Situated Between the Victorians and Modernism, the Fin De Sie`Cle Is an Exciting and Rewarding Period to Study. in the Literatur

THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO THE FIN DE SIE` CLE

Situated between the Victorians and modernism, the fin de sie` cle is an exciting and rewarding period to study. In the literature and art of the 1890s, the processes of literary and cultural change can be seen in action. In this, more than any previous decade, literature was an active and controversial participant within debates over morality, aesthetics, politics and science, as Victorian certainties began to break down. Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, H. G. Wells, Thomas Hardy and Olive Schreiner were among the most prominent, occasionally even notorious, writers and artists of the period, challenging establishment values and producing a distinctive literature of their own. This volume includes the main currents of radical and innovative thinking in the period, as well as the attempts to resist them. It will be of great interest to students of Victorian and twentieth-century literature, art and cultural history.

A complete list of books in the series is at the back of this book

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO THE FIN DE SIE` CLE

EDITED BY GAIL MARSHALL Oxford Brookes University

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sa˜o Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB28RU,UK

Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York

www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521615617

# Cambridge University Press 2007

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2007

Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge

A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data The Cambridge companion to the fin de sie` cle / edited by Gail Marshall. (Cambridge companions to literature) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13 978-0-521-85063-6 (hardback) ISBN-10 0-521-85063-0 (hardback) ISBN-13 978-0-521-61561-7 (paperback) ISBN-10 0-521-61561-5 (paperback) 1. English literature – 19th century – History and criticism. 2. Literature, Modern – 19th century – History and criticism. 3. Decadence (Literary movement) 4. Art and literature. 5. Great Britain – Civilization – 19th century. 6. Europe – Civilization – 19th century. I. Marshall, Gail, 1965 – II. Title: Fin de sie` cle. PR 461.C36 2007 820.9’008–dc22 2006039242

ISBN 978-0-521-85063-6 hardback ISBN 978-0-521-61561-7 paperback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 CONTENTS

List of illustrations page ix Notes on contributors x Acknowledgements xiii Chronology xv

Introduction GAIL MARSHALL 1

1 Psychology at the fin de sie` cle JENNY BOURNE TAYLOR 13

2 Decadence and aestheticism DENNIS DENISOFF 31

3 Sexual identity at the fin de sie` cle RICHARD A. KAYE 53

4 Socialism and radicalism WILLIAM GREENSLADE 73

5 Empire ROSS G. FORMAN 91

6 Publishing industries and practices MARGARET D. STETZ 113

7 The visual arts SHEARER WEST 131

vii

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 CONTENTS

8 The New Woman and feminist fictions SALLY LEDGER 153

9 Realism STEPHEN ARATA 169

10 The fantastic fiction of the fin de sie` cle NICHOLAS RUDDICK 189

11 Varieties of performance at the turn of the century JOHN STOKES 207

12 Poetry MARION THAIN 223

Guide to further reading 241 Index 255

viii

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 ILLUSTRATIONS

1 Drawing I from Aubrey Beardsley’s ‘The Comedy-Ballet of Marionettes’, Yellow Book, 2 (1894), 88 page 44 2 Drawing II from Aubrey Beardsley’s ‘The Comedy-Ballet of Marionettes’, Yellow Book, 2 (1894), 90 46 3 Drawing III from Aubrey Beardsley’s ‘The Comedy-Ballet of Marionettes’, Yellow Book, 2 (1894), 92 47 4 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Blue Bower, 1865 (The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, The University of Birmingham) 133 5 Walter Richard Sickert, Gallery of the Old Bedford,c.1895 (Walker Art Gallery, National Museums of Liverpool) 137 6 William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones, page from the Kelmscott Chaucer, 1896 (The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge) 142 7 Frances Macdonald, The Sleeping Princess,c.1895–6 (Glasgow, Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum # Glasgow City Council (Museums)) 144 8 G. F. Watts, Hope, 1886 (Tate Britain, London 2005) 146 9 Aubrey Beardsley, TheToiletteofSalome, 1893 (# Copyright the Trustees of The British Museum) 149

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

STEPHEN ARATA is Richard A. and Sarah Page Mayo NEH Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Virginia and the author of Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Sie`cle (Cambridge, 1996). He is most recently the editor of William Morris’s News from Nowhere (2003) and George Gissing’s New Grub Street (2007) in the Broadview Literary Texts series and of a Norton Critical Edition of H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (forthcoming).

JENNY BOURNE TAYLOR is a Professor of English at the University of Sussex. She has published widely on the relationship between psychology and literature in the nineteenth century, including In the Secret Theatre of Home: Wilkie Collins, Sensation Narrative and Nineteenth-Century Psychology (1988); and (as co-editor, with Sally Shuttleworth) Embodied Selves: An Anthology of Psychological Texts 1830–1890 (1998). She is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Wilkie Collins (2006)and co-editor, with Martin Ryle, of George Gissing: Voices of the Unclassed (2005).

DENNIS DENISOFF is Research Chair in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture at Ryerson University. His most recent books include Aestheticism and Sexual Parody: 1840–1940 (2001), Sexual Visuality from Literature to Film: 1850–1950 (2004) and The Broadview Anthology of Victorian Short Stories (2004).

ROSS G. FORMAN researches colonial and postcolonial literatures and is completing a book about Victorian and Edwardian representations of China. He is Visiting Assistant Professor at Skidmore College in New York, has previously taught at New York University in London and at Kingston University, and was also associated with the AHRB Centre for Asian and African Studies at SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies, London).

WILLIAM GREENSLADE is Reader in English at the University of the West of England. He is the author of Degeneration, Culture and the Novel 1880–1940 (1994) and a number of essays on literature and cultural politics of the British fin de sie` cle. He has edited George Gissing’s The Whirlpool (1997), Thomas Hardy’s ‘Facts’ Notebook (2004) and (with Terence Rodgers) Grant Allen: Literature and Cultural Politics at the Fin de Sie` cle (2005). x

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

RICHARD A. KAYE is Associate Professor of English at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the author of The Flirt’s Tragedy: Desire without End in Victorian and Edwardian Fiction (2002) and Voluptuous Immobility: St. Sebastian and the Decadent Imagination (forthcoming). His articles have appeared in the journals Studies in English Literature, Modernism/Modernity, Arizona Quarterly and Victorian Literature and Culture.

SALLY LEDGER is Professor of Nineteenth-Century Literature at Birkbeck, University of London. She is the author of The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Sie`cle (1997) and Ibsen (1999), and was co-editor (with Scott McCracken) of Cultural Politics at the Fin de Sie`cle (1995) and (with Roger Luckhurst) of The Fin de Sie`cle: A Reader in Cultural History (2000). Her next book, Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination, will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2007.

GAIL MARSHALL is Reader in Nineteenth-Century Literature at Oxford Brookes University. She is the author of ActressesontheVictorianStage(1998)andVictorian Fiction (2002), and has edited books on George EliotandonShakespeareandVictorian culture. She is completing a monograph on Shakespeare and Victorian women.

NICHOLAS RUDDICK is Professor of English and Director of the Humanities Research Institute at the University of Regina. His books include Ultimate Island: On the Nature of British Science Fiction (1993), and editions of The Time Machine by H. G. Wells (2001)andThe Woman Who Did by Grant Allen (2004) in the Broadview series. He is currently writing a book on prehistoric fiction/le roman pre´historique.

MARGARET D. STETZ is the Mae and Robert Carter Professor of Women’s Studies and Professor of Humanities at the University of Delaware. Her recent books include British Women’s Comic Fiction, 1890–1990 (2001), Gender and the London Theatre, 1880–1920 (2004), as well as the forthcoming Facing the Late Victorians: Portraits of Writers and Artists from the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection. She has also been guest curator of exhibitions on Victorian print culture and book design at Harvard University, the University of Virginia, the National Gallery of Art Library, Washington, DC, and other sites.

JOHN STOKES is Professor of Modern British Literature in the Department of English, King’s College London. He is the author of The French Actress and her English Audience (2005) and editor, with Maggie Gale, of The Cambridge Companion to the Actress (2007).

MARION THAIN is Senior Lecturer at the University of Birmingham. She has published articles and books on late-Victorian poetry. She co-edits the Victorian section of the online Blackwell review journal, Literature Compass, and is, along with Kelsey Thornton, the general editor of the series ‘Late Victorian and Early Modernist Women Writers’.

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

SHEARER WEST is Professor of Art History at the University of Birmingham. Her books include Image of the Actor: Verbal and Visual Representation in the Age of Garrick and Kemble 1991), Fin de Sie`cle: Art and Society in an Age of Uncertainty (1993), The Visual Arts in Germany 1890–1937 (2000), and Portraiture (1999). She has also edited Visions of the ‘neue Frau’: Women and the Visual Arts in Weimar Germany (1995, with Marsha Meskimmon); The Victorians and Race (1996), and Italian Culture in Northern Europe in the Eighteenth Century (1999).

xii

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The editor wishes to thank Linda Bree and Maartje Scheltens at Cambridge University Press for their encouragement and generous support during the compiling of this Companion; and the contributors, with whom it has been a delight to work. Without the patience and kindness of Andy, Lily and Rosa Todd the last stages of the book would have been far more trying. Thanks are also due to the following institutions for permission to reproduce the book’s illustrations: Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham for permission to reproduce Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s The Blue Bower; the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, for permission to reproduce Walter Richard Sickert, Gallery of the Old Bedford; Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, for permission to reproduce William Morris and Edward Burne- Jones, page from the Kelmscott Chaucer; Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow, for permission to reproduce Frances Macdonald, The Sleeping Princess; Tate Britain, London, for permission to reproduce G. F. Watts, Hope; British Museum, London, for permission to reproduce Aubrey Beardsley, The Toilette of Salome.

xiii

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 CHRONOLOGY

1885 General Gordon killed in the Sudan Stead, ‘The Tribute of Modern Babylon’ Criminal Law Amendment Act passed Dictionary of National Biography founded Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines 1886 Trafalgar Square riots Haggard, She (–1887) Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge and The Woodlanders (–1887) Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Kidnapped Watts, Hope 1887 Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee Bloody Sunday riots 1888 Kodak box camera invented Jack the Ripper murders in Whitechapel First woman elected to London County Council Kipling, Plain Tales from the Hills 1889 First English performance of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House International Congress of Psychology in Paris Cleveland Street Scandal Prosecution of Zola by National Vigilance Association Booth, Life and Labour in London (–1903) S. Webb, Fabian Essays in Socialism 1890 Cecil Rhodes made Premier of the Cape Colony Morris, News from Nowhere Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (and in revised edition in 1891)

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 CHRONOLOGY

1891 The Clitheroe case First English performances of Ibsen’s Ghosts, Hedda Gabler and The Lady from the Sea Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles Gissing, New Grub Street 1892 Wilde, Lady Windermere’s Fan Shaw, Widowers’ Houses Death of Tennyson Morris founded the Kelmscott Press 1893 Independent Labour Party founded New edition of Pater’s Renaissance with ‘Conclusion’ restored Egerton, Keynotes Wilde, A Woman of No Importance Grand, The Heavenly Twins 1894 Women permitted to stand for Parish and District Councils Yellow Book founded Beerbohm, ‘A Defence of Cosmetics’ Kipling, The Jungle Book Hardy, Jude the Obscure (–1895) Sarah Grand coins the term ‘New Woman’ 1895 Oscar Wilde found guilty of committing indecent acts, and imprisoned to two years’ hard labour The Importance of Being Earnest and An Ideal Husband are taken off the stage Marconi invents wireless telegraphy Lumie` re brothers invent cinematography Sully, Studies of Childhood Nordau’s Degeneration translated into English Wells, The Time Machine Allen, The Woman Who Did Sickert, Gallery of the Old Bedford F. Macdonald, The Sleeping Princess (–1896) 1896 Founding of the Daily Mail London School of Economics opens 1897 National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies established Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee Stoker, Dracula James, ‘Turn of the Screw’ xvi

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 CHRONOLOGY

1898 Hong Kong enlarged when Britain leases Chinese territories Vagrancy Act increases penalties for homosexual soliciting 1899 Anglo-Boer War (–1902) Seats for Female Shop Assistants Act Conrad, ‘Heart of Darkness’ 1900 Conquest of Orange Free State and the Transvaal Ruskin and Wilde die Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams 1901 Queen Victoria dies

xvii

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 GAIL MARSHALL Introduction

In seeking a mode in which to speak of the moment of the fin de sie` cle, one is immediately confronted by a history of conflicting narratives and trajec- tories. The term itself, of course, carries its own chronological presupposi- tions boldly before it, allowing barely the whisper of a continuity beyond the ‘fin’ to be heard. That lack of continuity is particularly emphasised in Oscar Wilde’s employment of the term in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891):

‘Fin de sie` cle’, murmured Lord Henry. ‘Fin du globe’, answered his hostess. ‘I wish it were fin du globe’, said Dorian with a sigh. ‘Life is a great disappointment.’1

This well-known moment occurs at Lady Narborough’s house, in the midst of a particularly tedious evening, brought about by the sudden arrival of the hostess’s daughter, who, ‘to make matters worse, had actually brought her husband with her’ (p. 201). The scene works by typically Wildean paradox and humour to ensnare readers into confronting their own prejudices and limitations, and to confound expectations. In particular, in a scene which immediately follows upon Dorian’s murder of the painter Basil Hallward and the disposal of the body by Dorian’s one time friend Alan Campbell, the expectation of endings, and the assumption of ennui, are confounded. Dorian’s desire for a definitive ending, for sterility, a lack of continuity, his refutation of his life so far, the languor of his expressed desire, belie the extent of his visceral engagement with the sensational life which is the counterpart of his role as decadent icon. The extent of his languor testifies precisely to the extent of Dorian’s awareness of his inextricable involvement with life, its continuities and complications. The assumption of the desire for an absolute ending, rather than achieving that ending, actually signals the undeniable continuity of vitality, and is acted out in the scene itself, which provides the basis for a number of paradoxes and characters which achieve a further posthumous life in Wilde’s

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 GAIL MARSHALL plays: Mrs Erlynne, with her ‘Venetian-red hair’ would later surface in Lady Windermere’s Fan, Madame de Ferrol’s hair, which turned ‘quite gold from grief’ after the death of her third husband would provide the model for Lady Harbury, the subject of Lady Bracknell’s suspicions and speculation in The Importance of Being Earnest, and Lord Henry’s aperc¸us find their way into Wilde’s dramatic dandies. The richness of the scene works spectacularly against its obsession with endings, and acts synecdochically to proclaim the energy which emerges from confronting the possibility of ending. But this is not the final assertion of life in one doomed, or an anticipation of Dylan Thomas’s raging against the dying of the light. In confronting the end of the century, and arguably the ending of the narratives which had been engen- dered in the mid-nineteenth-century period, a creative energy is unleashed which, in its vitality and multiplicity, becomes the most effective statement against our understanding of this period as the end of anything. And yet, that understanding of the period has had a critical persistence, perhaps generated by W. B. Yeats’s elegy for what he termed ‘The Tragic Generation’ of writers of the period. In his Autobiographies (published posthumously in 1955), Yeats cites a catalogue of men doomed to early death, disgrace and an aesthetic of exhaustion and dissatisfaction. Holbrook Jackson’s equally influential study, The Eighteen Nineties (1913), seems to concur in its litanies for the lost dead, which anticipate the roll-calls of the dead which would be generated by the war just about to begin. Jackson writes of the poets of the period: Most of them died young, several were scarcely more than youths ...It would seem as if these restless and tragic figures thirsted so much for life, and for the life of the hour, that they put the cup to their lips and drained it in one deep draught: perhaps all that was mortal of them felt so essential to the Nineties that life beyond the decade might have been unbearable. Oscar Wilde died in 1900 at the age of forty-four; Aubrey Beardsley died in 1898,aged twenty-six; Ernest Dowson in 1900, aged thirty-three; Charles Conder, in 1909, aged forty-one; Lionel Johnson, in 1902, aged thirty-five; Hubert Crackanthorpe, in 1896, aged thirty-one; Henry Harland, in 1905, aged forty- four; Francis Thompson, in 1907, aged forty-eight, and John Davidson, in 1909, aged fifty-two.2 Such a list confirms Jackson’s assessment, in the preface to his work’s second edition, that the 1890s was a period, ‘extraordinarily self-contained, although its origins go back to the eighties and even to the seventies of last century, and its reverberations are still heard in the twenty-seventh year of a new century which is so different as to be, in our necessarily short perspective, a new era’ (p. 12). There is arguably, of course, a tension here as there is in Yeats. This is a period ending in early deaths, but which is still heard, a period which saw the

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Introduction denigration of the art of Beardsley – an art described by Yeats as having been ‘created out of a spirit of mockery’, ‘a form of beauty where his powerful logical intellect eliminated every outline that suggested meditation or even satisfied passion’ – but which generated in his supporters the animated realisation that ‘we knew we must face an infuriated Press and public, but being all young we delighted in enemies and in everything that had an heroic air’.3 Yeats creates out of a narrative of despair and rejection, ending in the early death to which he and Jackson both accord a form of iconic status, a response which is heroic and vital, suggestive of positive engagement, a response which is as much a part of the 1890s as the tragedy to which both bear witness. This tension is essentially of the period itself, and exposes the extent to which it is impossible securely to pronounce on the historical contingency of the fin de sie` cle. Such end-stopped, tragic readings of the period as Jackson and Yeats present are arguably enabled by their concentration on a particular sub-set of the myriad writers publishing at the time. The poets named by Jackson and of whom Yeats gives brief portraits are, however, just one branch of the industry that writing and publishing were becoming at this period. To concentrate on them is to enable a firm categorisation of the period, but once that group has to share critical attention with the journalists, dramatists, novelists of realism and fantasy, short story writers, women writers of the ‘new’ and ‘old’ varieties, and polemicists of the 1890s, to say nothing of the period’s artists and musicians, the issue of definition is impossibly muddied. Some categories of culture were almost brand new in the 1890s, as markets expanded to capitalise on the appetite for print culture of a newly literate population, often in the form of popular papers, such as Tit-Bits, which was founded in 1881, and which spawned a number of copy-cat successors. The birth of the ‘New Journalism’ of the late-Victorian period saw the emergence of such newspapers as the Daily Mail in 1896. That category of journalism was filled with celebrity gossip and sensation: it pioneered the celebrity interview alongside burgeoning correspondence columns which jointly acknowledged the new journalism’s professed basis in a form of democracy which promised in the words of W. T. Stead to ‘interpret the knowledge 4 of the few to the understanding of the many’. Such journalists and editors exploited the newly commercial opportunities for the proliferation of the written word in the period, opportunities enabled by increased literacy and technological developments in printing, marketing and transportation, and created a form of journalism which continues in the mass market dailies in Britain today, with all the attendant anxieties as to the probity and legitimacy of the personalisation of political issues which such techniques as the

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 GAIL MARSHALL interview entail. Born out of the nineteenth century’s increasingly democratic constitution, the journalism of the 1890s nonetheless managed to construct a new form which looked to the future for its apotheosis. Other ‘New’ forms emerged in the period too, most prominent amongst which were the ‘New Woman’ and the ‘New Drama’. The latter began effectively in 1889, with the first British production of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, produced by Charles Charrington, and starring his wife, Janet Achurch, in the role of Nora, who slammed the door on husband, children and home in a definitive gesture which still resonates controversially with theatre audiences today, but which at the time, as William Greenslade points out in his chapter, seemed a rallying cry for a new form of life (p. 80). In A Doll’s House, a number of forms of cultural as well as political newness co-existed which would establish a new context for the drama of the next decade. It was resolutely not a spectacular play, but rather one in which attention was concentrated on its language, rather than on its sets. It was politically engaged, and demanded a politicised, as well as an aesthetic, response from its audiences. Within this matrix of effects was the actress, the central transmitter of the newness of Ibsen, freed from the imperative to please, to dress in splendid outfits and to conform. In Ibsen, the economic imperatives of the commercial theatre gave way to subsidised performances, new to Britain, which paved the way for the subsidised companies of the next century. Ibsen also foregrounded a censored theatre. Many of his plays, including Ghosts, produced in 1891, were censored by the Lord Chamberlain’s office. G. B. Shaw, too, fell foul of the censors with Mrs Warren’s Profession, and following his downfall in 1895, Wilde met with the more unofficial, but equally decisive, judgement of his West End managers that his plays too had become unsuitable. In its controversy and politicisation, the theatre of the late-1880sand1890s made a decisive break with its earlier Victorian character. Wilde might still use aspects of that earlier theatre in his plays, but in combination with his paradoxes and wit, the elements of melodrama and the well-made play were being fundamentally challenged even as they were propagated. The New Woman owed much to Ibsen and Wilde in allowing some of her dilemmas to be performed – indeed the performing of femininity itself is central to the work of both playwrights – and like them, she too emerged as a new phenomenon of the period. Owing some of her character to the fallen woman of the mid-Victorian period, and some to the campaigners on women’s rights, and issues such as the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts, nonetheless the New Woman was very much a creation of the age, dependent on her being for the paraphernalia of publicity. Indeed, there is

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Introduction some debate as to the extent to which the New Woman existed beyond the pages of the novels, short stories and newspapers of which she was an integral part. As Sally Ledger shows in chapter 8, the New Woman’s genealogy might extend back to the earlier Victorian period, but the range and extent of her political awareness was unprecedented, as was the collective self- consciousness which was the determining characteristic of New Women’s work. Finally, unlike the aesthete poets, the New Women often lived long and active lives. Mona Caird died in 1932, aged seventy-four; Menie Muriel Dowie in 1945, aged seventy-eight; George Egerton in 1945, aged eighty-six; Sarah Grand in 1943, aged eighty-nine; and Vernon Lee in 1935, aged seventy-nine. Though the New Woman novel had arguably hit its peak in 1894–5, the political impact of the New Women themselves continued to be felt as they re-invented themselves and their talents in the service of the suffrage movement or local government. This, then, is an age conscious of itself as an era of new beginnings, but also one whose movements are defined by the extent to which they developed away from their Victorian roots, and transformed them in the light of the cultural and political possibilities of the period. It is, however, far from the definition Raymond Williams suggested for it, of a rather tired period, defined by a ‘working-out ... of unfinished lines; a tentative redirection’.5 Rather, as the chapters in this Companion demonstrate very vividly, it is a period of tremendous vitality, in which debate and controversy are central. It is a period in which the arts are used viscerally to debate contemporary concerns, and in which art itself becomes matter for controversy. This Companion addresses some of the central concerns and aesthetic practices of the period. Its first essays foreground some of the primary political, scientific, cultural and intellectual contexts of the period, but, as immediately becomes clear, contexts and texts are rarely easily separable at this time. As Jenny Bourne Taylor demonstrates in chapter 1, ‘Psychology at the fin de sie` cle’, not only did creative writers respond enthusiastically to the representational possibilities opened up by the new mind sciences and the readily available discourse of experimentation and case history, but the language of those sciences was also adopted by the self-proclaimed ‘Philistines’, the opponents of the ‘New’, to denigrate the aesthete, the New Woman and indeed any person or movement which threatened to disrupt their conservative outlook. Most famously, and infamously, adopted by Max Nordau in Degeneration (1892; translated into English in 1895), a term based in science came to operate metaphorically to condemn artists such as Wilde, Ibsen and the Impressionists to the realms of the insane, atavistic and criminal. As Bourne Taylor suggests, ‘Its power and popularity lay precisely in its vagueness – its ability to be pressed into the service of very

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 GAIL MARSHALL different social and political agendas’ (p. 16), and as such was far removed from the specificities of the new psychological sciences’ investigations into childhood, dreams and psychical research. The danger of the expanding use of the term ‘degeneration’ is exposed by the writer, art historian and political commentator Vernon Lee (whose birth name was Violet Paget), who wrote of enthusiastic responses to Nordau’s wholesale condemnation of the ‘New’, that it created a ‘community of persecution’, one in which

the highest and the lowest are always thrust together; the purest patriot and reformer is apt to find himself the associate of fanatics and criminals, rick- burners and bomb-throwers, for the mere reason that the powers that be, finding all disturbance equally distressing, have set their face against subversive 6 ideas, as well as against deeds of violence.

As Dennis Denisoff notes in chapter 2, a similar collapse of meaning is visible in the application of the term ‘decadence’. Hubert Crackanthorpe writes in the Yellow Book, ‘Decadence, decadence, you are all decadent nowadays. Ibsen, Degas, and the New English Art Club; Zola, Oscar Wilde, and the Second Mrs Tanqueray’,7 thus neatly exposing the extended coverage of the term, and the extent to which conservative criticism had created a homogenised target which misrepresented the multiplicity of the ‘New’ movements it sought to vilify. Like degeneration, ‘Decadence’ too achieved a new life in the hands of commentators who sought to condemn, rather than to celebrate. In his careful historical analysis of the development of the term out of a French tradition, Denisoff reveals how it achieved meaning through its relationship with ‘Aestheticism’ to produce art and effects which influenced popular culture, home decoration and fashion, as well as the realms of ‘high’ art. This relationship achieved its necessarily controversial apotheosis in the short-lived Yellow Book, perhaps the persistent symbol of Decadence, but one which was far from unequivocal in its writers’ contributions. The writers and artists were, as Denisoff notes, a mixed bunch, many of whom could not be described as Decadent at all. Their inclusion seems rather to signal a confident inclusiveness about a Decadent/Aestheticist agenda which might perhaps gain in definition by the side of oppositional writings and art. The Yellow Book provided a challenge to modes of literary and artistic practice and criticism which long outlived its own brevity, in an age where that very brevity became celebrated as an icon, even perhaps as a guarantee of a Decadent mode. Decadence was also a part of the sexual aesthetic of the period too, as Richard Kaye’s chapter (chapter 3) on sexuality and sexual identity at the fin de sie` cle shows. In it he identifies the emergence of the burgeoning science of

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Introduction sexology and the contribution it made to the ‘sexual anarchy’ of a period in which same-sex attraction was spoken of as never before, when legislation stepped in to regularise relations between men, and when women were sexually articulate as never before. Examining mythic figures, such as Salome, alongside late-Victorian men and women, Kaye shows a period intensely involved in questions of sex and its articulation, its political realisation, and its communal implications. Campaigners for reform in sexual and political practices often overlapped, as William Greenslade’s chapter (chapter 4) demonstrates in its outline of the progress of socialism and radical politics at the fin de sie` cle. Indeed, in very immediate ways, as the lives and works of Eleanor Marx and Olive Schreiner show, the personal was realised as intensely political at this period. Advanced communities sought new ways of living and working at this period which would enhance not only their lives, but those of the industrialised workers too, whose plight was brought to the attention of the nation at large in a series of strikes and rallies in the 1880s. The economic depression of the early to mid-1880s was the impetus behind the development of the socialist movement in Britain at the time, a movement which, though internally conflicted, nonetheless acted as a focus for the expression of a collective dissatisfaction and consciousness which sat provocatively alongside the period’s cultural emphasis on the individual. Greenslade argues persuasively that, riven though it was by internal conflict, in this period may be seen the roots of British socialism in the parliamentary labour party of the twentieth century. In chapter 5, Ross G. Forman shows in a wide-ranging account which covers cinema, pornography, adventure fiction and early sociological observation, that representations of Empire at the end of the century were similarly riven, representing, ‘on the one hand, the promise of continued expansion, new ‘‘spheres of influence’’, and the success of the ‘‘civilising mission’’ and, on the other, the fear of collapse, degeneration and reverse colonisation’ (p. 91). Taking in China as well as the more familiar sites of British imperial interests in Africa and India, Forman establishes the importance for Britain of its Empire, whilst outlining the fragility of Empire in the long aftermath of the Berlin Conference. At a time of retrospection about Empire, we see the rise of the adventure narrative as a means of articulating the threat of Empire, and the diminution of possibilities for adventure in the ‘civilised’ world. Degeneration theory emerges within the discourse of Empire too, as it acts to give a name and reason to the savagery of Empire, and a justification for the need to control that space and its ‘child-like’ inhabitants. Forman ends, however, by showing the extent to which, even then, the Empire was writing back to England, and offering one of the counter-voices typical of this period,

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 GAIL MARSHALL in his assessment of Wo Chang’s England Through Chinese Spectacles (1897), which exhorted the English to look to their own sins and responsi- bilities, and not just to concentrate on the faults of their Empire. Chapters 6 and 7 examine two of the cultural contexts of literature in the 1890s: the publishing industry and the practice of the visual arts at the time. In chapter 6, Margaret D. Stetz examines the ways in which publishing at the end of the nineteenth century became an industrialised form, but in so doing draws our attention to the ways and terms in which this shift to industrialisation was actually perceived by the Victorians themselves. She examines the gendered configurations of power and influence within publishing; the dilemma of socialist writers whose desire for success was predicated upon the subjection of workers in the increasingly mechanised printing industry; and the ways in which print culture in the 1890s was reaching, and bringing together in unexpected alliances, an unprecedented variety of both readers and writers. Her findings denote a period in which publishing practices changed dramatically. The three-volume novel was displaced as the primary form of publishing fiction, and novels were no longer sourced primarily through circulating libraries, but were advertised through newspapers and periodicals. Aesthetes, decadents and philistines alike had to be aware of the market that might engulf or support them. That market was highly responsive to demand, able to create luxury editions or the cheapest form available to the mass market. We are left, however, with the insight that, for all its mechanisation and technological advances, the industry of publishing was not fundamentally organised along profit-only lines, but rather maintained a firmly ideological set of practices which were less radical than the authors it sometimes had to accommodate. Stetz looks back at the rest of the nineteenth century to gain the most acute sense of the difference of the 1890s, as does Shearer West in chapter 7, ‘The visual arts’, in which she offers a series of illuminating genealogies, finding for instance for Aubrey Beardsley and other avant-garde artists of the period, a predecessor in Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Such artists were implicitly set against the empiricist and didactic practice of mid-Victorian art, concentrating instead rather on emulating Whistler’s Aestheticism and on finding expression for the Paterian sense of the abandonment of morality in the search for beauty. One example of such an approach would be Sickert’s Old Bedford, which is not a social documentary, but rather a disconcerting combination of a formal kind of beauty and a subject matter that was usually considered crude. Artists’ activities extended beyond the conventional subject matter of the Royal Academy too in an increasing interest in crafts such as furniture-making which promised significantly to democratise the artistic innovations of the period in line with many artists’ commitments to a

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Introduction socialist system. Beauty for both Wilde and William Morris, as West demonstrates, operated, though in different ways for both men, to counter the impact of the modern industrial age. In many ways, the visual arts of the period are marked by a lack of situatedness in the period itself, an anxiety – whether manifested in the neo-Classicism of Leighton or Watts, or in the temporal dissatisfactions of Symbolism – which gave those arts an almost necessarily transgressive potential. West argues finally that the legacies of eccentricity and internationalism permeate well into the twentieth century. However, as she notes, visual artists felt the shock of Oscar Wilde’s fall in 1895, as did other avant-garde figures. In a debate about chronological definitions, we have to examine the possibility that,asmanycommentatorssuggest,the1890s actually ended in 1895. Holbrook Jackson introduces his study of the 1890s with this anecdote: ‘In the year 1895 Max Beerbohm announced, how whimsically and how ironically it is not necessary to consider, that he felt himself a trifle out-moded. ‘‘I belong to the Beardsley period’’, he said’.8 New Woman writers too found their period of greatest productivity and effectiveness, as Sally Ledger demonstrates, before 1895. 1894 was the year which saw the naming of the New Woman, along with the publication of a wealth of fiction and journalism by some of the most significant figures in the New Woman movement, such as Sarah Grand, George Egerton, Mona Caird, Ella Hepworth Dixon, Edith Arnold and ‘Iota’. In retrospect, it seems that the New Woman was caught by a critical sleight of hand which saw her condemned along with Wilde and the Aesthetic movement, despite the fact that the New Woman movement itself was highly diverse, and that its proponents were far from being unequivocally in favour of Wilde. They were, however, whether as social purity campaigners, or as more militantly disturbing advocates of women’s sexual freedoms, partakers in the spirit of the ‘New’, which in its amorphousness enabled the wholesale condemnation of its participants. That said, the New Woman’s zenith also coincided, as Ledger points out, with the birth of the Yellow Book, a publication in which they participated to dispute women’s objectification in works such as Arthur Symons’s ‘Stella Maris’. The New Woman’s status in the 1890s was profundly disputatious and contended, and the extent of the controversy that they raised was in itself a measure of success in signalling how far they had made the function and nature of women a matter for public debate and controversy. They exposed the ideological silences which enabled Victorian women’s oppression in journalism, poetry and drama, but principally through the form of fiction. They used both fantastic and realist fictions, but it was perhaps the development of the latter as a form of autobiographical, politically motivated prose which interpellated its female readers to participate in a form of radical collective

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 GAIL MARSHALL self-consciousness, which was their most effective weapon. To this extent, they were also significant participants in the collapse of the reading consensus which had foregrounded the rise and popularity of mid-century realism. By the 1880s, as Stephen Arata shows in chapter 9, fiction was the subject of debate in the British House of Commons which deplored the spread of demoralising literature in the country, some of which was surely condemned all the more readily by virtue of its foreign, specifically French, derivation. The prosecution of Henry Vizetelly, Zola’s English translator and publisher, demonstrates the centrality of realist fiction to English cultural beliefs, and prefaces a decade in which the novel firmly left behind its idealism, and the morality of George Eliot’s realism, and looked instead to a form which could explore difference, which did not scruple to offend, and with sexual content which provoked vitriolic debate. Arata identifies in the realist fiction of the 1890s a definitive turning away from sympathy and comedy, and the assumption instead of a responsibility to recognise the tragic, the fractured, the dark. Wilde’s anti-mimeticism places the issue of realist representation firmly at the centre of the fin de sie` cle, as he parodies its practices and beliefs. Alongside the developing practice of realism, as Nicholas Ruddick points out in chapter 10, the form of fantastic fiction was burgeoning, with the creation of such notable texts as The Time Machine, Dracula and The Turn of the Screw, all pre-eminent in their field. Seeking an explanation for the explosion of fantastic fiction at this period, Ruddick suggests that it might lie in the experience of powerful, culturally taboo desires and fears, which might only be expressed through the medium of the fantastic. In his reading, the fantastic emerges as a form of encryption which could accommodate both fears and fantasies, as in the sub-genre of adventure fiction such as Rider Haggard’s She, in which the fears of women and the unleashed power of Africa are jointly subdued by Haggard’s band of doughty travellers. Contemporary interest in the fantastic was also manifested in the scholarly attempts of Andrew Lang to excavate the fairy tale, and by the attention paid to that form by mainstream writers such as Oscar Wilde, who adopted it for socially progressive ends. However, arguably the leading figure of the fantastic at this period is H. G. Wells, whose scientific romances explore the ramifications of Darwinism and degeneration in a futurity made safe by its tremendous distance. He both explores and employs the practice of the scientist in a series of texts, which like other fantastic fictions give the concerns of the 1890s a freer scope and articulation than was often possible in realist texts. The volume ends with two chapters on the development of other literary forms of the period, drama and poetry; forms which underwent a fundamental shift in definitions and practices at this time. I have already

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Introduction outlined the centrality of Ibsen to this period, and in chapter 11, ‘Varieties of performance at the turn of the century’, John Stokes begins by identifying the richness of fin de sie` cle theatre, its accommodation of Ibsen, Wilde and the political confrontation of Shaw in an aesthetic which defied the commercial economy of Victorian theatre. However, it is the aspect of performance which is of most interest here, and which Stokes locates alongside a traditional account of the theatre history of the period. Concentrating on the performance of the turn of the century actress, he assesses her contribution to the emergence of the nineteenth into the twentieth century, citing the iconic figure of Sarah Bernhardt as capable both of representing the age, and of helping it expand into an internationalised market. With the final chapter of this collection we return to the question of decadence, and its crucial importance in the evolution of a fin de sie` cle poetics. Marion Thain shows, however, that decadent poetry was just one among many competing poetic forms, and goes on to present a broad picture of the sheer variety of poetry and poetic voices at this period. She explores the importance of paradox, a trope which crucially underpins decadent writing in its ‘[enabling] writers to unite a world that was beginning to fragment along a number of different faultlines while simultaneously acknowledging those newly prominent fissures’ (p. 226), and explores a number of ways in which this trope operates. One central paradox of poetry at this period is its simultaneous disavowal of economic forces at the precise moment at which art becomes engaged in and with a consumer culture. However, alongside the work of the aesthete poets the 1890s also saw the emergence of a counter- Decadent movement and a genre of poetry concerned explicitly with political and social reform. What emerges out of this chapter, in its close attention to the forms and languages of poetry, is the sense of a vital form emerging out of the nineteenth century, and which would go on to fuel the modernism which was just around the corner, in its development of a vernacular poetic language and its writing the urban environment into the heart of its vision. In the 1890s, the imminence of The Waste Land can be felt. In the 1890s then we see a period in which art and politics, culture and science are profoundly, symbiotically interconnected, a period which sees a vitality of language, an exuberance of creativity generated by the end of the century which belies the very concept of endings.

NOTES 1 Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray,inThe Works of Oscar Wilde, London, Collins n.d., p. 205. 2 Holbrook Jackson, The Eighteen Nineties: A Review of Art and Ideas at the Close of the Nineteenth Century, 2nd edn, London, Cape, 1927; 1913, pp. 157–8.

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 GAIL MARSHALL

3 W. B. Yeats, ‘The Tragic Generation’, in Autobiographies, London, Macmillan, 1966, pp. 279–349 (pp. 333, 323). 4 W. T. Stead, ‘The Pall Mall Gazette’ (1893); quoted in John Stokes, In the Nineties, Hemel Hempstead, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989,p.10. 5 Raymond Williams, Culture and Society (1963); quoted in Sally Ledger and Scott McCracken (eds.), ‘Introduction’ to Cultural Politics at the Fin de Sie`cle,Cambridge, 1995,pp.1–10 (p. 10). 6 Vernon Lee, ‘Deterioration of Soul’, Fortnightly Review,n.s.59 (1896), 928–43 (p. 938). 7 Hubert Crackanthorpe, ‘Reticence in Literature’, Yellow Book, 2 (1894), 259–69 (p. 266). 8 Jackson, The Eighteen Nineties,p.17.

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 1

JENNY BOURNE TAYLOR Psychology at the fin de sie` cle

Things as they are totter and plunge, because man is weary, and there is no faith that is worth an effort to uphold them...Over the earth the shadows creep with deepening gloom, wrapping all objects in a mysterious dimness, in which all certainty is destroyed and any guess seems plausible...And thus it appears as if the whole of civilized humanity were converted to the aesthetic of the Dusk of Nations.1 (Max Nordau, Degeneration (1895)) In 1895 Max Nordau’s Degeneration wastranslatedandpresentedtoan English readership. Opening with an attack on wealth and luxury, it seems at first to echo a familiar liberal assault on aristocratic decadence. But Nordau’s tone soon changes, and for the most part Degeneration forms a long diatribe against ‘the new aesthetic tendencies’ in contemporary art, in particular mysticism, Impressionism and Symbolism, encompassing the writings of Tolstoy, Ibsen, Ruskin, Zola, Nietzsche and Baudelaire, the music of Wagner, and the art of Burne-Jones and D. G. Rossetti.2 In a sweeping overview that reproduces the ‘hysteria’ that he claimed to see all around him, Nordau insists that the work of modern artists displays all the symptoms of morbid mental pathology. It is they who are both causes and symptoms of contemporary decline and who need, like criminals and the insane, to be studied in the light of the developing disciplines of psychology, psychiatry and criminology. Between January and May in the same year, H. G. Wells’s story The Time Machine appeared as a monthly serial in the New Review. It too paints a stark picture of universal decline. But Wells sets the ‘dusk of nations’ far into the future, and uses the possibilities of both science and fiction to speculate on scenarios beyond the boundaries of the present. The laboratory dissolves as thetimemachineacceleratesintothefuture, and the process of evolution is imaginatively speeded up. As the Time Traveller grinds to a halt in the year 802,701 (too distant to make sense in our own time-scales) he discovers a world that seems a haven of ease. But he soon realises the terrible truth – that the Eloi, the child-like, apparently carefree inhabitants of the new world, are actually maintained and fed by the Morlocks, a repulsive but highly intelligent type of creature adapted to a life underground. Humanity, the Time Traveller postulates in horror, has split into two distinct species, two descendants of the human

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 JENNY BOURNE TAYLOR race: the pretty, weak and mentally challenged ‘upperworlders’ on the one hand; on the other, the repellent but technologically sophisticated carnivores – the dwellers of the underworld who are, perhaps, the truer heirs of modern humanity. Degeneration and The Time Machine sparked debate when they appeared in 1895, and while Nordau’s book was soon condemned – Henry James’s brother William James described it as ‘a pathological book on a pathological subject’ – both works demonstrate the powerful grip that the concept of degeneration exerted in Britain in 1895.3 They each illustrate how closely the idea was bound up with the belief in social and scientific progress that had dominated liberal intellectual culture during the mid-nineteenth century. Each writer represents decline as both product and reversal of the evolutionary process and draws on recent scientific debates to support their gloomy visions. Both, too, regard the degeneration of humanity as the outcome of modern civilisation – above all the pressures and divisions of city life – which takes the form of atavisms, or reversions to more ‘primitive’ or child- like stages. But Nordau’s cultural survey and Wells’s popular story also dramatise very different social narratives. While Nordau primarily regarded degeneration as a form of mental pathology bound to hysteria, leading to the narcissism and will-lessness of the modern artist, Wells saw it as the product of the deep class divide structurally produced by industrial capitalism, and these perspectives form particular strands in the interwoven debates on the workings and meaning of inheritance in the late nineteenth century. Nordau was a prolific writer and critic of Austro-Hungarian Jewish origins who had studied and practised medicine in Paris under Jean- Martin Charcot. Degeneration was dedicated to Cesare Lombroso, whose influential L’Uomo delinquente of 1876 had been a key text in the inaugura- tion of criminal anthropology. Lombroso had aimed to transform the early nineteenth-century method of physiognomy, in which characteristics were read primarily through facial features, into a scientific method of measuring and classifying different criminal types according to various ‘stigmata’ or visible signs in the skull, face and body. He argued that these ‘stigmata’ (Nordau lists ‘squint-eyes, hare-lips, irregularities in the form and position of the teeth’) were outward features of the atavistic process whereby the criminal or insane reverted to primitive forms.4 Lombroso’s theories, made available in England through Havelock Ellis’s The Criminal (1890), provided a compelling means of identifying and explaining deviance that could be put to a range of uses, including fictional ones. Hyde in Robert Louis Stevenson’s story The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), for example, bears signs of criminal reversion, and Mina Harker alludes to

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Psychology at the fin de sie` cle both Lombroso and Nordau when describing the Count’s criminality in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Nordau’s principal starting point was the account of mental heredity and degeneration which had emerged in France during the 1850s – above all the work of B. A. Morel, whose Treatise on the Physical, Intellectual and Moral Degeneracy of the Human Race of 1857 was regarded as one of the most influential works on mental science of the nineteenth century.5 Basing his theories on the study of both urban and isolated rural communities, Morel argued that families which became ‘tainted’ through alcoholism gradually proceeded through the stages of neurosis, psychosis, idiocy and imbecility. Degeneracy, Morel maintained, took the form of a ‘morbid deviation from an original type’, which ‘contains transmissible elements’ that accumulated in descendants, until the line finally became infertile.6 In developing his theories, Morel had modified J. B. Lamarck’s model of evolution, which, in contrast with Darwin’s theory of natural selection (which stressed chance mutation), viewed species development as a gradual process of adaptation to environment and the transmission of acquired characteristics to offspring. This model, with its implied stress on willed agency, had long been dominant in progressive French intellectual circles, and it continued to exert its influence, in Britain as well as France, through the century: the work of the biologist and social philosopher Herbert Spencer was based on it and even Darwin himself became increasingly ‘Lamarckian’ after 1870. Although Morel challenged Lamarck’s evolutionary optimism he too stressed the power of environmental factors, which, compounded by heredity, generated the process of family decline. While Nordau’s references lay in mental science, Wells – a former student of Darwin’s follower T. H. Huxley – drew primarily on biological theory. The notion that species could actually adapt to worsening physical and moral conditions had been elaborated in England by the eminent zoologist E. Ray Lankester, whose Degeneration: A Chapter in Darwinism appeared in 1880. Lankester argued that the theory of natural selection erroneously regarded all species as developing along their own ‘lines of descent’. Some species, such as certain kinds of crustaceans, had been wrongly classified and were in fact degenerate versions of more complex forms; here natural selection had been reversed, as ‘the organism becomes adapted to less varied and less complex conditions of life’. ‘Any new set of conditions occurring to an animal which render its food and safety very easily obtained, seem to lead as a rule to Degeneration’, Lankester concluded: ‘Possibly we are all drifting, tending to the condition of intellectual Barnacles or Ascidians.’7 The enervated Eloi in The Time Machine can easily be seen as a vivid rendering of Lankester’s theory. But as Wells noted in his 1891 article

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 JENNY BOURNE TAYLOR

‘Zoological Retrogression’, this process was not inevitable – man’s ‘own activities ...cause the conditions of his existence to fluctuate far more widely than those of any animal have done’.8 The argument that natural laws cannot be applied to human society without factoring in the intervention of human culture and reflection would be elaborated by T. H. Huxley in Evolution and Ethics in 1893, and The Time Machine can be read as a critical exploration of degenerationist theory as well as a dramatisation of it. Indeed, the story is as much about the process of speculative interpretation as it is about actual change. The Time Traveller’s initial hypothesis, following Lankester – that natural selection had created the unchallenging environment that produced the effete Eloi – is quickly refuted by the discovery of the Morlocks. His hypothesis that the struggle for survival has formed two post-human species can be read as a critical response to the widespread argument (expressed, for example in Spencer’s The Study of Sociology in 1873) that State intervention to alleviate extreme social conditions will hasten social decline. It is the unchecked separation of the lower reaches of the working class – economically, socially and culturally – that results in the bifurcation of humanity. The discourse of degeneration undoubtedly pervaded biological, psychological and social theory during the late nineteenth century. It cut across European national boundaries, and enabled connections to be made between apparently very different forms and processes. Its power and popularity lay precisely in its vagueness – its ability to be pressed into the service of very different social and political agendas.9 But by the 1890s it was also recognised that ‘degeneration’ had its drawbacks as a catch-all term. ‘Has not the theory of degeneracy been abused of late?’ wrote Henry Maudsley – who had crucially contributed to its use in the 1870s–in1895. ‘[M]any persons think, when the word ...has been spoken, that all has been said ..., though nothing actually has been said.’10 We, too, can easily become mesmerised by the term as we reconstruct fin de sie` cle intellectual culture. This is particularly risky in discussing debates on the workings of the mind. For ‘degeneration’ formed only one aspect of late-Victorian psychological explorations, debates which were taken up and reshaped in the work of many fin de sie` cle writers – including Thomas Hardy, George Gissing, R. L. Stevenson, Bram Stoker, George Egerton and Henry James. Many of the traditional concerns of philosophy, such as the intricate relationship between the mind, the body and the brain; the power of the will and the nature and limits of consciousness, had been contested and recast in the emerging field of mental science during the early and mid-nineteenth century. Physiological psychologists, in particular Alexander Bain, Herbert Spencer and George Henry Lewes, had rejected idealistic concepts of a unified self or soul. With practising physicians such as William Carpenter and Henry Holland, they

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Psychology at the fin de sie` cle had recast older associationist accounts of how the mind forges links between impressions into a materialist and dynamic analysis of how external sensations and internal bodily processes are transformed though the interplay of conscious volition, latent memory, and automatic or reflex actions. Mid-century accounts of madness and other kinds of mental disorder had attempted to draw clear lines around pathological behaviour and had stressed the importance of individual agency and self-control. But they were also intrigued by states of trance, dreams and ‘double consciousness’, which they saw as providing a key to the workings of the ‘normal’ mind. Late-Victorian psychology developed these investigations. However there were also crucial shifts after 1870, and by the 1890s psychology, psychiatry and neurology had emerged as distinct, if closely related, fields of knowledge. Each of these fields became increasingly profes- sionalised, basing their legitimacy on the authority of a dominant scientific naturalism based on empirical observation and experimentation. ‘The method I refer to is that of experimental psychology in its strictest sense’ wrote the psychical researcher F. W. H. Myers, summarising contemporary developments in 1886: ‘the attempt to attack the great problems of our being not by metaphysical argument ...but by a study, as detailed and exact as any other natural science, of all such phenomena of life as have both a psychical and a physical aspect’.11 The laboratory settings of much late-Victorian gothic fiction reflect these preoccupations, and as in earlier texts such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1817), experimentation is both a source of fascination and horror. But the scientist turns his investigations inwards in fin de sie` cle gothic, using the language of both vivisection and chemistry and making the laboratory the arena for a new kind of introspection. Dr Jekyll in Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) transforms an old ‘dissecting room’ into a laboratory in which he separates the cells which make up the two sides of his ‘dual’ self; Dorian in Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)engagesin psychological ‘vivisection’, speculating that a kind of mysterious physical metamorphosis has divorced his appearance from his inner self. The scientist in Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) explicitly uses vivisection (ultimately unsuccessfully) to transform animals into new kinds of human subjects, while the Invisible Man in the story of 1897 uses chemistry to dissolve his physical body altogether. More broadly the short story itself became a kind of fictional laboratory, a means of experimenting with specific sensations and situations: probing the boundaries between body and mind, between the normal and the pathological, the child and the adult, the animal and the human, even the living and the dead, while also exploring the fluctuating self as subject, dramatising specific moods and patterns of consciousness.

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 JENNY BOURNE TAYLOR

At the same time mental science remained a broad and flexible field within this dominant framework, responsive to the pressures of late-Victorian modernity. Insanity among the working and ‘nervous disease’ among the expanding middle classes were widely considered to be on the increase – triggered by the growing economic insecurity, the competitiveness, speed, technological sophistication and rampant consumerism of contemporary capitalism. The idea that the body contains only a fixed amount of energy or ‘nerve force’, rapidly exhausted by the pressures of modern life, would be applied in different ways to women, men and children. It appeared in women suffering from ‘neurasthenia’, or nervous exhaustion; in the fear that overwork would bring about mental decay in men, or that ‘brain-forcing’ would make young minds blow before their time. The heightened interested in Spiritualism – partly a reaction against increasing secularism, partly a response to it – generated its own experiments: psychical research probed divisions within the self revealed by automatic writing as well as occult communication and telepathy, seeing all as complex mental phenomena. Studies of trauma and hysteria, including those by Pierre Janet, Richard Krafft-Ebing and Sigmund Freud, drew on recent experiments in hypnotism and led to new ideas about how hidden memories shaped somatic symptoms, to the realisation that the relationship between psyche and soma, or mind and body, was far more complex than had previously been imagined. In England, too, the scientific model came under increasing scrutiny by the 1890s, as tensions peaked between the claims of experimental psychology and philosophy of mind over who could truly grasp the elusive nature of identity, and of consciousness itself. So the fin de sie` cle was a moment of transition in the field of mental science as in so many other spheres; but it was also a moment of intellectual consolidation, as fields became established within specific institutional contexts. This brief overview will draw out specific strands within the complex debates on selfhood in Britain after 1870, and place them in context by comparing four contemporaries: physicians Henry Maudsley and Sir James Crichton-Browne; the psychologist James Sully; and the co-founder of the Society for Psychical Research, F. W. H. Myers. They do not cover the full range of late-nineteenth-century concepts of mind; but they offer a glimpse of a complex and contested field.

Insanity and nervous disease: Henry Maudsley and James Crichton-Browne The study and treatment of mental disease had become recognised as a legitimate branch of medicine by 1850. But by the 1870s the optimism that had fuelled the early nineteenth-century reform movement had run its course, as overcrowded state asylums became receptacles for an expanding population

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Psychology at the fin de sie` cle of pauper inmates. While the professional status of alienists (as ‘mad-doctors’ were now called) grew, the scientific credentials of psychological medicine came increasingly to rest on establishing a physiological basis for madness, and its social prestige to rely on the private treatment of nervous disorders in the consulting-room.12 And both psychological medicine and the specific treatment of nervous disorders were intimately connected with the advance of neurology. This rapidly developing discipline incorporated on the one hand the medical study of dysfunctions of the nervous system (such as epilepsy and paralysis) alongside vaguer conditions such as hysteria and neurasthenia; on the other (following developments in France and Germany) the laboratory- based study, relying heavily on animal experiments, of the structure and functions of the brain. Henry Maudsley and James Crichton-Browne’s careers were established in this context, and they dramatise both the profound changes and the continuities in the psychiatric profession during the latter part of the nineteenth century. Both were heirs of the lunacy reform movement. Maudsley was the son-in-law of its hero John Conolly, the superintendent of the showpiece state asylum at Hanwell, and advocate of the non-restraint system. James Crichton-Browne’s father was W. A. F. Browne, the Scottish reformer whose What Asylums Were, Are and Ought to Be of 1837 became the movement’s manifesto. Each contributed to the professional development of psychiatry, and established their reputations in the state system before moving into lucrative private practice. However the careers of these men took significantly different turns. Born in 1835, Henry Maudsley studied medicine at University College London, and was appointed medical superintendent at the Cheadle Royal Hospital for the Insane in Manchester before moving to London to take up the editorship of the Journal of Mental Science in 1861. His considerable intellectual authority during the late nineteenth century rested primarily on his early books, The Physiology and Pathology of Mind (1867), Body and Mind (1870) and Responsibility in Mental Disease (1874).13 An agnostic and an arch- materialist, Maudsley was scornful of introspection as a means of contemplat- ing consciousness and insisted that mental phenomena can only be understood through the inductive method of empirical observation. ‘Whatever be the real nature of the mind’, he insisted in The Physiology and Pathology of Mind,‘itis almost certainly dependent for its every manifestation on the brain and nervous system.’14 Following the work of Thomas Laycock, William Carpenter and Herbert Spencer, mid-century physiological psychologists who had emphasised the role that preconscious bodily reflexes play in apparently purposive actions, Maudsley asserted that consciousness represents the end product of a network of reflexes moving between different parts of the body, nerve-centres and the brain via the spinal cord. These processes are hereditary; as the species

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 JENNY BOURNE TAYLOR develops, conscious responses become automatic, then instinctive, as impulses are transmitted between generations in the form of unconscious bodily memory. Maudsley asserted that the conscious will plays only a small part in this process and he went on to explore these questions in detail in a later work, Body and Will,in1883. Responsibility in Mental Disease implicitly regards illness as punishment for past misconduct, reframing older religious notions of sin and retribution, through the Old Testament notion that ‘the sins of the father [and mothers] are visited on the children’ – an embodiment, he argues, ‘of the deep feeling of the inevitable dependence of a man’s present being on his antecedents in the past’.15 ‘Multitudes of human beings come into the world weighted with a destiny against which they have neither the will nor the power to contend’, Maudsley insisted; ‘They are the step-children of nature, and groan under the worst of all tyrannies – the tyranny of a bad organisation.’16 Maudsley thus extended the concept of ‘moral insanity’ (the complete breakdown of moral sense and emotional sympathy) by arguing that there was little essential difference between criminals and the insane, just as there was a fine line between eccentricity and insanity, and between madness and neurological disorders such as epilepsy. Indeed it was this idea of a ‘borderland’, in which classification breaks down, that Nordau would seize on in his account of the morbidity pervading modern life. Maudsley’s 1870s arguments about insanity were significant in establishing evolutionary psychology in England. His view, for example, that the ‘animal traits and instincts’ of idiocy are ‘a faint echo from a far distant past, testifying to a kinship which man has almost outgrown or has grown too proud to acknowledge’ is noted by Darwin in later editions of The Descent of Man.17 With his relentless stress on ‘the tyranny of organisation’, Maudsley seems a prime example of how the medical establishment naturalised and reinforced social divisions and hierarchies during the latter part of the nineteenth century. Yet while many of his views were widely shared (and can be discerned, albeit in more complex form, in the work of writers such as Hardy and Gissing) we cannot regard him as representative of the developing psychiatric profession as a whole. If we compare his career to James Crichton-Browne’s (born five years after Maudsley, in 1840) some significant contrasts emerge, though both worked in the same professional climate and formed part of the same elite. James Crichton-Browne was a key figure in the development of both psychiatry and neurology in late-Victorian Britain. While Maudsley was strongly critical of his own optimistic father-in-law, Crichton-Browne followed closely in the footsteps of his father, W. A. F. Browne, aiming to steer a path between the gloomy determinism of degeneration and mid-century reform. He was appointed the Medical Director of the West Riding County Asylum at Wakefield, and between 1866 and 1876 presided over what was one of the

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Psychology at the fin de sie` cle largest asylums in the country, drawing on new technologies of knowledge and classification that transformed the earlier methods of viewing and reading the mind that were part of physiognomy and phrenology. Crichton-Browne used photography as a means of interpreting and classifying the insane, developing the techniques of physiognomy in the light of the growing preoccupation with classification that found its clearest expression in Francis Galton’s work. However, photographs also had other uses: above all they illustrated Maudsley’s claim that insanity forms an uncanny link to humanity’s bestial past. It was this that fascinated Darwin, and the younger man’s photographs featured significantly in Darwin’s account, in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1871), of the close connections between humanity and its animal forebears. But Crichton-Browne’s ambitions at Wakefield went further. The study of how mental properties can be mapped onto the physical structure of the brain, first developed by the phrenologist Franz Joseph Gall, had gained force following Pierre Paul Broca’s discovery in 1860 that the capacity for language is situated on a particular part of the left hemisphere’s posterior lobe. It was Crichton-Browne’s ambition to rival developments in France and Germany by developing a massive research laboratory for the scrutiny of the brain. During the early 1870s Wakefield Asylum became a centre, not only for the study of nervous disease through clinical observations and autopsies of human patients, but also for neurological research based on animal experiments. Crichton-Browne invited Britain’s leading neurologist David Ferrier to Wakefield to conduct a series of experiments on the cerebral cortices of dogs (for which he would be unsuccessfully prosecuted by the Anti-Vivisection movements in the 1870s and 1880s), and his own research on epileptic patients formed part of this larger project. If Maudsley’s writing provided the polemical ballast for somatic theories of the mind, then Crichton-Browne’s work at Wakefield Asylum crucially contributed to its experimental base. Yet he noted in 1910 that he could not follow Maudsley’s materialism and agnosticism, and by the 1880s had moved away from the extreme implications of neurological research.18 Indeed, Crichton- Browne never rejected the values of moral management of his father’s generation, and in 1876 he took up the post of Lord Chancellor’s Visitor in Lunacy. This position, which involved overseeing the position of wealthy mental patients who were wards of Chancery, gave him access to a thriving private practice as a ‘nerve specialist’; and launched him into public life. Knighted in 1886, Crichton-Browne spent the last two decades of the nineteenth century promoting his ideas – as representative of the psychiatric profession as a whole – on the nation’s physical, mental and moral health. This involved a series of public interventions on environmental conditions, addressing the

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 JENNY BOURNE TAYLOR widespread fear of working-class urban degeneration that underpinned much late-century housing and sanitary reform. But the key area in which Crichton- Browne became involved in the 1880sand1890 was education, where, with James Sully, he formed part of a growing interest in the early stages of individual development – infancy and childhood.

Cultural development, dreams and childhood: James Sully The study of childhood brought together the fields of educational theory, medicine, neurology and mental science. ‘Yes, the baby has become an important object of scientific study’ James Sully wrote in the Cornhill Magazine in 1881. ‘The modern psychologist, sharing in the spirit of positive science, feels he must begin at the beginning, study mind in its simplest forms before attempting to explain its more complex and intricate manifestations.’19 The notion that psychic identity is rooted in childhood was not new – it had been a central tenet of Romanticism and was reinforced through the nineteenth century by autobiographical writing and by Charles Dickens’s and Charlotte Bronte¨’s work. But it took on renewed significance in an explicitly post- Darwinian framework, particularly after the newly established journal Mind published Darwin’s own ‘Biographical Sketch of an Infant’ in July 1877.The development of child psychology is one aspect of the much wider role that the idea of childhood played in the late-nineteenth-century cultural imagination: shaping the explorations of child consciousness in George Egerton’s story ‘A Psychological Moment in Three Periods’ (in Discords, 1894) and Olive Schreiner’s ‘The Child’s Day’ (written in the 1880s though published posthumously) as well as Frances Hodgson Burnett’s famous study of youthful morbidity and regeneration, The Secret Garden (1911). Childhood was primarily discussed within the framework of recapitulation in the late nineteenth century – the idea, first proposed by Ernst Haeckel in 1866, that ‘ontogeny’, the growth of the individual organism, mirrors, or recapitulates, ‘phylogeny’, the wider process of evolution.20 In many respects ‘recapitulation’ echoed ‘atavism’, but the concepts were applied to childhood in different ways. We can see the child as a ‘monument’, ‘a brief re´sume´ of the more important features in the slow upward movement of the species’, Sully stated in Studies of Childhood (1895), and as a ‘product’ of his race, ‘in whom we can discern signs of a hereditary transmission of the effects of ancestral experiences and activities’.21 But he also stressed, following Darwin, that the weakness of human infants played a central role in developing altruistic sentiments, in the evolution of humanity as a social species. Childhood therefore represented a particularly unsettling arena in fin de sie` cle debates on the mind. It was both strange and familiar: a stage that

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Psychology at the fin de sie` cle everyone passed beyond, but whose traces remained latent in the unconscious mind; that brought together the private world of the family and the public one of the state; that represented both the past and the future. Above all, childhood represented the point of intersection between notions of degeneration and more optimistic notions of growth and progress as they emerged after 1880, as Crichton-Browne and Sully themselves illustrate. For Crichton-Browne, all children were the key to the nation’s future health; but their undeveloped nervous systems could easily be drained of force: one of his earliest articles, ‘The Psychical Diseases of Early Life’ (1860) argues that children are particularly susceptible to mental and nervous disease, both inherited and acquired.22 He played a leading role in the campaign against over-pressure in schools in the 1880s. ‘Parents should remember that children are not nineteenth-century men and women, but diamond editions of very remote ancestors, full of savage whims and impulses, and savage 23 rudiments of virtue’, Crichton-Browne argued in 1883. But while he opposed ‘brain-forcing’, he also regarded the child’s world of fantasy and imagination with increasing unease: ‘dreamy mental states’ he argued in 1895, are unmistakable symptoms of possible degeneration.24 James Sully shared the view that children were ‘diamond editions of very remote ancestors’, but his understanding of childhood, and the role of fantasy and play in psychic development was very different from Crichton- Browne’s. Born in 1842 into a Baptist family, Sully attended the Baptist College in Regents Park in the early 1860s. This was affiliated to the Arts Degree at the University of London where he encountered the work of William Hamilton, Alexander Bain, Herbert Spencer and G. H. Lewes. Sully was thus first trained in the broad curriculum of London University; he went on to take his MA in Germany in 1868, and three years later studied in Berlin under the eminent physicist Hermann von Helmholtz. While Maudsley and Crichton-Browne became medical practitioners, Sully’s work developed in the rich intellectual culture of periodical journalism. His essays on psychology and aesthetics, particularly music, published as Sensation and Intuition (1874), were admired by such figures as George Eliot, G. H. Lewes, Charles Darwin and T. A. Ribot, and he developed his journalistic discussion into a sophisticated analysis of Illusions in 1881. As a prote´ge´ of the mid-century generation Sully produced articles on topics ranging from a critique of Schopenhauer, the meaning of laughter and the psychology of shopping, for the Cornhill Magazine,theWestminster Review and the Saturday Review during the 1870s as well as being one of the first contributors to Mind and Ribot’s Revue Philosophique. Stressing the fluidity of consciousness and the complex interplay of sensation and mental response, Sully elaborates Lewes’s assertion that ‘the mind is not a passive recipient of

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 JENNY BOURNE TAYLOR external impressions, but an active co-operant...a variable mechanism, which has a history’, particularly in his early work.25 It is necessary ‘to consider the variable influences at work on men’s minds in different ages, countries, and stages of society, as well as differences in natural capacity’, he stresses in a discussion of evolutionary theory.26 Illusions opens with the premise that ‘the illusions of the normal and of the abnormal condition – are so similar, and pass into one another by such insensible gradations, that it is impossible to discuss the one apart from the other’, and extends the ‘laws of association’ to explore the mind’s kaleidoscopic interplay of past and present in the process of internal representation and recollection.27 Sully played a central role in establishing psychology as an academic discipline in the 1890s, and was elected to the prestigious Grote Chair in Logic and Philosophy of Mind after his influential textbook The Human Mind appeared in 1892. But his work on childhood first developed on the fringes of academia. He lectured on the theory of education; his Outlines of Psychology of 1884 was followed by The Teachers’ Handbook of Psychology in 1886. It was through this work that he became involved in the emerging child study movement which drew heavily on the data provided by teachers in studying child development.28 Sully shared a desire for ‘scientific’ rigour with his European and American contemporaries, claiming that child study demanded an essentially male expertise, mothers being too emotional and subjective. But in contrast to American psychologists such as J. M. Baldwin (whose Mental Development in the Child and the Race also appeared in 1895) he was wary of studying children in simulated laboratory conditions. And while he clearly draws on the recapitulation model and stresses the likeness of children to ‘savages’, he is sceptical of using the analogy of animal development in studying infant growth. So while Sully increasingly emphasised the evolutionary aspects of the mind, he developed his interpretation of evolution by rejecting exclusively somatic accounts in favour of a more speculative and introspective account of human growth that amplifies elements of his earlier work on illusions and music. Studies of Childhood draws on cultural ethnography rather than biology – in particular on E. B. Tylor’s Primitive Culture (1870) and John Lubbock’s The Primitive Condition of Man (1867). While Lubbock emphasised the savagery of ‘prehistoric’ societies, Tyler was more interested in the stratified symbolic structures that underlie all human culture, and Sully develops both aspects of their analysis. Children, he argued, share with savages ‘crude fanciful ideas ...seizures by rage and terror’ and ‘absorption in the present moment’; but they also illustrate the symbolic complexity of apparently primitive forms.29 He stresses, moreover, that the world of childhood is only partly accessible, a combination of observation and projection,

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Psychology at the fin de sie` cle introspection, memory and reconstruction. ‘The child which the modern world has discovered ...is only half discovered’, he notes. ‘The observer of children must be a diviner, a sort of clairvoyant reader of their secret thoughts’, through the ‘feminine’ gift of ‘sympathetic insight’.30 Indeed in trying to get inside the child’s imaginative world Sully draws on a range of literary sources – the autobiographies of George Sand, John Ruskin and Frances Hodgson Burnett, and Stevenson’s The Child’s Garden of Verses – as much as direct observation and reportage. Sully regarded childhood not simply as a stage in a process but as laying down a multi-layered psychic structure that is central to all aspects of adult identity. Studies in Childhood explores the ‘myth-making’ capacity of children, their ‘imaginative transformation of objects’, the importance of play, or ‘the working out of an inner fancy’. But Sully also suggests that children’s myths of origin, their capacity for story-making and their endless curiosity lie at the heart of all meaning – ‘thought, even the abstract thought of science, grows out of the free play of the imagination’.31 While he was crucial in establishing professional psychology, Sully also inhabited its fringes, and he demonstrates how fluid the boundaries between science and art, amateur and professional knowledge, remained in the late nineteenth century. In his memoirs, for instance, he acknowledges his close friend Robert Louis Stevenson’s influence on his writing and puts into practice Stevenson’s suggestion in ‘A Chapter on Dreams’ that creative writing feeds on the act of dreaming by writing a story, based on a dream scenario, that was published in Harper’s Weekly.32 Sully’s own 1893 essay ‘The Dream as a Revelation’ was noted by Freud in the 1909 edition of The Interpretation of Dreams, and Sully’s reading of the dream as a palimpsest brings together the interwoven layers of late-Victorian psychology. ‘It seems natural at first to think of this transition from waking to sleeping consciousness as a degradation, as a reversion to a primitive infantile type of psychosis’ in which ‘sensuous imagination’ is uncontrolled, Sully argued; but dreaming is the ‘weakened activity of a mature mind, formed by complex human experience’. The unconscious activity illuminated in dreaming is both the ‘revelation’ of a hidden past which ‘brings from the dim depths of our subconscious life the primal, instinctual impulses’, and is ‘a recurrent reinstatement of our ‘‘dead selves’’, an overlapping of the successive personalities, the series of whose doings and transformations constitutes our history’.33

Multiplex personality and psychical research: F. W. H. Myers ‘Psychology has of late occupied itself much with the curious phenomena of double or alternating personality’, Sully noted in his essay on dreams, and ‘double consciousness’ was the arena on which the viewpoints which

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 JENNY BOURNE TAYLOR explored the unstable borderlands of the self converged. Mid-century mental scientists had debated whether this peculiar phenomenon, in which individuals apparently shifted between very different personalities, was primarily a pathological response to the physical doubleness of the brain or a result of disordered association. However the increased use of hypnotism in France to explore and treat hysteria in the 1880s enabled cases of disso- ciated personality to be studied in the ‘laboratory’ conditions of the clinic. The discussion that sprang from these case studies gave a new urgency to the old question: Is there a co-ordinating power within each individual, formed through memory and shaping individual will, that constitutes the core of the self? Or are we nothing but a series of bodily sensations, cerebral reflexes and fragmented memories that together constitute the fiction of individuality? Charcot regarded hysteria as an aspect of hereditary degeneration and saw the susceptibility to hypnosis of his working-class patients as a symptom of their morbid pathology. His findings were disputed, particularly by Hippolyte Bernheim at Nancy who argued that it was the power of suggestion rather than any physical process that lay at the root of hypnotism’s curative power. Nonetheless, Charcot’s belief that paralysis on one side of the body could be relieved or transferred by the application of metallic discs complicated the relationship between symptom and organic disease. This was a very different kind of experimental work from that of David Ferrier and Crichton-Browne in Wakefield, and both Charcot and Bernheim recognised that hypnotism was able to probe parts of the mind that more orthodox methods were unable to reach. At the same time the meaning of trauma had shifted, following the realisation that victims of railway and other accidents often suffered delayed physical and psychological symptoms. This concept of delayed shock helped to form the view that hysterical symptoms – including the splitting of the personality – might be a response to repressed events in the past; this would be developed into the modern concept of trauma by Pierre Janet and Sigmund Freud in the 1890s. Frederic Myers was deeply engaged with these multi-faceted debates and extended their boundaries. Born in 1843, he was a brilliant classical scholar who shone at Cambridge, and his intense, idealistic Hellenism never really left him. A Fellow of Trinity College from 1865 until 1874, Myers left university teaching to become a school inspector and to support the higher education of women. Myers thus followed a traditional Victorian upper- middle-class male education and his early writings included a study of Wordsworth and essays on classical and modern literature. He went through a fervently Christian phase in the late 1860s, followed by disillusionment. By 1870 he was exploring the claims of spiritualism with two Cambridge

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Psychology at the fin de sie` cle friends, Henry Sidgwick and Edmund Gurney, and the three formed the Society for Psychical Research in 1882. The Society for Psychical Research was the elite, highly intellectual end of the extraordinary range of interests grouped under the broad banner of late- Victorian Spiritualism. Spiritualism attracted both working- and middle- class followers; it included conscious frauds, those who regarded it as a direct extension of Christianity, those who saw it as an alternative faith system and those who regarded spirit communication as a phenomenon that science would one day explain. The SPR aimed to gather examples of spirit communication and automatic writing and study them with absolute objectivity, relating them to mental phenomena such as double consciousness. ‘Psychical’ still carries the ambiguities inherent in these aims, but in the late nineteenth century its occult and psychological connotations were closely connected – indeed the short-lived ‘Psychological Society of Great Britain’ was a forerunner of the SPR in the 1870s. And while many members of the medical and scientific establishment were dismissive, others were actively engaged – the eminent American psychologist, William James, for example, was a President of the SPR in the 1890s. As a founding member of the SPR, Myers aimed to investigate whether minds might exist outside the limits of the individual body: it was he who coined the term ‘telepathy’ and he ultimately proposed a form of immortality in his posthumous survey, Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death (1903). Myers thus marks the outer limit to the boundaries of scientific naturalism – ‘just as the old orthodoxy was too narrow to contain men’s knowledge, so now the new orthodoxy of materialistic science is too narrow to contain their feelings and aspirations’, he argued in 1886.34 But Myers developed his theories by embracing science; becoming, as William James noted, a ‘wary critic of evidence, the skilful handler of hypothesis, the learned neurologist’.35 He visited a range of French asylums, including the Salpeˆtrie`reand Nancy in the early 1880s, and was the main figure in making both Janet’s work on traumatic memory and Freud’s Studies on Hysteria available in England. Myers wished to ‘track personality to its recesses’ through the investigation of mental dissociation in the light of the most recent research.36 His own examples of ‘multiplex personality’ included Louis V., a ‘neglected child of a turbulent mother’, whose personality split between ‘savage impulsiveness’ and being ‘gentle, respectful, modest’.37 But it also included the ‘timid elderly peasant woman’ Mme B., who divided into three distinct personae: ‘Le´onie’, her conscious waking character; ‘Le´ontine’, a ‘noisy and frivolous’ personality who emerged under hypnotic trance, and the mysterious ‘Leonore’, a transcendent ecstatic consciousness that linked mental dissociation with the mysterious working of a higher self.38 Like Sully, Myers regarded the mind as a

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 JENNY BOURNE TAYLOR palimpsest with a structure and a history. But he extended the therapeutic hypnotism of the Nancy School to propose that the fragmented selves revealed in cases of double consciousness are aspects of a ‘subliminal consciousness’ that ‘at some future time, and under changed conditions’ may unite. These overlapping debates formed a central part of the intellectual landscapes that shaped fin de sie` cle literature, and the fascination of many of its most compelling texts lies in the ways that they actively combine the elements of contemporary psychology into new kinds of hybrid forms. We can read the small, sinister figure of Hyde in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, for example, as an example of criminal atavism, as the embodiment of the split between the ‘civilised’ left, language-making side of the brain, versus the ‘primitive’ right hemisphere; but Jekyll’s studies also ‘led wholly towards the mystic and transcendental’ – towards ‘the guess that man will be ultimately known for a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous, and independent deni- 39 zens’ that picks up elements within Myers’s work. Stevenson was fascinated with French debates on double consciousness, and the case of Jekyll and Hyde bears close similarities to that of Louis V.40 And although Myers wrote to Stevenson politely pointing out psychological inaccuracies in the representation of Hyde, the pharmacological transformation not only echoes and dramatises the hypnotic experiments on double personality, but dramatises the wider metaphysical question about what makes ‘self’ that Myers grappled with. Stories of the undead, ghosts and haunting, such as Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Richard Marsh’s The Beetle, draw on the methods of hypnotism, complicating a straightforward division between science and superstition that echo the methods of the Society for Psychical Research. Henry James shared his brother’s fascination with spirit communication as a way of exploring the hidden recesses of the self in stories such as ‘The Turn of the Screw’, ‘The Jolly Corner’ and ‘Sir Edmund Orme’. This brief overview has only explored some of the strands that made up debates on the nature of the mind at the fin de sie` cle. By the mid-1880s the physiological tradition had come under attack, both from a resurgent idealism and from psychologists such as James Ward, who argued in 1886 that it was unable to really get to grips with the subjective aspects of consciousness.41 A comprehensive survey would include the work of F. H. Bradley, T. H. Green and Ward himself; William James and Henri Bergson’s decon- structions of consciousness; the continuing interest in Schopenhauer’s writing; and the emergence of psychoanalysis. It would investigate the role that mind played in the process of evolution as explored by Darwin in The Expression of the Emotions, by Francis Galton, George Romanes and Darwin’s eccentric critic Samuel Butler. Maudsley, Crichton-Browne, Sully and Myers all took as their starting point the relationship of the individual

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Psychology at the fin de sie` cle mind to a collective process of change. But they perceived this relationship in very different ways, and while they contributed to the formation of late nineteenth-century psychology, they, too, highlighted the fluidity of its boundaries.

NOTES

1 Max Nordau, Degeneration, 8th edn, London, William Heinemann, 1895, pp. 5–7. 2 Nordau, Degeneration,p.22. 3 William James, Psychological Review, 2 (1895), 289. This and other responses to Nordau are reprinted in Sally Ledger and Roger Luckhurst (eds.), The Fin de Sie`cle: A Reader in Cultural History c. 1880–1900, Oxford University Press, 2000. 4 Nordau, Degeneration,p.17. 5 See Ian Dowbiggin, ‘Degeneration and Hereditarianism in French Mental Medicine 1840–90: Psychological Theory as Ideological Adaptation’, in W. F. Bynum, Roy Porter and Michael Shepherd (eds.), The Anatomy of Madness: Essays in the History of Psychiatry, London, Tavistock Publications, 1985,Vol.I,pp.188–232 (p. 191). 6 B. A. Morel, Traite´ des de´ge´ne´rescences physiques, intellectuelles et morales de l’espe`ce humaine, Paris, 1857; cited in Nordau, Degeneration,p.16. 7 E. Ray Lankester, Degeneration: A Chapter in Darwinism, London, Macmillan, 1880, pp. 24, 33, 60. 8 H. G. Wells, ‘Zoological Retrogression’, The Gentleman’s Magazine, 271 (1891), 247–53 (p. 53). 9 See Stephen Arata, Fictions of Loss at the Fin de Sie`cle, Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 14–19, and William Greenslade, Degeneration, Culture and the Novel 1880–1940, Cambridge University Press, 1994, chapters 1 and 2. 10 Henry Maudsley, ‘Criminal Responsibility and the Insane’, British Medical Journal, 28 September 1895, 771. 11 F. W. H. Myers, ‘Human Personality in the Light of Hypnotic Suggestion’, Proceedings for the Society of Psychical Research, 4 (1886–7), 1–25 (p. 1). 12 Janet Oppenheim, ‘Shattered Nerves’: Doctors, Patients and Depression in Victorian England, Oxford University Press, 1991, ch. 1. 13 Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture 1830–1980, London, Virago, 1985, pp. 112–20; and Trevor Turner, ‘Henry Maudsley: Psychiatrist, Philosopher, and Entrepreneur’, in Bynum et al. (eds.), The Anatomy of Madness, Vol. III, pp. 151–89. 14 Henry Maudsley The Physiology and Pathology of Mind, London, Macmillan, 1867,p.40. 15 Henry Maudsley, Responsibility in Mental Disease, London, Henry S. King, 1874,p.23. 16 Henry Maudsley, Body and Mind, 2nd edn, London, Macmillan, 1873,p.43. 17 Maudsley, Body and Mind, pp. 51–2. 18 James Crichton-Browne, ‘The First Maudsley Lecture’, Journal of Mental Science, 66 (1920), 199–227 (p. 200). 19 Sully, ‘Babies and Science’, Cornhill Magazine, 43 (1881), 543–5 (p. 544).

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 JENNY BOURNE TAYLOR

20 See Stephen Jay Gould, Ontology and Phylogeny, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1977. 21 James Sully, Studies of Childhood, 2nd edn, London, Longmans, Green & Co., 1986, pp. 8, 9. 22 Journal of Mental Science, 6 (1860), 284–320. 23 Crichton-Browne, ‘Education and the Nervous System’, in M. A. Morris (ed.), The Book of Health, London, Cassell, 1883, pp. 269–380 (p. 379). 24 Crichton-Browne, ‘Dreamy Mental States’, Stray Leaves from a Physician’s Portfolio, London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1927, pp. 1–42. 25 G. H. Lewes, Foundations of a Creed, London, Tru¨ bner & Co., 1874, Vol. I, 162. 26 James Sully, Sensation and Intuition: Studies in Psychology and Aesthetics, London, Henry S. King, 1874,p.12. 27 Illusions: A Psychological Study, London, C. Kegan Paul & Co., 1881, pp. 4, 169. 28 See Adrian Wooldridge, Measuring the Mind: Education and Psychology in England c. 1860–1990, Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp. 36–43. 29 Sully, Studies of Childhood, pp. 8–9. 30 Studies of Childhood,p.14. 31 Studies of Childhood,p.70. 32 Sully, My Life and Friends, London, T. Fisher Unwin, pp. 215–16. 33 James Sully, ‘The Dream as a Revelation’, Fortnightly Review, 5 (1893), 354–65 (pp. 354–5, 358, 362–3). 34 Myers, ‘Introduction’, in Edmund Gurney, F. W. H. Myers and Frank Podmore, Phantasms of the Living; cited in F. Turner, Between Science and Religion: The Reaction to Scientific Naturalism in Late Victorian Britain, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1974,p.2. 35 William James, ‘Frederic Myers’ Services to Psychology’, Memories and Studies, New York, Greenwood Publishers, 1968; 1911,p.146. 36 F. W. H. Myers, Letter to Stevenson, 28 February 1886, in Paul Maixner (ed.), Robert Louis Stevenson: The Critical Heritage, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981, pp. 212–22. 37 Myers, ‘Multiplex Personality’, Nineteenth Century, 20 (1886), 648–66 (p. 649). 38 Myers, ‘French Experiments of Strata of Personality’, Proceedings for the Society for Psychical Research, 5 (1888–9), 374–97 (p. 374). 39 Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Oxford, The World’s Classics, 1987; 1886, pp. 60–1. 40 See Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Sie`cle, London, Bloomsbury, 1991, pp. 105–16. 41 ‘Psychology’, Encyclopaedia Britannica, 9th edn, Edinburgh, 1886, pp. 37–85.

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 2

DENNIS DENISOFF Decadence and aestheticism

‘Decadence, decadence, you are all decadent nowadays.’1 Thus bewails the hyper-conservative critic in the essay that Hubert Crackanthorpe published in the second volume of the journal The Yellow Book. Yet while Crackanthorpe was mocking the critics, decadence and aestheticism were a major source of contention from the moment they began flaunting their dissident passions before the British public in the mid-nineteenth century. By the 1890s, many had had enough of the mix of aesthetic idealism, taunting self-display, uncommon sexuality and degeneracy that had become packaged as their defining characteristics. Max Nordau devoted an entire chapter of Degeneration (1892) to chastising both for encouraging pessimism, sexual aberrancy, mysticism and poor taste in clothing. While we might now find Nordau’s extremism laughable, his contemporaries did not cast him aside as quickly. Similar arguments were being made even by artists and writers. George Du Maurier, for example, has the hero of his novel The Martian (1898) attack aesthetes as ‘little misshapen troglodytes with foul minds and perverted passions’.2 Even contributors to the Aesthetic or Decadent movement – such as Richard le Gallienne, Vernon Lee and Walter Pater – voiced displeasure with some of their qualities. Meanwhile, late aestheticist and decadent works such as Aubrey Beardsley’s drawings and Ada Leverson’s short stories imply that themovementshadinfactfallenintoself-parody. By the century’s end, people were using the terms ‘decadent’ and ‘aestheticist’ to condemn almost any artwork that displayed innovations in aesthetic philosophy, subject or style – including realist stories, New Woman writing, and Impressionist art. And yet, the last decade of the century also gave us the best work of some of the most influential artists and writers of the era – Oscar Wilde, Max Beerbohm and Beardsley among them. Moreover, these years produced one of the most significant products of aestheticism and decadence – The Yellow Book. In its image, marketing, history, diversity of contributors and self-parody, the journal captured not only quintessential

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 DENNIS DENISOFF elements of decadence and aestheticism, but also the sociopolitical dynamics of the British fin de sie` cle itself. In this chapter, I wish to turn to The Yellow Book to demonstrate the unique dissidence of aestheticism and decadence as they manoeuvred through that final decade of the century. To do so, however, I wish first to outline some key aesthetic and philosophic notes in the Aesthetic and Decadent movements.

The dissident tradition of decadence and aestheticism Echoing the controversies that surrounded them in the Victorian era, the reputation of decadence and aestheticism did not fare well during most of the twentieth century either. In Aestheticism (1954), R. V. Johnson repeated the nineteenth-century argumentthatifaestheticismwereto be consistently followed it must lead to a selfish life. John Reed’s Decadent Style (also 1954), meanwhile, described decadence as the illegitimate offspring of Naturalism and aestheticism. And in his Decadence of 1979, Richard Gilman declared that decadence never really exists except as the negative reflection of whatever strong development in culture, society or technology happens to exist at any particular time. These arguments reveal assumptions regarding notions of morality and progress that underlay the study of aestheticism and decadence in the Victorian era and into the twentieth century. Ironically, they are the very assumptions that nineteenth-century decadent and aestheticist works themselves often aimed to challenge. Western culture, the decadent argument goes, has habitualised a view of birth and growth as positive, and decay and death as negative, when in fact they are all part of one indivisible, non-progressive package. In connection with this critique, decadence also challenged other false normativisations such as the fundamental importance of the middle-class family model, industrial progress and a common moral basis to beauty and the meaning of life. Aestheticism is similarly anti-conformist, supporting an aesthetic doctrine that suggests that one’s private utopia is at hand, if one would only learn to ignore the domineering bourgeoisie. Johnson is correct in noting that an aestheticist approach to life cannot be sustained in the long run, but neither can industrial, capitalist and imperialist development. Indeed, key proponents of aestheticism readily acknowledged its fleeting quality. In Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), Pater speaks not only of each moment of pleasure as woefully brief, but even life as such. It may be true that aestheticism cannot result in a society of aesthetic idealists, but even to imagine perfect beauty is better than acquiescing in the mundane reality of an industrial society.

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Decadence and aestheticism

Charles Bernheimer recently critiqued Gilman’s description of decadence as nothing but the negative pole in a binary that reinforces progress and civilisation. According to Bernheimer, although decadence may not signify anything concrete within this model, its importance lies precisely in the fact that, unlike so many other aesthetic and philosophical approaches, it admits to the false reality in which the binary is situated. Decadence thereby challenges Western thought processes without attaching itself to any one particular cultural or historical agent. In ‘Interversions’, Barbara Spackman similarly argues that, while major nineteenth-century aesthetic movements like Naturalism and Realism tried to hide their own fabrications in order to create the illusion of being reality, decadence is more honest because it emphasises the artificiality inherent in any effort at representation: ‘This ‘‘true fake’’ would be one that always retains the sign of its own artificiality, that announces itself as copy and thereby remains dependent upon the thing 3 copied, upon nature, or the real.’ Decadence refuses to accept the notion of a clear distinction between positive and negative forces, offering instead a model of ‘contamination whereby the logic of diversity functions to contam- inate and introduce an asymmetry into the logic of absolute difference’.4 In other words, art and literature produced as part of the Decadent movement refuse to allow society to pretend that it can know one objective reality or that progress to any sustainable ideal is even manageable. From the Latin ‘de cadere’, meaning ‘to fall away’, ‘decadence’ was first commonly used to describe a society as it decayed, falling from a state of health and prosperity to one of physical and ethical ruin. In 1834,De´sire´ Nisard used the term ‘decadent’ to describe artworks that he felt over-emphasised artificiality and gave too much attention to words and language rather than what the words were supposed to signify. In 1868, The´ophile Gautier turned this into a compliment. His preface to Charles Baudelaire’s poetry collection Les Fleurs du mal bates critics and other prudish members of French society by using vivid images and references to hallucination, mental illness and immorality to celebrate a decadent style. According to Gautier, Baudelaire’s poetry reflects art and society at its full maturity, where it is most complex and daring, and where the artist has fulfilled his responsibility to beauty itself by maximising the reader’s pleasure through vivid, suggestive images and symbols. According to Paul Verlaine and others, it was within a decaying civilisation that a few individuals would have the wealth and privilege to create and experience this most intense of pleasures. At the expense of the majority, these few would know the most that beauty had to offer. One of the cornerstone paradoxes of decadence was that the greatest beauty was seen to arise at the cusp of a society’s destruction.

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 DENNIS DENISOFF

Aestheticism is similarly characterised by an interest in perfection, although its focus is more specifically on artistic ideals. It is invested in Gautier’s articulation of the idea of l’art pour l’art (art for art’s sake) in the preface to his novel Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835). Gautier attacks reviewers for their hypocritical moralising and their habit of sniffing out lewder elements of an artwork rather than paying attention to the beauty of the object. Art, Gautier declares, has no responsibility except to beauty and should be evaluated with this in mind. Therefore, for Gautier, only that which is utterly useless can be ultimately beautiful because an object’s utility detracts from its function as a source of pleasure. Gautier’s advocacy of amorality in art and literature made its way into England through the poetry of Algernon Swinburne. Linda Dowling has effectively argued that British decadence was influenced by a conception of language first articulated by the German philologist Johann Gottfried 5 Herder and brought to Britain by Max Mu¨ ller. It was Swinburne, however, who introduced the decadent style to the English mainstream. In 1862, he described Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal as having sounds that ‘suggest colours and perfumes’ and a ‘heavy, heated temperature, with dangerous hothouse scents in it’.6 The claim that poetry has scented and coloured sounds is itself a decadent move, alluding to Baudelaire’s interest in synaes- thesia – the condition in which one sensory stimulation results in the experience of another, such as when smelling a lily results in hearing the sound of a trumpet. Baudelaire claimed that, by making use of these sensory correspon- dences, as well as those between this reality and a transcendent one, poets could capture the meaning of their souls. Baudelaire’s articulation of the synaesthetic function of images helped set the foundation for Symbolism. Decadence and Symbolism arose in France at the same time from similar origins. Generally speaking, decadence has maintained a more overtly socio-political character than Symbolism, whether it is being attacked as a manifestation of an immoral age or celebrated as a daring declaration of contempt for bourgeois complacency. Symbolism is more invested in establishing symbols and images as previously under- appreciated means of communication. In the words of Arthur Symons, the Symbolists ‘would flash upon you the ‘‘soul’’ of that which can be apprehended only by the soul – the finer sense of things unseen, the deeper meaning of things evident’.7 In short, Symbolism searched for methods of articulating ideas and experiences that basic language was too limited to address. By loading his review of Baudelaire with phrases like ‘heavy, heated temperature, with dangerous hothouse scents’, Swinburne was giving readers a preview of his own poetry. For his Poems and Ballads (1866), he chose

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Decadence and aestheticism subjects that he knew would be controversial and offered them in a sensual, erotic language. ‘Anactoria’, for example, opens with the poet Sappho remind- ing her female lover of their sexual experiences:

I feel thy blood against my blood; my pain Pains thee, and lips bruise lips, and vein stings vein. Let fruit be crushed on fruit, let flower on flower Breast kindle breast, and either burn one hour.8

This piece is aestheticist in its emphasis on sensual pleasure and its refusal to moralise blatantly. It is most decadent, meanwhile, in its choice of a titillating topic and a focus on sensual details that some would see as distasteful. The vibrancy of the images and the mix of love, sexual pleasure and pain almost overwhelm the text. However, by depicting lesbianism as violent and unfulfilling (Sappho pines alone), Swinburne ultimately reinforces the common association of same-sex desire with aberrancy and dys- functionality. The intensity of the imagery turns Sappho’s love into a bizarre spectacle. The poem could have proved more politically effective had Swinburne chosen instead to depict same-sex female desire as, for example, a romantic, domestic ideal superior to the common heterosexual model. That said, ‘Anactoria’ goes on to claim that only the poet herself, blessed by the Muses, has the power to bestow immortality on her beloved. Thus, true to aestheticism, Swinburne depicts art – not domestic conventions or love – as the ultimate source of pleasure. With subjects such as same-sex desire, hermaphroditism and necrophilia, Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads riled critics admirably. Thomas Spencer Baynes, for example, took issue with Swinburne’s ‘perverted moral perceptions’,9 while Alfred Austin accused him of being even less masculine than Tennyson.10 According to Clyde Hyder, Swinburne’s collection was ‘attacked with a bitterness rarely equaled in the annals of literary history’, thereby ensuring his notoriety was well established.11 A different branch of aestheticism had been developing in Britain before Swinburne introduced Gautier’s ideas. This was thanks primarily to the Pre- Raphaelite Brotherhood that formed in 1848. The group included writers and artists such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais, while others such as Christina Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris were close associates. The Pre-Raphaelites based their views in large part on those of John Ruskin, who argued in works such as The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) and The Stones of Venice (1851 and 1853) that good art reflected the morality of the artist. In The Stones of Venice and Unto This Last (1860), he argued on behalf of medieval craft culture, claiming that industrialisation dehumanised workers and choked

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 DENNIS DENISOFF their moral potential. The Pre-Raphaelites echoed Ruskin in critiquing the humanist approach to art that arose during the Renaissance and supported his view that nature was an artist’s key guide. Just as neither of these tenets accord well with standard-model decadence or aestheticism, Ruskin’s concern for the pride of craftspeople lead Morris to the seemingly un-aestheticist position that ‘nothing can be a work of art which is not useful’.12 Morris does go on to claim that sensual pleasure and amusement can be forms of usefulness, so his declaration is not utterly in conflict with Gautier’s. The Pre- Raphaelites also contributed to aestheticism and decadence in their attack on the status quo in art, their attention to detail in their work, and their use of symbols. Moreover, the sensuality of their representations of men and women (especially women) led to their being dubbed ‘the fleshly school’ and being criticised for immorality. In Degeneration, Nordau gave them their own chapter on chastisement. With reference to the aestheticism and decadence of the fin de sie`cle, one of the Pre-Raphaelites’ greatest influences was in the realm of popular culture. Women adopted the voluptuous appearance, medieval dress and long, bushy hairstyles of women in Pre-Raphaelite art and poetry. Morris’s interest in the ‘House Beautiful’, meanwhile, encouraged the middle class to maintain an artistic eye even in the privacy of their own homes. Generally unable to afford the tapestries, wallpaper, stained glass and other objects that Morris designed and had produced, Londoners often decorated their homes with less expensive objects such as blue-and-white china, peacock feathers and knock-offs of Japanese fans. Satirists were quick to ridicule the shallow pretensions of this deluge of faux-connoisseurs. The most famous spoof, Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera Patience (1881), mocks the dandified aesthetes and all the paraphernalia that came with them, from the lilies and knee breeches to anything too French (including beans). Ironically, aestheticism benefited from these comic representations because they sustained attention on the phenomenon and allowed it to become an influential aspect of modernist aesthetics. Meanwhile, as Jonathan Freedman has argued, in a world characterised by industrialisation and cultural homogenisation, aestheticism offered a strategic means for ‘middle- 13 class men and women [to] claim authority for themselves’. Deca- dent authors and artists, meanwhile, sought escape from the banality and redundancy of the productivist culture in the creation of new experiences through artifice and experimentation. A large number of the bourgeoisie itself was looking to be surprised, shocked – entertained, basically – and the cultivation of the unnatural promised them fresh, exciting sensations and realms of being. Thus despite their common association with elitism and

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Decadence and aestheticism exclusiveness, decadence and aestheticism developed in part as products reflecting the escapist wishes of the dominant middle class. The role of escapism is especially apparent in Walter Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance. Like Swinburne’s poems, Pater’s essays embody the aestheticism and decadence that they support. The prose is elegant, and it foregrounds style in a way harmonious with aestheticism’s emphasis on the beauty of the object as much if not more than on its content. The work is also often erotic and maintains the view of sensual pleasure as amoral. While the prose is decadent in its intricate, poetic language and languorous pace, Pater’s novel Marius, the Epicurean (1885) is so loaded with detailed, beautiful descriptions that it loses any strong sense of momentum. The standard Victorian novel may be thick, but it is thick with casts of thousands, plot twists and cliff-hangers. Marius is thick with details and information that often prove to be of little if any relevance to the plot. A reader must wade through unconventional syntax, archaisms and quotations in Greek and Latin that keep foregrounding the surface of the text rather than the meaning of the words. While echoing Gautier’s notion of l’art pour l’art, Pater’s aestheticism does not focus on the art object as ideal, but on the aim of maximising one’s experiences of pleasure. Referring to our life as nothing but a moment, Pater warns us that

our one chance lies in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time. Great passions may give us this quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, which comes naturally to many of us. Only be sure it is passion – that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness. Of such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake, has most.14

The Renaissance emphasises the importance of the individual seeking out pleasure in daily life. According to Pater, sensuality, being natural, cannot be immoral, and it follows that all desires are equally worthy pursuits. When the public began interpreting Pater’s essays as advocating immoral passions, he made a concerted effort to clarify that he maintained Christian ethics. But it was too late; he had already been designated his role in the Aesthetic and Decadent movements. While first-wave aestheticism had become commoditised and even passe´in Britain by the early 1880s, decadence had not established as strong a familiarity. Even in France, it was not until 1883 that Paul Bourget articulated what has become the most famous description of the decadent style. Transposing the familiar anti-individualist rhetoric of social decadence onto

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 DENNIS DENISOFF language, Bourget describes it as a style where ‘the book’s unity decays to make way for the independence of the page, where the page decays to make way for the independence of the sentence, and the sentence decays to make way for the independence of the word’.15 It is the Belgian Joris-Karl Huysmans’s 1884 novel A rebours, however, that is most often marked as the most important decadent work ever. Its narrative is decadent, mean- dering from one of the hero Des Esseintes’s bizarre sources of stimulus to the next without the solid plot trajectory common to the nineteenth-century novel. The hero himself is decadent; in Symons’s view, ‘in the sensations and ideas of Des Esseintes we see the sensations and ideas of the effeminate, over-civilised, deliberately abnormal creature who is the last product of our society: partly the father, partly the offspring of the perverse art that he adores’.16 And its style is decadent, with the prose sometimes going on for pages in its lists of collections of things such as esoteric books and freakish plants. The narrative is propelled by the hero’s obsession with finding new sensations or, to be honest, with the readers’ interest in finding out what this character could think up next – the underwater room, his jewel-encrusted tortoise, the ‘mouth organ’. Readers become less shocked with each new creation as their conventional assumptions become increasingly dislodged. More than celebrate depravity, the work threatens to dissolve readers’ long- held moral assumptions. The individual most devoted to explaining these workings of decadence to the English audience was Arthur Symons. In ‘The Decadent Movement in Literature’ (1893), he describes decadence as characterised by ‘an intense self-consciousness, a restless curiosity in research, an over-subtilizing refinement upon refinement, a spiritual and moral perversity’.17 Despite his respect for decadent works, his language belies a sense of them as immoral devia- tions from fundamental ideals of beauty, a position that would move to the foreground when he reworked this essay into a book, now titled The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899). In it, he concludes that ‘a movement which in this sense might be called Decadent could but have been a straying aside from the main road of literature ... The interlude, half a mock-interlude, of Decadence, diverted the attention of the critics while something more serious has crystallized, for the time, under the form of Symbolism.’18 His discussion in the earlier essay of the artists’ efforts to capture something fleeting does accord with the Symbolists’ turn to symbols and the stimulation of the senses and mind in order to access realms beyond the physical. Likewise, his closing description of the ‘ideal’ of decadence – ‘to be a disembodied voice, and yet the voice of a human soul’19 – is as easily applicable to Symbolism. The particularly decadent characteristics that fade to the background in Symons’s later articulation of Symbolism include the attention to

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Decadence and aestheticism sexualities, passion, illness and cruelty. These were the very things that critics found most objectionable but which were necessary to sustain the challenge to false realities that Bernheimer later articulates. During the 1880s, just when works like Patience were threatening to deflate British aestheticism’s claim to cultural authority, the titillation and relatively fresh ideas of decadence gave it a much-needed jolt. The result was a more challenging, even dangerous image of aestheticism than the one being popularised through puff-parodies and cartoons. Two of the most influential contributors to the decadent phase of aestheticism were the Anglo-Irish George Moore and Oscar Wilde. Moore’s main influences included Gautier, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Huysmans, Pater and the naturalist Emile Zola. His Confessions of a Young Man (1888) offered an image of his experiences in bohemian Paris that was so vivid as to feel threatening, as if chaos and dissolution hovered just across the channel. While Pater’s novel Marius the Epicurean retains a distance between its ancient Roman hero and the novel’s readers, Moore articulated decadence and bohemianism through the interior monologues of a member of contemporary British society. The beautifully turned phrasing and lulling cadence spills from the lips of an Englishman, creating a decadence that many British readers found too close for comfort. In Wilde’s writing, one similarly finds the influence of Gautier, Baudelaire, Pater, the Pre-Raphaelites and Huysmans. He even absorbed the pop-culture versions that had arisen during the 1880s, most notably in his sartorial refinement and his display of aestheticist and decadent symbols such as yellow books and green carnations. Wilde was one of the most important aestheticist and decadent artefacts of his era, performing its shift from the productivist ethos that characterised the industrial revolution to a consump- tionist one in which the display of taste and ownership became a key marker of identity. As early as 1882, before any of his own major publications, Wilde was sent to America to give lectures on aestheticist topics. He was not the most knowledgeable person on the subject, nor the most invested, but he had made himself one of aestheticism’s most notorious embodiments, which promised greater financial results. Notably, the tour was conceived and managed by Richard D’Oyly Carte, who was already successfully producing Patience in New York. He wanted Wilde to perform the aesthete that the comic opera spoofed, and Wilde obliged. He spoke on a sort of socialist aestheticism in line with Ruskin and Morris, but his posturing and costume supported such decadent perspectives as the importance of surface and artifice, and the superiority of detailed beauty to a quest for deeper meaning. Wilde’s best known work, The Picture of Dorian Gray, came out in two forms that reveal a conflict in decadence as it too became a popular

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 DENNIS DENISOFF commodity. The shorter version serialised in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine in 1890 is more explicit about same-sex desire, while the 1891 novel version removes many of these immoral insinuations and builds up a heterosexual subplot involving Dorian’s abuse of the woman Sibyl Vane’s devotion. Wilde may have seen himself as a sincere aesthete but, as the revisions of Dorian Gray suggest, he also consciously took part in the cultural machinery that was nurturing a less daring form of decadence for the masses. The novel’s main storyline echoes Huysmans’s A rebours, with the wealthy, selfish hero indulging in a string of vague sins culminating in an aesthete’s greatest sin – the destruction of a piece of art. Unlike the reclusive Des Esseintes, however, Dorian is young, handsome and desperately in need of external affirmation. He is the French decadent invested in the commodity culture arising from Britain’s shift toward consumerism and the bourgeois tenet of house- and self-beautification. The heterosexual love story of Dorian Gray is not entirely conventional either, allowing Wilde, as it does, to explore the decadent notion of art’s superiority to nature. Dorian, it turns out, cannot admire Sibyl Vane as a woman but only as an actress, an artificial object designed for aesthetic consumption. Dorian’s vanity then extends this conundrum to the consideration of the individual himself as an object of art, where the wish for an utterly beautiful self-image proves the catalyst for his destruction of others’ lives, and eventually his own. The moral, if one is interested in finding one, wraps itself around issues of selfishness, unbridled passions, and the objectification of others – issues more forcefully addressed in Wilde’s play Salome´ (1892; trans. 1894). Written in French, Wilde’s Salome´ is over-heated and stiltedly artificial, disallowing any wish a viewer may have of suspending disbelief. Often the play’s symbols are heavy-handedly spelt out, as in the opening instructions from the Page of Herodias: ‘Look at the moon. How strange the moon seems! She is like a woman rising from the tomb. She is like a dead woman. One might fancy she was looking for dead things.’20 When the English translation by Wilde’s boyfriend Alfred Douglas was published by John Lane, it was accompanied by a cover design and drawings by Aubrey Beardsley. The artist’s innovative use of asymmetry and lines, and his effective juxtaposition of black and white space contributed to the view of Salome as the only fully Symbolist work from the British fin de sie` cle. The play’s androgynous characters, sexual violence and setting in a decadent kingdom, meanwhile, affirm the work’s position within the decadent tradition. The tale of old King Herodias’s lust for the virgin Salome had already established the sexually decadent theme of the work, readily assisted by the climactic image of the heroine kissing the lips of John the Baptist’s severed head.

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Decadence and aestheticism

Wilde even considered filling the orchestra pit with bottles of perfume that would be opened to release scents evoking the emotions of the moment, but ventilation issues put a cork in that idea. It may have seemed that, with Wilde, the Aesthetic and Decadent movements had finally explored the full breadth of their cultural possibilities, but fin de sie` cle society would discover otherwise when The Yellow Book hit the stands.

The parodic turn of The Yellow Book In a scene from Wilde’s novel, Dorian sits himself down and cracks open a yellow book that Lord Henry had sent him. Before he realises what has happened, the words therein have won him over:

in exquisite raiment, and to the delicate sound of flutes, the sins of the world were passing in dumb show before him...It was ...a psychological study of a certain young Parisian, who spent his life trying to realise in the nineteenth century all the passions and modes of thought that belonged to every century except his own ...There were in it metaphors as monstrous as orchids, and as 21 subtle in colour ...It was a poisonous book. It is one thing to read such a book, another entirely to create one. This was not the exact intention of the publisher John Lane and the editors Aubrey Beardsley and Henry Harland when they began work on The Yellow Book (1894–7), but by giving the journal that name, they were buying into an image already notorious among contemporary readers. The title, the pre- publication advertising and the use of Beardsley as art editor all encouraged prospective readers to expect something risque´. It was in large part due to Lane’s business savvy that The Yellow Book proved to be the most influential avant-garde journal of the decade. He had been publishing aestheticist and decadent works since the late 1880s. In addition to the English translation of Wilde’s Salome´, he had published important works such as the influential feminist short story collection Keynotes (1893) by George Egerton, the poetry collection Sight and Song (1892) that lovers Katharine Bradley Harris and Edith Emma Cooper published under the joint pseudonym of Michael Field, and the poems in Silverpoints (1893) by the aesthete John Gray, who was purported to be the inspiration of Wilde’s character Dorian Gray. Fitting smoothly into the marketing machinery of the Aesthetic and Decadent movements, Lane saw The Yellow Book not simply as another venture, but as a way to give readers exposure to authors already on his roster. The Yellow Book is a decadent and aestheticist artefact for reasons other than its inclusion of particular authors and artists. In fact, the journal

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 DENNIS DENISOFF contains work by many individuals who did not define themselves as part of either movement. Contributors included individuals who were well known at the time, such as the prose writers George Egerton, Henry James and George Moore, and the visual artists Laurence Housman and Charles Ricketts. Other contributors reached their peak of popularity years later, such as the poet W. B. Yeats, the science fiction writer H. G. Wells and Kenneth Grahame, best known as the author of The Wind in the Willows (1908). While the range of styles and viewpoints represented by these contributors might appear to undermine the image of The Yellow Book as the heart of fin de sie` cle decadence and aestheticism, one must remember that the popular emphasis placed on the movements’ interest in aesthetic idealism, sexual perversity and degeneracy was an over-simplification. Even canonical works such as Huysmans’s and Wilde’s novels are morally undetermined, sexually coy and – in the case of Dorian Gray – as interested in youthfulness as decay. When one takes into account the movements’ investment in mass recognition and conspicuous consumption, The Yellow Book begins to appear as a more appropriate representative of aestheticism and decadence at the century’s end. The Yellow Book did embody key decadent and aestheticist traits, including the view that aesthetic recognition was due to everyday objects, including journals themselves. Even before the first volume was published, Lane and the editors said that they wished ‘to depart as far as may be from the bad old traditions of periodical literature, and to provide an Illustrated Magazine which shall be beautiful as a piece of book making, modern and distinguished in its letter-press and its pictures, and withal popular in the better sense of the word’.22 Each volume was to draw attention to its own materiality, encouraging one to admire the book even before opening it. The yellow spines were to line the shelf of one’s study as a vibrant aesthetic display among the dull- coloured books that surrounded it. One early critic chose to praise instead those who ‘on the day of literary judgment’, could say ‘Behold my shelves: no quarterly block of yellow ochre cumbers them with its farrago of aspiring affectation and preposterous incompetence.’23 But even this negative response reveals that readers had approached even the first volume with an aesthetic awareness akin to that which Pater and Morris had encouraged. The respect for image extended into the journal’s decision to include freestanding visual works that did not function as subordinate complements to verbal texts. That said, only some of the works that the editors chose to include are readily recognised as decadent or aestheticist. Such visual art often addresses historical or mythological subjects, with decadent pieces also often including images of bizarre creatures, physical distortions, pain, opulence, and explicit and unconventional sexuality. Artifice, anti- or hyper-realism,

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Decadence and aestheticism excessive detail and uncommon uses of colour are also characteristic of both. As suggested by Bourget, the structure, style and even themes of decadent works encourage a disregard for cohesion and a sense of dissipation. The overall effect is one of discomfort combined with titillation. Some of these traits – such as the focus on detail and the use of symbols, myths and history – can be found in many works by the Pre-Raphaelites, but the sense of the immoral and wicked cannot. The two main continental decadent artists were the French Gustave Moreau and Belgian Felicient Rops, who are as often called Symbolists. Fin de sie` cle artists working in Britain who are associated with decadence and aestheticism include Charles Ricketts and Laurence Housman, who both have work in The Yellow Book. But it is Beardsley who had the greatest influence on British visual decadence. As the art editor of The Yellow Book, he is also the one person who most influenced the popular image of the journal as a decadent medium. Early examples of formalism and art nouveau, the form and style of Beardsley’s work often exist for their own sake, proving as fascinating as and more beautiful than whatever they might represent. Indeed, many would find no beauty in his ageing satyrs, monstrous abortion-like creatures and lascivious imps. Even Beardsley’s relatively tame works in The Yellow Book prove potent once one recognises what to expect from him. Consider ‘The Comedy-Ballet of Marionettes, as performed by the troupe of the The´aˆtre-Impossible, posted in three drawings’, which appeared on pages 88, 90 and 92 of the second volume of The Yellow Book. In the first piece (figure 1), we find a woman with voluptuous black hair and a balloon- ing black dress. A male imp dressed in white guides her across a white room to an archway leading onto a white balcony looking out at a white building. Eventually one notices that the curtained archway is actually shaped like a huge penis. (Lane had complained of having to look at Beardsley’s work upside-down to make sure all the sexual references were expurgated. Apparently some got through.) That the imp’s invitation to the archway is sexual is affirmed by his lewd expression, the woman’s own voluptuousness and her knowing glance at the viewer. Her full physical features are also suggestive of Pre-Raphaelite works, which had years earlier become commonly recognised as ‘fleshly’. The subject of unconventional sex is supported by the work’s decadent style, the overall flatness of the imagery contrasting with the excess detail on the woman’s dress and the imp’s costume. The building seen through the archway is especially detailed, persistently drawing the eye even though it has no clear purpose other than decoration. One eventually realises that Beardsley is not trying to accent the building with this intricacy of vertical columns, but to lead the viewer to recognise that the

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 DENNIS DENISOFF

1 Drawing I from Aubrey Beardsley’s ‘The Comedy-Ballet of Marionettes’, Yellow Book, 2 (1894), 88

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Decadence and aestheticism archway is also a penis. Rather than aiming at realism, the piece foregrounds the erotic undertones of the scene. In the second image (figure 2), a woman in white is being led to an archway by another, more eccentric-looking woman, suggesting an invitation for lesbian sex. A male imp dances on a pillow in the foreground, lewdly grinning as he points at the couple. Building on our knowledge of the first drawing, the archway in the back need not explicitly outline a penis; it is now simply phallic and accented by a satyr’s face grinning lasciviously above the doorway. In the first drawing, the main black section that drew one’s initial attention was taken up by the central female. In this drawing, Beardsley has shifted attention to the female wooer by making her hair and clothing black. If one follows the title’s suggestion that these images make up a ‘comedy ballet’ with some narrative, the shift in attention can be read as a shift in the heroine’s sexual control from herself to the source of desire. A black hori- zontal panel that appears along the bottom of the second drawing suggests a carpet but, thematically, the panel also separates the two women from the male imp in the foreground. Turning their backs on him and the viewer, the women smile at each other as they walk off toward the privacy behind the doors beneath the grinning satyr. In the last drawing (figure 3), another voluptuous woman in black is framed between a wooing woman and a pudgy, older male creature with a two-pointed beard and horns. The central woman smiles at the coy invitation of the other woman while the horned male looks on with chagrin. Notably, the black panel at the bottom now clearly demarcates the front of a stage, with four impish creatures playing music in the pit. The theatrical setting of this picture marks all the characters as self-aware, something that is less obvious in the first drawing. Through the three pieces, Beardsley guides us to the realisation that the characters are performing their sexualities not only for each other but for the viewers. We are led to recognise that the performance of desire is a public phenomenon in which we participate not only when we pick through his drawings in search of eros, but in our day-to-day lives as well. Thus Beardsley’s triptych undermines society’s pretence of sexual reserve, acknowledging the extensive public interactions that were taking place but being denied. The drawings are what Spackman calls ‘true fakes’, refreshingly admitting the performative aspect of passion. Beardsley enhances the discomfort created by the exposure of our own sexual performances by having each drawing include a character making knowing eye contact with the viewer. Beardsley might be joining the viewer in enjoying the sexual references or he might be grinning at the viewer’s discomfort. In either case, the implication is that the viewer is part of the The´aˆtre-Impossible, whether willing to admit it or not. The triptych thereby

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 DENNIS DENISOFF

2 Drawing II from Aubrey Beardsley’s ‘The Comedy-Ballet of Marionettes’, Yellow Book, 2 (1894), 90

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Decadence and aestheticism

3 Drawing III from Aubrey Beardsley’s ‘The Comedy-Ballet of Marionettes’, Yellow Book, 2 (1894), 92

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 DENNIS DENISOFF reinserts the play of passion that Pater celebrates in his Renaissance and that Symons expurgated in his shift of interest from decadence to Symbolism. Just as the character in Beardsley’s drawings who is making eye contact appears to be lightly mocking the others in the scene, so too did participants in aestheticism and decadence of the 1890s parody the community to which they belonged. In Max Beerbohm’s ‘Defence of Cosmetics’, for example, which appeared in the inaugural 1894 issue of The Yellow Book, the flippant narrator declares that ‘the old signs are here and the portents to warn the seer of life that we are ripe for a new epoch of artifice’.24 As Beerbohm well knew, artifice had been a key element of both decadence and aestheticism for decades. Indeed, he acknowledges as much by having the title of his piece echo Baudelaire’s own ‘Eloge du maquillage’ (‘Praise of Cosmetics’) (1863) in which Baudelaire had already declared that virtue was artificial and supernatural. Beerbohm’s essay was hotly attacked by reviewers, much to his delight. Adding some vim to the situation, Beerbohm would lament insin- cerely in a letter published in the second volume of the journal that, ‘So far as anyone could be lynched in literature, I was.’25 ‘Indeed, it seems incredible to me’, he goes on, ‘that any one on the face of the earth could fail to see that my essay, so grotesque in subject, in opinion so flippant, in style so wildly affected, was meant for a burlesque upon the ‘‘precious’’ school of writers. If I had only signed myself D. Cadent or Parrar Docks.’26 By the fin of the fin de sie` cle, actual aestheticist and decadent works had become so entangled with their critiques, parodies and self-analyses that it was no longer useful to accuse the art and literature of artifice or super- ficiality. The surface fac¸ade had become the main site of meaning, and this challenge to the depth model of identity threatened to leave critics with no ethical foundation on which to build their accusations. Conversely, aesthetes and decadents who themselves wished to voice critiques of the movements had the privilege of being insiders, which meant other participants would be more likely to listen to them. Since Vernon Lee’s 1884 novel Miss Brown,a key point of contention in Britain had been the tendency of men such as the Pre-Raphaelites, Swinburne, Wilde, and Beardsley to depict women as little more than objects of desire or symbols of sexual aberrancy and decay. Although Beardsley’s ‘Comedy-Ballet of Marionettes’, for example, can be read as snubbing men’s claim of sexual dominance, even here the female characters tend to be robed in the role of titillating decadent. The movements’ ongoing interest in undermining conventions regarding sex, gender and sexuality was attractive to many women, but this misogyny needed to be addressed and The Yellow Book offered the opportunity. Victoria Cross, Ella D’Arcy, Ada Leverson, Charlotte Mew, Evelyn Sharp, Netta Syrett and many other female authors found and gave support and

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Decadence and aestheticism encouragement within the journal’s community, effectively shaping fin de sie` cle aestheticism and decadence. The publication’s proliferation of ‘New Woman’ short stories is especially notable in this regard. Many of these made use of earnest realist styles that suggest no strong influence from more typically aesthetic and decadent prose. Pieces by Leverson such as ‘Suggestion’ and ‘The Quest of Sorrow’ are different in this regard because they display the witty, self-parodic style that had become common to decadence and aestheticism. She uses it, however, to question the movements’ own aesthetic and social values, including their attitude toward women. ‘The Quest of Sorrow’ depicts an aesthete who, like Huysmans’s Des Essientes and Wilde’s Dorian Gray, is in search of new sensations. Specifically, Leverson’s beautiful youth, Cecil Carington, realises he has not yet experienced sorrow. ‘I had never known grief’, he bewails, ‘Sadness had shunned me, pain had left me untouched; I could hardly imagine the sensation of being unhappy.’ On he goes, ‘I wanted to be miserable, despair- ing: a Pessimist! I craved to feel that gnawing fox, Anxiety, at my heart; ... I thirsted for salt tears; I longed to clasp Sorrow in my arms and press her pale lips to mine.’27 Aesthetes and decadents were both seen as having artistic temperaments and sensitivity, but here Leverson pushes the emotionalism of the man to comic extremes. This theatrical and eloquent display of grief itself suggests that Cecil has already found sorrow, but his turn to eloquent metaphors such as that of the ‘gnawing fox, Anxiety’ belies his sincerity. As the author implies, by the 1890s, aestheticist and decadent claims of crises were often little more than fabricated opportunities for self-display. The story goes on to offer a portrait of the aesthete as a conceited youth. Cecil’s worry that he and his decorator might fail to realise his contradictory ideals of home de´cor prove groundless. Like interior design, religion offers no consternation either, with Cecil’s love of incense easily converting him from agnosticism. He then tries to depress himself by getting his poem ‘Foam-Flowers’ rejected by a publisher. With alliterative purple prose and convoluted form Leverson laces the lyrics: ‘The wandering wild west wind, in salt-sweet hope, / With glad red roses, gems the woodland way.’28 Refraining from sending it to ‘any of the more literary reviews or magazines, for there it would have stood no chance of rejection’, he chooses instead a ‘commonplace, barbarous periodical’. He is later shocked (but again, apparently not grieved) to find it published as an ‘amusing parody on a certain modern school of verse’. Leverson’s reference to the ‘more literary’ publications is a playful swipe at the pretensions of The Yellow Book itself, as is the misinter- pretation of ‘Foam-Flowers’ as a parody of aestheticist poetry. The entire scenario is a comic inversion of reviewers’ misinterpretations of Beerbohm’s ‘Defence of Cosmetics’ as not parodic. Leverson would have known that

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 DENNIS DENISOFF

Beerbohm, despite his feigning despair for being ‘lynched in literature’, was thrilled by the attention. Pointing to the conceited self-aggrandisement of such a pose, she has Cecil likewise make the facetious declaration that he is grieved by the fact that his literary success failed to bring him grief. Leverson thereby deflates the hypocrisy of the aesthete community, but her critique is far from aggressive and Beerbohm would have had to laugh; he himself had published a story in The Yellow Book called ‘The Happy Hypocrite’ which parodied Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray by having an acerbic aesthete wear a happy- faced mask that ultimately converts the man to goodness and joy. The second half of ‘The Quest for Sorrow’ is spent with Cecil trying to fall in love with his best friend’s fiance´e in the hopes that the marriage of the other two would break his heart. But when Cecil’s declaration leads Alice to leave her fiance´, the aesthete loses all interest in her. She just as quickly loses interest in him as well, and he rushes off on a beach holiday, ‘content to 29 linger with laughter on my lips, seeking for Sorrow no more’. The scenario echoes that of Dorian Gray and Sibyl Vane. As soon as Sibyl confesses her devotion to Dorian, he realises he only loved her as an artificial construct of his own imagining. But while Sibyl kills herself because of Dorian’s rejection, Leverson has her female character re-direct her affections to the man that she had always loved and who sincerely loved her. Alice proves as self-motivated as Cecil, refusing to allow his objectification to control her identity and life. It is the witty, pretty aesthete himself, in this story, who functions as little more than an image of surface beauty, with Alice turning to Cecil out of an interest in ideal love and not for an actual love of the man. And yet, our hero refuses yet again to recognise that the grief he seeks is dogging him. Leverson’s story captures perhaps the defining characteristic of fin de sie`cle decadence and aestheticism – its uncomfortable relationship to its own super- ficiality. One would expect that Alice’s quick recovery from Cecil’s rejection would have penetrated the aesthete’s shallow egotism. And indeed, perhaps it does, because Leverson’s closing image is not simply of Cecil enjoying the beach. Rather, it is of Cecil constructing through his tortured consonance and poetic syntax an image of himself as happy. He is not sincerely happy, but performing joy for others to see – although this self-awareness does bring some degree of satisfaction. The initial implication is that the aesthete who objectifies others, like aestheticism and decadence in general, might survive in the rarefied hot-house environment of his own fabrication but exposure to the political realities of the outside world risks wilting the aesthete’s fragile fac¸ade. The situation is not that simple, however, because the avatars of aestheticism and decadence, from Pater and Swinburne to the contributors to The Yellow Book would not have denied the ethereality of their ideals. That said, for the sake of their own identities, they could deny – as

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Decadence and aestheticism

Cecil does – that it brought them any doubt or unease. The dissidence of aestheticism and decadence usually functioned to destabilise the binary logic that privileged the productivist values of industrial capitalism. In ‘The Quest of Sorrow’, however, Leverson uses it to expose some of the weaknesses in the foundation on which the aesthetes and decadents had based their own claims. But like so many other participants in the movements during this final decade, she does so not to destroy them, but to acknowledge their anxiety and to help refashion their positions more effectively to address the changing socio-political concerns of the era.

NOTES 1 Hubert Crackanthorpe, ‘Reticence in Literature’, The Yellow Book, 2 (1894), 259–69 (p. 266). 2 George Du Maurier, The Martian, London, Harper, 1898,p.336. 3 Barbara Spackman, ‘Interversions’, in Liz Constable, et al. (eds.), Perennial Decay: On the Aesthetics and Politics of Decadence, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999, pp. 35–49 (p. 37). 4 Barbara Spackman, ‘Interversions’, p. 41. 5 Linda Dowling, Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de Sie`cle,Princeton University Press, 1986. 6 Algernon Swinburne, ‘Charles Baudelaire: Les Fleurs du Mal’, The Spectator, 6 (1862), 998–1000 (p. 998). 7 Arthur Symons, ‘The Decadent Movement in Literature’, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 87 (1893), 858–67 (p. 859). 8 Algernon Swinburne, ‘Anactoria’, in Poems and Ballads, London, Chatto, 1904, p. 57. 9 Alfred Austin, ‘Mr. Swinburne’, Temple Bar: A London Magazine for Town and Country Readers, 26 (1869), 457–74; reprinted in Clyde Hyder (ed.), Swinburne: The Critical Heritage, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970,pp.92–111 (p. 97). 10 Thomas Spencer Baynes, ‘Swinburne’s Poems’, Edinburgh Review, 134 (1871), 71–99 (p. 71). 11 Clyde Hyder, ‘Introduction’, Swinburne Replies, Syracuse University Press, 1966, pp. 1–13 (p. 1). 12 William Morris, ‘The Lesser Arts’, News from Nowhere and Selected Writings and Designs, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1986, pp. 84–105 (p. 102). 13 Jonathan Freedman, Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism, and Commodity Culture, Stanford University Press, 1990,p.48. 14 Walter Pater, The Renaissance, New York: World Publishing Co., 1967,p.224. 15 ‘l’unite´ du livre se de´compose pour laisser la place a` l’inde´pendance de la page, ou` la page se de´compose pour laisser la place a` l’inde´pendance de la phrase, et la phrase pour laisser la place a` l’independance du mot’, from Paul Bourget, Essais de psychologie contemporaine, Paris, Plon, 1901, 20. Translation author’s own. 16 Arthur Symons, ‘The Decadent Movement in Literature’, p. 866. 17 Ibid., pp. 858–9.

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 DENNIS DENISOFF

18 Arthur Symons, The Symbolist Movement in Literature, London, Dutton Everyman, 1958; 1899,p.4. 19 Arthur Symons, ‘The Decadent Movement in Literature’, p. 867. 20 Oscar Wilde, Salome,inThe Collected Works of Oscar Wilde, London, William Collins Sons and Co., 1989,p.353. 21 Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray,inThe Collected Works of Oscar Wilde,p.101. 22 Publisher’s Prospectus for the first volume of The Yellow Book,p.1. 23 ‘A Yellow Melancholy’, The Speaker (28 April 1894), 468–9 (p. 468). 24 Max Beerbohm, ‘A Defence of Cosmetics’, The Yellow Book, 1 (1894), 65–82 (p. 65). 25 Max Beerbohm, ‘A Letter to the Editor’, The Yellow Book, 2 (1894), 281–4 (p. 281). 26 Ibid., p. 282. 27 Ada Leverson, ‘The Quest of Sorrow’, The Yellow Book, 8 (1896), 325–35 (p. 325). 28 Ibid., p. 328. 29 Ibid., p. 335.

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 3

RICHARD A. KAYE Sexual identity at the fin de sie` cle

The intense current interest in the fin de sie` cle has largely given us a view of the period as a perilously risque´ epoch in attitudes about sex, sexuality and sexual identity. Many of the iconic figures of the period – the New Woman, the Bachelor-Dandy, the Decadent, the Femme Fatale – have assumed an enduring aura of risk, danger and transgression in erotic matters. Such fin de sie`cle ‘myths’ as Salome, Dracula, Dorian Gray, and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde reveal a cultural landscape given over to terrifying metaphors for sexuality. Degeneration, vampirism, syphilis, hysteria, these would seem to be the metaphors by which many late-Victorians thought of sexuality and the erotic self. Adding to this charged sexual atmosphere, the last decades of the century were dominated by controversies over declining birth rates and New Women, as well as sex scandals involving corruptible telegraph boys and upper-class Lotharios (the Cleveland Street case, in which a male brothel was exposed), and literary celebrities (the Wilde trials, in which a celebrated playwright was successfully prosecuted for sodomy). At the same time, we find at the end of the century such visionary enterprises as the Free Union and Birth Control movements, along with considerable utopian thought on sexuality in the writings of Olive Schreiner, Havelock Ellis, John Addington Symonds and Edward Carpenter, all of whom detailed the deprivations of modern marriage and erotic longing with an explicitness, boldness and experimentalism that would have been impossible in a mid-Victorian context. Confronted with these disparate and even opposing images, ideas, events and movements, critics dealing with sexuality at the fin de sie` cle have tended to see sheer conceptual chaos, the ‘sexual anarchy’ that the Victorian novelist George Gissing famously diagnosed as animating the period.1 In his sweeping study The Victorians (2003), A. N. Wilson dismisses the 1880s as ‘an era of kaleidoscopic muddle when the future of Ireland or the Liberal Party is determined not by political discussion but by sex scandals’. At the fin de sie`cle, when ‘human visions and revisions took bizarre and violent forms’, Wilson insists, ‘aesthetes turn from wallpaper design to designing society’. For Wilson,

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 RICHARD A. KAYE the ‘perennial task set for themselves by patient minds, of distinguishing Appearance and Reality, grew no easier as the nineteenth century hurtled on, a mad ghost train out of control’. With a similar stress on an exploding mayhem, Terry Eagleton has written of the fin de sie` cle as a period when the ‘high-rationalist subject of Mill or Middlemarch gradually imploded into Madame Blavatsky and Dorian Gray’.2 In the shared, almost apocalyptic view of Wilson and Eagleton, the fin de sie` cle represents an irrational disturbance in the smooth-running certainties of the Victorian epoch, dominated by gaudy exhibitionists such as Wilde and Blavatsky, less a legitimate epoch in the understanding of the erotic realm than a nasty cul de sac in a heroic progress towards sexual enlightenment. Even such seemingly advanced thinkers as Schreiner, Symonds, Ellis and Carpenter, in this view, could only struggle in their personal and professional lives towards the insights of Freudian belief that would emerge with the arrival of the twentieth century. The historian of sexuality Jeffrey Weeks, observing that Carpenter was a maverick in his explorations of sexuality, nonetheless dismisses his views of female sexuality as largely essentialist.3 Other critics have decried the seeming dissolution of mid-Victorian socialist and feminist values in the popularity of spiritualist and mystical movements, in which, we are instructed, opportunistic poseurs such as Madame Blavatsky won over feminist women, most notably the working-class activist Annie Besant, a maverick campaigner on behalf of birth control who became a keen devotee of Blavatsky’s Theosophy movement, which had proved enormously successful in Britain and America in promoting a belief in the occult. This paradoxical map has made the fin de sie` cle an intensely compelling but difficult to decipher era in the conception of the sexual self. The 1880s and 1890s witnessed a complex and sometimes contradictory constellation of differing movements and comprehensions of sexuality, unique to the late-Victorian period but not, of course, altogether unrelated to the era of psychoanalytic thought of the early twentieth century. It is commonplace to note the ways in which fin de sie` cle theorising about sex set the stage for Freudian thought; for example, many of Freud’s crucial theoretical formulations on infant sexuality are evident in fin de sie` cle culture, where images of sexually cognisant children abound. Yet writers and thinkers at the fin de sie` cle offered ideas of sexuality that were not simply ‘pre-Freudian’ but markedly distinct from Freudian beliefs and case histories. This is not only true of the pervasive fin de sie` cle concern with the genetic bases for sexual identity but of the late-Victorian interest in linking sexuality to socially resonant values. Today, of course, genetic theories of sexual orientation have proved surprisingly resilient in the popular imagination and among some scientists. What has been lost in accounts of fin de sie` cle

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Sexual identity at the fin de sie` cle culture, however, has been what fin de sie` cle sexual theorists continually stressed – namely, the necessarily social nature of sexuality and sexuality’s function within society. The intellectual avant-garde of the fin de sie` cle offered theoretical insights on eros that diverged significantly from Freud’s conception of sexuality as existing either in a sequestered psychic space or (as Freud was to make explicit in Civilization and its Discontents) in an inevitable opposition to a social realm that can never fully accommodate the individual’s relentless hungers. For many advanced sexual thinkers, this impulse took the form of an interest in the social and even communal nature of erotic desire, evident in William Morris and Carpenter’s visionary conception of the erotic, which linked sexual choices to the aspirations of an enlightened, egalitarian community, in which day-to-day life was devoted to hand-crafted objects and com- munally produced goods and in which marriage would be radically reconceived on egalitarian grounds. Yet, as we shall see, the reluctance of many fin de sie` cle sexual visionaries to endorse a wholly individualist attitude towards sexual freedom and their much-reiterated belief in the societal consequences of erotic acts suggests an enduring debt to a Victorian dream of social unity. That dream now had to register the impact of Darwinian ideas, in which free will was forever trumped by larger forces – namely, the struggle by varying species in a seemingly brutal natural schema. Yet it was precisely in the area of sex, as outlined in Darwin’s The Descent of Man (1871), that the natural world seemed to offer a consoling logic for fin de sie` cle thinkers, since Darwin’s theory of sexual selection presented a natural schema in which female ‘choosers’ ruled supreme and male adornment was a crucial factor in species procreation. This social emphasis also informs the Theosophy Movement, which, while seeming to rest on a fantastical system, in fact sought to bring a certain coherence to the period’s thinking about sexuality, so that women’s ‘spirituality’ could be given expression outside the domestic sphere. Fin de sie` cle political struggles around issues of sexuality were often an odd mixture of reactionary and advanced thinking. Thus many feminists who struggled mightily for suffrage were opposed to contraception – on the premise that it would allow men to safely indulge in prostitution without fear of medical consequences. The fin de sie` cle literary imagination supplied an impressive number of figures who would later be taxonomised as hysterics and narcissists, but the liberating powers of these demonic creatures become less apparent in the clinical language of sexology and psychoanalysis, which tended to accentuate cases to be diagnosed and ‘cured’. The turn of the century is not simply a ‘pre-Freudian’ epoch, disappointingly dated in its erotic attitudes and sexual ideas but uniquely constituted. At the same time, many of the ideas of sexual theorists of the fin de sie` cle have found an afterlife in

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 RICHARD A. KAYE contemporary culture, where theories of innate sexual preference continue to hold sway. The fin de sie` cle mythology populated by Draculas, Dorian Grays and Salomes has proven undyingly appealing, while the ideal of social better- ment and the sexually free community envisioned by Schreiner, Carpenter and Morris galvanised progressive movements well into the twentieth century. But such movements existed in tandem with more reactionary ideologies that sought to reassert social control over more public expressions of sexual mis- chief, ideologies that found sustenance in the complex, dark images, arche- types and narratives of sexuality pervasive at the fin de sie`cle.

Monstrous metaphors: Salome and other degenerates Many of the period’s most arresting ideas and images about sexuality are evident in the late-Victorian fascination with an atavistically aggressive female. This was a staple of late-Victorian male-bonding narratives in such texts as Rider Haggard’s She (1885) with its ruthless goddess-ruler, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel of London anarchists, The Dynamiter (1885), featuring the dominatrix brothel-owner Sen˜ ora Mendizabal, who tells the novel’s hero, ‘I should take a pleasure...in bringing you acquainted with a whip.’4 The most enduringly successful of these femme fatales is undoubtedly Salome in Oscar Wilde’s play, in which the playwright revisited an obscure Biblical legend and fashioned it into one of the most adapted myths of the Decadent movement. This sense of Salome as a ferocious man- killer is echoed in Aubrey Beardsley’s 1894 drawings of ‘Salome’ that were published along with Wilde’s text, yet there are other reasons for the success of Wilde’s play beyond its appeal as a image of female ferocity or as a vehicle for actresses taking up the role of femme fatale. That Salome is a participant in a semi-repressed family romance evokes a neglected, key element of the Salome myth as Wilde inherited it: that the princess is a child, that her fundamental perversity is not only related to her femininity but to her obdurate, spoilt girlishness. Wilde’s rendering helped to establish a sense of Salome’s childish erotomania, for both Herod and his wife act like obsessive youngsters who misuse their adult privileges. Salome’s arrogant insistence in Wilde’s text that her step-father stick to their agreement and that she be allowed to kiss the lips of John the Baptist resembles nothing so much as the lust-mad whining of a girl. In expressing a girl’s erotic longing the turn-of-the-century Salome myth found a foundation in a crucial revelation of late-nineteenth-century sexual theory and psychoanalysis at the beginning of the twentieth century: children harbour ‘indecent’ desires. In 1893, the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso wrote that children, especially female children, were more atavistic than adults and closer in temperament to the

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Sexual identity at the fin de sie` cle prostitute and the criminal. Less than a decade later, Freud located such ‘criminal’ features in all youngsters, arguing further in works such as Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905) that at the level of the unconscious there is no distinction between the female child, the adolescent, the prostitute and the ‘civilised’ woman. The pertinence of Freud’s analysis for a discussion of Salome lies in the way in which in Freud’s conception of the extremities along a continuum of archetypal females – the seemingly innocent but in fact sexually knowing infant, an average ‘uncultivated’ woman, the lecherous prostitute – collapse into the make-up of a single Everywoman. A fusion of varying archetypal females is precisely what one finds in Wilde’s Salome, where the princess is alternately a peevish, erotically discerning girl, an unworldly adolescent (like Freud’s case study Dora), and a woman who prostitutes herself by cannily bargaining for sexual favours. Throughout the play, Wilde’s strategy is to emphasise varying Salomes by sharply juxtaposing them, sometimes within the course of two or three sentences. Thus Salome declares of the Tetrarch, her stepfather: ‘It is strange that the husband of my mother looks at me like that. I know not what it means. Of a truth I know it too well.’5 At moments such as this the cloistered, repressed princess co-exists with the ‘Daughter of Sodom’ who is too blackened by knowledge to be a figure signifying purity. (Although Wilde’s ‘Salome’ was initially banned and had to wait for a new century to be performed on a British stage, it would attract an array of actresses who relished the possibilities of performing as a seductive, male-defying femme fatale.) Although it retains the aura of wickedness that it earned on its initial publication, Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) is less an endorsement of debauched sexuality than, in its early sections, a vision of bachelor life free of the restraints of marriage and girded by the pursuit of beauty in objects and other people. Even when the novel becomes a cautionary tale, a counter-bildungsroman in which Wilde’s age-defying protagonist cuts himself off from society, Dorian Gray retains a nostalgia for the serenities of Clubland. Dorian’s tragedy consists in refusing to see himself mirrored in the social realm (the traditional fate for a bildungsroman hero) and instead finding himself refracted in a cloistered, grotesquely mutated painting. Society is largely depicted in terms of the homoerotically redolent milieu of Basil’s studio and garden, where Lord Henry seduces Dorian into aestheticist conviction. That this ‘seduction’ takes place amidst the minutely observed movement of a pollinating bee in Basil’s teeming garden suggests Wilde’s interest in finding a foundation in nature for the courtship rituals of same- sex eros. Dorian does not so much ‘de-evolve’ as become transformed, as he experiments on others while experimenting on himself. This stress on transformation rather than growth or evolution assimilates the insights of

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 RICHARD A. KAYE

Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1859), in which the word ‘evolution’ never appeared (Darwin preferred the non-teleological phrase ‘descent with mod- ification’) and of The Descent of Man (1871), with its dazzlingly self-adorned, preening males, so similar to the flirting dandies of Dorian Gray. In linking homosexual desire to the narcissistic personality of Dorian Gray, Wilde would seem to be accepting both a sexological and a later Freudian conception of same-sex eros. Drawing on an 1899 paper by Havelock Ellis, Freud claimed that narcissism (a term he credited Ellis with inventing and which he described as someone ‘who experiences sexual pleasure in gazing at, caressing, and fondling his own body’) is ‘found in many people who are characterised by other aberrations – for instance ...in homo- sexuals’.6 By linking narcissism to same-sex desire (and in not distinguishing it sufficiently from auto-eroticism), Freud implied a neurotic connection, one with presumably negative social consequences. Yet arguably narcissism also constitutes an effort to see oneself in others, to locate men of similar tastes outside the self. On the one hand, the negative conception of homosexuality as linked to narcissism is at the heart of Wilde’s text – chiefly, in Dorian’s infatuation with his own tormented portrait. But complicating this nihilistic conception of homoerotic self-love is the artist Basil’s love for Dorian, which Wilde depicts in positive terms as pure, an idealised version of a sexuality that the late-nineteenth-century sexology defined as a love of oneself and a failure to desire the opposite sex. In a sense, as Whitney Davis has suggested, narcissism represents an effort by the male of same-sex preferences to locate in others versions of himself, idealised renditions that entertain homosexuality as a socially acceptable possibility in a hostile world.7 The prevalence of male doubles in fin de sie` cle fiction would seem to insist on male sexuality itself as necessarily doubled, a binary that posits a sexuality that is neatly two-dimensional, as in Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). As if to acknowledge the new era of medical and legal taxonomies of new erotic abnormalities, the novella focuses on physicians and attorneys. In Stevenson’s novella, the absence of major female figures puts an intense pressure on the male protagonists, one that finds its horrid manifestation in the eminent Dr Jekyll’s experiments on himself – arguably a form of ‘procreation’ that produces a new being in a world where women have no significant functions. The obsessions of another deranged physician eager to produce offspring without maternal help animates H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr Moreau (1896), in which a mad Darwinian logic, coupled with a cracked aesthete’s obsession with perfect forms, results in the creation of rebellious animal monstrosities and, ultimately, apocalyptic chaos. The sexual politics animating Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), where lawyers and physicians also figure prominently, offers an analogous alarmist sexual

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Sexual identity at the fin de sie` cle ideology, this time related to end-of-the-century anxieties about syphilitic contagion, loose women and the prevalence of new, sexual ‘inversions’. The aristocratic Dracula, whose bites suggest a polymorphous perversity – the potential that orifices might open up anywhere on the body and thereby provide an experience at once thrilling and painful – must be controlled, not through the new scientific and legal professions but via older, more brutal rituals of elimination. The female protagonists – the flirtatious Lucy and her upright friend Mina, who has the virginal strength to ward off Dracula’s advances – represent the poles of female sexuality in the late-Victorian period. Lucy’s flirtatiousness (she is toying with three suitors at the novel’s outset) suggests an uncontainable eroticism, so she becomes vulnerable to vampiric assault. Only Mina has the requisite virginal strength to ward off Dracula’s attentions, though she is later caught when her own intellectual defences are weakened by the men with whom she works, and their manipulation of her knowledge. It is the male protagonists, however, who must drive a stake through Dracula’s heart, rectifying a sexual disorder. (In a metaphorical gang rape, a trio of men are required to accomplish the act, in an apt duplica- tion of the number of Lucy’s suitors.) As if to suggest the obsessive circularity of the unacknowledged desires everywhere on display in Stoker’s novel, Dracula concludes with an outlandish but apt detail: in a perverse surrender to nostalgia, Jonathan and Mina return to Transylvania years later on vaca- tion, a new child in hand, evidently unable to resist the allure of their shared traumatic past, and perhaps unable to resist bringing their child, who arguably carries some of Dracula’s blood, back to his homeland.

Sex scandals: the Cleveland Street case and the Wilde trials The two most sensational trials of the late-Victorian period – the 1889–1890 Cleveland Street case and the three Wilde trials of 1895 – had their sources in the populist moral fervour of the maverick activist journalist W. T. Stead’s campaign to save female prostitutes from upper-class rakes. ‘All you who are squeamish and all who are prudish and ...prefer to live in a fool’s paradise of imaginary innocence and purity ... will do well not to read the Pall Mall Gazette of Monday and the following three days’, wrote Stead immediately before his article appeared.8 His efforts would eventually result in the Labouche` re Amendment, which for the first time criminalised homosexual acts. The eleventh clause of the Criminal Law Amendment provided that

any male person, in public or private, commits, or is party to the commission of, or procures or attempts to procure the commission by any male person of any act of gross indecency with another male person, shall be guilty of a misdemeanour, and being convicted thereof shall be liable at the discretion of

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 RICHARD A. KAYE

the court to be imprisoned for any term not exceeding two years, with or without hard labour.9

With one stroke, a distinction between private and public sexual acts between men was eliminated, in a legal move that would ensnare hundreds of men in the Cleveland Street case and subsequently Oscar Wilde in his legal imbroglio with Lord Queensberry and then the British legal establishment. The Cleveland Street case unfolded when a telegraph boy was found with an excessive amount of cash, in a case that exposed the existence of a homosexual brothel in the West End of London. Panic spread quickly through the upper tiers of British society, as rumours of arrests reaching as high as parliament and the household of the Royal family percolated throughout London. ‘What is this case’, asked Labouche` re, ‘but a criminal conspiracy by the very guardians of morality and law, with the Prime Minister at their head, to defeat the ends of justice?’10 But it was not until the playwright Oscar Wilde became entangled in its insidious net that the Labouche` re Amendment took on internationally resonant dimensions. The Wilde case hardened an increasingly commonplace link between homosexuality and an effeminate behaviour that in an earlier epoch simply had signalled aristocratic privilege and affectation. This new backlash against an entwined effeminacy and homosexuality galvanised not only social puritans but many otherwise advanced thinkers. In her article ‘The Woman Question’ (1899), Olive Schreiner railed against a new male type, the ‘curled darling, with his drawl, his delicate apparel, his devotion to the rarity and variety of viands, whose severest labour is the search after pleasure’. For Schreiner, such dandiacal males were ‘more repulsive than the parasitic female because a yet further product of decay’ – the last term a none-too-coded reference to Wilde and his brethren’s (now routed) Decadent movement.11 In an era when the homosexual was ‘invented’ by medical sexology as a separate species from the heterosexual, Wilde’s aestheticism had offered the retort that sexuality, like taste, was simply a heightened sensitivity to the beautiful. Wilde’s pivotal 1891 meeting with the young Alfred Lord Douglas (‘Bosie’), a handsome, well-born undergraduate at Oxford, was a turning point in Wilde’s personal and public life. The playwright’s intense devotion to Bosie provoked the young man’s father, the notoriously irascible Lord Queensberry, into a full-throttle campaign of verbal abuse, in which Queensberry, in either an ignorant error or deliberate provocation, accused Wilde of ‘posing as a somdomite’ [sic] and corrupting his son. Choosing to take Queensberry to court for criminal libel, Wilde’s charges backfired. He lost the libel case and was himself brought up on charges of ‘gross indecency’, the broad rubric of the Labouche` re Amendment. For a time the courtroom became the occasion for

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Sexual identity at the fin de sie` cle

Wildetoengageininspiredreparteewiththebluntlyaccusativeprosecutor Edward Carson – until Wilde, in answering Carson’s question of whether he had ever had physical relations with a certain young man, responded, ‘Oh, dear no. He was a peculiarly plain boy.’ This rash response (coupled with the testimony of working-class youths who testified that Wilde did indeed have physical relations with them) changed the course of the trial and doomed Wilde to the two years of hard labour at Reading Gaol he received as a sentence. Wilde’s three trials have formed a decisive part of his mythic status in English letters as a ‘martyr’ to a forbidden homosexual love as well as a reckless lover of unworthy lads, a reputation that Wilde himself mytholo- gised in his best-known poem, ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’ (1896) and the posthumously published De Profundis, which movingly recounted his bru- talising experiences in prison. Certainly Wilde’s reputation as a sexual dissident began with his last trial, when, even as he cagily avoided admitting to the offences of sexual relations with young men, he defended the exalted form of Hellenic love that he claimed his personal life had come to represent. At the end of his speech, supporters in the courtroom (many of whom were undergraduates from Oxford who had come down to London’s Old Bailey courthouse to rally on Wilde’s behalf) burst into applause. By most biographical accounts, Wilde’s prison years broke his health and spirits, and he was required to take up residence in Paris, the by-then common destination for men of homosexual tastes in the wake of Labouche` re. As tempting as it is to see Wilde as the ‘martyr’ or ‘victim’ of a repressive intractably Victorian puritan order, such a highly functional conception of Wilde’s fate tends to simplify the complexities of Wilde and the diabolically conceived trap that Labouche` re represented. As Michael Foldy has convincingly argued, Wilde came to personify a strong menace to late-Victorian notions of national ‘health, a threat that had its nodules elsewhere in the cenacles of upper-class privilege’. ‘If all persons guilty of Oscar Wilde’s offence were to be clapped in gaol’, observed Stead, hinting darkly at the reach of a movement he had helped spawn, ‘there would be a surprising exodus from Eton, Harrow, Rugby and Winchester, to Pentonville and Holloway’.12 Suddenly the public school homosexual Arcadias, as much as the brothels of London, were fair legal game for social puritans. Moreover, as Foldy argues, Wilde’s insistence throughout his final trial that his main allegiance was to an exalted Hellenic ideal in his love of young men stood in striking contradiction to the utilitarianism of his carnal encounters, in which ‘gifts’ were traded with working-class men in exchange for erotic favours. It was a contradiction that Wilde’s persecutors brilliantly exploited. Even before his entanglement with the British legal system, Wilde’s errant sexuality had made him the focus of satire. Beginning with Gilbert and

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 RICHARD A. KAYE

Sullivan’s Patience (1881), Wilde and his aestheticism are lampooned in the effeminate aesthete Reginald Bunthorne, in an operetta whose popularity led Max Beerbohm to declare that it helped prolong the aestheticist movement after its heyday. More catastrophically for Wilde, Robert Hichens’s The Green Carnation (1894), with innumerable sexual double-entendres, underlined the connections between aestheticism and same-sex erotics. Hichens lampooned the playwright and his lover Lord Alfred Douglas as Mr Amarinth and Lord Reggie, master wit and his slavishly imitative friend, leaving no doubt about Douglas’s sexuality when he depicts Lord Reggie chasing a boy. Although perhaps intended as an affectionate satire (Wilde himself expressed admiration for the book), The Green Carnation strongly confirmed Lord Queensberry’s charges concerning Wilde’s indecent sexual influence over his son, thus helping doom the playwright as a reckless corrupter of youth during Wilde’s legal imbroglio. The successful prosecution of Wilde cemented the power of the increasingly influential Labouche`re Amendment (which remained on the books until 1967): Wilde’s case was only the most sensational example of a period saturated in fresh ‘cases’ of sexual disturbance.

New sexual theories: Richard Krafft-Ebing, Havelock Ellis, Olive Schreiner and Madame Blavatsky Historians of sexuality have often noted that the 1880s and 1890s were a period of intense legal and medical theorising on sexuality, much of it rigidly given over to sexological ‘types’ whose sexuality was not only perverse but constituted their very identities. As we have seen, the legal system largely duplicated this sexological enterprise, emphasising public homosexual acts much as empirically driven theorists such as Krafft-Ebing had stressed observable behaviour. To be sure, such scientific and legal modes of discourse on certain subjects – homosexual desire, for example – were often at ideological odds; Havelock Ellis saw his research as militating against prevailing anti-homosexual legislation in Britain. Furthermore, while the passage of the Labouche` re Amendment signalled a legal consensus on homosexual activity within Britain, late-Victorian medical science by no means offered a univocal discourse on those variously described at the fin de sie` cle as Inverts, Hermaphrodites, Uranians, Urnings and Intersexes. For as is suggested by this wavering nomenclature (in which same-sex desire is frequently equated with a blurring of categories of gender), late-Victorian sexological writing offered a range of understandings of the new ‘species’ of the homosexual, who had once previously represented, as Foucault noted, ‘a temporary aberration’.

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Sexual identity at the fin de sie` cle

There was considerable difference in the logic animating (to take the two most prominent sexologists of the era) Krafft-Ebing and Ellis on the subject of same-sex desire. Krafft-Ebing stressed a series of sexual types in which individuals were diagnosed according to specific erotic ‘aberrations’. Drawing on nineteenth-century ideas of the nervous system as a network of electrical circuits distributing finite amounts of energy, Krafft-Ebing believed any interruption of the flow of energy (such as masturbation) produced erotic aberrations such as homosexuality. Ellis shared Krafft-Ebing’s focus on case studies but tended to stress the sexual health, moral probity and (a crucial late-Victorian refinement of mid-nineteenth-century sexology) social worth of his aberrant sexual subjects. On the question of whether homosexuality, for example, was a congenital or acquired phenomenon, there were significant divergences between these two thinkers; in his best-selling magnum opus, Psychopathia Sexualis (first published in Germany in 1886 and several times revised, most substantially in 1902), Krafft-Ebing allowed for both congenital and acquired inversions, a point he reiterated in later editions of his work even though he tended over time to see congenital factors as more decisive. Ellis, with his interest in creating the conditions for the public acceptance of his homosexual subjects, rejected Krafft-Ebing’s idea of acquired homosexuality. As Paul Robinson observes, ‘By arguing that homosexuality was invariably congenital, Ellis intended to undermine any suggestion that inversion might be a vice, a form of behavior willfully indulged out of boredom or sheer perversity.’13 At the same time, Ellis the sexual modernist refrained from regarding homosexual behaviour in pathological terms, likening it to the ethically neutral trait of colour-blindness, an analogy he borrowed from J. A. Symonds. Nonetheless, the divergences in sexological writing do not mask the underlying affinities linking the various modes of late-Victorian sexological exploration. For, as Foucault noted, the writings of sexologists like Krafft- Ebing and Ellis, whether they served to create new pathologies for physicians or healthy subjects who would be assimilable to a socially enlightened society, required an emphasis on sexuality as a series of latent secrets that must be rendered overt, usually in keenly theatrical terms. Foucault describes this theatricalised manifestation of erotic desire as an ‘exchange of discourses, through questions that extorted admissions, and confidences that went beyond the questions that were asked’.14 Much as late-Victorian melodrama invited a theatrical representation of inner conflicts, turn-of-the- century sexual theory required that individual psychology reveal a final, sexual truth. The dynamics of Ellis and Krafft-Ebing’s case studies depended on the analogous dynamics of popular melodrama, a tendency that reached its apotheosis with Charcot’s technique at Salpeˆtrie` re Hospital, in which, at

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 RICHARD A. KAYE the Bal des Folles so popular with the public, hysterical female patients were hypnotised and exhibited in a huge amphitheatre. (Later, Freudian analysis refined this procedure, replacing it with a more private, but arguably no less theatrical, psychoanalytic session, in which the observation of exaggerated effects reveals general truths.) As I have been suggesting, sexuality at the fin de sie` cle was invariably construed by British, European and American theorists in keenly social terms. Thus, in the scientific discourse on homosexuality as established by turn-of-the-century medical sexology in the writings of Krafft-Ebing, Ellis, P. Moreau, B. Tarnowski and K. H. Ulrichs, homosexuality was a social problem, one that must succumb to public scrutiny and legal authority. And despite the broad-minded impulses animating Ellis’s work, late-nineteenth- century sexology inadvertently reached an apotheosis in the emerging legal apparatus appearing in Germany and Britain that was seeking evidence of sexual criminality. Scientific knowledge became, in a sense, indissociable from legal knowledge. Ellis recognised the link between medical and legal consti- tutions of the homosexual subject when, writing of Wilde’s prosecution, he observed that the trials ‘have generally contributed to give definiteness and self-consciousness to the manifestations of homosexuality, and to have aroused inverts to take up a definite stand’.15 Sexology encouraged a conception of the community as an all-seeing body of observers focused on a sexually errant citizenry. For even as they sought to expand the sphere of influence of their respective professions, nineteenth-century legal and scientific authorities proposed that sexual inversion should be the concern of ordinary citizens. Perhaps because he had himself discovered that his wife of many years was a woman of strong lesbian impulses, Ellis viewed same-sex erotic pathology as jeopardising the institution of marriage. But Ellis stressed the problems that homosexuality in marriage presented to young women who, owing to protocols on the education of females, remained ignorant of the perils of wedding a homosexual male. Other sexologists in Britain emphasised homosexuality in similar terms as a problem affecting not only individual men who might be deemed criminals but as a threat to middle-class households. Thus, in seeking to write the first comprehensive study of same-sex eroticism, entitled ‘Sexual Inversion’, Ellis chose to collaborate with John Addington Symonds, who was married and the father of several children. (Only after Symonds’s death did the volume appear, and without Symonds’s name owing to his family’s objec- tions.) Throughout Sexual Inversion, Ellis relied on a range of melodramatic devices to drive home his point that the sexual invert should be allowed to live free of the pressure to marry and produce children. Whereas Krafft-Ebing had stressed the potential legal scandal generated by the exposure of inversion, Ellis accentuated the perils of the repressed life, in which psychic denial led

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Sexual identity at the fin de sie` cle to genetic catastrophe. Thus, in illustrating the dangers inherent in ‘congenital’ homosexuality, Ellis reported the case of a young ‘invert’ of ‘great intellectual ability’ who had been advised by his doctor to marry. The young man did so but then fathered four clinically ill children. According to Ellis, one was ‘an epileptic, almost an imbecile, and with strongly marked homosexual tendencies; the second and third children were absolute idiots; the youngest died of convulsions in infancy’.16 By adapting to his case studies the tropes of nineteenth-century drama such as Ibsen’s, in which the wrongs of adult sinners were visited in horrific terms on their ‘innocent’ descendants, Ellis insisted that the efforts by doctors to cure their homosexual patients through marriage led to calamitous results. Just as Ibsen’s unblinking creed of honesty showed audiences that all concealed truths must eventually be exposed, the ‘homosexual secret’ of Ellis’s repressed married men eventually obeyed a law of nature whereby hidden repressions inevitably materialise, although the process might take a generation. This reliance on melodramatic techniques informed the very first work of fiction in English to take up the subject of homosexuality in explicit terms, Alan Dale’s A Marriage Below Zero (1889), a first-person account that detailed a young woman’s distress on discovering that her husband is locked into a romantic relationship with another man. The author of this pseudonymous novel – Alfred Cohen – was a British e´migre´ to New York and one of the city’s leading theatre critics at a time when melodrama dominated the American theatre.17 Marriage as a locus of misery and subordination was very much the focus of Olive Schreiner’s critique of Victorian sexual protocols. Like her friend Edward Carpenter but without his somewhat reductive conception of an inherently female sexual restraint, Schreiner saw the institution of marriage as an everyday arrangement based on the dynamics and relations of prostitution. In an 1899 article in Cosmopolitan Magazine, Schreiner decried the parasitism that marriage had encouraged in the American woman above all others, not only because of domestic labour but because of the sexual servitude of marriage: ‘whether kept as kept wife, kept mistress, or kept prostitute, she contributed nothing to the active and sustaining labors of her society’.18 Schreiner’s dimin- ished notion of modern matrimony, however, existed in tandem with a faith in individual self-development as well as in New Men and New Women. ‘Our first duty is to develop ourselves’, she wrote in an 1889 letter:

Then you are ready for any kind of work that comes. The woman who does this is doing more to do away with prostitution and the inequalities between man and woman, and to make possible a nobler race of human beings, than by all the talking and vituperation possible. It is not against men we have to fight but against ourselves within ourselves.19

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 RICHARD A. KAYE

Schreiner’s endorsement of the principles animating the Free Love movements of the period represented a radical dimension of the feminist theorisation of sexuality at the fin de sie` cle. Other feminists rather endorsed the widely held view that sex was a force in need of constant control – a ‘lumbering beast’ which once awoken might become unmanageable. As Lucy Bland argues,

Many feminists, indeed many women, were also concerned that contraception would subject them even further to men’s carnal desires. With such beliefs and fears, it was hard for women to think of birth control as involving their right to control over [sic] their own bodies. It was all the harder given the whole issue intermeshed not only with questions of morality, but also Malthusianism, 20 health, nation and ‘race’.

These anxieties about a perilous male sexuality also informed the most radical fin de sie` cle explorations of the role of the family in women’s low social status. Thus Frederick Engel’s Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884), while offering a blistering critique of modern marriage as distorted by capitalist values, maintained that once men were no longer encumbered by property and inheritance, they could return to a state of sex- love in which monogamy would come naturally. Similar fears inspired those women drawn to the occult movements that proved so popular at the century’s end. Beyond offering the familiar argument that sexual immoderation had caused untold unhappiness over the centuries, Blavatsky added the striking contention that birth control interfered with the laws of reincarnation. As Alex Owen has suggested, Blavatsky’s view of celibacy as a sign of the perfected spiritual life appealed to many late-Victorian women who were troubled by the associations of unbridled sexuality that adhered to the figure of the New Woman. These proto- feminist activists preferred the ‘masculine persona’ that the ‘science’ of the new occultism provided as well as the female-centric communal networks that the Theosophy Movement inspired.21 Equally grounded in activist coteries, thousands of socialist and free-thinking journals at the century’s end included fervent debates about birth control, monogamy, Free Love and Free Unions. Preeminent among these journals was The Adult (1897–9), an organ of the Legitimisation League. Until it was closed by police action, articles in The Adult published articles advocating every cause from a volun- tary register of prostitutes (made available to military troops) to the ‘spice and joy’ of multiple sexual partners for women. (Typically, Anarchist contributors offered the most radical positions – for example, by lamenting the state’s regulation of marriage and by endorsing serial monogamy.) Fin de sie` cle fiction which took up the subject of marriage generally expressed the powerful claims of eros with far less obliquity than mid-Victorian texts,

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Sexual identity at the fin de sie` cle frequently (as in much of the so-called ‘New Woman’ fiction of the epoch) raising the importance of full sexual expression only to insist on sexuality’s inherent peril for women and on an aching divide in the erotic requirements of men and women. ‘To be a celibate is a very great misfortune even for a woman’, declares Herminia Barton in The Woman Who Did (1895), ‘for a man it is impossible.’22 In Mrs Humphrey Ward’s Helbeck of Bannisdale (1898), the narrator observes that ‘There is something in the Catholic discipline on points of sex relation that perhaps weakens a man’s instinctive confidence in women ... The flesh seems to him always ready to fail.’23 The novelist and inexhaustible woman of letters, Margaret Oliphant, was more alarmed by the representation of marriage as an exhausted institution in the new fiction. Her notorious 1896 article in Blackwood’s Magazine, ‘The Anti-Marriage League’, railed against Grant Allen’s novel (a ‘shame to society’) along with Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895) as dangerous tracts. Hardy’s novel offered the period’s most ferocious critique of Victorian matrimony, which Hardy denigrated for solidifying relations based on momentary sexual attachments (Arabella’s seduction of Jude Fawley and their marriage is based on the mistaken idea, purposefully engineered by her, that Arabella is pregnant) as opposed to lasting bonds based on a true affinity (the love between Jude and Sue Bridehead, a woman Hardy later described as a ‘woman of the feminist movement – the slight, pale, bachelor girl – the intellectualized, emancipated bundle of nerves that modern conditions were producing’).24 Like Schreiner (whose 1883 The Story of an African Farm – arguably the first New Woman novel – evoked comparisons with Hardy), Hardy was deeply pessimistic about accomplishing a sexual revolution in his own time. The sexual visionaries Jude and Sue, like Schreiner’s explicitly feminist heroine Lyndall, are defeated by social opprobrium and a soul- destroying fate. In the years after the fin de sie` cle, opposition to marriage continued to suggest not only a threat to sexual norms but to political order. ‘Anarchists don’t marry’, explains a disdainful diplomat in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1904), based on an actual 1894 attempt to blow up the Greenwich Observatory. ‘They can’t. It would be apostasy.’25

Homosexuality, Aestheticism, and the New Chivalry: John Addington Symonds and Edward Carpenter As influential as late-Victorian science and the law were in determining public attitudes, they were far from being the only means by which late- Victorians conceived of themselves in erotic terms. With a figure such as Symonds, the lines between sexology and aestheticism blur completely. Partly as a mode of defence in the wake of the new criminal and medical

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 RICHARD A. KAYE establishment, the Aestheticist and Decadent movements propagated coded, positive conceptions of erotic life and sexual identity, sometimes expressed as a belief in a ‘New Chivalry’ (a term coined by the writer Charles Kains- Jackson in an 1894 article that endorsed male–male bonds – ‘intimacy of constant companionship, of physical and personal knowledge’ – on evolutionary grounds that saw them as an advance over the merely animalistic).26 For many late-Victorians, an imagined past represented a fertile area in which to think about sexuality. Pater set the tone for a richly archaic understanding of sexuality in his novel Marius the Epicurean (1885), in which the eponymous Roman hero forges friendships with other youths. In his novel Pater sketched a portrait of a susceptible aesthete who is drawn to a series of cults, among them Cyrenaicism, whose credo ‘from time to time breaks beyond the limits of the actual moral order, perhaps not without some pleasurable excitement in so bold a venture’.27 Implicitly rejecting Paterian aestheticism as both backward-looking and elitist, Edward Carpenter endorses a ‘homogenic’ love between men based on working-class aspirations and Whitmanesque ideals. Just as Sir Richard Burton had sought to excite interest in the East for its sexual libertinism with his 1883 translation of The Kama Sutra (dedicated to ‘that small portion of the British public which takes enlightened interest in studying the manners and customs of the older East’), Carpenter looked to non-European cultures for models of homoerotic behavior – elevated from the merely primitive, he implied, by deep emotional bonds.28 But whereas Burton’s eagle-eyed account in his translation’s ‘Terminal Essay’ detailed ‘Le Vice’ in a primal ‘Sotatic Zone’ and served to endorse Victorian moralising about aberrant sexual activity, Carpenter dispensed with such judgemental terms, identifying various elevated practices outside of ‘civilised’ Europe. In an article entitled ‘The Homogenic Attachment’, first published in magazine form in 1897, Carpenter insisted that primitive cultures offered exemplary cases of male– male eros. ‘Even among the savage races lower down than [the Tahitians] in the scale of evolution, and who are generally accused of being governed in their love-relations only by the most animal desires, we find a genuine sentiment of comradeship beginning to assert itself – as among the Balonda and other African tribes, where regular ceremonies of the betrothal of comrades take place, by the transmission of a few drops of blood into each other’s drinking bowls, by the exchange of names, and the mutual gift of their most precious possessions.’ Carpenter decried the ‘obtuseness of current European opinion’ that held such cultures in low regard. Carpenter’s views of women were, to be sure, hobbled by reductive notions of female eros. ‘Woman is the more primitive, the more intuitive, the more emotional ...[W]oman tends more to intuition and less to logic.’29

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Sexual identity at the fin de sie` cle

Yet Carpenter continually sought to establish the separation of sex and procreation, anticipating a later feminist programme. In a period where it is difficult to find an extended treatment of same-sex desire among women, Symonds offered a discussion of the subject in his essay ‘A Problem of Greek Ethics’, where he explored – in an analogy that his more alert Victorian readers would have appreciated – the relatively low repute in which Greek civilisation held lesbianism.30 Just as Carpenter’s basically essentialist notion of female sexuality as minimal was tempered by a grasp of how women were hampered by marriage, Symonds’s belief in the superiority of the male physical form was leavened by a keen belief that Sapphic eros was low in the social hierarchy of Greek society. ‘Sexual inversion among Greek women offers more difficulties than we met with in the study of paideresta’, noted Symonds, ‘This is due not to the absence of the phenomenon, but to the fact that feminine homosexual passions were never worked into the social system, never became educational and military agents’, a remark that reveals a keen understanding of lesbian erotic desire as a form of eros that, while widespread, inevitably falls under the radar in a patriarchally structured society. It was, of course, male–male desire that animated Symonds’s writings. In the chapter ‘The Genius of Greek Art’ in Volume II of his Studies of the Greek Poets (1875), he celebrated a return to an eroticised ideal of aesthetics as a guide to proper moral conduct. Symonds’s posthumously published memoirs, furthermore, revealed the anguish of his life as a married homosexual, yet during his lifetime he expressed his feelings toward other men through an exploration of the Greeks and their Renaissance devotees as precursors of aestheticism. As if in reaction to Symonds and other aesthetes’ sentimentalisation of classical homoerotic models, Engels decried, on feminist and decidedly hetero-normative grounds, the ‘degradation of women’ of Ancient Greece, in which men ‘fell into the abominable act of sodomy and degraded alike their gods and themselves with the myth of Ganymede’.31 Socialist activists such as Morris and Carpenter, meanwhile, offered spirited critiques of the era’s constricted sexual mores along with utopian prophecies of sexual freedom. Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890)envisioneda world of sexual egalitarianism modelled on medieval societies. The new mystical movements represented by figures such as Blavatsky provided their own counter-narrative to newly powerful scientific and legal understandings of erotic desire, ushering into the discussion of sexuality a new appreciation of Eastern traditions of erotic expression. Blavatsky, vocal in her opposition to birth control, advocated celibacy for women, insisting on a Buddhist connection between the spiritual and the erotic. Although Blavatsky, Schreiner and Symonds were not as explicitly communitarian in their thinking as Morris and Carpenter, each accentuated

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 RICHARD A. KAYE sexuality’s ties to larger social ideals. This attempt to link a managed, enlightened erotic life to an ideal of a socially aware polity remains fundamentally different from Freud’s subsequent explorations of the psyche, which largely downplayed the constructive role of a social order as Freudian psychoanalysis situated sexual dilemmas within a fairly dichotomised acceptance of, or rebellion against, social opprobrium in matters of sexual expression. Moreover, the socialist aspirations of Morris and Carpenter, linking questions of sexuality to radical social change, in many ways anticipated the social and cultural movements of the 1960s in Europe and America, which sought to forge a connection between a liberationist sexual ethos and an egalitarian (and even utopian) erotic communal model. Yet, as we have seen, the epoch’s visionary prophets of collective erotic consciousness, however much they sought to disconnect sexuality from procreation and insisted on the pleasures of the sex, competed with vivid myths of sexuality which, in their anticipation of Freud’s sense of the erotic as a troublingly ungovernable force, in many ways proved far more enduring. Today, Edward Carpenter is a dimly familiar figure in the turn-of-the century history of sexuality and radical social reform, whereas Salome, Dorian Gray, Dr Jekyll and Dracula continue to prey on the popular imagination as they mutate into endless adaptations. Yet while W. B Yeats famously viewed the fin de sie` cle as ‘the autumn of the body’ given that the arts were asleep – ‘dreaming of things to come,’ Yeats wrote – we can say with confidence that late-Victorian writers were wide awake to the generative possibilities of an erotic life tied to a boldly expansive social vision.32

NOTES

1 George Gissing, quoted in Jacob Korb, George Gissing: A Critical Study, London, Methuen, 1965,p.187. 2 A. N. Wilson, The Victorians, New York, W. W. Norton, 2003, pp. 439–40. Terry Eagleton, ‘The Flight to the Real’, in Sally Ledger and Scott McCracken (eds.), Cultural Politics at the Fin de Sie`cle, Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp. 11–20 (p. 11). An alternative view is that of the historian H. Stuart Hughes: writing of the late nineteenth-century intellectual ferment of Freud, Croce, Weber, Durkheim and Sorel, he observed that ‘In the perspective of a cultural scene dominated by Social Darwinism, the young thinkers of the 1890s can be regarded as aiming precisely at the opposite of what they have usually been accused of doing. Far from being ‘‘irrationalists’’, they were striving to vindicate the rights of rational inquiry’ (H. Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society: The Reconstruction of European Social Thought, 1890–1930, New York, Vintage, 1958,p.39). 3 Jeffrey Weeks, ‘Coming Out’: Homosexual Politics in Britain from the Nineteenth Century to the Present, London, Quartet Books, 1977,p.76. 4 Robert Louis Stevenson, The Dynamiter, London, Alan Sutton Publishing, 1984, p. 135.

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Sexual identity at the fin de sie` cle

5 Oscar Wilde, Salome,inThe Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays, ed. Peter Raby, Oxford University Press, 1998,p.187. 6 Sigmund Freud, ‘On Narcissism: An Introduction’ (1914)inGeneral Psychological Theory, New York, Simon and Schuster, 1997,p.56. 7 Whitney Davis, ‘Narzissmus in der homoerotischen Kultur und in der Theorie Freuds’, in Mechthild Fend and Marianne Koos (eds.), Maennlichkeit im Blick: Visuelle Inszenierungen in der Kunst seit der Fruehen Neuzeit, Cologne/Weimar/ Vienna, Boehlau Verlag, 2004, pp. 213–32. 8 W. T. Stead, Pall Mall Gazette, 4 July 1885. 9 Quoted in Theo Aronson, Prince Eddy and the Homosexual Underground, London, John Murray, 1994,p.17. 10 Quoted in H. Montgomery Hyde, The Cleveland Street Scandal, London, Coward, McGann and Geoghegan, 1976,p.45. 11 Quoted in Sally Ledger, The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Sie`cle, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1997,p.76. 12 Quoted in Michael Foldy, The Trials of Oscar Wilde: Deviance, Morality, and Late-Victorian Society, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1997,p.130. 13 Robinson, Paul, The Modernization of Sex: Havelock Ellis, Alfred Kinsey, William Masters and Virginia Johnson, New York, Cornell University Press, 1989,p.5. 14 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Vol. I, trans. Robert Hurley, New York, Vintage, 1978,p.41. 15 Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Vol. II, Sexual Inversion, New York: Random House, 1936; 1897,p.352. 16 Ellis, Sexual Inversion,p.226. 17 See Richard A. Kaye, ‘The Return of Damon and Pythias: Alan Dale’s A Marriage Below Zero, Victorian Melodrama, and the Emergence of a Literature of Homosexual Representation’, College Literature, 29.2 (Spring 2002), 50–79. 18 Olive Schreiner, ‘The Woman Question’, Cosmopolitan Magazine,XXVII(1899), 184–5. 19 Olive Schreiner, Letter to Mary Roberts (January 1889), in Richard Rive (ed.), Olive Schreiner: Letters, Oxford University Press, 1988,p.145. 20 Lucy Bland, Banishing the Beast: English Feminism and Sexual Morality, 1885–1914, London, Penguin, 1995,p.189. 21 Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment, Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004,p.86. 22 Grant Allen, The Woman Who Did, Oxford University Press, 1995; 1895,p.111. 23 Mrs Humphry Ward, Helbeck Of Bannisdale, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 2004; 1898,p.215. 24 Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure, New York, W. W. Norton, 1989; 1895,p.8. 25 Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent, London, Penguin, 1973; 1907,p.69. 26 Charles Kains-Jackson, ‘The New Chivalry’ (1894), reprinted in C. White (ed.), Nineteenth-Century Writings on Homosexuality: A Sourcebook, London, Routledge, 1999,p.158. 27 Walter Pater, Marius the Epicurean, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1985; 1885, p. 119. 28 Quoted in J. Weeks, Sex, Politics, and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality Since 1800, London, Longman, 1981,p.65.

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 RICHARD A. KAYE

29 Edward Carpenter, Love’s Coming of Age, New York, Boni and Liveright, 1911, p. 40. 30 John Addington Symonds, ‘A Problem in Greek Ethics’ (1891), in Robert Peters (ed.), Male Love: ‘A Problem in Greek Ethics’ and Other Writings, New York, Pagan Press, 1983, pp. 70–1. 31 Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884), ed. Eleanor Burke Leacock, London, Lawrence and Wishart, 1972, p. 128. 32 W. B. Yeats, Essays and Introductions, London, Macmillan 1974,p.191.

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 4

WILLIAM GREENSLADE Socialism and radicalism

When the Westminster Gazette began publication in January 1893 as a radical–liberal evening paper it turned to the essayist and novelist, Grant Allen, to provide a regular column of social commentary. The range of issues on which this notably prolific, socialist polemicist campaigned included Home Rule for Ireland, the uselessness of the aristocracy, the tyranny of monopolies, the burden on women of ‘worn out moralities’, the importance of internationalism; his affiliations lay with the Fabian Society, the Land Nationalisation Society, the Legitimation League and the Free Press Defence Committee. Allen’s enthusiasms are instructive partly because they suggest something of the extent to which the boundaries separating radical–liberal or New Liberal positions, and those subsequently denoted as socialist, had become blurred by the 1890s. In the last year of his life, 1899, and in common with many, although by no means all, socialists, Allen campaigned against the Boer War (1899–1902); yet it was a New Liberal thinker, J. A. Hobson, who spearheaded pro-Boer support and who produced the most eloquent critique of imperialism of its day.1 But beneath the confusing, shifting surface at the fin de sie` cle, there were detectable patterns in the orientation of radical ideas. Some had their origins in the evolution in social thought associated with the assimilation of the ideas of Comte. His positivism offered a substantial legacy to British intellectuals who sought a systematic means of analysing society and developing a rational future founded on a secular, scientific basis. From such application of scientific knowledge to the problems of society would come a positive philosophy of life 2 which for its adherents ‘would be the salvation of mankind’. Herbert Spencer had ambitiously attempted since the 1850s to apply models of biological evolution to all aspects of human activity and whilst his unshaken commitment to laissez-faire was increasingly subject to challenge, the idea of society as a live organism continued to carry authority well into the 1900s. In his contribution to Fabian Essays in Socialism (1889) Sidney Webb argued that ‘owing mainly to the efforts of Comte, Darwin, and Herbert Spencer, we can

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 WILLIAM GREENSLADE no longer think of the ideal society as an unchanging State. The social ideal from being static has become dynamic. The necessity of the constant growth and development of the social organism has become axiomatic.’3 Meanwhile the Idealist philosopher, T. H. Green, was establishing a lasting influence on a generation of future public servants and politicians through a philosophy which seemed to resolve the dichotomy which was opening up between Individualism and Collectivism. For Green, the self was ‘a social self’ made free, not negatively by the absence of restraint or coer- cion, or even by the practice of private virtue, but positively, by the sharing of a common purpose through the State, thus realising a fundamental need of human nature. Such a social philosophy saw the individual as an end, not as a means. The working of society, seen in this way, could be rational and purposive, not simply the product of apparently random evolutionary forces. Green’s tone and emphasis were (perhaps more than he intended) an alarm call to a new radicalised liberalism after decades of the influence of Spencer. Nevertheless the largeness of Green’s consensual platform and the generality of his terms left space for endless debate. What was the real relationship between ‘society’ and the ‘state’? And if the self was a ‘social self’, what future was there for the self of a thoroughly radical social dissenter? In many ways, the influence and nature of Green’s thinking, insofar as it spread beyond the circles of the intellectual elite, typified the contradictions, dilemmas and frustrations of fin de sie` cle socio-political argument.4 So an ethically conscious and politically engaged generation was emerging from the 1870s which, in Stefan Collini’s words, ‘shared an emotional as well as an intellectual aversion to Individualism’ and desired to cultivate ‘a new ethical spirit in social relations, a stronger sense of community and of the duties of its members to each other’.5 Such a spirit can be traced through the painful and moving trials of the ‘theoretic’ and ‘ardent’ Dorothea Brooke, the heroine of George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–2). Eliot explores how ‘fellow feeling’ can be made socially effective. Dorothea’s efforts to find a principle of living, beyond the claims of egoism and the boundaries of the parochial society in which she moves, offer a template for a new kind of secular citizenship: in the ‘Finale’ to the novel Eliot’s narrator links the ‘incalculably diffusive’ ‘effect of [Dorothea’s] being on those around her’ to ‘the growing good of the world’.6 Indeed the powerful legacy of ‘Queen George’ herself, following her death in 1880, was deeply instructive to progressive, intellectual women such as the political activist, Edith Simcox, in pointing to the possibilities of living an ethically conscious life re-defined by the shifting relationship between the claims of the private life and an expanding public sphere. Within political discourse a tangible effect of these developments was the gradual mutation of liberalism away from laissez-faire towards increasing

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Socialism and radicalism state intervention and ‘Collectivism’ and the opening up of common ground between New Liberals and spokesmen of the nascent socialist movement. This was nowhere more visible than in the widely held concern about land ownership. While a speaker in W. H. Mallock’s ‘Radicalism: A Familiar Colloquy’ (1881) could patronise radicals as obsessed with the ‘rank, birth and breeding’ of the aristocracy,7 the economic and fiscal arguments against the status quo in land ownership were nonetheless formidable. John Stuart Mill had put the matter simply: income from land, he said, was independent ‘of any trouble or outlay incurred’. Landlords ‘grow richer, as it were, in their sleep, without working, risking, or economising’.8 Meanwhile the facts were coming out, as in, for example, John Bateman’s The Great Landowners of Great Britain,first published in 1876 and revised and expanded through three further editions to 1883. It listed ‘all owners of three thousand acres and upwards, with their possessions and incomes’.9 So the impact of the American political economist, Henry George – as if on cue – was sensational, both through his best-seller, Progress and Poverty, published in England in 1881, and through his extensive lecture tours. George argued that like our access to air and sunlight, access to the product of ownership of land (as distinct from occupancy) was a common right, which could be secured by what he became famous for, a Single Tax, on rents, to be paid to the exchequer for the benefit of all. ‘Owners’ of land would become, in effect, land agents for the commonwealth. While Marxist socialists like Hyndman and Engels believed that George’s analysis had failed to address the problems of wage-labour, leaving capitalist relations intact, the effect of George’s message was to draw together socialists and radicals alike: radical liberals such as Joseph Chamberlain and Jesse Collings, and socialists – Darwinian, libertarian, Fabian and Christian – such as A. R. Wallace, Edward Carpenter, G. B. Shaw and Stewart Headlam. In Martin Crick’s view the ‘debate about land reform was probably the only force capable of creating a mass audience for Socialism in the early 1880s’ and the reasons were not hard to find.10 George wrote vividly about the plight of the labourer who is ‘robbed of the produce of his labour and compelled to toil for a mere subsistence’ and about inequality, the ‘great cause’ of which was ‘the unequal distribution of wealth’.11 Moreover George’s determination to confront head-on the seductive appeal of Malthusian explanations of poverty found a ready audience amongst radicals. Malthus’s theory that the growth of a population always outstrips its capacity to feed itself could still be appealed to, particularly at a time of rising unemployment in the wake of the agricultural and industrial depression experienced in the late 1870sand1880s. On the ground there was evidence enough of too many hands chasing too few jobs – depicted in the tribulations of Joseph Coney in Margaret Harkness’s 1888 novel Out of Work and of John Hewitt in George Gissing’s The Nether World

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 WILLIAM GREENSLADE

(1889) and figuring extensively in socialist periodical stories of the period. But George believed that Malthusian theory provided an all-too-convenient excuse for resisting reform, sheltering selfishness ‘from question and from conscience by the interposition of an inevitable necessity’.12 In the early 1880s Britain was entering what appeared to contemporaries to be a decisive economic, social and political crisis. The economic situation of 1880, according to The Times, combined ‘more circumstances of misfortune and depression than any within general experience’.13 The agricultural depression which had begun in the late 1870s continued to precipitate urban as well as rural unemployment, which now rose steeply to 10 per cent of the population by 1886. Dynamite attacks on London government offices, on the police at Scotland Yard and on the London rail and underground system added to the sense of mounting public anxiety. The threat of terrorism, whether from international anarchism or Irish Fenianism, was absorbed into realist novels of the mid-1880s, such as Gissing’s Demos (1886), Allen’s Philistia (1884) and For Mamie’s Sake (1886) and Henry James’s The Princess Casamassima (1886) which, with varying degrees of profundity and point, reflect contemporary anxieties about the threat to property and social order. In his 1909 Preface to his novel James described this state of mind memorably in referring to ‘society’s not knowing but only guessing and suspecting and trying to ignore, what ‘‘goes on’’ irreconcilably, subversively, beneath the vast smug surface’.14 The sense of crisis was intensified by a renewed concentration in the newspaper press and elsewhere on the alarming spectacle of London as a site of poverty and squalor at the heart of Empire. Subsequent events ensured that poverty and unemployment would become live political issues. Meetings of the unemployed, organised from 1884, were followed by a winter of distress in 1885–6 (the worst for thirty years), by the West End unemployment demonstrations of 8–9 February 1886 and the ‘Bloody Sunday’ protest of 13 November 1887. The influx into the capital of Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe, fleeing the pogroms, drew further attention to labour conditions. Then followed strikes by unskilled and semi-skilled workers such as the matchgirls of Bryant and May in Bow, East London (1888), the textile workers of Manningham Mills, Bradford (1888–9), the dockers in 1889 and gasworkers in 1889 and 1890, all of which contributed to the initial explosion of ‘New Unionism’ between 1888 and 1892. ‘In 1883 a socialist movement seemed to break out spontaneously in England’, observed a commentator in 1891.15 The period of the early–mid- 1880s was indeed crucial for the development of socialist organisations. Hyndman’s Democratic Federation, founded in 1881, adopted a socialist manifesto, Socialism Made Plain,in1883, although Hyndman himself had

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Socialism and radicalism already declared for Marx two years before. By 1883 William Morris was adopting an overtly socialist position; he formed the Socialist League in 1885. 1884 saw the founding of the Fabian Society. The leading socialist journals followed: To-Day (1883–9), Justice (1884–99) and Commonweal (1885–90). But it is unlikely that a socialist response to the pressing issues of the day could have developed quite so rapidly had it not been for the existence of a vigorous secularist movement. Under Charles Bradlaugh, the National Secular Society (NSS) was flourishing along with its papers, the National Reformer, The Freethinker and Progress. Secularism had been an important agent of radical thought since the middle of the century and contacts between secularists and socialists were increasingly plentiful and significant. When the editor of The Freethinker, G. W. Foote, was imprisoned for blasphemy in 1882, his deputy, Edward Aveling, used the opportunity to publish socialist-leaning articles. Such a policy of permeation by which, in Annie Besant’s words, ‘London radicalism’ was leavened with ‘socialist thought’, was notably successful in winning converts.16 With the establishment of the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) there was now an opportunity for secularists, like Herbert Burrows and John Burns, impatient with the speed of social change, to move across. Aveling and Besant, both vice-presidents of the NSS, as well as John Bruce Glasier and Tom Maguire, came over to socialism in 1884. Others, like George Lansbury, were converted, following a public debate that April between Bradlaugh and Hyndman in which Hyndman insisted that the secularists were not equipped to grapple with the country’s social and economic problems. The power of organised Christianity, the beˆte noire of the secularists, was now invoked, strategically, by some early socialists to persuade secularists to go that step further. The very success of the Church in publicising the facts of poverty at this period had alerted the attention of propagandists like Aveling and Belfort Bax. Andrew Mearns’s sensational tract The Bitter Cry of Outcast London (1883) was, after all, Congregationalist in origin: it opened by declaring that ‘there is no more hopeful sign in the Christian Church of to-day than the increased attention which is being given by it to the poor and outcast classes of society’.17 The determination of the Churches to lay bare the extent of slum poverty was evidence of a ‘revival of the Christian social conscience’ and did of itself contribute to the development of socialism. Indeed the Rev. Stewart Headlam’s ‘Priest’s Political Programme’ of 1884, with its call for the restoration to the people of ‘the value which they give to the land’ and for ‘a better distribution of the wealth created by labour’, was an unmistakably socialist document.18 The critiques of the capitalist state mounted by socialists in the 1880s were marked by a determination not simply to question conventional political

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 WILLIAM GREENSLADE thinking but to re-appropriate issues of the day by re-formulating their representation in public discourse. Under the pressure of events, writing from a socialist perspective could be produced for immediate impact; readers were targeted as initiates and affiliates, not merely as free-floating intelli- gences. Morris’s Commonweal offered in its ‘Notes on the News’ or ‘Notes on Passing Events’ columns, authoritative commentary on major international and national issues – emigration policy, Government policy in Ireland and the Sudan, or the significance of the 1887 Jubilee – from a class-based, anti-parliamentary perspective.19 And socialist writers were usually quick to respond to topics, made controversial in the national press of the day, with pointed counter-diagnoses. The response to W. T. Stead’s exposure of the ‘white slave trade’ in the Pall Mall Gazette was one such case. His revelation in 1885 of a ‘Maiden Tribute to Modern Babylon’ was cleverly fashioned into a morality tale of passive victims and evil perpetrators, of a Minotaur at the heart of the labyrinth of the degenerate city. But the socialist rejoinder was to sidestep the moral framework of this melodrama and to focus instead on the social and economic causes. ‘To get rid of prostitution’, argued Eleanor Marx and Edward Aveling in ‘The Woman Question’ (1886), ‘we must get rid of the social conditions that are its parent.’20 Soon after the story broke Morris pronounced that ‘the real Minotaur is Capital – not one man, but the whole system is guilty’. Immorality was not a question of guilt but of unhappiness: ‘Whatever is unhappy is immoral. It is unhappiness that must be got rid of. We have nothing to do with the mere immorality.’21 Here was fertile ground for a materialist analysis of social distress. Against much prevailing establishment diagnosis, grounded in degenerationist notions of inherited and/or acquired organic defect, in which moral censoriousness was couched in the language of pseudo-science, the socialist response was to turn the spotlight on the economic conditions which produced widespread evidence of social ‘unhappiness’. Oscar Wilde saw the point when he asserted that ‘starvation, and not sin, is the parent of modern crime’.22 But the hold of the prevailing diagnostic discourse was not always easy to contest. Morris, in 1886, was troubled by having to use the word ‘residuum’, an ‘ugly word for a dreadful fact’. ‘If this residuum were a necessary part of civilisation’, he wrote, then it was a poison ‘that shall one day destroy it’.23 Morris’s uneasy assimilation of the language of determinism suggests that he is almost overwhelmed by the immanence of the social problem, yet, as John Goode noted, ‘destroy’ suggests that he is still ‘differently situated from those who imagined the present world to be indestructible’.24 Given the propensity of progressive radicals to adopt the language of religious ‘conversion’ to describe their move to socialism in the early to mid- 1880s, it was perhaps not surprising that Christian believers would interpret

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Socialism and radicalism their own dedication to the socialist cause as a route to social salvation. ‘We have passed from listlessness to action, from apathy to energy, from despair to hope ... Socialism has come to save us’, wrote a Free Christian Church Minister.25 The fact was that socialism offered more resources of social and personal optimism, to wider and more complex constituencies in Britain, than some of its leading spokesmen could have acknowledged. While it had the hallmarks of a traditional religious crusade, the socialist consciousness promoted new ways of articulating the inner life, of realising a new subjectivity at the cutting edge of the possible in late-Victorian Britain. There were, then, two dominant threads in the story of socialism up until 1914. Firstly, there was the unresolved conflict between socialism as an ethical force, a ‘whole way of life’, and socialism as an instrument for political advance and material improvement, already in evidence in the activism of the 1880s. Secondly, there was the tension between the claims upon socialists of the renovating attractions of old traditions, on the one hand, and the new possibilities held out by forms of modernity. These interweaving perspectives offer a way of tracing the movement through the promises and disappointments of the fin de sie` cle and beyond. In 1889 Olive Schreiner offered an insight, advanced for the time, that a true politics had to be located in the realm of the personal. In tackling the exploitation of women, she argued that women’s ‘first duty’ is to ‘develop ourselves ...Then you are ready for any kind of work that comes ...It is not against man we have to fight but against ourselves within ourselves.’26 Schreiner’s emphasis on the importance of personal liberation as a necessary influence on the liberation of humanity was taken up by her friend Edward Carpenter. Both intuited the profound changes in subjectivity to which a radical politics had necessarily to be attuned. They articulated, and to some degree exemplified, that shift towards the primacy of personal relations over social, civic or religious commitments, which was to characterise twentieth- century modernity. Their libertarian politics took on a new significance when reassessed by socialist feminists in the 1970s. By the late 1880s the culture of socialism was beginning to accommodate such an ethic of self-development. When Eleanor Marx wrote in 1884 that ‘We were justified in setting aside all the false & really immoral bourgeois 27 conventionalities’, she had in mind the place of sex in relationships, free union versus marriage and free love versus monogamy. For middle-class radicals like Marx, Schreiner and Ellis, a socialist culture was precisely constituted by the exploration of new freedoms such as the wearing of rational dress or the acceptance of informal manners. Here were elements of the ‘bohemian’ lifestyle adopted by progressive women and men at this period (the adjective was chosen by Annie Besant to depict socialist

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 WILLIAM GREENSLADE intellectuals like Eleanor Marx with her ‘curly black hair flying about in all directions’, as Beatrice Webb described her).28 When Eleanor Marx and Aveling wrote that ‘Socialism is at present in this country little more than a literary movement ... [with] ... but a fringe of working men on its border’,29 they were at the very least testifying to the political and social solidarity which grew out of the shared experience of new and key works – especially in the theatre. Ibsen’s work was an inescapable reference point. Enthusiasm grew as Ibsen’s plays became translated, and then performed, in a flood of London productions from 1889. Before this, though, Ghosts had been serialised in To-Day (January–March 1885), six years before its first British production in 1891. The leading advocates of Ibsen in Britain, Shaw and William Archer, had close contacts with both the Morris and Marx circles. Shaw, May Morris and Aveling had taken part in probably the first reading of ADoll’sHousein England in 1885. This play had a truly galvanis- ing effect on British socialists. After its London premiere in 1889,attendedby Sergius Stepniak, Archer, Shaw and May Morris as well as by most of the leading writers and critics of the day, Edith Ellis famously recalled how, together with Schreiner, Dolly Radford, Emma Brooke and Eleanor Marx, ‘we were restive and almost savage in our arguments. What did it mean? Was it life or death for women ...Was it joy or sorrow for men?’30 Of earlier writers Shelley seems to have predominated as the one to read in this socialist culture. The Shelley Society, founded in 1886 by F. J. Furnivall, a socialist and an enthusiastic setter-up of societies, offered lectures by the poet and writer, Mathilde Blind, and by Eleanor Marx, Aveling and Carpenter.31 Here was evidence enough of a buoyant cultural politics at the fin de sie`cle. A key ingredient was the availability of new models of independence for women, the re-casting of relationships between women and men and the occupation of new arenas of metropolitan space. A new modernity was in the making and the socialist revival was productively bound up with these developments. The burgeoning of new societies and of formal and informal groupings, the ‘settlement houses, ladies’ residences, and teashops ... the mixed discussion clubs held in drawing-room settings’ were ‘refashioned as a new political space for women’.32 Such spaces were formed by what Edward Said has called relationships of ‘affiliation’. Urban identities were now increasingly shaped by a recognition of intellectual and vocational affinity rather than by family or class expectations; the articulation of progressive thinking was, in practice, informed by such developments. And there were many examples to hand. The friends and contacts of the poet, Amy Levy, included radical women such as ‘Dollie’ Maitland (later Radford), Schreiner, Marx, Clementina Black, Harkness and Vernon Lee, each of whom belonged to other networks of progressive-minded women and men. Schreiner and Maitland were members

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Socialism and radicalism of the Men and Women’s Club (1885–9) led by the charismatic, if domineering, Karl Pearson and whose members included Maria Sharpe, Ernest Radford, William Archer, Ralph Thicknesse, Charlotte Wilson and Emma Frances Brooke (Schreiner left in 1886). Other informal groupings revolved around Eleanor Marx and Margaret Macmillan. Relationships of affiliation, did, of course, stimulate experiment. The Fellowship of the New Life was one such attempt. Prompted by Edith Ellis and Ramsay MacDonald, it set up a short-lived communal house in Bloomsbury. Elsewhere, advanced couples relocated to be in proximity to like-minded pro- gressives: the Radfords moved to be near the Morrises at Hammersmith; the Humanitarian, Henry Salt and his wife, Kate, moved to be close to Carpenter outside Sheffield; Edward and Constance Garnett set up home in Surrey near the Olivier family and, as enthusiastic Russophiles, befriended the e´migre´ anarchists, Stepniak and Peter Kroptotkin. Others, like Shaw, attached themselves to familial substitutes, such as the Avelings and the Salts. The Carpenter me´nage offered another advanced version of the family, this time constructed on homosexual lines. Here was a striking instance of the coexistence of modern, secular ethics and the traditional values of community and comradeship, anticipated in the democratic, comradely ethic of Walt Whitman. Carpenter offered leadership for Whitmanites like Charles Sixsmith at Bolton, and later in the 1900she provided a formative link between the socialist circle of Willie Hopkin and Alice Dax in Eastwood, Nottingham and the young D. H. Lawrence.33 Carpenter’s simple-life philosophy was partly derived from his involvement in a Ruskin-inspired communal farm and aimed at discovering the ‘means of ensuring some independence from the labour of others’.34 While he believed that there were fairer ways of distributing wealth, he also thought that true democracy required an ethic of comradeship which necessitated a change ‘not just in the class structure, but in the mode of production of the human heart’.35 Carpenter’s search for new sources of both simplicity and energy, as anti- dotes to the satiated body of capitalist over-production, found echoes in Tom Mann’s desire to re-kindle in socialists an older moral order with a view to the ‘purifying of the industrial and social life of our country’. Such an aim would be achieved by ‘the making of true individuality’, but realised through ‘regard for the brethren’. The ‘development of the highest possible qualities in ourselves’, he said, was ‘undoubtedly a religious duty, but for the chief reason, that we may be of greatest service’.36 A modern commitment to self-development now finds expression in the re-emergence of traditional values of comradeship and self-discipline, associated with religious non-conformity. Denominational nonconformity had been a distinctive source of English political radicalism.

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 WILLIAM GREENSLADE

In the face of the power of the established church, dissenters asserted ‘liberties’ and ‘rights’ and cherished their own communality of personal bonding and feeling. This legacy found an outlet in the best-selling radical paper, Reynolds News. Socialists were keen to trace this inheritance back through Chartism and early nineteenth-century radicalism to the Levellers movement of the 1640sand1650s and beyond, back to the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. From Thorold Rodgers’s revisionary work on economic history (1866–87) to Morris’s ‘A Dream of John Ball’ (1886)and the republication in Commonweal and the SDF’s Justice of the writings of the Chartist, Ernest Jones, the desire to re-connect with the erased history of the common people was an unmistakable component of the renovatory work of socialist culture. Much stress was laid on the importance of the May Day festival: ‘as the churches celebrate Christmas and Easter’, said James Leatham in 1895, ‘so should the workers celebrate 37 May Day ... with enthusiastic demonstration and exhortation’. That year Bruce Glasier addressed May Day crowds of 12,000–16,000 in Glasgow, and 300,000 people had demonstrated in Hyde Park in 1890, proof of its importance as a national and international socialist occasion. There was also a communitarian tradition which extended out of early nineteenth-century radicalism as exemplified in the recent example of the Paris Commune of 1871. This traumatic moment was crucial to the articulation of Morris’s revolutionary position of the mid–late-1880s: he could still speak bitterly, in 1887, of the suppression of the commune by the ‘middle class republic’ which ‘butchered so many thousands of citizens at Paris in 1871’.38 As historians of socialism, like Stanley Pierson, have argued, there was a fundamental tension between socialism as a ‘religion’, a way of life, and its later, more difficult, embodiment in the struggles of the labour movement, in trades unionism, municipal administration and eventually through parliamentary representation, in the form of the Labour Representation Committee and the Labour Party. Such tensions were evident in the publication and reception of Fabian Essays in Socialism (1889), which included contributions from Sidney Webb, Hubert Bland, Annie Besant, Graham Wallas and its editor, Shaw. Webb’s essay, in particular, was singled out for criticism by Morris as seriously overestimating ‘the importance of the mechanism of a system of society apart from the end towards which it may be used’.39 Webb argued from an essentially utilitarian, statist standpoint, at odds with the near-utopian emphasis of those who sought in socialism a remodelling of the whole life and for whom the relation between the individual and the State was a secondary matter. But for Webb it was more important,

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Socialism and radicalism

to take even more care to improve the social organism of which we form part, than to perfect our own individual developments ... the perfect and fitting development of each individual is not necessarily the utmost and highest cultivation of his own personality, but the filling, in the best possible way, of his humble function in the great social machine.40 Such functionality found its way into ideas of national efficiency via the, not so humble, cult of the ‘expert’, who now joined hands across old ideological divisions in a new, if short-lived, grouping, the ‘co-efficients’, conceived as a ‘ministry-in-waiting’ of all the talents, drawing on imperialistic- minded conservatives as well as the Fabians, Webb and H. G. Wells.41 ‘Performance, not participation’, in Michael Freeden’s words, had become ‘the criterion of a healthy political system’.42 And eschewing work through political party, Webb and his partner, Beatrice Webb, adopted a strategy of ‘permeation’ through writing and investigation and the cultivation of backroom strategists who had the ear of the ‘coming’ political men of the day. Morris’s hostile reaction to Webb was symptomatic of a fundamental divide, which E. P. Thompson describes as marking ‘the great parting of the ways in the modern Socialist movement’.43 The Morris faith was that Socialism was ‘a complete theory of human life, founded indeed on the visible necessities of animal life, but including a distinct system of religion, ethics, and conduct, which ...will not indeed enable us to get rid of the tragedy of life ... but will enable us to meet it without fear and without shame’.44 For Morris, as, famously, for Ruskin, ‘there is no wealth but life’.45 When Ruskin surveyed the bleak processes of factory production back in the 1850s, he had made a crucial distinction between work as answering material needs and work as a source of pleasure: ‘It is not that men are ill fed, but that they have no pleasure in the work by which they make their bread, and therefore look to wealth as 46 the only means of pleasure.’ Morris picked up this theme in a series of key essays. ‘Nothing should be made by man’s labour which is not worth making; or which must be made by labour degrading to the makers’, he argued in ‘Art and Socialism’ (1884).47 Socialism was not just about material advance, higher wages, shorter working hours, but, rather ‘what else was being done, while these were going on’.48 ‘Shall all we can do’, he asked, ‘be to shorten the hours of ... toil to the utmost, that the hours of leisure may be long and beyond what men used to hope for ...what then shall we do with the leisure, if we say that all toil is irksome?’49 But, of course, by the 1890s, leisure for thousands now included Saturday afternoons at football, cricket or horse- racing. Morris identified a familiar dilemma, produced by and perpetuated under advanced capitalism to this day. But in the articulation and definition

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 WILLIAM GREENSLADE of socialist theory, as it confronted the possibility of forms of practical implementation, it was immanent and inescapable. Glasier expressed his sense of it in 1893:

Instead of the complete ideal of Socialism involving ...the exaltation of recrea- tion and art above the mere mechanical and industrial achievement, we have the prospect of an eight hour day, pensions for old age, and the Fabian elysium of an army of workers under the State receiving at least three pounds a week per adult 50 male, held forth as the highest achievement of socialism possible.

Inevitably, the ethical, religious strain in socialism came into conflict with other traditions. For Raymond Unwin, future garden-city planner, and follower of Morris and Carpenter, the ‘scientific’, Marxist socialism of Belfort Bax placed him in that ‘depressing camp of socialists’ who had no ‘faith in 51 man’. For Glasier, it was the ‘strange disregard of the religious, moral and aesthetic sentiments of the people’ by Hyndman’s SDF which made for ‘an overwhelming defect’.52 Yet Bax, while condemning ‘the great curse, bourgeois civilisation, around ...on all sides’, also spelt out the dangers of harking back ‘like Mr Ruskin’ to ‘an impossible past, while renouncing the present as hopelessly bad’.53 But Jonathan Rose’s compendious survey of working-class readers reveals no discernible interest in Bax’s writings and a great deal of enthusiasm for Ruskin’s. ‘The first Labour MPs’, Rose notes, ‘cited Ruskin, more often than anyone else, as the author who had moulded their minds.’54 ‘[T]his new party lifts its head all over the North. It has caught the people as I imagine the Chartist movement did. And it is of the people – such will be the secret of its success’ – thus Tom Maguire writing to Edward Carpenter two months before the formation of the Independent Labour Party in January 1893.55 Something of the ecumenical spirit of the ILP had been anticipated in Carpenter’s own disavowal of socialist sectarianism, two years before. ‘I stick up for the Fabians and the Trade Unions just as I do for the Anarchists’, he wrote. ‘We are all travelling along the same road. Why should we be snarling at one another’s heels?’56 In retrospect, only the ILP offered any promise at all of assimilating the differing, increasingly incompatible strains of socialist politics and political culture examined in this chapter. Whatever its ultimate failures, it was perhaps only in this movement that the opposing currents of tradition and modernity, of ethical and practical socialism, were to be found most creat- ively in dialogue. Indeed, the comparative strength of the ILP as a socialist organisation was in no small measure derived from its ability to draw on the idea of socialism as a whole way of life while ensuring that its communication and cultural expression was achieved through thoroughly up-to-date means. Here was a movement ‘inextricably interwoven in the whole, existing

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Socialism and radicalism culture of northern workers, reaching back to the moral and social vision that had informed the radical tradition throughout the entire century’.57 The brilliant editor and publicist, Robert Blatchford, and the ex-miner and visionary ILP leader, Keir Hardie, both understood this. Blatchford’s highly successful Clarion (its circulation rose from an average of 40,000 a week in the 1890sto80,000 in the 1900s) was supported by a cultural infrastructure which included the Clarion Cycling Club and the Clarion Handicraft Guild with its Morrisian motto: ‘Joy in work, and hope in leisure.’ The Clarion’s appeal was also comparatively wide: half of its readers were working class, according to Blatchford, while many of the rest came from the newer, lower- middle classes. The other important outlet was Hardie’s the Labour Leader, but there were also a range of small ILP papers put out by local branches, mainly in the north of England. At the heart of the movement was the building of educational and cultural organisations which welcomed women as well as men, children as well as adults, with the purpose of creating socialist ‘fellowship’. The ILP was particularly hospitable to socialist feminist women drawn to the ethical socialism of Carpenter. For Isabella Ford, Enid Stacy, Katherine St John Conway (later Glasier) and Caroline Martyn, moral transformation went hand in hand with the development of an alternative socialist culture; the emancipation of women would only be achieved through improving every aspect of women’s lives. Women’s concerns had naturally to compete with other issues since, according to Margaret Macmillan, ‘the ILP was not formed to champion women. It was born to make war on capitalism and competition.’58 Still, such an agenda included discussion of the revision of gender relations, including an analysis, advanced for its time, of masculinity in relation to the private and public spheres. ‘Socialism in its fullest sense’, wrote ‘Lily Bell’ (Isabella Bream Pearce) in a remarkable piece for the Labour Leader in 1896, ‘means the liberation of the feminine element in humanity ... [Man’s] affections, his sympathies, all the finer feelings within himself have been by himself forcibly separated from his outward life ...the result being that he has made a hell upon earth, where was meant to be a kingdom of heaven.’59 The ethical imperative had, once again, prompted cutting-edge thinking at the fin de sie` cle. The extent to which later socialist movements failed to assimilate and live up to such an insight can be measured by the decline in the reputation of Edward Carpenter. From the high point of his influence as a libertarian, socialist visionary at the outbreak of the First World War, the politics he stood for became steadily marginalised through the 1920s. His death in 1929 prompted a commemorative volume of essays, published in 1931, which in attempting, rather unsuccessfully, to recuperate his legacy did

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 WILLIAM GREENSLADE nothing but confirm his now marginal position. Comrades from the 1880sand 1890s, including Henry Salt, Charles Sixsmith and Raymond Unwin, did their best to honour him, along with William Morris, as a figure of the golden age of socialism in whose light the troubled present was experienced as a lapsed era of divided purpose and expended hopes. Indeed Unwin, now as President of the Royal Institute of British Architects, spoke later in 1931 of the influence of Morris with ‘his crusade for the restoration of beauty to daily life’. Those were ‘times when it was very interesting to be alive’; he made no apology for ‘urging the importance of harmony and beauty’ at a time of economic crisis.60 The immediate context of Unwin’s address was the Wall Street Crash and the ensuing economic slump across Europe. Presiding over its management in Britain was Ramsay MacDonald, now Labour Prime Minister, whose administration of 1929–31 fell after it had executed savage cuts in public expendi- ture. When Macdonald returned to lead a National Government sustained in office by the Conservatives his party turned against him as an arch-betrayer of socialist principle. MacDonald’s long journey as a socialist – from Fellowship of the New Life to the Fabians, the SDF, the ILP, the Labour Representation Committee, to Parliament and eventually to the Labour Cabinet and the office of Prime Minister – was a near epitome of the development of socialism over its first fifty years. That development moved it out of and beyond its radical, communitarian, non-conformist, libertarian origins to assume responsibility for manoeuvring the British state in the face of the power of international capital and the economic and political consequences of a World War and the disastrous confusion of means and ends which characterised the Russian communist experiment after the defeat of Trotsky. But the history and meaning of socialism in Britain had already been subject to active revision, even as a socialist culture was still in the making. Reviewing Morris’s ‘The Well at the World’s End’ in 1896, H. G. Wells, choosing to ignore the example of the ILP, already wrote off that history as a story of missed opportunity, even of defeat. Looking back to the 1880s, when ‘economic reform was in the air, and Socialism was a possible force in politics’, he judged that the movement failed through lack of the right leadership, misled, he implied, by William Morris: ‘had the huge mass of feeling that social stresses had then evolved, and Henry George and Bellamy contributed to shape, found for itself a directing mind, a great Socialist party might to-day have sat in Westminster with Radicalism under its wing’. With the wisdom of hindsight of a man not yet thirty, Wells spoke of ‘those absurd younger days, when one seriously imagined we were to be led anywhere but backward by this fine old scholar’, concluding that Morris’s ‘dreamland was no futurity, but an illuminated past’.61 But News from Nowhere was already a finger-post to ‘futurity’ in ways which Wells found difficult, at that time, to

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Socialism and radicalism understand. The point was that the communitarian utopia of Morris’s text, in which ‘mastery has changed into fellowship’62 had already been anticipated in the advanced practice of the fin de sie` cle socialist culture of which Morris was a part. For the elderly radicals and socialists of 1931,as for later generations, those ‘younger days’ would always offer resources of hope with which to counter the disappointments of the present.

NOTES 1 J. A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study, London, 1902. 2 Susan Budd, Writers of Unbelief: Atheists and Agnostics in English Society 1850–1960, London, Heinemann, 1977,p.191. 3 Sidney Webb, ‘Historic’, in G. B. Shaw (ed.), Fabian Essays in Socialism, London, Fabian Society, 1889, pp. 30–61 (p. 31). 4 See Jose Harris, Private Lives, Public Spirit: Britain 1870–1914, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1994,p.228, and generally pp. 223–30. 5 Stefan Collini, Liberalism and Sociology: L. T. Hobhouse and Political Argument, Cambridge University Press, 1979, pp. 66–7. 6 George Eliot, Middlemarch, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1965; 1871–2, pp. 30, 32 and 896. 7 W. H. Mallock, ‘Radicalism: A Familiar Colloquy’, Nineteenth Century, 49 (1881), 415–38 (pp. 418–19). 8 W. J. Ashley (ed.), J. S. Mill, Principles of Political Economy, London, Longmans Green & Co., 1923; 1848,p.818. 9 John Bateman, The Great Landowners of Great Britain, 4th edn, London, Harrison & Son, 1883; 1876. 10 Martin Crick, The History of the Social-Democratic Federation, Keele, Ryburn, 1994,p.19. 11 Henry George, Progress and Poverty, London, Dent, 1911; 1879, pp. 250–1. 12 George, Progress and Poverty,p.73. 13 See John Lucas, ‘Conservatism and Revolution’, in John Lucas (ed.), Literature and Politics in the Nineteenth Century, London, Methuen, 1971,pp.173–220 (p. 178). 14 See Henry James, Preface to The Princess Casamassima,Harmondsworth,Penguin, 1987; 1886,p.48. 15 Cited by Stephen Yeo, ‘A New Life: The Religion of Socialism in Britain 1883–1896’, History Workshop, 4 (1977), 5–56 (p. 7). 16 Annie Besant, An Autobiography, London, T. Fisher Unwin, p. 311; see William Greenslade, ‘Revisiting Edward Aveling’, in John Stokes (ed.), Eleanor Marx (1855–1898): Life, Work, Contacts, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2000, pp. 45–6. 17 Andrew Mearns, The Bitter Cry of Outcast London, Leicester University Press, 1970; 1883,p.3. 18 Peter d’A Jones, The Christian Socialism Revival 1877–1914, Princeton University Press, 1968, pp. 79–80, 113–14. 19 See Nicholas Salmon (ed.), William Morris: Journalism. Contributions to Commonweal 1885–1890, Bristol, Thoemmes Press, 1996, pp. xiii, xix–xx.

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 WILLIAM GREENSLADE

20 Eleanor Marx and Edward Aveling, The Woman Question; reprinted in M. Mulvey-Roberts and T. Mizuta (eds.), Sources of British Feminism Vol. VI, Bristol, Thoemmes Press, 1993, pp. 1–25 (p. 20). 21 William Morris, ‘Meeting on the Recent Exposures’, 5 August 1885; reported in Commonweal, 1 (1885), p. 78, in Salmon (ed.), William Morris: Journalism,p.27. 22 Oscar Wilde, ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’, in De Profundis and Other Writings, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1973,p.31. 23 William Morris in 1886; cited by John Goode, ‘William Morris and the Dream of Revolution’ in John Lucas (ed.), Literature and Politics in the Nineteenth Century, pp. 221–80 (p. 234). 24 Goode, ‘William Morris’, pp. 234–5. 25 E. M. Geldart, Justice, 1 November 1885; cited by Stanley Pierson, Marxism and the Origins of British Socialism: The Struggle for a New Class Consciousness, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1973,p.73. 26 Olive Schreiner to Mary Roberts (January–March 1889), in Richard Rive (ed.), OliveSchreiner:Letters,Vol.I:1871–1899, Oxford University Press, 1988,p.145. 27 Eleanor Marx to J. L. Mahon, 1 August 1884; cited in Chushichi Tsuzuki, The Life of Eleanor Marx 1855–1898: A Socialist Tragedy, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1967,p.108. 28 Beatrice Webb, My Apprenticeship, 2 vols., Harmondsworth, Penguin 1938, pp. ii, 349. 29 Marx and Aveling, The Woman Question,p.5. 30 Sally Ledger, ‘Eleanor Marx and Henrik Ibsen’, in Stokes (ed.), Eleanor Marx, pp. 53–68 (p. 54). 31 See Lynn Pykett, ‘‘‘A Daughter of Today’’: The Socialist-Feminist Intellectual as Woman of Letters’, in Stokes (ed.), Eleanor Marx, pp. 13–23 (p. 18); Simon Avery, ‘Tantalising Glimpses: The Intersecting Lives of Eleanor Marx and Mathilde Blind’, in Stokes (ed.), Eleanor Marx,p.180. 32 Judith R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London, London, Virago, 1992,p.69. 33 See Sheila Rowbotham, ‘In Search of Carpenter’ (1977); reprinted in Sheila Rowbotham, Dreams and Dilemmas: Collected Writings, London, Virago, 1983, pp. 239–56 (p. 250); Edward Carpenter, My Days and Dreams, Being Autobiographical Notes, London, George Allen & Unwin, 1916,p.250; Emile Delaveney, D. H. Lawrence and Edward Carpenter: A Study in Edwardian Transition, New York, Taplinger, 1971, pp. 22–5. 34 Rowbotham, ‘In search of Carpenter’, pp. 245, 247. 35 John Ryle, Review of Edward Carpenter: Selected Writings, Vol. I, TLS, 25 January 1985,p.95. 36 Tom Mann, ‘Preachers and the Churches’, in A. Reid (ed.), Vox Clamantium, 1894,p.303; cited by Yeo, ‘A New Life’, p. 15. 37 Chris Wrigley, ‘The ILP and the Second International: The Early Years, 1893–1905’, in D. James, T. Jowitt and K. Laybourn (eds.), The Centennial History of the Independent Labour Party, Halifax, Ryburn, 1992, pp. 299–313 (p. 304); Chris Waters, British Socialists and the Politics of Popular Culture 1884–1914, Manchester University Press, 1990,p.96. 38 William Morris in Commonweal, 25 June 1887; see Thompson, William Morris, London, Merlin Press, 1976,p.481.

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Socialism and radicalism

39 E. P. Thompson, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary, revised edn, London, Merlin Press, 1977; 1955, pp. 547–8. 40 Webb, ‘Historic’, in Fabian Essays in Socialism,p.58. 41 G. R. Searle, The Quest For National Efficiency, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1971, pp. 150–2. 42 Michael Freeden, The New Liberalism: An Ideology of Social Reform, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1978,p.183. 43 Thompson, William Morris,p.548. 44 Ibid., p. 548. 45 John Ruskin, Unto This Last: Four Essays on The First Principles of Political Economy, London, George Allen, 1909,p.156. 46 John Ruskin, ‘The Nature of Gothic’, from The Stones of Venice, Vol. II (1853)in John Ruskin: Selected Writings, Oxford University Press, 2004,p.42. 47 William Morris, ‘Art and Socialism’, in A. L. Morton (ed.), Political Writings of William Morris, London, Lawrence and Wishart, 1973, pp. 109–33 (p. 123). 48 Morris, ‘Communism’, in Morton, Political Writings of William Morris, pp. 227–40 (p. 228). 49 Morris, ‘Art of the People’ (1879); cited in Waters, British Socialists and the Politics of Popular Culture, pp. 54; 205n. 50 John Bruce Glasier, in the Labour Prophet (August 1893); in Waters, British Socialists, pp. 175; 220n. 51 Raymond Unwin, Journal entry for 6 May 1887; cited by Standish Meacham, ‘Raymond Unwin 1863–1940: Designing for Democracy in Edwardian England’, in Susan Petersen and Peter Mandler (eds.), After the Victorians: Private Conscience and Public Duty in Modern Britain, London, Routledge, 1994,pp.79–104 (p. 82). 52 Crick, The History of the Social-Democratic Federation,p.89. 53 E. Belfort Bax, The Ethics of Socialism, London, Swan Sonnenschein, 1893, pp. 119, 117. 54 Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2001; 2002,p.405. 55 E. P. Thompson, ‘Tom Maguire a Rembrance’, p. xii, cited in Thompson, William Morris, pp. 608–9. 56 Edward Carpenter in Commonweal, 5 December 1891; cited in Chushichi Tsuzuki, Edward Carpenter 1844–1929: Prophet of Human Fellowship,Cambridge University Press, 1980, pp. 97–8. 57 Patrick Joyce, Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class, 1848–1914, Cambridge University Press, 1991,p.83. 58 Margaret Macmillan, cited in June Hannam, ‘Women and the ILP, 1890–1914’in James et al. (eds.), Centennial History, pp. 205–28 (p. 214). 59 Labour Leader, 8 February 1896; cited in Hannam, ibid., p. 211. 60 ‘The Architect’s Contribution’, Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects, 7 November 1931, pp. 5–11 (p. 9); cited in Meacham, ‘Raymond Unwin’, p. 81. 61 H. G. Wells, Review of The Well at the World’s End; reprinted in Patrick Parrinder and Robert Philmus (eds.), H. G. Wells’s Literary Criticism, Brighton, Harvester Press, 1980,pp.111–13 (pp. 111–12). 62 William Morris, News from Nowhere, Oxford University Press, 2003; 1890, p. 181.

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 5

ROSS G. FORMAN Empire

At the conclusion of Matthew Phipps Shiel’s 1898 work The Yellow Danger – an adventure in which protagonist John Hardy stymies an invasion of Europe by Asian ‘hordes’ headed by Dr Yen How, a ‘fiendish’ composite of East and West – the novel’s narrator steps back to assess his country’s position at the end of the nineteenth century. Contrasting the evil cosmopolitanism of the Far Eastern mastermind with the provincialism of his British heroes, Shiel writes ‘England, no doubt, will, in truth, absorb the world: the Loadstone [sic] is within us. But we must change. If the world is to become English, the English must first become worldly.’1 This warning and prophecy reiterates the novel’s opening, in which Victorian Britain’s imperial expansion is seen as concomitant with her potentially disastrous retraction from Europe: ‘Europe had receded from Britain, and Britain, in her pride, had drawn back from Europe. From the curl of the moustache, to the colour and cut of the evening-dress, to the manner in which women held up their skirts, there was similarity between French and German, between German and Russian and Austrian, and dissimilarity between all these and English’ (p. 2). From its title to its conclusion, The Yellow Danger thus dramatises the double helix of fin de sie` cle representations of Empire: on the one hand, the promise of continued expansion, new ‘spheres of influence’, and the success of the ‘civilising mission’ and, on the other, the fear of collapse, degeneration and reverse colonisation that Shiel’s narrative works so well to conjure up and then dispel. Put historically, the glorification of the Empire during Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897 at one extreme vied with the millenarian prediction of fin de sie`cle, fin du globe at the opposite end of the spectrum. And the civilising mission, with its goals to educate colonial subjects into Western modernity and morality and to integrate them into the productive economy of empire, could itself give rise to local and trans- national forms of resistance. In addition, by juxtaposing two versions of cosmopolitanism – the corrupt and corrupting Asiatic hybrid and the

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 ROSS G. FORMAN acquisitive and assimilating Briton – Shiel’s novel identifies cultural encounter as the key site for both the production and destruction of great nations and peoples. And by envisaging Western solidarity as the main mode for safe- guarding these achievements, the novel positions struggles between European powers, such as the scramble for Africa and for China, and Britain’s isolation from her neighbours, as the likely source of downfall. The Yellow Danger encapsulates various aspects of Britain’s relationship with Empire and Empire writing that were central to the fin de sie` cle period: the tensions of inter-imperial competition coupled with the desire for international cooperation; the rise of colonial elites and the stirrings of indigenous independence movements; the need to shore up or redefine nationalism in the light of new social formations locally and internationally; the spread of anxieties about the instability of sex, gender, race and class roles; the new importance of speed to communication and mobility and as a cultural frame for modernity; and the all-consuming question of what the future would hold. The novel is both indicative of and participative in the cultural perception from the 1880s onwards that Empire was crucial to many aspects of British life at home, as well as abroad. Shiel’s book also identifies some of the limits of the term ‘fin de sie` cle’. Its currency was primarily European, its millenarian associations patently Christian, and its theorists (at least as far as Empire was concerned) mainly male. As a measure of the achievements and failures of the Victorian era, it imposed a centre–periphery model of Empire on a framework that was blatantly more multiple and fragmentary, as well as fraught with contradictions. Above all, it wrote history from a British perspective, even if that perspective was far from unitary and, on the radical, socialist and feminist sides especially, far from uninformed by exchange and solidarity with communities in the colonies. Fourteen years after the Berlin Conference divided up the colonial prizes among different European powers, most of the proverbial blank spaces on the world map might have been filled. But many of these spots were still changing hands. By ceding the Philippines and Spanish colonies in the South Seas and the Caribbean to the United States, the conclusion of the Spanish American War shifted the balance of power away from Europe. The US annexation of Hawaii in 1898 and its plans to build a canal through Nicaragua to link the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans also promised to tip the balance further in America’s direction. Meanwhile, Japanese expansion in Taiwan, Korea and Manchuria was a rising concern. And observers kept hearing the death knell of the ‘Celestial’ Empire (seen throughout the century as the largest potential market for imperialism), even if its demise ended up being protracted and the predicted ‘carve-up’ of its territory never occurred. Still, Russia had gained a foothold in Northern China (not to mention Central

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Empire

Asia), Germany had secured a colonial enclave, and France was menacing the south. The Great Game played by Kipling’s Kim had many sides to it and many fronts; which victors would get which spoils would only ever be clear in retrospect. Perhaps as importantly, Shiel’s novel illuminates a number of developments in literary production, including the expansion of adventure fiction as a genre, the rise of what Patrick Brantlinger has called the ‘imperial Gothic’, and, above all, the new significance of popular fiction to British society and politics.2 Moreover, with its focus on Japan and China and its unease at their adoption of Western ideas about and technologies of modernity, the novel exemplifies the trend, at this time, to understand imperialism more broadly. The Victorians and later the Edwardians no longer viewed imperialism in the strict terms of the formal acquisition of land, but in the wider terms of informal or economic imperialism, as well as in terms of ‘Greater Britain’, a potentially looser confederation of Anglophone territories first theorised by the Liberal MP Charles Dilke at mid-century. With the rise of American power and the probability, if not immanence, of self-rule in Australia and Canada and even Ireland and South Africa, this notion of forms of confederation rose to new prominence. Confederation was not simply political, but also cultural. J. Astley Cooper, in his article ‘Americans and the Pan-Britannic Movement’, published in The Nineteenth Century in 1895, proposed ath- letics as a means of knitting together the English-speaking ‘race’ and recom- mended an imperial cricket tournament to bring people of the Empire together.3 Like many other, better-known narratives with reverse colonisation sub- plots from the period, including H. Rider Haggard’s She (1887) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), Shiel’s The Yellow Danger works through a sense of guilt, a feeling that Britain is reaping the just rewards for her destructive behaviour overseas. Like these works, too, The Yellow Danger finally asserts a positive view of empire – a world in which Britons never shall be slaves, and Britain always will prevail. Britons, in effect, will always remain independent subjects, rather than subject to others. Yet by making the potentially destabilising effects of Britain’s expansion into Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Pacific a central theme, these texts also recognise the new powers of self-determination they have ceded to their imperial citizens. Although resolutely conservative texts, they were written in a period when such conservatism had to contend with other voices and currents, including those of women writers and writers hailing from the colonies (be they Britons overseas or ‘native’ subjects); even though their narratives work to disable challenges to perceived hegemonies of gender and of race, they nonetheless must represent them.

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 ROSS G. FORMAN

Acquisition Even in their conservatism, however, these texts promote a model of imperialism that had slowly revolutionised Britain’s relationship with her overseas territories: the model of an acquisitive empire. The idea was, as Shiel suggests, that, ‘all Man is embryo within us’ (p. 347). In Dracula, as Christine Ferguson has pointed out, one of the primary mechanisms for defeating the threat of the foreign invader is not through the eradication of difference, but through the ability to incorporate it. Ferguson notes that Darwin, in The Origin of Species (1859), had underscored the advantages of diversity to the survival of the species. For Ferguson, the ‘band of men’ led by Dr Van Helsing defeats Dracula through its mastery of linguistic variation. Dracula, by contrast, cannot adapt to changing circumstances because his standardised English is essentially morbid; his language flows according to a principle of stasis, offering another example of the vampire trait of ‘death in life’.4 If Ferguson sees Stoker’s novel as exemplifying what postcolonial criticism perceives as the shift from English to englishes, nevertheless there is a key difference in this late-Victorian embrace of multiplicity. Here, the productive nature of diversity lies not in these terms themselves, but in the overarching ability to commandeer and direct difference. What at first glance looks like multiculturalism avant la lettre is actually monoculturalism with tentacles. In the same year that Stoker published Dracula, Walter Frewen Lord released a set of ‘essays in imperial history’ that he entitled The Lost Empires of the Modern World. This book begins with the following sentence, derisively characterising the point of view espoused by the detractors of Empire and rebutted by his work: ‘The world is continually being reminded that in the arts of empire the English are mere plagiarists, stupid plagiarists who have spoilt what they have stolen.’5 The British, according to this philosophy, are ‘neither rare nor original. Heavy blood-suckers, they bestride the earth with their so-called empire like a nightmare’ (p. 4). Given Ferguson’s argument about the lack of flexibility in the vampire’s use of language, the parallels between Stoker’s literary text and Lord’s historical one are striking. Neither Stoker nor Lord believed that Britain was simply playing a ‘game of grab’ around the world, that Britain’s overseas expansion was a matter of exploitation, theft, ‘violence and fraud’ (p. 4). They did not concur with democrats like Edward Carpenter that trade alone had driven the Pax Britannica – the peace and prosperity that British administration ostensibly offered its colonial subjects and which was often justification for imperial expansion – and that ‘official England has no real care for, takes no real interest in her Empire when she has acquired it’.6 Yet both chose

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Empire to present this argument in order to disable it by suggesting Britain’s conduct has been, in fact, superior to other potential forms of imperialism that the past and the vampire both represent. In effect, both describe methodologies by which other cultures, commodities and territories are re-appropriated and internalised. Both also parody Britain’s achievements on the global front through the metaphor of blood- sucking, which signals the withdrawal and consumption of resources without giving anything in return – exactly the opposite of what they believe Empire has actually achieved. Indeed, Lord’s choice of the word ‘plagiarism’ seems almost inspired, for it not only reads Empire as a text, but also hints at the idea that originality itself is not terribly critical to the grand scheme of things. Rather, what both Stoker and Lord seem to think is important is the ability to acquire and synthesise, something at which the British are shown to excel. In addition, Britain is shown to have a productive relationship with the past; put affirmatively, plagiarism simply means learning history’s lessons and putting them to good use. Such was the model of Britain as an acquisitive Empire, able to select, absorb, domesticate and recycle the commodities, peoples, languages and methods of other cultures, and to claim to be superior to its subjects and competitors because of its superior capacity to make such choices and integra- tions. Britain had the resources to make order out of chaos and avert entropy. Returning to Darwinian principles asserting that diversity within group solidarity is the surest means of survival, this model shifted the focus from threat to opportunity. The conclusion to Dracula underscores this point when it envi- sages the touristic possibilities of Transylvania as a direct substitution for a land infected with the plague of vampirism. Acquisition as a textual model for Empire also helps explain the proliferation of literary materials at the fin de sie` cle, especially in terms of the growth of cookbooks, travel guides and travelogues, folklore and fairytales, and adventure fiction, all of which had as their goal the incorporation of the world outside Britain into a British network. James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890), a ‘general work on primitive superstition and religion’, was a landmark in this encyclo- paedic way of archiving culture. Indeed, Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management, published in 1861 and continually reprinted thereafter, was an early pioneer of this model. Its ‘plagiarism’ of other cookery writers was part and parcel of its inclusion of recipes for French, Italian and Indian food because scope, not originality, was its function. As the technology for importing and freezing foodstuffs improved – paradoxically, at the same time that many Britons ‘out in empire’ were increasing their consumption of tinned meats and other goods from home to avoid being ‘contaminated’ by local produce – the culinary horizons continued to expand. The 1880sand1890s

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 ROSS G. FORMAN were a burgeoning period for culinary compendia, including J. W. Hoffman’s Cyclopædia of Foods (1890) and Charles Herman Senn’s Senn’s Culinary Encyclopædia (1898). Both of these books included extensive descriptions of Continental, Turkish, Indian and even American dishes and condiments. Those who did not care to recreate these dishes in their own homes had new opportunities to try them elsewhere. Increasingly frequent colonial and ethnographic exhibitions also played their part in broadening Britons’ exposure to the world’s cuisines, not to mention its textiles, housing styles, music and visual arts. They defined imperialism as commodity culture, and they ‘offered living pictures of the nation and empire as natural and universal markets’.7 Millions of people attended these events, and those who did not make it to the exhibition grounds could not miss the media explosion surrounding them. Exhibitions in the 1880sand1890s featured Chinese, Japanese and Indian restaurants and tearooms, where the public could sample delights ranging from samosas to sushi. The 1884 International Health Exhibition created a sensation with its Tartar encampment, which included live Siberian mares, whose sour milk (or koumiss) was served to visitors. Beyond these special occasions, the fin de sie` cle was a period of rapid growth for restaurants in general, and Britain’s global turn manifested itself in this arena, as well. In fact, by the time Shiel revisited the Yellow Peril in his 1905 novel The Yellow Wave, he set a crucial opening scene in a Japanese restau- rant in Bloomsbury, located a stone’s throw from the centre of the imperial archive that was the British Museum Reading Room – and made the very alien sushi and sukiyaki served there an integral part of the threatening image of Britain’s annihilation at the hands of Asiatic outsiders. The 1890s also saw the development of a new way to connect Britain with her Empire, as well as to encourage exchange between different sites of Empire: the birth of cinema. The moving picture was in many ways simply the culmination of earlier visual technologies, such as the kinetoscope. Yet cinema, more than any other medium, offered the potential to make imperial settings and societies palpable. It also had the capacity to represent the key imperial conflicts of the period to large audiences: the Spanish American War, the Anglo-Boer War and the Boxer Rebellion in China an anti-foreign movement, which culminated in the siege of the legations in Beijing in the summer of 1900. They were relieved by a British force which subsequently forced humiliating conditions on the ‘Celestial Empire’ exploded across the screens of Empire, collapsing the distance between metropole and colony, promoting intracolonial affiliation and bolstering nationalism by foregrounding the achievements of British soldiers. Often very short and thin on narrative in comparison with later films, the cinema of war at the turn of the century gloried in troop movements and staged battles that showed the

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Empire blue jackets at their best – protecting women and children from the Boxers, for instance. Like postcards, which were also a burgeoning form in the 1890s, cinema formed part of the new archive that animated, rather than simply described, Empire. It also became a part of the confederative trend, with films being produced in Britain, France and the United States for international marketing, emphasising imperial linkage over imperial rivalry. Thus Thomas Edison’s company, one of the largest cinema producers during this era, made a series of movies about British and Indian regiments in Hong Kong in 1898.Whenthe Boxer Uprising broke out, Edison also filmed re-enacted battles, as in ‘Bombardment of Taku Forts, by the Allied Fleets’. Films were also popular ‘in Empire’, exposing huge colonial audiences to conditions of life in Europe and North America that they might otherwise not have encountered. Film therefore complemented the trend among periodical and book publishers in the 1880sand1890s to look to the Empire in order to expand their markets. Sexology and pornography were other areas in which Britain’s self-fashioning as an acquisitive Empire manifested itself. These fields, too, were blossoming at the fin de sie` cle, as new legal, medical and discursive strategies to regulate sexuality encouraged a proliferation of materials around them. These clandes- tine or privately circulated texts form an integral part of what Michel Foucault has named the ‘plurisecular injunction’ to talk incessantly about sex that marked the late nineteenth century.8 Many new works about sexuality and their pornographic offshoots were explicitly bound up in questions of Empire. If, as Thomas Richards has demonstrated, Empire imagined a world unified by information and sought to achieve control by amassing an archive of knowledge, then erotica was a great place to do some collecting.9 In Empire could be found new forms of sex, new ways of having sex, new aphrodisiacs and sex toys and, of course, new conceptions of sexuality itself. All of these needed to be discovered, described, archived and disseminated. In addition, vitriolic debates between the metropole and numerous colonies over the repeal of Contagious Diseases acts and ordinances gave issues of prostitution a decidedly imperial twist in the public mind.10 The 1880s and 1890s saw the release of myriad erotic works generated out of the Near East. These were either direct translations from Arabic or English translations of French renderings of Arabic tales, as in the various versions of The Perfumed Garden. In the mid- to late-1880s, long-time colonial civil servant and diplomat Richard F. Burton brought together a set of Arabic tales under the title The Book of a Thousand Nights and a Night, published on a subscription only basis by the so-called Kamashastra Society. This famous work featured a ‘Terminal Essay’, which expounded the theory of a ‘Sotadic Zone’ of permissive male homosexuality,

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 ROSS G. FORMAN located largely in the colonial world. Burton’s essay was, according to Dane Kennedy, a crucial contribution to the formation of homosexuality as a distinct type of sexual identity because it was ‘the first serious inquiry into same-sex liaisons to address a public audience in Britain’.11 Thus Empire became a tool in expanding the arena of sexual experience and in familiaris- ing Britons with new sexual subjectivities. In 1897, Henry Havelock Ellis and John Addington Symonds published the first volume of Studies in the Psychology of Sex, entitled Sexual Inversion. They, too, sought to justify tolerance towards homosexuality through an anthropological survey of same-sex practices worldwide, underpinning it with a Darwinian pairing of progress with increasing tolerance. ‘I do not know whether it has been pointed out that in the evolution of culture the popular attitude towards homosexuality has passed through three different stages, roughly corresponding to the stages of savagery, barbarism, and civilisation’, Sexual Inversion states. ‘At first it is primarily an aspect of economics, a question of under- or over-population; and is forbidden or allowed accordingly.’ Thus among primitive societies of the past (and, implicitly, of the present), attitudes towards homosexuality are integrally linked to the preservation of the group through reproduction; it is either discouraged to enhance fertility rates or encouraged to decrease excess competition for scarce resources. ‘Then (as throughout the Middle Ages from the time of Justinian) it becomes primarily a matter of religion, and thus an act of sacrilege.’ In this stage, homosexual behaviour comes under the domain of the principal cultural institution; no longer regulated by pragmatics, it is now subject to penalisation. ‘Now we hear little either of its economic aspects or of its sacrilegiousness; it is for us primarily a disgust- ing abomination, that is, a matter of taste, of aesthetics; and, while unspeak- ably ugly to the majority, it is proclaimed as beautiful by a small minority.’12 Sexual Inversion’s model of homosexuality’s origins is significant because it recognises that the metropolitan codes surrounding heterosexuality and homosexuality – which scholars generally argue were codified in Britain during the fin de sie` cle – were not formulated by the West in isolation, but with explicit reference to the colonial and non-European world. Moreover, the book’s developmental model of homosexuality is intriguing not simply because it links predominant evolutionary ideas about civilisation to sexual politics, but also because in defining homosexuality as a question of taste, it returns to the notion of acquisition. Aesthetics is the organising principle behind Britain’s ability to select appropriate art, food, music and commodities in its colonial trawl; here, it also forms part of the mechanism by which sexuality is chosen. What prevails is a healthy attitude towards admitting diversity into the social body – even if Ellis’s final comments can also be read

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Empire as a critique of the literary movement of aestheticism and decadence and Oscar Wilde’s defence of homosexual love during the 1895 trials. At the more pornographic end of the spectrum were the various compendia of sex acts and practices worldwide produced and disseminated by Charles Carrington [aka Paul Harry Ferdinando] from Paris. In 1896, Carrington published the English edition of a work entitled Untrodden Fields of Anthropology: Observations on the Esoteric Manners and Customs of Semi- Civilised Peoples; Being a Record of Thirty Years’ Experience in Asia, Africa, and America. By a French Army-Surgeon, with a second, revised and expanded edition appearing in 1898. This volume, by one ‘Dr Jacobus X’, purports to be the work of a French colonial army surgeon, reporting on his experiences in Africa, Australasia, Indochina and French Guiana. Untrodden Fields of the Anthropology is typical of late-nineteenth-century pornographic texts in its investment in polymorphous perversity. Again, acquisition becomes the dominant mode for justifying the text’s global reach; the pornographic connoisseur gains fulfilment from a drive to knowledge that is both geographically comprehensive and sexually multiple. Yet far from recycling earlier conceptions of libertinism, in which sexuality is assumed to be fluid precisely because definitional categories have yet to be solidified, books such as Untrodden Fields of Anthropology work according to the opposite principle: the reader’s investment in polymorphism is a product of the proliferating categories of perversity themselves. Thus the pleasure of the text is achieved through transgression, and the more acquisitive the catalogue of acts, the more limitless the possibilities for titillating bound- ary crossing.

Retrospection Untrodden Fields of Anthropology is also typical of fin de sie` cle writing in using the fact of its publication in the 1890s as an excuse to reflect back on the developments and achievements of the nineteenth century as a whole. The end of the nineteenth century was a time of considerable retrospection about Empire. The intent was to trace a genealogy of Empire, often for the purposes of jingoism – to trace a trajectory of national and global identity, culminating in the moment of ‘high imperialism’ – and to combat the ‘Little Englanders’, who argued for retrenchment, rather than further development. J. R. Seeley, in his famous work The Expansion of England (first published in 1883), encapsulated this thinking. Britain, he proclaimed, had grown steadily greater and greater. ‘The prodigious greatness to which it has attained makes the question of its future infinitely important’, he continues, ‘...because it is evident that the great extension of our state exposes it to new dangers,

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 ROSS G. FORMAN from which in its ancient insular insignificance it was free.’13 History, he further argued, was distinctly palpable and crucial to Britons ‘because it is pregnant with the great results which will affect the lives of ourselves and our children and the future greatness of our country’ (p. 359). These sentiments were also disseminated out ‘in empire’ and at more popular levels. The ‘(Anglo-Indian) Optimist’ who published Essays: Fin de Siecle in India in 1895, argued against the ‘Pessimist’ camp’s belief in end-of-century cataclysm by emphasising how Britain had, ‘all through our history, shown that we possess the most wonderful recuperative power’. England, he continued, parroting the grandest claims of the civilising mission, ‘will come forward with a greater claim than ever on the gratitude of mankind, as the Regenerator and the Pioneer of Civilisation and the Higher Christianity’.14 For both Seeley and the Optimist, history provided the proof positive that Britain could retain and justify her global paramountcy into the next century. Fiction writers, both popular and elite, were quick to follow suit with narratives that used their genre to promote similar didactic aims. Writer after writer revisited the 1857 Indian Mutiny at the end of the century to try to understand how Britain’s preeminence in the world had developed – the Mutiny being a key moment for the transition from corporate imperialism under the East India Company to direct imperialism under the crown. Writers also enlisted retrospection in their quest to heal old wounds. As Flora Annie Steel explained in the preface to her Mutiny novel On the Face of the Waters (1897), the ‘Great Rebellion’ was ‘a time which neither the fair race nor the dark one is ever likely quite to forget or to forgive’.15 Ironically, the object of her novel revisiting this moment was to make such forgetting possible, to turn bygones into bygones. Not only was there a surge in narratives about important events in Britain’s imperial history, such as the Mutiny and the Opium Wars, but there was also a rediscovery of Britain’s subjugated past during the Roman period. Although the most famous example of this pattern is Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1898), where the narrator Marlow links Britain’s contemporary imperialist drives to the uncivilised, blue-painted Britons encountered centuries earlier by the Romans, the connection itself was widely promulgated, especially in adventure fiction and children’s periodicals such as the Boy’s Own Paper. George Alfred Henty’s Through the Sikh War: A Tale of the Conquest of the Punjaub (1893)andRujub the Juggler (1893), also known as In the Days of the Mutiny: A Military Novel, were complemented by Beric the Briton: A Story of the Roman Invasion (1892). Writers also reinterpreted contemporary conflicts, such as the Boxer Rebellion, through a retrospective lens. Henty’s novel about the Boxers, With the Allies to Pekin (1904), for instance, is roughly identical in plot to his Mutiny narrative. Other

100

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Empire writers made the connection more directly. ‘To find something akin in its savage barbarity’, W. A. P. Martin wrote in the year of the conflict itself, ‘you must go back to Lucknow, where a mixed multitude shut up in the Residency were holding out against fearful odds in expectation of relief by Havelock’s Highlanders, resolved to perish of starvation rather than surrender, for the fate of Cawnpore stared them in the face.’16 When a multinational force led by the British eventually ended the Boxers’ siege of the British Legation, the decisive victory over the renegade Chinese served to recuperate the more tenuous victory forty-three years earlier in the Sepoy Rebellion. It also ratified the new model of international cooperation, whereby Britain would provide leadership but not necessarily assert full control. Boys’ and girls’ adventure novels such as these, mass-marketed and given away to children at schools, reinvented the Empire around issues of personal heroism. With their young protagonists and subtitles filled with words such as ‘grit’, ‘pluck’, and ‘courage’, these works also implicated their audience in Britain’s greatness by remaking the readers according to their hero’s models. By emphasising personal agency and integrity, these texts characterised Empire not in terms of larger social, political, economic and religious issues but in terms of the individual. This concentration on the role of the hero, coupled with the growth of the genre of biography, can be interpreted as another element in the shift of relationships between the individual and the masses that characterised the incoming modernist project. Although certainly not in sympathy with the modernist drive to render the psychology of the individual through techniques such as free indirect discourse, stream of consciousness and interior monologue, nevertheless, adventure fiction of this period shares with modernism a desire to personalise history. Paralleling the optimism about British expansion that adventure fictions inculcated was a renewed interest in the failure of rival imperial projects, notably those of Spain and Portugal, but also those of the Ottomans and even the Mughals and Marathas. Generally, these narratives about other Empires had a liberationist subtext. For instance, Henty’s With Cochrane the Dauntless: A Tale of the Exploits of Lord Cochrane in South American Waters (1897) links its title character’s military genius in helping South American states obtain their independence from Spain and Portugal (and later Greece’s independence from Turkey) to his ulterior and altruistic motives: his ‘generous enthusiasm for the oppressed’.17 Cochrane’s miracu- lous ability to ‘infuse some of his own mad spirit into these indolent Brazilians’ (p. 358) is such that ‘in the course of six months, Lord Cochrane had with practically but one fighting ship put an end to the Portuguese domination in Brazil, had captured three strong fortresses, driven three large bodies of troops across the Atlantic, taken an immense number of prizes, a vast quantity of

101

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 ROSS G. FORMAN naval and military stores, and had annexed to Brazil a territory more than half as large as Europe, a record unapproached in the world’s history’ (p. 378). Conquering on behalf of others, in other words, was almost as worthwhile as enlarging Britannia’s own realm – or was at least its natural corollary. If nothing else, Britain could inspire shiftless Catholics in the Americas and ‘lazy natives’ elsewhere so they could achieve what otherwise they could not do on their own. Other writers revisited the recent past of the slave trade to characterise the Spanish and Portuguese as cruel traffickers in human merchandise; British sailors and captains played the role of liberator in these narratives. The British had made literature out of the suppression of the slave trade in the South Atlantic since before the mid-1840s, when the Aberdeen Act granted the British navy the right of search and seizure over ships suspected of carrying slaves between the west coast of Africa and the Americas and set up ‘mixed courts’ of adjudication in Sierra Leone and Brazil. Yet the late- nineteenth-century resurgence of interest in the topic had a new function: to counter any notion that Britain’s Empire could be subject to a decline and fall like that of Spain and Portugal’s by projecting a compassionate and benevolent maritime imperialism back over the course of the century. If slavery was the subject of these fables, the slaves themselves were not. Far from individualising their African characters, as some earlier slave squadron novels did, fin de sie` cle works were mainly concerned with inter-imperial conflicts – and the supremacy of British beneficence.18 Harry Collingwood’s 1886 novel The Congo Rovers: A Story of the Slave Squadron19 pits Spanish slavers not only against Her Majesty’s officers, but also against the anglicised Don Manuel Carnero and his half-English daughter Don˜a Antonia. In this narrative, British intervention against the evils of the traffic in slaves is final not only because the squadron defeats the traders, but also because it leads to the ‘good’ Spanish identity being subsumed into the British one. Antonia marries a Briton in an act of historical wish fulfilment writ small. The union allegorises the British desire to bring Spain, Portugal and their former colonies in America into its fold economically, religiously and politically. Popular writers also rediscovered Spanish imperialism’s cruel subjugation of indigenous peoples in Latin America during this period. The defeats of Moctezuma and Tupac Amaru, the ‘last Inca’, were all the subject of novels at the fin de sie` cle. H. Rider Haggard had earlier resurrected a lost Arab empire in sub-Saharan Africa in She. As the end of the century approached, he looked Westwards to the imperial past of the Americas, retelling the story of Spain’s defeat of the Aztecs in his 1893 novel Montezuma’s Daughter. Two years earlier, Henty had published By Right of Conquest; or, With Cortez in Mexico. Thomas William Hand and Walter Teale, showmen who

102

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Empire toured Canada with ‘pyro-spectacular’ dramas about military events such as the Siege of Lucknow and the First Opium War, also produced the grand spectacle of The Conquest of Mexico and Death of Montezuma. With the Aztec ruler in chains and the cataclysmic eruption of the volcanoes Popo and Ixtac as a backdrop, Hand and Teale’s elaborate fusion of fireworks and theatrics was meant to show ‘the greed and cruelty of the Spaniards, the rising of an alarmed and insulted nation, the struggle for possession and the destruction of the ancient capital of a falling race’.20 Whereas the grand finale of the burning Chinese capital in their The Bombardment of Pekin represented Britain’s triumph, in Mexico’s case, even God seems angry at the depredations of the Spanish and their form of imperial expansion.21 The ostensibly oppressive nature of non-Western empires offered another way for Britons to affirm themselves as liberators, rather than conquerors. In these geographical contexts, often what was at stake was the treatment of women. Although Britain had outlawed the custom of a widow (or sati) immolating herself on her husband’s funeral pyre in 1829, it still functioned as a metaphor for women’s oppression by Indian men in the 1890s. In 1895, Mrs Archibald Little (Alicia Bewicke) founded the anti-footbinding organisation Tien Tsu Hui (or Natural Feet Society) with the similar aim of saving Chinese women from being crippled for the sake of their menfolk. Footbinding, a specifically Manchu custom, was explicitly linked to the subjugation of the Han Chinese by a ‘foreign’ power; as such, it was also a symbol of the Manchu’s unfitness to govern. Whatever their good intentions, the actions of reformers like Little resemble problematic Western efforts to stop female genital mutilation in Africa today in that they asserted the moral superiority of the British and represented them as a humanising force. Where freedom and liberation offered a self-validating view of Britain’s relations with foreign rivals, many writers also sought to differentiate Britain from her neighbours by locating the source of their imperial losses in their divergent sexual politics. Theorising the acceptance or encouragement of miscegenation as the root of the problem, these writers heralded Britain’s proscrip- tion of relationships across the ‘colour line’ as one of Britain’s bulwarks against the decline that others had suffered. Articulatingawidelyheldtheoryaboutthe Portuguese, for instance, Richard Burton saw the sixteenth-century viceroy Afonso de Albuquerque’s fostering of miscegenation in Goa as a ‘fatal flaw’. The idea that bad sexual politics were behind imperial demise was certainly not new; Edward Gibbon had alluded to it in TheDeclineandFalloftheRoman Empire (1776–88). What was new, however, was the notion that the policing of racial boundaries through sex was an ideological goal of the state. The prominence of eugenics (a term coined in 1883 by Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton) during this period was a further symptom of this shift.22

103

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 ROSS G. FORMAN

Degeneration The racialisation of notions of decline manifested itself most spectacularly at the end of the century in the concept of degeneration. New ways of viewing racial evolution opened up the possibility that devolution could also be occurring. On the one hand, the moment of high imperialism marked the zenith for notions of the ‘civilising mission’. It was hardly a coincidence that Kipling’s famous poem ‘The White Man’s Burden’ was occasioned by the US’s gain of control over the Philippines during the Spanish American War. Kipling’s exhortation that America live up to its responsibility to educate and civilise its newly conquered ‘sullen peoples’ appealed to the bright side of progress; it was part of the dismantling of the ‘ladder of races’ which, for much of the nineteenth century, had proposed that race was destiny. On the other hand, if ‘natives’ could be educated out of their savagery and into modernity, so too could the civilised revert back to their savage origins. Degeneracy could manifest itself on the individual level, as in the case of the ‘tropicalised’ white coloniser, whose physical and moral constitution deteriorated under the influence of an unhealthy climate.23 Or it could manifest itself on the social level, as in the idea that the rapidity of Western progress had physically and morally ‘exhausted’ intellectual elites. The acquisitive imperative of fin de sie` cle culture could also be seen as a potential antidote to degeneration, as the drive to infuse new energy in an anaemic civilisation.24 Degeneration theory gave a new twist to social Darwinism by arguing that the resurfacing of ‘primitive’ traits explained a host of ills experienced by modern civilisation. It asserted a particular version of the maxim ‘ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny’ by equating the development of the individual from birth to adulthood to the development of the human species from savagery to civilisation. Thus childhood was the modern analogue of primitiveness. Not only were children like savages, but problematic adults in the Western world were also regressive in two ways: they were both childlike and primitive. Atavism was the underlying characteristic motivating these comparisons. Children and primitives were both groups who placed the needs of the individual above the needs of the social whole. They were also both groups that lacked the ability to control or regulate their various lusts and desires. When Van Helsing repeatedly refers to Dracula’s ‘child-brain’ in Stoker’s novel, for instance, the scientist invokes and popularises the notion of the degenerative type in this dual form. Degenerate types as popularly conceived also manifested themselves in the new analogies that late-Victorian writers and social analysts began to draw between the impoverished working classes of Britain’s cities and the colonial

104

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Empire primitives of Britain’s overseas possessions. In common with invasion and reverse colonisation narratives, many of these works saw Britain – and in particular London – as an imperial frontier or crucible, the double, as Joseph McLaughlin points out, of colonial and imperial places and peoples.25 The increasing physical separation between rich and poor and the burgeoning interest in mapping the city made geography as anatomy a common feature of Victorian representations of London.26 The result was that metaphors of savagery and barbarism developed ‘out in empire’ were redeployed ‘at home’. The phrase ‘outcast London’, which gained currency during this period, itself conjured up this colonial context, with its echoes of the racially and religiously defined class structure in India known as the caste system. The sexual promiscuity of the working classes mirrored that of primitive groups and led similarly to overpopulation and poverty.27 The methodology for studying Britain’s poor had also changed. As slum literature gained popularity and the slum novel developed into a discrete genre in the 1870sand1880s, the anthropologist’s gaze turned inward. ‘There are not wanting signs that the ‘‘one-roomed helot’’ and his brood are about to receive a little scientific attention’, George Sims facetiously commented in his slum reform tract How the Poor Live (1889). ‘They have become natural curiosities, and to this fact they may owe the honour in store for them, of dividing public attention with the Zenanas, the Aborigines, and the South Sea Islanders.’28 Reformers like Sims chastised the British public that charity – and the civilising mission – begins at home. With and without sarcasm (and with or without accusations of hypocrisy), they reminded readers of Britain’s role as the liberator of oppressed peoples worldwide, the role expressed so cogently by the period’s adventure fiction, and cajoled them to extend their humanitarianism to the outcasts on their own door- steps. Or as the pseudonymous Wo Chang exhorted Britons in England through Chinese Spectacles (1897), a work much admired by Carpenter, ‘don’t be always turning the thick end of the telescope to other nations when you look at their faults, while you turn only the thin end of the glass upon the sins of your own country’.29 Still, analogies between the poor in Britain and the poor in the Empire ran both ways. In the preface to the ‘new’ 1898 edition of The Complete Indian Housekeeper & Cook, for instance, Flora Annie Steel and Grace Gardiner pointed to the ‘political’ side of domestic economy. They argued that by translating the ‘theory that a thing is worth what you can get for it’ to India, Britain was replicating its domestic ‘difficulties between labour and capital’ on the subcontinent.30 The result, they concluded, would be the institution of a poor rate in India. Reversing the common relationship between urban poverty and degeneration as an importation of colonial weaknesses, Steel

105

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 ROSS G. FORMAN and Gardiner invoke the more liberal notion of Britain as an exporter of social ills. That such an overtly political statement precedes a cookbook dedicated to ‘English girls to whom fate may assign the task of being house-mothers in our Eastern Empire’ (p. v) should not be surprising. The 1890s were a time of increasing feminist visibility. They were also a period in which women actively contested the argument that they should be confined to the domestic realm through an analogy between the purportedly separate spheres of women’s and men’s worlds and the home and away of empire. Moreover, Britain’s ‘odd women’ were choosing to move to the Empire abroad, sometimes to seek husbands or care for siblings, and sometimes, as with the heroine of Olive Schreiner’s short story ‘The Buddhist Priest’s Wife’ (written in 1891–2), to seek adventure when unable to secure love on their own terms at home. The publication of journalist H. M. Stanley’s In Darkest Africa, or the Quest, Rescue, and Retreat of Emin, Governor of Equatoria in 1890 marked a turning point in the representation of impoverished London as an outpost of Empire. From this moment onwards, reformers increasingly applied the rhetoric of Africa as the ‘dark continent’ to the slums of Britain’s major cities. In 1890, William Booth, the head of the Salvation Army movement, published In Darkest England and the Way Out. In the initial chapter of this massive work, Booth explores what he calls ‘the African parallel’, comparing London to the jungles described in Stanley’s travelogue. ‘Civilisation, which can breed its own barbarians, does it not also breed its own pygmies?’ Booth asks. ‘May we not find a parallel at our own doors, and discover within a stone’s throw of our cathedrals and palaces similar horrors to those which Stanley has found existing in the great Equatorial forest?’31 A year later, Margaret Harkness’s novel Captain Lobe was reissued as In Darkest London. It, too, likened the conditions of the urban jungle to those of the imperial heartland. Perhaps more accurately, Andrew Mearns in his slum tract The Bitter Cry of Outcast London (1883) proclaimed that the ‘horrors’ of the ‘pestilential rookeries’ in which the abject poor lived ‘call to mind what we have heard of the middle passage of the slave ship’.32 Shifting the blame for the problem from the environment of the urban jungle itself onto the systems of exploitation which penned in these people, Mearns’s analogy with the outlawed slave trade highlights how the abuse of labour – not racialised degeneration or innate primitivity – lies at the heart of the comparison between Africa and England. In any event, the ‘African parallel’ was so prominent that charity organisations, including the London Missionary Society, sent many of their workers to the docks and slums for training among the urban heathens before posting them overseas. As Simon Joyce notes, ‘With such a Darwinian model

106

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Empire of progress, it made perfect sense to treat the East End like a backwater of empire, and to work through the same ameliorative strategies that had proven successful abroad.’33 In a further conflation of discourses about Africa and Asia under the umbrella of the universal primitive, London’s division into the East and the West Ends became a metonym for the global division of East and West on the colonial map. Often without irony or self-awareness, writers applied Kipling’s dictum that ‘East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet’ to the zones of the imperial capital.34 That East London was home to a burgeoning number of Jews escaping persecution in Eastern Europe further added to this Orientalist picture. In fact, journalism and fiction about London’s small Chinese community in Limehouse often invoked the Yellow Peril as a foil to its real object of concern, the ‘threat’ of the Jews populating nearby areas. Thus the double mapping of Africa and the East was complemented by the double mapping of anti-Chinese and anti- Semitic sentiment.

Stocktaking Beyond degeneration, what this imagery of the urban poor at the imperial centre also signalled was the inward, reflective turn that characterised fin de sie` cle thinking about Empire across a wide variety of genres and political and philosophical orientations. Retrospection, acquisition and degeneration were all key ways in which Britain and her myriad subjects managed the challenges, threats and opportunities that the Empire’s high profile during this period thrust upon them. Like it or not, the end of the century provided an excuse for everyone in this ‘nation of shopkeepers’ to take stock of Britain’s relationship to the external world. But the British had no monopoly on this exercise in imperial stocktaking; the fin de sie` cle was also a moment when Americans, colonial subjects and foreign intellectuals all memorialised Britain and her overseas possessions from an outsider’s perspective. In some instances, the reflections of foreigners and colonial subjects were intended for audiences back home and disseminated in their own languages. Often, these were adulatory works, written by foreign elites and representing the British as they themselves would like to be seen – as liberators and upholders of the standard of freedom across the globe. In the context of political repression at home, South American intellectuals and abolitionists Rui Barbosa and Joaquim Nabuco both published such views of Britain’s political and social systems in Brazilian newspapers in the mid-1890s and quickly anthologised them.35 Both praised the spirit of freedom and humanity in Britain and her

107

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 ROSS G. FORMAN institutions – although Nabuco added the caveat, when his articles appeared in book form in 1900, that he had written the pieces before the outbreak of the South African War. More commonly, however, works by outsiders were travel accounts of visits to Britain, India or other sites of Empire. In many instances they were highly critical of Britain’s imperial conduct or of the disjunction between British ideals and the realities on the ground at home and in Empire. In many instances, too, their works were published in English, with a largely British and metropolitan audience in mind. Their purpose was to prompt the British to take another look at themselves, as was the case with Wo Chang, a self- proclaimed ‘Chinese subject – long resident under the British flag’ (p. 266), and T. N. Mukharji, the Bengal civil servant who came to London to super- vise India’s arts and manufactures displays at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition of 1886. In fact, with the choice of the word ‘spectacles’ rather than ‘eyes’, the very title of Wo Chang’s England through Chinese Spectacles announces its goal of offering a corrective lens for readers to see ‘some of those defects which may perhaps be allowed to go too far in neutralising the nobler tendencies of the British nation’ (pp. xi–xii).WoChangisopenlycriticalof Britain’s treatment of his country throughout the nineteenth century, and in a passage quoted by Carpenter in his Humane Review article, he reviles the British government for responding to Chinese attempts to suppress the opium trade with outrage and gunboat diplomacy. ‘Of this mock-heroic indignation of Britain when a smaller nation refuses to put its stores of wealth and enrichment entirely at her mercy’, Carpenter commented in his gloss on the passage, ‘our war with the Transvaal is a painful instance’ (p. 195). What is most striking about England through Chinese Spectacles is the way in which Wo Chang’s account characterises British society by replicating the discourse of reverse colonisation, invoking the vocabulary of savagery and primitivity familiar to British readers both from the Yellow Peril fiction of writers like Shiel and the slum literature of Booth, Harkness and their fellow reformers. However, if, like Sims, he invites the British to turn their anthropological gaze inwards, the object of his study is not the outcasts themselves, but the structural mechanisms that create them. ‘Barbarous’ is the word he uses to describe the ‘country of my adoption’ in his final chapter on ‘The Land Question in England’; moreover, the ‘destitution, squalor, pauperism, and crime, which brood over the United Kingdom like a hideous nightmare’ are of ‘savage origin’ (p. 266). But in this articulation of the storm cloud of the nineteenth century, the emphasis is on how savagery arises from Britain’s unjust laws and institutions.

108

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Empire

Wo Chang concludes by offering a vision of China that few in Britain would have recognised, but one which works by turning the prevalent idea that China is the topsy-turvy antithesis of Britain entirely on its head. He reverses the notion of Oriental despotism and decay, averring that the Chinese of all nations have the greatest respect for inalienable rights and liberties. And he proposes that Asian stasis, which for imperialists was always the hallmark of the East’s resistance to modernity and industrialisation, is actually the stability that fin de sie`cleBritainwants: ‘For 1200 years at least have the people [of China] enjoyed a degree of quietude for which Europe will have a long time to wait, while the most correct public morals have been built up, assuring to one and all an amount of happiness from which, I fear, England is still a long way off’ (p. 291). Against the backdrop of more than a millennium of peace and prosperity, Wo Chang seems to be asking, how much do Britain’s century of imperial expansion and her contemporary fears of imminent collapse really matter? In its glorification of China as all that Britain desires to be, England through Chinese Spectacles seems at the opposite pole from the myriad ways that Britain sought to represent herself to herself at the end of the nineteenth century. Yet there is a curious convergence, as well, in the book’s emphasis on time and space as the key essentials of modern life. If China was the other side of the world for Britain, the future was the other side of the past, and prediction complemented retrospection as a means of grappling with the end of an era. Nowhere was this doubling of past and future more evident than in late- nineteenth-century adventure fiction, which was rapidly embracing the mode of writing that we now call science fiction. Thus towards the end of The Yellow Danger, Shiel indulges in a prophecy about airplanes, which, he says, will be the ‘paramount motif’ of the new century (p. 346). ‘When the journey from London to Pekin became a matter of a few hours’, he writes, ‘and a thing easy to each man, then Man, and each man, might be said, for the first time, to possess the earth’ (p. 347). By annihilating space, ‘boats of air’ will bring the ‘annihilation of other sorts of spaces – of the space, for example, between you and me’ (p. 347). With hindsight, it is easy to mock this promise of a Britain that unifies the world by ruling the air as it formerly ruled the seas. But Shiel’s vision of speeded-up transportation and communication as the catalyst for change, both good and evil, flags up just how crucial he and his fin de sie` cle compatriots believed Empire would be to Britain’s future.

109

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 ROSS G. FORMAN

NOTES

1 M. P. Shiel, The Yellow Danger, London, Grant Richards, 1898,p.347. 2 On the imperial Gothic, see Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1988, pp. 227–53. 3 J. Astley Cooper, ‘Americans and the Pan-Britannic Movement’, The Nineteenth Century, 38 (1895), 426–41 (p. 441). 4 Christine Ferguson, ‘Nonstandard Language and the Cultural Stakes of Stoker’s Dracula’, ELH, 71 (2004), 229–49 (p. 245). 5 Walter Frewen Lord, The Lost Empires of the Modern World: Essays in Imperial History, London, Richard Bentley and Son, 1897,p.3. 6 Edward Carpenter, ‘Empire: In India and Elsewhere’, The Humane Review, 1 (1900), 193–207 (p. 207). 7 Peter H. Hoffenberg, An Empire on Display: English, Indian, and Australian Exhibitions from the Crystal Palace to the Great War, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2001,p.27. 8 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. I, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1981,p.22. 9 Thomas Richards, The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire, London, Verso, 1993,p.73. 10 Philippa Levine, Prostitution, Race, and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire, New York, Routledge, 2003,p.91. 11 Dane Kennedy, ‘‘‘Captain Burton’s Oriental Muck Heap’’: The Book of the Thousand Nights and the Uses of Orientalism’, Journal of British Studies, 39 (2000), 317–39 (pp. 336–7); Richard F. Burton, ‘Terminal Essay’, A Plain and Literal Translation of the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, Now Entituled The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night with Introduction[,] Explanatory Notes on the Manners and Customs of Moslem Men and a Terminal Essay upon the History of The Nights, Vol. X, Benares [London], Kamashastra Society, 1886, pp. 63–302. 12 Henry Havelock Ellis and John Addington Symonds, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Vol. I, Sexual Inversion, London, Wilson and Macmillan, 1897, pp. 156–7. 13 J. R. Seeley, The Expansion of England: Two Courses of Lectures, 2nd edn, London, Macmillan, 1895,p.2. 14 ‘An (Anglo Indian) Optimist’ [Charles William Whish], ‘The Aggressive Anglo- Saxon’, Essays: Fin de Siecle [sic], Allahabad, The Pioneer Press, 1895,p.87. 15 Flora Annie Steel, On the Face of the Waters, London, William Heinemann, 1897, p. vi. 16 W. A. P. Martin, The Siege in Peking: China Against the World, Edinburgh, Oliphant Anderson & Ferrier, 1900,p.16. 17 George Alfred Henty, With Cochrane the Dauntless: A Tale of the Exploits of Lord Cochrane in South American Waters, London, Blackie & Son, 1897, p. vi. 18 On works of the period from the 1830stothe1850s, see Catherine Gallagher, ‘Floating Signifiers of Britishness in the Novels of the Anti-Slave-Trade Squadron’, in Wendy S. Jacobson (ed.), Dickens and the Children of Empire, Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2000,pp.78–93.

110

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Empire

19 Henry Collingwood [William Joseph Cosens Lancaster], The Congo Rovers: A Story of the Slave Squadron, London, Blackie & Son, 1886. 20 Thomas William Hand and Walter Teale, The Conquest of Mexico and Death of Montezuma: A Pyro-Spectacular Drama, Ottawa, T. W. Hand Firework Co., Limited, 1903,p.1. 21 Hand and Teale, Hand and Teales’ [sic] Pyro-Spectacular Drama, The Bombard- ment of Pekin, By the British and French. Time 1860, n.p., Thomas William Hand and Walter Teale, 1899. 22 Nancy Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain, 1800–1960, Hamden, CT, Archon Books, 1982,p.111. 23 Stepan, ‘Biological Degeneration: Races and Proper Places’, in J. Edward Chamberlain (ed.), Degeneration: The Dark Side of Progress, New York, Columbia University Press, 1985,pp.97–120 (p. 104). 24 Cannon Schmitt, Alien Nation: Nineteenth-Century Gothic Fictions and English Nationality, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997,p.154. 25 Joseph McLaughlin, Writing the Urban Jungle: Reading Empire in London from Doyle to Eliot, Charlottesville, University of Virginia Press, 2000,p.4. 26 Mary Burgan, ‘Mapping Contagion in Victorian London: Disease in the East End’, in Debra N. Mancoff and D. J. Trela (eds.), Victorian Urban Settings: Essays on the Nineteenth-Century City and Its Contexts, New York, Garland Publishing, 1996, pp. 43–56 (p. 44). 27 Seth Koven, Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London, Princeton University Press, 2004,p.61. 28 George R. Sims, How the Poor Live, and Horrible London, London, Chatto & Windus, 1889,p.64. 29 Wo Chang [pseud.], England through Chinese Spectacles: Leaves from the Notebook of Wo Chang, London, The Cotton Press, 1897,p.213. 30 Flora Annie Steel and Grace Gardiner, The Complete Indian Housekeeper & Cook, London, William Heinemann, 1898, p. vii. 31 William Booth, In Darkest England and the Way Out, London, International Headquarters of the Salvation Army, 1890, pp. 11–12. 32 Andrew Mearns, The Bitter Cry of Outcast London: An Inquiry into the Condition of the Abject Poor, London, James Clarke, 1883,p.4. 33 Simon Joyce, Capital Offenses: Geographies of Class and Crime in Victorian London, Charlottesville, University of Virginia Press, 2003,p.216. 34 Rudyard Kipling, ‘The Ballad of East and West’ (1889), in Rudyard Kipling: Complete Verse, New York, Anchor Books, 1989,p.233. 35 Rui Barbosa, Cartas de Inglaterra, Rio de Janeiro, Leuzinger, 1896; Joaquim Nabuco, Minha formac¸a˜o, Rio de Janeiro, H. Garnier, 1900.

111

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 6

MARGARET D. STETZ Publishing industries and practices

‘The real revolution in British publishing in the reign of Queen Victoria was that it became a fully fledged industry, turning over millions of pounds, conducting its affairs in a businesslike manner, and dealing fairly with the 1 different interest groups within it and around it.’ So wrote John Feather in 1988, using a term (‘industry’) that the twentieth century came to accept as a seemingly uncontroversial and unproblematic one to describe the sphere from which texts issue and through which they circulate. At the fin de sie` cle, however, no one could have called publishing an ‘industry’ so breezily, without comment. The word still bore a wealth of associations and evoked a wide range of both negative and positive feelings that made its usage a vexed matter. It was a label fraught with political meaning, and some members of the late-Victorian world of books and periodicals accepted it gladly, even as others rejected it as antithetical to their beliefs and to the ways in which they worked or wished to work. With so many of the important ideological conflicts at the end of the nineteenth century focused on labour, the notion of publishing as occupying the status of an industry inserted itself squarely amidst these discussions, and was much debated. The image of machinery, moreover, on which this idea relied – whether of factory machines or of the human brain and hands as potential sources of mechanised and standardised labour – had enormous resonance among publishers, printers, editors and authors alike. One response, as modelled by the Aesthetes of the 1880sand1890s, was to deny outright that Art (always with a capital ‘A’) had anything to do with the collective undertakings and division of labour demanded by industrial practices; neither did it have any relationship to industriousness. The making of literature was, the Aesthetes insisted, solitary, private, impossible to bind to a schedule, and equally impossible to document. ‘I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning’, Oscar Wilde announced defiantly, ‘and took out a comma.’ As for the rest of his day’s toil, he said, ‘in the afternoon... I put it back again’.2

113

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 MARGARET D. STETZ

For those adherents of the Aesthetic Movement who did not have inherited wealth on which to depend, this public stance was belied by their quite different behind-the-scenes scrambling and scrabbling to support themselves, as they turned out literature in bulk. Wilde himself, who by the late 1880shad a wife and two children but no capital, should be counted among the most industrious (if not the most earnest) of late-Victorian authors. As Richard Ellmann reported, ‘in 1891... he published four books (two volumes of stories, one of critical essays and a novel), a long political essay (‘‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’’) and wrote his first successful play, Lady Windermere’s Fan, as well as most of Salome. Languor was the mask of industry.’3 Especially notable about this catalogue of Wilde’s annual output was not merely its length but its variety, which was determined as much by trends in what would be profitable as by any aesthetic ideals. Wilde, whose creativity and economic need were alike abundant, channelled inspiration into whatever would pay, including such newly popular and indeed pre-eminent publishing formats of the late 1880s and early 1890s as volumes of short stories. All evidence affirms the correctness of Josephine M. Guy’s and Ian Small’s conclusion that ‘the late nineteenth-century literary market was ruthlessly competitive and commercial, and that professional writers who needed to earn a living with their pen were in no place to resist or even contest those values’.4 Even Frederick Rolfe (1860–1913), the spectacularly individualistic Decadent who cloaked the details of his life with the invented persona of ‘Baron Corvo’, made it clear in his autobiographical novel Nicholas Crabbe, Or the One and the Many that he had supported himself at the turn of the century through journalism by bowing to the demands of others and writing at great speed whatever he was commissioned to write. As the narrator of Nicholas Crabbe informs us about the protagonist’s literary efforts,

So, with infinite trouble, he contrived (during the next few days) to excrete certain rot of the kind which is dear to the magazine-editor, to wit – The Romance of a Raphael, The Confessions of a Carnation, Alligator-Hunting in the Andaman Islands, Burke’s Stranded Gentry, 800–1,000 words each, and a new Daynian Folk-lore story about Judas Iscariot of 2,500 words. The last was an afterthought, done to cleanse his clogged and slimy pen.5

What was true for Crabbe was true for Rolfe himself, who in the late 1890s contributed sensational travel narratives and tall tales about having been buried alive to George Newnes’s Wide World magazine at the very moment that he was crafting volumes of aesthetic prose fiction for John Lane’s Bodley Head press. The most famous protest against this state of affairs was George Gissing’s New Grub Street (1891), in which the novelist Edwin Reardon bewails

114

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Publishing industries and practices having to ‘make a trade of an art’ and longs to be employed instead as a mere cog in a firm, which would pay him a salary for rote-work, make no pretence of demanding invention, and relieve him of the desperate uncertainty that goes along with independent literary entrepreneurship. ‘How I envy those clerks who go by to their offices in the morning!’ he exclaims. ‘There’s the day’s work cut out for them: no question of mood and feeling: they have just to work at something, and when the evening comes, they have earned their wages, they are free to rest and enjoy themselves.’6 Though New Grub Street remains the most prominent representation of late-Victorian authorship, and virtually the only one still known today, it was by no means unique, for there were countless short stories, novels, essays, books and memoirs of the period, by women as well as by men, devoted to the subject of authorship. Many of these contained similar reflections upon the conditions faced by professional writers versus the comparatively desirable lot of workers employed in other kinds of businesses. Cosima Chudleigh, the heroine of A Writer of Books (1898) by ‘George Paston’ (the pseudonym of Emily Morse Symonds), bemoans the professional author’s solitary existence and casts a longing look at officework for its possibilities for social exchange, asserting that it is isolation, even more than ‘market’ pressure, that makes the writer’s working environment so dismal and that renders even poorly paid communal enterprises attractive in comparison:

Literature is the most lonely of all trades ... The writer works in silence and privacy, spinning his plot, making his effects, wrestling with his difficulties, with none to see, none to help, none to applaud ...[and] spends long toilsome, lonely months or years upon his book ...Nowadays, when I go into a shop or office I envy the girls who have company to lighten their toil, and fixed wages, 7 and fixed hours for work, instead of having to sit alone at their tasks.

Clearly, gender did matter in determining reactions to the late-Victorian author’s working life. Women seemed to feel more acutely the social depri- vation necessitated by the ‘industrious’ pursuit of a livelihood by the pen, with their daily labours accomplished in solitude. Barred by the code of respectability which still weighed so heavily upon all women of the middle classes, they could neither travel at night unchaperoned nor enter public establishments unescorted. They had, therefore, none of the recourse at the end of the workday to cafes, restaurants and other sites of conversation, pleasure and camaraderie that were open to male authors who had devoted themselves to solitary occupation in the daylight hours. If male and female writers alike used the word ‘envy’ – albeit for different reasons – to describe their view of the working conditions in offices or shops,

115

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 MARGARET D. STETZ they expressed no such positive feelings about the world of ‘industry’ in its more commonly understood sense, as the sphere of factories and machinery. On the contrary, the mere sight of truly industrial environments almost universally filled them with horror, a response bound up not only with sympathy for the workers, but with unacknowledged shame and guilt over their own part in advancing mechanisation. In his short story ‘The Lord of the Dynamos’, which first appeared in the Pall Mall Budget of September 1894, H. G. Wells recreated as a nightmarish and apocalyptic vision of Hell the atmosphere of the building in which large generators ran:

If it were possible we would have the noises of that shed always about the reader as he reads, we would tell all our story to such an accompaniment. It was a steady stream of din, from which the ear picked out first one thread and then another; there was the intermittent snorting, panting, and seething of the steam-engines, the suck and thud of their pistons, the dull beat on the air as the spokes of the great driving wheels came round, a note the leather straps made as they ran tighter and looser, and a fretful tumult from the dynamos; and, over all, sometimes inaudible, as the ear tired of it, and then creeping back upon the senses again, was this trombone note of the big machine. The floor never felt steady and quiet beneath one’s feet, but quivered and jarred. It was a confusing, unsteady place, and enough to send anyone’s thoughts jerking into odd zigzags.8 Most significant was the narrator’s wish to make this deafening ambient noise ‘always about the reader as he reads’, for it did in reality serve as the unheard and unrecognised background ‘accompaniment’ to ‘our story’. Although the ostensible subject of Wells’s attack was the machinery that powered London’s train system, the focus on the reading public suggested a second concern. At the centre of this tale lay an indirect accusation of complicity; those who read magazines and those who wrote for them were equally responsible for the subjection of unnamed labourers to the deplor- able pressroom conditions under which mass-market periodicals at the end of the century were created. The Pall Mall Budget, to which Wells contributed ‘The Lord of the Dynamos’, was a weekly paper which included literature alongside caricatures and illustrations by the likes of Aubrey Beardsley, Max Beerbohm and Arthur Rackham. It was the offshoot of a larger entity: the Pall Mall Gazette, one of the many newspapers that utilised the latest advances in technology. According to N. N. Feltes, the introduction of these machines to speed the printing process led the way toward a new industrial revolution, with new distinctions introduced between workers, and the employment of unapprenticed youths by publishers. The unhappy consequence of this transformation was ‘an

116

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Publishing industries and practices intense struggle between proprietors and workers, as indicating in publishing the steady appropriation of labour-power as fixed capital’.9 Another result was the operation of the pressroom as a place of deafening sound and of what Wells correctly labelled ‘fretful tumult’. By appearing regularly in mass-market periodicals and playing the part of ‘a sort of scribbler ... in New Grub Street’, Wells was able in the mid-1890stoearn‘£1,000 a year from this ephemeral journalism’.10 As a socialist and Fabian Society member, however, he was well aware that his own success came at a price to others, especially to the workers who were forced to operate and oversee the mechanised rotary presses needed to turn out such quantities of print. The unprecedented sales enjoyed by Tit-Bits, George Newnes’s digest of information and a vehicle for lower-middle-class entertainment, changed the landscape of British publishing:

Within months [of the founding of Tit-Bits in 1881] there were eleven imita- tions on the market, and by 1891 Newnes’s venture had given rise to a new class of popular weekly which included such titles as Rare-Bits (1881), Scraps (1883), Great Thoughts (1884), Wit and Wisdom (1886), Spare Moments (1888), Snacks (1889), and, most importantly, Answers (1888) and Pearson’s Weekly (1890).11

For professional authors such as H. G. Wells or even the elitist and arrogant Decadent Frederick Rolfe, this expansion of outlets for short stories and essays proved a boon. Both men, in fact, contributed to Pearson’s Weekly, which was characterised by its aim of allowing readers ‘to keep their eyes busy while their brains took a rest’,12 but which nonetheless issued one of Wells’s most important novellas, The Invisible Man, in two instalments in 1897. At the end of the century, the overlap between so-called serious writers, including those who considered themselves Aesthetes or Decadents, and the contributors to the ‘popular weekly’ form whose work appeared in mass-market periodicals that relied upon mass production was enormous. Figures such as Wells and Rolfe often turned out to be associated both with avant-garde, highbrow quarterlies such as the Yellow Book and with the successors to Tit-Bits. As Clement Shorter reported in 1899, a ‘journal of the type of Tit-Bits is produced at the rate of 24,000 an hour’.13 Such volumes of print, Peter McDonald reminds us, were only possible thanks to ‘the modern cost-saving American Hoe Rotary Press’ which George Newnes began using for Tit-Bits in 1892 and which soon became standard.14 Thus, to look at the material conditions underpinning authorship in the 1890s is to see how integrally literary careers in general were bound up with the realities of an ‘industry’ in the most familiar and literal sense – i. e., in terms of factory-style conditions of production.

117

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 MARGARET D. STETZ

If authors expressed distaste for the idea of publishing as an industry, even as they exploited the opportunities afforded by mass production, those who made and distributed books or periodicals also anguished over the implications of increased mechanisation. Among the most significant developments of the 1890s was the proliferation of alternatives to the industrialisation of publishing, through the establishment of small presses specialising in fine printing, which usually meant that they reinstated hand-printing and manual typesetting and opposed the move toward higher-speed, mechanised printing and typesetting as a corruption of their art by capitalist business concerns. These ventures were often linked politically and philosophically to the Arts and Crafts Movement and, more specifically, to British socialism. Chief among them was, of course, William Morris’s Kelmscott Press. For Morris, as Fiona MacCarthy explains, establishing this press was ‘not just a matter of a new approach to the meaning of the making of the book. More importantly this was a new concept of a press as a community with a life and a creative volition of its own.’15 The collective ideal, nevertheless, was difficult to realise and to sustain. Such efforts often relied less upon the cooperation and dedication of a community and more upon the autonomous decisions and labours of a single, sometimes autocratic visionary. The Kelmscott Press did not long survive Morris’s death in 1896. Establishing a press devoted to fine printing demanded, moreover, immense amounts of unremunerated labour and time. Only someone who was already well-to-do, with no need to earn a livelihood could enjoy the luxury of such an ambition. When, for instance, the book designer Charles Ricketts – who had already supplied the Bodley Head with the stunningly aesthetic binding, title-page and illustrations for Oscar Wilde’s The Sphinx (1894) – determined to found a press of his own, the start-up effort involved was lengthy, challenging and largely solitary:

Through the last months of 1894 and all of 1895 Ricketts was at work prepar- ing for his press. His original plan had been to use Jenson’s type, but before long he decided like Morris to design his own. After careful study of the great masters of typography he produced his fount, though the six months he had set aside for this lengthened into a year. In addition there were initial letters, borders and illustrations to do, all of which he designed and cut himself, an arduous and time-consuming task when a border alone could take up to a 16 month to engrave.

Publishers, too, who began with idealistic goals sometimes resorted over time to compromises with technology and with ‘industry’ in the undesirable sense. Joseph Dent, a printer and bookbinder who started the publishing firm known as J. M. Dent, was a highminded admirer of the Arts and Crafts

118

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Publishing industries and practices

Movement and of socialism. His memoirs offer ardent testimony to his hatred of machinery, as well as to the epiphanic experience in 1888, of his first sight of Florence, on a trip organised by the philanthropic Travellers’ Club and ‘carried out on co-operative principles’. Dent writes of this journey,

I can never make anyone understand what the revelation of this wondrous old world meant to me. Here was a city built before industrialism had destroyed the spirit of beauty, where man had lived by something other than money-making, luxury and power. A city of flowers, indeed, and a city beautified by men’s handicraft.

One consequence of this visit, which Dent credits with having begun ‘to widen my vision of the world and to develop any sense of the beautiful I had in me’,17 was his dedication in the 1890s to projects that were as esoteric and ambitious as they were commercially risky. Such was his edition of Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, for which he commissioned illustrations in 1892 from an untried and unorthodox twenty-year-old artist, Aubrey Beardsley. Despite Dent’s admiration for William Morris, when it came to the Malory project, it was to mechanics that he turned. Stephen Calloway describes the publisher as ‘making use of the new photo-mechanical line-block process for reproduction, in place of Morris’s expressive woodcut technique, and of printing and binding by ordinary commercial means’.18 In the next decade, Dent would go further and initiate the Everyman’s Library, one of the longest lived and most profitable examples of a mass-market series and one that brought reprints of classic texts to consumers through mass production. Other publishers had no such qualms about industry. Among the readiest to embrace technology was George Newnes, who not only reached out across the Atlantic to import American inventions, but also aligned his own business with that of British industries, such as the railway system. The operations of the latter had already been responsible, earlier in the Victorian period, for instituting monumental changes in publishing and reading: ‘Improved systems of distribution, especially national railway systems, allowed for the emergence of a mass circulation popular press.’19 Peter McDonald recounts how Newnes turned eagerly to this vehicle for circulating his wares: ‘within weeks’ of founding Tit-Bits in 1881, ‘he had made arrangements for W. H. Smith’s to sell the paper at their railway bookstalls’. He then went further and, ‘to attract his all-important commuter readership, Newnes introduced a Railway Insurance Scheme, inaugurated in 1885,in which he offered £100 to the next of kin of anyone who died in a railway accident with a copy of Tit-Bits in their possession’.20 Even those publishers who inhabited the seemingly more elitist and less commercially driven realm of aesthetic bookmaking proved keenly alive to

119

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 MARGARET D. STETZ the opportunities of the railways. When John Lane broke with his business associate, Elkin Mathews, in 1894 and spirited away the Yellow Book for a firm of his own that specialised in publishing Aesthetes, Decadents and ‘New Women’, he made sure that his daring new illustrated quarterly would be available at railway stations. Lane’s periodical appeared to target a consumer who was affluent, sophisticated and at home in Paris or Dieppe, but the Yellow Book also sold nicely to those whose experience of travel was confined to a daily commute through Waterloo or Victoria. The glare of its shocking yellow-and-black covers and binding designed by Aubrey Beardsley seemed a well-chosen device to make the magazine particularly conspicuous and eye-catching for those passing hastily by the shelves at W. H. Smith’s on their way to a train. George Newnes’s early experience as a commercial traveller for a firm of haberdashers taught him a valuable lesson about the importance of catering to commuters; John Lane’s employment history did the same. Lane’s first position on arriving in London at the age of sixteen was as a clerk in the Railway Clearing House, the office that oversaw and handled accounts regarding the traffic of freight and passengers throughout all of Britain – a job that certainly primed him to understand the centrality of the railroad to modern existence. Not until ‘the end of 1891’, did Lane in fact decide ‘it was time for him to shake the dust of the Clearing House for ever from his feet’, which meant that his first four years of working in collaboration with Elkin Mathews as a bookshop owner and then as a publisher overlapped with his daily tasks in an office linked to overseeing the running of the railway system.21 Lane’s experience made him savvy to commercial practices in a way that not all of his contemporaries – including his business partner, Elkin Mathews – appeared to be. Perhaps the clearest contrast was between Lane and a figure such as Arthur Symons, who was raised in the unmaterialistic household of his clergyman father before becoming a professional essayist, theatre critic, poet and editor – first of books and then in 1896 of a new magazine, the Savoy, meant to rival directly Lane’s Yellow Book. Lane understood the crucial importance of never offending or alienating either W. H. Smith or the sensibilities of its consumer base. When the social and legal scandal involving Oscar Wilde (whose books Lane was publishing) exploded in April 1895, Lane almost immediately withdrew Wilde’s volumes from his list and then fired Aubrey Beardsley, a lightning-rod for controversy, from the art editorship of the Yellow Book. Symons, on the contrary, was too principled or too naive to recognise what a death knell it was when, after the publication of the Savoy’s third number, the manager of W. H. Smith announced that the firm’s audience of ‘young ladies’ would be offended by its illustrations and that the magazine would no longer be stocked. Symons

120

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Publishing industries and practices neither repudiated the art in question (the manager of Smith’s cited a reproduction of a nude by William Blake) nor broke with Aubrey Beardsley, who was responsible for overseeing the choice of the visual contents of the Savoy. The results were predictable to anyone who comprehended fully the role of the railways in daily life at the fin de sie` cle, and the Savoy folded within months. The ultimate blame for this failure also lay with the magazine’s publisher, Leonard Smithers, who was far better versed in business matters than were either Symons or Beardsley, but who appears to have been too ‘tactful, patient, and open-minded’22 – to use James G. Nelson’s complimen- tary description of him – to put his foot down. Symons’s and Smithers’s backing of Aubrey Beardsley despite the cost to the Savoy, is a salutary reminder that the late-Victorian publishing industry did not always conduct itself with the ruthless commercialism or callous disregard of individuals associated with industrial practices. Loyalty often did weigh heavily alongside concern for profits. Indeed, in many ways, the day-to-day world of the fin de sie` cle publishing house scarcely resembled the operation of an ‘industry’ per se; it retained instead a surprising degree of that air of the domestic and the personal implied by the word ‘house’. Like the British middle-class home the publishing house emphasised the importance of personal connections and allegiances, at the same time that it remained a (more or less) benevolent dictatorship. Richard Maxwell reminds readers, ‘It was William Morris at the end of the century ... who most memorably made this connection between books and houses ... [in which] the book itself can be imagined as a kind of house, whose charmed interiority can be shared on an egalitarian basis.’23 There was nothing egalitarian, however, about the London publishing houses that produced Victorian books. They were bastions of paternalism and of patriarchy; their ‘heads’ ruled autocratically and played favourites. Vitriol and expressions of desire for vengeance pour forth from Frederick Rolfe’s fictionalised account of his dealings with turn-of-the-century publishing houses; yet that does not mean we should dismiss out-of-hand the descriptions in Nicholas Crabbe of how these businesses operated. What Rolfe lays bare quite convincingly is the very personal, intimate, almost incestuous quality of relations between authors and their publishers, as well as among the various London firms, in the final decade of the century. Rolfe’s narrative confirms what J. A. Sutherland later observed: ‘While it was a feature of nineteenth-century business generally that as it expanded the managerial functions tended to separate from the manufacturing, this was not the case with publishing. Authors and printers could expect personal attention from a publisher, even the greatest.’24 When the protagonist, Nicholas Crabbe, seeks work as a paid reader at the offices of his publisher, ‘Slim Schelm’ – Rolfe’s

121

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 MARGARET D. STETZ anti-semitic name for John Lane, who in fact was not Jewish, but whom Rolfe accused of the sharp practices stereotypically assigned, in racist caricatures, to Jews – the publisher draws Crabbe into his own network:

And while you’re in the neighbourhood you might as well go and see Doron Oldcastle Limited [the publisher Grant Richards]. Tell him I sent you. Show him your book. He’s a very pushing young publisher; and I’m sure he’ll be only too glad to give you some MSS. to read. Unfortunately my own reading staff’s quite full; otherwise I should have been most happy. And by the by, you might go to Appleton’s Weekly [Pearson’s Weekly] offices – you know where they are – and ask for Mr Giddy. He was one of my clerks once. Tell him I sent you; and ask him to get you something to do on the paper.25

Meanwhile, the editor of the illustrated quarterly, the Blue Volume (Rolfe’s thinly disguised name for the Yellow Book, which was edited by Henry Harland), to which Crabbe has contributed short stories just as Rolfe himself did, reassures the hungry, anxious author ‘that there was lots of work going begging: the thing was to get to know the proper people. He offered to arrange a hundred introductions.’26 Introductions such as these, whether in writing or in person, were an essential part, if not the foundation, of life in London’s literary and publishing circles. To lack them was to be at a grave disadvantage. In his 1898 guide, How to Publish a Book or Article and How to Produce a Play: Advice to Young Authors, Leopold Wagner announced unequivocally, ‘A young litte´- rateur can scarcely make a mistake if he devote one-half his energies to producing good work, and the other half to making friends and seeking introductions in serviceable quarters.’27 It was here that the world of publishing houses proved especially difficult for women to negotiate, for even though Victorian women held a position of honour – though not usually one of control or of economic power – in the domestic sphere, they were outsiders to the web of masculine socialising. The ‘proper people’ to know (by which Rolfe’s character meant editors, publishers, readers for firms and journalists) were invariably men. In her roman a`clefabout a woman becoming a professional author, The Story of a Modern Woman (1894), Ella Hepworth Dixon describes how the novice journalist and novelist Mary Erle gets ushered into the privileged sanctum of editors’ offices by drop- ping the name of her father, a well-known writer on scientific subjects. Mary Erle’s experience, of course, parallels that of her creator. As the daughter of William Hepworth Dixon, who had served as editor of the Athenaeum, Ella Hepworth Dixon received her contacts in publishing as her paternal inheritance. She had also learned from him such invaluable tips as how to pitch an idea for an article and how to determine the appropriate venue for a given manuscript.

122

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Publishing industries and practices

Few late-Victorian women writers were so fortunate. Most came from middle-class families that lacked connections to the literary profession. Young women who travelled from provincial towns or cities to seek a livelihood in London’s New Grub Street were, like the heroine of ‘George Paston’s’ A Writer of Books (1898) – Emily Morse Symonds’s fictional narrative about a woman learning to be a novelist – ripe for exploitation by men offering to provide for a price the information necessary to success. Angling for sexual favours from the pretty lodger who has arrived at his boarding house and who has a manuscript in her luggage, Mr Carlton, a book critic for several journals, suavely tells her, ‘The big houses want big names. You had much better try one of the smaller firms; I could tell you of two or three who have no objection to launching a promising young writer.’28 Many male writers earned a living by addressing the seemingly insatiable demand for books and magazines that taught readers, especially female readers, how to produce and market a saleable manuscript. From William Robertson Nicoll’s monthly, the Bookman, which was founded in 1891,to Herbert Morrah’s annual, The Literary Year-Book and Bookman’s Directory, countless publications gave both encouragement and practical advice to those seeking a foothold in the literary world. They informed hopeful amateurs that, ‘a most important matter for the writer to bear in mind is, that articles should be of a topical nature ...Again, the old-fashioned article which deals with the dead world in any place is not wanted. The interest of the public is in living people and living material.’29 They also supplied the names and addresses of British publishers of all stripes and detailed the sorts of publications in which each specialised. Recognising the enormous profits to be made from such handbooks, even John Lane got into the game. In 1898 he issued Arnold Bennett’s Journalism for Women: A Practical Guide, which made no effort to disguise the fact that its target readership was the middle-class female audience looking to infiltrate mass-market periodicals. Many women aspirants, however, relied on nothing but what Evelyn Sharp called ‘sheer luck’ in pursuing their literary careers. In her 1933 memoir, Sharp confessed, ‘I had no technical knowledge to guide me, and no literary friends’, when turning her hand to fiction-writing.30 ‘I sent a short story to the ‘‘Yellow Book’’, and a novel I had written before I left home, to the Bodley Head, both of which, as it turned out, were suitable destinations. Through the acceptance of these two manuscripts I came to know Henry Harland and John Lane, and so, within a year of my arrival on that wet evening in the Bloomsbury hostel, I found myself attached to the ‘‘Yellow Book’’ group of writers.’31 To be admitted to such a circle, however, did not always mean that a woman enjoyed the full range of privileges afforded to male peers, such as a

123

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 MARGARET D. STETZ berth as reader for a publishing firm. For many a male novelist, having a steady stream of payments for vetting manuscripts or for reviewing books for periodicals meant being able to direct his energies wholly toward literary occupations that would advance his standing as an insider. A woman writer in the 1890s was more likely to find herself in the sort of situation described later by Netta Syrett, another member of that ‘‘‘Yellow Book’’ group of writers’. In The Sheltering Tree (1939), Syrett provided this account of her financial difficulties at the beginning of her career in the mid-1890s:

[Although] I had ceased to be a professional teacher in the sense of making teaching a whole-time job, the little I earned by writing short stories would not have enabled me to contribute to the expenses of the flat [shared with four siblings in London’s Ashley Gardens], in which I had two rooms to myself, without the lectures I gave in various schools.

Hers was thus a divided life, split between the conventional and respectable role for middle-class ladies of the schoolteacher and the more suspect identity of female author. It was also a physically taxing and demanding existence, requiring her constantly to shift gears and to travel across London, as she fulfilled her many obligations to pupils at several different institutions, while still turning out manuscripts and doing the socialising required of an author who wished to stay connected to literary circles. ‘For a long time’, Syrett revealed, ‘I used to teach all the morning, and when I wasn’t going to a party, write all the evening.’32 Neither John Lane nor Henry Harland appears to have offered her the ‘hundred introductions’ that would have led to the additional work within the publishing business that she needed. Those women authors who, as Joanne Shattock has put it, ‘confronted an almost entirely masculine literary establishment’, but who did manage to cross the barriers and secure appointments in publishing houses or in journalism, found that there were further hurdles to clear.33 Ella D’Arcy, for instance, acted as sub-editor of the Yellow Book during the majority of its three-year run; yet there is no record that suggests she received a salary for this. Henry Harland’s own accounting for the magazine shows the Bodley Head firm owing money only to him and to Aubrey Beardsley for their services.34 Neither, of course, was Henry Harland’s wife Aline compensated for the editorial assistance she gave her husband, who for reasons of health did most of his work for the quarterly at home. Rosamund Marriott Watson (aka ‘Graham R. Tomson’), a fixture in the Yellow Book coterie who nevetheless kept one foot in the opposing camp of W. E. Henley, enemy of the Decadents, faced a problem of a different sort. She was given regular, paid journalistic work, but was forced to confine herself to appropriately feminine topics. Linda Hughes tells us, ‘Though

124

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Publishing industries and practices

Graham R. would have been delighted to cover contemporary art for Henley’s magazine, Henley awarded that plum to male staff, and Graham R. was tapped instead for a feature traditionally associated with women, a fashion column. Her fashion writing ... appeared in the Scots Observer once or twice a month from 12 January 1889 to 12 March 1892.’35 Such an experience of gender discrimination was far from unique. In Women and Journalism (2004), Deborah Chambers, Linda Steiner and Carole Fleming state that ‘in the nineteenth and early twentieth century journalism remained characterised by a sharp gender division of labour in newsrooms ... Those white, middle-class and well-educated women who managed to enter journalism were confined to writing about topics and in a style that contrasted sharply with the straight factual reporting of their male colleagues.’ Few women, too, were allowed to rise to paid editorial positions, except at magazines and newspapers specifically devoted to women’s concerns and geared solely toward a female readership. In the sphere of fiction-writing, women were much more likely than men to be relegated to less prestigious niche markets and, in particular, urged to target their efforts to the lists of juvenile literature. In the late-Victorian period, according to Nigel Cross, ‘Half the women writers ... wrote children’s books. Only 10 per cent of male authors were similarly engaged ... Men who wrote for children were exercising a choice. For the averagely educated but uninspired and inexperienced literary woman there was no choice.’36 It was, of course, male editors and publishers who got to decide who were the ‘uninspired’ women authors fit only to write for children, rather than adults. Had British publishing at the end of the century truly been an industry, run wholly for the sake of maximising profits, women might have encountered fewer obstacles to equal employment. They were, after all, mainstays of late- Victorian manufacturing, turning out everything from matches to clothing, because they worked efficiently and accepted lower rates of pay. But the world of print, which produced both books and periodicals and retained the semi-domestic rhetoric of the late-Victorian publishing firm as a ‘house’, continued to resist the full integration of women. Great ironies attended the situation of the fin de sie` cle woman writer. Laurel Brake avers that in ‘every field of contemporary writing, in newspapers and magazines, in short fiction and the novel, in John Lane’s list, and thus unsurprisingly in the Yellow Book itself, the woman question and the New Woman, and questions of gender more generally’, were among the most pressing and most often discussed issues of the day.37 Most historians of the period appear to concur. Hilary Fraser, Stephanie Green and Judith Johnston conclude that ‘By the 1890s the debate on women’s rights and roles had

125

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 MARGARET D. STETZ found firm footing within the mainstream as well as the radical press.’38 The contradiction was clear and unarguable: women authors frequently were excluded, restricted or marginalised in the upper echelons of print production, particularly at the decision-making level, at the same time that they were welcomed everywhere as a topic of controversy. They were, moreover, featured prominently in campaigns to promote the sales of books and periodicals. An issue of the Bookman of 1892 shows us in action the masculine publishing world’s determination to capitalise upon the figure of the woman writer. The October number of William Robertson Nicoll’s magazine contained in its column called ‘News Notes’, a monthly assemblage of literary gossip and puffs, the following announcement: ‘Mrs. Clifford’s new volume, entitled ‘‘The Last Touches’’, will be published by Messrs. A. and C. Black at the end of October.’39 Readers would have known that the ‘Mrs. Clifford’ referred to here was Lucy Lane Clifford, widow of the mathematician W. K. Clifford, for she was already famous. Her first book, Anyhow Stories (1882), achieved significant commercial success and helped to popularise the genre of literary fairy tales to which Oscar Wilde, ‘George Egerton’ (Mary Chavelita Dunne) and others later contributed. Purchasers of the Bookman would have been taken aback, however, by the second appearance of Clifford’s name in this issue, which occurred in a profile under the heading ‘New Writers’. How could an author whose first success had come ten years earlier be counted as a new writer? The poet William Watson’s article about Clifford began by addressing that very problem. Watson wrote, ‘It is not quite correct to describe Mrs. Clifford as a ‘‘New Writer’’, but her recent success, ‘‘Aunt Anne’’, has widened her reputation so very considerably that she may be said to have taken a fresh start, and to have for the first time clearly established her claim to be looked on as a writer of a high order of fiction.’40 The ruse was transparent. There was indeed no reason to class Clifford among new writers, but so strong was the editor’s wish to publish an essay puffing Mrs Clifford – and to accompany this discussion, with a process engraving that filled one-quarter of the page, displaying the appealing sight of the author’s head and shoulders – that some suitably prominent place to talk up her latest work had to be found. Only when the next issue of the Bookman appeared did the motive for this effort become clear. The November number featured a full-page advertisement taken out by the firm of A. and C. Black, and there at the top of the list of ‘New Novels’ was the title of Clifford’s volume, ‘The Last Touches, and Other Stories’, available at the price of six shillings. The Bookman wanted to entice publishers to buy a full page of advertising space, and it offered in return two tie-ins, as it were, within the magazine’s copy, however forced those might be. The rates printed at the end of the

126

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Publishing industries and practices

October 1892 issue suggest why William Robertson Nicoll hoped to see publishers move from the one-column advertisements that most of them were buying to full-page ads. One column cost £4.40, but a double-column ad brought in £8.00, and there were nine publishers who had bought only half-page or quarter-page ads in October. Lucy Clifford was little more than an object of exchange between Nicoll and the firm established by Adam and Charles Black. Given the continuing position of the professional woman author as a topic of debate in the public imagination, Clifford could attract more attention than could a man, especially if her portrait, too, were reproduced. Clifford’s publisher and the Bookman, a monthly produced by Hodder and Stoughton (which had its own stable of female novelists to market), chose Clifford as their focus and conspired to promote a woman writer, not because they were convinced of her genius, but because they needed simultaneously to splash the wares of the publisher and to increase the advertising revenues of the magazine. Such strategic alliances between and among the men who ran publishing businesses and periodicals were common, as were these visual and textual uses of the turn-of-the-century female writer. This sort of promotional arrangement between journalism and literary publishing was crucial in the early 1890s, because the method of distributing and selling fiction was undergoing a revolution in response to developments in the industrial side of production. This was the moment identified with the death of the three-volume novel and with it the end of the circulating library. Both of these mid-Victorian institutions vanished, thanks to technological changes that cheapened the cost of printing and binding and allowed for the rise of the one-volume work of fiction sold for as little as three shillings and sixpence. Alexis Weedon writes, ‘From 1846 to 1916 ... [publishers] achieved a four-fold increase in production and a halving of book prices ... When printers moved to a factory system, replaced double- with quad-sized presses and bought machine-made paper, they passed on to publishers the benefits of large-scale manufacturing through the reduction of the basic unit cost of a book.’41 In the 1890s, books no longer reached readers through Mudie’s or its competitors; making consumers aware of and interested in new titles was now the province of newspapers and magazines. At the same time, the enormous growth in the number of periodicals also meant a huge increase in the outlets publishing both short stories and serialised fiction and competing with books, a shift that altered the whole system of pricing and of circulation. As Laurel Brake remarks, periodicals ‘were an important factor in forcing the reduction of the price of books during the period’.42 The newly affordable one-volume format in book-publishing made possible another fin de sie` cle phenomenon: the book of short stories as a rival to

127

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 MARGARET D. STETZ the novel. For the first time, authors could support themselves through short fiction alone, without writing long works to sell to the circulating libraries. Slimmer, more compact books were also easier to transport and hence to export. By the end of Victoria’s reign, her Empire was well stocked from sea to sea with the wares of English publishers, who addressed the burgeoning colonial market and saw their profits soar. Summing up the years from 1880 to 1895, Nigel Cross declares that ‘publishing and journalism underwent a radical transformation’.43 This transformation quite literally was stoked by the factory-like conditions of mass production created by high-volume and high-speed papermaking, typesetting, printing and binding. As publishing came unmistakably to resemble an industry, it both generated and bolstered other industries, particularly advertising and public relations, in order to reach a mass market with its goods. Yet nothing about the fin de sie` cle was ever simple, one-sided, or unam- biguous. The reshaping of publishing into an industry was a move opposed by many, especially by those who valued fine printing. It was also an incomplete revolution, for the publishing system continued to operate through cronyism and personal contacts, a practice that sometimes put networks before net worth and, moreover, that favoured men while disadvanta- ging women. More than anyone might have expected, traces of the clublike, masculine atmosphere of the old Grub Street of Samuel Johnson’s day still survived in its late-nineteenth-century counterpart. New Grub Street might, however reluctantly, accept mechanisation and agree to perform its work against the backdrop of what H. G. Wells called a ‘fretful tumult’.44 But there were some traditions, especially those rooted in the ideology of gender, which it would not surrender. In the late-Victorian publishing house, no woman would ever feel completely at home.

NOTES

1 John Feather, A History of British Publishing, London, Routledge, 1988,p.179. 2 Juliet Gardiner, Oscar Wilde: A Life in Letters, Writings and Wit, London, Collins and Brown, 1995,p.61. 3 Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, London, Hamish Hamilton, 1987,p.290. 4 Josephine M. Guy and Ian Small, Oscar Wilde’s Profession, Writing and the Culture Industry in the Late Nineteenth Century, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000,p.10. 5 Frederick Rolfe (Baron Corvo), Nicholas Crabbe, Or the One and the Many, London, Chatto and Windus, 1958, pp. 40–1. 6 George Gissing, New Grub Street, reprinted, New York, Penguin, 1968; 1891, p. 81. 7 ‘George Paston’ [Emily Morse Symonds], A Writer of Books, reprinted, Chicago, Academy Chicago, 1999; 1898, pp. 95–6.

128

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Publishing industries and practices

8 H. G. Wells, ‘The Lord of the Dynamos’, The Complete Short Stories of H. G. Wells, London, Ernest Benn, 1927,p.286. 9 N. N. Feltes, Modes of Production of Victorian Novels, Chicago, University of Chicago Press,1986,p.61. 10 David C. Smith, H. G. Wells, Desperately Mortal, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1986,p.30. 11 Peter McDonald, British Literary Culture and Publishing Practice, 1880–1914, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997,p.145. 12 Richard D. Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–1900, 2nd edn, Columbus, Ohio University Press, 1998, p. 364. 13 Clement Shorter, ‘Illustrated Journalism: Its Past and Its Future’, Victorian Print Media: A Reader, eds. Andrew King and John Plunkett, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2005, pp. 404–14 (p. 412). 14 McDonald, British Literary Culture,p.148. 15 Fiona MacCarthy, William Morris: A Life for Our Time, London, Faber and Faber, 1994,p.624. 16 J. G. P. Delaney, Charles Ricketts: A Biography, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1990, pp. 95–6. 17 J. M. Dent, The Memoirs of J. M. Dent, 1849–1926, ed. Hugh R. Dent, London, J. M. Dent, 1928, pp. 51–2. 18 Stephen Calloway, Aubrey Beardsley, New York, Harry N. Abrams, 1998, p. 45. 19 Deborah Chambers, Linda Steiner and Carole Fleming, Women and Journalism, London, Routledge, 2004,p.17. 20 McDonald, British Literary Culture, pp. 146–7. 21 J. Lewis May, John Lane and the Nineties, London, John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1936,p.35. 22 James G. Nelson, Publisher to the Decadents: Leonard Smithers in the Careers of Beardsley, Wilde, Dowson, University Park, PA, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000,p.64. 23 Richard Maxwell, ‘Afterword’, The Victorian Illustrated Book, ed. Richard Maxwell, Charlottesville, University Press of Virginia, 2002,p.390. 24 J. A. Sutherland, Victorian Novelists and Publishers, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1976,p.85. 25 Rolfe, Nicholas Crabbe,p.25. 26 Ibid., p. 32. 27 Leopold Wagner, How to Publish a Book or Article and How to Produce a Play: Advice to Young Authors, London, George Redway, 1890,p.144. 28 ‘George Paston’, p. 53. 29 Herbert Morrah, ‘Contributors’ Guide – I’, The Literary Year-Book and Bookman’s Directory 1901, London, George Allen, 1901,p.268. 30 Evelyn Sharp, Unfinished Adventure: Selected Reminiscences from an Englishwoman’s Life, London, John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1933,p.52. 31 Ibid., p. 55. 32 Netta Syrett, The Sheltering Tree, London, Geoffrey Bles, 1939,p.85. 33 Joanne Shattock, Women and Literature in Britain, 1800–1900, Cambridge University Press, 2001,p.3.

129

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 MARGARET D. STETZ

34 Margaret D. Stetz and Mark Samuels Lasner, The Yellow Book: A Centenary Exhibition, Cambridge, MA, Houghton Library, Harvard University, 1994, pp. 21–2. 35 Linda Hughes, Graham R.: Rosamund Marriott Watson, Woman of Letters, Athens, OH, Ohio University Press, 2005,p.81. 36 Nigel Cross, The Common Writer: Life in Nineteenth-Century Grub Street, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1985,p.199. 37 Laurel Brake, Print in Transition, 1850–1910: Studies in Media and Book History, Houndmills, Palgrave Macmillan, 2001,p.161. 38 Hilary Fraser, Stephanie Green and Judith Johnston, Gender and the Victorian Periodical, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003,p.167. 39 ‘News Notes’, Bookman, October 1892,p.8. 40 William Watson, ‘New Writers: Mrs. W. K. Clifford’, Bookman, October 1892, 22–3 (p. 22). 41 A. Weedon, Victorian Publishing: The Economics of Book Production for a Mass Market, 1836–1916, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2003, pp. 158–9. 42 Brake, Print in Transition,p.4. 43 Cross, The Common Writer, pp. 204–5. 44 Wells, ‘The Lord of the Dynamos’, p. 286.

130

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 7

SHEARER WEST The visual arts

In his famous analysis of Britain in the 1890s, Holbrook Jackson saw the fin de sie` cle as a transitional point between the rule-bound certainties of Victorian society and the revolutionary ethos of modernism.1 This cultural melange of old and new is especially prevalent in the visual arts of the last decades of the nineteenth century, when worship of a mythic past conspired with a zeal for novelty. British artists during this period engaged with the same issues as their Continental counterparts, but their versions of fantasy and neophilia were unique: the same decades witnessed James McNeill Whistler’s attenuated poetic visions of the Thames; Frederic Leighton’s monumental reconstructions of the classical past; the novel, yet medievalising, furniture designs of William Morris and the Glasgow School; Burne-Jones’s languid androgynous figures; and Aubrey Beardsley’s perversely erotic drawings and engravings. Despite many artists’ professed rejection of both tradition and the ugliness of the modern world, the visual artists of the fin de sie` cle shared with literature an engagement with prevalent ideas: the legacy of Charles Darwin, the economic critique of Karl Marx and the psychological concerns of the generation that preceded Sigmund Freud. Artists abandoned Darwin’s scientific naturalism, but were drawn constantly to organic forms and the negative implications of natural selection – that is, the extinction of a decadent species, rather than survival of the fittest. The inspiration of Marx and his English followers led artists to consider craft and furniture-making as a newly dignified part of their profession. A pan-European obsession with neurosis and anxiety found its way into the tense mood and hermetic subject matter of many prints, drawings and paintings. It is essential to note that the art that we now associate with these fin de sie` cle tendencies was inevitably avant-garde, in the sense of being experimental and rejecting established conventions. However, avant-garde art was actually only a fraction of what was produced, purchased and exhibited in Britain during these decades. Since 1768 the professional art world had been dominated by the English Royal Academy – an organisation that conveyed artistic

131

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 SHEARER WEST status to its Academicians, as well as providing them with the most prestigious annual art exhibition in London. By the 1870s, the reputation of the Royal Academy was challenged by a range of alternative options for artists, such as independent societies and private galleries; nevertheless it remained true that the handle of ‘Royal Academician’ inevitably led to commercial success, if not always critical acclaim. Despite the hundreds of artists who maintained the Academy tradition by either joining its ranks or exhibiting in its annual show, there is a strong argument for thinking of the anti-academic avant-garde art of this period separately and in relation to the idea of a fin de sie`cle. Max Nordau’s contemporary and wildly popular critique of late-nineteenth-century society, Degeneration, defined fin de sie` cle as a concept saturated with spiritual malaise, contempt for morality and psychological sickness.2 Nordau’s enu- meration of fin de sie` cle ‘symptoms’ was accompanied by a list of patients – all of whom were authors, musicians and artists. Among Nordau’s ‘degenerate’ moderns, Burne-Jones, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Whistler had a prominent place amidst such cultural innovators as Oscar Wilde, Richard Wagner and Charles Baudelaire. There is therefore a case for considering the handful of artists of the avant-garde as representing what was seen at the time as a common fin de sie` cle temperament, whether or not one accepts Nordau’s relentlessly negative analysis. The visual arts of the fin de sie` cle, understood in this specific way, have their origins in the painting of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Rossetti’s association with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was confined to the early part of his career, specifically the late 1840s, but even then he never fully embraced the Brotherhood’s avowal to pursue ‘truth to nature’. While fellow Pre- Raphaelites John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt were producing historical and literary paintings replete with careful observations of nature, Rossetti painted ambiguous canvases such as The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1848–9)andEcce Ancilla Domini (The Annunciation) (1849–50), saturated with obscure symbolism, unnatural perspective and overtones of Catholicism. These elusive works presaged Rossetti’s real contribution to the visual art of the fin de sie`clewhichcamelater,inthe1860s, when he had fully renounced his Pre-Raphaelite heritage and began producing richly painted close-ups of sensual women. A notable example of this is The Blue Bower (figure 4), which offers a glimpse of many of the elements that were to emerge more strongly in the art of the fin de sie`cle. The painting depicts Rossetti’s then lover, Fanny Cornforth, but although this fact is known, the work is not intended to be a portrait of Cornforth. Instead it is an alluring, yet unsettling, representation that hints at more significance than its details convey. Cornforth is shown with overly large shoulders and flamboyant red hair, her statuesque form nearly bursting out

132

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 The visual arts

4 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Blue Bower, 1865 (The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, The University of Birmingham) of the claustrophobic space in which she sits. The lurid floral wallpaper against which she leans, and the Japanese lyre-like ‘koto’ pressing uncomfortably close 3 on the table in front of her, reinforce an impression of confinement. The painting challenges the limitations of the visual sense by hinting at other senses. The viewer is induced to imagine the contrast between the feathery softness of Cornforth’s improbable bustier and the thin sharpness of the koto’s strings. The heady smell of flowers is evoked through the rose entangled in her

133

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 SHEARER WEST hair, and reinforced by the floral wallpaper design. Sound is conveyed to the imagination by the musical instrument, but the position of Cornforth’s hands suggests a dying atonality, rather than a vigorous melodic line. The painting is at once original and derivative: Rossetti pays tribute to Venetian Renaissance masters such as Titian and Palma Vecchio, who also painted half-length views of sensuous women, but he transforms their idealised images of beauty into a more lurid and earthy sensuality. Furthermore, Rossetti’s representation of Cornforth challenges social stereotypes of femininity: in life Cornforth was a prostitute and could be playing that role here, but her tight-lipped mouth and the haughty superiority of her gaze – which does not lock with the viewer but lands somewhere on the viewer’s forehead – create an impression of an oddly languid authority at odds with her confined position. This almost mythic detachment and feminine power is counteracted by the sense of the work as something highly specific and personal to Rossetti, and indeed most of his ‘portraits’ of sensuous women were produced during a period in which he became increasingly reclusive and introverted. The moral ambiguities, unsettling sensuality and poetic aura of The Blue Bower were the aspects of Rossetti’s work that most attracted the poet Algernon Swinburne, who wrote self-indulgent descriptions of paintings such as Rossetti’s Lady Lilith (1864–8):

Clothed in soft white garments, she draws out through a comb the heavy mass of hair like thick spun gold to fullest length; her head leans back half sleepily, superb and satiate with its own beauty; the eyes are languid, without love in them or hate; the sweet luxurious mouth has the patience of pleasure fulfilled and complete.4

This transformation of visual art into a prose poem and the consequent melding of the two media was one of Rossetti’s many legacies to the art of the fin de sie`cle.TheBlueBowerpoints to many other qualities that became important to Rossetti’s successors: the obscure subject matter; the reinvented Renaissance source; the obsession with a dangerous, perhaps even distasteful, beauty; an ambiguous engagement with social stereotypes of gender; the evocation and mingling of all the senses; the obsession with decoration; the presence of an exotic non-European object; the realisation of private obsessions. Although Rossetti withdrew from the London art world in the last decades of his life, and painted only for a handful of private patrons, his work became widely regarded after his death, when both the Burlington Fine Arts Club and Rossetti’s anath- ema, the Royal Academy, staged major retrospective exhibitions of his work in 1883. The sudden emergence of Rossetti’s art into the public domain assisted in the consolidation of tendencies in art that had already been developing simultaneously with his private experiments.

134

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 The visual arts

Any attempt to create a chronology of art in the complex period after Rossetti’s death is bound to be artificial. Nevertheless, there are some thematic demarcations that provide a framework for understanding this turbulent time. First of all, a claim of ‘art for art’s sake’, fuelled by writers such as Swinburne and Walter Pater, became implicated in the artistic experiments of the 1870s. Second, throughout the 1880s and 1890s, artists began to eradicate established boundaries between ‘high’ art and craft by turning away from easel painting in favour of furniture and design. Finally, during all three decades, painters frequently embraced myths, allegory and ambiguous subject matter to create works of art that required the viewer to supply the often elusive meaning. By the 1890s the phrase ‘art for art’s sake’ was such a cliche´thatits philosophical and literary origins had become obscured. The term was origin- ally imported from France where it appeared in the preface to The´ophile Gautier’s novel, Mademoiselle de Maupin of 1835. Gautier, like his fellow countryman, Charles Baudelaire, was much admired by a young generation of British writers and artists, and his idea found its way into the writing of both Swinburne and Pater, and eventually into the art of Whistler. Notably, Swinburne’s development of the idea of ‘art for art’s sake’ appeared in an essay of 1868 on the Romantic artist, William Blake. Swinburne’s analysis saw art as detached from both science and morality.5 He attacked the assumption that a work of art must have a moral purpose: ‘in the name of sense and fact itself let us have done with all abject and ludicrous pretence of coupling the two [art and morality] in harness or grafting the one on the other’s stock: let us hear no more of the moral mission of earnest art’.6 Furthermore, according to Swinburne, art could not be shackled to the empirical methods of science; by implication, Swinburne was taking a swipe at the tendency for mid-Victorian art (including Pre-Raphaelitism) to be immersed in the detail of nature and everyday life: ‘Poetry or art based on loyalty to science is exactly as absurd ... as science guided by art or poetry ...To art, that which is best is most beautiful; to science, that which is best is most accurate; to morality, that which is best is most virtuous’ (p. 382). And he declared, ‘Art for art’s sake first of all, and afterwards we may suppose all the rest shall be added to her’ (p. 380). Swinburne’s divorce of art from morality flew in the face of didactic tendencies in mid-Victorian painting, and undermined what many, following the moralising aesthetics of John Ruskin, considered the value of art for a modern society. Swinburne’s sentiments were reiterated a year later by Walter Pater, the writer and Oxford don among whose disciples was Oscar Wilde. Pater developed his own version of ‘art for art’s sake’ in an essay first published in the Westminster Review of 1868, which gained wider circulation as a conclusion to his collection of writings, Studies in the History of the

135

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 SHEARER WEST

Renaissance of 1873. Like Swinburne, Pater’s consideration of ‘art for art’s sake’ thus appeared in the context of a discourse on visual art. Pater’s conclusion to Studies of the History of the Renaissance advocated ‘pure perception’, claiming that what was important was ‘the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake. For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass.’7 Pater’s promotion of a passionate response to beauty, freed from moral imperative, seemed to recommend an abandonment of all the rules that kept contemporary society functioning. The conclusion caused such outrage that Pater suppressed it in the second edition of his Renaissance essays of 1877. The contemporary artistic context in which the ideas of Swinburne and Pater were circulating is significant. Empiricism and didacticism were the orders of the day in painting and engraving. The empirical approach could take the form of the humorous ‘slice of life’ adopted by artists such as William Powell Frith, whose Derby Day (1856–8) – a large painting based on months of careful observation – represents all classes of society interacting with each other at the famous race. Didacticism appeared in the philanthropic motives of artists such as Luke Fildes, whose contributions to The Graphic magazine included Houseless and Hungry (1869) displaying the horrific poverty of London’s underclass. Neither of these tendencies satisfied Swinburne’s and Pater’s call for beauty and artistic autonomy. Whistler and Walter Sickert were among the earliest English artists to establish a mode of representation that seemed to realise the philosophical concept of ‘art for art’s sake’. Both artists set their evocative paintings in the same contemporary world visualised by Frith and Fildes; however, Whistler and Sickert reconceived contemporary subject matter so that viewers looked in vain for any narrative, morality or indeed meaning. Sickert’s various representations of music halls are a case in point. Rather than choosing as his subject the fashionable and respectable music halls of the West End of London, Sickert selected smaller East End theatres, dominated by working-class audiences and performances that included ribald humour and raucous political songs. In terms of subject matter Sickert’s Gallery of the Old Bedford (figure 5) is somewhere between Frith’s rather sanitised views of modern leisure life and Fildes’s focus on the lowest class of society, but Sickert’s unusual angles, intense use of rich colour and transformation of his audience of working-class men into an indistinguishable cluster of anonymous faces separate this painting’s effect from the empirical and didactic approaches of Frith and Fildes. Sickert gives us a glimpse of a lower class of London life – one that would be familiar to art’s mostly middle-class viewers largely through secondary sources such as newspapers and novels. However, Sickert’s stylistic experimentation occludes the painting’s meaning, forcing viewers simply to appreciate the purely aesthetic and suggestive qualities of the subject and style.

136

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 The visual arts

5 Walter Richard Sickert, Gallery of the Old Bedford,c.1895 (Walker Art Gallery, National Museums of Liverpool)

The painting also offers a disconcerting combination of formal beauty and subject matter that was considered crude by the class of audience most likely to see the work. Beauty within aestheticism was frequently tarnished with other less savoury qualities. Even more than Sickert, in his work Whistler takes the theory of art for art’s sake to its logical conclusion, and becomes one of the few artists who

137

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 SHEARER WEST acted as both a commentator and a practitioner of what came to be known as Aestheticism. Throughout the 1870s, Whistler began painting representations of the Thames at night, which he later entitled ‘Nocturnes’. Whistler did not choose to reproduce the picturesque views of the Thames as a cheerfully busy waterway, such as those popularised in the eighteenth century by the Italian artist Canaletto. Instead, like Sickert, Whistler selected vistas that were associated with lower classes of society: Battersea, for example, or Cremorne – a pleasure garden with a notorious reputation. He saturated these representations with pensive monochromatic colour schemes – violets, deep greens and aquamarine – and inevitably set the scenes at twilight or early evening, further obscuring the details of the subject. There is a significant difference in effect between Whistler’s nocturnes of the Thames and the contemporaneous and later Thames scenes of French Impressionist artists who came to London. Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley and Claude Monet equally depicted the Thames through an atmospheric haze of limpid pastel colour, but these artists never violated the French Impressionist desire to represent ‘reality’ as it appeared to the eye. Whistler’s Thames views, on the other hand, were always clearly the product of a subjective response that was more than purely optical. Whistler exhibited some of these experimental nocturnes and portraits at the 1877 Grosvenor Gallery. The Gallery was set up by a private patron, Sir Coutts Lindsay, as a showcase for new art. The works themselves were carefully selected and generously spaced out, in contrast to the tightly-packed confusion that had become the norm in Royal Academy exhibitions. Visitors to the Grosvenor Gallery were thus encouraged to linger over individual works, to appreciate their distinctive- ness and to experience the sort of pleasurable aesthetic sensation that Pater had written about. The Grosvenor Gallery offered the possibility of a new kind of aesthetic experience, but not all critics viewed this novelty positively. Most notably, John Ruskin wrote a diatribe against the paintings of Whistler shown at the Grosvenor Gallery, which he published in his ‘working man’s’ journal, Fors Clavigera,inJune1877. Commenting on the sale value of one of Whistler’s nocturnes, Ruskin wrote: ‘I have seen, and heard, much of cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas 8 for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.’ Ruskin’s article expressed alarm that Whistler’s nocturnes, which appeared to have been dashed off and lacked ‘finish’, could fetch huge prices on the art market; to Ruskin the payment was not commensurate with the labour that had been exerted. When Ruskin’s remarks became widely circulated by a mischievous public press, Whistler sued him for libel, although the trial did not occur until November 1878. At the trial, Ruskin did not appear, due to increasing ill

138

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 The visual arts health, but Whistler took the opportunity to express sardonically to the public his aesthetic views. In his testimony, Whistler averred that his nocturnes were primarily ‘an arrangement of line and form and colour’,9 and he left interpretation of the painting to the viewer: ‘As to what the picture represents, that depends upon who looks at it. To some persons it may represent all that I intended; to others it may represent nothing’ (p. 151). The outcome of the trial was an award of derisory damages of one farthing to Whistler, but the trial is a significant public expression of the doctrine of ‘art for art’s sake’. ‘Art for art’s sake’ expressed the idea that art was autonomous – not tied down by the needs or expectations of everyday life – and that looking at art was a pleasure enjoyed differently by the viewers. Another strand to the notion of ‘art for art’s sake’ attempted to articulate viewer response as an experience akin to listening to music, where subject matter was transcended by the power of the medium. This musical analogy shares with ‘art for art’s sake’ a champion in Walter Pater. Pater’s essay, ‘The School of Giorgione’, attempts to account for visual pleasure in terms of music: ‘All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music. For while in all other kinds of art it is possible to distinguish the matter from the form, and the understanding can always make this distinction, yet it is the constant effort of art to obliterate it.’10 Whistler attempted to realise Pater’s analogy by drawing attention to musical qualities in his paintings. Not only did he attach musical titles to his works (e.g. ‘nocturnes’, ‘symphonies’), but he was also known to include musical notation on picture frames to remind his viewers of the emotional experience of listening to music.11 In his ‘Ten O’Clock Lecture’ of 1888,Whistlercom- pared the actions of the artist to that of a musician, equating the making of art with the playing, rather than the composing, of music: ‘Nature contains the elements in colour and form, of all pictures, as the keyboard contains the notes of all music. But the artist is born to pick, and choose, and group with science, these elements, that the result may be beautiful – as the musician gathers his notes, and forms his chords, until he bring forth from chaos glorious harmony.’12 Whistler’s musical analogy was thus intended to convey something about the process of artistic production. Although in retrospect, it is possible to see this analogy as a harbinger of purely abstract art, there was never any suggestion among British aesthetes that art should abandon subject matter altogether. Indeed it was often the subject matter – the music halls, the views of the Thames – that combined with the poetic use of colour and form to create the ineffable effect of the art of the 1870sand1880s. The analogy to music also evoked more than the formal qualities, emphasising a special emotional response to art, or what Pater referred to as the ‘imaginative reason’, which he opposed to ‘mere intelligence’ and ‘pure perception’.13 Music also played another role in the art of the fin de sie` cle. Whistler was not alone among

139

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 SHEARER WEST artists and writers who were aware of the music and theory of the German composer Richard Wagner – whose name was prominent on Nordau’s list of ‘degenerates’. Wagner was so significant a sensation in Europe during this time that the Polish-born philosopher, Te´odor de Wyzewa, founded the French journal, Revue wagne´rienne, as a way of disseminating the composer’s ideas. Wagner’s theory of the ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’ or ‘complete work of art’ was predicated on the idea that all the arts could be found in opera, where music, painting, sculpture and poetry combined to result in one homogeneous and exalted whole.14 Wagner’s complete prose works were published in English in 1892. His ideas were adapted and distorted, but reappeared particularly in discussions of the decorative arts, as designers appropriated his idea of a Gesamtkunstwerk to signify the beauty of an environment that was conceived holistically. This opposed what was then the prevalent taste – houses that were seen to be mere receptacles for furniture and bric-a-brac. This fascination with the decorative and useful arts was another significant theme of the fin de sie` cle, but there were emphatic differences between the single-minded obsession with ‘art for art’s sake’ and the often more politically motivated reforms in the decorative arts. Until the second half of the nineteenth century, the making and decorating of furniture was very much considered a craft, clearly distinguished from what were perceived to be the more cerebral arts of painting and sculpture. Reforms in design education, however, accompanied a growing concern about machine manufacture, which provided cheap and convenient furniture, but removed the human element from the making of useful objects. What became known as the Arts and Crafts Movement began with William Morris’s company, Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Co. in 1861, founded for the purpose of reviving beautiful crafted objects for the home to counter the ugliness of modern machine-manufactured furniture. The Arts and Crafts Movement combined the aesthetes’ worship of beauty with a utopian belief in the value of individual hand crafting as morally superior labour. This aesthetic ideal became politically inflected in the 1880s, when Morris read a French edition of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, and joined first the Social Democratic Federation and later the Socialist League. His lectures and writings on art increasingly attacked the economic and political structures of contemporary society that made individuals slaves to the machine and to superfluous luxury objects.15 His utopian novel, News from Nowhere,of1890 envisaged a world where there was no government, no machines and everyone was an artist. In Morris’s visionary Nowhere, England became a physically beautiful place, full of attractive people who enjoyed their work. As one of the novel’s characters asserts, ‘there are some people who think it not too fantastic to connect this increase of beauty directly with our freedom and good sense’.16

140

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 The visual arts

Inspired by Morris, the designer C. R. Ashbee attempted to create his own NowherebyformingaGuildofHandicraftsin1888, eventually transporting his group of artists to their own colony in the Cotswolds. Experiments such as this had value in themselves but could be only superficial realisations of Morris’s ideal of a socialist society consisting solely of skilled artisans. The improvement in British design inspired by the Arts and Crafts Move- ment had a greater reach than Morris’s political views. Already in 1882, Oscar Wilde’s lectures given on a tour to America celebrated the new design aesthetic, with lines that could have come out of Morris’s own public pro- nouncements: ‘Have nothing in your house’, Wilde exhorted, ‘that has not given pleasure to the man who made it and is not a pleasure to those who use it.’17 However, Wilde presented the reforms of the Arts and Crafts Movement as the inspiration for new lifestyle choices. He gave many specific pieces of advice about decoration to his enthusiastic American audiences, urging them to reduce the clutter in their houses, place ‘rare china ornaments’ on their mantelpieces, use stained glass in some of their windows, arrange only single flowers in simple glass vases, and dress in the style of old master paintings and Greek sculpture to ensure the Gesamtkunstwerk that characterised the modern home was complete. Although Wilde, following Morris’s example, would later write a famous tract, ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’ (1891), even his more mature political vision embraced socialism because of its ability to free the individual from the shackles of authority. The impact of the modern industrial age, to Wilde, was a stifling of creativity and beauty, rather than an economic and social catastrophe envisaged by Morris. Beauty was as important to Morris’s aesthetic as it was to Wilde’s and Whistler’s, but in Morris’s case, beauty was intrinsically connected with social purpose. Whistler, on the other hand, had very little time for Morris’s fervent insistence on art’s political agenda. In his ‘Ten O’Clock Lecture’ of 1888 he mocked Morris’s earnest world view and made his target clear in a sneering reference to Hammersmith, Morris’s home borough and the setting of the opening chapters of News from Nowhere.18 Whistler, a devout modernist, was also offended by Morris’s apparent worship of the past and advocacy of a medievalising idea of communal artistic workshops. To Morris, the medieval aesthetic was a cipher for the better world prior to industrialisation, but in his own craft work, the medieval translated into bulky wooden furniture with richly painted patterns. Another by-product of Morris’s medievalism was a reform in book printing. In 1891, he founded the Kelmscott Press, a printing company devoted to the production of books that had the appearance of medieval manuscripts. One of the most significant of the fifty-three titles produced by Morris’s company was an edition of Chaucer’s works with woodcut illustrations based on drawings by Burne-Jones (figure 6). The

141

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 SHEARER WEST

6 William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones, page from the Kelmscott Chaucer, 1896 (The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge)

Kelmscott Chaucer took four years to complete, but despite the appearance of a finely crafted object, Morris employed photographic techniques to ensure the quality of some parts of the book.19 The usefulness of modern technology for the production of beautiful objects was thus not entirely lost to Morris, despite his insistence on traditional handcrafts. The Kelmscott Press was in fact part of a larger technological revolution in the publishing industry that led to an increase in the quality and quantity of periodicals devoted to both art and design. One of the most notable of these was The Studio, founded in April 1893, as ‘An Illustrated Magazine of Fine and Applied Art’. The Studio rapidly became a popular international journal, offering lavish reproductions focusing primarily on contemporary architecture and design. It provided its readers with tantalising glimpses of the latest examples of international modernist design, most of which were beyond the 20 financial means of the magazine’s largely middle-class clientele. The Studio did not reject modern technology, and it is important to realise that Morris’s socialist craft revival was only one aspect of design reform at the end of the nineteenth century. An equally significant international impact was achieved by a group of artists in Glasgow, whose work consolidated Morris’s craft

142

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 The visual arts ideals and medievalism with architecture, furniture and painting that had a distinctively modern appearance and effect. The ‘Glasgow School’, including most notably Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Margaret and Frances Macdonald, drewinspiration fromthepatternsofCelticmedievalism andtheholisticideals of ‘total environment’. Macintosh designed homes such as Hill House in Helensburgh and the Willow Tea Rooms in Glasgow right down to the light fittings, but his elegant and eccentric creations bore a more direct visual relationship to the arabesque vitality of international art nouveau than to Morris’s heavy medievalism. The artists of the Glasgow School also produced works that brought together the fine art of painting with the craftwork of design, as can be seen in the art of the Macdonald sisters. Frances Macdonald’s Sleeping Princess (figure 7) represents a languid reclining beauty, in the tradition of Rossetti’s women and Burne-Jones’s Briar Rose series on which it is based. The soft pastels used to create the image add to the ghostly effect of a child-like woman who appears to be floating and whose tiny arms and face are engulfed in the vast patterned garment that covers her like a blanket. Surrounding this small pastel is a finely crafted frame with designs reminiscent of both Celtic crosses and spider webs, further emphasising the sense that the woman is physically entrapped. At the bottom of the frame, the lines, ‘Love if thy tresses be so dark,/How dark those hidden eyes must be’ are taken from Tennyson.21 They hint at a viewer of the painting who expresses unrequited longing for the inaccessible sleeping woman. Here we see an exquisite example of modern design coexisting with an elegiac sense of a past grasped through myth or fairy tale. The mythic, nostalgic and supernatural qualities of Macdonald’s work represent a final characteristic of the visual arts of the fin de sie` cle. This tendency was what was known on the Continent as ‘Symbolism’, and indeed many British artists who practised this strand of fin de sie` cle art had close ties with French and Belgian Symbolist artists and writers. In Britain, the term ‘Symbolism’ was not employed directly to categorise the art of Frances Macdonald, Burne-Jones, Frederic Leighton and others, but the aspirations of French Symbolism were not far from the aims of these British artists. In France, the poet Jean More´as coined the term in a manifesto published in Le Figaro of 18 September 1886, describing the poetry of Mallarme´ and Verlaine, which privileged sound over sense and conveyed its often obscure meaning through peculiar syntax and unexpected usages of familiar words. By 1891 Albert Aurier was using the label to categorise the suggestive and ‘ideaist’ (as opposed to idealistic) art of Paul Gauguin.22 Symbolism in this sense is not an easy concept to grasp. A symbol indicates a direct relationship between an object and its meaning, such as an apple

143

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Cambridge Collections Online ©Cambridge University Press, 2007

7 Frances Macdonald, The Sleeping Princess,c.1895–6 (Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow) The visual arts symbolising the Fall in the Garden of Eden. In fact, Symbolism as a movement rejected this kind of legible correspondence. Symbolists represented objects, people and places, but they found ways of defamiliarising them so that clarity of meaning was lost and the viewer was left to interpret the works without a full context for doing so. The subjective qualities of Symbolism were symptomatic of a range of escapist tendencies in contemporary culture, evident in Morris’s utopian medievalism, an interest in ancient myth fuelled by the publication of James Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890) and a rage for psychical societies and se´ances. But Symbolism was also the product of a growing international fascination with psychology, dreams and repressed desire that culminated in Freud’s first major publication, The Interpretation of Dreams in 1899.Neither the escapism nor the subjectivity of Symbolism were wholly passive or detached from modern life. As Edward Lucie-Smith put it ‘Symbolism was a way of saying ‘‘no’’ to a number of things which were contemporary with itself. In particular, it was a reaction not only against moralism and rationalism but also against the crass materialism which prevailed in the 1880s.’23 In the visual arts, this rejection of materialism came in a variety of forms: artists like Leighton and Albert Moore looked to the ancient world for inspiration, but their representations of classical antiquity contained an uneasy mixture of archaeological specificity and narrative vagueness. Both artists often depicted women garbed in carefully rendered classical drapery, lounging passively or staring vacantly, with only titles such as ‘Venus’or ‘Garden of the Hesperides’ to indicate that a genuine classical source was intended. Artists such as G. F. Watts took a very different approach. Watts chose allegory, rather than myth, as the basis of his evocative paintings. His Hope (figure 8), for example, appears to offer a familiar allegorical device in the lone figure of a woman with attributes. However, artistic tradition supplied Hope with an anchor as an attribute, whereas Watts’s Hope wears the blindfold normally associated with the arbitrary nature of Fortune. Watts’s figure is perched awkwardly in a foetal position on top of a globe, embracing a lyre as if she is trying to protect it. The lyre has only a single unbroken string; this motif contributes to an aura of sadness and loss rather than hope and possibility. Although Watts intended his Hope to have appeal for a universal audience, most art in this Symbolist vein was obscure enough to perplex the majority, who had been bred on the photographic specificity of Royal Academy artists like William Powell Frith. Symbolist subject matter often therefore aroused irritation and confusion, rather than pleasure. As Nordau put it in his uncompromising attack on fin de sie` cle artistic tendencies:

If we wish to know at the outset what Symbolists understand by symbol and symbolism, we shall meet with the same difficulties we encountered in

145

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 SHEARER WEST

8 G. F. Watts, Hope, 1886 (Tate Britain, London)

determining the precise meaning of the name pre-Raphaelism [sic] ... viz. because the inventors of these appellations understood by them hundreds of different mutually contradictory, indefinite things, or simply nothing at all.24 Although Nordau’s characterisation is essentially correct, what he omitted was that Symbolist artists were often deliberately obscuring their meaning,

146

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 The visual arts either in a bid to appeal to an elite of the aesthetically initiated, or to disguise the potentially subversive implications of their subject matter. A case in point is the way British artists in the ambit of Burne-Jones represented men as androgynous figures. A hallmark of Burne-Jones’s paintings was the asexual beauty of male faces and bodies: the Burne-Jones male type had a finely chiselled face and an attenuated torso with pale skin of a smoothness akin to marble or wax. Many viewers appreciated the ethereal beauty of Burne- Jones’s figures, but it was only an aesthetic elite who linked the androgyny that Burne-Jones appeared to celebrate with the ideals of male same-sex love. Fascination with the androgyne was a pan-European phenomenon, finding its way into a range of literature, poetry and scientific studies, from the French Symbolist artist and writer, Jose´phin Pe´ladan’s fictional fantasy, L’Androgyne of 1891, to the English sexologist Edward Carpenter’s explicit studies of ‘homogenic love’.25 In most cases, authors used a neo-Platonic idea of the world as full of people who had been divided from birth from their ‘soul mates’; androgyny, with its merging of the physical qualities of both men and women, was seen as a material realisation of a united soul. By hinting that perfection consisted in a kind of homogeneity of genders, defenders of this idea of androgyny rejected Darwin’s proposal that increasing sophistication of the natural world resulted in greater heterogeneity, or separation of species. Androgyny, in its ideal union of opposites, more closely resembled Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk, in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. This philosophical approach to androgyny frequently blurred into another idea borrowed from the ancient Greeks: that the ideal human relationship was Platonic love among men. This was a notion perpetuated by a number of fin de sie` cle writers and artists, including Oscar Wilde, John Addington Symonds and the book illustrators Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon. Many of the advocates of this approach were men whose relationships with other men were as physical as they were intellectual: Wilde is a notable case in point, and Ricketts and Shannon were lifelong committed partners. However, while the idea of a physical male same-sex love could not be declared openly in the public domain, the visual arts could offer a coded reference to it. Poems and essays devoted to androgynous male icons such as Antinous (the Greek youth who was reportedly the lover of Emperor Hadrian) or Hyacinthus (the beautiful boy loved by the god Apollo) appeared frequently in published writing. A notable source for this material was The Artist and Journal of Home Culture, which was published between 1888 and 1894 – notably ending before Wilde’s trial and conviction in 1895. Coded references to ancient Greek sculpture were later exposed by Havelock Ellis’s Studies in the Psychology of Sex of 1897 as being more than innocent allusions to the ‘love of souls’. Ellis frequently identified artistic obsessions among his male

147

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 SHEARER WEST homosexual clients and described a ‘typical’ fantasy as follows: ‘Now he enjoyed visions of beautiful young men and exquisite Greek statues; he often shed tears when he thought of them.’26 The Symbolist inspired art that appeared in Britain during these years often used the androgynous figure to make this hermetic reference to male same-sex love. A case in point is the work of Simeon Solomon, a follower of Burne-Jones who was admired by Swinburne and knew Pater. Solomon’s preference for male sexual partners came to the fore in 1873 when he was arrested for sodomy, but before his public disgrace, his poetic androgynous figures were seen as exemplary evocations of the neo-Platonic idea of the perfect soul. His Love in Autumn, exhibited at the Dudley Gallery in 1872,a year before his conviction, represents one of the beautiful androgynes later admired by the authors of articles in The Artist and Journal of Home Culture. However, Solomon’s ‘Love’ – like Watts’s ‘Hope’ is not a conventional allegorical figure but a winsome adolescent boy, oppressed by his large wind- torn wings and the barren and gloomy autumnal landscape that surrounds him. Works like these find their hidden meanings in contemporary cultural, social and sexual anxieties. The prevalence in the visual arts of drapery- swathed languid women and beautiful young men emerged from circles of artists and writers who felt that male and female roles in society were changing for the better, but that the full implications of these changes could only be alluded to in works of art intended for public display. Fin de sie` cle Symbolism – like the aestheticism of ‘art for art’s sake’ and the political tendentiousness of much design reform – was a negative engagement with the actual circumstances of modern life. In each case, artists were driven by a strong utopianism, whether they wished to wallow in the beauty of art, reform the economic base of modern society, or find ways of dis- placing their social and political anxieties into ambivalent symbolism. If Rossetti’s art represented the beginnings of these utopian tendencies, Aubrey Beardsley’s drawings of the 1890s perhaps signal their failure. A comparison between Rossetti’s Blue Bower, discussed earlier (see pp. 132–4), and Beardsley’s The Toilette of Salome (figure 9)of1893 demonstrates the evolution of the avant-garde themes of the fin de sie` cle. Beardsley’s drawing was produced as part of his series of illustrations for the 1893 English publication Wilde’s French play, Salome´, which was written in Paris in 1891 but was denied a licence for English performance because of the ‘blasphemy’ of depicting biblical characters on stage. Wilde had initially favoured Beardsley as an illustrator of his controversial work, but even he ultimately disapproved of Beardsley’s irreverent and parodic illustrations. Although nearly thirty years separate Rossetti’s Blue Bower from Beardsley’s Toilette of Salome, they share some fin de sie` cle qualities. Both

148

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 The visual arts

9 Aubrey Beardsley, The Toilette of Salome, 1893 (British Museum)

149

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 SHEARER WEST represent aloof and potentially dangerous women. Both have erotic overtones. Both allude to decorative art, especially that of Japan; in Beardsley’s case the stark composition signals the ornamental lines of Japanese woodcuts that were beginning to be enthusiastically collected in England. Beardsley’s drawing, unlike Rossetti’s painting, has a narrative source. However, Beardsley did not interpret his source literally, but included inexplicable detail, such as the maid in a Pierrot costume who applies Salome´’s powder. There are other differences in Beardsley’s work. Although his Salome´ refers to the past in its overtones of rococo theatricality, his inspiration was not the beauty of the Renaissance but the eighteenth century – an age considered vulgar by the Victorians. Beardsley also abandoned Rossetti’s sensuous colourism for the expressive linear quality of art nouveau admired by decorative artists throughout Europe. In Beardsley, too, sensuality has been transformed into perverse eroticism: Salome’s book collection includes the work of the Marquis de Sade and Emile Zola’s scandalous novel about a prostitute, Nana. Beardsley was the ultimate example of what became known as the ‘decadence’ – a term readily adopted by a British society that had rejected the French term ‘Symbolism’, even while its artists embraced the latter movement’s tenets. Beardsley’s decadence offered a love of artificiality for its own sake and a satiric flavour that at first seems at odds with the serious worship of beauty as well as the earnest political commitment that characterised so much of the avant-garde art of his predecessors and contemporaries. Nevertheless, Beardsley’s decadence was simply a more emphatic ‘no’ than the rejection of contemporary society expressed by Rossetti, Morris, Leighton and others. For him, utopianism was abandoned in favour of cynicism. The overtones of ‘decadence’ merge easily with Nordau’s pseudo- scientific idea of ‘degeneration’ – both terms signal the end of an era. This end of fin de sie` cle culture is often placed, rather too definitively perhaps, at the conviction of Oscar Wilde in 1895. It is certainly the case that artists after that date were more circumspect in their use of homoerotic themes, and calls for an amoral ‘art for art’s sake’ were no longer made so vociferously. However, many of the characteristics of the visual arts since the 1860s remained strong well into the twentieth century. Ambiguous poetic themes did not disappear from art, the Arts and Crafts Movement merged seamlessly into a new coalition with the machine, and ‘art for art’s sake’ was transformed into the formalism and abstraction of the early twentieth- century avant-garde. Although there were many legacies, it can be argued that two additional characteristics of the art of the late nineteenth century left a strong impression on subsequent generations. First, the artists of the fin de sie` cle were particularly notable for their eccentric individuality – one of the qualities identified by Nordau as a symptom of degeneration.

150

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 The visual arts

In opposition to a widespread inclination for artists to seek social respectability, fin de sie` cle artists cultivated singularities of character, dress and behaviour. Whistler’s sartorial and behavioural quirks were part of his battles with a ‘philistine’ public, and Ricketts and Shannon lived in a semi-public gay partnership and went by the nicknames ‘Marigold’ and ‘Orchid’ to declare their divergence from social expectations. At a less happy extreme, the lives of these artists were often dogged by self-imposed yet unanticipated tragedies which resulted from their unorthodox ways of life. Rossetti was addicted to the opiate chloral and lived as a recluse; Solomon ended up as an alcoholic in a workhouse years after his trial; and Beardsley died from consumption aged only twenty-five. The generation of Nordau saw eccentricities and tragedies like these as symptoms of both ‘degeneration’ and ‘genius’. The avant-garde artists of modernism in the early twentieth century continued to display similarly extreme examples of behaviour and character. A second legacy of the visual arts of the fin de sie` cle was internationalism. Innovations in print technology, the growth of international exhibitions and the travels of the artists themselves made the art world a much smaller place. The works of Burne-Jones and Whistler were regularly exhibited in Paris and Belgium; while artists such as Whistler, Sickert, Beardsley, Shannon and Ricketts lived and travelled extensively in Paris and Belgium. Meanwhile, the Belgian artist Fernand Khnopff wrote glowing tributes to his English contemporaries in the Studio magazine, whereas Mackintosh’s designs and Morris’s idealism were enthusiastically imitated by architects and designers in Belgium and Germany and became the foundation for arguably the most exciting period in the history of design. Artists thus saw each others’ work in art periodicals and international exhibitions, and they met in the cafes of Paris. These interchanges were to continue among avant-garde artists throughout the next century.

NOTES 1 Holbrook Jackson, The Eighteen Nineties: A Review of Art and Ideas at the Close of the Nineteenth Century, London, Grant Richards, 1913. 2 Max Nordau, Degeneration, Lincoln and London, University of Nebraska Press, 1968, pp. 1–44. Nordau’s Entartung was first published in Germany in 1892; the first English edition was 1895. 3 Paul Spencer-Longhurst, The Blue Bower: Rossetti in the 1860s, London, Scala, 2000. 4 Jerome McGann and Charles L Sligh (eds.), Algernon Charles Swinburne, ‘Notes on Some Pictures of 1868’, in Major Poems and Selected Prose, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2004, pp. 372–4 (p. 372). 5 For the implications of Swinburne’s distinctions between art, science and morality, see Elizabeth Prettejohn, ‘Introduction’, in Elizabeth Prettejohn (ed.), After the Pre- Raphaelites, Manchester University Press, 1999, pp. 1–14.

151

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 SHEARER WEST

6 Algernon Charles Swinburne, ‘William Blake: A Critical Essay’, in Major Poems and Prose, pp. 375–84 (p. 381). 7 Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, London, Macmillan and Co. Ltd., 1920, pp. 138, 239. 8 John Ruskin, ‘Life Guards of New Life’, Fors Clavigera, letter 79 (July 1877), in E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (eds.), The Works of John Ruskin, London, George Allen, 1909, Vol. XXIX, p. 160. 9 ‘The Trial’, compiled by Linda Merrill, A Pot of Paint: Aesthetics on Trial in Whistler v Ruskin, Washington, DC, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992,p.144. 10 Pater, The Renaissance,p.135. 11 Andrew Wilton (ed.), The Age of Rossetti, Burne-Jones and Watts: Symbolism in Britain 1860–1910, exhibition catalogue, London, Tate Gallery, 1997,p.118. 12 James McNeill Whistler, ‘Mr. Whistler’s Ten O’Clock’, in The Gentle Art of Making Enemies (1890); reprint of 1892 edition, New York, Dover Publications, 1967, pp. 135–59 (pp. 142–3). 13 Pater, The Renaissance,p.138. 14 Richard Wagner, ‘The Art Work of the Future’, in Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, English translation William Ashton Ellis, 8 vols., London, Kegan Paul, Trench, Tru¨ bner and Co., 1892, Vol. I, pp. 69–213. 15 William Morris, ‘Art and Socialism’, in Selected Writings, ed. G. H. Cole, London, Nonesuch Press, 1934, pp. 624–45: extracts in appendix to Stephen Arata (ed.), William Morris, News from Nowhere, Ontario, Broadview Press, 2003; 1890. 16 Morris, News from Nowhere,p.110. 17 Oscar Wilde, ‘The House Beautiful’, in Collins Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, Glasgow, HarperCollins, 2003,p.913. Cf., for example, the comments of Old Hammond in News from Nowhere:‘all work is now pleasurable; either because of the hope of gain in honour and wealth with which the work is done, which causes pleasurable excitement, even when the actual work is not pleasant; or else because it has grown into a pleasurable habit, as in the case with what you may call mechanical work; and lastly ...because there is conscious sensuous pleasure in the work itself; it is done, that is, by artists’ (p. 137). 18 Whistler, Gentle Art, pp. 138–9. 19 William Peterson, The Kelmscott Press: A History of William Morris’s Typo- graphical Adventure, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1991. 20 See High Art and Low Life: The Studio and the Fin de Sie`cle, Studio International special centenary number, 201/1022–1023 (1993). 21 For a full discussion of this work, see Wilton, Age of Rossetti, pp. 231–2. 22 For a fuller discussion, see Edward Lucie-Smith, Symbolist Art, London, Thames and Hudson, 1972,p.59. 23 Ibid., p. 54. 24 Nordau, Degeneration,p.115. 25 See Edward Carpenter, Homogenic Love and its Place in a Free Society, Manchester, The Labour Press Society, Ltd, 1894, and A. J. L. Busst, ‘The Image of the Androgyne in the Nineteenth Century’, in Ian Fletcher (ed.), Romantic Mythologies, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967,pp.1–95. 26 Havelock Ellis and John Addington Symonds, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Vol. I: Sexual Inversion, London, Wilson and Macmillan, 1897,p.60.

152

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 8

SALLY LEDGER The New Woman and feminist fictions

In the first act of The New Woman, Sidney Grundy’s satirical play from 1894, the audience is presented with a dispute between two contrasting but utterly characteristic New Woman figures from the fin de sie` cle, Enid Bethune and Victoria Vivash:

ENID: Why should a man be allowed to commit sins – VICTORIA: And woman not be given an opportunity? ENID: Then you want to commit sins? VICTORIA: I want to be allowed to do as men do. ENID: Then you ought to be ashamed of yourself; there! VICTORIA: I only say, I ought to be allowed. ENID: And I say that a man, reeking with infamy, ought not to be allowed to marry a pure girl – VICTORIA: Certainly not! She ought to reek with infamy as well! 1 ENID: Victoria! Enid Bethune’s disapproval of male sexuality and her desire for sexual chastity in both women and men firmly ally her with a social purity feminism that was highly influential in the late nineteenth century. Social purity feminists campaigned against prostitution and decadent male sexuality, and had amongst their number the leading New Woman novelist, Sarah Grand (Frances Elizabeth McFall, 1854–1943). Grundy’s Victoria Vivash, by contrast, demands sexual parity between women and men, and wishes women to enjoy the same sexual freedoms as men. In the fictional field such a stance was supported by the popular writer of New Woman short stories, George Egerton (Mary Chavelita Dunne, 1859–1945). Both positions – as evidenced by the success of Sidney Grundy’s theatrical spoof on the New Woman – provoked considerable controversy in the late-Victorian cultural sphere. Whilst a range of feminist views were expressed by those woman writers who promoted the cause of the New Woman, her opponents condemned her with a lampoon- ing stereotype. Simultaneously over-sexed and mannish, over-educated

153

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 SALLY LEDGER and asinine, the stereotype of the New Woman rapidly proliferated in the periodical press of the 1890s. The New Woman was ‘christened’ in 1894. Although multitudinous articles on the Woman Question had appeared in the periodical press throughout the 1880s and early 1890s, it was the popular novelist, ‘Ouida’, who extrapolated the now famous – and then infamous – phrase ‘the New Woman’ from Sarah Grand’s essay, ‘The New Aspect of the Woman Question’.2 Announced in the periodical press, the New Woman was as much a journalistic phenomenon as a subject for debate amongst the novelists of the fin de sie` cle. In January 1894, Blanche Alethea Crackanthorpe caused a critical uproar with an article published in the Nineteenth Century. Crackanthorpe’s argument in ‘The Revolt of the Daughters’ was that an unmarried girl had a right to be considered ‘as an individual as well as a daughter’. She should be able to travel freely, visit music halls and enjoy a good education. She deserved the option of a future other than as a wife and mother, and Crackanthorpe professed support for the professional training of women on the basis that not all girls could marry. She put her case quite modestly: ‘Marriage is the best profession for a woman; we all know and acknowledge it; but, for obvious reasons, all women cannot enter its strait and narrow gate.’3 Despite Crackanthorpe’s protestations to the contrary, and despite the avowed support for marriage of a number of New Woman writers (not least Sarah Grand), one of the defining features of arguments against the New Woman in the 1890s was the supposition that she posed a threat to the institution of marriage. Eliza Lynn Linton, one of a number of notable anti-feminist commentators of the period, wrote a series of articles in 1891 and 1892 in which she characterised the ‘Wild Woman’ (an unmistakable prototype for the New Woman) as a creature who opposed marriage, who vociferously demanded political rights, and who sought ‘absolute personal independence coupled with supreme power over men’.4 The perceived threat to marriage was exacerbated by the appearance in 1895 of Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, notable for Sue Bridehead’s vehement opposition to legal marriage, and of Grant Allen’s The Woman Who Did, whose heroine similarly refuses the legal tie between man and woman. Writing in the wake of these novels’ publication, Margaret Oliphant attacked what she called ‘The Anti-Marriage League’, figuring Hardy’s Sue Bridehead and Allen’s Herminia Barton as the leaders of the New Women against marriage. Oliphant’s is a diatribe against the New Woman’s alleged support of ‘free love’ relationships, lamenting that, ‘Faithfulness is bondage in her eyes. She is to be free to change her own companion if she discovers another more fit to be loved. And if one, also another no doubt, and another.’5 It was a putative association between the New Woman and ‘free love’ that led to the labelling, in the periodical press, of the New Woman as a sexual

154

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 The New Woman and feminist fictions decadent. Oliphant deplored ‘the disposition to place what is called the Sex Question above all others as the theme of fiction’ in English novels of the 1890s, claiming that sex is ‘the subject matter which has been proved to be the most damaging in the world as a subject for thought and for the exercise of the imagination’.6 Citing The Heavenly Twins, Sarah Grand’s best-selling novel from 1893, and George Egerton’s Keynotes and Discords from 1893 and 1894, James Ashcroft Noble, writing in the Contemporary Review in 1895, complained that the ‘fiction of sexual sensualism which has lately made itself such a nuisance to ordinarily decent and wholesome readers’ distorted reality, presenting us with ‘a series of pictures painted from reflections in convex mirrors’, which unnaturally promotes ‘the sexual passion’ as the mainstay of all social action. Ashcroft Noble’s characterisation of Sarah Grand as a ‘sensual’ writer was wide of the mark – Grand was a distinctly puritanical feminist – but it was Egerton’s more sexually explicit short stories that most dismayed him. He deplored the way she presented ‘men and women as merely or mainly conduits of sexual emotion’ and described the parading of sexuality in the ‘new fiction’ as ‘sickening’.7 In the same vein, the Cornhill Magazine’s ‘Character Note’ on the New Woman in 1894 presented her as a ‘fast’ woman pursuing an unwilling male prey.8 The most rebarbative of all the attacks on the New Woman was probably Hugh Stutfield’s ‘Tommyrotics’ in which he constructed a highly sexualised ‘emancipated woman’ who:

loves to show her independence by dealing freely with the relations of the sexes. Hence all the prating of passion, animalism, the ‘natural workings of sex’, and so forth, with which we are nauseated. Most of the characters in these books seem to be erotomaniacs. Some are ‘amorous sensitives’; others are apparently sexless, and are at pains to explain this to the reader. Here and there a girl indulges in what would be styled, in another sphere, ‘straight talks to young men’.9

This putting-on of ‘masculine’ attributes was thoroughly characteristic of the New Woman as she appeared in the periodical press. In describing the ‘Wild Woman’ who preceded her ‘New’ sister, Eliza Lynn Linton had no doubt of the masculinisation of the type, defining her as:

a woman [who] does anything specially unfeminine and ugly ...A woman who smokes in public and where she is forbidden, who dresses in knickerbockers or a boy’s shirt, who trails about in tigerskins, who flouts conventional decencies and offends against all the canons of good taste.10

The ‘Character Note’ on the New Woman written for the Cornhill Magazine in 1894 similarly identified a certain masculinity in ‘Novissima’s’ ‘somewhat aggressive air of independence which finds its birth in the length of her

155

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 SALLY LEDGER stride’, the anonymous commentator also reflecting that her dress is ‘always manly’ and that while she is educated, she is the product of ‘cheap education’.11 It was new practices in the education of women that were blamed by many enemies of the New Woman for her supposed masculinisation. Hugh Stutfield claimed that ‘the New Woman, or the ‘desexualized half-man ...is a victim of the universal passion for learning’.12 Anti-feminist commentators deployed pseudo-scientific biological discourses against those women who vied for educational achievements, warning that women’s reproductive capacities would be damaged by traditionally masculine academic pursuits. Charles Harper’s response in 1894 was not unusual, warning that:

nature, which never contemplated the production of a learned or a muscular woman, will be revenged upon her offspring, and the New Woman, if a mother at all, will be the mother of a New Man, as different, indeed, from the present race as possible, but how different, the clamorous females of today cannot expect ... [There is] the prospect of peopling the world with stunted and hydrocephalic children ...and ultimate extinction of the race.13

Woman’s role variously as a wife, a mother and a sexual subject were all under scrutiny in the debates on the New Woman at the fin de sie` cle. The most polemical of the interventions on the side of the New Woman was Mona Caird’s essay, ‘Marriage’, published in John Chapman’s radical quarterly, the Westminster Review,in1888.14 Caird’s essay is startlingly modern. Her opening gambit is that marriage as an institution is a relatively recent phenomenon, dating from the age of Luther ‘when commerce, competition, the great bourgeois class, and that remarkable thing called ‘‘Respectability’’ also began to arise’ (p. 186). Her insistence on marriage as an historically situated social form implied that it was not necessarily a permanent, unmalleable institution. If Caird deemed marriage only a temporary social form, then so too was the ideal of female virginity at the marriage altar. This she also derided as a relatively recent bourgeois phenomenon which ‘has attained its present mysterious authority and rank through men’s monopolizing jealousy, through the fact that he desired ‘‘to have and to hold’’ one woman as his exclusive property’ (p. 193). Whilst a strong critic of marriage, Caird was quick to recognise that in the late nineteenth century women were faced with a demoralising choice between a ‘mercenary marriage’ or penury as a single woman trying to earn a living (p. 195). Such a choice rendered almost impossible her ideal of marriage which, ‘despite all dangers and difficulties should be free. So long as love and trust and friendship remain, no bonds are necessary to bind two people together’ (p. 197). For such freedom in marriage the ‘economic independence of woman’ was the primary condition, and the battle for

156

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 The New Woman and feminist fictions such independence was only very slowly won, persisting in varying degrees even today. Mona Caird was a virtually unknown thirty-four-year-old when she wrote ‘Marriage’, an article which for a short period catapulted her to some emi- nence as the most notorious feminist in England. The Daily Telegraph,struck by the leading ideas of the article – that marriage was a ‘vexatious failure’ and that ‘the man who marries finds that his liberty has gone, and the woman exchanges one set of restrictions for another’ (p. 197) – decided to run a letters column entitled ‘Is Marriage a Failure?’ Responses to Caird’s essay were published daily, and in total 27,000 letters were received from the public on the subject. Caird’s critique of marriage was polemical; more reformist in tone was the article by Sarah Grand that led to the ‘naming’ of the New Woman in 1894.In ‘The New Aspect of the Woman Question’, an article that appeared a year after the runaway success of her best-selling novel, The Heavenly Twins,Sarah Grand emphasised the moral superiority of the new type of woman whose mission it was to hold out ‘a strong hand to the child man’, insisting ‘but with infinite tenderness and pity, upon helping him up’.15 The impetus for the article was the double standard in bourgeois Victorian marriage whereby sexual virtue was expected of the wife but not of the husband. The new type of woman, well educated and determined not to acquiesce in the status quo, would demand that marriage be freed from the contamination of male sexual licence. Grand’s article condemned men for their sexual profligacy, and equally condemned those ‘cow women’ (bovine domestic creatures) who helped to perpetuate moral inequality between the sexes by turning a blind eye to their husbands’ philandering. Not once, though, did Grand condemn marriage per se, arguing, on the contrary, that:

True womanliness is not in danger, and the sacred duties of wife and mother will be all the more honourably performed when women have a reasonable hope of being wives and mothers of men.16 Men’s moral turpitude meant that they lacked manliness, and these men needed to be reformed rather than abandoned. Sarah Grand’s commitment to the reformation of men’s sexuality also found expression in The Heavenly Twins: the periodical press and the fiction market explored the same range of social and cultural concerns throughout the period. This is the novel that established the New Woman – although yet formally to be named – as a cultural icon. Whilst Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles was the best-selling novel from 1892, The Heavenly Twins had that honour in the following year. New Woman fiction became a central and massively popular feature of fin de sie` cle culture: between 1883 and

157

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 SALLY LEDGER

1900 over 100 novels were written about the New Woman, and a large proportion of these came into print in the first half of the 1890s. Lyn Pykett has identified 1894 as the ‘annus mirabilis of the New Woman’17 when, inspired by Grand’s success, a whole flood of novels and short stories by (amongst others) Mona Caird, Ella Hepworth Dixon, Edith Arnold, George Egerton and ‘Iota’ would reach a popular market.18 The Heavenly Twins stridently articulated the brand of social purity feminism that would be one of the objects of Sidney Grundy’s satirical play. Late nineteenth-century social purity feminism grew out of the feminist campaigns against the Contagious Diseases Acts in the 1860s. The Acts had been passed with the aim of curbing the transmission of venereal disease from prostitutes to men (most often soldiers in garrison towns); under the terms of the Acts, women suspected of prostitution could be forcibly detained and treated in a ‘Lock Hospital’ for up to three months. The Acts of course failed to control the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, because whilst they sought to check and control diseased women, they left their (equally diseased) male clientele free to re-infect anyone with whom they came into contact. It was this that infuriated the campaigners against the Acts, and which led to the growth of social purity feminism. The Contagious Diseases Acts of the 1860s were predicated on the assumption that it was the female body that was responsible for polluting the larger social body. The social purity movement turned this predicate on its head, arguing instead that it was male sexuality and the male body that most needed to be controlled. In an interview after the publication of The Heavenly Twins,Grandwas quite explicit about the sexual politics of the novel in which a young woman, Evadne Frayling, refuses to consummate her marriage when she discovers, on her wedding day, that her husband has a dubious sexual history (he finally dies of syphilis). Clearly referring to the Contagious Diseases Acts, Grand revealed in 1896 that her impetus for writing the novel derived from her perception that ‘Men endeavour to protect themselves from disease by restrictive laws bearing on women, but nothing has yet been done to protect the married woman from contagion.’ She added to this observation her hope that ‘we shall soon see the marriage of certain men made a criminal offence’.19 Evadne Frayling, the central female protagonist in The Heavenly Twins, sexually educates herself by secretly reading modern medical textbooks, and has sufficient physiological knowledge to protect herself from her husband’s syphilitic body. It is made clear that she desires her husband sexually even though she is determined to reject him, and the novel’s acknowledgement of female sexual desire is important, given its predominantly puritanical strain. Evadne’s friend, Edith Beale, is even less fortunate in her choice of husband, a syphilitic naval officer. Edith, the daughter of a Bishop, becomes an innocent

158

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 The New Woman and feminist fictions victim of the disease, bears a syphilitic baby and herself dies from syphilis- induced dementia. It was the novel’s determination to articulate what more circumspect commentators would have preferred to suppress, and its expose´ of the underbelly of male sexuality, that so enraged contemporary reviewers. Grand herself reflected that ‘The criticism evoked by The Heavenly Twins was, as most people know, almost wholly adverse. Nearly all the reviewers were against it.’20 Evadne Frayling’s credentials as a social purity feminist are impeccable. In refusing to consummate her marriage, she reflects that to submit to her husband would be tantamount to ‘countenancing vice, and [...] helping to spread it’.21 All the same, the novel’s veiled expression of the heroine’s sexual desire exceeds its social purity agenda. As a young girl, Evadne’s sexuality is diverted into fervent religious devotion, but as a nineteen-year-old her desire for Major Colquohoun is overt: ‘Her heart bounded – her face flushed [...] She had felt nothing like it before ...’ (p. 53). And later in their (unconsum- mated) marriage we learn that she yearns ‘to be held close, close; to be kissed until she could not think; to live the intoxicating life of the senses only, and not care’ (p. 344). Evadne has to repress her sexual desire in order to take up a ‘pure’ position, and it is in the articulation of this repressed desire that the pleasure of the text resides. It is, though, ultimately a novel that tends to conform: both the central female characters – Evadne Frayling and Angelica Hamilton – end up in conventional marriages with ‘respectable’ men, Angelica married to a man twenty years her senior and Evadne to the morally correct Dr Galbraith. Evadne is, though, more a patient than a wife to her second husband. Pregnant with their child, she attempts suicide because of an (irrational) fear that their child will bear some kind of hereditary taint. Evadne’s hysteria – Galbraith diagnoses it as such – seems to stem from a residual fear of the pollutant effect of male sexuality that has persisted after her first husband’s death. It is a fear that haunts Grand’s novel. By contrast, sexuality holds no fears for George Egerton’s female protagonists in her short story collections from 1893 and 1894, Keynotes and Discords. Egerton’s stories almost certainly inspired Sidney Grundy’s caricature of Victoria Vivash in his 1894 play. In many ways George Egerton’s life epitomises Grundy’s view of the ‘fast’ and sexually adventurous New Woman: in 1887, at the age of twenty-seven, she eloped to Norway with a bigamist, and thereafter she was twice married, once divorced and once widowed; she had a fleeting romance with the Norwegian novelist, Knut Hamsun, as well as a string of other love affairs. Egerton was one of the few fiction writers of the fin de sie` cle to explore female sexuality in an affirmative way, and does so most memorably in two short stories from 1893 and 1894

159

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 SALLY LEDGER respectively: ‘A Cross Line’ and ‘The Regeneration of Two’. In the first of the two stories the central female protagonist tries to transcend the tedium of her marriage by exploring her desire in erotic fantasies. In one of these she lies dreamily in the Irish hills where she lives and imagines herself as a Salome´ figure, erotically controlling a large male audience:

Her arms are clasped by jewelled snakes, and one with quivering diamond fangs coils round her hips. Her hair floats loosely ...And she can feel too ...the grand intoxicating power of swaying all these human souls to wonder and applause. ...One quivering, gleaming, daring bound, and she stands with outstretched arms and passion-filled eyes, poised on one slender foot, asking a supreme note to finish her dream of motion. And the men rise to a man and answer her, and cheer, cheer, till the echoes shout from the surrounding hills and tumble wildly away down the crags. The clouds have sailed away, leaving long, feathery streaks in their wake. Her eyes have an inseeing look, and she is 22 tremulous with excitement. The jewelled snakes with fangs suggest a sexually predatory femininity, and the power that the Salome´ figure has over her male audience is a far cry from the victimised subject positions of Grand’s Evadne Frayling and Edith Beale. Her ‘dream of motion’ suggests the cadences of sexual arousal, and as she climaxes in what is surely an aestheticised rendering of female masturbation, the erotic world of her imagined open-air theatre blends with the natural environment in which the fantasy takes place, the woman’s ‘inseeing eyes’ suggestive of the aftermath of sexual orgasm. There is a comparable episode in ‘The Regeneration of Two’, a story in which a young woman who has escaped an unhappy marriage embarks on a successful ‘free union’ with an itinerant bohemian poet. Her awakening sexual sense is registered in the text through an affective, erotic engagement with the natural environment, which is apprehended aesthetically by the main female protagonist:

The very breeze blowing freshly from the sea seems to whisper of a vague change. ...The fir-trees stand sturdily, as if listening to the gracile silver birches bending their delicate branches in airy persiflage. ...The steamer has left again, and in the sky above its track two clouds are meeting; now they fuse and turn into a chariot tipped with silver and soar upwards. (p. 138) The phallic fir trees poised in erotic suspense above the pliant silver birches, the fusing of two clouds and the climactic upward soaring of an erotically charged ‘chariot’ all suggest an autoerotic fantasy of sexual congress. This is as suggestive of female orgasm as the closing lines of the erotic dream-reverie in ‘A Cross Line’, the more usually quoted of the stories. Whilst Sarah Grand would never have expressed female sexuality in such a free manner, ‘social purity’ and ‘sexual liberationist’ New Women had a

160

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 The New Woman and feminist fictions shared preoccupation with motherhood. Motherhood is probably the unify- ing theme of the very diverse body of New Woman literature from the 1880s and 1890s. The role of motherhood in women’s lives is central to many of George Egerton’s short stories. Egerton has been criticised by feminist critics for a faultline of biological essentialism in her work that, ultimately, defines women through their reproductive function. ‘A Cross Line’, in which the central female protagonist, despite her sexual fantasies, ultimately acquiesces in maternity and a future with her tender but unsatisfactory husband, is most often quoted in this respect. It is the collapse into motherhood that critics have commented on, but this produces only a very selective reading of this story and of Keynotes and Discords as a whole. For up until this point in the story the female protagonist has been presented as anything but maternal, Egerton exploring other, less biologically defined areas of her selfhood. ‘Gipsy’, the elusive central figure in the story, is disgusted by the hatching chicks that her husband proudly presents to her – ‘She suppresses an exclamation of disgust’, we are told (p. 5) – and this suggests that the maternal instinct that is explored at the end of the story is not a biological given but a learnt behaviour. Gipsy learns how to be maternal from her husband and from her maidservant, the latter shyly showing her her own dead baby’s clothes. The same process of women learning how to be maternal is enacted in ‘The Spell of the White Elf’, from Keynotes. In this story the New Woman protagonist confides to the narrator-persona that she is infertile, and that she has adopted the daughter of a relative. Loving the child, the New Woman, who is a ‘blue-stocking’ academic and journalist, is none the less wry about her lack of ‘natural’ mothering skills: ‘ [my husband] said I did not know how to hold her, that I was holding her like a book of notes at a lecture, and so I gave her to Belinda [her maidservant]’ (p. 29). Tutored by her nurturing (and himself strongly maternal) husband, the New Woman becomes a devoted mother, and creates in the female narrator-persona a strong maternal desire, communicated to her by the other woman’s love for her child. If Egerton is at times a biological essentialist, at other times she clearly is not. It is striking, in Egerton’s fiction, that non-biological motherhood is shown to be much more fulfilling than biological ties with children. In ‘The Regeneration of Two’ (Discords) as in ‘The Spell of the White Elf’, the New- Womanish protagonist achieves fulfilment and a strong sense of independent selfhood through her fostering of ‘illegitimate’ children, whom she takes in and looks after alongside their outcast mothers. By contrast, biological motherhood is repeatedly associated with psychological suffering and despair in the stories: ‘Mrs Jones’ in ‘Wedlock’ (Discords) is unable to enjoy mothering her stepchildren because of the previous claim of her own child, a claim that eventually leads to madness and death; the ‘fallen woman’ figure

161

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 SALLY LEDGER in ‘Gone Under’ (Discords) begins on a path of self-destruction after the death of her baby; and the mother–daughter tie in ‘Virgin Soil’ (Discords)is bitterly painful to both, the barely grown-up daughter declaring to her mother that it would have been better to have ‘strangle[d] me as a baby’ (p. 132) rather than sell her off in marriage to a middle-aged philanderer, the humiliation of which has made the daughter ‘hate myself and hate you’ (p. 132). If women’s lives in Keynotes and Discords are sometimes defined by motherhood, it is not a definition that Egerton celebrates. She is much more likely to celebrate women’s sexual desire than their maternal ties, and it is the aesthetic rendering of female sexuality in her stories that is one of their most striking and modern aspects. In Grant Allen’s popular New Woman novel from 1895, The Woman Who Did, maternity destroys the heroine’s ‘free love’ project with her unmarried partner. Herminia Barton’s partner, Alan Merrick, dies before their child is born, leaving Herminia penniless and outcast and, years later, despised by her daughter. Dismissed by Millicent Garrett Fawcett, the leader of the women’s suffrage movement in the 1890s, as having been written by ‘an enemy’ of the women’s movement, Allen’s novel none the less demonstrates the very real dangers of ‘free love’ for women who were socially and economically dependent. Thomas Hardy’s Sue Bridehead, in Jude the Obscure (1895), who bears Jude’s children but refuses to marry him, is another such warning to would-be New Women: all of their children are murdered by Jude’s child from a previous relationship, Little Father Time who, perceiving that the children are a burden on their parents, also kills himself. The perverse Malthusianism of the child’s act leads to total nervous breakdown for Sue, who is a characteristic study of the New Woman as hysteric. Motherhood is likewise desperately unfulfilling for Sarah Grand’s Evadne Frayling and Edith Beale, whose experience of maternity is overshadowed by the spectre of inherited disease. The rise of the Eugenics Movement at the fin de sie` cle meant that discussions about women’s role as mothers became entangled with discourses on racial purity and strength. Some of Sarah Grand’s shorter works of fiction are steeped in the vocabulary of eugenics (race improvement). In ‘Eugenia’, from her anthology of short stories, Our Manifold Nature (1894), the eponymous heroine rejects the advances of an upper-class suitor, the degenerate Brinkworthy, in favour of Saxon Wake, whose family has struggled successfully to rise above humble yeoman origins. His resultant ‘fitness’ in eugenic terms leads Eugenia to prefer him as a mate.The eugenic project is equally overt in Menie Muriel Dowie’s Gallia,a popular New Woman novel from 1895. In this novel the New Woman heroine suppresses the sexual desire she feels for the man she loves on the basis that he is a physically flawed specimen of manhood (he has heart disease), and she

162

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 The New Woman and feminist fictions chooses instead to marry and mate with a fit healthy man for whom she feels nothing because, as she puts it: ‘I have wanted the father of my child to be a fine, strong, manly man, full of health and strength.’23 It is in the greater interest of the (Anglo-Saxon) race that she should marry the healthy male. It is no coincidence that the rise of the Eugenics Movement and its accompanying vocabularies of race improvement were contemporary with the so-called ‘Age of Empire’ in the 1880s and 1890s. The eugenics arguments that began to gather momentum in the 1890s were connected in a complex way with Britain’s ongoing imperialist project, and a good deal of New Woman writing was thoroughly implicated with the languages of eugenics and imperialism. The work of Olive Schreiner (1855–1920), the ‘mother’ of the New Woman fiction, whose novel from 1883, The Story of an African Farm, depicts ‘the first wholly serious feminist heroine’ in English fiction, importantly explores the relationships between race, motherhood 24 and empire. Whilst best known for The Story of an African Farm,itisinher short story, ‘A Child’s Day’ (1887), that the complexity of Schreiner’s understanding of gender and imperialism is most fully articulated. In this story, which later formed the first chapter of her novel, From Man to Man (1926), a preoccupation with motherhood and the natural world is enmeshed with a complex exploration of racial hierarchies and various species of oppression. The story is narrated from a five-year-old child’s point of view, a young girl with a powerful maternal instinct. The entire story centres on maternity, the opening line announcing that ‘The little mother lay in the agony of childbirth.’25 The birth over, there ensues a battle between the white child and the ‘Hottentot’ (Khoikhoi) maid, ‘Old Ayah’, the child desiring to be maternally involved with the new-born infant, the maid wishing to exclude her. Various quasi-colonialist narratives are deployed to articulate the struggle, with the child at one point dreaming that she meets Queen Victoria on a remote island and tells her that ‘I am the little Queen Victoria of South Africa’ (p. 34). The imaginary Queen allows Rebekah to reign sovereign on the island, and the narrative here clearly has a symbolic function, representing the white child’s desire to overturn the black maid’s power over her in the house. Rebekah does not simply identify with Queen Victoria as a colonial ruler, though; there is a corresponding (and conflictual) identification with the colonised and the oppressed throughout the story. This conflict articulates Schreiner’s contradictory position as a colonial woman who opposed imperialist policies. Rebekah, it seems, has learnt about childbirth from the ‘Kaffir’ servants in the house. Whilst the privileged white woman’s childbirth is closeted and hidden from Rebekah, who is only aware that ‘something was happening at the house’ (p. 26), the ‘Kaffir’ women’s births take place out in the open, regarded as part of the normal course of events. The story both

163

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 SALLY LEDGER idealises and identifies with the ‘natural’ rhythms of maternity associated with the ‘Kaffir’ servants. Rebekah imagines herself as being in some ways ‘unnatural’ and inadequate as a (white) mother, apologising to her imaginary infant for her inability to breast-feed: ‘My baby, I’m so sorry I have to give you food out of a bottle – Kaffir women have milk for their babies – and cows and sheep too – but I am like the birds’ (p. 45). Rebekah’s identification with the colonised and the oppressed is thus reinforced by her sympathy with ‘black’ childbirth and motherhood. The alternation of sympathies – Rebekah at various points feeling a rap- port with the colonised, and then imagining herself a ‘Queen’, a colonial empress – is further illustrated in one of the stories the young girl tells her imaginary baby. ‘What Hester Durham Lived For’ – a narrative that Rebekah has overheard her father reading to her mother – includes an account of the Indian Mutiny. ‘Hester’ is an English woman who wants her life to end when her young son dies. Persuaded by a priest to ‘do good’ by diverting her maternal drive into a ‘civilising’ mission, Hester travels to India, and the house she lives in is attacked by Indian soldiers. At last rediscovering – in a colonial environment – the maternal mission she thought she had lost, Hester Durham fearlessly ‘mothers’ all the women and children in the house (‘even the old black Ayah’, p. 42) up to the time they are murdered by the military men. Hester is an heroic colonial woman, her stoical ‘English’ courage enabling her to face death at the hands of the ‘natives’, comforting those dependants who will die with her. Her ambivalent political status – she is of the colonial party, but at the same time is a victim of military oppression – reflects Rebekah’s (and Olive Schreiner’s) own dual identification with both the colonisers and the colonised. If New Woman writers such as Schreiner, Grand and Dowie found themselves entangled, in their writings, with the eugenics project, Mona Caird (1854–1931), arguably the most radical of all the New Woman novelists of the period, emphatically distanced herself from it. Caird was also – unsurprisingly in this context – one of the most outspoken critics of motherhood amongst the New Woman writers, and nowhere more so than in her best- known novel, The Daughters of Danaus (1894). Following in the wake of the immense success of Sarah Grand’s novel from 1893, The Heavenly Twins, The Daughters of Danaus provoked an equally vehement response. The feminist press was enthusiastic: Shafts deemed it ‘one of the best books the century has produced’, and devoted parts of four issues to reviewing and quoting extensively from the novel.26 Shafts’s enthusiasm was by no means typical, though. More characteristic was the response of W. T. Stead, a campaigning journalist who was in general sympathetic to New Woman fiction. Stead was dismayed by the polemical character of a novel that he

164

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 The New Woman and feminist fictions thought belittled ‘the divine privilege of maternity’, and insisted that no amount ‘of fierce denunciations of ‘‘the reproductive rage’’ [will] make motherhood other than divine in the estimation of the race’.27 The main protagonist of The Daughters of Danaus stridently denounces motherhood. As she observes an acquaintance, Lady Engleton, with her newborn child, ‘full of pride and exultation’, Hadria Fullerton is overwhelmed by a ‘sensation of disgust’.28 The importance of maternal nurtur- ance is peremptorily dismissed by Caird’s heroine with the pragmatic reflection that:

...since few of us know how to bring up so much as an earth worm reasonably, I can’t see that it matters so very much which particular woman looks after the children. Any average fool would do. (p. 185) Hadria’s frontal assault on the Victorian reification of motherhood impacts most forcefully when she compares it to prostitution, a social problem which so much preoccupied social commentators in the second half of the century. The analogy is clearly provocative: ‘Motherhood, as our wisdom has appointed it, among civilized people, represents a prostitution of the reproductive powers, which precisely corresponds to that other abuse, which seems to most of us so infinitely more shocking’ (p. 343). Given Hadria’s polemical stance on marriage and motherhood, it is perhaps surprising to learn that quite early on in the novel she acquires both a husband and two children. But whereas earlier nineteenth-century novels quintessentially closed with a marriage, here its insertion into the early part of the narrative allowed Caird to dissect, rather than celebrate, one of Western culture’s major institutions, and this is, again, a major feature of New Woman fiction from the fin de sie` cle. Having married, borne children, and regretted both, Hadria Fullerton leaves her husband and her children and goes off to Paris to pursue a career as a composer of music. She also explicitly contemplates adultery, claiming that ‘I am doing nothing wrong, according to my own beliefs’ (p. 412). Mona Caird was more radical in her sexual politics in this regard than her contemporary, Sarah Grand, who is much more tentative about extra-marital relationships. In The Beth Book, Grand’s novel from 1897, the (married) heroine’s desire to live with her lover is clear; but at the close she moves only very hesitantly towards such a relationship, which is never clearly articulated. The New Woman of the late nineteenth century was repeatedly associated with modernity, and it is significant in this respect that the music which Hadria composes is emphatically ‘modernist’: we are told that ‘Her bizarre composi- tions shocked [her husband] painfully’ and that ‘It was rebel music, offensive to the orthodox’ (p. 321). This association with modernity and the cultural

165

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 SALLY LEDGER avant-garde meant that the New Woman was often linked to the Decadent movement in art and literature. To the opponents of the New Woman such a link provided useful critical ammunition. In 1895 the Speaker linked the New Woman to Oscar Wilde, who would shortly be sentenced to two years’ hard labour for acts of ‘gross indecency’: ‘For many years past Mr Wilde has been the real leader in this country of the ‘‘new school’’ in literature – the revolutionary and anarchist school which has forced itself into such prominence in every domain of art ... The new criticism, the new poetry, even the new woman, are all, more or less, the creatures of Mr Oscar Wilde’s fancy.’29 Many New Woman writers were quick to distance themselves from the Decadent movement, quite rightly detecting a political risk in the association. Sarah Grand attacks Decadence and Aestheticism through the figure of Alfred Cayley Pounce, in The Beth Book. Pounce, who had been Beth’s childhood friend, is a reviewer for an art journal called the Patriarch, and has been corrupted by its Decadent and immoral circle. But whilst social purity feminists such as Grand disavowed the Decadent movement, other New Woman writers eagerly entered into dialogue with it, particularly in the pages of The Yellow Book, one of the main organs of Decadent literature and art. The Yellow Book was launched in 1894, very much the year of the New Woman, and from the start it was brimming over with stories, essays and poems not only about women, but also by women, and some of them were very much ‘new’ women: female contributors included George Egerton, Charlotte Mew, Ella D’Arcy, Vernon Lee and Victoria Cross. Charlotte Mew’s short story from 1894, ‘Passed’, is a striking feminist revision of Decadent formulations of femininity. In the edition of The Yellow Book that preceded the publication of Mew’s story, Henry Harland, its literary editor, had included a poem by Arthur Symons called ‘Stella Maris’ in which the poet lingers on erotic memories of a sexual encounter with a prostitute, a romanticised ‘Juliet of a night’ with whom he enjoys a ‘delicious shame’. Symons revels in the lips that ‘deliciously steal/Along my neck,/And fasten there’, and breathes in ‘the perfume in your hair’.30 Mew’s short story, in the next edition of the journal, revisits this night-time scene but recasts the figure of the prostitute in a more naturalistic narrative. ‘Passed’ is an immense- ly powerful, Edgar Allen Poe-like short story that has at its centre a young, middle-class woman’s encounter with a poverty-stricken young actress, who drags the narrator across London in a headlong flight to the attic room in which her prostitute sister lies dead. Fleeing in fear, the middle-class narrator persona later encounters again the young woman who had pleaded with her for help. She comes across her in a notorious West End arcade, dressed in red, and accompanied by a man who is clearly a customer. The epiphany of the story is the guilt the narrator feels at the failure of nerve that prevented

166

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 The New Woman and feminist fictions her from giving the help the young woman had asked for. Mew’s story presents a socialised and moralised encounter with a prostitute, an encounter that implicitly challenges Arthur Symons’s romanticised and connoisseur- like delectation of the prostitute’s sensuous body in ‘Stella Maris’. The Yellow Book, a journal that for about a year between 1894 and 1895 provided a cultural forum for genuine dialogue between New Women, Aesthetes, Decadents and other avant-garde writers of the fin de sie` cle, fell victim, in April 1895, to the downfall of Oscar Wilde. Although Wilde had never contributed to The Yellow Book, it was to some extent deemed guilty by association, and operated a much more cautious editorial policy after his imprisonment. The cultural archetype of the New Woman, and the large body of literature that brought her to life, was similarly caught up in the scandal surrounding Oscar Wilde. On 21 December 1895 Punch triumphantly announced ‘THE END OF THE NEW WOMAN – The crash has 31 come at last’. Victorian feminism, for this most misogynist of Victorian journals, was on the run. An enormous number of New Woman novels and short stories had been published and widely read in the early 1890s, concomitant with both the rise of mass-market fiction and with the resurgence of interest in the Woman Question at the fin de sie` cle. But this deluge of popular New Woman fiction dwindled dramatically after 1895, confirming Punch’s prediction at the close of that year. Whilst important New Woman novels were published thereafter – Sarah Grand’s The Beth Book, Mary Cholmondeley’s Red Pottage (1899) and Gertrude Dix’s The Image Breakers (1900) immediately spring to mind – the heyday of the New Woman fiction was the first half of the 1890s. It is a body of literature that remains one of the most remarkable features of fin de sie` cle culture.

NOTES 1 Sidney Grundy, The New Woman (1894), in Jean Chothia (ed.), The New Woman and Other Emancipated Woman Plays, Oxford University Press, 1998, Act 1, Scene 1,p.16. 2 See Sarah Grand, ‘The New Aspect of the Woman Question’, North American Review, 158 (1894), 270–6, and ‘Ouida’, ‘The New Woman’, North American Review, 158 (1894), 610–19. 3 B. A. Crackanthorpe, ‘The Revolt of the Daughters’, Nineteenth Century, 35 (1894), 23–31 (p. 25,p.27). 4 Eliza Lynn Linton, ‘The Wild Women as Social Insurgents’, Nineteenth Century, 30 (1891), 596–605 (p. 596). Other articles in the series were ‘The Wild Women as Politicians’, Nineteenth Century, 30 (1891), 79–88, and ‘The Partisans of the Wild Women’, Nineteenth Century, 31 (1892), 455–64. 5 Margaret Oliphant, ‘The Anti-Marriage League’, Blackwood’s Magazine, 159 (1896), 135–49 (p. 146).

167

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 SALLY LEDGER

6 Ibid., pp. 136–7, 145. 7 James Ashcroft Noble, ‘The Fiction of Sexuality’, Contemporary Review, 67 (1895), 490–8, (p. 494). 8 ‘Character Note: The New Woman’, Cornhill Magazine, ns. 23 (1894), 365–8. 9 Hugh Stutfield, ‘Tommyrotics’, Blackwood’s Magazine, 157 (1895), 833–45 (p. 836). 10 Linton, ‘Partisans of the Wild Women’, p. 460. 11 ‘Character Note: The New Woman’, pp. 365, 367. 12 Stutfield, ‘Tommyrotics’, p. 837. 13 C. G. Harper, Revolted Woman: Past, Present and to Come, London, Elkin Matthews, 1894,p.27. 14 Mona Caird, ‘Marriage’, Westminster Review, 130 (1888), 186–201. All further references to this text will be incorporated into the main body of the chapter. 15 Grand, ‘New Aspect of the Woman Question’, p. 273. 16 Ibid., pp. 274–5. 17 Lyn Pykett, The Improper Feminine: The Women’s Sensation Novel and the New Woman Writing, London and New York, Routledge, 1992,p.137. 18 New Woman fiction published in 1894 includes: Mona Caird, The Daughters of Danaus, London, Bliss, Sands and Foster, 1894; Ella Hepworth Dixon, The Story of a Modern Woman, Toronto, Broadview Press, 2004; 1894; Edith Arnold, Platonics: A Study, Bristol, Thoemmes Press, 1995; 1894; Iota (K. Caffyn), The Yellow Aster, London, Hutchinson, 1894; George Egerton, Keynotes and Discords,Birmingham University Press, 2003; 1893 and 1894; Sarah Grand, Our Manifold Nature, London, Heinemann, 1894. 19 Sarah A. Tooley, ‘The Woman’s Question: An Interview With Madame Sarah Grand’, Humanitarian, 8 (1896), 160–9. 20 Ibid., p. 160. 21 Sarah Grand, The Heavenly Twins (London, William Heinemann, 1893), p. 79. All further references to the novel will be cited in the main body of the text. 22 George Egerton, Keynotes and Discords,p.9; my ellipses. All further references to these short story collections will be cited in the main body of the text. 23 Menie Muriel Dowie, Gallia, London, Methuen, 1895,p.321. 24 E. Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Novelists From Bronte¨to Lessing, London, Virago, 1977,p.199. 25 Olive Schreiner, ‘The Child’s Day’, in Carol Barash (ed.), An Olive Schreiner Reader, London, Pandora, 1987,p.24. All further references to this short story will be cited in the main body of the text. 26 Review of The Morality of Marriage and Other Essays, Shafts (February and March, 1898), pp. 24–5,p.28. 27 W. T. Stead, ‘The Book of the Month: The Novel of the Modern Woman’, Review of Reviews, 10 (1894), 64–74 (pp. 66–7). 28 Caird, Daughters of Danaus,p.173. Subsequent references to the novel will be included in the main body of the text. 29 Speaker, 13 April 1895,p.403; quoted in John Stokes, In the Nineties, Hemel Hempstead, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989,p.14. 30 Arthur Symons, ‘Stella Maris’, The Yellow Book, 1 (1894), 129–31 (p. 130). 31 Punch, 21 December 1895,p.297.

168

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 9

STEPHEN ARATA Realism

Casting his practised eye over the English literary scene in 1884, Henry James was heartened to see signs of a new interest – new for England, at any rate – in the theory of the novel. ‘Only a short time ago’, James writes in ‘The Art of Fiction’, ‘it might have been supposed that the English novel was not what the French call discutable’: not, that is, an appropriate topic for debate or even moderately impassioned conversation.1 The novel in Victorian Britain had in James’s view become a highly sophisticated art form, yet there was still among British readers ‘a comfortable, good-humoured feeling abroad that a novel is a novel, as a pudding is a pudding, and our only business with it could be to swallow it’ (p. 44). Now such mindless ingestion was becoming less common. We have learned to increase our readerly pleasures, James maintains, precisely by stepping back to contemplate them critically. ‘The successful application of any art is a delightful spectacle, but the theory too is interesting’ (p. 45) – especially at moments of creative ferment such as the 1880s, when theory and application alike were in productive turmoil. Casting aside outworn conventions, modern writers were in James’s view developing new techniques for achieving the novel’s only abiding goal: to ‘represent life’ through an ever-renewed engagement with ‘reality’ (p. 46). For James in 1884, the progress of literary realism was more or less coterminous with the advance of narrative fiction as a whole. Surveying the contemporary literary landscape, he found much to be encouraged by, not least in the new self-consciousness with which writers and readers of novels practised their respective tasks. ‘The Art of Fiction’ makes an urgent case for the ‘fertilising’ effect on the novel of ‘discussion’, of ‘experiment’, of ‘curiosity’, of ‘variety of attempt’, of a perpetual ‘exchange of views and ...comparison of standpoints’. As James reminds his readers, ‘Art lives upon discussion’ (pp. 44–5). Well, some kinds of discussion anyway. In May 1888 the House of Commons engaged in a vigorous debate on the state of contemporary fiction in Britain. All in all, the Members were considerably less sanguine than James

169

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 STEPHEN ARATA had been four years earlier. Their discussion was prompted by a motion put forward by the Member for Flintshire, Samuel Smith: ‘That this House deplores the rapid spread of demoralising literature in this country, and is of opinion that the law against obscene publications and indecent pictures and prints should be vigorously enforced, and, if necessary, strengthened.’2 The publications alluded to were all, to Smith’s mind, unnecessarily graphic. Indeed, it was precisely their gratuitous ‘realism’ that made them dangerous to impressionable readers, especially the young. In his opening remarks Smith identified ‘the chief culprit’ in this country-wide dissemination of what he called ‘pernicious’ realist literature as Henry Vizetelly, 67-year-old head of the publishing firm of Vizetelly & Co. (p. 353). Vizetelly, whose long career had included stints as an engraver, a newspaper publisher, a journalist, a translator, a wine expert and a war correspondent, had since 1878 been the primary – in most cases the only – source of English translations of works by contemporary French and Russian novelists. The authors published by Vizetelly were of a kind to make Henry James’s appreciative heart beat fast. Among others they included Gustave Flaubert, Alphonse Daudet, Guy de Maupassant, Paul Bourget, Leo Tolstoi and Fyodor Dostoievsky – the very writers who through example and precept had helped quicken interest in the modern art of fiction. Obviously not everyone shared James’s enthusiasm. Indeed, many Victorian readers, who associated realist writing with the representation of morally questionable scenes, actions and characters, viewed the writers on Vizetelly’s list with deep distrust. By 1888, moreover, Vizetelly was best known for his (nearly) unexpurgated translations of the novels of Emile Zola, leading theorist and practitioner of Naturalism in fiction. To its detractors, Naturalism was Realism at its most gratuitous. Beginning with Nana and L’Assommoir in 1884, Vizetelly & Co. published seventeen of Zola’s works in four years. Sales were high; so too, in many quarters, was the level of outrage. In his remarks before the Commons, Smith was unequivocal in his denunciation of Zola’s fiction. It was ‘noxious and licentious’, ‘inartistic garbage’, ‘dirt and horror pure and simple’. This was writing whose ‘sheer beastliness’ made it ‘only fit for swine’ (pp. 353–4). After much more of the same from Smith and other Members sympathetic to his views, Smith’s motion was passed unanimously. Five months later Henry Vizetelly was taken to court for having published The Soil, a translation of Zola’s La Terre, which the solicitor-general Sir Edward Clarke did not scruple to call a work of ‘bestial obscenity’ (p. 371). Vizetelly was fined £100 and compelled to withdraw his Zola translations from the market. The following summer he was in court again, this time for having reissued those same translations in slightly bowdlerised forms. Sentenced to three months’

170

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Realism imprisonment in addition to receiving another, heavier fine, Vizetelly lost his taste for defying the authorities. After 1890 the fortunes of Vizetelly & Co. declined rapidly. James in his study, Vizetelly in the dock. As we think about English realist fiction at the fin de sie` cle, it can help to keep these paired images in mind. The 1880s and 1890s, according to John Olmsted, ‘saw more writing devoted to the art of fiction than had appeared in the previous half century’.3 The majority of that writing centred on literary realism. On the one hand, realism was a topic of earnest inquiry for those who cared deeply about the forms and techniques of narrative art, its whys and hows. Over the middle decades of the nineteenth century a broad consensus had developed concerning the hallmarks of realism in the English tradition: a fidelity to everyday life; a valuation of ordinary people, events and experiences; a commitment, in Kate Flint’s words, both to ‘recording the visible details of a crowded material 4 world’ and to ‘giving a sense of the complex interior lives’ of individual women and men; a (qualified) belief in the power of language to mirror accurately the world without and the world within. By the 1880s, that consensus had begun to fray as writers explored new techniques and refur- bished familiar ones. ‘Realism’ in the hands of Henry James or Thomas Hardy or Sarah Grand becomes a different thing from what it had been for George Eliot or Anthony Trollope. Late-Victorian realism is recognisably a continuation of the High Victorian tradition yet sufficiently innovative that contemporaries felt it merited being called ‘New’. That designation – ‘The New Realism’ – covered a wide range of writing practices, but for all the writers concerned the ‘question of realism’ was first and foremost a question of literary technique, of conscious artistry and craft.5 At the same time, as Henry Vizetelly learned, the ‘question of realism’ could quickly move beyond the bounds of strictly literary concerns. Discussions of realism crop up in surprising places: not just in quarrels over moral education and public safety, but in discussions about the rights of women, or the growth of cities, or the progress of history, or the distinctions between nations, or even simply (except that it was never simple) the physical and psychological well-being of the average English citizen. As these often vigorous late-Victorian debates over realism show, it is not possible to quarantine artistic from social issues for very long. The participants themselves saw no reason to attempt it. James’s many writings on the formal and narrative arts of fiction, to take only one example, continually return us to the social realm those arts so abundantly nourish, while even the most aesthetically challenged social observer will circle back over and again to the vexed question of how words on a printed page, artfully arranged, can contribute to significant cultural change.

171

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 STEPHEN ARATA

For some wary English observers, the first thing to be said about realism was also the most damning thing one could say about it, namely that it was a foreign import. Major exporters included the United States, Russia and the countries of Scandinavia. Most of the supply, however, as well as the bulk of the theory, came from France. Writing in 1884, Mrs Humphrey Ward noted the widely accepted truth that ‘the French have now fully possessed themselves of those realistic and ‘‘scientific’’ methods, which are only just beginning to affect the English novelist’.6 Ward pointed to the ‘great career of Balzac’ as at once the origin and the apex of French literary realism. Strictly speaking, Honore´ de Balzac could be labelled a realist only anachro- nistically, since the terms re´alisme and realism did not enter their respective languages until the decade following his death in 1850. The earliest use in English of ‘realism’ to describe a literary method occurs in an 1853 article in the Westminster Review on ‘Balzac and his Writings’, which sought to introduce British readers to the novels of the Come´die Humaine, none of which had at that time been translated into English. Balzac’s novels were taken by later generations of Victorian readers – both those who read French and those who simply read about the French – to epitomise at once the strengths and the weaknesses of the realist method. His admirers credited Balzac with having expanded the reach of narrative fiction. The Come´die Humaine, wrote the anonymous Westminster Review essayist, ‘contains pictures of every kind of society existing in France during the first half of the nineteenth century, whether literary, political, commercial, military, ecclesiastical, or rural’.7 The world suddenly seemed bigger, fuller, more varied and complex. This was a result not just of Balzac’s willingness to depict social regions and character types that previously had not been thought suitable for fiction, but also of the exuberance with which he detailed the sheer abundance of things in the world. His characters moved through a fictional space that was, in a sense, more fully furnished than ever before. The characters themselves were perceived as being more completely realised, more individualised, and thus more true to life than those found in earlier narratives. In addition, Balzac was praised for eschewing conventional plots in favour of the careful, accurate representation of everyday life. In his novels the narrative action is driven forward not by adventure or improbable incident but by a plausible sequence of events which, though unremarkable in itself, leads nevertheless to crisis and transformation. To those less enamoured of Balzac’s artistry, each of these virtues har- boured a corresponding literary vice. Fidelity to the rhythms of the everyday was too often simply a receipt for narrative tedium; ‘life-like’ fictional characters seldom deserve our extended attention any more than most real people do; cataloguing objects for their own sake risked a descent into

172

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Realism banality. Balzac, noted the Westminster Review, ‘was accused of giving an unnatural degree of importance to details, of recording trivialities, of describing interiors with the precision of an appraiser’ (p. 211). According to his detractors, such faults meant that the Come´die Humaine was in a literal sense ‘inartistic’, since art is art precisely because it is not like life. By the 1880s, however, the worst charge brought against Balzac was that he was in large measure responsible for what had happened to French fiction after his death. By licensing the portrayal of people and topics previously considered inappropriate for art, Balzac had paved the way for subsequent writers to produce works of fiction that disapproving readers denounced as either dirty or dull – even, sometimes, both. On the evidence of contemporary reviews, it appears that for every reader who found Flaubert’s portrayal of Emma Bovary’s adultery morally offensive there were two who found his depiction of her Yonville life unutterably tedious. A generation later Zola was repeatedly accused both of enflaming his readers’ desire for unseemly stimulation and of numbing their senses through his exhaustive, exhausting inventory of everyday life in France under the Second Empire. The French realist tradition – embodied for Victorian readers by Balzac and Stendhal, Flaubert and de Maupassant, Daudet and Zola and the brothers Edmond and Jules de Goncourt – loomed large for British writers and critics in the last decades of the century. Different as these authors were from one another, collectively they had produced a body of realist writing that could be neither ignored nor slighted. For many fin de sie` cle critics, sympathetic to the realist project but uncomfortable with its Gallic manifestations, the French example spurred efforts to identify a counterbalancing English realist tradition untainted by what George Saintsbury termed the ‘dull uncleanness’ contam- inating contemporary literature across the Channel.8 Rather than dwelling on sordid or tedious subjects for their own sakes, the argument went, English realists from Daniel Defoe onward kept in constant view fiction’s ultimate social function, namely to elevate or improve its audience. Realist representation ought always to be in the service of the reader’s moral education. Committed to the faithful rendering of the visible world, English writers nevertheless recognised that, as the critic W. S. Lilly put it in 1885, the task of the true artist ‘is to extract from human life, even in its commonest aspects, 9 its most vulgar realities, what it contains of secret beauty’. Because the ‘vocation’ of all legitimate writers is ‘to refine, to elevate, to moralise’ their readers, Lilly contends, it is their duty even ‘in the midst of the ugly and sordid realities of daily life to present that image of a fairer and better world, the desire of which springs eternal in the human breast’ (p. 249). Lilly was far from the only critic to imply that what saved English realism was the leavening of idealism (or, alternately, of romanticism) that it

173

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 STEPHEN ARATA contained. Dickens’s claim that in Bleak House he dwelt on ‘the romantic side of familiar things’ was one way to formulate the relation of the ideal to the real. Another was to insist, as Lilly and others did, that the artistic rendering of the material world could be justified only when it provided a gateway to the ‘invisible reality’ of divine truth. In either case, the great English novelists were said to have avoided the pitfalls that ensnared their French counterparts. French novels wallowed in the real; English novels transformed it. In the hands of Jane Austen or Charles Dickens or George Eliot, the real was lifted out of the realm of the banal and the vulgar by the transforming power of the imagination. Only through imagination could reality be charged with ethical or social value. In Eliot’s novels, wrote Arthur Tilley in 1883, ‘characters and incidents, apparently commonplace, become invested with a halo of romance and interest. This is true realism, the realism which shows a scrupulous reverence for the truth of nature, and yet can 10 poetise that truth even in its most homely aspects.’ Tilley contrasts Eliot’s method with that of William Dean Howells and Henry James, American practitioners of ‘the new school of fiction’ associated with the name of Zola. Where Eliot’s characters and situations are only ‘apparently commonplace’, those of Howells and James are ‘essentially so’. ‘May it not be said’, Tilley writes, ‘that while George Eliot elevates the commonplace, the new school vulgarises it? And if so, is this true realism? Is it not rather the sin of Zola?’ – the sin, that is, of being ‘merely a faithful transcriber’ of life and not a genuine artist (pp. 264–5). As Tilley’s essay makes clear, Eliot’s example was considered decisive by critics eager to champion a distinctly English brand of realism. In their eyes, Eliot had remained true to the idea of fiction as a vehicle of moral improvement. Her realism was motivated by a desire to expand and to refine the moral sensibilities of her readers. A ‘picture of human life such as a great artist can give’, she wrote in 1856, ‘surprises even the trivial and the selfish into that attention to what is apart from themselves, which may be called the raw material of moral sentiment’.11 The picture of human life Eliot gives in her own novels aspires to ‘the faithful representing of commonplace things’, as she puts it in an oft-quoted passage from Chapter 17 of Adam Bede (1859). Eliot foregrounds the commonplace not in order to underline its banality or tedium – as their critics claimed Flaubert and Zola often did – but in an effort to locate the exceptional within it. Eliot effectively extended the reach of the novel while keeping faith with its traditional office of moral education. Her works also remained bound by conventions of decorum regarding certain questionable or risque´ topics. The representation of ‘ordinary experience’ was still restricted by what in her final published work Eliot calls ‘duteous reticences’. In the opening chapter of

174

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Realism

Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879), Eliot’s narrator claims that duteous reticence arises from ‘that reverence for the higher efforts of our common nature, which commands us to bury its lowest fatalities, its invincible rem- nants of the brute, its most agonising struggles with temptation, in unbroken silence’. Presumably she is referring to sex, though the periphrasis (which is a form of reticence) perhaps leaves room for other meanings as well. Eliot died in 1880, at the moment when the influence of French realism was beginning to be felt strongly in certain areas of English literature. For readers suspicious of that influence, it was precisely the relative lack of reticence regarding sexual matters in the ‘new fiction’ that caused the most alarm. The reception of George Moore’s first two novels is a case in point. Non-marital intima- cies figure in the plot of each: A Modern Lover (1883) charts the fortunes, amorous and artistic, of a callow young painter named Lewis Seymour, while A Mummer’s Wife (1885) recounts the history of Kate Ede, who leaves her dreary Midlands home and even drearier husband after being seduced by an actor in a travelling troupe. In the early 1880s Moore was among the very few British writers to profess openly his allegiance to Zola (an allegiance he renounced, with flourishes, a few years later), and his first novels are notable for their sexual frankness. That frankness earned his books a place on the index librorum prohibitorum of secular Victorian culture – the list of works Mudie’s Circulating Library refused to stock because of their ‘immoral’ content. Moore’s novels were also the target of numerous intemperate reviews. The Spectator darkly cautioned readers that A Modern Lover was a product of ‘Zola and his odious school’,12 while the critic William Wallace called A Mummer’s Wife ‘the most repulsive story ever written’.13 Alarmed or offended critics often claimed to be speaking on behalf of the ‘young reader’ who, it was argued, was most likely to be damaged – emotionally, intellectually and of course morally – by exposure to novels such as Moore’s. The Young Reader, invariably female, was a familiar figure in late- Victorian debates over realist literature. Conservative critics such as Saintsbury suggested that ‘the ‘‘cult of the young person’’’ was a sign of the relative health of English letters. Unlike their Continental or American counterparts, Saintsbury contended, English writers continued to respect the sensibilities of the young, which ‘has at least kept [English fiction] from 14 the last depths of dirty dulness’. In a similar vein, Walter Besant argued that in civilised societies art is necessarily bound by the strictures of ‘an authority known as Average Opinion’, which seeks above all else to protect respectable young women.15 In Moore’s view, on the other hand, the cult of the young female reader threatened to emasculate literature. In ‘A New Censorship of Literature’, his response to the suppression of A Modern Lover, Moore claimed that Charles Mudie told him that the novel was withdrawn from

175

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 STEPHEN ARATA library circulation because ‘two ladies from the country’ had objected to a single scene of (implied) nudity. Moore could hardly decide which was the more objectionable and damaging: the power exercised over literature by ‘a mere tradesman’ such as Mudie or the deference accorded to fastid- ious women readers. Moore combined the two figures the following year in an incendiary pamphlet titled Literature at Nurse (published, as was A Mummer’s Wife, by Vizetelly & Co.); here, Mudie is depicted as a nursing mother who starves her healthy offspring by denying them the breast while favouring ‘a callow, a whining, a puking brood of bastard bantlings’ – effeminate novelists ‘in baby clothes’ who ‘disgrace the intelligence of the English nation’.16 Moore was not alone among fin de sie` cle writers in arguing that deference to the Young Reader had led to a sickly and effeminate – sickly because effeminate – literature, nor was he alone in aligning the new realism with the virtues of ‘strength, virility, and purpose’ (p. 150). Interviewed by the Pall Mall Gazette in 1884, Zola confessed his ‘extreme astonishment at the absolute state of decay’ of literature in England and suggested that the circulating libraries’ ‘tendency to cater exclusively for young girls’ was to blame.17 Henry James likewise decried the fact that at present the English novel,

is almost always addressed to young unmarried ladies, or at least always assumes them to be a large part of the novelist’s public. This fact, to a French storyteller, appears, of course, a damnable restriction, and M. Zola would probably decline to take au se´rieux any work produced under such unnatural conditions. Half of life is a sealed book to young unmarried ladies, and how can a novel be worth anything that deals only with half of life?18

Such comments undoubtedly tell us less about actual readers than about long-standing, still-lingering cultural assumptions concerning gender traits and gender roles. (As we will see shortly, women were often identified with realist writing when critics wanted to disparage realism – another indication that stereotypes rather than real readers are at issue here.) Yet Moore’s and James’s lamentations also convey their sincere desire that fiction deal with more than ‘half of life’, a desire shared by many of their colleagues. The needs of the Adult Reader thus were vigorously advanced in opposition to what 19 Thomas Hardy termed ‘the censorship of prudery’ in Britain. Those needs, and how to meet them, were the subject of a symposium on ‘Candour in English Fiction’ published in The New Review in 1890. The participants – Walter Besant, Eliza Lynn Linton and Hardy – were all identified with realist writing. They were agreed that, as Linton put it, ‘of all the writers of fiction in Europe or America the English are the most restricted in their choice of subject’ because of the culture’s obsession with shielding the Young

176

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Realism

Person. Besant thought that on the whole such an obsession was a good thing for public morals, while Linton advocated a strict segregation – by means of a locked bookcase in father’s library if necessary – of adult literature from literature suitable for those not yet ‘initiated ...into certain mysteries of life’. While ‘mature men and women should not sacrifice truth and common-sense in literature for the sake of the Young Person’ and while ‘a faithful present- ation of the realities of human life’ is the goal of every conscientious novelist, society must continue to ensure that young people should not be allowed ‘to read books which are not meant for them’. Only Hardy wondered why ‘adults who would desire true views for their own reading insist ... upon false views for the reading of their young people’. For Hardy, the realist novel alone among modern art forms could treat the subject of the ‘profounder passions’ in their collision with social mores with a power and insight comparable to that found in Greek or Elizabethan drama. It was therefore scandalous that novelists were prohibited from writing about ‘things which everybody is thinking but nobody is saying’. Linton likewise regretted that ‘things as they are – human nature as it is – the conflict always going on between law and passion’ cannot be spoken of freely. For all three contributors, ‘candour in English fiction’ primarily meant candour about sexual passion. The symposium itself was an indirect acknowledgement that strictures were loosening, that candour was beginning to displace duteous reticence as the day’s watchword. The rate of displacement was slow, however, as the public outcry against the sexual improprieties that feature in Hardy’s three great novels of the 1890s–Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891), Jude the Obscure (1896)andThe Well-Beloved (1897) – suggests. Vigorous disputes, usually conducted at high decibel levels, over the relax- ing of restrictions on sexual content fill up many pages in late-Victorian periodicals. Significant as they are, though, their very prominence can obscure some of the other issues at stake whenever apologists and critics grappled over the merits of the new realism. Outrage over sexual frankness might be heartfelt and sincere yet also be the vehicle for expressing other not fully choate concerns about the potential social effects of the new fiction. Readers were unsettled by Moore’s first novels, for instance, not just for their relatively explicit content but for the detachment with which Moore narrated events. Hardy likewise was criticised for his dispassionate portrayal of passion’s ravages as well as for his insistence that, as he put it in his preface to Jude the Obscure, a novel is never a guide to ethical conduct but ‘simply an endeavour to give shape and coherence to a series of seemings, or personal impressions’. The idea that novelists ought to present their materials ‘objec- tively’, without intervention or comment, had been powerfully formulated by Flaubert – ‘always bear in mind that impersonality is a sign of strength’ in

177

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 STEPHEN ARATA a writer, he assured Louise Colet in 185320 – and continued to be a touch- stone of French realist fiction to the end of the century. Prior to the 1880s there was no equivalent tradition in English fiction, which continued to stress the value of establishing relations of ‘sympathy’ between narrators, readers and fictional characters. Remaining aloof from their own characters, and declining to court readers’ sympathetic identifications with them or with their narrators, Moore and Hardy were viewed by many readers as puz- zlingly uninterested in the notion of art as a form of moral education. Again the example of Zola was uppermost in critics’ minds. ‘He is as cold as a vivisectionist at a lecture’, Andrew Lang complained of Zola in 1882. ‘It is part of his method never to comment ...[and] never to turn to the reader for sympathy.’21 As with Zola, the new realists’ commitment to a dispassionate ‘scientific’ handling of their material was seen to preclude the kind of warmly human response – that ‘raw material of moral sentiment’ – so assiduously cultivated by Victorian novelists. This turn away from sympathy was perceived by many as the defining feature of late-Victorian realism. It was also seen as one facet of a larger realignment in the relations between writers and their publics. In his astute 1898 study of Dickens, George Gissing argues that the 1880s had witnessed a decisive break in the tradition of English realism. Prior to that time, Gissing contends, the practice of realism had been grounded in a community of interest and outlook linking writers to readers. The conventions of realist writing – what subjects could be represented and by what means – adequately expressed social values novelists held in common with their audiences. Because he worked ‘in the strength of a faultless sympathy’ with his readers, Gissing suggests, Dickens was better able to critique ‘political folly, or ... social injustice’, since his critique was offered within the framework of a shared ideology.22 For writers of Gissing’s own generation, that bond was irreparably broken. The new realists of the 1880sand1890s were characterised by their willingness to offend. Arthur Morrison, author of Tales of Mean Streets (1894) and A Child of the Jago (1896), grim stories set in London’s impoverished East End, put the matter bluntly: ‘Under the conditions of life as we know it there is no truth worth telling that will not interfere with some hearer’s comfort.’23 Like Moore, Morrison and Gissing assumed from the start of their careers that writers of integrity – determined to ‘picture things as they are’, as Gissing puts it in ‘The Place of Realism in Fiction’ (1895) – will necessarily be in an antagonistic relationship with the public. ‘Combative it was, of course, from the first’, Gissing notes of the new realism.24 The commitment to ‘sincerity of vision’ puts the realist writer at odds with the majority of readers, who strenuously resist having their assumptions challenged or their complacen- cies unsettled. In the last analysis, Gissing contends, the artist recognises ‘no

178

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Realism responsibility save to his artistic conscience’ (p. 217). Gissing’s own artistic conscience led him to the same narrative stance of studied detachment from his materials that reviewers noted in Moore’s early novels. (In New Grub Street (1891) Gissing parodies the ‘objective’ scientific method of the new realists – himself included – in his account of Harold Biffen’s painstaking effort to reproduce novelistically the ‘unutterable tedium’ of the life of Mr. Bailey, Grocer.) The novels of poverty and urban misery with which Gissing first made his name – The Unclassed (1883), Demos (1886), Thyrza (1887) and especially The Nether World (1889) – are striking in their refusal to solicit readerly sympathy for the acutely suffering characters who people them. The novelist too remains at a distance. ‘The afflictions of others’ may rend the heart, Gissing wrote coolly to his brother Algernon, but to the writer they are simply ‘materials for observation’.25 The fact that Gissing himself lived in near-perpetual destitution during this time makes the dispassion of his narratives all the more notable. Morrison likewise confirmed that ‘observation is my trade’ (p. 185). For him, however, recording what he sees becomes a form of political engagement. Unlike the conservative Gissing, Morrison was willing to contemplate seriously the possibility of radical social upheaval as a means to alleviate the plight of the urban poor. He strove to represent that plight not just in terms of individual suffering but also in terms of the institutions and social practices that fostered individual suffering. Morrison saw realism as a tool for sham- ing readers into recognising their complicity in the everyday oppressions of contemporary life. ‘If the community have left horrible places and horrible lives before [the novelist’s] eyes, then the fault is the community’s; and to picture those places and those lives becomes not merely his privilege, but his duty’ (p. 181). For Morrison, picturing did not involve prosyletising; he no more inclines to overt commentary in his narratives than Gissing does. Yet Morrison believed (as Gissing did not) that a vivid portrait of the way we live now would necessarily be an incitement to social change. To wary critics, it was precisely the potential link between narrative realism and political radicalism that caused most concern. Since realists invariably are committed to expanding the range of what can be represented in fiction, the project of realism as a whole is suffused with a democratising spirit. ‘Realism, we were assured’, wrote William R. Thayer in 1894, ‘was the application of democratic principles to literature.’26 That spirit tended to be more robust in France, where realism was often enlisted in the service of left-wing politics. Zola’s vigorous crusades against retrograde institutions of church and state confirmed the suspicions of many that realism was, or could be, an instrument of disruption. Moreover, the ‘perversities’ of French realism were often said to spring from the same instabilities in the French character

179

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 STEPHEN ARATA that had been responsible for the country’s turbulent political history from the Revolution forward. In a sublimely magisterial generalisation, Saintsbury declared in 1888 that the present sorry state of French literature had ‘a political explanation ... to wit, the steady descent of French genius ever since the final overthrow of the old monarchy in 1830’.27 Only slightly more circumspectly, Lilly argued that when in Nana (1880) Zola showed his actress-courtesan heroine ‘in all the foulness of her life’, he had been moved by the same ‘spirit’ that animated the worst excesses of 1789 (p. 249). For readers like these, the example of the French again threw into relief the different historical trajectory of British politics and British literature. Just as the stability of British institutions expressed the national genius for compromise and moderation, so too did the harmonies of the Victorian novel enact the national ideal of consensus. The reformist energies of a Dickens or an Eliot were harnessed by a deep-seated antipathy to radical or abrupt change and a corresponding desire to create narrative spaces where antimonies merge and contradictions are resolved. As George Levine has noted, until around 1880 ‘the primary form in which most nineteenth-century English realism manifests itself is comedy’.28 Tragic or even just socially disruptive possibilities that arise in the course of certain narratives – Levine points to examples in Thackeray and in Trollope – are suppressed or denied in the name of comic resolution. By contrast, in the fin de sie` cle comedy and realism largely part ways. The novels of James, Hardy, Gissing, Moore and Morrison enact a decisive break with the comic tradition of English fiction. Despite their quite different political viewpoints, these writers share the belief that the contradictions, tensions and ruptures characteristic of modern life are largely incompatible with the norms of comedy. Hence the open-endedness of so many fin de sie` cle realist novels – their refusal, in James’s famous phrasing, to indulge readerly yearning for resolution via ‘a distribution at the last of prizes, pensions, husbands, wives, babies, millions, appended paragraphs, and cheerful remarks’.29 When narrative closure is achieved, it tends to the bleak, even the tragic. Indeed, according to Hardy, realism could remain true to the present moment in history only by becoming ‘mainly impassive in its tone and tragic in its developments’.30 Far, therefore, from denying the tragic possibilities inherent in many of his novels, Hardy allows them luxuriously to exfoliate. In 1871 the great Danish critic George Brandes had argued that ‘literature in our day shows it is alive by taking up problems for discussion’.31 While few English writers would have assented to so bluntly programmatic a statement, Brandes was nevertheless prescient in recognising that the realist literature which he championed so vigorously was on the verge of becoming an

180

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Realism important venue for the public airing of pressing – and often volatile – social issues. In England the ‘social problem’ novel could boast an impressive lineage stretching back to the 1840s, and many late-Victorian realists, such as Gissing and Morrison, considered their own works as a continuation of that tradition. By the end of the century, however, the term ‘realism’ had for many English critics become essentially a shorthand way of referring to any literary work that dealt with topics likely to unsettle readers. Gissing complained of reviewers for whom ‘realistic ... simply meant painful or revolting’.32 Novels that took up controversial subjects were routinely criticised not for being controversial but instead for being ‘too realistic’. Fin de sie` cle disputes over realism – and such disputes were a growth industry in the periodical press throughout the 1880s and 1890s – were often only tangentially about realism. That is, they tended to move rapidly away from arguments concerning realism as a set of narrative strategies and conventions in order to take up the more general question of literature’s role in effecting social change. In Brandes’s terms, the issue was the extent to which literature should take up problems for discussion. Or, as Lyn Pykett has noted more recently, late- Victorian critics continually return to the question of ‘who or what may be represented in fiction, in what manner, by whom, and for whom’ (p. 169). As Pykett has shown, such questions helped fuel the many attacks directed at ‘New Women’ writers during this period. It is an indication of how closely realism was linked with progressive politics (realist literature strives to convey ‘the great thoughts of liberty and the progress of humanity’, claimed Brandes) that critics of late-Victorian women’s movements often described feminism and realism as related maladies. In his 1894 essay ‘Reticence in Literature’, Arthur Waugh identifies New Women fiction as the inevitably degraded end-point of the ‘realist movement in English literature’, itself a regrettable and largely failed attempt to adapt French models to English uses. Waugh argued that the ‘flaws’ of realist fiction – the wallowing in detail for its own sake, the inability to recognise the claims of proportion and selection, the fascination with the morbid, the tasteless and the obscene – perfectly expressed the dangers inherent in women’s movements. Realism, like feminism, was an attempt to break through boundaries and overturn hierarchies, and by expanding the field of representation (both political and literary) to bring into prominent view what had always been considered beneath consideration. ‘We are told’, Waugh dourly concludes, ‘that this [new kind of literature] is part of the revolt of women, and certainly our women writers are chiefly to blame’ for the turn taken by recent fiction.33 In 1900 Wilfred Sparroy reached a similar conclusion. After coupling the ‘noisy revolution’ of the ‘belligerent sex’ with ‘the ever-increasing popularity of French realism’, Sparroy argues that these linked phenomena are clear symptoms of

181

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 STEPHEN ARATA present-day ‘female degeneration’.34 When hostile critics denounced Sarah Grand’s scandalously popular novel The Heavenly Twins (1894)forits ‘Zolaism’, they had in mind not simply Grand’s use of some of Zola’s narrative techniques but also, and more importantly, her controversial views regarding the evils of marriage – as if writing in a realist mode was somehow the cause of her radical opinions or, conversely, as if radical opinions must inevitably find their expression via the vocabulary of realism. By the close of the century, realism in England was closely associated with fiction written by and for women and having to do primarily with the contested relation between the domestic and the public spheres. It is no coincidence, then, that the backlash in the fin de sie` cle against realism was largely a backlash against women’s fiction, nor that it took the form of a rejection of literature’s social efficacy. The two major literary movements that emerged in the 1880s and flourished in the 1890s – aestheticism and ‘romance’ or adventure fiction – were self-designedly men’s clubs, and from their different standpoints each dismissed the idea that fiction’s social role was to ‘take up problems for discussion’. The aestheticist credo, art for art’s sake, was always more effective as a rallying cry than as a programme for any actual writing, but it did convey the aesthete’s sense that his business was not with this world. It also expressed a conviction that true art, as the twenty- year-old James Joyce solemnly put it, ‘makes no account of history ... but sets store by every time less than the pulsation of an artery’.35 Likewise, the sacralisation of art by fin de sie` cle aesthetes was a way to withdraw it from the fret and fever – and, often, the complexities – of the everyday and of mass culture and entrust it instead to the chosen few. ‘Certainly the inmost region [where art resides] will never yield to one who is enmeshed in profanities’, Joyce cautions us (p. 54). For many aesthetes (though not for Joyce), the profane masses were predominantly female, one reason that aesthetic art has many high priests but is noticeably short of priestesses. Women were also largely excluded from the precincts of late-Victorian adventure or romance fiction. Popular novelists such as Rider Haggard, Hall Caine and Arthur Conan Doyle and influential critics such as George Saintsbury and Andrew Lang embraced the romance as an antidote to the contemporary novel, which they saw as having been corrupted to the verge of extinction by realism and its preoccupation with social issues. With their emphasis on plot and action, their predilection for exotic or even frankly fantastic settings, and their exuberant disregard for ‘reproducing actual life’, romancers set themselves the task of reinvigorating an enervated, feminised and overly self-conscious age. According to Haggard, romance fiction answers the call of ‘a weary public’ that yearns for ‘books to make them forget, to refresh them, to occupy minds jaded with the toil and emptiness

182

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Realism and vexation of our competitive existence’.36 Like aestheticism, late- Victorian romance shuns the messiness of ordinary, present-day life in pursuit of the eternal and the ideal. ‘More and more do [men and women] long to be brought face to face with Beauty, and stretch out their arms towards that vision of the Perfect, which we only see in books and dreams’ (p. 173). In its content and phrasing, that sentence may put us in mind of early Yeats, or late Pater, or Wilde en tout temps, but it is in fact Haggard again, urging the claims of the kind of boy’s adventure fiction at which he excelled. He conceived of his novels not just as entertaining yarns or diversions to refresh jaded modern minds but also as homages to Beauty, always female, occasionally immortal, and embodied by such memorable figures as Ayesha in She (1887), Nyleptha in Allan Quartermain (1887), Maya in Heart of the World (1896), and the title characters of Cleopatra (1889), Nada the Lily (1892) and Montezuma’s Daughter (1893). Aestheticist and romance fiction in the fin de sie` cle are alike in being reactionary movements. Each emerges in reaction to realism’s dominance; each also seeks to restore lost worlds of innocence and certainty by returning literature to an original ‘purity’. In aestheticist writing such purity is conceived in religious terms, while in romance fiction it is defined anthropolog- ically (the recovery of more authentic forms of social life or of a more genuine human nature), but both cases are marked by a turning away from the lived experience of the late-Victorian world. In the eyes of its critics, realist writing was not a response to or a commentary on the contemporary world’s myriad problems; it was a symptom of them. According to Caine, decent people necessarily recoil from fictions that aim at ‘reproducing actual life’ because such fictions do the same psychological and moral harm as the aspects of life they depict. ‘Clean-minded people are weary of the talk’ of realism, writes Caine.37 This fetishising of clean-mindedness – figured as the asceticism of the aesthete or the austerity of the heroic adventurer or the moral chastity of the reader Samuel Smith sought to protect from Henry Vizetelly – is a recurring feature of fin de sie` cle campaigns to disparage realism or displace it as the age’s dominant form of narrative fiction. Yet not all critiques of realism were backward-looking. When in ‘The Decay of Lying’ (1891) Oscar Wilde declared that ‘as a method Realism is a complete failure’, he did so in the name of an openly experimental modern literature.38 The playfully provoking conceit of this essay-in-dialogue – that ‘lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of art’ – enables Wilde to break the spell of realism’s central convention: that the ‘proper aim’ of art is to imitate life (p. 320). Realism’s failures, according to Wilde, originate precisely in the ‘substitution of an imitative for a creative’ model of artistic work (p. 303). Art can never succeed in ‘reproducing’ life; it creates

183

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 STEPHEN ARATA the illusion of having done so not by the accumulation of detail or by an encyclopedic thoroughness but rather by the creative transformation of the materials life provides. In Wilde’s view, there is a vast difference between a work of ‘unimaginative realism’ and a work of ‘imaginative reality’ (p. 299). The latter revels in its status as a made object. Literature for Wilde is not a medium for conveying a prior reality but instead creates the reality it conveys. The successful artist takes the ‘rough material’ of life and ‘recreates it ... in fresh forms’ (p. 301). The paradox – though Wilde might prefer to call it the open secret – of literature lies in the fact that through artifice alone is a sense of reality achieved. Only in ‘breaking from the prison-house of realism’ into a forthright anti-mimeticism do we recognise the ‘great secret ... that Truth is entirely and absolutely a matter of style’ (p. 305). That is, truth in literature results not from fidelity, however scrupulous, to the ‘real’ but rather from the careful manipulation of language and of rhetorical conventions: ‘It is style that makes us believe in a thing – nothing but style’ (p. 316). Wilde’s anti-mimeticism was anticipated by a number of fin de sie` cle writers, not just coterie figures such as Walter Pater but also mainstream authors such as Robert Louis Stevenson. In ‘A Humble Remonstrance’ (1885), his response to James’s ‘The Art of Fiction’, Stevenson memorably took issue with James’s contention that literature justifies itself by ‘competing with life’ – that is, by striving to body forth the world in language. Not so, Stevenson replied. The novel in particular thrives only when it foregrounds its ‘immeasurable difference from life’. Because life is ‘monstrous, infinite, illogical, abrupt and poignant’, fiction must ‘pursue an independent and creative aim’, namely to be ‘neat, finite, self-contained, rational, flowing, and emasculate’.39 Like Wilde, Stevenson puts aside the claims of mimesis in favour of a literature professedly ‘artificial’ even to the point of abstraction: ‘the goal of all art is to make a pattern’. Yet such an aim does not consign art to inconsequentiality. Indeed, literature becomes a vehicle of truth, even of practical knowledge, only once it ‘turn[s] away ...from the gross, coloured and mobile nature at our feet’ and abandons the quixotic aim of competing with life (p. 348). Stevenson compares the successful work of literature to a proposition of geometry. ‘Both are reasonable, both untrue to the crude fact; both inhere in nature, neither represents it’ (p. 350). With Wilde and Stevenson – committed anti-realists both – we begin to move in the direction of recognisably modernist conceptions of literary art. Theirs is not a simple rejection of realism but rather a fundamental reimagining of its tenets and aims. Yet we should also bear in mind that fin de sie` cle realist writers too were engaged in a perpetual reimagining of their chosen medium. As all informed commentators in the period recognised, ‘realism’ is a protean term, used at different historical moments to designate a wide

184

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Realism range of writing practices. In ‘A Note on Realism’ (1883), Stevenson reminds us that the ‘question of realism’ is always a question of ‘technical method’. The most disparate methods can, in skilful hands, produce with equal intensity the one desired illusion: fidelity to ‘life.’ About this truth no realist writer has ever been naı¨ve. It is ‘absurd’, wrote James in 1888, ‘to say that there is, for the novelist’s use, only one reality of things’.40 James quotes approvingly de Maupassant’s dictum that ‘what the sincere critic says is, ‘‘Make me something fine in the form that shall suit you best’’’ (p. 522). James’s great strengths as a critic are inseparable from his conviction that the available means for creating the illusion of reality are almost without number. In his great 1905 essay ‘The Lesson of Balzac’, James notes – with pleasure, with wonder, with admiration, with conviction – the many forms in which the realist imagination has expressed itself. Realist novelists – those ‘seers of visions’, in James’s phrase – compose their various fictional landscapes, bathed in the light peculiar to their individual temperaments. The question for the sincere critic therefore is always:

Just how, accordingly, does the light of the world, the projected, painted, peopled, poetized, realized world, the furnished and fitted world into which we are beguiled for the holiday excursions, cheap trips or dear, of the eternally amusable, eternally dupeable voyaging mind – just how does this strike us as different in Fielding and in Richardson, in Scott and Dumas, in Dickens and in Thackeray, in Hawthorne and in Meredith, in George Eliot and in George Sand, in Jane Austen and in Charlotte Bronte¨?41

To trace the arc of James’s own career, culminating in the richly innovative realism of the novels of 1902–4 – The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl – is to recognise that the adventures of the eternally amusable, eternally dupeable voyaging mind had, with the new century, taken a new turn.

NOTES 1 Henry James, ‘The Art of Fiction’ (1884), in Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature, American Writers, English Writers, New York, Library of America, 1984, pp. 44–65 (p. 44). Further references are given in parentheses in the text. 2 The National Vigilance Association, Pernicious Literature: Debate in the House of Commons. Trial and Conviction for the Sale of Zola’s Novels. With Opinions of the Press (1889), in George J. Becker (ed.), Documents of Modern Literary Realism, Princeton University Press, 1963, pp. 350–82 (p. 352). Further references are given in parentheses in the text. 3 John Charles Olmsted (ed.), A Victorian Art of Fiction: Essays on the Novel in British Periodicals 1870–1900, New York and London, Garland Publishing, 1979, p. xiv.

185

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 STEPHEN ARATA

4 Kate Flint, ‘‘‘Seeing is Believing?’’: Visuality and Victorian Fiction’, in A Concise Companion to the Victorian Novel, ed. Francis O’Gorman, Oxford, Blackwell, 2005, pp. 25–46 (p. 28). 5 In the context of late-Victorian fiction, it is more accurate to talk about the ‘New Realism’ or the ‘New Fiction’ than about Naturalism, a term applied usefully only to certain kinds of fiction produced on the Continent and in the United States. English novelists such as George Gissing, Thomas Hardy, George Moore and Arthur Morrison are occasionally labelled Naturalists by twentieth-century critics, but in fact all English writers of the period (except Moore, briefly) distanced themselves from the Naturalist movement. Polemical essays such as Zola’s ‘The Experimental Novel’ (1880) attracted considered interest in Great Britain but no followers. For an overview, see Brian Nelson (ed.), Naturalism in the European Novel: New Critical Perspectives, New York and Oxford, Berg Publishers, 1992. 6 Mrs Humphrey Ward, ‘Recent Fiction in England and France’, Macmillan’s Magazine, 48 (1884), pp. 250–8 (p. 250). 7 ‘Balzac and his Writings’, Westminster Review, 60 (1853), 104–12 (p. 109). Further references are given in parentheses in the text. 8 George Saintsbury, ‘The Present State of the Novel. I’, Fortnightly Review, 48 (1887), 410–17 (p. 412). 9 W. S. Lilly, ‘The New Naturalism’, Fortnightly Review, 38 (1885), 240–56 (p. 254). 10 Arthur Tilley, ‘The New School of Fiction’, National Review, 1 (1883), 257–68 (pp. 263–4). Since Tilley goes on to describe William Dean Howells and Henry James as followers of Zola, it is worth noting that neither writer would have described himself in that way. 11 George Eliot, ‘The Natural History of German Life’ (1856); in Thomas Pinney (ed.), Essays of George Eliot, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963, pp. 266–99 (p. 270). 12 Quoted in John Sutherland, The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction, Stanford University Press, 1989,p.445. 13 Academy, 656 (November 29, 1884), p. 354. 14 Saintsbury, ‘Present State of the Novel’, p. 412. 15 Walter Besant, ‘Candour in English Fiction’, New Review, 2 (1890), 6–9 (p. 7). 16 George Moore, Literature at Nurse, or Circulating Morals (1885); in Walter Greiner and Gerhard Stilz (eds.), Naturalismus in England 1880–1920, Darmstadt, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1983, pp. 148–54 (p. 150). 17 Quoted in Lyn Pykett, ‘Representing the Real: The English Debate about Naturalism, 1884–1900’; in Berg (ed.), Naturalism in the European Novel, pp. 167–88 (p. 177). 18 Henry James, ‘Emile Zola’ (1880), in Literary Criticism: French Writers, Other European Writers, The Prefaces to the New York Edition, New York, Library of America, 1984, pp. 864–70 (pp. 868–9). 19 All the quotations in this and the following paragraph are taken from Walter Besant, Eliza Lynn Linton and Thomas Hardy, ‘Candour in English Fiction’, New Review, 1 (1890), 6–21. 20 Becker (ed.), Documents of Modern Literary Realism,p.93. 21 Andrew Lang, ‘Emile Zola’, Fortnightly Review, 35 (1882), 439–52 (p. 452).

186

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Realism

22 George Gissing, Charles Dickens: A Critical Study, London, Blackie and Son, 1898, pp. 95, 75. 23 Arthur Morrison, ‘Preface’, 3rd edn, Child of the Jago (1897); reprinted in Greiner and Stilz (eds.), Naturalismus in England, pp. 179–85 (p. 180). 24 George Gissing, ‘The Place of Realism in Fiction’ (1895), in Selections Autobiographical and Imaginative from the Works of George Gissing, with Biographical and Critical Notes by His Son, London, Jonathan Cape, 1929, pp. 217–21 (pp. 217–18). 25 Algernon and Ellen Gissing (eds.), Letters of George Gissing to Members of His Family, London, Constable, 1927, pp. 128–9. 26 William R. Thayer, ‘The New Story-Tellers and the Doom of Realism’, Forum, 18 (1894), 470–80 (p. 477). 27 George Saintsbury, ‘The Present State of the Novel. II’, Fortnightly Review, 49 (1888), 112–23 (p. 123). 28 George Levine, The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady Chatterley, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1981,p.21. 29 James, ‘Art of Fiction’, p. 48. 30 Hardy, in Besant, Linton and Hardy, ‘Candour’, p. 16. 31 Quoted in Becker (ed.), Documents of Modern Literary Realism,p.11. 32 Gissing, ‘Place of Realism’, p. 217. 33 Arthur Waugh, ‘Reticence in Literature’, Yellow Book, 1 (1894), 201–19 (p. 218). 34 Wilfred Sparroy, ‘Art and the Woman’, Macmillan’s, 64 (1900), p. 34; quoted in Pykett, ‘Representing the Real’, p. 186. 35 James Joyce, ‘James Clarence Mangan’ (1902), in Kevin Barry (ed.), James Joyce: Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing, Oxford University Press, 2000, pp. 53–60 (p. 59). 36 Rider Haggard, ‘About Fiction’, Contemporary Review, 51 (1887), 172–80 (p. 174). 37 Hall Caine, ‘The New Watchwords of Fiction’, Contemporary Review, 57 (1890), 479–88 (p. 480). 38 Oscar Wilde, ‘The Decay of Lying: An Observation’ (1891), in Richard Ellmann (ed.), The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde, University of Chicago Press, 1969, pp. 290–320 (p. 319). 39 Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘A Humble Remonstrance’ (1885), in The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Vailima Edition, 26 vols., New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1921, Vol. XIII, pp. 344–58 (p. 350). 40 Henry James, ‘Guy de Maupassant’ (1888), in Literary Criticism: French Writers, Other Writers, the Prefaces to the New York Edition, pp. 521–49 (p. 523). 41 Henry James, ‘The Lesson of Balzac’ (1905), in Literary Criticism: French Writers, Other Writers, the Prefaces to the New York Edition, pp. 115–39 (p. 125).

187

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 10

NICHOLAS RUDDICK The fantastic fiction of the fin de sie` cle

Did any period in literary history produce a higher concentration of masterpieces of fantastic fiction than the Victorian fin de sie` cle? Within a single three-year period appeared H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), and Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898). And these were just the most prominent peaks of a Himalayan range of fantastic fiction rising abruptly at the end of the nineteenth century. But before trying to account for this phenomenon, I should explain what I mean by fantastic fiction. Many of the generic labels used to classify popular fiction today were not yet in use in the nineteenth century. ‘Science fiction’, for example, did not exist in 1895 when H. G. Wells embarked on a series of novels that are now considered classics of the genre. It was not until the 1930s that the phrase began to be used to describe a number of works of fiction that seemed to share a family resemblance. The ‘fantasy’ and ‘horror’ sections of bookshops today carry labels recently developed by the publishing industry to exploit the popularity of J. R. R. Tolkien and Stephen King, respectively. Popular genres are fluid entities, forming, blending and dissol- ving in response to changes in the literary marketplace. Here I will argue that one of the great literary achievements of the fin de sie` cle was a successful break with fictional realism, and so I require a transgeneric category embracing all the works that I will offer as evidence. In the fin de sie` cle itself, a novel was a realistic work; contemporary critics noted a revival of romance, namely fiction containing magical, supernatural and other non-realistic elements. Today, romance is used to refer to a popular genre of erotic fiction for female readers. So to avoid taxonomic confusion, I will apply fantastic here to fiction which represents any sort of departure from ‘consensus reality’.1 The term was applied in this way in the fin de sie` cle itself and remains in current academic use, though some influential critical theorists have attempted to narrow its meaning. The fantastic is here to be understood as a transhistorical fictional mode encompassing such past and present genres as folk and fairy tales, beast fables, parables, utopian fantasy, ghost stories,

189

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 NICHOLAS RUDDICK

Gothic fiction, weird fiction, horror fiction, dark fantasy, heroic fantasy, scientific romance and science fiction. The great Victorian novelists – Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, the Bronte¨s, Gaskell, Eliot – were primarily realists, using a mode of representation designed to reflect the daily reality of their readership. Why did fin de sie`cle writers abandon a mode that had produced so many masterpieces? Given the profuse variety of fantastic fiction produced in such a short time, there is no simple answer, but a hypothesis that takes into account both the nature of the fantastic impulse and the historical context of the fin de sie` cle may serve as a useful starting point. Any break with realistic representation in the arts is partially authorised by the universal human experience of dreams or night- mares as alternative realities in which the constraints of the real world are suspended. Powerful desires or anxieties have long been held to account for this suspension: fearing for one’s life and wishing to escape, one dreams that one can fly. A desire might be culturally ‘unspeakable’ as a result of social taboos; but it can still be articulated in fiction via symbolic motifs and narratives unfolding according to the logic of dreams. The fin de sie` cle saw heightened cultural anxiety stemming from certain consequences of the Darwinian revolution. Britain after 1859 had experienced nothing less than an ideological ‘New Reformation’2 (the phrase is T. H. Huxley’s) during which evolutionism rapidly superseded creationism, and science replaced theology as the primary means of approaching questions about human origin, nature and destiny. Although evolutionism seemed at first to be compatible with a confident faith in progress and human perfectibility, new sets of anxieties, no longer assuaged by the certainty of divine or providential super- vision, intensified as the nineteenth century approached its close. Many intelligent late-Victorians accepted the fallacious ‘biogenetic law’ (1866) propounded by the German evolutionist Ernst Haeckel, which stated that each organism in the course of its embryonic development recapitulated all the evolutionary stages of its phylum (a primary division of the animal kingdom, such as the one including all vertebrates). According to Haeckel, each human embryo, beginning as a single-celled organism on the lowest rung of the ladder of creation, ascended through the intermediate levels of the fish, the reptile and so on, until finally attaining humanity. Some inferred from this ‘law’ that certain human groups, for example, women or dark- skinned people, were innately incapable of attaining the higher level of development achieved by white men, and that the developmental process could accidentally or deliberately be arrested or reversed. Meanwhile, new data in the early 1880s indicated that certain species had become less complex in the course of their evolution and that some organisms even degener- ated in the course of their own lifetimes. Perhaps civilised human beings

190

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 The fantastic fiction of the fin de sie` cle might revert atavistically to ancestral forms under the unprecedented stresses of modern life? One consequence of such ‘degenerationist’ anxieties was the wide conviction that a ‘savage’, ‘ape’, or ‘beast’ was latent in everyone and was threatening to get loose. In France, the great novelist E˙ mile Zola explored such notions in his Rougon-Macquart series of novels (1871–93) that strove for a scientific realism. But in Britain, ‘Mrs Grundy’, the collo- quial embodiment of Victorian narrow-mindedness and prudery, made it very difficult for writers to address such fears in the realistic mode: Zola’s English publisher was successfully prosecuted by the National Vigilance Association and imprisoned in 1889. In fin de sie` cle Britain, then, novelists who wanted to address questions about the essential nature and fate of the human animal tended to encrypt their fictions in the fantastic mode. The first notable example of this tendency was The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), a novella that made Robert Louis Stevenson’s literary reputation. He himself was the first to use ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ in its modern sense in reference to two sides of his own personality,3 and the locution soon entered popular culture, for the novella’s central motif seemed to offer a tantalising clue to the mystery of the Whitechapel (‘Jack the Ripper’) murders in 1888. Today, Jekyll and Hyde is not an easy read: without a sympathetic protagonist or any important female characters, and with a denouement that everyone knows in advance, it can on first reading be a disappointment. Nevertheless, it is a remarkable achievement: a work that initiated a renaissance of fantastic fiction by discovering a strategy to articulate some of the most alarming anxieties of the age. Stevenson explored the implications of his intuition that the mentality of the Victorian urban professional class – of the men who had instigated the scientific and technological revolution – was divided against itself in a manner that cast an ominous shadow over their civilisation. Dr Henry Jekyll is an eminent Victorian who retains within his own organism desires that survive from more primitive evolutionary stages of human development. A bachelor, he must conceal how he satisfies these desires if he is to conform to Victorian standards of propriety. Probably he visits prostitutes surreptitiously – hardly unusual for a man of his time – and represses violent feelings in the interest of preserving respectability. Some readers today assume that Jekyll is gay or perverted, but he himself attests that ‘it ... was rather the exacting nature of my aspirations than any particular degradation in my faults’ that caused him shame (p. 76). A scientist– physician with a home laboratory, he develops a drug that splits his personality into a ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ part, enabling ‘Hyde’, embodiment of the latter, to indulge his desires shamelessly. What Jekyll does is perhaps typical of the masculine, analytic, technocratic mind: to try to solve the problem of

191

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 NICHOLAS RUDDICK the divided self not by harmonising its elements but by compartmentalising them until the left hand no longer knows what the right is doing. In section 118 of In Memoriam (1850), Tennyson had equated moral progress with ‘working out the beast’, namely allowing the inner ape (animal lust) and tiger (violence) to die. Hyde, however, is a modern man in whom the ape and tiger have been unleashed. He is Self unnervingly become Other; he arouses such uncanny disgust among men because they refuse to acknowledge consciously that a similar being lives under repression in themselves. Jekyll and Hyde was frequently invoked in relation to the Ripper murders because it raised the horrific possibility that the monster who had committed such crimes might look like – might be – a respectable gentleman. If this was so, contemporary criminological theory, which held that delinquents displayed visibly atavistic traits, was based on an illusion. Fantastic literature, especially at its most anxious, achieves some of its most powerful effects by strategies of indirection and constraint. The nocturnal setting of Jekyll and Hyde is phantasmagorical rather than realistic, an external projection of the nightside of the civilised mind. In actuality, the streets of Victorian London teemed by night with thousands of prostitutes catering to men like Jekyll, a fact that had long been unmentionable in polite society. However, by 1886, after Josephine Butler’s crusade against the Contagious Diseases Act and W. T. Stead’s campaign against the sexual traffic in young girls, total suppression of this ugly truth was neither possible nor desirable. Jekyll and Hyde, appearing at this pivotal moment, registers this new awareness indirectly: a ‘man about town’, returning from ‘some place at the end of the world’ at 3 a.m., watches Hyde trample a young girl to the ground (pp. 31–3). The novella’s excluded feminine appears in figurative disguise at strategic points, suggesting that the narrative is struggling to repress a force of nature: the moon is seen ‘lying on her back’ (p. 59) as though about to be violated, while Hyde is heard ‘weeping like a woman’ (p. 65). Stevenson’s fantastic constraint of the feminine throws an intense light on the masculine mind; but his strategy may also indicate that he was not temperamentally suited to the task of dissecting ‘the female animal’.4 Indeed, that almost all the important fantastic fiction of the fin de sie` cle is by male authors suggests that the period was characterized by intense desires and anxieties of a specifically masculine kind. Men feared emasculation or supersession by the rising generation of well-educated, free-thinking, assertive New Women, but their fears were often modified into ambivalence by erotic excitement. H. Rider Haggard began She (1887) only a month after the publication of Jekyll and Hyde. She begins as an African adventure-romance in the same vein as Haggard’s earlier best-seller King Solomon’s Mines (1885), appealing to an expanding popular readership’s fascination with exotic ‘savages’ whose

192

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 The fantastic fiction of the fin de sie` cle barbaric practices affirmed the validity of the imperialist enterprise. But She soon moves into very different terrain, and ultimately resists easy generic categorisation. The novel fascinated the founders of psychoanalysis, Freud and Jung, because its topography and characters seemed to demand symbolic interpretation, as if they were the manifest content of ‘some gigantic allegory’ (She,p.6). Haggard hints at the latent levels of meaning in two main ways: by the deliberate stereotyping of the triad of main characters, Holly the baboon, Leo the lion, and Ayesha the serpent; and by the use of sexually charged motifs, such as the landscape of Koˆr that evokes the exterior curves and interior spaces of a female body, and the phallic pillar of fire that conferred on Ayesha superhuman beauty, quasi-immortality and the power to dominate and destroy others. Ayesha herself is the embodiment of anxious male fantasies about female empowerment, but Haggard explores these fantasies so thoroughly that She reveals as much about fin de sie` cle male attitudes towards women as such masterpieces of realism as Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) and George Moore’s Esther Waters (1894). At the denouements of both Jekyll and Hyde and She, an evolutionary or devolutionary scenario unfolds in accelerated time: monkey becomes man, woman becomes monkey. The transformations are deeply shocking to observers because the familiar is shown to conceal a terrifying otherness. Both works participate in the cultural absorption of the Darwinian insight into the proximity of the human and animal realms. However, Stevenson’s focus on masculinity leaves women in the separate, marginal sphere to which Victorian propriety relegated them. By contrast, Haggard’s romance foregrounds the Woman Question as deliberately as any contemporary work of fiction. Ayesha, though very old, is actually a kind of New Woman. Free from cant as a result of her estranged perspective on the patriarchal pieties, she has a modern secular worldview, dismissing all religions, including Christianity, as the product of human fear about mortality. Her chief amusement is chemistry and, like Dr Jekyll, she has her own laboratory. Ayesha ruthlessly deploys the sexual power that her beauty confers, and uses her dynamic subjectivity to ‘blast’5 her rivals for male attention. Ayesha in her serpentine, ‘hot-potting’ aspect is one of the great femmes fatales of the fin de sie` cle imagination, sister to the many Salomes and Judiths whose lust to decapitate derives from male anxiety about increasing female empowerment. Irresistibly desirable, Ayesha has a highly conscious, analytical attitude towards her own sexuality; she knows neither modesty nor shame. She is perhaps best understood as a phallic woman: not Old Eve seduced by the serpent, but a New Eve who has appropriated the serpent’s phallic power, making her extremely dangerous to the patriarchal status quo. Holly shudders with horror when he imagines Ayesha, transposed to England, blasting her

193

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 NICHOLAS RUDDICK rival Queen Victoria and using her power over men to conquer the world. Holly’s speculative scenario might suggest that Ayesha is a forerunner of such monstrous invaders as Wells’s Martians or Stoker’s Dracula, but this is far from the case. For while Haggard is terrified by his creation, he also genuinely admires her. He shares Ayesha’s contempt for democracy and respectability, and respects (if he cannot entirely endorse) her secular materialism and biological realism. He also cannot see her as truly evil. For along with her many traditional feminine virtues (chastity, honesty, courage), she is incomparably wise, and the fruit of her wisdom is that love is the only thing worth living for, so that even her obliteration of her rival Ustane might be considered a venial sin. Certainly, Haggard’s intense ambivalence about Ayesha explains the novel’s disconcerting shifts in tone from the rhapsodic to the jocular, and helps make She such an interestingly complex work. Holly conceives of himself as the Beast in relation to Leo as male Beauty, while Holly’s metamorphosis from misogynist to unrequited lover is brought about by Ayesha as female Beauty. Haggard’s use of the well-known fairy tale to underline fundamental binary oppositions suggested by his triangle of protagonists is a characteristic strategy of the fin de sie` cle, when the cultural prestige of fairy tales had begun to rise. Andrew Lang, one of the period’s most versatile, prolific and respected men of letters – he was a close friend of Rider Haggard, who dedicated She to him – had an important role in this process. Lang’s scholarly interest in comparative anthropology, a burgeoning post- Darwinian discipline, gave him new insights into the cultural significance of folk-fairy tales of the kind that he knew from his childhood in the Scottish Borders, where the oral tradition had remained vital. These endlessly varying fantastic narratives, exchanged among the illiterate peasantry for millennia, had been first transcribed as curiosa, then gentrified for the middle classes, then gradually relegated to the nursery during the nineteenth century, when the attainment of maturity was supposed to coincide with a capitulation to the reality principle. Lang recognised in these tales enduring ‘survivals’6 of primitive ideas. Moreover, as tales from widely dispersed cultures shared similar motifs and plots, universal patterns of human thought might be inferred from them. The Blue Fairy Book (1889), like Lang’s subsequent ‘coloured’ fairy tale collections,7 was a miscellany, casting its net wide in global folklore. Adults reading The Blue Fairy Book to children learned that the familiar ‘English’ fairy tale might derive from the French aristocratic salon-tale (‘Beauty and the Beast’), the Arabian Nights (‘Aladdin’), or the ancient Greek novel via the Scandinavian peasantry (‘East of the Sun, West of the Moon’). Lang even included an abridged version of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels,possiblytosuggest that great literary works generated their own folk versions and that the literary and folk traditions interpenetrated one another. The effect of Lang’s coloured

194

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 The fantastic fiction of the fin de sie` cle

Fairy Book project was to generate a new respect for the folk-fairy tale: its wide diffusion and longevity suggested the universality and potency of its appeal, while its inherent variability made it available for rejuvenation by each new generation of tellers. Joseph Jacobs, an Australian-born Jewish historian resident in London from about 1873 to 1900, was almost as polymathic as Lang. His best- known works are English Fairy Tales (1890) and More English Fairy Tales (1894)8 which, like Lang’s anthologies, were great popular successes. They included not only such traditional favourites as ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’ and ‘The Three Bears’ but also fascinating local variants of canonical tales, such as ‘Tom Tit Tot’ (of ‘Rumpelstiltskin’) and ‘Mr Fox’ (of ‘Bluebeard’). Lang’s coloured Fairy Books had sprung from his desire to demonstrate that children all over the world, ‘savage’ or civilised, enjoyed the same sort of stories. Jacobs, on the other hand, while aware that children constituted the tales’ primary intended audience, aimed also to persuade their parents that an English folktale collection was a valuable repository of cultural heritage. It was conventional wisdom that England had lost its folk literature as a result of the Puritan dislike of fantasy and of industrialisation before the advent of folklorists. That is why English-speaking children had long had to make do with translations of the classic tales of the Frenchman Charles Perrault (first published in 1697) and of the German brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm (first published from 1812–15). Determined to salvage what remained of the indigenous tradition, Jacobs mined the folk memories of anglophone people throughout the Empire and the United States, then deliberately polished his transcriptions, not only to make them suitable for children, but also to highlight quintessentially English qualities, for example, ‘rude vigour’,9 more evident perhaps to an outsider like himself. Towards the rear of his collections, separated from the tales by a page of admonishment – ‘Little Boys and Girls Must Not Read Any Further’ – he provided detailed scholarly notes. Here adult readers learned how some of the tales, so ancient that they probably contain traces of palaeolithic beliefs, had permeated canonical literature, so that, for example, ‘Childe Rowland’ was alluded to by Shakespeare in King Lear, used by Milton as the basis of Comus, and was still influencing the fiction of Jacobs’s contemporaries like Grant Allen. Oscar Wilde’s cultural influence on the fin de sie` cle, through the force of his intellect and literary talent, his celebrity as the wittiest man of the age, and the effect of his catastrophic downfall in 1895, can hardly be overstated, and a significant portion of his fiction is in the fantastic mode. Wilde’s interest in fairy tales was genetic rather than anthropological. His father had published Irish Popular Superstitions in 1852, and later his mother, a fervent Irish nationalist, had expanded her husband’s work into a two-volume collection

195

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 NICHOLAS RUDDICK of ancient Irish legends (1887). Lady Wilde’s project had greatly impressed W. B. Yeats, the first of whose several collections of Irish folk tales would be published in 1888 as part of his own nationalist project. It was in this same year that Wilde published his first book, The Happy Prince and Other Tales, a slender volume of five stories, of which two are perhaps the greatest nineteenth-century literary fairy tales in English. ‘The Happy Prince’ and ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’ owe little to the spirit of the Irish Renaissance, more to Hans Christian Andersen, and more still to Wilde’s radical personal agenda. In ‘The Happy Prince’ Wilde rigorously delineates the surprising synergy between his aestheticism and socialism. As the Prince’s statue dis- tributes its material wealth to the deserving poor (including Andersen’s Little Match Girl), it gains a higher spiritual value, an inner beauty incomprehen- sible to the crude utilitarians who run the city. ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’ begins as a homage to two of Andersen’s stories, ‘The Swineherd’ (1842) and ‘The Nightingale’ (1844). Yet with his tale’s disturbingly unhappy ending, in which the nightingale makes her futile self-sacrifice for the egocentric student, Wilde makes a deliberate break with what he sees as the Dane’s superannuated romanticism. Here Wilde demonstrates how the fairy tale, a genre associated with infantile escapism, can expose the hollow- ness of Victorian values with brutal honesty. In The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), his only novel, Wilde extends Stevenson’s exploration of the divided self. Wilde’s scenario has an autobiographical origin. Wilde was not the man to portray realistically the plight of the gay man in a society that criminalised all male homosexual acts – yet he could not remain silent. Accordingly, he used a fantastic motif of the literally divided self, borrowing both from Jekyll and Hyde – the motif had gained even more piquancy since the Cleveland Street Scandal of 188910 – and from the fairy tale, where impossible wishes come true and where metamorphosis (‘Beauty and the Beast’) or subdivision (Andersen’s ‘The Shadow’ (1847)) had long been used to explore disjunctive states of being. However, Dorian Gray offers itself not as a fairy tale, in which beautiful protagonists are normally good, but as a tragic parable: those who pollute their souls destroy themselves, even if society fails to detect their guilt and punish their transgressions. Wilde’s intention in Dorian Gray was certainly to address the terrible consequences of suppressing ‘the love that dare not speak its name’. The evidence is in the shorter version first published complete in the July 1890 issue of Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, in which Hallward overtly confesses his passion for Dorian. But so vituperative was the critical reaction to this novella that when revising it for book publication Wilde lost his nerve, or at least allowed the mercenary in himself to overcome the idealist. The 1891 novel version is damaged not so much by the small deletions that make

196

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 The fantastic fiction of the fin de sie` cle

Hallward’s feelings for Dorian seem more platonic, but by the additions, especially the melodramatic James Vane subplot and the late scene in which Dorian’s renunciation of Hetty is supposed to confirm the heterosexual nature of his sins. These changes, together with the questionable concept of the ‘poisonous book’,11 negate the aesthete’s defiant boast in the Preface (itself an 1891 addition), ‘There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all’ (p. 3). Dorian Gray exists, then, in two versions, and the differences between them reveal so clearly the author’s change of heart in 1890–1 that they were damagingly highlighted by Queensberry’s defence in Wilde’s first trial. Indeed, the textual ‘doubling’ of Dorian Gray reinforces the claim of the divided self to be the leitmotiv of the fantastic fiction of the fin de sie` cle. Popular-cultural revisitations by Edgar Rice Burroughs and Walt Disney have perhaps obscured Rudyard Kipling’s aim and achievement in his two Jungle Books (1894–5). The eight Mowgli stories constitute at once a fantasy of recapitulation and an attempt to recuperate prelapsarian Adam. The stories powerfully evoke a nostalgia for the time in the ‘childhood’ of our species when man and animal lived together fraternally. Though the young Mowgli repeats the Jungle-People’s mantra, ‘We be of one blood, ye and I’,12 as a man he is born to rule over animals and must return to mankind when he outgrows his primitive animism. While Kipling accepts the evolutionary notion of the child as a being fated to recapitulate the ascent of man from savagery to civilisation, he simultaneously invokes the mythic potency of the Genesis scenario against Darwinist naturalism. He replaces survival of the fittest with the divinely ordained Law of the Jungle that regulates the relationships of animals to each another and to man, who, as possessor of the Red Flower (fire), is a superior being. One other species, the Bandar-log (Monkey-Folk), ‘the people without a Law’ (p. 34), is also set apart, but they dwell below, not above, the other animals – here Kipling seems bent on absolutely repudiating man’s simian ancestry. He also borrows heavily throughout the Jungle Books from folk-fairy tales in which animal helpers abound, incorporating elements from the beast fable (for example, in ‘The King’s Ankus’) that enable the writer to stand outside humanity in order to satirise it. Animals usually retain more of Kipling’s sympathies than men; the wonderful intensity of his identification with his animal protagonists can be seen in such non-Mowgli tales as ‘Rikki-Tikki-Tavi’, while ‘The White Seal’ and ‘Letting in the Jungle’ reveal his anger at human encroachment on the natural world. Though Kipling has been justly accused of allowing his white imperialists to escape the criticism that he directs at ‘lesser breeds’, he is capable of very sympathetic portraits of ‘natives’ (for example, the Inuit in ‘Quiquern’). Moreover, Kipling’s Mowgli is a dark-skinned Indian boy; it

197

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 NICHOLAS RUDDICK was Burroughs who would feel obliged to give Tarzan, Mowgli’s most famous descendant, a white aristocratic lineage. The most significant contribution of any writer to fin de sie` cle fantastic fiction was made by H. G. Wells. His work includes six scientific romances, The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds (1898), When the Sleeper Wakes (1899) and The First Men in the Moon (1901), of which The Time Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau and The War of the Worlds (discussed below) would become among the most important and influential works of science fiction ever written. Wells also wrote more than thirty shorter fantastic works before 1901, including the brief masterpiece ‘The Star’ (1897)about Earth’s close encounter with a fiery intruder to the solar system, and the novella ‘A Story of the Stone Age’ (1897), one of the first serious fictional attempts to imagine the lives of our palaeolithic ancestors. Wells had from his impoverished youth been fascinated by speculations about the future progress of humanity towards a more equitable society. Utopian fantasies proliferated in the fin de sie` cle, but Wells frequently found them unsatisfactory because they were either insufficiently grounded in science or deliberately anti- scientific. In his view, for example, the very different socialist utopias Looking Backward (1888) by Edward Bellamy and News from Nowhere (1891)by William Morris both failed to take into account one of the chief consequences of evolutionary theory – that utopian security, once attained, would lead to degeneration, for an intelligent species is only ‘kept keen on the grindstone of pain and necessity’.13 On the other hand, the mathematical fantasia Flatland (1884) by Edwin A. Abbott served as a positive model for Wells. For in showing how difficult it was for a two-dimensional being to conceive of a third dimension of space, Abbott suggested how blinkered our own conception of the universe might be. And Wells was eager to shake his readership’s complacency by revealing to them some of the uncomfortable implications of evolutionary theory for the human species. The Time Machine was the first work of fiction directly to confront the profound post-Darwinian revision of the relationship between human beings and time. The time machine itself, like Jekyll’s powder, is a fantastic means of revealing an unpalatable truth, in this case that all historical time, including the reader’s present, is of vanishingly small significance in the new evolutionary context. Deep biological time, in which species form, diverge and become extinct, passes far too slowly to be perceptible to human beings. So to make its reality palpable, Wells has his Time Traveller voyage more than 800,000 years into the future, full of Victorian confidence in progress and curious about how close humanity will have approached by then to perfection. He discovers instead that human beings no longer exist; we are the

198

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 The fantastic fiction of the fin de sie` cle extinct common ancestor of two different species, both subhuman, living in the ruins of the utopia that hastened human degeneration. Here Wells reconfigures, at both the social and species level, Jekyll and Hyde’s motif of internal subdivision: the socioeconomic gulf between the West and East End of Victorian London eventually gives rise to the Eloi (the childlike, vegetarian, surface-dwelling heirs of the idle rich) and Morlocks (the ape- like, carnivorous, subterranean descendants of the working classes). The Time Traveller then travels into the far future, to discover that life on Earth is coming to an end. On the kind of bleak shoreline where terrestrial life may have begun eons before – a place the Time Traveller knows as his comfortable home suburb of Richmond-upon-Thames – our ultimate descendant, a football-sized blob with tentacles, hops about. The entire course of organic life on Earth has been a brief ripple in the ocean of cosmic time. The Time Traveller returns to Richmond to report on the melancholy fate of mankind – only for his tale to be scornfully dismissed by most of the supposedly educated professional men that form his circle of friends. They simply do not have the imagination to grasp how evolutionary theory has reframed the human enterprise. The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) is Wells’s most Swiftian work, a dark satire that aims to shatter human illusions about our perfectibility as a species. It is concerned with two kinds of ethical responsibility, that of scientists towards their fellow human beings, and that of humanity towards animals. In Moreau’s scenario of the scientist who strives to artifi- cially improve an existing creature, Wells revises Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) from a post-Darwinian perspective. One of the starkest differences between the novels is that Moreau has none of Victor Frankenstein’s Promethean virtues: Moreau performs experiments because he can, not because he wishes to benefit mankind. In ‘Evolution and Ethics’ (1893), an importance influence on Wells, T. H. Huxley had proposed that in the absence of any evident providential design in evolution, it was the responsibility of humanity to impose its own ethical system on the world. Viewed in this Huxleyan light, Moreau is operating in a moral vacuum of his own making. Literally isolated as a result of his repellent egotism, Moreau denies his fellowship with animals by his attempts to humanise them, and reveals his inhumanity by the suffering he inflicts upon them. Indeed, Moreau speaks as eloquently as Frankenstein about the dangers of playing God, and even more eloquently about what might be inferred about a creator from his creation. The callous bungler Moreau can be viewed as a small-scale version of that other White-Bearded Designer, the Judeo-Christian God of Genesis, who – if we grant his existence – has made the whole biosphere into his House of Pain.

199

The scenario in which plucky human underdogs successfully defeat an invasion of Earth by hideous alien super-beings has been irresistible to Hollywood, so that The War of the Worlds has been Wells’s most filmed novel. Unfortunately, most of the adaptations, in which the Martians are defeated by ingenuity or prayer, miss or ignore Wells’s central point: mankind does not defeat the Martians. The Martians die because, being technologically advanced enough to have purged harmful microbes from their own planet, they no longer have an immune system that will protect them from terrestrial bacteria. Humanity survives only because it is better adapted to Earth’s ‘primitive’ environment than the invaders. As it was believed in 1898 that Mars was an older planet than Earth, The War of the Worlds is a partial inversion of The Time Machine: now superhumans travel the equivalent of about a million years back in time to conquer the ‘primitive’ Victorians. The Martians are as divided and degenerate as the Eloi and Morlocks, but while speciation in The Time Machine was the consequence of socioeconomic differences, in The War of the Worlds it was the result of an intellectual gulf between the elite and the masses. Once humanoid like ourselves, the Martians have diverged into a master species with a brain that has hyper- trophied at the expense of the rest of its anatomy, and a decerebrate slave species raised only for the nourishment its blood provides. Wells brilliantly exploits the uncanny familiarity of these vampiric monsters; no less than the ape-like Morlocks, they are evidence of the potentially horrific consequences of late-Victorian social division. Given the appearance of Bram Stoker’s masterpiece a year before The War of the Worlds, we might be tempted to assume that the vampiric monster was a quintessential fin de sie` cle motif. Such a conclusion, however, should be tempered by the awareness that Dracula (1897) ‘is far more important to us than it was to its contemporary Victorians’.14 Our popular culture, enthusiastically embracing fantasies of disruption to the stable tedium of our lives, tends to valorise ‘the subversive’. Vampires have become central icons of this culture, embodying the seductive, nocturnal glamour of transgressive sexuality, empowering and immortalising their victims as they initiate them into their ranks. In its fin de sie` cle context, however, Dracula was anything but subversive. It was the quintessential product of a conservative backlash – against those ‘degenerate’ ideas and practices that, in the view of many, had led to the downfall of Oscar Wilde. The cultural chill following Wilde’s conviction in May 1895 made it more difficult than ever to refer openly to sexual matters in a realistic novel: hence the fantastic metaphor of vampirism. But Dracula is not simply a tirade against homosexuality: vampirism is Stoker’s metaphor for the insidious destructiveness of all expressions of sexuality unsanctified by marriage. His novel dramatises moral panic: aliens

200

(continental, oriental, Jewish) were secretly importing diseases (syphilis), practices (sexual perversions), and beliefs (feminism) into England that, infecting susceptible women, caused them to lose their womanliness (their desire to be submissive wives and devoted mothers) but retain their beauty (their sexual power over men). The pillars of the patriarchy were endangered and it was to these men that Dracula was chiefly addressed: they are represented in the novel by Van Helsing’s Crew of Light who must protect the manly lifeblood of Anglo-Saxondom from contamination. That vampires and ghosts are both supernatural beings should not blind us to the very different approaches to their representation in fin de sie` cle fiction. A careful reading of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898) reveals that each time the governess sees the ghosts of Quint and Miss Jessel, no one else does: these revenants are hallucinations, phenomena subjectively present only to her. The mystery in Turn, then, resides not in whether the ghosts appear, but in why the governess sees them. In 1897 Andrew Lang cited Henry James’s older brother as the authority on the ‘modern doctrine of ghosts’.15 William James had noted that ghosts were hallucinations caused by the pressure of obscurity and fear; only if more than one person simultaneously sees the same apparition may we begin to think of it as a ‘real external presence’.16 Yet though fin de sie` cle psychology, no less than our own, tends to inculpate the governess for the evil apparitions, we should not leap to the conclusion that ‘the evil ... is in her own mind’ and that she ‘infects’ the innocent children with it.17 For this is too absolute an interpretation of a novella that is likely to strike us today as a powerful anticipation of postmodernism’s fascination with indeterminacy. Is it not possible that the governess’s inner turmoil is caused by the reluctance of her conscious mind to acknowledge the actual corruption that she unconsciously detects in Miles and Flora? May her excessive idealisation of the children not be based on a naive misreading, not merely of her charges, but of human nature? Recapitulationism, soon to be rejuvenated by Freud, suggested that children were innate savages, not dewy-eyed innocents. Moreover, these children are orphans thrice bereaved over a two-year-period and cruelly neglected by their only living relative. Both, in short, are likely to have suffered deep emotional wounds, and in their vulnerability may well have been abused by Quint and Jessel. The ‘things’ which Miles said (p. 83) that caused him to be expelled might have been learned from his abusers. But the theory of the corruption of the children is ultimately as unsatisfactory as the theory of the corruption of the governess. Turn’s endless fascination resides in its ambiguities: as Todorov noted, James sustains fantastic hesitation throughout the text, never allowing it to collapse into the uncanny or marvellous.18

201

Both Dracula and The Turn of the Screw, which evoke horror via a monstrous incursion into a familiar setting, are culminations of the century- long process of the domestication of the Gothic. Moreover, that they both describe evil as a quasi-infection transmitted from monster to victim makes them typical fantastic fictions of the fin de sie` cle, when anxieties about the spread of syphilis arrived at the threshold of the utterable. That said, the two works are very different, and their simultaneity suggests that in 1897–8 the modern genres of supernatural horror fiction and psychological dark fantasy branched from their Gothic stem. In Dracula the heterogeneous narrative composed of journal entries, letters, press cuttings and transcripts serves to authenticate ‘a history almost at variance with the possibilities of later-day belief’ (p. 5) by resorting to a range of independent witnesses. In Turn,by contrast, the very homogeneity of the governess’s first-person narrative ensures that the reader can take little on trust. Dracula, recurring to comforting traditional patterns of religious belief, embodies evil as an external, supernatural agency which human beings, if they are not to be possessed by it, must banish to the realm of demonic otherness. In Turn, however, such alterity comes into existence only as one of the psychic ploys whereby the self strives to contain its own centrifugal tendencies; the psychological, not the diabological, is the preferred approach to understanding the sources of evil in the self. How was fantastic fiction received in the fin de sie` cle itself? Perhaps surprisingly, given the contemporary prestige of both positivism as a philosophical perspective and realism as a fictional mode, most reviewers were not opposed in principle to what Julian Hawthorne in an 1890 review of Dorian Gray referred to as ‘The Romance of the Impossible’.19 Less concerned than we are to place fantastic fiction in subgeneric categories, they were more interested in the issue of how, in the new scientific age, a fantastic scenario might effectively express a universal truth. But rapidly changing ideas about what exactly was ‘scientific’, together with a pre-Freudian naivety about sexual symbolism, led to some readings that probably seem very odd to us. In 1887 the Saturday Review approved of Haggard’s She because there was ‘no supernaturalism proper’ in it, ‘only forces of nature which are new or unknown’; Ayesha was able to deploy these forces ‘better than persons of 20 less wisdom’. On the other hand, a decade later the Athenaeum dismissed Dracula as ‘highly sensational’, a symptom of a ‘reaction – artificial, perhaps, rather than natural – against late tendencies in thought’.21 In other words, the reviewer saw Stoker’s supernaturalism as an improvised tactic to rally traditional belief in its losing battle against scientific naturalism. Fin de sie` cle critics were also interested in the more abstract question of how fantasists negotiated the relation between primary and secondary worlds.

202

George MacDonald’s ‘The Fantastic Imagination’ (1893), perhaps the period’s major theoretical essay on the issue, approves man’s delight in inventing ‘a little world of his own, with its own laws ...which is the nearest, perhaps, he can come to creation’, but with this Coleridgean qualification: those secondary worlds that are ‘new embodiments of old truths’ are products of the Imagination, while ‘mere inventions’ are ‘the work of the Fancy’.22 Here MacDonald expresses a distinction that was already implicit in contemporary discourse. In 1887, for example, Blackwood’s had noted that Haggard was a cruder stylist than Stevenson but likely to be a more popular romancer, for though Haggard ‘has not proved as yet that he has anything that can be called imagination’, his robust inventiveness was sufficient to dazzle ‘the masses’.23 MacDonald’s essay, strongly affirming the importance of fairy tales, anticipates Tolkien’s views on the modern genre that we now refer to as ‘fantasy’ so as to distinguish it from more ‘realistic’ science fiction. Perhaps MacDonald’s binarism provoked H. G. Wells as he was formulating a fantastic fiction that would be truer to what the physicist John Tyndall in his Belfast Address of 1874 had termed the scientific imagination. For in 1895 Wells gave The Time Machine the subtitle An Invention partly to interrogate the prevailing assumption that by its own self-definition his literary ‘artefact’ would be a mere fancy lacking in imaginative truth. Reviewers immediately hailed the brilliance of this almost unknown writer’s imagination, ranking it with that of Swift and Poe. Indeed, the scientific journal Nature suggested that Wells’s originality was characteristic of the age, for ‘it is naturally in the domain of social and organic evolution that the imagination finds its greatest scope’;24 in December 1898 Joseph Conrad, enthusing about The Invisible Man in a letter to Wells, apostrophised, ‘O! Realist of the Fantastic’.25 While Wells was apprising readers of fantastic fiction’s ability to imagine evolutionary truth, critics were already alert to its potential to convey psychological truth. Jekyll and Hyde was quickly recognised as the product of ‘intuitive psychological research’,26 with the implication that at the symbolic level Stevenson’s tale satisfied scientific criteria even if the literal events described were incredible. Psychology had become a formal academic discipline in most developed nations during the 1880s; Hawthorne and Poe were acknowledged masters of the fantastic tale as a means of exposing unconscious motivations; and fiction writers and psychologists were already looking to each other as collaborators – or rivals – in the exploration of the dark continent of the human mind. The relationship between Henry and William James during the 1890s may be viewed as a fraternal struggle to decide who was the better psychologist. In 1889 William was appointed professor of psychology at Harvard, and the next year published both The Principles of Psychology, a masterly summa of all that was known in the discipline, and

203

‘The Hidden Self’, an article anticipating Freudian depth psychology. But William would thereafter gradually retreat into philosophy, leaving the psychological field free for Henry, whose prose would become an ever subtler instrument to expose the telltale nuances by which the self betrayed its hidden otherness. Reviewers of The Turn of the Screw noted that it was ‘a ghost story, psychologically conceived, and illustrating a profound moral law’,27 and praised the author’s ‘skill as a delineator of psychic phenomena’.28 To suggest something of the rich variety of fin de sie` cle fantastic fiction beyond the familiar masterpieces, I will briefly enumerate some lesser- known works whose themes are especially relevant today or which offer exceptional insights into the mentality of the period. Hauntings (1890)by ‘Vernon Lee’ (Violet Paget) contains two fine baroque tales of supernatural femmes fatales, one a ghost (‘Amour Dure’), the other a reborn pagan goddess (‘Dionea’). Olive Schreiner’s Dreams (1891) is a collection of short allegorical speculations from a New Woman’s point of view about the future of gender relations. C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne, still remembered for his romance of Atlantis, The Lost Continent (1900), earlier produced in The New Eden (1892) a post-Darwinian revision of Genesis, describing a scientific experiment to determine the essential differences between the sexes and how they might be accommodated to avoid a ‘Fall’. In The Parasite (1894), Arthur Conan Doyle dramatises characteristic fin de sie` cle tensions between the demands of positive science and the lure of the supernatural via the narrative of a Professor of Physiology who is attracted against his will to a mysterious woman with hypnotic powers. Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan (1894) is a novella about a woman who lures her male victims into committing unspeakable infamies; it anticipates Dracula’s theme of the dangers of unrestrained female sexuality. Grant Allen’s The Great Taboo (1890) was probably the first literary work influenced by the comparative anthropologist J. G. Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890), that pioneering compendium of ‘primitive’, but not entirely outgrown, religious beliefs; Allen’s later satire The British Barbarians (1895) uses comparative anthropology to expose the ‘savage tribe’ notorious for being the most taboo-ridden: the Victorians. Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897), like Dracula, concerns an attempted subversion of British society by a hypnotic alien being. Finally, Robert Hichens’s ‘How Love Came to Professor Guildea’ (1900), another study of a mind divided against itself and probably the finest fin de sie` cle ghost story after The Turn of the Screw, tracks the fatal consequence of desires that must not be expressed but cannot be repressed. What, finally, might account for such diversity? The fin de sie` cle, often thought of as a decadent endtime, is far better understood as the period in which the modern world as we now recognise it was being born. For the

204

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 The fantastic fiction of the fin de sie` cle generation of writers emerging in the aftermath of the Darwinian revolution, entirely new themes cried out for fictional treatment: for example, humanity’s place in biological nature, evolutionary time and the cosmos of the astronomers; traditional religion’s rearguard struggle against scientific materialism; the psychosexual consequences of our primitive inheritance. Mrs Grundy stood in the way of the development of a radical realism capable of exploring these new themes, some of which were ill-suited to realistic treatment anyway. Writers as ideologically and temperamentally disparate as Wells and Kipling, Wilde and Stoker adopted the indirect representational mode of the fantastic as a common stratagem to bypass censorship so as to arrive at new, unorthodox, or unpalatable truths. Furthermore, to adequately address the unprecedentedness of their historical circumstances, fin de sie` cle fantasists found it necessary to update, combine or transform existing fantastic forms such as the Gothic novel, the beast fable, the ghost story, the fairy tale, the marvellous voyage and the utopian romance. The efflorescence of fantastic fiction that sprang from the hotbed of the fin de sie` cle proved to be a surprisingly sturdy hybrid stock, begetting lineages that remain vigorous and fertile today.

NOTES 1 Kathryn Hume, Fantasy and Mimesis: Responses to Reality in Western Literature, New York, Methuen 1984,p.21. 2 T. H. Huxley, ‘Autobiography’ (1890), in Collected Essays, Vol. I, New York, Greenwood, 1968, pp. 1–17 (p. 17). 3 In a letter of 1 January 1886; reproduced in Martin A. Danahay (ed.), Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Ontario, Broadview, 1999,p.125. 4 George Egerton [Mary Chavelita Dunne], ‘A Cross Line’, Keynotes, London, Elkin Mathews and John Lane, 1893,p.3. 5 Cf. the vril deployed by the Gy-ei superwomen in Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race (1871), the first important fantastic work to use an evolutionary worldview to project the end of patriarchy. 6 An anthropological concept derived from E. B. Tylor’s Primitive Culture (1871). 7 There were twelve more of them, from The Red Fairy Book (1890)toThe Lilac Fairy Book (1910). 8 Jacobs also published Celtic Fairy Tales (1892), Indian Fairy Tales (1892) and More Celtic Fairy Tales (1894). 9 Joseph Jacobs, English Fairy Tales, New York, Dover, 1967,p.229. 10 See Ronald Pearsall, The Worm in the Bud: The World of Victorian Sexuality, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969, pp. 467–73.In1889, a homosexual brothel in London’s West End employing telegraph boys was raided by police. Two clients of lower social rank were subsequently jailed, but the brothel’s upper- class patrons managed to avoid prosecution; a newspaper editor who publicised this injustice was himself imprisoned for libel.

205

11 Donald L. Lawler (ed.), Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, New York, Norton, 1988,p.98. 12 Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Books, New York, Signet, 1964,p.33. 13 Nicholas Ruddick (ed.), H. G. Wells, The Time Machine: An Invention, Ontario, Broadview, 2001), pp. 92–3. 14 Nina Auerbach and David J. Skal (eds.), Bram Stoker, Dracula, New York, Norton, 1997, p. ix. 15 Andrew Lang, The Book of Dreams and Ghosts, Hollywood, CA, Newcastle, 1972, p. vi. 16 William James, The Principles of Psychology, Vol. I, London, Macmillan, 1890, p. 272n. 17 Leon Edel, introduction to Henry James: Stories of the Supernatural (1970), in Deborah Esch and Jonathan Warren (eds.), Henry James, The Turn of the Screw, New York, Norton, 1999, pp. 191–2. 18 See Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, Vol. I, 1975,p.43. 19 The title of Julian Hawthorne’s review of Wilde’s Dorian Gray in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, 46 (1890), 412–15. 20 Saturday Review, 8 January 1887,p.44. 21 Athenaeum, 26 June 1897,p.853. 22 George MacDonald, ‘The Fantastic Imagination’ (1893), in Robert H. Boyer and Kenneth J. Zahorski (eds.), Fantasists on Fantasy: A Collection of Critical Reflections, New York, Avon, 1984, pp. 14–21 (p. 15). 23 ‘The Old Saloon’, Blackwood’s Magazine, 141 (1887), 291–315 (p. 303). 24 ‘Our Book Shelf’, Nature, 52 (1895), 268. 25 Frederick R. Karl and Laurence Davies (eds.), The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, Vol. II, 1898–1902, Cambridge University Press, 1983,p.126. 26 [London] Times, 25 January 1886, 13. 27 Outlook, 60 (1898), 537. 28 Chautauquan, 28 (1899), 630.

206

JOHN STOKES Varieties of performance at the turn of the century

Like many other forms of artistic expression at the fin de sie` cle the drama faced in several directions at once, its distinction being that because drama is inherently dialogic it is relatively easy to express conflicting tendencies within the same work. Thus we find plays that actually incorporate the complexities of change within their formal structure. And this phenomenon goes back to preceding decades when a series of assaults on the status quo had produced strange hybrids. The theatre of the mid-nineteenth century, though by no means to be dismissed, had tended towards the comforting and the established: plays that celebrated the culture socially and domestically, together with productions of Shakespeare that were coloured with patriotic motifs and settings that consolidated the figure of Shakespeare, the national bard, as if he could have seen the British Empire coming. As elsewhere in Europe, the conventions of the ‘well-made play’, usually based on French models with their fixed structures, predictable climaxes and established themes, were pervasive. Change, when it came, was belated and partial, with Ibsen largely responsible. In his middle and later periods Ibsen inaugurated a theatrical debate into the great issues of the day: the claims of women, the call for leadership, the function of religion, the nature of creativity and, above all, the need to engage with the future. The story of the fight to get his plays staged in England has been told many times.1 Between 1889 and 1891 the following plays were staged: A Doll’s House (1889, with an earlier private reading in 1886 organised by Eleanor Marx), Ghosts (1891), Hedda Gabler (1891) and The Lady from the Sea (1891). The response to these productions was extraordinary, ranging from outright disgust (such as Clement Scott’s likening ‘the auditorium [to] a hospital-ward or dissecting room’ in the Daily Telegraph and so on) to immediate conversion to a new if sometimes puz- zling aesthetic. It’s not just coincidence that the two best remembered dramatists writing in English at the time of the Ibsen wars were both Irishmen, both in their way

207

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 JOHN STOKES outsiders: Oscar Wilde and Bernard Shaw. Wilde started off trying to produce historical romances rather in the manner of Victor Hugo. Later, in the early 1890s, he produced society plays that although obviously still drawing on French models – the likes of Dumas fils – imply a far more progressive ideology and manage to mix social satire with powerful sentiments in which women – even fallen women – are the moral guides. In Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892), A Woman of No Importance (1893) and An Ideal Husband (1895) Wilde strives to go beyond mere forgiveness towards prophecy and he looks to a future in which the frustrated moral sensibilities of women might herald a new and more liberated time. No wonder that critics have drawn parallels with Hedda Gabler, although at the time many of his contemporaries found Wilde’s plays curiously difficult to place. Even The Importance of being Earnest (1895), perennially popular, seems both modern in its logical illogicality and old-fashioned in its dependence upon traditional farce.2 Put Shaw against Wilde, his near contemporary, and one finds difference as well as similarity. Shaw, a professional theatre critic in a way that Wilde never really was, took on the might of the theatre establishment by mixing social criticism with comedy in a mode that aspired to the realistic in its subject matter with a distinctly melodramatic – that is to say old-fashioned – dramaturgical style. In plays such as Widower’s Houses (1892) and Mrs Warren’s Profession (published in 1898, produced in 1902), his Unpleasant Plays, he exposes the ways of contemporary corruption as Ibsen had done with, say, The Pillars of Society in a series of distinctly over-the-top char- acterisations and confrontations. In England other playwrights, best by far at comedy, were also to attempt to move on, though with less startling results, The ‘problem plays’ of Arthur Wing Pinero and Henry Arthur Jones are, at most, Ibsen spin-offs that lack the boldness to go all the way, aesthetic compromises with the very idea of social crisis. On the continent, matters were very different. Frank Wedekind’s Spring Awakening with its scenes of group masturbation and of a headless body arising out of its grave was, astonishingly enough, written (though admittedly not staged) in 1891; in France Alfred Jarry was to assault the bourgeoisie with his scatological farce Ubu Roi in 1896. This mood of a burgeoning avant-garde gained far less ground in the English-speaking world. The exception is Wilde who attempted the Symbolist mode with his Salome, inspired by the Belgian Symbolist playwright Maeterlinck in its use of language – rhythmic, repetitious – but also physically ritualistic, erotic and violent. Salome, though, was not to be staged in London in Wilde’s lifetime. Yet another Irishman, W. B. Yeats, heard the same incantatory sounds but connected them with folk tradition. In 1894 a remarkable double-bill was

208

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Varieties of performance produced at the Avenue Theatre in London: Shaw’s Arms and the Man and Yeats’s The Land of Heart’s Desire. The striking green and black poster, designed by Aubrey Beardsley, showing the seductive figure of a woman with eyes aslant, promised rather more than the evening would deliver, and the experiment was not a success. Nevertheless, it was a sign that a real challenge to the commercial hegemony was underway and indeed a number of ‘non- commercial’ theatre groups did manage to draw attention to continental innovation and even to have some influence upon the repertoire of leading actor–managers such as Herbert Beerbohm Tree who were, of course, very commercially minded indeed. Put this way it is easy to see why the formal narrative of theatre at the fin de sie` cle is frequently told as a series of interlocking modes or genres: Realism, modulating into Naturalism, the Symbolist reaction that will lead, eventually, to modernism. In this version of the story the importance of Ibsen and, a little later August Strindberg, must above all be stressed because their work encompasses the changes (in his preface to Miss Julie Strindberg laid down naturalistic laws which he then proceeded to break); Maeterlinck must be mentioned because of his influence (even though he’s rarely staged these days);3 and Chekhov is to be seen as the self-conscious synthesiser and manipulator of all these trends, a playwright who dissolves generic distinctions in a tragic–comic mode that was impossible to pin down yet, in retrospect, seems to have epitomised the many moods of the fin de sie` cle so subtly that his very first audiences in Russia, and later elsewhere, were uncertain how to respond. Chekhov, after all, had his characters pose the questions that had no definitive answer. What exactly would the future be like? A slow, dreamy decline in which the world and its products would gradually run out of energy or a violent, insurrectional time in which conflict alone would drive the world forward? It’s a dilemma that underlies not only many of the plays of the period but fin de sie` cle performance itself, in particular performance by women. On both sides of the curtain there was, at least at the time, rather less awareness of indicative genre than of the unique event that was taking place at that particular moment and the immediacy of the human bodies that were involved. After all, it’s always the present that we appreciate in theatre. When we say, as we often do, that it is the mark of great actors and actresses that they should be ‘versatile’, we are referring not so much to the range of character- isations of which they are capable, as to their ability to manifest themselves in very different kinds of play virtually simultaneously. At the turn of the century, when the strikingly new was often managing to co-exist with an established repertoire yet when the opportunities for global touring were

209

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 JOHN STOKES greater than ever before, and when revolutionary image-making techniques were beginning to proliferate, a select number of artists were elevated in just this style. What they brought to each role was distinctive in its personal possibilities; they were protean, multiple, yet they remained unmistakably themselves and no one else, almost irrespective of the play in which they appeared. They achieved celebrity, yet they maintained their authenticity as well. They were famous, charismatic, mythic even, and yet they were pal- pably, undeniably, up there on the stage, in the here and now. They embodied their own complex times.4 And, above all, they were international. Inevitably, the very fact that the ‘presence’ of such stars as Sarah Bernhardt, who toured the world between 1881 and the early 1920s, and Eleonora Duse, who flourished in the 1890s and early 1900s, had this mixed aspect provoked as much disquiet as it did admiration. The fin de sie` cle witnessed, along with changes in theatrical genre and in theatrical organisation, a crisis at the heart of theatrical representation itself. There is compelling evidence of this in the recurrent appearance in novels and short stories written between about 1880 and about 1910 of a particular topos which involves the description of a performance, invariably by a beautiful woman, in which she becomes so involved in what she is doing that she appears ‘possessed’ by it, controlled by and yet inhabiting her role as if in a dream. This has, in turn, an intoxicating or hypnotic effect upon the audience. However, the narrative or authorial voice controlling the fiction as a whole invariably implies a deep ambivalence about the phenomenon it is recording. An early example can be found in Edmond de Goncourt’s novel La Faustin (1882) inspired by the actress Rachel Fe´lix, in which the heroine’s almost frightening ability to capture the spirit of a piece is connected, inevitably, with a powerful and duplicitous sexual appetite.

In spite of everything the roˆletook possession of her, carried her out of herself, and almost unconsciously the tragedienne entered into the work of composition, working principally and for preference in bed, where she could better concentrate her attention ...She ceased to be herself, experiencing the inmost secret enjoyment which the actor does in being another than himself. A new woman created by the labour of her brain entered her skin, drove her out and took her life.5 This leads the narrator to observe the daunting fact that it is often women who have little or no education who most successfully recreate the heroic and sublime emotions of classical drama:

Ask them the reason how such a miracle came to pass. The reply in one word, ‘Instinct! Instinct!’ That is, in fact, the only explanation of this lucid somnam- bulism, this insight into the mighty past.6

210

Imaginative ‘instinct’ is a dangerous force that links passion, most obviously of a sexual kind, with acting talent – and in strange ways. More than two decades later, though still clearly inspired by the Goncourt novel, the English poet and critic Arthur Symons was to produce a novella called ‘Esther Khan’ in which the heroine, an embryonic star actress, sets out to take revenge on her treacherous lover, Haygarth, a playwright, and his new Italian girlfriend simply by acting supremely well:

Then, with an immense effort, she cleared her mind of everything but the task before her. Every nerve in her body lived with a separate life as she opened the door at the back of the stage, and stood, waiting for the applause to subside, motionless under the eyes of the audience. There was something in the manner of her entrance that seemed to strike the fatal note of the play. She had never been more restrained, more effortless; she seemed scarcely to be acting; only, a magnetic current seemed to have been set in motion between her and those who were watching her. They held their breaths, as if they were assisting at a real tragedy; as if, at any moment, this acting might give place to some horrible, naked passion of mere nature ...In the last act she had to die, after the manner of the Lady of the Camellias, waiting for the lover who, in this case, never came. The pathos of her acting was almost unbearable, and, still, it seemed not like 7 acting at all. The curtain went down on a great actress.

In Symons’s portrait of the actress the lover is vanquished but at a mutual cost for if, as a spectator, he is toppled from his uniquely privileged position so she, as a performer, must endure her triumph alone. In Gabrielle d’Annunzio’s cruel Flame of Life (1900), based on Duse, the ageing actress La Foscarina is made to experience a rather similar isolation. All she has left, in contrast with her still virile lover, yet another playwright, are briefly compensatory memories of youthful triumphs:

One Sunday in May, in the immense arena in the ancient amphitheatre under the open sky, I have been Juliet before a popular multitude that had breathed in the legend of love and death. No quiver from the most vibrating audiences, no applause, no triumph has ever meant the same to me as the fullness and the intoxication of that great hour ...Each word before leaving my lips seemed to have passed through all the warmth of my blood. There was no fibre in me, which did not give forth an harmonious sound. Ah, grace! The state of grace! Each time it is given to me to touch the summit of my art I recover that unspeakable abandonment. I was Juliet.8

Even in a crowded theatre the summit of genius is, in traditional Romantic fashion, reached by the artist alone. Yet, as several cultural historians have insisted,9 the phenomenon of the internationally successful actress needs to be related to the growing, if sometimes unfocused, feminist movements of the

211

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 JOHN STOKES fin de sie` cle. These are strong women who achieve a considerable degree of cultural autonomy often, ironically enough, by playing female outsiders – fallen and treacherous women – which is one reason why, in fiction at any rate, they must be symbolically crushed. What all the imaginative accounts share is a jealous fascination with the power that is displayed when a performing woman both fulfils and transcends herself in a mimetic act that inspires, yet evades, the vision of other artists. This pattern is strongly reminiscent of Rene´ Girard’s well-known triadic structure of desire which links mimesis with rivalry and with violence. According to Girard, mimesis is the desire to appropriate an object possessed by a model; only ‘culture’ can control its disruptive force.10 Transferred to the configuration of the possessed actress and her jealous admirers we might say that the conflict is essentially to do with the actress’s ‘self-possession’, the apparent wholeness that tempts and menaces her spectators at one and the same time. As a result an underlying hostility comes to the fore despite the admiring stance. After all, the object that the actress possesses, that the narrator/novelist half-wishes to appropriate, but must eventually resist, is nothing less than her own undivided, and undeniable, singularity. All this takes place at an historical moment when the right to identity is being strongly contested in the world at large, in particular by women. What, then, of the audience in general; how does it participate in the real- life dramas of performers whose art gives them such extraordinary presence? D’Annunzio’s Foscarina certainly admits the power of the ‘popular multitude’, but here is how a much greater novelist, Marcel Proust, deals with the situation as his hero ponders his own response to a performance by ‘Berma’, the greatest actress of the age, of whom he had such high expectations. It was noticeable, he later realised, that he felt obliged to join in the general applause because he could then persuade himself that he had seen the actress on one of her very best days: ‘ It would appear that certain transcendent realities emit all around them a sort of radiation of which the crowd is sensitive.’ An even deeper irony lies in the way that these ‘transcendent realities’ are to be felt only after, not actually during, the performance. Proust continues:

Thus it is that when any great event occurs, when on a distant frontier an army is in jeopardy, or defeated, or victorious, the vague and conflicting reports from which an educated man can derive little enlightenment stimulate in the crowd an emotion which surprises him and in which, once the experts have informed him of the actual military situation, he recognizes the popular perception of that aura which surrounds momentous happenings and which may be visible hundreds of miles away. One learns of a victory either after the event, when the war is over, or at once, from the hilarious joy of one’s hall porter. One discovers

212

the touch of genius in Berma’s acting either a week after one has heard her, from a review, or else on the spot, from the thundering acclamation of the stalls. But this immediate recognition by the crowd being mingled with a hundred others, all erroneous, the applause came most often at wrong moments, apart from the fact that it was mechanically produced by the effect of the applause that had gone before, just as in a storm, once the sea is sufficiently disturbed, it will continue to swell even after the wind has begun to subside. No matter; the more I applauded, the better, it seemed to me, did Berma act.11 Proust is, inevitably, the most searching of the many writers who engaged with the figure of the legendary actress – perhaps, in part, because he was writing when the phenomenon was beginning to peak (or, rather, about to modulate into the figure of the film star). There is a distinctly historical aspect to this passage. Like the others it is concerned with the artist, but it is even more taken up with the individual spectator’s relation to the audience as a whole, here conceived of as that increasingly imminent threat in the fin de sie` cle, the impersonal ‘crowd’. It is noticeable that Proust uses violent metaphors – wars and storms – to describe the effect of applause. It is as if actress and spectator are at the mercy of some vast and uncontrollable outside force that threatens to subsume them both. One can hear the same fear in some of the comments on the popular appeal of music-hall performers and the kind of reaction they could whip up. The template for the topos of the possessed performer had been supplied by Diderot in his Paradoxe sur le come´dien, which argues that good acting requires the performer to be, in some degree, emotionally distant from his or her role. This eighteenth-century text was newly discovered in the fin de sie` cle. Translated into English and published in 1883 with a preface by Henry Irving, it became the source of much controversy partly because it seemed to present issues that connected with contemporary awareness of the disquieting power of the performing woman – one thinks, too, of George du Maurier’s Trilby (1894) in which a woman’s voice is literally released and then controlled by Svengali, a sinister but creative man. In the case of the female writer the potential for identification would obviously seem much greater. Here is ‘George Egerton’ in her story ‘A Cross Line’ from the Keynotes collection of 1893 indulging the fantasies of a would-be dancer:

Then she fancies she is on the stage of an ancient theatre out in the open air, with hundreds of faces upturned toward her. She is gauze-clad in a cobweb garment of wondrous tissue. Her arms are clasped by jewelled snakes, and one with quivering diamond fans coils round her hips. Her hair floats loosely, and her feet are sandal-clad, and the delicate breath of vines and the salt freshness of an incoming sea seems to fill her nostrils. She bounds forward and dances,

213

bends her lissom waist, and curves her slender arms, and gives to the soul of each man what he craves, be it good or evil ...She can see herself with parted lips and panting, rounded breast, and a dancing devil in each glowing eye, sway voluptuously to the wild music that rises, now slow, now fast, now deliriously wild, seductive, intoxicating, with a human note of passion in its strain. She can feel the answering shiver of feeling that quivers up to her from the dense audience, spellbound by the motion of her dancing feet, and she flies swifter and swifter, and lighter and lighter, till the very serpents seem alive with jewelled scintillations. One quivering, gleaming, daring bound, and she stands with outstretched arms and passion-filled eyes, poised on one slender foot, asking a supreme note to finish her drama of motion. And the men rise to a man and answer her, and cheer, cheer till the echoes shout from the surrounding hills and tumble wildly down to the crags.12

The passage has been compared to the Dance of the Seven Veils performed by Wilde’s Salome, and for good reason because it, too, identifies sexual excitement with danger and even with death itself.13 The dominant influence is clearly that of Nietzsche (virtually acknowledged elsewhere in the story), particularly his elevation of the figure of the dancer to a position of supreme, because autonomous, creativity. It might be thought strange that the arch- misogynist should become a feminist hero, but in some respects that is indeed what happened. Part of the explanation lies in the duplicitous draw of dance itself. There’s a distinctly Dionysian aspect to dancing at this time, from the self-destructive, almost suicidal, tarantella performed by Nora Helmer in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House to Lottie Collins, the music-hall star, whose gyrating to ‘Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-Ay’, an erotic frenzy, stockings and suspenders fleet- ingly on display, left her hollow-eyed and drained. According to a press report in 1892: ‘During that very effective passage in which her toes go to her forehead three times in rapid succession all her blood goes there too, and stays for several hours. Miss Collins says that this is very unpleasant.’14 Yet, if the classic fin de sie` cle performer is a possessed woman who stands for ‘instinct’, for an irrational force that threatens to drown out all thought and inhibit constructive ideas, so too the age would increasingly demand expressions of resistance, sometimes in the form of an intensifying national or political affiliation, sometimes even in an equally Nietzschean expression of will and a bid for leadership. There were times when performing women had to lay claim to a masculine ability to take action without losing their feminine ability to inspire and invoke awe. This is the advance attempted, and largely achieved, by Sarah Bernhardt herself in whose later career we can see a determined response to historical events transposed into theatrical performance. Bernhardt had, to quite a considerable extent, established herself through her ability to swoon, to lose herself in emotion, taking her

214

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Varieties of performance audience, or at least its female portion, along with her. In Phe`dre, La Dame aux Came´lias, in the melodramas of Sardou and the quasi-religious plays of Rostand – La Samaritaine and La Princesse Lointaine – female strength had been demonstrated in a sacrificial way.15 By the turn of the century, however, her horizons were changing and she decided to take on the challenge of the dramatic character who, perhaps more than any other, embodied the dreamy, uncertain mood of the fin de sie` cle, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and in an astonishingly bold move, to reveal new depths within his personality. In May 1899 Bernhardt played the Prince in a newly commissioned prose translation. As recent scholars have shown,16 the interpretation was intended to be both thoroughly radical and intensely individualistic. Bernhardt was determined to set herself against what the poet Jules Laforgue called ‘Hamletism’, the cultish admiration for the Prince as hero (or, rather, anti-hero) on the grounds of his poetic melancholy and indecision. Hamlet had become the prototype of a certain brand of crepuscular melancholy and impotence. Witness Oscar Wilde, for instance, writing on Hamlet in ‘De Profundis’:

...a dreamer [who] is called upon to act. He has the nature of the poet and he is asked to grapple with common complexities of cause and effect, with life in its practical realization, of which he knows nothing, not with life in its ideal essence, of which he knows much. He has no conception of what to do, and his folly is to feign folly ...In the making of mows and jests he sees a chance of delay. He keeps playing with action, as an artist plays with a theory. He makes himself the spy of his proper actions, and listening to his own words knows them to be but ‘words, words, words’.17

Or, as Shaw put it in his characteristically more facetious way, Hamlet was a typically pessimistic man of the late nineteenth century who ‘has no real belief in the superstitious reason which he gives for not killing himself, and in fact anticipat[es] exactly the whole course of the intellectual history of western Europe until Schopenhauer found the clue that Shakespear missed’.18 ‘Hamletism’ was, indeed, a pervasive phenomenon around the fin de sie` cle, consciously invoked by Chekhov in the opening of his great play about death and survival, The Seagull (1896). Indeed, so widespread was the cult that initially the most remarkable thing about Bernhardt’s rendering may have been the opportunities it determinedly passed by. Maurice Maeterlinck was merely condensing precedent when he wrote in his influential essay of 1896, ‘The Tragical in Daily Life’, that while he admired Othello, ‘he does not appear to me to live the august daily life of a Hamlet, who has time to live, inasmuch as he does not act’.19 The sheer theatricality

215

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 JOHN STOKES of this situation is a recurrent theme in the interpretations put forward by Ste´phane Mallarme´ whose essay on Hamlet, first published in 1886 but reprinted in 1897, has a rather forbidding opening that juxtaposes an autumnal landscape with the annual opening of the theatre season:

Far removed from everything, autumnal Nature prepares Her Theatre sublime and pure. She will not, in Her solitude, shed light upon essential miracles until the Poet, whose lucid eye alone can penetrate their meaning (and that meaning is the destiny of man), has been called back to ordinary cares and pleasures.20

In the tragedy of autumn Nature goes her own splendid way while the poet, the only person who could grapple with understanding her processes, returns to the city and to mediocre modern entertainment. Fortunately, at the theatre he is also able to experience, even to identify with, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the supreme visionary and poetic hero who, as Mallarme´ later realises in this essay, has alongside his instinctive morbidity the great theatrical advantage of not having to grow old. The autumnal mood is always to be associated on another level with the tenor of the age itself as if historical time were fated – compare Yeats’s essay ‘The Autumn of the Body’ (1898). Mallarme´’s Hamlet is suspended and frozen in art, with the poet himself mirrored in the figure of the young Prince who will never become like Polonius, dull and loquacious. After decades of having been thought about by other artists, this primordial character now exists, says Mallarme´, mainly ‘through heredity in the souls of this fin de sie` cle’, that is to say, as a powerful Romantic inheritance.21 In her revisionist attempt to replace, or at least to modify, this late Romantic Hamlet, Bernhardt saw her own gender as an actual advantage. As her major claim was for Hamlet as man of action she necessarily rejected the thesis – astonishingly widespread – that Hamlet is a feminine soul trapped in a masculine body. Bernhardt’s point was not only that Hamlet is a thoroughly masculine character in his self-willed commitment to revenge and, ultimately, in his courage, but that these qualities can be represented – embodied indeed – by a woman. Moreover, while retaining an overall concept of gender characteristics as binary (femininity is adaptability sometimes coupled with wiliness; masculinity is focused self-determination), Bernhardt believed that as a performer she could express either pole, or both. There was no reason why an actress should not attempt to preserve, even develop, masculine strength. Yet, if it was the trancelike, eternally hovering Hamlet of the fin de sie` cle, epitomised in Mallarme´ and Wilde, that Bernhardt was determined to replace, why then should certain critics have insisted that they still saw in her performance traces of the previously established type? ‘Sarah Bernhardt gives us a youth under the influence of over-sensitive nerves’, wrote one. ‘She

216

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Varieties of performance makes Hamlet sometimes weak and sometimes violent’, said another, ‘the latter quality being much more manifest than the former, capricious and a creature of nerves.’ A third critic commented that ‘Mme. Sarah Bernhardt’s Hamlet is too learned, too bookish a youth, urged to action by an impending calamity. He finds the weight of existence too great for his frail shoulders.’22 The issue that has to be considered here is whether these critics saw in Bernhardt’s performance only what, thanks to ‘Hamletism’, they were already familiar with – an overburdened intellectual, an oversensitive youth – and that they therefore missed the rest. Or, was it that Bernhardt herself, consciously or unconsciously, denied her own precepts when it came to the actual performance, so that the determined revenge hero betrayed his mental state nonetheless? Or, as is perhaps most likely, was something even more subtle going on? Did Bernhardt show a conventionally dreamy and morbid nineteenth-century Hamlet in the act of actually overcoming and redirecting his vocational destiny in order to confront the twentieth? The translation itself is relevant to these questions. Hamlet’s famous exclamation, ‘The time is out of joint; – o cursed spite/That ever I was born to set it right!’ becomes, for example, ‘Le sie` cle est disloque´. O maudit ennui/ d’eˆtre ne´, moi, pour le remettre en ordre.’ ‘Le sie` cle’, meaning ‘time’ or ‘age’ but also ‘century’ (this is 1899 we should remember), is accompanied by other signal words. ‘Maudit’ means cursed certainly but it is also a word familiar from the phrase ‘le poe` te maudit’, as in Verlaine’s well-known collection of essays on, amongst others, Mallarme´ and Rimbaud, Les Poe`tes maudits, published in book form in 1884. And ‘Ennui’ has less to do with ‘spite’ than Baudelairean ‘boredom’ – as in the last stanza of the famous dedication to Les Fleurs du mal – ‘C’est l’Ennui!’ Similarly, Hamlet’s cursing of Claudius, ‘Bloody, bawdy, villain!/Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain!/O! vengeance!’ becomes ‘sanglant, immonde sce´le´rat!/ Ehonte´ traıˆtre, lubrique, de´ge´ne´re´ sce´le´rat/O vengeance!’ Again one should note an implicitly contemporary reference since ‘kindless’ has come out as ‘de´ge´ne´re´’, yet another fin de sie` cle buzz-word: ‘degenerate’.23 The introduction to the French translation used by Bernhardt makes no reference to the revenge tradition but it does make admiring mention of Mallarme´’s Hamlet essay. There’s an historical dialectic at work that is symptomatic of the later fin de sie` cle – of change, of supposed reform, a shift from decadence to action, the same pattern that is commonly found in Bernhardt’s rendering of Hamlet. To show resolution, then, she had to work through irresolution – which the text generalises as the spirit of the age: ‘Le sie` cle est disloque´.’ So it was indeed: in France the national self-lacerations over the Dreyfus case of 1894, in which a Jewish army officer was falsely accused of passing

217

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 JOHN STOKES secrets to the German Embassy, had left their scars; the humiliations of the Franco-Prussian war, when France had been invaded by German troops, should have been forgotten, but they weren’t; in England worries about the survival of Empire led to concern about the health of what was sometimes seen as an essentially Anglo-Saxon culture; elsewhere, in Europe and beyond, political movements struggled to appeal to both national identity and the increasingly organised aspirations of the oppressed. The theatre needed to expand its relevance to match an international market and to reinforce its claim to represent the age. Decadence now urgently needed to be troped into its opposite: progress. The ‘creatures of nerves’ had to start getting things done – and, fortunately, the technology was to hand to bring that message home to the world, a technology with a world-wide potential that was all action, nothing but action. In 1900 Bernhardt chose the final duel scene from Hamlet with which to commemorate herself on film – a fight in which as woman, as twentieth- century woman, as actress, she triumphs, even if ultimately vindicated in death. The short episode was shown at the great Paris exhibition of that year: in it Bernhardt dies triumphantly, standing up. For ‘words, words, words’ the film substitutes, with the aid of a recording synchronised to the fighting, the sound of clashing swords. It’s a high definition image, a black on white outline splendidly suited to the new medium yet freighted with meaning, a living shadow play, a triumphantly assertive hero.24 Yet, Bernhardt’s female Hamlet wasn’t the only filmed performance to be shown at the Paris Exhibition. Another was Constant Coquelin in Rostand’s runaway success, Cyrano de Bergerac. Both performances, in calculatedly historical ways, looked to the future. Cyrano is set in the seventeenth century. Its hero, a flamboyant Gascon poet and swordsman, becomes infatuated with Roxanne who is, in turn, besotted with Christian, dashingly handsome but nervously inarticulate. Cyrano has a flaw, a grotesquely large nose, which he believes makes him unacceptable to women. He therefore generously offers to compose poetic tributes to Roxanne that Christian can pass off as his own. At the siege of Arras, which Roxanne attends, Christian is struck down and dies in her arms. Rostand then cleverly adds a rich dose of pathos by setting his last act in the convent to which Roxanne has retired. One evening she is visited as usual by Cyrano. Listening to the poet read Christian’s letters in the twilight, Roxanne realises that he was their true author. It’s too late; the real bravery of Cyrano’s face is disclosed, but he collapses and dies. When Coquelin, then actor–manager of the The´aˆtre de la Porte Saint Martin, premiered Cyrano in 1897 it turned out to be the crowning point of his career; rarely has a Parisian audience been as ungrudging as on that

218

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Varieties of performance famous first night. The show went on to run for 400 performances and it subsequently did exceptionally well in London, in New York and across the whole of America – eventually Coquelin was to take Cyrano to virtually every capital city in the world. In London, however, the intellectually ambitious critic Arthur Symons was made unhappy by critics who simply saw the play as ‘a triumphant revolt against the Northern blasts, the Decadent miasmas, the Symbolist fogs, which have been making France unfruitful’, complaining that ‘it is made to flash, and to take in the ignorant’.25 Ironically, it was left to Henry James to try to explain the extraordinary – and frankly enviable – international success of a poetic drama performed in the original: ‘If there be a quality of M. Rostand’s own idiom, the bristling bravery of his verse, the general frolic of his vocabulary, especially under the happy crack of the whip of rhyme, it is that surely, of resisting simplification to the death. What therefore, has become of it beyond the seas?’ James’s answer to his own question was that the only explanation for Rostand’s universal appeal was that he was ‘inordinately romantic’.26 This surely was undeniable, as Bernhardt obviously grasped when, although she hadn’t played the part of Roxanne, the play’s beautiful and passionate heroine, in any of the original productions, she made herself available for a world tour with Coquelin as the male lead in 1900 and 1901. At the same time, just as Roxanne represents a reinvigorated romantic femininity so is Cyrano’s bulbous embarrassment best seen as an unmistakable sign of the masculine. (In some recent productions a prosthetic appen- dage, welded to the face of the lead actor, has become a phallic flange shamefully difficult to conceal.) Its owner capitalises on his feelings and his talents by substituting language for a supposed physical inadequacy. As Max Beerbohm put it at the time, ‘All the speeches blow in gusts of rhetoric straight over the footlights into the very lungs of the audience.’27 A rhetorical hero, Cyrano is to be linked, very broadly speaking, with other characters in plays of the fin de sie` cle and after, who possess the power of demagoguery, of a verbal energy that threatens to revitalise Symbolist languor: W. B. Yeats’s Cuchulain in a sequence of plays; J. M. Synge’s Christy Mahon in The Playboy of the Western World (1907); Bernard Shaw’s John Tanner who actually compiles ‘The Revolutionist’s Handbook’ in Man and Superman (1905). Even Chekhov gives us versions of the type, though more obliquely, and with even more obvious scepticism, in the form of Veshenin in Three Sisters (1901) and the student Yopakhin in The Cherry Orchard (1904) with their distant and highly inventive prophecies of social change. These characters are all in their way performers, actors, which both enables and limits their usefulness. The figure of the rhetorical man, whose outbursts have to be continually tested against reality and results, is now set against that of the possessed woman.

219

Coquelin was a notable theorist who believed, in line with Diderot, that actors should be emotionally distanced from the parts they play, although he also recognised that all good performers need, in the first place, to have their own distinctive personalities.28 Rather like Cyrano himself, who is caught in the bind of expressing through the voice of another the feelings to which he cannot publicly admit, actors may see themselves as living beings trapped in limiting roles. Even Bernhardt may have felt something of the same pressure. By the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, the leading lights of the late nineteenth century, her contemporaries and co-conspirators were fading fast – she was sixty in 1904. When her old friend the poet Catulle Mende` s died in 190929 Bernhardt held a gala benefit at her own theatre to raise money for a memorial bust. There were readings from Cyrano and, for once, and at its author’s specific request, Bernhardt chose to deliver the lines of the play’s tormented protagonist rather than of Roxanne, its exquisite 30 muse. Opting for words over looks, she would have delivered them, we can be sure, with her customary vigour, a fitting revenge for the passing of time and the injustice of carelessly gendered presumptions. Beerbohm had written about Coquelin in the role that Cyrano was the ‘showiest part of modern times ...Innumerable footlights, all marvellously brilliant, converge on him. And as he moves he flashes their obsequious radiance into the uttermost corners of the theatre. The very footlights, as he passes them, burn with a pale, embarrassed flame, ashen to him as stars to the sun.’31 Of all the popular spectacles of the fin de sie` cle it is Rostand’s magnificent play, with its bold, but still romantic, heroine and its scintillat- ing, though woefully idealistic, hero that most accurately sums up the moment since it simultaneously indulges and rebukes preferences that still dominated the stage. When Roxanne tells Christian that she would love him even were he ugly, leaving him to realise that it is Cyrano’s poetic letters not his own good looks to which she has been irresistibly drawn, potent language triumphs over physical beauty, a development from which both sexes would seem to stand to benefit.32 It would, though, take more than a mere turn-of-the-century mood for that inspiring vision ever to be realised.

NOTES 1 See, for instance, Ibsen: The Critical Heritage, ed Michael Egan, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972, which includes William Archer’s famous selection of hostile reactions: ‘Ghosts and Gibberings’; Sally Ledger, Henrik Ibsen, Plymouth, Northcote House, 1999; Sally Ledger, ‘Eleanor Marx and Henrik Ibsen’ in John Stokes (ed.), Eleanor Marx (1855–1898): Life–Work–Contacts, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2000, pp. 53–67; Simon Williams, ‘Ibsen and the Theatre,

220

1877–1900’inThe Cambridge Companion to Ibsen, ed. James McFarlane, Cambridge University Press, 2001, pp. 165–84. 2 See Kerry Powell, Oscar Wilde and the Theatre of the Nineties, Cambridge University Press, 1990, pp. 108–23. 3 See Katharine Worth, The Irish Drama of Europe from Yeats to Beckett, London, Athlone Press, 1978. 4 Significantly enough, the one country that failed to produce its own all-powerful performing female was England. The reasons may have been political. After all, England already had a female leader. As a counter to Victoria’s forbidding authority the English opted for Ellen Terry’s mixture of independent strength and irresistible charm. See Michael Booth, ‘Ellen Terry’ in John Stokes, Michael R. Booth and Susan Bassnett, Bernhardt, Terry, Duse: The Actress in her Time, Cambridge University Press, 1988; and Nina Auerbach, Ellen Terry: Player in her Time, London, Phoenix House, 1987. 5 Edmond de Goncourt, La Faustin, translated by G. F. Monkshood and Ernest Tristan, London, Greening and Company, 1906,p.46. 6 de Goncourt, La Faustin,p.48. 7 Arthur Symons, Spiritual Adventures, London, Archibald Constable and Co., 1905, pp. 80–1. 8 Gabriele D’Annunzio, The Flame of Life, translated from the Italian by Kassandra Vuvaria, London, William Heinemann, 1900, pp. 320–2. 9 See, for example, Susan A. Glen, Female Spectacle. The Theatrical Roots of Modern Feminism, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2000; Rhonda K. Garelick, Rising Star. Dandyism, Gender and Performance in the Fin de Sie`cle, Princeton University Press, 1998 and Mary Louise Roberts, Disruptive Acts: The New Woman in Fin-de-sie`cle France, University of Chicago Press, 2002. 10 See James G. Williams (ed.), The Girard Reader, New York, The Crossroad Publishing Company, 2004,p.290. 11 Marcel Proust, ‘Within a Budding Grove’, Remembrance of Things Past, translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1983, pp. 485–6. 12 Keynotes and Discords, London, Virago, 1983, pp. 19–20. 13 Salome has been much discussed as the archetypal instance of the possessed woman. See Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Sie`cle, London, Bloomsbury, 1991, pp. 144–68; and Elaine Showalter (ed.), Daughters of Decadence, London: Virago, 1993, pp. xiii–xiv. Also see Glen, Female Spectacle, and Garelick, Rising Star, and Rene´ Girard, ‘Scandal and the Dance: Salome in the Gospel of Mark’, New Literary History, 15 (1984), 311–24 which draws parallels between Salome, ‘celebrity’ and political leadership. 14 ‘Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-Ay’, The Era, 8 October 1892,p.17. 15 For Edmond Rostand in general see Sue Lloyd, The Man who was Cyrano, Bloomington, Indiana, Unlimited Publishing, 2002. 16 Gerda Taranow, The Bernhardt Hamlet: Culture and Context, New York, Peter Lang, 1996; Tony Howard, ‘The Woman in Black: Some Notes on the Actress as Hamlet’, Women and Theatre, Occasional Papers 1,(1992), 63–83,andWomen as Hamlet: Performance and Interpretation in Theatre, Film and Literature, Cambridge University Press, 2007. 17 Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, Glasgow, HarperCollins., 1994,p.1052.

221

18 Our Theatres in the Nineties, 3 vols., London, Constable and Co., Vol. III, p. 202. 19 Maurice Maeterlinck, The Treasure of the Humble, London, George Allen, 1913, p. 105. 20 This translation is from Ste´phane Mallarme´, Selected Prose Poems, Essays, and Letters, translated and with an introduction by Bradford Cook, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1956,p.56. 21 Ste´phane Mallarme´, Œuvres comple`tes, Edition pre´senteé, etablie et annoteé par Bertrand Marchal, Paris, Bibliothe` que de la Ple´ıäde, 2003, Vol. II, p. 169. Author’s own translation. 22 All quotations taken from Jules Huret, Sarah Bernhardt, London, Chapman and Hall, 1899, pp. 177–92. 23 All quotations from La Tragique Histoire d’Hamlet, translated by Euge`ne Morand and Marcel Schwob, Paris, Librairie Charpentier et Fasquelle, 1900. 24 See David W. Menefee, Sarah Bernhardt in the Theatre of Films and Sound Recordings, Jefferson, NC and London, McFarland, 2003. 25 The Star, 10 July 1901. 26 Henry James, ‘Edmond Rostand’, The Scenic Art, London, Rupert Hart-Davis, 1949, pp. 306–7. 27 Max Beerbohm, Around Theatres, London, Rupert Hart-Davis, 1953,p.5. 28 See ‘Art and the Actor’ in Brander Matthews (ed.), Papers on Acting, New York, Hill and Wang, 1958, pp. 1–40. 29 Information from The Times, 9 February 1909; The Era 13 and 20 February 1909. 30 Information from L’Intransigeant, 28 May 1909. 31 Max Beerbohm, Around Theatres,p.74. 32 Roxanne’s key lines are: ‘Je t’aimerais encore! Si toute ta beaute´ tout un coup s’envolait...’ Edmond Rostand, Cyrano de Bergerac, Paris, Charpentier et Fasquelle, 1898, Quatrie` me Acte, Sce` ne VIII.

222

MARION THAIN Poetry

Fin de sie` cle poetry was often both anti-Victorian and anti-bourgeois in spite of the fact that its authors were frequently middle-class Victorians. While Victoria’s reign did not end until 1901, during the last quarter of the nineteenth century poetry was moving away from those forms and styles that had come to be considered most quintessentially Victorian. By the time a sense of ‘Victorian’ values and aesthetics had been recognised and labelled as such, poets were able self-consciously to define their work in opposition to them, sometimes explicitly disavowing any affinity.1 It is for this reason that the last quarter of the century is often identified with the death of the Victorian aesthetic, and Decadence perceived as the wringing out of the last drops of a faded and over-played aesthetic. Yet, if this was the period in which Victorian poetry died, it was without a doubt the period in which many new poetries were born. In comparison with the lucrative novel, the economic marginality of poetry by this point in the century undoubtedly put it in a different relationship with its recent heritage. Much less likely to be loyal to tried and tested formulas, poetry begins to see itself as avant-garde. What we see in poetry of the period is not so much the limbo of ‘transition’ to modernist concerns, however, but what Richard Le Gallienne identified as a self- conscious desire for a new aesthetic and a new beginning.2 The death of Alfred Lord Tennyson in 1892 can be seen as a symbolic marker of the fate of Victorian poetry. The well-attended funeral demonstrated that many ordinary people, whether or not they read poetry, felt the poet laureate represented something significant about national identity and pride. After Tennyson died, however, the post remained empty until the unexpected appointment of Alfred Austin in 1896. This passing on from ‘Great Alfred’ to ‘Little Alfred’,3 the much less well-known poet, whose literary stature appeared diminutive when lined up alongside Tennyson’s, again can be read as a symbolic manifestation of poetry’s cultural marginality at the end of the century. Austin was a surprising choice in many ways, but comes to represent the splintering of poetry into diverse types and

223

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 MARION THAIN groups, away from the unified cultural meaning a figure such as Tennyson could perhaps hope to represent earlier in the century. Indeed, in spite of major landmarks such as ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’ (1896), A. E. Housman’s long poem ‘A Shropshire Lad’ (1896), and Swinburne’s continuing controversial but important career, no one literary giant dominates poetry of this period. Diversity, and the absence of a figure-head icon, might justly be said to characterise poetry of the period. By the 1890s there was a dizzying array of poetic movements, genres, types and coteries. This was beneficial for women poets, who no longer had to negotiate a relationship with a canonical trajectory, and deal with all the problems of gender this inevitably raises. In fact, women poets were publishing in such great numbers and with such vigour by the end of the century that there is no longer a polarity between a ‘woman’s tradition’ and a mainstream. True, women poets sometimes bring distinctive issues or concerns into poetry of the period – and these must be acknowledged – but their position is not one defined by marginality: they are woven into the core of fin de sie` cle poetics, and must not, within this chapter, be segregated to a separate narrative. The period in which Austin became Laureate was more generally a period in which the marginal became central. Along with this shift in the cultural currency of poetry, one of the most immediately noticeable differences between mid- and late-century verse is the growing dominance of the short lyric poem over the longer narrative poem (whether this latter was the lyric sequence, the dramatic monologue, or more straightforwardly verse narrative forms). This development went hand in hand with a fashion for intricate, compact forms of verse, owing much to the influence from France. French ‘Parnassianism’ emerged in the 1830sas poets distanced themselves from the social politics of the Romantics, and sought a style of verse that was impersonal, with the emphasis placed on highly wrought form. This development was at the heart of the ‘l’art pour l’art’ (or ‘art for art’s sake’) movement. The fashion emerged in Britain in the 1870s and 80s, but also set the tone for the compressed, gem-like lyrics of the 1890s too. The´odore de Banville was a primary French influence, with Austin Dobson playing a key role in translating the style into English poetry. This turn towards the short, strict form, and the vogue for French literature, are pretty much the only two features that hold together the new blossoming of a diverse set of poetic impulses at the end of the century.4 Yet to try to map this diversity I will highlight three broad trends in poetry of the period (aestheticism and Decadence, counter-Decadence, and political or commentary verse), each of which splinters again into subgroups. These broadly construed stylistic trends are not intended to confine individual writers, or individual poems, to specific categories, and a subsequent analysis

224

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Poetry of Yeats (a figure discussed in relation to none of the three groups) will show how his work, in particular, cuts across all three, rejecting easy divisions and showing how his long career can be seen to form a commentary on the poetry of the period, even if it does not typify the age. Towards the end of this chapter I turn from stylistic features to the landscapes that characterised fin de sie` cle poetry. In both the new urban cityscapes, and the apparently nostalgic or traditional settings, we see a poetry that is bound, by its own historical condition, to look simultaneously forwards and back. This chapter ends with a retrospective mapping of fin de sie` cle poetry in relation to modernist poetry of the early twentieth century: a movement which began in this late century outburst of lyric energy. ‘Decadence’ identifies a significant current in fin de sie` cle literature, and can usefully be seen as emerging from, and within, the central principles of aestheticism while differing from them in crucial respects. The cultivation of the beautiful experience for the sake of art was often replaced at the end of the century by the cultivation of any experience for aesthetic impact. Arthur Symons most succinctly describes this tendency in his preface to the second edition of his volume of poems Silhouettes (1896). Here he writes that, ‘a work of art can be judged from only two standpoints: the standpoint from which its art is measured entirely by its morality, and the standpoint from which its morality is measured entirely by its art’.5 No wonder then that Decadence provoked accusations of immorality; it was justly connected with a desire to unsettle and challenge. Less justified was the caricature of the ‘Tragic Generation’ drawn by Yeats in the early twentieth century, which emphasised not only sexual scandal, but the disillusionment, ennui and despair with life that was sometimes the result of exhaustive seeking of moments of heightened receptivity and intense experience. This doom-laden conception of the period did lasting damage to its critical reception, and hid the extent to which this poetry is concerned with rising to the challenges of modernity. If poets no longer had a moral responsibility, they were now shouldering the burden of finding a new kind of cultural currency. Decadence was caught up in a wide range of paradoxes as a result of its eschewal of moral and social purpose in favour of intrinsic aesthetic value, and it is in this sense that fin de sie` cle poetry looked much more towards the twentieth century than the nineteenth. In order to understand this often perplexing poetry it is necessary to avoid simply trying to resolve its contradictions, and instead to see paradox itself as a central conceit. Many critics have seen Decadence, as the name implies, as a failure: a falling away from a literary standard, and a self-indulgent wallowing in its own ineffectuality. Yet perhaps this is to underestimate the power of paradox in the poetry: that desire to hold together two incompatible terms.

225

A paradox is, by its very nature, a means of overcoming impossible divisions; it enables writers to unite a world that was beginning to fragment along a number of different fault lines while simultaneously acknowledging those newly prominent fissures. In this way, the Decadent lyric both acknowledged implicitly the impossibility of its unified vision in the modern world, even while it forged, at its best, a finely wrought artistic conceit that enabled reconciliations not quite possible in life. This gives the lyric an undeniable energy as poetic form strains against impossible content. A framework of four paradoxes will be established below, offering a way into a detailed understanding and analysis of the work. I begin with a temporal paradox that informs much of what is characteristic of Decadence: this is the puzzle of Walter Pater’s ‘gem-like flame’. This central conceit also underpins my second paradox: that between art and morality, which Symons uses to define Decadence in the above quotation. Thirdly, I explore the paradoxical relationship between the aesthetic and the economic which is played out over the object of the Decadent book of poems itself as well as in its contents. Finally, I turn to the relationship between Decadence and Catholicism that was so prominent at the very end of the century, and find an illuminating affinity. Walter Pater’s The Renaissance, a hugely influential work for the period, contains much that explains the preoccupations of fin de sie` cle poetry. This is the text Oscar Wilde termed his ‘golden book’, ‘the very flower of decadence’.6 The ‘Conclusion’ of Pater’s work that caused such strong feelings when it was published is famously based around a temporal paradox: the desire to celebrate the flux and transitory nature of life by stilling the moment and preserving it. Pater’s injunction to ‘burn always with this hard, gemlike flame’ takes a signifier of temporal flux – the flickering flame – and combines it with an image of stasis – the flame being hard and gemlike.7 ‘[T]o maintain this ecstasy’, writes Pater, ‘is success in life’ (p. 219). This perception of time as flux and the quest for perfect moments that could arrest such flux gets to the heart of much Decadent poetry. The Victorian age was dominated by worries about rapid temporal change, whether about evolutionary theory, the decline of conventional religious belief, or the changes brought about by rapid industrialisation. Pater’s response is that ‘our one chance lies in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time’ (p. 220). When Pater re-issued the volume without the ‘Conclusion’ he voiced concerns that such sentiment could be mistaken as a licence to enjoy the intensity of the moment with little thought to moral or other consequence. However writers responded to Pater’s work, it provided a powerful motif for their search for an escape from the experience of ceaseless change.

226

An intense poetic engagement with painting characterises the period because it was often through art itself that fin de sie` cle poets sought to find this still moment in the midst of perpetual flux. The aunt and niece who worked together under the name Michael Field (Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper) wrote an entire book of poetry based around art they had seen in the galleries of Europe. Within Sight and Song (1892), ‘A Portrait’, written around a painting by Bartolommeo Veneto, gives voice to the model depicted and we see her attempt to preserve her beauty in the painting at the moment before she loses her looks to age.8 The woman’s beauty is valuable to a large extent because it is natural, and therefore transient, but the painting and the poem seek to extract this beauty and preserve it in the realm of art and artifice. The poem ends by telling us that in her self-creation through the portrait, the model has ‘conquered death’. This is ultimately what the concern with Pater’s temporal paradox signified: an attempt to overcome the threat of mortality to which a recognition of temporal flux will inevitably lead. Yet art’s ability to still the moment, to capture fleeting impressions, is, of course, something of an illusion – and the very aim was paradoxical: the poets sought to preserve moments which were so beautiful and powerful because of their transitory nature, and so their very attempt to take the moment out of time would in some sense destroy it. Rosamund Marriott Watson’s poetic rendering of Burne-Jones’s painting, The Depths of the Sea (1886), seems to engage darkly with this theme by musing on the ‘brightest, bitterest triumph’ of the mermaid who drags down a beautiful sailor to join her under the sea, not realising that her possession of him is predicated on his death. Intense sensory experience was also sought as a means of inhabiting Pater’s temporal paradox. This attempt to transcend flux through ‘wine and woman and song’ (as Ernest Dowson put it in ‘Villanelle of the Poet’s Road’ (1899)) was at the heart of Arthur Symons’s definition of Decadence quoted earlier, and is central to my next paradox: that between art and morality. This valuing of the sensory intensity of the moment was in danger of creating a new aesthetic completely divorced from any prescribed moral framework, and the result can be seen in poetry which finds and celebrates beauty in unexpected places. Eugene Lee-Hamilton’s poem ‘Baudelaire’ acknowledges this influence from the French poet in its eulogy to the ‘gorgeous iridescence 9 of decay’ found in a Paris gutter. Here the detritus is seen as it presents itself to the senses rather than judged for the role it plays in the economy of the city. It is this new way of seeing the world that enables the polluting oil-slick to be apprehended as ‘A wavy film of colour, gold and fire’. Finding beauty and sensory intensity through narcotics and illicit sexual desire were, similarly, particularly common strategies for the Decadents, and did much to prise art away from the moral framework that Matthew Arnold and others

227

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 MARION THAIN had, earlier in the century, insisted was such a crucial part of artistic value. What we see in this poetry again and again is a freeing of the value of sensation from moral reference points. Characteristically Decadent is Arthur Symons’s ‘White Heliotrope’, published in London Nights (first edition: 1895; second edition: 1897).10 Here the succinct four-stanza poem occupies a strict form and rhyme scheme. The scene of illicit, or at the very least, unrestrained, passion is set in the first stanza, but noticeably is not commented upon by the unjudging title:

The feverish room and that white bed, The tumbled skirts upon a chair, The novel flung half-open, where Hat, hair-pins, puffs, and paints, are spread; The familiar fin de sie` cle icons are all here: the fever and the fret; the roughly abandoned skirts; the novel, probably signifying the racy and possibly corrupting narrative of the infamous French yellow paperback, flung ‘half-open’ as if symbolic of the abandoned woman herself; and the make-up that Max Beerbohm had so famously declared a crucial part of the aesthetic celebration of artifice over nature.11 The second stanza engages with that desire seen in Pater’s ‘Conclusion’ to find a still point in this scene of transient mess: The mirror that has sucked your face Into its secret deep of deeps, And there mysteriously keeps Forgotten memories of grace; The mirror, in this case, acts as an image equivalent to Pater’s ‘gem-like flame’: that which should simply reflect the transient impressions of the world, but which, through some aesthetic paradox, is able to preserve ‘memories of grace’. The third stanza returns to the world of flux:

And you, half dressed and half awake, Your slant eyes strangely watching me,. And I, who watch you drowsily, With eyes that, having slept not, ache; In this stanza everything is in process. The repetition of the word ‘half’ – used also in the opening stanza – indicates how everything is in the midst of change. The woman is ‘half dressed’ and ‘half awake’, and the narrator (perhaps still in bed) watches her ‘drowsily’ with aching eyes that, between sleep and wakefulness, are half open. Decadent poetry is full of such transitional states. Its obsession with twilight is usually interpreted as a reflection of the fin de sie` cle’s sense of itself as the tail-end of the Victorian era, but it is just as much an indication of the Decadents’ experience of the unstable world

228

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Poetry as constantly in flux. The final stanza again returns to that earlier attempt to transcend the process of the world through the intense physical experience:

This (need one dread? nay, dare one hope?) Will rise, a ghost of memory, if Ever again my handkerchief Is scented with White Heliotrope.

Here the amoral motif of the white heliotrope scent is used to encompass the moment and to fix it in a realm beyond the transient, in which it lives on, accessible whenever the perfume is encountered. It is significant that the white heliotrope is a beautiful flower, but not a native one. Hot-house flowers were often to be found in Decadent literature signifying that rarefied realm of artifice the dandy inhabited: a world divorced from any natural moral law. Yet, while French Decadence saw art as a matter entirely divorced from morality, British poets could never quite make that leap, preferring instead to re-inscribe a new morality based on aesthetic values. Arthur Symons’s statement of a new moral order (in which art should be judged as moral insofar as it is good art) captures succinctly this paradox of British Decadence. Many poets felt, like Pater, that the intensely experienced moment they sought would lead them to a truer moral vision, and this trajectory is completed for a not insignificant number of poets by the conversion to a new religious faith at the end of the century that I will soon explore. If Decadence can be seen to have an ambivalent relationship with morality, then this is even more true of its engagement with the economy. Aestheticism had claimed the autonomy of art, supposedly separating it from the marketplace as well as from a moral framework, yet it is no coincidence that aestheticism became prominent just as economic and consumerist issues began to impinge on art through the rise of mass culture at the end of the nineteenth century. Theodor Adorno noted that, ‘To that extent, the code- word of l’art pour l’art is the opposite of what it claims to be.’12 So the moment at which art claims to exist apart from moral and economic forces within society is also the moment at which art becomes truly engaged with a consumer culture as well as figuring a new kind of moral framework. This aesthetic/economic paradox is summed up in the physical appearance of Decadent volumes of poetry, many of which were issued in limited editions, of good quality binding and fine design. Such expensive production satisfied a double imperative: on the one hand these are designed precisely not to appeal to a mass market (in stark contrast to the penny novels), but on the other, the very commodification of the text in the fine wrappers (often silk, gilt and leather) is a recognition of, and pandering to, consumer desires. The physical appearance of, for example, Oscar Wilde’s Poems is a perfect

229

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 MARION THAIN example. The volume was first published in 1881, but was re-issued most spectacularly in 1892 with a new extravagant gilt-embossed cover designed by Charles Ricketts, one of the key figures in fin de sie` cle book design. This development is reflected in what I will be calling the ‘political and commentary verse’ of the period which engages, often satirically, with fin de sie` cle culture. In May Kendall’s decidedly un-Decadent poem ‘The Legend of J. J. Jackson the Self-Made Man’ this ‘self-madest man’ is a representative of a new bourgeoisie and a new economic mobility in society.13 The poem shows the man killed, while in the act of proudly surveying his empire, by the multiple artistic likenesses of himself that he keeps around him. The water- colour and chalk portraits, the bronze casts and marble statues, all gang up on him: ‘Twelve J. / J. Jacksons against one’. His economic prosperity is somehow in deep tension with art, and it is as if he – as a representative of the new mass culture that enabled such entrepreneurship – encouraged and supported artistic enterprise (provided it was created in his own image) but fundamentally misunderstood the nature of the aesthetic and under-esti- mated the problems of its relationship with the new mass culture. While aestheticism’s commitment to the beautiful entailed an autonomy which should in theory separate it from the economic realm, the two were in fact held in paradoxical fusion, each threatening to annihilate the other. A rather happier partnership can be found between Decadence and Catholicism. Joris-Karl Huysmans, Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud may be the best known French converts, but English poets were, it seems, were following suit. Oscar Wilde is the most famous, but Lionel Johnson, Ernest Dowson, Aubrey Beardsley, Lord Alfred Douglas, John Gray, Andre´ Raffalovich, Frederick Rolfe (also known as Baron Corvo), and ‘Michael Field’ also turned to Rome. Francis Thompson should also be mentioned here because although he was not a convert, being already a Catholic, poems such as ‘The Hound of Heaven’ do capture the energy generated by the intermingling of his faith and a Decadent sensibility. So what was this strange affinity between aestheticism and Catholicism? Both, as Hanson points out, were elaborate paradoxes, and the space offered by Catholic ritual allowed the contradictions of Decadence to exist unresolved.14 (Indeed, puritan anti-Catholicism was particularly strong during the latter half of the nineteenth century when the Catholic Church was re- establishing itself in England, and Catholicism and Decadent literature were often condemned in much the same terms (p. 8).) Lionel Johnson’s ‘The Dark Angel’ (Poems, 1895), with its ‘aching lust[s]’ and ‘evil ecstasy’, is a powerful example of this. Moreover, John Gray, the poet turned priest, offers a particularly interesting case-study because he managed to combine the two personas so perfectly. Once known as John ‘Dorian’ Gray, the possible

230

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Poetry model for Oscar Wilde’s notorious The Picture of Dorian Gray, Gray later became just as notorious for his piety. After a quintessentially Decadent volume, Silverpoints (1893), his first volume of sacred verse, Spiritual Poems, appeared in 1896. Many of the poems in this latter volume are translations of European verse, and in this way the poet can again be seen as iconic of his age. Decadent poetry was truly cosmopolitan, and during this period translation was considered an important poetic genre in its own right. This volume shows clearly how a rich Catholic discourse of the divine and the ecstatic can be fused with a Decadent aesthetic. For example, ‘Saint Bernard. To the Stabbed Side of Jesus’ – a translation from the German of Paulus Gerhardt – is an unflinching fetishisation of Christ’s wound:

Save in thy wounded Side, for me There rests no consolation. O precious Wound, be thou adored, ... Conceal me, Wound; within thy cave Locked fast, no thing shall harm me; There let me nestle close and safe, There soothe my soul and warm me.15

Christ’s wounds become a motif imbued with a homoerotic charge for many of the male Decadent converts, and an image that mediated between the world of intense, and perverse, experience, and their new-found religious vocation. This use of Christ’s body and his wounds as an erotic interface between Gray and his religion might be seen as a specifically male Decadent trope (and certainly seems to have an affinity with male sexuality throughout Hanson’s study). Yet there is no doubt that the two women who wrote as Michael Field were also influenced by this discourse in the work of Gray, Raffalovich, Huysmans and others. ‘Imple Superna Gratia’ (‘to fill up with divine grace’) is a fine example of an intermeshing of Pater’s aesthetic discourse with the Catholic iconography of the wounds:

We may enter far into a rose, Parting it, but the bee deeper still: With our eyes we may even penetrate To a ruby and our vision fill; Though a beam of sunlight deeper knows How the ruby’s heart-rays congregate.

Give me finer potency of gift! For Thy Holy Wounds I would attain, As a bee the feeding loveliness

231

Of the sanguine roses. I would lift Flashes of such faith that I may drain From each Gem the wells of Blood that press!16

Here the narrator asks for this greater sensitivity of perception – a finer potency of gift – because he/she wants to penetrate, understand and attain the wounds of Christ as the bee penetrates, understands and attains the blood-red rose. The bee’s penetrating vision, or the ‘finer potency of gift’ resonates directly with Pater’s celebration of the finest sensibility in the ‘Conclusion’ to The Renaissance (a ‘counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to be seen in them by the finest senses?’ (p. 219)). The ‘flashes of faith’ sought in the poem are like the fleeting, transient impressions Pater praises here too. When Bradley and Cooper write of draining ‘the wells of blood’ from ‘each Gem’, the contradiction of forcing blood from a stone plays around the same paradox of Pater’s ‘hard gem-like flame’. In both images a precious tangible thing is distilled from the fleeting moment. Moreover, the quasi-Decadent imagery enables transubstantiation to become a sexualised feeding off the blood of Christ’s wounds as the bee takes pollen from the flower. This overtly erotic image matches Gray’s fetishisation of the wound in its poetic power. Here there is an element of the vampiric in the poem’s religious zeal as Bradley and Cooper translate a male homoerotic image for their own use. If the above paradoxes typify the content of Decadent poetry, then what of its characteristic stylistic features? What we see in all the poetry already cited are the results of a move away from the dramatic or performative narrative styles that dominated earlier in the century, to those focused more intensely on the microcosmic and the fleeting. ‘Symbolism’ and ‘Impressionism’, stylistic terms that usefully describe two important currents within Decadent poetry, point to a focus on the individual moment or object, rather than its place within a wider narrative. Both were definitive of a new era of poetry that had moved away from narrative, naturalism and objectivity, and was inaugurating a set of artistic parameters that were to form the basis of the early twentieth-century aesthetic, in spite of modernism’s much proclaimed rejection of the 1890s. Impressionism aims to capture exactly the subject’s sensory experience of the world, as a way of showing the connection of the mind with external reality. This technique both highlights the ‘modern’ problems of subjectivity that so concern Pater in the ‘Conclusion’ to the Renaissance, whilst also forming the first step in overcoming that threat of solipsism. This impetus represents a key part of the stylistic shift from Victorianism to modernism. Symbolism too, in its focus on compression and ‘vision’, connects very

232

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Poetry directly with a twentieth-century aesthetic. Symbolism’s desire to see, through symbols, beyond this world to another, is specifically associated with an aestheticist desire to synthesise dichotomies such as the real and ideal, content and form, the time-bound and the eternal. The relationship between the dancer and the dance was often invoked to visualise this fusion. See, for example, Symons’s ‘Nora on the Pavement’ (1896), which finds truth and beauty on the margins of society, as the dance of a local madwoman embodies the unification between the idea and its expression that is sought through the symbol. While aestheticism and Decadence constitute the best-known stylistic trajectory of the period, there were was much that did not fit within its orbit. Most notable are the so-called ‘counter-Decadent’ circle (sometimes known as the Henley Regatta – a pun on the annual boat races held on the Thames at Henley, and linked here with a muscular British response to Decadence) centred around W. E. Henley, who edited the National Observer between 1849 and 1903, and writers of Empire such as Rudyard Kipling. This poetry is characterised by a strong sense of national identity, and the traditional virtues of masculinity. Henley’s work is also characterised by a strong metrical interest, and an inventive fascination with form and rhythm. Strict French forms are much in evidence in his work, and music permeates his poetry as a formal structure as well as a recurrent theme. ‘Ballade of Antique Dances’ marries musical content and form nicely in its ballade refrain of ‘In Gigues, Gavottes, and Minuets’. Even his ‘London Voluntaries’, written in a more fluid, free-verse form, are underpinned by musical balance and phrasing, as the titles (for example, ‘Scherzando’, ‘Largo e mesto’) reveal. While the use of strict forms and highly wrought gem-like poetic structures is as characteristic of Decadence as of counter-Decadence, what often differentiates the two is the energetic, pacey and even militaristic rhythms of counter-Decadence. Such qualities were seen to contrast with the perceived effeminacy of Decadence. This is often combined with a demotic spirit, and sometimes the representation of dialect within the poem to identify with the speech of common man. The common man, for Henley, is very often the London man or woman. A poem such as ‘Hammersmith’ demonstrates this urge to celebrate the Londoner without elevating her or romanticising her: ’LIZA’s old man’s perhaps a little shady, ’LIZA’s old woman’s prone to booze and cringe; But ’LIZA deems herself a perfect lady, And proves it in her feathers and her fringe. For ’LIZA has a bloke her heart to cheer, With pearlies and a barrer and a jack,

233

So all the vegetables of the year Are duly represented on her back. Her boots are sacrifices to her hats, Which knock you speechless – like a load of bricks! Her summer velvets dazzle WANSTEAD FLATS, And cost, at times, a good eighteen-and-six. Withal, outside the gay and giddy whirl, 17 ’LIZA’s a stupid, straight, hard-working girl. This poem is a sonnet, whose controlled and classical form is deliberately in tension with the italicised colloquialisms and the down-to-earth content. In the final couplet we see almost a parody of the concluding, sometimes revelatory, clever, or contradictory, statement of the sonnet: that flat declaration: ‘’LIZA’s a stupid, straight, hard-working girl.’ Yet this is hardly a condemnation of the girl: it is important to see that the poet enjoys the energy of the slang words, and he finds the tension between high cultural form and low cultural content vital and engaging. Rudyard Kipling is the other well-known figure in this category. His national pride is manifest in rather different ways, but his imperialist poetry is similarly dependent on driving rhythmical features, and dialect. In ‘Gunga Din’ the recurrent ‘Gunga Din’ itself acts as a metrical unit primarily, as do derivative phrases such as ‘Din! Din! Din!’.18 The Hindi phrases included in the poem serve, as with Henley’s cockney slang, to root it in the expression of real individuals rather than a universalised poetic voice. Henry Newbolt’s His Admirals All (1897) and The Island Race (1898) also deserve a mention here for their nationalistic fervour and ‘manly’ vigour. This type of poetry was no less formative of the new aesthetic that was to provide a basis for twentieth-century experimentation. The return to the language of everyday folk, now in the form of the urban middle and working class, was to have profound consequences for lyric poetry throughout the next century. The third trend I identify in poetry of the period encompasses much verse that is not well known, but which was a powerful flavour of the fin de sie`cle, and of which there was a large quantity published. This is the verse that is political in nature and often light in tone. It comments on the issues of the day, rather than the issues of the eternal poetic ‘now’, and as a result has something of a journalistic quality to it. It too, however, is enamoured of strict, short, verse forms. While nothing could be further from Decadence, this style of poetry is allied in some ways to counter-Decadence in that it tends to be quite fast paced and rhythmical. Unlike counter-Decadent poetry, however, this poetry is one not infused with pride and heroism, but is often humorous, debunking and satiric, or at least primarily political in intent. Two broad groupings emerge from this body of writing which includes poems of social

234

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Poetry and political reform, and poems commentating on contemporaneous developments in science and the arts. The recent thorough exploration of women’s poetry of the period has concentrated in key part on gender politics, and has brought into print a fairly large quantity of poetry dealing with the first of these two themes. Because few scholars and editors have yet been motivated to undertake the rediscovery of the ‘minor’ male poets who wrote such verse, most of the following examples will come from women’s poetry. Some of the authors who contributed so heavily to this category include Mathilde Blind, John Davidson, May Kendall, Constance Naden, Edith Nesbit and May Probyn.19 Although these writers did not necessarily share the same vision, they did share a tendency towards socialist politics and radical vision. Within my first grouping of poems of social and political reform one might note particularly Nesbit’s ‘A Great Industrial Centre’ which asks the middle classes to spare a thought for those who live and work ‘in hell!’:

Squalid street after Squalid street, Endless rows of them, each the same, Black dust under your weary feet, Dust upon every face you meet, Dust in their hearts, too – or so it seems – Dust in the place of dreams.20

The portrait of ‘A Labourer’s Wife’ in Davidson’s ‘To the Street Piano’ (1894) shows the typically lilting, fast-paced and musical verse that we find describing the woes of the urban poor. Unlike meditations on rural poverty from much earlier in the century, sentimentalism is eradicated through pacey rhythm. A. Mary F. Robinson’s volume The New Arcadia (1884) should also be men- 21 tioned here. While this is Robinson’s only foray into this style of political verse, it is a sustained attempt to depict the reality of the lives of socially marginal characters while avoiding the patronising sentimentalism of the pity- ing observer. The large quantity of work interrogating gender politics might be well represented by May Probyn. In her series of triolets (short, fixed-form poems often witty in tone) in ‘A Nosegay from a French Garden’ she presents a witty but cynical analysis of marriage (see ‘Before’ and ‘After’), while in ‘Dante’s Wife’ she re-fashions one of literary history’s greatest love stories: if Beatrice was Dante’s celebrated mistress, what of his wife?22 Such poetry by women is well described in Linda Hughes’s anthology, New Woman Poets.23 It can also be placed within an ongoing dialogue about gender politics in which both men and women participate. John Davidson’s satiric ‘To the New Women’ – with its exhortation to ‘meet your splendid doom, / On heaven-scaling wings, / Women, from whose bright womb / The radiant future springs!’ – can be directly

235

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 MARION THAIN compared with May Kendall’s ‘Woman’s Future’ which enthusiastically and flamboyantly proclaims that women will indeed, in time, be ‘The poets, the sages, the seers of the land!’.24 My second grouping contains poetry that comments on contemporaneous scientific and artistic preoccupations. Perhaps surprisingly, a substantial quantity of what was written on science in this period, particularly Darwinian science, was written with a feminist desire to find new hope in the possibility for change offered by this science of mutation. Poems on this theme include Constance Naden’s ‘Natural Selection’ (Collected Poems, 1894), May Kendall’s ‘Lay of the Trilobite’ (Dreams to Sell, 1887) and Mathilde Blind’s epic, TheAscentofMan(1889). All three writers produced a good deal of writing on science, and show how witty and inventive such popular commentary can be. In its commentary on artistic trends, such poetry should be examined in relation to Decadent verse, no matter how different the two seem stylistically. For example, the new significance of Botticelli’s paintings at the end of the century is reflected in popular poetry that acts as a useful barometer for taste. Works as slight as Ernest Radford’s ‘It’s not Botticelli, oh no!’ – a short spoof on the problems of attribution touching on the names of the founders of the Botticelli revival – give us an important context for reading the interest of various writers (including Pater and D. G. Rossetti) in Botticelli.25 Much of this kind of artistic commentary occurs in the periodical press, a medium that reflects the timeliness and immediacy of the poetry. Periodicals such as Punch,the Fortnightly Review, Longman’s Magazine and even Oscar Wilde’s Woman’s World, all provided a forum for such cultural commentary in poetic form. But what about Yeats, who has not yet been placed in the map offered by this chapter? There is a body of work that cuts across all three major trends outlined thus far, and which is made up of the poetry of the so-called ‘Celtic Twilight’. Yeats himself can be positioned centrally to this period if only because his long career provides a backbone to it. Yeats’s writing itself can be characterised by a combination of Decadent themes, a counter-Decadent nostalgic nationalist commitment (albeit Irish rather than English), and a political commentary responding to current developments in Ireland that shares some of the immediacy of the political and commentary poetry described above. As Thornton writes in The Decadent Dilemma, ‘Yeats in the nineties was continually in search of some group to which he could belong or some idea in which he could believe, and because of this he seems to belong to many groups.’26 Yet Yeats’s work brought something distinctive that also characterises poetry of the fin de sie` cle: that revival of Irish folklore and mysticism. This formed the core of the Celtic revival and offered an alternative to the

236

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Poetry urbanised and rationalised world of the late nineteenth century. A striking number of women writers were drawn to Yeats and his mythical vision. Katharine Tynan, later Hinkson, (1861–1931) is perhaps the most notable because she became so central to the Catholic poetic network around the turn of the century, but others include Emily Hickey (1845–1924), Dora Sigerson (1866–1918) and Nora Hopper (1871–1906). Other poets who might fall into this category can be found among the fourteen or so members of ‘The Rhymers’ Club’. The founder members appear to have been W. B. Yeats, T. W. Rolleston (1857–1920), and the Welsh Ernest Rhys (1859–1946), and there does seem to have been a strong Celtic basis to the group.27 Yet the two books published by the club show how diverse this self-defined group of writers really was, representing everything from Yeats’s fairyland to the rather English Decadence of Arthur Symons and Ernest Dowson, a strong presence of London and its city vernacular, and even the strong rhythms of Rolleston that are more familiar within counter-Decadent poetry. The Rhymers’ Club was typical of the period more for the mixture of styles and trends it represented than as a definitive Decadent grouping. While the four stylistic and thematic groupings I have identified above might characterise some of the broad directions in which verse was moving at the end of the century, what perhaps most distinctively characterised the poetry of the period across the board was a revolution in its setting and language. If the formal language of this poetry was French, then its vernacular was cockney. The city, and particularly London, frequently set the poetic scene, and offered new scenarios as well as demotic language. I have already described how Henley’s counter-Decadence is full of the rhythms of the city and the slang cadences of the vernacular. Yet the city has also been seen here as an essentially Decadent motif in Eugene Lee-Hamilton’s poem ‘Baudelaire’ and Arthur Symons’s ‘London Nights’, where the city offers a maze of unwholesome Decadent pleasures. In Amy Levy’s poetry, too, the city is frequently the central character. Such topics are also at the heart of what I have described as political and commentary verse, and John Davidson is one of the most comprehensive poets of the city. Sometimes in his work London is simply the beautiful backdrop, the warm beating heart, as he puts it in ‘London’ (from his Ballads and Songs (1894)). Sometimes, as in the well- known ‘Thirty Bob a Week’ from the same collection, it is the voice and situation of city types that he aims to capture:

I ain’t blaspheming, Mr Silver-tongue; I’m saying things a bit beyond your art: Of all the rummy starts you ever sprung, Thirty bob a week’s the rummiest start!28

237

No wonder T. S. Eliot admired Davidson’s work, writing, ‘The personage that Davidson created in this poem has haunted me all my life, and the poem is to me a great poem for ever.’29 Eliot’s urban types in The Waste Land undoubtedly owe much to the dignified denizen’s of Davidson’s London. Yet this urban vernacular that became so important to modernism is only half of the picture. Much poetry of the period is bathed in the nostalgia of the Irish twilight, the Classicism of Sappho and Parnassus, or the rural England of Thomas Hardy’s memories. At a point in history that is characteristically looking both forwards and back, these more historically rooted poetic landscapes were never simply conservative ways of avoiding the present. The half-light of the Irish revival allows the fusion of ancient and contemporary in ways that reveal the full complexity of the present moment, rather than conceal it. The appeal to Sappho that Swinburne effects in several poems in Songs of the Spring-Tides (1880) is much more about the workings of memory and memorialising that distance the past, than a simple appeal to the authority of the ancients. A. Mary F. Robinson’s use of the classical landscape is similarly problematised, as she constantly marks her distance from this orthodoxy because of the problems for the modern woman poet in accessing this discourse. Thomas Hardy’s Wessex landscape is equally uncomfortable in the sense that its hauntings represent an unresolved, almost pathological, relationship between past and present. Thomas Hardy is a poet not yet placed in relation to the themes identified in this chapter, but whose work does represent that fine balance, definitive of poetry of the period, between the impulse to reach forwards and the pull from the past. Hardy chooses scenes and scenarios that are often domestic and conventional in nature – scenes that would not be out of place in a Victorian novel – and ballad-like forms that seem fundamentally Victorian in their refrains. Yet his poetic writing often has a pared down, ‘modern’ quality to it (for example, the rhythm of ‘Rain on a Grave’ has a quality found in Ezra Pound’s writing), and the symbolic wasteland of ‘The Darkling Thrush’ (where ‘tangled brine-stems scored the sky / Like strings of broken lyres’) can not fail to register with T. S. Eliot’s later vision.30 Alice Meynell is another writer who often takes domestic, and similarly personal, scenarios for her poems, frequently representing visions of motherhood. Yet far from celebrating the fulfilment of maternity, Meynell offers an ambiguous and complex picture that is a long way from conventional Victorian celebrations of the family.31 If one wants to look specifically for the birth of modernism in fin de sie` cle poetry then it is most readily found in the newly urban poetic landscape of writers such as Davidson, and the interiority of much poetry of the period that, following Pater, worries about its ability to connect with and represent

238

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Poetry the outside world. Impressionism and Symbolism began the trend towards compact and precise poetic representation that was developed by, for example, the Imagists. The poetic renaissance that began with the end of the Victorian (albeit before the end of Victoria’s reign) saw the birth of the lyric form that gave twentieth-century poetry such energy and focus. Yet what we see in those years of such poetic energy and diversity at the end of the nineteenth century is not only the birth of some of the central tenets of modernism, but the formation of a peculiarly fin de sie` cle poetic resurgence that must be recognised in its own right, in all its many specificities.32

NOTES 1 See Joseph Bristow’s analysis of the use of the term ‘Victorian’ in ‘Why Victorian? A Period and Its Problems’, Literature Compass, 1 (2004), VI 055, 3 (www. literature-compass.com). 2 H. Montgomery Hyde, ‘Introduction’, to Richard Le Gallienne, The Romantic ’90s, London, Putman & Company, 1951, pp. 77–8. 3 See John Lucas, ‘Poetry in the Late Nineteenth Century’, in Joseph Bristow (ed.), Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry, Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. 283–8. 4 R. K. R. Thornton’s The Decadent Dilemma, London, Edward Arnold, 1983, provides the most comprehensive overview of the French roots of the movement. 5 Arthur Symons, ‘Preface: Being a Word on Behalf of Patchouli’, in Silhouettes, 2nd edn, London, Leonard Smithers, 1896, pp. xiii–xiv. 6 Wilde quoted in W. B. Yeats, Autobiographies, London, Papermac, 1980; 1955, p. 130. 7 Walter Pater, The Renaissance, in William E. Buckler (ed.), Walter Pater: Three Major Texts, New York University Press, 1986,p.219. 8 Michael Field, Sight and Song (1892), London, Elkin Mathews and John Lane, pp. 27–30. 9 Eugene Lee-Hamilton, Sonnets of the Wingless Hours (1894); see R. K. R. Thornton and Marion Thain (eds.), Poetry of the 1890s, 2nd edn, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1997, pp. 6–7. 10 Arthur Symons, London Nights, London, Leonard Smithers, 1897,p.50. 11 See Max Beerbohm, ‘A Defence of Cosmetics’, in the first Yellow Book (1894), 65–82. 12 Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, London, Routledge, 1984,p.339. 13 May Kendall, Songs from Dreamland (1894); see Thornton and Thain (eds.), Poetry of the 1890s, pp. 11–13. 14 Ellis Hanson, Decadence and Catholicism, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1997,p.7. 15 Excerpt from the poem, in John Gray, Spiritual Poems, London, Hacon & Ricketts, 1896, pp. xl–xli. 16 Michael Field, Poems of Adoration, London, Sands and Co., 1912,p.92. 17 W. E. Henley, London Types (1898) – verses given together with illustrations by William Nicholson, London, William Heinemann, 1898, no pagination.

239

18 Rudyard Kipling, Barrack-Room Ballads (1892); see Thornton and Thain (eds.), Poetry of the 1890s,p.234. 19 See also recent work on Dollie Radford’s socialism, by Ruth Livesey, ‘Dollie Radford and the Ethical Aesthetics of Fin de Sie` cle Poetry’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 34 (2006), forthcoming. 20 E. Nesbit, Ballads and Lyrics of Socialism 1883–1908, London, The Fabian Society, 1908,p.38. 21 Robinson, The New Arcadia, London, Ellis and White, 1884. 22 May Probyn, A Ballad of the Road, London, W. Satchell, 1883,p.114; Poems, London, W. Satchell, 1881,p.27. 23 London, The Eighteen Nineties Society, 2001. 24 John Davidson, Ballads and Songs, pp. 3–4; May Kendall, Dreams to Sell, London, Longmans, Green and Co., 1887, pp. 38–9. 25 Ernest Radford, Measured Steps, London, T. Fisher Unwin, 1884. 26 Thornton, The Decadent Dilemma,p.165. 27 See R. K. R. Thornton and Ian Small, ‘Introduction’ (no pagination), The Book of the Rhymers’ Club, 1892, 1894, Oxford, Woodstock Books, 1994. 28 Davidson, Ballads and Songs,p.93. 29 T. S. Eliot, ‘Preface’ to Maurice Lindsay (ed.), John Davidson, a Selection of his Poems, London, Hutchinson, 1961,n.p. 30 James Gibson (ed.), Thomas Hardy: The Complete Poems, Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2001,p.150. 31 See Angela Leighton’s Victorian Women Poets: Writing Against the Heart, London, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992, pp. 256–65. 32 This chapter profited greatly from advice from R. K. R. Thornton.

240

Psychology and ideas of the mind Arata, S., Fictions of Loss at the Fin de Sie`cle, Cambridge University Press, 1996 Bynum, S., R. Porter and M. Shepherd (eds.), The Anatomy of Madness: Essays in the History of Psychiatry, London, Tavistock Publications, 1985 Chamberlin, J. E. and S. Gilman, Degeneration: The Dark Side of Progress, New York, Colombia University Press, 1985 Crabtree, A., From Mesmer to Freud: Magnetic Sleep and the Roots of Psychological Healing, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1993 Ellenberger, H., The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry (1970), London, Fontana, 1994 Ender, E., Sexing the Mind: Nineteenth-Century Fictions of Hysteria, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1995 Gauld, A., The Founders of Psychical Research, London, Routledge, 1968 Greenslade, W., Culture, Degeneration and the Novel, Cambridge University Press, 1994 Hacking, I., Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory, Princeton University Press, 1995 Harrington, A., Medicine, Mind and the Double Brain, Princeton University Press, 1987 Hurley, K., The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Degeneration and Materialism at the Fin de Sie`cle, Cambridge University Press, 1996 Luckhurst, R., The Invention of Telepathy, Oxford University Press, 2002 Oppenheim, J., The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England 1850–1914, Cambridge University Press, 1985 ‘Shattered Nerves’: Doctors, Patients and Depression in Victorian England, Oxford University Press, 1991 Otis, L., Organic Memory: History and the Body in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century, University of Nebraska Press, 1994 Pick, D., Faces of Degeneration: Anatomy of a European Disorder c. 1848–1918, Cambridge University Press, 1989 Rylance, R., Victorian Psychology and British Culture 1850–1880, Oxford University Press, 2000 Showalter, E., Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Sie`cle, London, Bloomsbury, 1991 Steedman, C., Strange Dislocations: Childhood and the Idea of Human Interiority, London, Virago, 1995 Sully, J., My Life and Friends, London, T. Fisher Unwin, 1918 Taylor, J. B. and S. Shuttleworth (eds.), Embodied Selves: An Anthology of Psycho- logical Texts 1830–1890, Oxford University Press, 1998

241

Thurschwell, P., Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, Cambridge University Press, 2001 Turner, F., Between Science and Religion: The Reaction to Scientific Naturalism in Late Victorian Britain, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1974

Decadence and aestheticism Baudelaire, C., The Flowers of Evil (1868), James McGowan (trans.), Oxford University Press, 1993 Beckson, K. (ed.), Aesthetes and Decadents of the 1890s: An Anthology of British Poetry and Prose, New York, Vintage, 1966 Bernheimer, C., Decadent Subjects: The Idea of Decadence in Art, Literature, Philosophy, and Culture of the Fin de Sie`cle, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002 Constable, L. et al. (eds.), Perennial Decay: On the Aesthetics and Politics of Decadence, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999 Dellamora, R., Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1990 Denisoff, D., Aestheticism and Sexual Parody: 1840–1940, Cambridge University Press, 2001 Dowling, Linda, Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de Sie`cle, Princeton University Press, 1986 Ellmann, R., Oscar Wilde, London, Penguin, 1987 Freedman, J., Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism, and Commodity Culture, Stanford University Press, 1990 Gagnier, R., Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public, Stanford University Press, 1986 Gilman, R., Decadence: The Strange Life of an Epithet, London, Secker & Warburg, 1979 Johnson, R. V., Aestheticism, London, Methuen, 1954 Maltz, D., British Aestheticism and the Urban Working Class, Basingstoke, Palgrave- Macmillan, 2005 Nordau, M., Degeneration (1892), Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1993 Pater, Walter, The Renaissance (1873), Cleveland, OH, Meridian, 1967 Psomiades, K. A., Beauty’s Body: Femininity and Representation in British Aestheticism, Stanford University Press, 1997 Reed, J., Decadent Style, Athens, OH, Ohio University Press, 1985 Schaffer, T., The Forgotten Female Aesthetes: Literary Culture in Late-Victorian England, Charlottesville, VA, University Press of Virginia, 2000 Schaffer, T. and K. A. Psomiades (eds.), Women and British Aestheticism, Charlottesville, VA, University Press of Virginia, 1999 Showalter, E. (ed.), Daughters of Decadence, New Brunswick, NJ, Rutgers University Press, 1993 Swinburne, A. C., Collected Poetical Works, New York, Harper and Brothers, 1928 Symons, A., The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899), London, Dutton Everyman, 1958 Weir, David, Decadence and the Making of Modernism, Amherst, MA, University of Massachusetts Press, 1995

242

Sexual identity at the fin de sie`cle

Dollimore, J., ‘Perversion, Degeneration, and the Death Drive’, in Andrew H. Miller and James Eli Adams (eds.), Sexualities in Victorian Britain, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1991 Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault, Oxford University Press, 1993 Foucault, M., The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Vol. I, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1978 Hyde, H. M., The Cleveland Street Scandal, London, Coward, McGann and Geoghegan, 1976 Krafft-Ebing, R. von, Psychopathia Sexualis: A Medico-Forensic Study (1885), Harry E. Wedeck (trans.), New York, G.P Putnam’s Sons, 1965 Mason, M., The Making of Victorian Sexual Attitudes, Oxford University Press, 1994 The Making of Victorian Sexuality, Oxford University Press, 1994 Robinson, P., The Modernization of Sex: Havelock Ellis, Alfred Kinsey, William Masters and Virginia Johnson, New York, Cornell University Press, 1989 Sedgwick, E. K., Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, New York, Columbia University Press, 1985 Shanley, M. L., Feminism, Marriage and the Law in Victorian England, 1850–1895, Princeton University Press, 1989 Showalter, E., Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Sie`cle, New York, Viking Press, 1990 Vicinus, M., Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women, 1850–1920, University of Chicago Press, 1985 Walkowitz, J., City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late- Victorian London, University of Chicago Press, 1982 Weeks, J., Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Britain from the Nineteenth Century to the Present, London, Quartet Books, 1977 Sex, Politics, and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality Since 1800, London, Longman, 1981 White, C. (ed.), Nineteenth-Century Writings on Homosexuality: A Sourcebook, London, Routledge, 1999

Socialism and radicalism

Beckman, L. Hunt, Amy Levy: Her Life and Letters, Athens, OH, Ohio University Press, 2000 Birch, D., (ed.), John Ruskin: Selected Writings, Oxford University Press, 2004 Brandon, R., The New Women and the Old Men: Love, Sex and the Women Question, London, Flamingo Brown, T. (ed.), Edward Carpenter and Late-Victorian Radicalism, London, Frank Cass, 1990 Burnett, J., Idle Hands: The Experience of Unemployment, 1790–1900, London, Routledge, 1994 George, H., Progress and Poverty (1879), London, Dent, 1911 Goode, J., ‘William Morris and the Dream of Revolution’ in John Lucas (ed.), Literature and Politics in the Nineteenth Century, London, Methuen, 1971

243

Greenslade, W., Culture, Degeneration and the Novel, Cambridge University Press, 1994 Greenslade, W. and T. Rodgers (eds.), Grant Allen: Literature and Politics at the Fin de Sie` cle, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2005 Harris, J., Private Lives, Public Spirit: Britain 1870–1914, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1994 James, D., T. Jowitt and K. Laybourn (eds.), The Centennial History of the Independent Labour Party, Halifax, Ryburn, 1992 Janowitz, A., Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition, Cambridge University Press, 1998 Joyce, P., Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class, 1840–1914, Cambridge University Press, 1991 Morris, W., News from Nowhere (1890), Oxford University Press, 2003 Mutch, D., English Socialist Periodicals, 1880–1900: A Reference Source, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2005 Pierson, S., British Socialists: The Journey from Fantasy to Politics, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1979 Rose, J., The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2001; 2002 Rowbotham, S., ‘In Search of Carpenter’ (1977), reprinted in Sheila Rowbotham, Dreams and Dilemmas: Collected Writings, London, Virago, 1983 Salmon, N. (ed.), William Morris: Journalism. Contributions to Commonweal 1885–1890, Bristol, Thoemmes Press, 1996 Stokes, J. (ed.), Eleanor Marx (1855–1898): Life, Work, Contacts, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000 Thompson, E. P., William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary, revised edn, London, Merlin Press, 1977; 1955 Thompson, P., Socialists, Liberals and Labour: The Struggle for London 1885–1914, London, Routledge, 1967 Vadillo, A. Parejo, Women Poets and Urban Aestheticism: Passengers of Modernity, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005 Waters, C., British Socialists and the Politics of Popular Culture 1884–1914, Manchester University Press, 1990 Wilde, O., ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’, in De Profundis and Other Writings, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1973 Yeo, Stephen, ‘A New Life: The Religion of Socialism in Britain 1883–1896’, History Workshop Journal, 4 (1977), 5–56

Empire Aguirre, R. D., Informal Empire: Mexico and Central America in Victorian Culture, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2005 Arata, S., Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Sie`cle, Cambridge University Press, 1996 Boehmer, E., Colonial and Postcolonial Literature, 2nd edn, Oxford University Press, 2005 Empire, the National, and the Postcolonial, 1890–1920: Resistance in Interaction, Oxford University Press, 2002 Bongie, C., Exotic Memories: Literature, Colonialism, and the Fin de Sie`cle, Stanford University Press, 1991

244

Brantlinger, P., Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1988 Burton, A., At the Heart of the Empire: Indians and the Colonial Encounter in Late- Victorian Britain, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1998 Chamberlain, J. E., and S. L. Gilman (eds.), Degeneration: The Dark Side of Progress, New York, Columbia University Press, 1985 Codell, J. F., Imperial Co-Histories: National Identities and the British and Colonial Press, Madison, NJ, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003 Colley, A. C., Robert Louis Stevenson and the Colonial Imagination, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2004 Gikandi, S., Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism, New York, Columbia University Press, 1996 Hoffenberg, P. H., An Empire on Display: English, Indian, and Australian Exhibitions from the Crystal Palace to the Great War, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2001 Jacobson, W. S. (ed.), Dickens and the Children of Empire, Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2000 Kennedy, D., The Highly Civilized Man: Richard Burton and the Victorian World, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2005 Koven, S., Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London, Princeton University Press, 2004 Levine, P., Prostitution, Race, and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire, New York, Routledge, 2003 McLaughlin, J., Writing the Urban Jungle: Reading Empire in London from Doyle to Eliot, Charlottesville, VA, University of Virginia Press, 2000 Pick, D., Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c, 1848–1918, Cambridge University Press, 1989 Porter, B., The Lion’s Share: A Short History of British Imperialism, 1850–2004, 4th edn, Harlow, Pearson Longman, 2004 Richards, T., The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire, London, Verso, 1993 Roy, P., Indian Traffic: Identities in Question in Colonial and Postcolonial India, Berkeley, CA, University of California Press, 1998 Schmitt, C., Alien Nation: Nineteenth-Century Gothic Fictions and English Nationality, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997 Sigel, L. Z., Governing Pleasures: Pornography and Social Change in England, 1815–1914, New Brunswick, NJ, Rutgers University Press, 2002 Sinha, M., Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Effeminate Bengali’ in the Late Nineteenth Century, Manchester University Press, 1995 Stepan, N., The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain, 1800–1960, Hamden, CT, Archon Books, 1982

Publishing industry Altick, R. D. The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–1900, 2nd edn, Columbus, Ohio University Press, 1998 Writers, Readers, and Occasions: Selected Essays on Victorian Literature and Life, Columbus, Ohio State University Press, 1989

245

Beetham, M., A Magazine of Her Own? Domesticity and Desire in the Woman’s Magazine, 1800–1914, London, Routledge, 1996 Brake, L,. Print in Transition, 1850–1910: Studies in Media and Book History, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2001 Subjugated Knowledges: Journalism, Gender and Literature in the Nineteenth Century, New York University Press, 1994 Brake, L., Bell B., and D. Finkelstein (eds.), Nineteenth-Century Media and the Construction of Identities, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2000 Brake, L. and Codell J. F. (eds.), Encounters in the Victorian Press: Editors, Authors, Readers, Houndmills, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005 Brantlinger, P., The Reading Lesson: The Threat of Mass Literacy in Nineteenth- Century British Fiction, Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 1998 Casteras, S. P. and L. Peterson, A Struggle for Fame: Victorian Women Artists and Authors, New Haven, Yale Center for British Art, 1994 Chambers, D., L. Steiner and C. Fleming, Women and Journalism, London, Routledge, 2004 Cross, N., The Common Writer: Life in Nineteenth-Century Grub Street, Cambridge University Press, 1985 Curtis, G., Visual Words: Art and the Material Book in Victorian England, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2002 Delaney, J. G. P., Charles Ricketts: A Biography, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1990 Dent, Hugh R. (ed.), The Memoirs of J. M. Dent, 1849–1926, London, J. M. Dent, 1928 Fehlbaum, V., Ella Hepworth Dixon: The Story of a Modern Woman, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2005 Feltes, N. N., Modes of Production of Victorian Novels, University of Chicago Press, 1986 Frankel, N., Oscar Wilde’s Decorated Books, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2000 Fraser, H., S. Green and J. Johnston, Gender and the Victorian Periodical, Cambridge University Press, 2003 Gross, J., The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters: A Study of the Idiosyncratic and the Humane in Modern Literature, London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969 Guy, J. M. and I. Small, Oscar Wilde’s Profession: Writing and the Culture Industry in the Late Nineteenth Century, Oxford University Press, 2000 Hoagwood, T. A. and K. Ledbetter (eds.), ‘Colour’d Shadows’: Contexts in Pub- lishing, Printing, and Reading Nineteenth-Century British Women Writers, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan 2005 Hughes, L. K., Graham R.: Rosamund Marriott Watson, Woman of Letters, Athens, OH, Ohio University Press, 2005 Jackson, K., George Newnes and the New Journalism in Britain, 1880–1910, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2001 James, E., Macmillan: A Publishing Tradition, Houndmills, Palgrave Macmillan, 2002 Jordan, J. O. and R. L. Patten, Literature in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century British Publishing and Reading Practices, Cambridge University Press, 1995 King, A. and J. Plunkett (eds.), Victorian Print Media: A Reader, Oxford University Press, 2005 Lambert, J. W. and M. Ratcliffe, The Bodley Head, 1887–1987, London, The Bodley Head, 1987

246

Lewis, M. J., John Lane and the Nineties, London, John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1936 MacCarthy, F., William Morris: A Life for Our Time, London, Faber and Faber, 1994 Maxwell, R. (ed.), The Victorian Illustrated Book, Charlottesville, University Press of Virginia, 2002 McDonald, P. D., British Literary Culture and Publishing Practice, 1880–1914, Cambridge University Press, 1997 Nelson, J. G., The Early Nineties: A View from the Bodley Head, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1971 Elkin Mathews: Publisher to Yeats, Joyce, Pound, Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1989 Publisher to the Decadents: Leonard Smithers in the Careers of Beardsley, Wilde, Dowson, University Park, PA, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000 Onslow, Barbara, Women of the Press in Nineteenth-Century Britain, London, Macmillan, 2000 Peterson, W. S., The Kelmscott Press: A History of William Morris’s Typographical Adventure, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1991 Richards, G., Memories of a Misspent Youth, 1871–1896, London, William Heinemann Ltd, 1932 Sharp, E., Unfinished Adventure: Selected Reminiscences from an Englishwoman’s Life, London, John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1933 Shattock, J. and M. Wolf, The Victorian Periodical Press: Samplings and Soundings, Toronto: Leicester University Press and University of Toronto Press, 1982 Stetz, M. D. and M. Samuels Lasner, England in the 1880s: Old Guard and Avant- Garde, Charlottesville, University Press of Virginia, 1989 England in the 1890s: Literary Publishing at the Bodley Head, Washington, DC, Georgetown University Press, 1990 The Yellow Book: A Centenary Exhibition, Cambridge, MA, Houghton Library, Harvard University, 1994 St John, J., William Heinemann: A Century of Publishing, 1890–1990, London, Heinemann, 1990 Sullivan, A., British Literary Magazines: The Victorian and Edwardian Age, 1837–1913, Westport, CT, Greenwood Press, 1984 Sutherland, J., Victorian Fiction: Writers, Publishers, Readers, London, Macmillan 1995 Victorian Novelists and Publishers, University of Chicago Press, 1976 Tusan, M. E., Women Making News: Gender and Journalism in Modern Britain, Urbana and Chicago, University of Illinois Press, 2005 Waugh, A., A Hundred Years of Publishing: Being the Story of Chapman & Hall, Ltd, London, Chapman and Hall, 1930 Weedon, A., Victorian Publishing: The Economics of Book Production for a Mass Market, 1836–1916, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2003 Whyte, F., William Heinemann: A Memoir, London, Jonathan Cape, 1928

Visual arts Baron, W. and R. Shone (eds.), Sickert, exhibition catalogue, London, Royal Academy of Arts, 1992 Barringer, T. and E. Prettejohn (eds.), Frederic Leighton: Antiquity, Renaissance Modernity, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1999

247

Birkett, J., The Sins of the Fathers: Decadence in France 1870–1914, London, Quartet Books, 1986 Callen, A., Angel in the Studio: Women in the Arts and Crafts Movement 1870–1914, London, Astragal Books, 1979 Casteras, S. and C. Denney (eds.), The Grosvenor Gallery: A Palace of Art in Victorian England, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1996 Crawford, A., C. R. Ashbee: Architect, Designer and Romantic Socialist, 2nd edn, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2005 Cruise, C., Love Revealed: Simeon Solomon and the Pre-Raphaelites, London, Merrill, 2005 Dijkstra, B., Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-sie`cle Culture, Oxford University Press, 1986 Dorra, H. (ed.), Symbolist Art Theories: A Critical Anthology, Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1994 Farmer, A. J., Le Mouvement esthe´tique et ‘de´cadent’ en Angleterre 1873–1900, Paris, Librairie Ancienne Honore´ Champion, 1931 Fletcher, I., Decadence and the 1890s, London, Edward Arnold, 1979 Gilbert, E. L., ‘‘‘Tumult of Images’’: Wilde, Beardsley and Salome’, Victorian Studies, 26 (1983), 135–59 Gould, V. F., G. F. Watts: The Last Great Victorian, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2004 Hamilton, W., The Aesthetic Movement in England, London, Reeves and Turner, 1882 Helland, J., The Studios of Frances and Margaret Macdonald, Manchester University Press, 1996 High Art and Low Life: The Studio and the Fin de Sie`cle, Studio International special centenary number, 201 (1993) Jackson, H., The Eighteen Nineties: A Review of Art and Ideas at the Close of the Nineteenth Century, London, Grant Richards, 1913 Kooistra, L. J., The Artist as Critic: Bitextuality in Fin-de-Sie`cle Illustrated Books, Aldershot, Scolar, 1995 Lambourne, L., The Aesthetic Movement, London, Phaidon, 1996 Lucie-Smith, E., Symbolist Art, London, Thames and Hudson, 1972 Matthieu, P.-L., The Symbolist Generation 1870–1910, New York, Rizzoli, 1990 Merrill, L., A Pot of Paint: Aesthetics on Trial in Whistler v Ruskin, Washington, DC, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992 Naylor, G., The Arts and Crafts Movement, London, Trefoil, 1990 Nordau, M., Degeneration (1892), Lincoln and London, University of Nebraska Press, 1968 Peters Corbett, D., The World in Paint: Modern Art and Visuality in England 1848–1914, University Park, Pennsylvania University Press, 2004 Pierrot, J., The Decadent Imagination 1880–1900, University of Chicago Press, 1981 Prettejohn, E., (ed.) After the Pre-Raphaelites, Manchester University Press, 1999 Reed, J., Decadent Style, Athens, OH, Ohio University Press, 1985 Shaw, G. B., The Sanity of Art, New York, Benjamin Tucker, 1908 Spencer-Longhurst, P., The Blue Bower: Rossetti in the 1860s, London, Scala, 2000 Stokes, J., In the Nineties, Hemel Hempstead, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989

248

Teich, M., and R. Porter (eds.), Fin de Sie`cle and its Legacy, Cambridge University Press, 1990 West, S., Fin de Sie`cle: Art and Society in an Age of Uncertainty, London, Bloomsbury, 1993 Wilton, A. (ed.), The Age of Rossetti, Burne-Jones and Watts: Symbolism in Britain 1860–1910, exhibition catalogue, London, Tate Gallery, 1997 Zatlin, L., Aubrey Beardsley and Victorian Sexual Politics, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1990

The New Woman Ardis, A., New Women, New Novels: Feminism and Early Modernism New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 1990 Boumelha, P., ‘Women and the New Fiction 1880–1900’, in Thomas Hardy and Women: Sexual Ideology and Narrative Form, Brighton, Harvester Press, 1982 Burdett, C., Olive Schreiner and the Progress of Feminism, Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2001 Cohen, E., Talk on the Wilde Side, New York and London, Routledge, 1993 Cunningham, G., The New Woman and the Victorian Novel, London, Macmillan, 1998 Heilmann, A., New Woman Fiction: Women Writing First-Wave Feminism, Basingstoke, Macmillan, 2000 New Woman Strategies: Sarah Grand, Olive Schreiner, Mona Caird, Manchester University Press, 2004 Kranidis, R., Subversive Discourse: The Cultural Production of Late-Victorian Feminist Novels, Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1995 Ledger, S., The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Sie`cle, Manchester University Press, 1997 Mangum, T., Married, Middlebrow and Militant: Sarah Grand and the New Woman Novel, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1998 Marks, P., Bicycles, Bangs and Bloomers, Lexington, University Press of Kentucky, 1990 Miller, J. E., Rebel Women: Feminism, Modernism and the Edwardian Novel, London, Virago, 1994 Mort, F., Dangerous Sexualities: Medico-Moral Politics in England Since 1830, London, Routledge, 1987 Murphy, P., Time is of the Essence: Temporality, Gender and the New Woman, Albany, State University of New York Press, 2001 Pykett, L., The Improper Feminine: The Women’s Sensation Novel and the New Woman Novel, London, Routledge, 1992 Richardson, A., Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth Century: Rational Reproduction and the New Woman, Oxford University Press, 2003 Showalter, E., Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Sie`cle, London, Bloomsbury, 1991 Stubbs, P., Women and Fiction: Feminism and the Novel 1880–1920, Brighton, Harvester Press, 1979 Wlakowitz, J., Prostitution and Victorian Society, Cambridge University Press, 1980

249

Realism

Armstrong, N., Fiction in the Age of Photography: The Legacy of British Realism, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1999 Auerbach, E., Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, Willard R. Trask (trans.), Princeton University Press, 1953 Baguley, D., Naturalist Fiction: The Entropic Vision, Cambridge University Press, 1990 Becker, G. J. (ed.), Documents of Modern Literary Realism, Princeton University Press, 1963 Beer, G., Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Cambridge University Press, 1983 Brooks, P., Realist Vision, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2005 Byerly, A., Realism, Representation, and the Arts in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Cambridge University Press, 1997 Ermarth, E. D., Realism and Consensus in the English Novel, Princeton University Press, 1983 Flint, K., ‘‘‘Seeing is Believing?’’: Visuality and Victorian Fiction’, in Francis O’Gorman (ed.), A Concise Companion to the Victorian Novel,Oxford, Blackwell, 2005 Kearns, K., Nineteenth-Century Literary Realism: Through the Looking-Glass, Cambridge University Press, 1996 Levin, H., The Gates of Horn: A Study of Five French Realists, New York, Oxford University Press, 1966 Levine, G., The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady Chatterley, Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 1981 Morris, P., Realism, London, Routledge, 2003 Nelson, B. (ed)., Naturalism in the European Novel: New Critical Perspectives, Oxford, Berg, 1992 Olmsted, J. C. (ed.), A Victorian Art of Fiction: Essays on the Novel in British Periodicals 1870–1900, New York and London, Garland Publishing, 1979 Orel, H. (ed)., Thomas Hardy’s Personal Writings: Prefaces, Literary Opinions, Reminiscences, Lawrence, University of Kansas Press, 1966 Rignall, J., Realist Fiction and the Strolling Spectator, London, Routledge, 1992 Rothfield, L., Vital Signs: Medical Realism in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Princeton University Press, 1992 Williams, D. A. (ed.), The Monster in the Mirror: Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literary Realism, Oxford University Press, 1978

Fantastic fiction

Alkon, P. K., Science Fiction before 1900: Imagination Discovers Technology, New York, Twayne, 1994 Bergonzi, B., The Early H. G. Wells: A Study of the Scientific Romances, Manchester University Press, 1961 Bleiler, E. F., Science-Fiction: The Early Years, Kent, OH, Kent State University Press, 1990 Botting, F., Gothic, London and New York, Routledge, 1996

250

Briggs, J., Night Visitors: The Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story, London, Faber, 1977 Carter, M. L. (ed.), Dracula: The Novel and the Critics, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Research Press, 1988 Dijskstra, B., Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Sie`cle Culture, New York and Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1986 Dorson, R. M., The British Folklorists: A History, University of Chicago Press, 1968 Green, R. L., Andrew Lang: A Critical Biography, Leicester, Edmund Ward, 1946 Harris-Fain, D. (ed.), British Fantasy and Science-Fiction Writers before World War I, Detroit, Gale, 1997 Hillegas, M. R., The Future as Nightmare: H. G. Wells and the Anti-Utopians, Oxford University Press, 1967 Hume, K., Fantasy and Mimesis: Responses to Reality in Western Literature, New York and London, Methuen, 1984 Hurley, K., The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin de Sie`cle, Cambridge University Press, 1996 Jackson, R., Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion, London and New York, Methuen, 1981 Lovecraft, H. P., Supernatural Horror in Literature, New York, Abramson, 1945 McConnell, F., The Science Fiction of H. G. Wells, Oxford University Press, 1981 Morton, P., The Vital Science: Biology and the Literary Imagination, 1860–1900, London, Allen and Unwin, 1984 Punter, D., The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fiction from 1765 to the Present Day, London, Longman, 1996 Senf, C. A., The Vampire in Nineteenth-Century English Literature, Bowling Green, OH, Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1988 Skal, D. J., The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1993 Stableford, B., Scientific Romance in Britain 1890–1950, New York, St Martin’s, 1985 Suvin, D., Victorian Science Fiction in the UK: The Discourses of Knowledge and Power, Boston, G. K. Hall, 1983 Todorov, T., The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1975 Zipes, J. (ed.), Victorian Fairy Tales: The Revolt of the Fairies and Elves, New York and London, Methuen, 1987

Theatre

Auerbach, N., Ellen Terry: Player in her Time, London, Phoenix House, 1987 Beerbohm, M., Around Theatres, London, Rupert Hart-Davis, 1953 Booth, M. R., and Joel H. Kaplan (eds.), The Edwardian Theatre: Essays on Performance and the Stage, Cambridge University Press, 1996 Egan, M. (ed.), Ibsen: The Critical Heritage, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972 Foulkes, R. (ed.), British Theatre in the 1890s: Essays on Drama and the Stage, Cambridge University Press, 1992 Garelick, R. K., Rising Star: Dandyism, Gender and Performance in the Fin de Sie`cle, Princeton University Press, 1998

251

Glen, S. A., Female Spectacle: The Theatrical Roots of Modern Feminism, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2000 Howard, T., Women as Hamlet: Performance and Interpretation in Theatre, Film and Literature, Cambridge University Press, 2007. Knepler, H., The Gilded Stage: The Lives and Careers of Four Great Actresses, London, Constable, 1968 Ledger, S., Henrik Ibsen, Plymouth, Northcote House, 1999 James, H., The Scenic Art, London, Rupert Hart-Davis, 1949 Powell, K. (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Victorian and Edwardian Theatre, Cambridge University Press, 2004 Oscar Wilde and the Theatre of the 1890s, Cambridge University Press, 1990 Roberts, M. L., Disruptive Acts: The New Woman in Fin-de-sie`cle France, University of Chicago Press, 2002 Shaw, G. B., Our Theatres in the Nineties, 3 vols, London, Constable and Co., 1932 Stokes, J., M. R. Booth and S. Bassnett, Bernhardt, Terry, Duse: The Actress in Her Time, Cambridge University Press, 1988 The French Actress and her English Audience, Cambridge University Press, 2005 Taranow, G., The Bernhardt Hamlet: Culture and Context, New York, Peter Lang, 1996 Worth, K., The Irish Drama of Europe from Yeats to Beckett, London, Athlone Press, 1978

Poetry

Beckson, K. (ed.), Aesthetes and Decadents of the 1890s: An Anthology of British Poetry and Prose, 2nd edn, Chicago, Academy, 1981 Bristow, J. (ed.), The Fin-de-Sie`cle Poem, Ohio University Press, 2005 Dellamora, R., Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1990 Dowling, L., Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de Sie`cle, Princeton University Press, 1985 Fletcher, I. (ed.), Decadence and the 1890s, London, Edward Arnold, 1979 Hanson, E., Decadence and Catholicism, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1997 Hughes, L. K., (ed.), New Woman Poets: An Anthology, London, Eighteen Nineties Society, 2001 Jackson, H., The Eighteen Nineties, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1913 Le Gallienne, R., The Romantic ’90s, London, Putman & Company, 1951 Lucas, J., ‘Poetry in the Late Nineteenth Century’, in J. Bristow (ed.), Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry, Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. 283–8 Psomiades, K. A., Beauty’s Body: Femininity and Representation in British Aestheticism, Stanford University Press, 1997 Schaffer, T., and K. A. Psomiades (eds.), Women and British Aestheticism, Charlottesville, University Press of Virginia, 1999 Small, I., The Aesthetes: A Sourcebook, London, Routledge, 1979 Snodgrass, C., ‘The Poetry of the 1890s’, in R. Cronin, A. Chapman and A. H. Harrison (eds.), A Companion to Victorian Poetry, Oxford, Blackwell, 2002, pp. 321–41

252

Thain, M. and A. P. Vadillo (eds.), Fin-de-Sie`cle Literature and Culture and Women Poets: A Special Issue of Victorian Literature and Culture, 34 (2006) Thornton. R. K. R., The Decadent Dilemma, London, Edward Arnold, 1983 Thornton, R. K. R. and I. Small (eds.), Decadents, Symbolists, Anti-decadents: Poetry of the 1890s, A series of facsimile reprints, Oxford, Woodstock Books, 1994 Vadillo, A. P., WomenPoetsandUrbanAestheticism, Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2005

253

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 GUIDE TO FURTHER READING

241

242

Sexual identity at the fin de sie`cle

Socialism and radicalism

243

244

245

246

247

248

249

Realism

Fantastic fiction

250

Theatre

251

Poetry

252

253

Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007