing of the affective energies, an emotional understanding that has cognitive force as ‘passionate utterance’. How could these very different readings arise from Austin’s How to Do Things with Words ? Habermas does give a deft defi nition of the three terms in play in Austin’s work, yet this exposes some of the problems arising from discussion of the perlocutionary as a category. He describes the three components of performativity very much in the terms we have already seen, but with an important difference: to say something , a meaningful statement, is the locutionary act; to act in saying something is the illocutionary act, where words do /perform something, what we do in saying something. (Most famously, we have seen, this speech act is the ‘I do’ of the wedding ceremony.) Finally, there is the perlocutionary speech act, to bring about something through acting by saying something, a deliberate attempt to ‘affect’ the addressee. 24 The problem lies in the way the perlocutionary is formulated by both Habermas and Cavell, not as an effect that is generated by the illocutionary, but as an independent speech act severed in kind from the illocutionary. Here there are, as it were, two kinds of speech act—the illocutionary and the perlocutionary—which are assumed to be generically different. Hence Habermas can think of the perlocutionary act as one of malign intentionality, a cynical use of emotion as deceit. For exactly the same reason, Cavell can think of the TOWARDS A PERLOCUTIONARY POETICS? 193 perlocution as the site of liberating feeling, where the dry force of illocutionary assertion gives way to the expressive force of the perlocution. Although he criticizes Ayer for seeing that which is ‘emotive’ as a kind of linguistic extra, and wants to see the expression of emotion as intrinsic to the speech act, Cavell comes near—but happily not quite, I shall argue—to doing the same thing. 25 The reason for this is that Austin is undoubtedly more interested in the illocutionary than the perlocutionary. Because the latter is about the effect of a speech act, it is as if he sees this almost as the province of psychology (as I think Habermas does) rather than language and abandons it as a category demanding serious discussion. Cavell argues that this is exactly the case. He believes that Austin’s problems began when he was forced to extend the function of performativity. Instead of two categories, the performative and the constative, he posited three—the locutionary, the illocutionary, and the perlocutionary—all of which can be performative. Yet Austin was only really interested in the illocutionary statement: where we marry, bet, bequeath, or name, where we do something in language. Austin’s main example is ‘I name this ship’. 26 Cavell began to investigate whether there are parallel conditions governing the illocutionary and the perlocutionary speech act as two complementary forms. He looked at the necessary conditions for the perlocutionary. He was helped, I think, by the fact that Austin was already into aesthetic questions without saying so when he posited that statements were not true or false but felicitous or infelicitous (and he used the words unhappy or happy). Although Austin expressed this as appropriateness, a rule-bound appropriateness germane to the illocutionary, he smuggled in aesthetic concerns. Cavell confronts Austin in two ways. First, he looks at the grammar of the illocutionary verb. For Austin, on the one hand, it is always the fi rst-person indicative—I do, I name. Cavell, on the other hand, investigates the possibility of perlocutionary verbs that will be radically different from illocutionary verbs. Secondly, Cavell tries to fi nd parallel perlocutionary forms that match Austin’s six forms of appropriateness for the illocutionary act. He aims for an alternative perlocutionary taxonomy. Cavell meticulously sets out Austin’s six rules for the illocutionary, but then posits a new classifi cation: he asks how far an alternative and corresponding set of conditions for the perlocutionary statement can be established. He lists seven perlocutionary statements rather than six. In defi ance of Austin’s understanding that art speech is ‘parasitic’ on actual speech acts in an unserious way (although Cavell is not explicit about this), many of his 194 I. ARMSTRONG examples are taken from opera as the cultural apotheosis of performing the perlocutionary.

ILLOCUTIONARY AND PERLOCUTIONARY I will consider these perlocutionary correspondences shortly. I turn now to the work of Ted Cohen, since his astute analysis of Austin’s terms exposes a serious diffi culty entailed in the untethering of the illocutionary and the perlocutionary that we see in the work of both Cavell and Habermas. At the same time, Cohen’s research also suggests ways in which that diffi culty might be overcome. In 1973, Cohen published his article, ‘Illocutions and Perlocutions’, in the journal Foundations of Language . He followed this up with ‘Figurative Speech and Figurative Acts’ in 1975 in the Journal of Philosophy , and with another article in 1976, ‘Notes on Metaphor’, in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism . The fi rst two articles are most relevant here. In the fi rst, he argues that Austin had paid insuffi cient attention to perlocution, possibly seeing it as an extra linguistic phenomenon that did not concern Austin as much as the philosophical implications of illocution. As Cohen wrote in 1975: ‘The mistake was to regard perlocutions uniformly as less integral parts of total speech acts, as essentially non-linguistic results which are the causal by-products of the real internal speech-act machinery.’ 27 However, for Cohen in 1973, the ‘conceptual function of perlocutions’ warranted as much philosophical attention as illocution. 28 The intent of his argument in the fi rst article is to demonstrate that illocution and perlocution constitute a total and indivisible speech act: there is ‘no easy way to pry them apart without enervating them’. 29 In order to make this point, and to explore what bearing perlocutions have on ‘the illocutions which generate them’, he developed an analysis of the speech act that went beyond the customary ‘“in”/“by” distinction’. 30 In his view, there are direct perlocutions and indirect perlocutions, ‘transparent’ relations between the illocution and the perlocution, and ‘oblique’ relations, associated and unassociated perlocutions. In direct structures locution, illocution and perlocution follow one another as a causal chain: ‘To perform a locutionary act is therein to perform an illocutionary act, according to Austin, and so whenever a perlocution follows on a locution, it will also, in some sense, be following on an illocution.’ 31 The two, Cohen claims, are not always easily distinguished, but the difference between them, however closely tied, can be understood by looking at the effects (perlocution) TOWARDS A PERLOCUTIONARY POETICS? 195 of saying something and those effects that arise because of the ‘force’ or assertion (illocution) of what is said. 32 This is a diffi cult distinction, since it may not always be possible to avoid illocution and perlocution merging into one another, but Cohen sustains it nevertheless. Cohen’s argument is in marked contrast to Cavell and Habermas, who have no diffi culty in distinguishing the two forms. For Cohen, a transparent speech act occurs when there is a direct relationship between all three elements, where the locution, illocution, and perlocution work as a unity: I make a threat, I threaten, I intimidate. Yet for him, there are also cases where the perlocution occurs ‘without the mediation of the illocution’, when the perlocution is generated by the primary locution. 33 (‘Will you listen to me’ is the example. 34 ) Or there may be cases where the perlocution springs out of the illocution, an ‘unassociated’ perlocution unrelated to the perlocution. 35 These distinctions may sometimes be questionable for us, since his illustrative material is sparse, but Cohen is emphatic that unless there is an effect there can be no illocution. 36 Although he asks whether every illocution is ‘an associated perlocution’, he clearly believes that illocutions bring about associated perlocutions that ‘belong’ with them. 37 Intimidating is associated with threatening, and alerting with warning. It is, he says, ‘in the nature of the illocution to effect the perlocution’, but as a result ‘the perlocution is something like the rationale’ for the illocution and not the other way round; a formulation that bestows great power on the perlocution. In other words, a perlocution might be detachable, but it always bears on the illocution. 38 The importance of this thinking—which, unlike that of Cavell, ties the perlocutionary to the illocutionary with a tight leash—is that it makes affect an intrinsic part of all language, all speech acts. If an illocution cannot be deemed to have taken place unless it has an associated effect , all our performative linguistic exchanges are always already acts fused with feeling. We do not have to posit separable illocutionary and perlocutionary linguistic ‘states’ in order to redeem the place of affect in communication. It is already there. Cohen’s view is surely the right one, whereas the tendency to posit an independent perlocutionary surely falls into the trap of separating a rule-bound ‘ordinary’ discourse from an exceptional discourse of affect. Having said this, it is still necessary to explore the dynamic of the ‘parasitic’ language of poetry, or of language that seems to be operating with an excess of perlocutionary energy. Cohen implicitly follows up this question in his second article, where he explores the question of fi gural language in the speech act, examining the ‘intrinsic capacity’ of meta- 196 I. ARMSTRONG phor to ‘surpass its [language’s] own (putative) limits’. 39 He recapitulates his early arguments but takes them forward by examining the occasions when there is an ‘internal anomaly’ or ‘aberration’, ‘whose semantics are awry’ in some way in a speech act. 40 Performatives, Cohen says, are not always reducible to Austin’s ‘canonical form’. 41 Transparency fails when ‘either what is meant or what is done cannot be told’ from the utterance alone. 42 The chain of a speech act is now elaborated through fi ve elements: Utterance or literal meaning, Locution, which is the meaning of Utterance, the Force of the Utterance indicated in the Utterance itself. This is followed by the activation of the Utterance’s force in the Illocution, and the Perlocution that arises directly from Illocution. In all cases of fi guration, something prevents these elements from ‘fi tting together’ or following from one another. When there is a breakdown of this kind, a ‘block’ in which force cannot be found in the Utterance, or when the Illocution cannot be deduced from the Utterance, for instance, these are the conditions for fi gurative speech acts. ‘When there is a grammatical breakdown within the sentence’, the utterance itself will manifest an obviously false literal meaning that has to be reconstituted as fi gure to have any meaning at all. 43 From among the utterance’s possible forces, another has to be actualized for a different illocution to be realized. This means that force has been transformed, or, as Cohen puts it: ‘If an I [Illocution] comes forth, F [Force] has not died, but it has been transfi gured.’ 44 Cohen’s examples of blocks are not actually of fi gures or metaphor but of impossible sentences (‘I promise that I was in Chicago yesterday’), and thus his illustrative material is weak, presaged by the sparseness mentioned earlier, although his argument is convincing, retaining as it does the ligature of all the elements in the speech act chain. 45 To accept Cohen’s argument does not mean dispensing with Cavell’s position, however. We do not have to see the perlocutionary as an alternative discourse in order to understand its power. Cohen implicitly allows that the play of the illocutionary and perlocutionary, although they belong together, can have a differential intensity and can be generated in different ways. They can pull apart from one another, the perlocutionary straining at the leash. They can move from being a virtual tautology to differing signifi cations. If the perlocutionary can be to some extent the rationale of the illocutionary, and if the perlocutionary can bypass its usual generation by the illocutionary by springing from the utterance rather than being associated with the illocution, there is room for considerable perlocutionary possibility. One might also postulate that in the speech act chain, there TOWARDS A PERLOCUTIONARY POETICS? 197 are occasions when the perlocutionary becomes dominant. This may be particularly the case in poetic language, when the blockage that presages fi guration releases the perlocution into a new emotional horizon when the speech act’s fi gural nature is resolved. We can stress the perlocutionary without losing hold of the ligatures of the speech act that keep hold of a statement and include it in the shared linguistic world. Cavell’s revision of Austin’s six conditions for performativity grants the perlocutionary dominance in something like the way described above. Let us see what the perlocutionary correspondences consist of and the verbs that follow from this. (1) Where Austin sees the illocutionary context as a conventional procedure with a conventional effect, often a ritual participation in a culture, where certain words have to be uttered, with analogous perlocutionary statements, there is no conventional procedure—the speaker is on his/her own, generating the linguistic encounter. (2) Where the particular persons and circumstances must be appropriate to the procedure for Austin (you need to be married by an authorized person), there are no anteced- ently specifi ed persons in the perlocutionary statement. ‘I am not invoking a procedure but inviting an exchange.’ 46 Consequently, I must declare myself and single you out —both acts that have no predetermined form and have to be made ab initio . Conditions (3) and (4) are that all of the participants must execute the procedure correctly and completely. There are no analogues here for the perlocutionary, as there is no prior dictation of form. One could, however, say (5) that the ‘procedure’/exchange is something that unfolds in real time, evolves without being predetermined. For Cavell, since there is no predetermined form for the utterance, the ‘setting or staging’ of my perlocutionary utterance (invocation, provocation, confrontation) must be grounded in my being ‘moved ’ to speak, to speak out of passion. I must actually be suffering passion, and demand that you respond. Not (6) in a future response, but now . Cavell adds a seventh condition: for him contestation, constant interpretation, is possible. Not in Austin; but for Cavell there is no fi nal word . Herein lies the attempt at moral education that is part of the perlocutionary project. Cavell elicits much from these perlocutionary ‘rules’. Not the least important is that perlocutionary utterance can go wrong: it can result in moralism, hate speech, and political manipulation. However, unless we recognize it as at the core of our experience, we are impoverished. Perlocutionary utterance is ‘you’ directed. The ultimate in perlocutionary statements—‘I love you’, ‘I hate you’—are directed out of the self 198 I. ARMSTRONG and depend on the other. This is the function of the many exemplary statements that Cavell collects. They utter a call to the other: for example, ‘I’m bored’, take some notice of me, and do something about it. And this can happen in life and in art. Elisabeth to Tannhäuser: ‘Heinrich, what have you done to me?’ 47 Because perlocutionary experiences are shared experiences , they are irreducibly public. Thus Cavell interprets the perlocutionary in both interpersonal and social terms. ‘[W ] ords are essentially owed ’, he says. As in an apology, speech is required: ‘Flowers are not a sub- stitute.’ 48 A passionate utterance ‘is an invitation to improvisation in the disorders of desire’. 49 At the same time, it is supremely rational. Language is saturated in desire, but we need to make our desires intelligible, ‘to ask residence in the shared realm of reason’. 50 The perlocutionary becomes dominant, perhaps, when the far end of the spectrum of language that brings change about by or through saying something is reached, and we are into the end of the scale where, in Riley’s terms, words do something with us. We move closer to a poetics of the perlocutionary by considering the place of verbs in Cavell’s argument. Austin’s taxonomy of illocutionary verbs is extensive: (1) Verdictives (a verdict—I grade); (2) Exercitives (power, rights—I vote); (3) Commissives (commitment—I promise); (4) Behabitives (response—I thank); and (5) Expositives (expounding, affi rm). Of the fi ve, ‘Behabitives’ are closest to the perlocutionary. These ‘Behabitives’ register our reaction to other people’s behaviour, attitudes, and conduct: I apologize, I thank, I condole. 51 But what are perlocutionary verbs? Even when they are fi rst-person verbs, they are not about executing something. Since passionate utterance makes demands on the singular body, and since ‘expressions of emotion excite emotion’, perlocutionary verbs are going to register responsiveness to the other. 52 Cavell takes ‘encourage’ as a test case hov- ering between illocution and perlocution, and notes that the semantic range of ‘encourage’ in envisaging consequential effects on the feelings— hearten, inspire, rouse, and embolden (I would add comfort)—has no trace of the illocutionary. Moreover, as Cavell points out, while it is possible to say ‘I banish…you’ as an illocutionary act, it is strangely unhelp- ful to use the fi rst person in verbs such as ‘I seduce, alarm, amuse, [or, my additions] irritate, fl irt with…you’. 53 These are not going to have consequential effects on the feelings (quite the reverse). Cavell does not make a dictionary of perlocutionary verbs, but it may well be that the charting of the semantic range of a verb rather than adducing a thesaurus TOWARDS A PERLOCUTIONARY POETICS? 199 is the way to understanding a perlocutionary verb, a verb that effects by saying something, yes, but also does something with us . ‘Heinrich, what have you done to me?’ In this rhetorical question, we have to linger on the semantic range of ‘done’. The indeterminate ‘what’ opens the semantic range. (‘Heinrich, you have done what to me?’) ‘Done’ here incorporates the meaning of ‘moved’, ‘transformed’, ‘changed’, ‘made to suffer’, and ‘charged with emotion’. It becomes a perlocutionary verb by calling for a predicate, but, as with rhetorical questions, a predicate that cannot be realized, and this in itself signals its perlocutionary force. Precisely because we cannot give a determinate content to ‘done’—compare the ‘I do’ of the marriage service—‘done’ is doing something with us. Although we might say that the totality of the locution, ‘Heinrich, what have you done to me?’, is a locution with some illocutionary force because the totality of the rhetorical question itself acknowledges that something has been done in saying, the illocution is vestigial, and can only be derived at second hand from the perlocutionary power of the verb. ‘Heinrich, what have you done to me?’ is one of those cases that Cohen mentions in which the locution generates the perlocutionary and, as it were, skips the illocution. In the case of an apology, however, a verb that both Austin and Cavell single out, claiming it respectively for illocution and perlocution, they are surely both right. For Austin, ‘I apologize’ is a ‘Behabitive’: its illocutionary force registers our reaction to ‘other people’s behaviour’, attitudes, and conduct. 54 ‘I apologize’: I am doing something, performing a speech act, an act of contrition. 55 For Cavell, apology is a need of both the speaker and the listener in the stress of the non-conventional encounter. If an apology is conventional, it is hardly one at all. Thus it has to realize the perlocutionary effect of regret and to do so in a way that entails the consent of the listener. Here the illocutionary act of contrition and the perlocutionary effect of regret are leashed together in the way that Cohen describes, even when the encounter possesses no other of Austin’s required characteristics of the speech act. Thus, to sum up, we can posit a situation where there is almost always a causal relation between illocution and perlocution, when perlocution is mediated by illocution, Cohen’s transparent relation. Yet perlocution can sometimes bypass illocution, constituted by the locution alone. It may have a highly indirect relation to illocution and it may have to be recon- structed when there is a breakdown in the literal relation between the two. It may—this is where Cavell supplements Cohen—be intensifi ed to 200 I. ARMSTRONG such an extent that it dominates an exchange, straining at the leash of connection. It may belong to a scale of intensity to such an extent that the effects created by language intensify what Riley describes as what words do with us. It outruns predictable effects and suffuses the speech act in unfamiliar affect.

PERLOCUTIONARY POETICS Have we reached a point at which the features of a perlocutionary poetics can begin to emerge? It may be that the perlocutionary will simply point to many of the things we know already about poetic language. Riley indicates the ways in which words outrun our intentions—exclamations, laments, rhetorical questions, puns, clichés, expressions not hard bound to ‘the narrows of semantic meaning’. 56 Yet I do not think we need simply to reclassify what we know already, or, at least, what we know already might look different. I wonder if the verb ‘to be’ (and possibly the verb ‘to have’) in poetry is not a profoundly perlocutionary verb. A primal verb, it asks us to assent to, examine, or respond to a state, a condition. It is an ontological verb, transcending the individual state and moving to an assertion of being. It is the site of metaphor, since the elements of comparison are conjoined by ‘is’. The verb to be is so often in the present tense. Not always, but often it is not the fi rst but the second or third person that is stressed. And strangely, the third person rather than the second person singles us out, as Cavell puts it.

‘I happy am’ (William Blake) 57 ‘She was the universe’ (George Gordon Byron) 58 ‘I am half sick of shadows’ (Alfred Tennyson) 59 ‘April is the cruellest month…’ (T.S. Eliot) 60

Perlocutionary verbs seem to me to appear in chains or as compounds with other verbs, persuading us to make careful distinctions between them. As with the verb ‘to be’, states of mind or emotions can thereby be made ‘intelligible’. ‘My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains / My sense’: here John Keats is playing in a most subtle way on present-tense states that register being . 61 It is being in a very complex way, for Keats is saying that concurrently his heart aches, that numbness actually pains him when numbness TOWARDS A PERLOCUTIONARY POETICS? 201 theoretically should not, and that concurrently he has to make a distinction between the heart and the sense in order to explain this. And, to make it clear that this usage crosses over into modernity, I quote from recent poets:

Some bodies are forgotten in the language compounds… Some or many are being disappeared… Some or many that disappeared arise in some or many of us… 62

the stew in the oven is singing its please eat me song the television is painting its face with human blood 63

To move away from verbs to the perlocutionary ‘you’, the other, and the making public of ‘you’, we might look carefully at rhetorical questions, commands, apostrophes, where the ‘you’ is sometimes importunately addressed and enjoined to share.

‘Behold her, single in the fi eld’ (William Wordsworth) 64 ‘Bring me my arrows of desire’ (Blake) 65 ‘Let us go then, you and I…’ (Eliot) 66 ‘How can we know the dancer from the dance?’ (Yeats) 67 ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’ (Dylan Thomas) 68

To look more closely at the operation of perlocutionary language, I will consider Christina Rossetti’s ‘A Birthday’:

My heart is like a singing bird Whose nest is in a watered shoot; My heart is like an appletree Whose boughs are bent with thickset fruit; My heart is like a rainbow shell That paddles in a halcyon sea; My heart is gladder than all these Because my love is come to me.

Raise me a dais of silk and down; Hang it with vair and purple dyes; Carve it in doves and pomegranates, And peacocks with a hundred eyes; Work it in gold and silver grapes, 202 I. ARMSTRONG

In leaves and silver fl eurs-de-lys; Because the birthday of my life Is come, my love is come to me. 69

In some senses, the poem of print culture accords perfectly well with the Austinian stipulation that a conventional procedure is in force, since it follows the historically agreed conditions and forms of verse on the printed page. Indeed, all of Austin’s conditions are present in Christina Rossetti’s poem, as are Cavell’s, but with this proviso: Austin’s conditions are residu- ally present and provide only a ‘legal’ framework for the text that is not greatly illuminating. To understand the poem culturally and ideologically, we accept the fi gure ‘poet’ as the authorized individual lyric speaker (condition 2). The poem establishes recognizable formal and metrical rules and does not violate these terms, and even offers some highly conventional metaphor in the use of the word ‘heart’ (conditions 3 and 4). There is an assumption that the poem is in perpetuity, such that we can repeat and return to a reading under the same conditions (conditions 5 and 6). Yet, useful and necessary cultural anchor, cultural construction , as these conditions are, they do not give us purchase on the text. Nevertheless, it would be precipitate to say that we could do without them. This is nowhere so true as in the residual use of illocution, which is a kind of second-order, derived form. The pounding iambic anaphora of the fi rst four statements—‘My heart is like’, ‘My heart is like’, ‘My heart is like’, ‘My heart is’—with its cardiac pressure and physiological beat is an imperious performative act. It is the performing of an assertion, a comparison, and an act done in language with illocutionary force. It is what is done by language that is harder to defi ne, although one might say that the perlocutionary engulfs the poem. The ontological present tense and the verb ‘to be’—‘is’ is repeated eight times—take us by fi at into the perlocutionary imagination. For what they do through language is to ask for or even command a response to ‘is’. Despite the cardiac beat, the heart is no literal heart, and we are blocked from grasping the meaning of the assertion unless we manage, as Cohen puts it, to reconstitute the force of ‘heart’ as the emotional core of being. This is a revisionary act comparatively easy to establish, since it is a traditional signifi cation: the predi- cates of each assertion of comparison—the bird singing from a ‘shoot’ or plant or tree growth inundated with water, the apple tree bending under the plenitude of fruit, the fl oating shell or container—create the shock of comparison because their appositeness is uncertain. They do not ‘fi t’ TOWARDS A PERLOCUTIONARY POETICS? 203 or follow from the word ‘heart’ easily, even when we accept the non- literal sense of ‘heart’. The rooted apple tree, the free-fl oating shell on the ocean—how are these ‘felicitous’ comparisons? What happens through language is not the achievement of some correspondence, the closure of a comparison/confi rmation pairing, in which the illocutionary comparison generates its confi rmation: it is to set an inquiry into comparison in motion. It is here that words are doing something with us, but also we are enjoined to do something with words in a never-ending comparative act in a sense that Austin did not recognize, but is immanent in his work. The perlocutionary becomes the rationale of the vestigial illocutionary act, and takes over, superseding and dissolving the causal connections that Cohen saw between locution, illocution, and perlocution in the non- fi gurative speech act, and breaking the connections between them in order to open an inquiry into linguistic transformation, the epiphany of each similitude. This is the perlocutionary. It takes us into unknown linguistic possibilities. ‘My heart is gladder than all these’—my heart is gladder than all these comparisons . And the comparative adjective opens indefi nite vis- tas of comparison. Aphrodite’s apples or Venus’s shell; these take us into different erotic associations. The perlocutionary is not about establishing these meanings, but about working on them. Here Derrida’s ‘remainder’ is called into play because interpretation is an unfi nished project. Thus Cavell’s perlocutionary conditions or states are equally pertinent to this poem. The lyric speaker is on her own, partly because she is paddling in a halcyon sea of new meaning. Yet the poem is also ‘you’ directed. She is invoking an exchange, singling out the reader who has no contractual relation to the poem but sees it unfold in real time without a predetermined outcome. She is moved to speak—‘My heart…My heart…’—not in the future but now : ‘Because my love is come to me’. Not ‘has’ but ‘is’. The lover is already present, is part of the now of the poem, and the poem longs to tell us so. What Cavell leaves out is the perlocutionary response called into being from the reader or addressee. The reader is enjoined to the interpersonal act of interpretation, doing things with the words that do things with you. It is here that what Cavell calls the ‘disorder of desire’ is at work, and where the unconscious leaves evidence of its ‘remainder’. Like the free-fl oating fi nal line of the poem, which rhymes with nothing in the second stanza but only with the last line of the fi rst, quoting from the fi rst stanza, desire asks for closure and endlessness simultaneously. The unfi nished projects of desire and interpretation are concurrent. 204 I. ARMSTRONG

The second stanza is organized around imperatives—‘Raise me a dais… Hang it…Carve it…Work it’. And here the iambic beat of the fi rst stanza is reversed so that the stress falls on the imperative verbs. Austin claims that imperatives are illocutionary in that they ‘resemble’ a fi rst-person order or command: ‘Raise me a dais’ resembles the construction ‘I order you to raise me a dais’, thereby establishing a power relationship of master and slave, a risk that Rossetti takes. 70 This reading, though, ignores the impor- tunateness of the command, the need of the other that motivates an imperative. The imperative verbs—‘Raise’, ‘Carve’, and ‘Work’—generate the perlocutionary by assuming the motivation they exhort. The passionate utterance of the fi rst stanza is to be transformed into art by a communal effort of creation and by a communal act of representation in carving and embroidery, doing things. These are to engender further acts of interpretation and representation. Much could be said of this imagery, where, as in the fi rst stanza, the perlocutionary is so intensifi ed that it becomes almost independent of its originary base in the illocution. I have said enough, however, to demonstrate how we might begin to explore both the linkage and the lesion of illocution and perlocution in poems. Austin thought that the capacity of language to make the fi ne distinctions he analyses was a ‘creative act’. 71 The advantage of retaining his terms and of modifying Cavell, fi rst, is that language always holds within itself the force of both the illocutionary and the perlocutionary as necessarily related aspects of utterance. Affect is not an independent force outside utterance. Julia Kristeva’s notorious distinction, for instance, between the semiotic and the symbolic puts them deliberately in an irrational relation to one another that is alien to Cavell’s thought. 72 Secondly, utterance is social and public: as speakers and poets, we declare ourselves and ask for an exchange. How do these principles work for fi ctional prose, particularly the passionate utterance of elaborated ‘poetic’ prose? To recognize Sally Ledger’s love of Charles Dickens’s work, I will end by discussing a passage from Bleak House (1852–1853). It will be a brief inquiry into sentimentality, a form of passionate utterance with which we are uncomfortable. Sally Ledger’s next research project was to be a major investigation of sentimentality, the genesis of our accounts of it, and its forms and functions in nineteenth-century culture. Undoubtedly, her aim was to subtilize our readings by historicizing and rethinking the term. Sentimentality is associated with excess of feeling, with manipulation, and with oversimplifi cation. Yet we may be missing something in the following passage if we TOWARDS A PERLOCUTIONARY POETICS? 205 accept this account unreservedly. This is the fi nal passage in the death of Jo, the crossing sweeper, which ends with the unfi nished Lord’s Prayer:

‘Jo, my poor fellow!’ ‘I hear you, sir, in the dark, but I’m a gropin—a gropin—let me catch hold of your hand.’ ‘Jo, can you say what I say? ‘I’ll say anythink as you say, sir, for I knows it’s good.’ ‘OUR FATHER.’ ‘Our Father!—yes, that’s wery good, sir.’ ‘WHICH ART IN HEAVEN.’ ‘Art in Heaven—is the light acomin, sir?’ ‘It is close at hand. HALLOWED BE THY NAME!’ ‘Hallowed be—thy—’ The light is come upon the dark benighted way. Dead! 73

Since it is followed by the narrator’s fulmination implicating the whole nation in this death—‘Dead, your majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen…’—the unfi nished prayer might seem the height of outrageously manipulative sentiment: ‘Make ’em cry’, Dickens was supposed to have said, although others claim that this advice came from his friend Wilkie Collins. 74 When the ritual of prayer is performed, we do things in and by words: to utter ‘Hallowed be thy name’ is not merely to speak of a conditional hallowing, it is to hallow through the act of prayer itself and simultaneously to express the act of worship. That is what Woodcourt is doing, and one reading of this episode is to assert that he is imposing this ritual on Jo with didactic piety. He may be, but Dickens has already allowed for the reader’s agnostic and ideological impatience earlier, when he gives to Jo a critical insight into Chadband’s phoney, self-regarding prayer (‘he sounded as if he wos aspeaking to his-self’). 75 This fi nal passage is an example of Derridean quotation: the narrative is quoting the Lord’s Prayer quoted by Woodcourt and quoted again by Jo. It changes its perlocutionary nature as this happens. Part of the emotional pressure generated here is attributable to the fact that Woodcourt knows the meaning of the ritual, but Jo does not. It simply does not have the same locutionary signifi cance for him, its cultural meaning. Woodcourt understands the urgency of its completion, while Jo does not even know that it is incomplete. For, unlike Austin’s speech act, the prayer remains unfi nished. The prayer means different things to each: a familiar prayer uttered for and with the dying 206 I. ARMSTRONG to Woodcourt, an entirely new form of words in which every element is fresh to Jo. The illocutionary and perlocutionary elements are deliberately put at cross-purposes. Thus all the perlocutionary features that Cavell describes come over with peculiar intensity. Woodcourt is intensely alone in his desire to grant Jo a peaceful and sanctifi ed death: he has invoked an exchange, declared himself, and singled Jo out. As the exchange proceeds in real time, Woodcourt is moved to speak urgently, not in the future because Jo does not have one, but now . These features are doubled in Jo’s responses (factors that may encourage commentators to attribute an overload to the passage), but with divergent senses so that a contrapuntal perlocutionary utterance emerges. Jo, isolated in death and alone ‘in the dark’, ‘a-gropin’ in many senses, singles Woodcourt out for comfort: ‘let me catch hold of your hand’. He commits to the repetition that Woodcourt sees as an exchange of sanctifi ed language, but sees it for his own part as a supreme act of trust: ‘I’ll say anythink you say, sir, fur I knows its good.’ Where Woodcourt knows that the ‘correct’ form of words must unfold in real time before it is too late, Jo interprets them anew: ‘Our Father! Yes, that’s wery good, sir.’ That’s ‘very good’ because he has actually managed to repeat the words with supreme effort in the face of death, and because he clearly images ‘father’ humanistically in terms of the kind men who have singled him out in the past, Lady Dedlock’s dead lover, Snagsby, Woodcourt himself. It is the same with ‘WHICH ART IN HEAVEN’. Jo misses out the relative ‘which’, arriving ‘incorrectly’ but with intense perlocutionary force at ‘Art in Heaven’. In this amputated form, its senses become agnostically indeterminate as God the Father disappears from the formulation: ‘art in heaven’. Someone or something is in heaven, ‘art’ or are in heaven. It is the ontological force of the verb ‘to be’ that comes out, not the subject of the verb, the very condition that Jo will soon not be in—being. Jo is more interested in ‘the light’ than in heaven—‘is the light a-comin, sir?’—and it is not clear that he distinguishes between terrestrial and heavenly light, terrestrial and spiritual darkness. The heavy symbolism is another pointer towards the diagnosis of sentimentality, yet his poignant literalizing of the light constitutes a warning against a too-ready symbolism. ‘The light is come upon the dark benighted way. Dead!’ The fi nal sentence is perhaps Chadband-like in its ready assumption of the spiritually benighted Jo. And yet two constructions fend this off. The prose speaks not of a benighted person but a benighted ‘way’: the analogy is the high- way, the road, the passage or crossing that Jo has swept every day, and also TOWARDS A PERLOCUTIONARY POETICS? 207

‘the way, the truth, and the life’ of Jesus Christ’s teaching. It is these that are ‘benighted’ by the nineteenth century. Secondly, ‘the light is come’, just as Rossetti’s love ‘ is come’. And just as Rossetti’s love is already present, already there, so too is heaven a presence throughout, ‘art in heaven’, available. Not accessed, perhaps, but performatively possible. There is excess enough here, the intensity of melodrama and emphatic rhetoric, a tradition on which the passage freely draws. But it is hardly manipulative or oversimplifi ed. On analogy with the richness of Clifford Geertz’s ‘thick description’, one might designate this as thick sentimentality. 76 Cavell’s reading of the perlocutionary asks us to think very seriously about the central place occupied by passionate utterance in our experience and the nature of perlocutionary language in the speech act. Although it is important to be cautious about his too adamant separation of illocutionary and perlocutionary utterance, he is right to open up the practices of the perlocutionary imagination. Highly important is his insistence on the social nature of the perlocutionary. In his essay ‘The Lyric Poet and Society’ (1957), Theodor W. Adorno grants the modern lyric poet social meaning only by affi rming that it is paradoxically in his isolation that the lyric poet and society come together. 77 The modern poet’s alienation becomes social by being theorized as alienation. Cavell’s thinking leads us in a different direction. ‘When I say, before the registrar or altar, &c.,…’ Austin writes. What on earth is that seemingly redundant ‘&c.’ doing ? It is a slip, a sign that all the affect of the perlocutionary that Austin’s reticence warded off is returning in a coded form from the unconscious. We owe it to Cavell to have decoded that ‘&c.’ and to have taken it into the light of common day.

NOTES 1. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus , trans. by C. K. Ogden. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1922), 189. In preparing this chapter, I thank Yopie Prins for conversations, William Miller, and all of the Johns Hopkins graduate students whom I taught in autumn 2009. 2. Stanley Cavell, Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 166. 3. Cavell, Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow , 161. 4. Denise Riley, Impersonal Passion : Language as Affect (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 2. 5. See, for example, James Chandler, ‘The Politics of Sentiment: Notes Towards a New Account’, Studies in Romanticism 49.4 (2010): 553–75. 208 I. ARMSTRONG

6. See, for example, Barbara Hardy, The Advantage of Lyric : Essays on Feeling in Poetry (London: Athlone Press, 1977). 7. A. J. Ayer, Language , Truth and Logic , 2nd edn., (1936; London: Victor Gollancz, 1946), 44, 108, and Cavell, Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow , 163. 8. J. L. Austin, How To Do Things With Words , 2nd edn., ed. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisa (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), 6; emphasis in original. 9. Austin, How to Do Things with Words , 133. 10. Austin, How to Do Things with Words , 121; emphases in original. 11. Austin, How to Do Things with Words , 26; emphasis in original. 12. Austin, How to Do Things with Words , 34; emphasis in original. 13. Austin, How to Do Things with Words , 36; emphasis in original. 14. Austin, How to Do Things with Words , 36; emphasis in original. 15. Derrida’s critique of Austin was fi rst delivered as a lecture at the conference on ‘Communication’ at Montreal, August 1971, and fi rst appeared in Derrida, Marges de la Philosophie (Paris: Edition de Minuit, 1972), 365–93. The fi rst English translation is ‘Signature Event Context’, trans. Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman, Glyph 1 (1977): 172–97. John R. Searle, ‘Reiterating the Differences’: A Reply to Derrida’, Glyph 1 (1977): 198– 208. Derrida’s response to Searle’s essay is ‘Limited Inc. abc…’,Glyph 2 (1977): 162–254. Derrida’s essays on Austin and Searle are reprinted in Limited Inc. , ed. Gerald Graff, trans. Weber and Mehlman (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988). ‘Signature Event Context’ also appears in Margins of Philosophy , trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1982), 307–30, and, most recently, in Jacques Derrida : Basic Writings , ed. Barry Stocker (London: Routledge, 2007), 105–34. 16. ‘Signature Event Context’, in Jacques Derrida : Basic Writings , ed. Stocker, 124. 17. ‘Signature Event Context’, in Jacques Derrida : Basic Writings , ed. Stocker, 125. 18. Riley, Impersonal Passion , 3. 19. ‘Signature Event Context’, in Jacques Derrida : Basic Writings , ed. Stocker, 127; emphasis in original. 20. ‘Signature Event Context’, in Jacques Derrida : Basic Writings , ed. Stocker, 129. 21. ‘Signature Event Context’, in Jacques Derrida : Basic Writings , ed. Stocker, 123. 22. Jürgen Habermas, On the Pragmatics of Communication , ed. Maeve Cook (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 126. 23. See Cavell, Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow , 169. 24. See Austin’s exposition of the same principles in How to Do Things with Words , 101–02. TOWARDS A PERLOCUTIONARY POETICS? 209

25. Cavell, Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow , 175. 26. Austin, How to Do Things with Words , 5. 27. Ted Cohen, ‘Figurative Speech and Figurative Acts’, Journal of Philosophy 72.19 (1975): 673. 28. Cohen, ‘Illocutions and Perlocutions’, Foundations of Language 9.4 (1973): 492. 29. Cohen, ‘Illocutions and Perlocutions’, 503. 30. Cohen, ‘Illocutions and Perlocutions’, 494, 493. 31. Cohen, ‘Illocutions and Perlocutions’, 494. 32. Cohen, ‘Illocutions and Perlocutions’, 494. 33. Cohen, ‘Illocutions and Perlocutions’, 496. 34. Cohen, ‘Illocutions and Perlocutions’, 495. 35. See Cohen, ‘Illocutions and Perlocutions’, 496. 36. See Cohen, ‘Illocutions and Perlocutions’, 497. 37. Cohen, ‘Illocutions and Perlocutions’, 501. 38. Cohen, ‘Illocutions and Perlocutions’, 499. 39. Cohen, ‘Figurative Speech and Figurative Acts’, 671. 40. Cohen, ‘Figurative Speech and Figurative Acts’, 674. 41. Cohen, ‘Figurative Speech and Figurative Acts’, 675. 42. Cohen, ‘Figurative Speech and Figurative Acts’, 678. 43. Cohen, ‘Figurative Speech and Figurative Acts’, 681. 44. Cohen, ‘Figurative Speech and Figurative Acts’, 684; emphasis in original. 45. Cohen, ‘Figurative Speech and Figurative Acts’, 680. 46. Cavell, Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow , 181. 47. See Cavell, Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow , 177 and 180, where he discusses Richard Wagner’s Tannhäuser (1845). 48. Cavell, Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow , 179. See Cavell, Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow , 182–83, where he discusses Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Don Giovanni (1787). 49. Cavell, Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow , 19 and 185. 50. Cavell, Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow , 188. 51. See Austin, How To Do Things With Words , Lecture XII, 148–64. 52. See Cavell, Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow , 179. 53. See Cavell, Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow , 171. 54. Austin, How to Do Things with Words , 160. 55. Austin follows his account of the ‘Behabitive’ with a statement that attempts to ward off the interpretation of ‘apologize’ explored by Cavell, but it is by no means clear that it does so: ‘There are obvious connexions with both stating or describing what our feelings are and expressing, in the sense of venting our feelings, though behabitives are distinct from both of these’ (How to Do Things with Words , 160). 56. Riley, Impersonal Passion , 2. 210 I. ARMSTRONG

57. William Blake, ‘Infant Joy’, in Songs of Innocence and Experience , ed. Andrew Lincoln (London: Tate Gallery and William Blake Trust, 1991), Plate 25. 58. George Gordon Byron, ‘Darkness’, in The Complete Poetical Works , ed. Jerome J. McGann, 7 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980–1993), 4.43. 59. Tennyson, ‘The Lady of Shalott’, in The Poems of Tennyson , 2nd edn, ed. Christopher Ricks, 3 vols. (Harlow: Longman, 1989), 1.391. 60. T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land , in The Complete Poems and Plays , 1909–1950 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1980), 37–55 (37). 61. John Keats, ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, in John Keats : Complete Poems , ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1982), 279. 62. Caroline Bergvall, ‘Cropper’, in NyPoesi , 2 (2006), ed. Paal Bjelke Andersen; see http://www.nypoesi.net/tidsskrift/206/?tekst=10 (accessed 5 May 2015). 63. Alicia Ostriker, ‘Drone’, in The Book of Seventy (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009), 46. 64. William Wordsworth, ‘The Solitary Reaper’, in Poems , in Two Volumes , and Other Poems , 1800–1807 , ed. Jared Curtis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), 184–85 (184). 65. Blake ‘Preface’ to ‘Milton A Poem’, l. 38, 66. Eliot, ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, Complete Poems and Plays , 1909–1950 , 3. 67. W. B. Yeats, ‘Among School Children’, in The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats : The Poetry , ed. Richard J. Finneran (New York: Scribner, 1997), 217. 68. Dylan Thomas, ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’, in Collected Poems : 1934–1953 , ed. Walford Davies and Ralph Maud (London: J.M. Dent, 1998), 148. 69. Christina Rossetti, ‘A Birthday’, in Complete Poems , ed. R. W. Crump and Betty Flowers (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2001), 31–32. 70. See Austin, How to Do Things with Words , 73. 71. Austin, How to Do Things with Words , 72. 72. See Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language : A Semiotic Approach to Literature (1977), ed. Leon S. Roudiez, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980). 73. Charles Dickens, Bleak House : An Authoritative and Annotated Text , Illustrations , a Note on the Text , Genesis and Composition , Backgrounds , Criticism , ed. George Ford and Sylvère Monod (New York: W.W. Norton, 1977), 571–72. 74. This somewhat apocryphal quotation, ‘Make ’em laugh, make ’em cry, make ’em wait’, has also been attributed to Charles Reade. 75. Dickens, Bleak House , 571. TOWARDS A PERLOCUTIONARY POETICS? 211

76. See Clifford Geertz, ‘Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture’, in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 3–30. 77. See Theodor W. Adorno, ‘On Lyric Poetry and Society’, in Notes to Literature , 2 vols. ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991–1992), 1.37–54. BIBLIOGRAPHY

3 Geo. 4 c. 126. ‘An Act to Amend the General Laws now in being, for Regulating Turnpike Roads in that Part of Britain, Called England’. 8 August 1822. 6 Geo. 4 c. 10. ‘An Act For Repairing the Road from Hinckley in the County of Leicestershire to Nuneaton in the County of Warwick and from thence to Bishop’s Gate in the City of Coventry’. 23 March 1825. ‘Advertisement for Female Life in Prison ’. Athenæum , 6 September 1862: 294. Adorno, Theodor W. ‘On Lyric Poetry and Society’. In Notes to Literature , ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, 2 vols. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991–1992. 1, 37–54. Ahmed, Sara. The Promise of Happiness . Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Alexander, Annie. Choice of Evils , 3 vols. London: F.V. White, 1894. Allen, Grant. ‘Plain Words on the Woman Question’. Fortnightly Review 46 (1889): 448–58. Allen, Grant. The Woman Who Did , ed. Sarah Wintle. 1895; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Allibone, S. Austin. A Critical Dictionary of English Literature and British and American Authors Living and Deceased from the Earliest Accounts to the Latter Half of the Nineteenth Century . 3 vols. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1859–1871. [Anon.] ‘The Bishop of Exeter on Divorce’. The Times , 2 December 1857: 12. [Anon.] ‘Cabmen’s Dodges’. Morning Post , 6 May 1862: 6. [Anon.] ‘Christie’s Faith’. Pall Mall Gazette , 26 December 1866: 12. [Anon.] ‘Argus’. ‘Daniel O’Wheedle: A Portrait Drawn from Real Life’. Northern Star , 5 September 1840: 3.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Authors 2016 213 J. Bristow, J. McDonagh (eds.), Nineteenth-Century Radical Traditions, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59706-9 214 BIBLIOGRAPHY

[Anon.] ‘The Devil and Owen O’Connelly, or the New Irish Chancellor: A Romantic Ballad’. Northern Star , 19 December 1840: 3. [Anon.] ‘Foreign Magazines and Reviews’. In Index to the Periodical Literature of the World (Covering the Year 1892) (London: Review of Reviews Offi ce, 1893), 50–68. [Anon.] ‘Huzza for the Rule of the Whigs’. Northern Star , 29 July 1848: 3. Reprinted from Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 64 (July 1848): 112–13. [Anon.] ‘The Late F. W. Robinson’. Bookman: A Magazine of Literature and Life 14:6 (1902): 555. [Anon.] ‘Mattie: A Stray’. Morning Post , 2 August 1864: 2. [Anon.] ‘Mattie––A Stray’. Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art 18 (30 July 1864): 160–61. [Anon.] ‘Mission Statement’. International Association for Literary Journalism Studies, 7 December 2014 http://ialjs.org/mission-statement (accessed 5 September 2013). [Anon.] ‘Mr. Stead’ – ‘Songs of a Navvy’. Star , 20 April 1912: 2f. [Anon.] ‘New Novels’. Examiner , 2832 (10 May 1862), 294 [Anon.] ‘ On the Sinking of the Titanic: Some Notable Victims’. The Times , 18 April 1912: 12b. [Anon.] ‘Owen: A Waif’. Morning Post , 9 June 1862: 3. [Anon.] ‘The Passing Hour: The March of the World in Picture and Pen’. Black and White 22 (1901): 831. [Anon.] ‘The Romance of the World from Day to Day’. Daily Paper , 4 October 1892: 20–22. [Anon.] ‘To Be Continued in Our Next’. Review of Reviews 27 (January 1903): 79–91. [Anon.] ‘Tom Pen’. ‘Song for the People, XXXII: A Stave about the Quack Patriot and His Repeal Delusion’. Northern Star , 10 October 1846: 3. [Anon.] ‘Trial of the Nuneaton Rioters’. The Times , 9 April 1833: 7. [Anon.] ‘W. T. Stead’. Daily Chronicle , 19 April 1912: 6c. [Anon.] ‘S’. ‘W. T. Stead’. Westminster Gazette , 17 April 1912: 1c–2a . [Anon.] ‘What is a Peer?’ Northern Star , 7 May 1842: 3. Ardis, Ann L. New Women, New Novels: Feminism and Early Modernism . Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990. Armstrong, Isobel. The Radical Aesthetic . Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. Athitakis, Markm. ‘NBCC Reads: Norman Sims on Literary Journalism’. http:// bookcritics.org/blog/archive/nbcc-reads-a-last-word-on-literary-journalism- from-norman-sims . Accessed 5 September 2013. Austin, J. L. How To Do Things With Words . 2nd edn. Ed. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisa. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972. Ayer, A. J. Language, Truth and Logic . 2nd edn. London: Victor Gollancz, 1946. Bagwell, Philip. The Transport Revolution . London: Routledge, 1988. BIBLIOGRAPHY 215

Bamford, Samuel. Passages in the Life of a Radical . 2nd edn. 2 vols. London: Simpkin and Marshall, 1844. Baylen, Joseph. ‘W. T. Stead as Publisher and Editor of the Review of Reviews’. Victorian Periodicals Review , 12.2 (1979): 70–84. Beaumont, Matthew. Utopia Ltd.: Ideologies of Social Dreaming in England, 1870- 1900 . Leiden: Brill, 2005. Beetham, Margaret. ‘British Workwoman ’. In Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor, eds. Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism in Great Britain and Ireland . Gent: Academia Press; and London: British Library, 2009. Belchem, John. ‘Republicanism, Popular Constitutionalism, and the Radical Platform in Early Nineteenth-Century England’. Social History 6.1 (1981): 1–32. Bell, Bill, ed. The Edinburgh History of the Book in Scotland, Volume 3: Ambition and Industry, 1800-1880. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2007. Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project . Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999. Benjamin, Walter. Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings 1935-38 . Ed. Howard Eiland et al. Trans. Edmund Jephcott and Howard Eiland. 4 vols. Cambridge MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002. Bidouze, René. Lissagaray, La Plume et L’épeé . Paris: Les Éditions Ouvrières, 1991. Blake, Emilia Aylmer. An Unruly Spirit , 3 vols. London: F.V. White, 1890. Blake, William. Songs of Innocence and Experience . Ed. Andrew Lincoln. London: Tate Gallery and William Blake Trust, 1991. Bodenheimer, Rosemary. The Politics of Story in Victorian Social Fiction . Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991. Boime, Albert. Art and the French Commune . Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995. Boniface, Susie. Interview with Kirsty Wark. BBC2 Newsnight , 21 February 2013. Bowen, John. ‘Introduction’. In Charles Dickens. Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of ’Eighty . Ed. Bowen. 1841; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003. Xiii–xxxiv. Bowen, John, Other Dickens: Pickwick to Chuzzlewit . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Bowker, R. R. ‘London as a Literary Centre––Second Paper: The Novelists’. Harper’s New Monthly Magazine , 77 (1888): 3–27. Bragg, Tom. ‘Charles Reade’. In Pamela K. Gilbert, ed. A Companion to Sensation Fiction . Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. 293–305. Brake, Laurel. ‘“Fiction of Another Sort”: News and the Novel in W.T. Stead’s Journalism’. In Marie-Francoise Cachin and Claire Parfait, eds. Au Bonheur du feuilleton . Paris: CREAPHIS, 2007. 179–92. 216 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brake, Laurel. ‘Stead Alone: Journalist, Proprietor and Publisher, 1890–1903’. In Roger Luckhurst et al, eds. W. T. Stead: Newspaper Revolutionary . London: British Library, 2012. 77–97. Brake, Laurel. ‘The Longevity of Ephemera’. Media History 18.1 (2012): 7–20. Brantlinger, Patrick. ‘Did Dickens Have a Philosophy of History? The Case of Barnaby Rudge ’. Dickens Studies Annual 30 (2001): 59–74. Byron, George Gordon. ‘Darkness’. In The Complete Poetical Works . Ed. Jerome J. McGann. 7 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980–1993. 4.40. Caird, Mona. ‘Marriage’. Westminster Review 130 (August 1888): 186–201. Reprinted in Carolyn Christensen Nelson, ed. A New Woman Reader: Fiction, Articles, Drama of the 1890s. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2001. 185–199. Carey, John. The Violent Effi gy: A Study of Dickens’ Imagination . London: Faber, 1979. Caroline Bergvall. ‘Cropper’. NyPoesi 2 (2006). Ed. Paal Bjelke Andersen. http:// www.nypoesi.net/tidsskrift/206/?tekst=10 . Accessed 5 May 2015. Carpenter, Mary. Our Convicts . 2 vols. London: Longman, 1864. Cavell, Stanley. Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. Chandler, James. ‘The Politics of Sentiment: Notes Towards a New Account’. Studies in Romanticism 49.4 (2010): 553–75. Chapman, Siobhan. “From Their Point of View’: Voice and Speech in George Moore’s Esther Waters ’. Language and Literature 11.4 (2002): 307–23. Chase, Karen, and Michael Levenson. The Spectacle of Intimacy: A Public Life for the Victorian Family. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Chase, Malcolm. ‘Building Identity, Building Circulation: Engraved Portraiture and the Northern Star ’. In Joan Allen and Owen R. Ashton, eds. Papers for the People: A Study of the Chartist Press . London: Merlin Press, 2005. 25–53 Chase, Malcolm. Chartism: A New History . Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007. Chesterton, G. K. Superstition of Divorce . London: Chatto and Windus, 1920. Chittick, Kathryn. Dickens and the 1830s . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Clark, T. J. The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers . London: Thames and Hudson, 1984. Cleeve, Lucas. The Woman Who Wouldn’t . London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent, 1895. Cobbett, William. ‘History of the Coventry Elections’. Political Register 36 (25 March 1820): 82–130. Cobbett, William. ‘To The Reformers In General …’. Political Register 3 (26 October 1816): 513–44. Cobbett, William. Rural Rides . Ed. Ian Dyck. 1830; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2001. BIBLIOGRAPHY 217

Cohen, Ted. ‘Figurative Speech and Figurative Acts’. Journal of Philosophy 72.19 (1975): 669–84. Cohen, Ted. ‘Illocutions and Perlocutions’. Foundations of Language 9.4 (1973): 492–503. Cohen, William A. Sex Scandal: The Private Parts of Victorian Fiction . Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996. [Collins, Wilkie.] ‘The Unknown Public’. Household Words 18 (21 August 1858): 217–22. Connor, Steven. ‘Space, Place and the Body of Riot in Barnaby Rudge ’. In Connor, ed. Charles Dickens: Longman Critical Readers . London: Longman, 1996. 211–29. Cooper, Thomas. ‘To the Shakesperean Brigade of Leicester Chartists’. Northern Star , 20 August 1842: 4. Cross, Nigel. The Common Writer: Life in Nineteenth-Century Grub Street (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Dane, Clemence. A Bill of Divorcement: A Play in Three Acts . London: William Heinemann, 1921. Dawson, Gowan. ‘The Review of Reviews and the New Journalism in Late- Victorian Britain’. In Geoffey Cantor et al, eds. Science in the Nineteenth- Century Periodical . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 172–95. Dean, Tim. ‘An Impossible Embrace: Queerness, Futurity, and the Death Drive’. In James Joseph Bono, Tim Dean, and Ewa Płonowska Ziarek, eds. A Time for the Humanities: Futurity and the Limits of Autonomy . Bronx, NY: Fordham University Press, 2008. 122–40. Demoor, Marysa, and K. McDonald, eds. Victorian Periodicals Review 43.2 (2010). Derrida, Jacques. ‘Signature événement contexte’. In Derrida. Marges de la Philosophie . Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1972. 365–93. Derrida, Jacques. ‘Signature Event Context’. Trans. Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman. Glyph 1 (1977): 172–97. Derrida, Jacques. ‘Signature Event Context’. In Margins of Philosophy . Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. 307–30. Reprinted in Barry Stocker, ed. Jacques Derrida: Basic Writings. London: Routledge, 2007. 105–34. Derrida, Jacques. ‘Limited Inc. abc…’. Glyph 2 (1977): 162–254. Derrida, Jacques. Limited Inc . Ed. Gerald Graff. Trans. Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988. Dickens, Charles. Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of ’Eighty . Ed. John Bowen. 1841; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003. Dickens, Charles, ed. Bentley’s Miscellany , 1837–1839. Dickens, Charles. Bleak House: An Authoritative and Annotated Text, Illustrations, a Note on the Text, Genesis and Composition, Backgrounds, Criticism , Ed.George Ford and Sylvère Monod. 1853; New York: W.W. Norton, 1977. 218 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Dickens, Charles. Hard Times . Ed. Fred Kaplan and Sylvère Monod. 3rd edn. 1854; New York: W.W. Norton, 2001. Dickens, Charles, ed. Master Humphrey’s Clock , 1840–1844. Dickens, Charles. Oliver Twist . Ed. Kathleen Tillotson. 1838; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Dickens, Charles. The Christmas Books, Volume 1: A Christmas Carol/The Chimes . Ed. Michael Slater. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971. Dickens, Charles. The Letters of Charles Dickens . Ed. Madeline House et al. 12 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965–2002. Dickens, Charles. The Old Curiosity Shop . London: Chapman and Hall, 1841. Dickens Journals Online. http://www.djo.org.uk/indexes/articles.html . Accessed 13 April 2013. Dixie, Florence. Gloriana and the Revolution of 1900 . London: Henry & Co. 1890. Dollimore, Jonathan. Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault . Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. Duckworth, Alastair. The Improvement of the Estate: A Study of Jane Austen’s Novels . Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971. Dumas, Alexandre. The Black Tulip . Ed. Robin Buss. 1850; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003. Duncan, Ian. Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel: The Gothic, Scott, Dickens . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Dyck, Ian. William Cobbett and Rural Popular Culture . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Dyer, Gary. British Satire and the Politics of Style, 1789-1832 . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Dzelzainis, Ella. ‘Radicalism and Reform’. In John Kucich and Jenny Bourne Taylor,eds. The Oxford History of the Novel in English: Volume 3: The Nineteenth- Century Novel, 1820-1880 . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. 427–43. Easley, Alexis. ‘W. T. Stead, Late Victorian Feminism, and the Review of Reviews ’. In Roger Luckhurst et al., eds. W. T. Stead: Newspaper Revolutionary . London: British Library, 2012. 37–58. Eckley, Grace. Maiden Tribute: A Life of W. T. Stead . London: Xlibris, 2007. Eckley, Grace. NewsStead (1992–2004). Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive . Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. Eliot, George. Felix Holt, the Radical . Ed. Fred C. Thomson. 1866; Oxford: Clarendon, 1980. Eliot, George. The George Eliot Letters . Ed. Gordon Haight. 9 vols. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959–1978. Eliot, George. Impressions of Theophrastus Such . Ed. Nancy Henry. 1879; London: Pickering Chatto, 1994. BIBLIOGRAPHY 219

Eliot, George. The Journals of George Eliot . Ed. Margaret Harris and Judith Johnson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Eliot, George. Middlemarch . New edition. London: William Blackwood, 1874. Eliot, George. ‘The Natural History of German Life’ (1856). In Selected Essays, Poems and Other Writings . Ed. A.S. Byatt and Nicholas Warren. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990. 107–39. Eliot, George. Scenes of Clerical Life . Ed. Graham Handley. 1858; Ware: Wordsworth, 2007. Eliot, George. Scenes of Clerical Life . Ed. Thomas Noble. 1858; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Eliot, George. Silas Marner . Ed. David Carroll. 1861; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996. Eliot, T. S. The Waste Land. The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909-1950 . New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1980. Epstein, James. Radical Expression: Political Language, Ritual, and Symbol in Nineteenth-Century Britain, 1790-1850 . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Everett, Nigel. The Tory View of Landscape . New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994. Fahnestock, Jeanne. ‘Bigamy: The Rise and Fall of a Convention’. Nineteenth- Century Fiction , 36.1 (1981): 47–71. Fantina, Richard. Victorian Sensational Fiction: The Daring Work of Charles Reade . New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Fonkenell, Guillaume. Le Palais Des Tuileries . Arles: Honoré Clair, 2010. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality Volume 1: The Will to Knowledge . Trans. Robert Hurley. 1976; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998. Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and its Discontents . Ed. Leo Bersani. Trans. David McLintock. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2002. Fritzsche, Peter. Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays . Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957. Furneaux, Holly. Queer Dickens: Erotics, Families, Masculinities . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Fyfe, Aileen. Steam-Powered Knowledge: William Chambers and the Business of Publishing, 1820-1860. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. Gallagher, Catherine. The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction: Social Discourse and Narrative Form, 1832-1867. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. Gates, Barbara T. Victorian Suicide: Mad Crimes and Sad Histories . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988. Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures . New York: Basic Books, 1973. 220 BIBLIOGRAPHY

George, Dorothy. English Political Caricature: A Study of Opinion and Propaganda . 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1959. Gilmartin, Kevin. Print Politics: The Press and Radical Opposition in Early Nineteenth-Century England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Gottshall, James K. ‘Devils Abroad: The Unity and Signifi cance of Barnaby Rudge ’. Nineteenth-Century Fiction 16.2 (1961): 133–46. Grand, Sarah. The Beth Book . London: W. Heinemann, 1897. Grand, Sarah. ‘The New Aspect of the Woman Question’. North American Review , 158 (1894): 270–76. Grand, Sarah. ‘The Woman’s Question: An Interview with Madame Sarah Grand’. Humanitarian 8.3. (1896): 161–69. Reprinted in Carolyn Christensen Nelson, ed. A New Woman Reader: Fiction, Articles, Drama of the 1890s. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2001. 160–67. Graver, Suzanne. George Eliot and Community: A Study in Social Theory and Fictional Form. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984. Greenslade, Roy. ‘Media Analysis: Public Interest, Phone Hacking, and the Murdochs’. Evening Standard . 11 April 2012. http://www.standard.co.uk/ business/markets/media-analysis-the-public-interest-sometimes-needs-a- mucky-approach-7636652.html . Accessed 11 April 2013. Greenslade, Roy. ‘News is not the Newspaper’. Guardian , 11 February 2013: 31. Grimes, Kyle. ‘Verbal Jujitsu: William Hone and the Tactics of Satirical Confl ict’. In The Satiric Eye: Forms of Satire in the Romantic Period . Ed. Steven E. Jones. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. 173–184. Habermas, Jürgen. On the Pragmatics of Communication . Ed. Maeve Cook. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998. Hager, Kelly. Dickens and the Rise of Divorce: The Failed Marriage Plot and the Novel Tradition . Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2010. Haight, Gordon. George Eliot: A Biography . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968. Hall, Catherine, Keith McClelland, and Jane Rendall. Defi ning the Victorian Nation: Class, Race, Gender and the Reform Act of 1867 . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Hampton, Mark. Visions of the Press in Britain, 1850-1950 . Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2004. Hardy, Barbara. The Advantage of Lyric: Essays on Feeling in Poetry . London: Athlone Press, 1977. Hardy, Thomas. ‘Laws the Cause of Misery’, ‘How Shall We Solve the Divorce Problem’. Nash’s Magazine 5.6 (1912): 670–84. Hardy, Thomas. Jude the Obscure . 1895. Ed. Norman Page. New York: Norton, 1999. Harper’s Bazaar . http://hearth.library.cornell.edu/h/hearth/browse/title/473 2809.html . Accessed 9 August 2012. BIBLIOGRAPHY 221

Harrison, Janice Hubbard. Edwardian Stories of Divorce . New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996. Hartley, Jenny. Charles Dickens and the House of Fallen Women . London: Methuen, 2008. Hartley, Lucy. ‘Democracy at the Crossroads: Tocqueville, Mill, and the Confl ict of Interests’. In The American Experiment and the Idea of Democracy in British Culture, 1776-1914 . Ed. Ella Dzelzainis and Ruth Livesey. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2013. 61–78. Harvey, David. Paris, Capital of Modernity . London: Routledge, 2003. Haywood, Ian. Working-Class Fiction . Plymouth: Northcote House, 1997. Hazlitt, William. ‘Character of Cobbett’, 1821. Reprinted in The Fight and Other Writings . Ed. Tom Paulin and David Chandler. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000. 129–39. Henry, Nancy. ‘George Eliot and Politics’. In The Cambridge Companion to George Eliot . Ed. George Levine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 138–58. Herbert, A.J. Holy Deadlock . London: Methuen, 1934. Hocquenghem, Guy. Homosexual Desire . Trans. Daniella Dangoor. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993. Hollington, Michael. Dickens and the Grotesque . Beckenham: Croom Helm, 1984. Hollis, Hilda. ‘Felix Holt: Independent Spokesman or Eliot’s Mouthpiece’. ELH 68.1 (2001): 155–77. Huffer, Lynne. Mad for Foucault: Rethinking the Foundations of Queer Theory . New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. Hughes, Kathryn, ed. George Eliot: Family History . 5 vols. London: Routledge/ Thoemmes, 2000. Hughes, Kathryn. George Eliot: Last Victorian . London: Fourth Estate, 1998. Humpherys, Anne. ‘Breaking Apart: The Early Victorian Divorce Novel’. In Victorian Women Writers and the Woman Question . Ed. Nicola Diane Thompson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. 42–59. Humpherys, Anne. ‘Coming Apart: The British Newspaper Press and the Divorce Court’. In Nineteenth-Century Media and the Construction of Identities . Eds. Laurel Brake, Bill Bell, and David Finkelstein. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000. 220–31. Humpherys, Anne. ‘Enoch Arden , the Fatal Return, and the Silence of Annie’. Victorian Poetry 30.3/4 (1992): 331-42. Humpherys, Anne. ‘The Journal that Did: Form and Content in The Adult (1897– 1899)’. Media History 9.1 (2003): 63–78. Humpherys, Anne. ‘The Three of Them: The Scene of ‘Divorce’ in Nineteenth- Century English Fiction’. In After Intimacy: The Culture of Divorce in the West since 1789 . Eds. Karl Leydecker and Nicholas White. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007, 113–134. 222 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Huysmans, Joris-Karl. Against Nature . Ed. Nicholas White. Trans. Margaret Mauldon. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Johannsen, Albert. The House of Beadle and Adams and Its Dime and Nickel Novels: The Story of a Vanished Literature . 3 vols. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1950. Jones, Colin. ‘French Crossings I: A Tale of Two Cities’. Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 20 (2010): 1–26. Kalsem, Kristin. In Contempt: Nineteenth-Century Women, Law and Literature . Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2011. Kapp, Yvonne. Eleanor Marx: Family Life (1855-1883) . 2 vols. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1972. Keating, P. J. The Working Classes in Victorian Fiction. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971. Keats, John. ‘Ode to a Nightingale’. In John Keats: Complete Poems . Ed. Jack Stillinger. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1982. 279–81. Kincaid, James. Dickens and the Rhetoric of Laughter . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971. Kinross, Albert. The Love Brothers . London: Cassell, 1910. Koven, Seth. Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004. Kristeva, Julia. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature , 1977. Ed. Leon S. Roudiez. Trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980. Kurnick, David. ‘Felix Holt: Love in the Time of Politics’. In A Companion to George Eliot . Ed. Amanda Anderson and Harry E. Shaw. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2013. 141–152. Law, Graham. Serializing Fiction in the Victorian Press . Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000. Lawes, Kim. Paternalism and Politics: The Revival of Paternalism in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain . Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000. Leckie, Barbara. “One of the Greatest Social Revolutions of Our Time’: The Matrimonial Causes Act, Divorce Court Journalism, and the Victorian Novel’. In After Intimacy: The Culture of Divorce in the West since 1789 . Eds. Karl Leydecker and Nicholas White. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007. 31–56. Lepelletier, Edmond. Paul Verlaine His Life—His Work . Trans. E. M. Lang. London: Laurie, 1909. Li, Hao. Memory and History in George Eliot: Transfi guring the Past . Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000. Liddle, Dallas. The Dynamics of Genre: Journalism and the Practice of Literature in Mid-Victorian Britain. Charlottesville, VA: University of Press of Virginia, 2009. BIBLIOGRAPHY 223

[Linton, Eliza Lynn]. ‘Gone to Jail’. All the Year Round 7 (2 August 1862): 487–93. Linton, Eliza Lynn. ‘The Judicial Shock to Marriage’. Nineteenth Century 29 (May 1891): 691–700. Linton, Eliza Lynn. ‘The Philosophy of Marriage’. In Is Marriage a Failure? Ed. Harry Quilter. London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1888. 182–202. Lissagaray, Prosper Olivier. Histoire de la Commune de Paris . Brussels: Librarie Contemporaine de Henri Kistemaeckers, 1876. Lissagaray, Prosper Olivier. History of the Commune of 1871 . Trans. Eleanor Marx. London: Reeves and Turner, 1886. Lopatin, Nancy. ‘Popular Politics in the Midlands: The Coventry Political Union and the Great Reform Act’. Midland History 20 (1995): 103–18. Marcus, Steven. Dickens from Pickwick to Dombey . London: Chatto and Windus, 1963. Mayhew, Henry. The Criminal Prisons of London and Scenes of Prison Life . London: Griffi n, Bohn & Co., 1862. McCalman, Iain. Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries and Pornographers in London, 1795-1840 . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. McCormack, Kathleen. George Eliot’s English Travels: Composite Characters and Coded Communications . London: Routledge, 2005. McCracken, Scott. ‘Imagining the Modernist City’. In The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms . Eds. Peter Brooker et al. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. 637–54. McCracken, Scott. Masculinities, Modernist Fiction, and the Urban Public Sphere . Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007. McDonagh, Josephine. ‘Child-Murder Narratives in George Eliot’s Adam Bede : Embedded Histories and Fictional Representation’. Nineteenth-Century Literature 56.2 (2001): 228–59. McDonagh, Josephine. ‘Space, Mobility, and the Novel: “The Spirit of Place is a Great Reality”’. In Adventures in Realism . Ed. Matthew Beaumont. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007. 50–67. McDonagh, Josephine. Child Murder and British Culture, 1720-1900 . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. McGowan, John P. ‘Mystery and History in Barnaby Rudge ’. Dickens Studies Annual 9 (1981): 33–52. McKnight, Natalie. ‘The Erotics of Barnaby Rudge ’. Dickens Studies Annual 40 (2009): 23–36. Meredith, George. Diana of the Crossways . London: Chapman & Hall, 1885. Michasiw, Kim Ian. ‘Barnaby Rudge : The Since of the Fathers’. ELH 56.3 (1989): 571–92. Mill, John Stuart. Collected Works . Ed. John M. Robson. 33 vols. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963–1991. 224 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Morgentaler, Goldie. Dickens and Heredity: When Like Begets Like . London: Macmillan, 2000. Mulpetre, Owen. Stead and the New Journalism . Kindle Edition, 2012. Mulpetre, Owen. ‘W.T. Stead Resource Site’. ‘ http://www.attackingthedevil. co.uk/ . Accessed 29 March 2015. Mussell, James, and Suzanne Paylor. ‘Mapping the ‘Mighty Maze’: The Nineteenth- Century Serials Edition’. 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 1 (2005). http://www.19.bbk.ac.uk/article/view/ntn.437 . Accessed 5 September 2015. Newdegate Family. Applications for Charity . Warwickshire Record Offi ce, CR1841/47. Newdigate v. Newdegate Depositions . National Archives, C13/1502/21. Norgate, Gerald Le Grys. Revised by Sayoni Basu. ‘Robinson, Frederick William (1830–1901)’. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography . Oxford University Press, 2004. Online edn. May 2013. http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/35791 . Accessed 19 February 2015. Norton, Caroline. Stuart of Dunleath . 3 vols. London: Coulburn and Co., 1851. Nunokawa, Jeff. ‘Queer Theory: Postmortem’. In After Sex? On Writing since Queer Theory . Ed. Janet Halley and Andrew Parker. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011, 245–56. [Oliphant, Margaret]. ‘Novels’. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 94 (1863): 168–83. Oliphant, Margaret. The Selected Works of Margaret Oliphant: Part I–Literary Criticism and Literary History, Volume 1 Literary Criticism, 1854-69 . Ed. Joanne Shattock. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2011. [Oliphant, Margaret.]. ‘Sensation Novels’. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 91 (1862): 564–84. Ord, William. Report from the Select Committee on Bribery at Elections (1835). Houses of Parliament Parliamentary Papers online. http://gateway.proquest. com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&res_dat=xri:hcpp&rft_dat=xri:hcpp: rec:1835-015566 . Accessed 28 July 2015. Ouida. Moths . 3 vols. London: Chatto and Windus, 1880. Peters, John Durham. ‘Discourse Network 1912’. In W. T. Stead: Newspaper Revolutionary . Eds. Roger Luckhurst et al. London: British Library, 2012. 166–80. Poovey, Mary. Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation 1830-1864 . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Rancière, Jacques. The Aesthetic Unconscious . Trans. Debra Keates and James Swenson. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009. Ransom, P. J. The Archaeology of the Transport Revolution . Tadworth: World’s Work, 1984. Rewald, John. The History of Impressionism , 4th edn. London: Secker and Warburg, 1980. BIBLIOGRAPHY 225

Richards, Eric. ‘“Captain Swing” in the West Midlands’. International Review of Social History , 19.1 (1974): 86–99. Richards, Thomas. The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle 1851-1914 . London: Verso, 1991. Rigney, Ann. The Afterlives of Walter Scott: Memory on the Move . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Riley, Denise. Impersonal Passion: Language as Affect . Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. Robb, Graham. Rimbaud . London: Picador, 2000. Robinson, Frederick. Grandmother’s Money . London: Hurst & Blackett, 1860. Robinson, Frederick. High Church . London: Hurst & Blackett, 1860. Robinson, Frederick. Female Life in Prison . 2 vols. London: Hurst and Blackett, 1862. Robinson, Frederick. Owen: A Waif . 3 vols. London: Hurst and Blackett, 1862. Robinson, Frederick. Church and Chapel . London: Hurst & Blackett, 1863. Robinson, Frederick. Mattie: A Stray . 3 vols. London: Hurst and Blackett, 1864. [Robinson, Frederick.] ‘A Prison Matron’. Memoirs of Jane Cameron . 2 vols. London: Hurst and Blackett, 1864. Robinson, Frederick. W. Carry’s Confession . London: Hurst & Blackett, 1865. [Robinson, Frederick.] Prison Characters Drawn from Life with Suggestions for Prison Government . 2 vols. London: Hurst and Blackett, 1866. Robinson, W. Sydney. Muckraker: The Scandalous Life of W. T. Stead, Britain’s First Investigative Journalist . London: Robson, 2012. Ross, Kristin. The Emergence of Social Space . London: Verso, 2008. Rossetti, Christina. ‘A Birthday’. In Complete Poems . Ed. R. W. Crump and Betty Flowers. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2001, 31–32. Rubenstein, Helge, ed. Oxford Book of Marriage . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. Sanders, Michael. “God is Our Guide! Our Cause Is Just!’: The National Chartist Hymn Book and Victorian Hymnody’. Victorian Studies 54.4 (2012): 679–705. Sanders, Michael. The Poetry of Chartism: Politics, Aesthetics, History . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Sanders, Valerie. ‘Marriage and the Antifeminist Woman Novelist’. In Victorian Women Writers and the Woman Question . Ed. Nicola Diane Thompson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. 24–41. Sanders, Valerie. The Brother-Sister Culture in Nineteenth-Century Literature . Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002. Schreiner, Olive. TheStory of an African Farm . London: Chapman & Hall, 1883. Schults, Raymond. Crusader in Babylon: W. T. Stead and the Pall Mall Gazette. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1972. Schwan, Anne. ‘“Dreadful Beyond Description”: Mary Carpenter’s Prison Reform Writings and Female Convicts in Britain and India’. European Journal of English Studies 14.2 (2010): 107–20. 226 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Schwan, Anne.. “From Dry Volumes of Facts and Figures’ to Stories of ‘Flesh and Blood’: The Prison Narratives of Frederick William Robinson’. In Stones of Law, Bricks of Shame: Narrating Imprisonment in the Victorian Age. Ed. Jan Alber and Frank Lauterbach. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009, 191–212. Schwan, Anne. Convict Voices: Women, Class, and Writing about Prison in Nineteenth-Century England . Durham, NH: University of New Hampshire Press, 2014. Scott, J. W. Robertson. The Life and Death of a Newspaper: An Account of the Temperaments, Perturbations and Achievements of John Morley, W.T. Stead, E.T. Cook, Harry Cust, J.L. Garvin, and Three Other Editors of the Pall Mall Gazette. London: Methuen, 1952. Searby, Peter. ‘Paternalism, Disturbance and Parliamentary Reform: Society and Politics in Coventry, 1819–32’. International Review of Social History 22.2 (1977): 198–225. Searle, John R. ‘Reiterating the Differences: A Reply to Derrida’. Glyph 1 (1977): 198–208. Sen, Sambudha. London, Radical Culture, and the Making of the Dickensian Aesthetic . Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 2012. Sen, Sambudha. ‘Radical Satire and Respectability: Comic Imagination in Hone, Jerrold, and Dickens’. In The Working-Class Intellectual in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain . Ed. Aruna Krishnamurthy. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009. 143–66. Shaw, George Bernard. The Doctor’s Dilemma, Getting Married, and the Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet . London: Constable & Co., 1911. Shuttleworth, Sally. George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science: The Make-Believe of a Beginning . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Slater, Michael. Dickens and Women . London: Dent, 1983. Snediker, Michael. Queer Optimism: Lyrical Personhood and Other Felicitous Persuasions . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Spence, Peter. The Birth of Romantic Radicalism: War, Popular Politics and English Radical Reformism, 1800-1815 . Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996. 26–40. Stead, W. T. ‘The Future of Journalism’. Contemporary Review 50 (1886): 663–79. Stead, W. T. If Christ Came to Chicago . Chicago: Laird & Lee, 1894. Stead, W. T. ‘Interview’. Sunday Tribune [Chicago] (November 1893). In Frederic Whyte. The Life of W. T. Stead , 2 vols. New York: Houghton Miffl in and Jonathan Cape, 1925. Stead, W. T. ‘Introduction’. Index to the Periodicals of 1895 . London: Editorial Offi ce, 1896. V–vi. Stead, W. T. Mr Carnegie’s Conundrum , Review of Reviews Annual for 1900 . London: Review of Reviews Offi ce, 1900. Stead, W. T. ‘Preface’, Index to the Periodical Literature of the World (Covering the Year 1891) . London: Editorial Offi ce, 1892, 5–6. BIBLIOGRAPHY 227

Stead, W. T. ‘Preface’. Index to the Periodicals of 1894 . London: Editorial Offi ce, 1895, iii–iv. Stead, W. T. ‘Preface’. Index to the Periodicals of 1897 . London: Editorial Offi ce, 1898, iii. Stead, W. T. ‘Preface’. Index to the Periodicalsof 1900 . London: Editorial Offi ce, 1901, iii–iv. Stead, W. T. ‘Programme’. Review of Reviews 1.1 (January 1890): 14. Stead, W. T. ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’. Pall Mall Gazette , 6 July 1885: 1–6; 7 July 1885: 1–6; 8 July 1885: 1–5; 10 July 1885: 1–6. Stead, W. T. ‘The Reviews Reviewed’. Review of Reviews 1.1 (January 1890): 54. Stead, W. T. ‘To My Readers’, Review of Reviews 1.5 (May 1890): xxiii. Steedman, Carolyn. Dust . Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001. Stern, Madeleine B. ‘Booth, Mary Louise (Apr. 19, 1831–Mar. 5, 1889)’. In Notable American Women: 1607-1950 . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971. Stockton, Kathryn Bond. The Queer Child: or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century . Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 2009. Strachan, John, ed. British Satire 1785-1840 . 5 vols. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2003. Sutherland, John. The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction . Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989. Sutherland, John. Victorian Novelists and Publishers . London: Athlone Press, 1976. Tambling, Jeremy. Dickens,Violence and the Modern State: Dreams of the Scaffold . Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995. Taylor, Miles. The Decline of British Radicalism, 1847-1860 . Oxford: Clarendon, 1995. Tennyson, Alfred. ‘The Lady of Shalott’. In The Poems of Tennyson . 2nd edn. Ed. Christopher Ricks. 3 vols. Harlow: Longman, 1989. 1.387–395 Thackeray, William Makepeace. ‘De Juventute’. Cornhill Magazine, 2 (1860): 501–12. Thomas, Dylan. ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’. In Collected Poems: 1934- 1953 . Ed. Walford Davies and Ralph Maud. London: J.M. Dent, 1998, 148. Thomas, Gillian. A Position to Command Respect: Women and the Eleventh Britannica . Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1992. Thompson, E.P. The Making of the English Working Class . 1963; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992. Thomson, Fred C. ‘The Genesis of Felix Holt’. PMLA , 74.5 (1959): 576–84. Tomalin, Claire. The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens . Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991. Trahey, Jane, ed. Harper’s Bazaar: 100 Years of the American Female . New York: Random House, 1967. 228 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Trollope, Antony. The Small House at Allington . Ed. Julian Thompson. 1864; Harmondsworth: Penguin 1991. Tuchman, Gaye, with Nina E. Fortin. Edging Women Out: Victorian Novelists, Publishers and Social Change . London: Routledge, 1989. Tucker, Paul. ‘The First Impressionist Exhibition and Monet’s Impression, Sunrise : A Tale of Timing, Commerce, and Patriotism’. Art History 7.4 (1984): 465–76. Wade, John. Black Book, or Corruption Unmasked! Being an Account of Persons, Places, and Sinecures . London: John Fairburn, 1820–1823. The Waterloo Directory of English Newspapers and Periodicals, 1800-1900 . Waterloo, ON: North Waterloo Academic Press, 1997-continuing. Watts-Dunton, Theodore. ‘A Great Builder of the Old Three-Decker: F. W. Robinson’. Athenæum , 14 December 1901: 812–13. Weightman, Gavin. Secrets of a Titanic Victim: The Story of the Real My Fair Lady . London: Backstory, 2012. Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City . 1973; London: Hogarth, 1993. Wilson, Colette E. Paris and the Commune, 1871-78: The Politics of Forgetting . Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007. Winnicott, D. W. The Family and Individual Development . 1965; London: Routledge, 1999. Winnicott, D. W. Playing and Reality . London: Tavistock Publications, 1971. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus . Trans. C. K. Ogden. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1922. [Wooler, Thomas J.,] ‘The Black Dwarf’. ‘Letters of the Black Dwarf. From the Black Dwarf in London to the Yellow Bonze, at Japan. Difference in The Treatment of Great Men by the People’. Black Dwarf , 9.2 (11 September 1822): 361–76. Wordsworth, William. ‘The Solitary Reaper’. In Poems, in Two Volumes, and Other Poems, 1800-1807 . Ed. Jared Curtis. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983. 184–85. Yeats, W. B. ‘Among School Children’. In The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats: The Poetry . Ed. Richard J. Finneran. New York: Scribner, 1997. 215–17. Zedner, Lucia. Women, Crime, and Custody in Victorian England. Oxford: Clarendon, 1991.

SALLY LEDGER: A CHRONOLOGICAL BIBLIOGRAPHY Ledger, Sally. ‘Constructing Teachers. From BA to PGCE: Some Versions of English’. Literature Teaching Politics , 6 (1987): 17–20. Ledger, Sally. ‘The Peculiarities of Englishness’. News from Nowhere 5 (June 1988): 90–93. BIBLIOGRAPHY 229

Ledger, Sally. ‘History, Politics and Women: A Contextual Analysis of the Writings of William Hale White (‘Mark Rutherford’). Unpublished doctoral thesis. University of Oxford, 1990). Ledger, Sally. ‘William Morris, Philip Webb and “Mark Rutherford”’. Journal of the William Morris Society , 10 (1992): 14–20. Ledger, Sally. ‘Feminist Criticism in the Nineties’. Literature and History 2 (1993): 76–82. Ledger, Sally, Jane Spencer and Josephine McDonagh, eds. Political Gender: Texts and Contexts . London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994. Ledger, Sally, and Josephine McDonagh. ‘Introduction’. In Political Gender: Texts and Contexts , ed. Ledger, Spencer, and McDonagh. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994. 1–10. Ledger, Sally, and Scott McCracken, eds. Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siècle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Ledger, Sally, and Scott McCracken. ‘Introduction’. In Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siècle . Ed. Ledger and McCracken. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. 1–10. Ledger, Sally. ‘The New Woman and the Crisis of Victorianism’. In Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siècle . Ed. Ledger and McCracken. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. 22–44. Ledger, Sally. ‘In Darkest England: The Terror of Degeneration in Fin-de-Siècle Britain’. Literature and History 4 (1995): 71–86. Ledger, Sally. ‘Gissing, the Shopgirl, and the New Woman’. Women: A Cultural Review 6 (1995): 263–74. Ledger, Sally. ‘The New Woman, The Bostonians and the Gender of Modernity’. Barcelona English Language and Literature Studies 7 (1996): 55–62. Ledger, Sally. ‘Introduction’. Women’s Writing 3 (1996): 191–96. Ledger, Sally. ‘Women, Modernity and Tradition: The Gender of Modernity , by Rita Felski; Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context , by Anne McClintock; Banishing the Beast: English Feminism and Sexual Morality, 1885-1914 , by Lucy Bland’. Women’s Writing 3 (1996): 311–19. Ledger, Sally, The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siècle . Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997. Ledger, Sally, and Stella Swain, eds. Legal Fictions. New Formations 32 (1997). Ledger, Sally. Henrik Ibsen . Plymouth: Northcote House, 1999. Ledger, Sally. Henrik Ibsen . 2nd edn. Plymouth: Northcote House, 2005. Dickens, Charles. The Christmas Books . Ed. Sally Ledger. London: Everyman, 1999. Ledger, Sally. ‘Introduction’. In Dickens, The Christmas Books . Ed. Ledger. London: Everyman, 1999. Xxv–xxxv. 230 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ledger, Sally. ‘Ibsen and Gender at the Fin de Siècle’. In Luisa Maria Flora and Isobel Armstrong, eds. The Crossroads of Gender and Century Endings . Lisbon: Colibri, 2000. 49–60. Ledger, Sally. ‘The Feminine Political Novel in Victorian England , by Barbara Harman Leah’. Gaskell Society Journal 14 (2000): 109–11. Ledger, Sally, and Roger Luckhurst, eds. The Fin de Siècle: A Reader in Cultural History, c.1880-1900. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Ledger, Sally, and Roger Luckhurst.‘Introduction: Reading the Fin de Siècle’. In Ledger and Luckhurst, eds. The Fin de Siècle: A Reader in Cultural History, c.1880-1900 . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Xiii–xxiii. Ledger, Sally. ‘Women, Writing, and the Industrial Revolution , by Susan Zlotnick’. Nineteenth-Century Literature 55 (2000): 125–29 Ledger, Sally. ‘Ibsen, the New Woman and the Actress’. In Angelique Richardson and Chris Willis, eds. The New Woman in Fact and Fiction: Fin de Siècle Fictions . Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001. 79–93. Ledger, Sally, ‘The Insatiability of Human Wants: Economics and Aesthetics in Market Society , by Regenia Gagnier’. English Literature in Transition 45 (2002): 324–27. Egerton, George. Keynotes: Discords . Ed. Ledger. Birmingham: University of Birmingham Press, 2002.. Ledger, Sally. ‘Introduction’. In Egerton, Keynotes: Discords . Ed Sally Ledger. Birmingham: University of Birmingham Press, 2002. Ix–xxvi. Egerton, George. Keynotes: Discords . Ed. Ledger. London: Continuum, 2006. Ledger, Sally. ‘Chartist Aesthetics in the Mid-Century: Ernest Jones, a Novelist of the People’. Nineteenth-Century Literature 57 (2002): 31–63. Ledger, Sally. ‘From Queen Caroline to Lady Dedlock: Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination’. Victorian Literature and Culture 32 (2004): 575–600. Ledger, Sally. ‘ Douglas Jerrold: 1803 – 1857 , by Michel Slater’. Victorian Studies 46 (2004): 353–55. Ledger, Sally. ‘New Woman Drama’. In Mary Luckhurst, ed., A Companion to Modern British and Irish Drama, 1880 – 2005 . Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006. 48–60. Ledger, Sally. ‘Naturalism: Dirt and Horror Pure and Simple’. In Matthew Beaumont. Ed., Adventures in Realism . Oxford: Blackwell, 2007. 68–83. Ledger, Sally. Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Ledger, Sally. ‘The New Woman and Feminist Fictions’. In Gail Marshall, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Fin de Siècle . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 153–68. Ledger, Sally. ‘Palgrave Advances in Charles Dickens Studies , ed. John Bowen and Robert L. Patten’. Nineteenth-Century Literature 61 (2007): 516–21. BIBLIOGRAPHY 231

Ledger, Sally. ‘Wilde Women and The Yellow Book : The Sexual Politics of Aestheticism and Decadence’. English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920 50 (2007): 5–26. Ledger, Sally. ‘“Don’t Be So Melodramatic!” Dickens and the Affective Mode’. 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 4 (2007): http:// www.19.bbk.ac.uk/index.php/19/article/viewFile/456/316 . Ledger, Sally. ‘The Victorian Novel , by Louis James’. Victorian Studies 49 (2007): 380–82. Ledger, Sally. ‘ Charles Dickens and his Performing Selves: Dickens and the Public Readings , by Malcolm Andres’. Textual Practice 22 (2008): 186–88. Ledger, Sally. ‘The New Woman and the Empire , by Iveta Jusová; New Woman and Colonial Adventure Fiction in Victorian Britain: Gender, Genre, and Empire , by LeeAnne Richardson’. Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 27(2008): 178–81. Ledger, Sally. ‘“God Be Thanked: A Ruin!” The Embrace of Italian Modernity in Pictures from Italy and the Daily News ’. In Clotilde De Stasio, Michael Hollington and Francesca Orestano, eds., Dickens and Italy: Little Dorrit and Pictures from Italy . Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2009. 82–92. Ledger, Sally. ‘From the Old Bailey to Revolutionary France: The Trials of Charles Darnay’. In Colin Jones, Josephine McDonagh and Jon Mee, eds., Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities and the French Revolution . Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 75–86. Ledger, Sally. ‘God Be Thanked: A Ruin!” The Rejection of Nostalgia in Pictures from Italy ’, Dickens Quarterly 26 (2009): 79–85. Ledger, Sally. ‘Radical Writing’. In Joanne Shattock, ed. The Cambridge Companion to English Literature, 1830-1914 . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 127–46 Ledger, Sally, and Holly Furneaux, eds. Charles Dickens in Context . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Ledger, Sally. ‘Christmas’. In Ledger and Furneaux, eds. Charles Dickens in Context . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. 178–85 Ledger, Sally. ‘Dickens, Natural History, and Our Mutual Friend’. Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 9 (2011): 363–78. Ledger, Sally. ‘Popular Culture and Popular Politics in the 1830s: Oliver Twist ’. In Robert L. Patten, ed. Dickens and Victorian Print Cultures . Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012. 505–50. INDEX

A anti-O’Connell poems, 23 Abraham, Julie, 56 Ardis, Ann L., 7, 140, 153n34 Act for Marriages in England (1836), Armstrong, Isobel, 17, 18, 24, 138 187–207 Adelaide, Princess, 22, 31, 32 Arnold, Matthew, 100, 162, 163, 180 Adorno, Theodor W.: ‘Lyric Poet and Associated Press, 165 Society, The’ , 207 Athenæum , 65, 66, 79n8 Adult, The: The Journal of Sex , 142 Austen, Jane: Mansfi eld Park , 99 aesthetic, 12, 21, 24, 32, 48, 69, 114, Austin, J.L. , 17, 187, 189, 192 116, 193, 194 How To Do Things With Words , 17, Ahmed, Sara, 55, 56 187, 189, 192, 209n55 Alexander, Annie (Annie French): Ayer, A.J., 188, 193 Choice of Evils, A , 16, 140, 143, Language, Truth and Logic , 188 144 Allen, Grant, 142, 153n21, 169 Woman Who Did, The , 137, 140, B 141, 143 Bagehot, Walter, 180 All the Year Round , 70, 82n42, 168 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 4, 10 Althusser, Louis (and Balibar, Dialogic Imagination , 4 Etienne): Reading Capital Bamford, Samuel, 89, 94, 96, 98 (1977) , 4 Passages in the Life of a Radical , 89 Anglo-Boer War, second, 180 Barber, Lionel, 177 Annual Register , 103 Barjau (French newsagent, Frith Anthony, Susan B., 66 Street, Soho), 134n23 Anti-Corn-Law League, 28 Barrère, Camille, 134n23, 135n36

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 233 J. Bristow, J. McDonagh (eds.), Nineteenth-Century Radical Traditions, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59706-9 234 INDEX

Barthes, Roland, 5 C Baylen, Joseph, 182n19, 185n56 Caird, Mona, 8, 140–2, 147, 152n19, Beadle and Adams, 65 169 Benjamin, Walter: Arcades Project, Daughter of Danaus , 140, 141 The , 115 Captain Swing, 90 Bentley’s Miscellany , 58n7 Carey, John, 41 Bersani, Leo, 13, 41, 46, 47 Carlyle, Thomas, 139, 162 Besant, Annie, 169 Carpenter, Mary: Our Convicts , 68 bigamy plot, 143 Cassell’s Magazine , 65 Black Dwarf, The, 25, 26, 34n15 Catholic Emancipation, 88, 104 Blackwood, John, 111n60 Cavell, Stanley, 187–90, 192–200, Blackwood’s Magazine , 73 202–4, 206, 207, 209n55 Blake, Emilia Aylmer: Unruly Spirit, ‘Performative and Passionate An , 140 Utterance’, 187 Blake, William, 200, 201 Chambers Brothers, 168 Blanketeers, 96 Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal , 168 Boime, Albert, 129–32, 135n43 Charivari, Le , 131 Bombe, La (newspaper), 120 Chartism, satire and, 21–35 ‘boomerang plot’, 145, 153n34 Chartist satirical verse, 23 Booth, Mary Louise, 66 Chase, Malcolm, 28 Booth, William, 162 Châtelet, Lieutenant, 118 Borderland , 159, 168, 175 Chesterton, George Laval: Revelations Bowen, John, 49 of Prison Life , 68 Braddon, Mary Elizabeth, 65 Chesterton, G.K., 138 Brantlinger, Patrick, 50 child custody laws (1881), 151n15 Bright, Mary Chavelita Dunne. See church tithes, 109n28 Egerton, George Civil List, 22 British Library, 80n19, 157, 178, 179, civil marriage, 138 185n56 Cixous, Hélène, 4 Newspaper Archive, 179 Clark, T. J., 129, 130 nineteenth-century newspapers Cleeve, Lucas: Woman Who Wouldn’t, database, 179 The , 142, 152n23 British naturalism, 63 Clemence Dane: Bill of Divorcement , British Workwoman, The , 66, 80n19 155n61 ‘broadsheet’ press, 164 Cobbett, William, 10, 14, 30, 85–112 Brontë, Anne: Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Political Register , 90, 94, 108n23 The , 145 Rural Rides, 91, 92 Broughton, Rhoda, 65 ‘Rustic Harangues’, 91 Brown, Ford Madox, 64 Cohen, Ted, 190, 194–203 Butler, Josephine, 162 ‘Figurative Speech and Figurative Byron, George Gordon, 200 Acts’, 194 INDEX 235

‘Illocutions and Perlocutions’, 194 Derrida, Jacques, 4, 190–2, 203, ‘Notes on Metaphor’, 194 208n15 Cohen, William A., 52, 54 Of Grammatology , 4 Collins, Wilkie, 65, 77, 162, 205 ‘Signature Event Context’, 190, Woman in White, The , 73 208n15 Colvin, Marie, 164, 182n21 ‘Devil and Owen O’Connelly, The’ Commune, 15, 113–36 (Anon.) , 23 Complete Suffrage Union, 28 Dickens, Charles, 2, 9–13, 17, 18, 21, Connor, Steven, 42 32, 37, 38, 40–6, 49–56, 58n7, Contagious Diseases Acts, 141 63–84, 113–15, 133, 138, 143, Contemporary Review, The , 160, 162, 144, 150n3, 161, 168, 187, 181n10 204, 205 Cooper, Thomas, 22, 24, 26, 29–32 Barnaby Rudge , 13, 37, 38, 40–4, Cornhill Magazine , 169 46–50, 52, 56 Courbet, Gustave, 135n43 Bleak House , 17, 204 Coutts, Angela Burdett, 67 Chimes, The , 71, 82n47 Coventry Political Union, 103 Dombey and Son , 76 coverture, law of, 151n15 Great Expectations , 70, 73, 74 Cross, Nigel, 65 Hard Times , 70, 138, 150n3 Cruikshank, George, 23 Old Curiosity Shop, The , 58n7 Political House That Jack Built, Oliver Twist , 70, 71, 74 The , 23 Tale of Two Cities A , 39 Cunningham, Gail: New Woman Dickens Project (University of and the Victorian Novel, California, Santa Cruz) , 11 The , 7 Dictionary of Magazines, Reviews and Periodicals, A , 170 digital media, 178 D divorce, 15, 16, 137–55 Daily Mail , 164, 165 Divorce Law Reform Union, 149 Daily News , 64 divorce laws, reform of, 140, 149, Daily Paper , 164–7, 182n24 151n15 Daily Telegraph , 164 Dixie, Florence: Gloriana and the Daily Visitor , 165 Revolution of 1900 , 154n43 ‘Daniel O’Wheedle’, 23 Dixon, Thomas: From Passions to Daumier, Honoré, 126 Emotions , 188 Dean, Tim, 46, 48 documentary journalism, 69 ‘death-by-narrative’ device, 141, 143 Dollimore, Jonathan, 43, 44, 57 death drive, 40, 43, 44, 46–8 Dombrowski, General, 118 Defoe, Daniel, 13, 63, 68–71 Dowie, Menie Muriel, 137 Moll Flanders , 69 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 149 Democratic Review, The , 28 Drayton, Michael: Poly-Olbion , 97 236 INDEX

Dumas, Alexandre, père: Black Tulip, F The , 165, 182n24 Family Herald, The , 65 Dyck, Ian, 90, 107n10 Fantina, Richard, 69, 77 Dyer, Gary, 26, 27 ‘Fatal Return’ novels, 143, 144, 153n35 British Satire and the Politics of Style Favre, Yves-Alain, 121 1789-1832 , 26 Fawcett, Millicent Garrett: Janet Doncaster , 140 feature writing, 160, 161 E Fielding, Henry, 71 Eagleton, Terry, 5, 6 Financial Times , 177 Criticism and Ideology , 5 fi n de siècle, 1, 6–8, 15, 16, 137, 161 ‘Flight to the Real, The’, 6 Fleet Street Fox, 177 Literary Theory: An Introduction , 5 Ford, Isabella, 8 Walter Benjamin: Towards a Forster, John, 42, 43 Revolutionary Criticism , 5 Fortnightly Review, The , 153n23, 163, Edelman, Lee, 13, 41, 44–8 169, 174, 175 No Future , 44 Fothergill, Jessie: Kith and Kin , 147 Education Act, 164 Foucault, Michel, 4, 46, 47, 50 Egerton, George, 8, 9, 137, 140, 142, Archaeology of Knowledge , 4 147 Foundations of Language , 194 ‘Cross Line, A’ in Keynotes , 140 Franco-Prussian War, 115, 121, 128 Discords , 8, 9 semaine sanglante, la (‘Bloody Keynotes , 8, 9, 140 Week’ of May 1871), 115–17, Eliot, George (Mary Ann Evans), 14, 120, 126, 130 65, 82n47, 85–112, 141, 162, French, Annie. See Alexander, Annie 180 (Annie French): Choice of Evils, A ‘Author’s Introduction’ to Felix Freud, Sigmund, 37, 44, 51 Holt , 86, 90 Civilization and its Discontents , 37 Felix Holt, the Radical , 14, 86 Friend of the People , 28 Middlemarch , 112n65, 141 From Fact to Fiction (BBC Radio 4), ‘Mr Gilfi l’s Love Story’, 93 164 ‘Natural History of German Life’, Frye, Northrop, 24, 25, 31, 33n8 97 Anatomy of Criticism , 24, 33n8 Recollections of Theophrastus Such, Furley, Mary, 71, 82n47 The , 103 Furneaux, Holly, 9, 59n36 Scenes of Clerical Life , 93 Silas Marner , 93, 94 Eliot, T.S., 200 G Evans, Mary Ann. See Eliot, George Gagnier, Regenia, 11 Evans, Robert, 85, 91, 93, 104 Gale Cengage, 178 Examiner, The , 50, 73 Gallagher, Catherine, 100 INDEX 237

Gambetta, Léon, 115 Hector, Alexander, 143, 144 Gaskell, Elizabeth, 77 Herbert, A.J.: Holy Deadlock , Mary Barton , 77 155n62 Ruth , 77 Hetherington, Elizabeth, 171 gay rights movement, 44 ‘high norm’ satire, 25 Geertz, Clifford, 207 historical novel, 13, 41, 48, 49, 97 genre , 12–14, 24–7, 29, 32, 33n8, 41, Hocquenghem, Guy, 47 48, 63, 69, 160, 163, 173 Home Chimes , 65 Gilmartin, Kevin, 29, 89 ‘Home for Homeless Women’ (Urania Gissing, George: Odd Women, The , 148 Cottage), 67 Gordon Riots (1780), 13, 38, 50 Hone, William, 10, 23, 29 Gothic novels, 76 Political House that Jack Built: With Grand, Sarah (Frances McFall), 7, Thirteen Cuts, The , 23, 28 140, 141, 148 Hood, Thomas, 72 Beth Book, The , 140, 154n43 Horatian satire, 26, 29 Heavenly Twins, The , 148 Household Words , 143, 162 Ideala , 140, 142 Huffer, Lynne, 47 Great Exhibitions, 114 Hunt, Henry, 103 Greenslade, Roy, 176, 177 Hurst and Blackett, 65, 79n12, Grimes, Kyle, 26, 27 79n14, 83n60 guardian, 72, 75, 76 Huysmans, J.-K., 15, 113, 114, 118 Guardian, The , 164 A Rebours , 113, 114, 132 ‘Huzza for the rule of the Whigs’, 23

H Habermas, Jürgen, 192–5 I On the Pragmatics of Ibsen, Henrik, 9 Communication , 192 Hedda Gabler , 9 Hager, Kelly: Dickens and Divorce , Master Builder, The , 9 144, 150n3 Illustrated London News, The , 28 Halberstam, Judith, 48 Impressionism, 128–32, 136n56 Hampton, Mark, 166 International Association for Literary Hamsun, Knut, 8 Journalism Studies, 181n9 Hardy, Thomas: Jude the Obscure , 137 Irigaray, Luce, 4 Harkness, Margaret. See Law, John Harmsworth, Alfred, 180 Harper’s Bazar , 65, 66, 80n19 J Harper’s New Monthly Magazine , 64 Jacobs, Joseph, 111n60 Haussmann, Baron, 129 Jerome, Jerome K., 65 Hazlitt, William, 105 Jerrold, Douglas, 10, 29 Hearst, William Randolph, 159, 176, John Bull , 73 180 Jones, Ernest, 10 238 INDEX

Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism , LeFanu, J.S., 65 194 Legitimation League, 142 Journal of Philosophy , 164 Lepelletier, Edmond, 119, 127 Joyce, Patrick, 11 Leroy, Louis, 131, 136n56 Julia’s Bureau, 159 Leveson, Mr Justice, 176, 177, Juvenalian satire, 26, 29 184n52 Leveson report, 177 Lewes, George Henry, 180 K Library Editions, 171, 172, 177, Keating, P.J., 75 184n54 Keats, John, 200 Linton, Eliza Lynn, 65–7, 143, 149n1 Kettle, Arnold, 10, 11 ‘Girl of the Period, The’, 66 Introduction to the Novel , 10 ‘My Love’, 67 Kinross, Albert: Love Brokers, The , Lissagaray, Prosper-Olivier, 15, 115, 155n60 116–19, 120, 121, 125, 127, Kristeva, Julia, 4, 5, 204 130–2, 134n13 History of the Commune 1871 , 116–19 ‘literary journalism’, 160, 161 L ‘literature reviews’, 160 Lacan, Jacques: Ecrits , 4 Luckhurst, Roger, 1, 7 Lane, John, 180 Luddism, 89 Law, Graham, 64 Lukács, György, 24 Law, John, 7 Lynn, Eliza. See Linton, Eliza Lynn Ledger, Sally, 1–18, 21, 23, 32, 38, 40, 48, 55, 115, 133, 137, 187, 204 M (and Scott McCracken): Cultural Macaulay, Thomas Babington: History Politics at the Fin de Siècle , 6 of England , 104 Dickens and the Popular Radical MacCabe, Colin, 4 Imagination , 9–13, 21, 32, 133 MacMahon, Marshal, 15 Dickens in Context , 9 Macmillan Archives, 66 (and Roger Luckhurst): Fin de Macmillan’s Magazine , 169 Siècle: A Reader in Cultural manhood suffrage, 96, 101 History c.1880-1900, The, 7 Marcus, Steven, 52 ‘History, Politics and Women: A Marks, Elaine and Isabelle de Contextual Analysis of the Courtivron: New French Writings of William Hale White Feminisms , 4 (Mark Rutherford)’ (Oxford Married Women’s Property Acts DPhil) , 6 (1870, 1874, and 1882), New Woman, The , 1, 7, 8, 10, 15, 151n15 16, 137 Marx, Eleanor, 8, 116, 119, 121, Political Gender (1994), 9 134n13 INDEX 239

Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels: Newdigate, Francis, the younger, 91, Communist Manifesto, The , 49 99 Masterfi le database, 177 Newdigate Newdegate, Charles, 99 Master Humphrey’s Clock (journal), 41, Newdigate Newdegate, Lady Maria, 58n7 103 Matrimonial Causes Act (1857), 143, Newdigate, Sir Francis, 91, 92 153n28 Newdigate, Sir Roger, 93 Mayhew, Henry, 68, 72, 81n29 Newgate school of fi ction , 71 Criminal Prisons of London and New Journalism, 16, 163, 164, 167, Scenes of Prison Life, The , 81n29 170, 174, 176, 180, 185n56 Great World of London, The , 68, New Man, 141, 146, 147 81n29 Newnes, George, 168, 174, 180 London Labour , 72 News International, 176 McCracken, Scott, 1, 6, 15, 113–16 News of the World, The , 139, 164, 176, McDonagh, Josephine, 1–12, 82n47 184n52 McFall, Frances. See Grand, Sarah Newspaper Directories, 170 melodrama, 2, 10–12, 14, 17, 21, 22, ‘newspaper fi ction’ , 164, 165 32, 37, 40, 41, 48, 49, 56, 69, New Woman, 1, 7, 8, 10, 15, 16, 66, 73, 78, 207 137–55 Meredith, George: Diana of the New York Journal , 165 Crossways , 143 New York Times, The , 164 Methodism, 27 nineteenth century, the, 6, 12, 23, 67, Michasiw, Kim Ian, 42, 45, 50, 56, 57 76, 80n19, 86, 91, 92, 94, 99, Miller, D.A.: Novel and the Police, 103, 109n26, 114, 115, 138, The , 69 157, 167, 169, 174, 178, 207 Mill, John Stuart, 104 Northern Echo, The , 164, 167, 179 Mitchell’s Newspaper Press Directory , 170 Northern Star and Leeds General Monet, Claude, 15, 115, 127–32 Advertiser, The , 33n1 Green Park , 128–30 North, John, 178, 185n55 Impression, Sunrise (L’Impression, Notes to the People , 28 soleil levant) , 131, 136n56 Nunokawa, Jeff, 48 Moore, George: Esther Waters , 77 Morley, John, 167, 179, 185n56 Morning Chronicle, The , 81n29 O Morning Post, The , 69, 70, 73, 74, 76 Observer, The , 64 Morris, George, 104 O’Connell, Daniel, 23 Morris, William, 6 O’Connor, Feargus, 23 Oliphant, Margaret, 63, 65, 70, 73, 74, 77, 83n60, 137, 149n1, 162 N ‘Anti-Marriage League, The’, 137 Napoleon III, 130 Orwell, George: Nineteen Eighty-Four , Newdigate family, 99 25 240 INDEX

Ouida (Marie Louise de la Ramée), R 148 ‘radical satire’, 26–8, 30, 31, 41 Moths , 148 Ramée, Marie Louise de la. See Ouida Oxford Movement, 97 Rancière, Jacques, 24 Reade, Charles, 63, 65, 69, 77 It Is Never Too Late to Mend , 68 P Rebecca Riots (1839-1843), 91, Pall Mall Gazette (PMG) , 16, 67, 161, 109n28 162, 167, 168, 179, 185n56 Reddy, William M.: Navigation of Paris Exhibition (1867), 15, 114, 115 Feeling, The: A Framework for Paris sieges, 15, 114 the History of the Emotions , 188 parody, 26 Red Republican, The , 28 Paston, George: Writer of Books, A , Reform Act (1832) (First), 86, 88, 89, 140, 154n43 104 Penny Satirist , 28 Reform Act (1867) (Second), 86, 164 ‘periodical literature’, 7, 16, 160, 163, Regency radicalism, 21, 22, 25, 26, 32 167–75 Regent, Prince, 23, 24, 29, 31 Peterloo Massacre, 96 register, 17, 33n8, 44, 88, 90, 91, 94, Pinkney, Tony, 5 103, 115, 118, 130, 198, 200 Pissarro, Camille, 128, 135n43 Reid, Christopher, 5 PMG . See Pall Mall Gazette (PMG) Report of the Select Commission into Political Register, The , 90, 94 Bribery at Elections (1835), 89 polyphony, 26 ‘representational realism’, 32 Poole, William Frederick, 172, 173 Reuter, Paul Julius, 165 Poor Law (1834), 71, 109n26, review, 16, 28, 69, 70, 73, 104, 109n28 152n19, 160–5, 167–75, 179, Poovey, Mary, 70 182n19 Porteous, Jim, 2, 9, 18n1 Review of Reviews, The , 163–5, ‘Prison Matron, A.’ See Robinson, 167–75, 179 Frederick William annual, 163–5, 169–75, 179 ProQuest, 178, 179 ‘annual index’, 169–75, 179 Protestantism, 49, 95 foreign journals in, 170 Prussian Year Book, The , 170 ‘Foreign Magazines and Reviews’, Pulitzer, Joseph, 176 174 Punch , 28, 29 guide’ , 169, 170, 174 Pykett, Lyn, 7 ‘indexes’, 167–75, 179 international journalism, 173 monthly index, 169, 173, 175 Q ‘New Books of the Month’, 169, queer radicalism, 13, 41, 48, 55 170 queer theory, 47 ‘Notable Articles From the ‘Quixotic’ satire, 24, 25 Reviews’, 169 INDEX 241

‘Reviews Reviewed’ department, Royal Commission, 92, 149 170 Ruskin, John, 40, 169 ‘To Be Continued in Our Next’, 165 ‘Two and Two Makes Four’, 164 S Rewald, John, 136n56 Sampson Low, Son, and Marston, Reynolds, George W. M., 10 79n14 Rhodes, Cecil, 180 Sanders, Valerie, 76, 149n1 Ricks, Christopher, 4 Saturday Review, The , 69 Riehl, Wilhelm, 95, 96, 101 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 4 Riley, Denise, 17, 188, 189, 191, 198, Scharff, David E., 57 200 Schreiner, Olive, 8, 143 Impersonal Passion , 188 Story of an African Farm, The , 143 Rimbaud, Arthur, 120 Scott, Walter, 48, 49 Robb, Graham, 120 Searle, John, 190 Robinson, Frederick William, 13, Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 48 63–84 Sen, Sambudha, 23, 29 Carr’s Confession , 79n14 sensation novels, 76, 77, 83n60, 139 Christie’s Faith , 63, 67 Shawcross, Revd W. H., 138 Crystal Stories , 66 Shaw, George Bernard, 151n15 ‘Daisy March, the Prison Flower’, Getting Married , 155n60 66 Showalter, Elaine, 7 Female Convict , 66 sibling incest, 76 Female Life in Prison , 66, 70–2, Six Acts (1819), 91 82n47 Slater, Michael, 53, 82n47 ‘fi rst and last love’, 69 slum fi ction , 13, 63 Grandmother’s Money , 79n14 Snediker, Michael, 46, 57 High Church , 79n14 Spencer, Jane, 1 Mattie: A Stray , 63, 69, 70, 75 ‘Stave about the Quack Patriot and his Memoirs of Jane Cameron , 66, 69, Repeal Delusion, A’ , 23 71 Stead, W.T., 16, 157–85. See also Owen: A Waif , 63, 64, 68, 70, 72–8 Review of Reviews, The Poor Humanity , 67 ‘Future of Journalism, The’, 162 Prison Characters Drawn from Life ‘government by journalism’, 162, 166 with Suggestions for Prison If Christ Came to Chicago , 159, Government , 66 167, 181n12 prison trilogy, 67–9 ‘Maiden Tribute of Babylon, The’, ‘Women Are Strange’, 66 16, 159 Rossetti, Christina: ‘A Birthday’, 201, and periodical literature, 167–75 202, 204, 207 as publisher and proprietor, 168 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 64 on role of editor, 166–8 242 INDEX

Stockton, Kathryn Bond, 55 ‘Birds in the Night’, 121, 123 Strachan, John: British Satire , 26 ‘Des Morts’, 126, 127 Strand Magazine, The , 168 ‘green’, 123, 128 Swift, Jonathan: Modest Proposal, A , 31 Romances sans paroles , 119–27 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 64, 65 ‘Spleen’, 123 ‘streets’, 117, 118, 123, 125–7 Vermersch, Eugène, 120, 126 T tabloid press, 139 Taylor, Helen, 5, 19n5 W Telford, Thomas, 92 Wade, John: Black Book, or Corruption Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 102, 200 Unmasked! Being an Account of In Memoriam , 102 Persons, Places, and Sinecures , 22 Thackeray, William Makepeace, 29, 65 Waterloo Directory of English Thatcher, Margaret, 3 Newspapers and Periodicals, Thomas, Dylan, 201 The, 1800–1900 , 178, 179, Thompson, Henry Yates, 168 185n55 Times Index , 172 Watts-Dunton, Theodore, 65, 69, Times Literary Supplement, The , 160 79n14 Times, The , 71, 103, 104, 160, 169, Webb, Philip, 6 172 Westminster Gazette , 158, 159 Tit-Bits , 168 ‘What is a Peer?’ (Anon), 23 Tocqueville, Alexis de: Democracy in White, William Hale, 6 America , 104 WikiLeaks, 164 Trollope, Anthony: The Small House at Williams, Raymond, 6, 11, 14, 87, 90, Allington , 139 107n10 Troughton, Thomas Ball, 89 Culture and Society, 1780-1950 6 Tuchman, Gaye, 66 Drama, from Ibsen to Eliot , 6 Turnpike Act (1822), 92 Wills, W. H., 143 turnpike roads, 14, 85, 86, 88–95, 99, Wilson, Colette, 119 102, 104, 105, 109n31 Winnicott, Donald, 57 turnpike tolls, 109n28 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 187 turnpike trusts, 91, 93, 109n28 Wollstonecraft, Mary: Vindication of the Rights of Woman, A , 9 Women’s suffrage, 16, 66 V Women’s Writing (journal), 8 Verlaine, Mathilde (Verlaine’s wife), Wood, Ellen, 139, 153n35 121, 123 Channings, The , 73 Verlaine, Paul, 15, 115, 119–27, 128, East Lynne , 139, 143, 145, 129, 131, 132 153n35 ‘Beams’, 121, 127 Wooler, Thomas J., 10, 25, 26 INDEX 243

Woolf, Virginia, 8 Yonge, Charlotte M., 149n1 Wordsworth, William, 201 Young England movement, 97

Y Z Yeats, W.B., 201 Zangwill, Israel, 65