Notes Introduction 1 Select examples include the following: On the cholera epidemic: Iain Sinclair’s White Chappell Scarlet Tracings (1987) and Matthew Kneale’s Sweet Thames (1992). On the Crimean War: Beryl Bainbridge’s Master Georgie (1997). On the invention of photography: Lynne Truss’ Tennyson’s Gift (1996), Robert Solé’s The Photographer’s Wife (1999), orig. pub. La Mamelouka (1996), Helen Humphreys’ Afterimage (2000), Ross Gilfillan’s The Edge of the Crowd (2001), Katie Roiphe’s Still She Haunts Me (2001), Fiona Shaw’s The Sweetest Thing (2003), and Gail Jones’ Sixty Lights (2004). On the race to control the Nile: Robert Solé’s The Photographer’s Wife (1999). On Colonialism: David Malouf, Remembering Babylon (1994), Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs (1997) and Tobsha Learner’s Soul (2006). On the discovery of fossils: John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) and Graham Swift’s Ever After (1992). On spiritu- alism: Michèle Roberts’ In the Red Kitchen (1990), and Sarah Waters’ Affinity (1999). The crisis of faith engendered by science: Graham Swift’s Ever After (1992). On the emergent discipline of psychiatry: Sebastian Faulks’ Human Traces (2005). On the new city: Iain Sinclair’s White Chappell Scarlet Tracings (1987), Sheri Holman’s The Dress Lodger (1999) and, in an Australian context, A. L. McCann’s The White Body of Evening (2002). On consumerism: Fiona Shaw’s The Sweetest Thing (2003). 2 A. S. Byatt’s Possession: A Romance in 1990, Peter Carey’s The True History of the Kelly Gang in 2001 and Oscar and Lucinda in 1988. 3 Green-Lewis’ reference to the ‘look’ of the period may resonate with Jameson’s indictment of the glossy images that stand in for the ‘substance’ of the his- torical past (Jameson, 1985: 118), but given that her discussion is concerned with Victorian photographs and visual technologies, it seems more likely that the use of ‘look’ is simply reflective of her own interests and concerns. 1 Memory Texts: History, Fiction and the Historical Imaginary 1 In the Waverley novels, she argues, this pressure is manifest in Scott’s slow beginnings and speedy conclusions, which must grapple with historical expectations. 2 Writing in 1937, Lukács mirrors this concern, praising Scott’s invention of figures that never ‘fall psychologically outside the atmosphere of the age’. For Lukács, this is an important part of what separates Scott from the ‘pseudo-historical’ novels of the earlier centuries, since those novels ‘simply equated naively the world of feeling of the past with that of the present’, and establishes him as the founder, and leading example, of the historical novel. Nonetheless, he finds it necessary to trace, in the thought of Hegel and 184 Notes 185 Goethe, a philosophical defence of ‘necessary anachronism’ which, in Scott, ‘consists, therefore, simply in allowing his characters to express feelings and thoughts about real, historical relationships in a much clearer way than the actual men and women of the time could have done. But the content of these feelings and thoughts, their relations to their real object, is always histori- cally and socially correct. The extent to which this expression of thought and feeling outstrips the consciousness of the age is no more than is absolutely necessary for elucidating the given historical relationship’ (See Lukács, 1962: 60, 61, 63). 3 For more on Scott and Hegelian dialectical evolution see Lukács, (1937) 1962. For an elaboration of Foucault’s archeological model of historical inquiry see Foucault, 1977. 4 For Janik, Hutcheon’s category of historiographic metafiction does not adequately describe novels such as Graham Swift’s Waterland or A. S. Byatt’s Possession or those by Peter Ackroyd, Julian Barnes and Kazuo Ishiguro, which have been defined by many scholars (some of them by Hutcheon herself), as examples of her genre. ‘Indeed, these novels transcend the categories into which we have lately come to divide contemporary fiction.’ He argues that these novels belie the neat allotment of twentieth-century literature into one of three categories: modernism, antimodernist realism and postmodernism, suggesting, rather, that they display, and exploit, characteristics of each (Janik 1995: 161–2). 5 Rody usefully describes this complicated notion of rememory: ‘… a “rememory” (an individual experience) hangs around as a “picture” that can enter anoth- er’s “rememory” (the part of the brain that “rememories”) and complicate consciousness and identity. “Rememory” as trope postulates the intercon- nectedness of minds, past and present … For Sethe as for her author, then, to “rememory” is to use one’s imaginative power to realize a latent, abiding connection to the past. “Rememory” thus functions in Morrison’s “history” as a trope for the problem of imagining one’s heritage’ (Rody 1995: 101). 6 Indeed Rosario Arias Doblas argues that the prevalence of the use of ghostli- ness and hauntings as a metaphor for the presence of the past justifies the naming of the ‘spectral’ novel as a ‘subset of the neo-Victorian novel’ (Doblas, 2005: 87). 2 Contemporary Victorian(ism)s 1 This is an image of the Victorian era utilised by Matthew Kneale in his novel Sweet Thames (1992), in which he draws Felicia Lewis, a stereotypically puritanical Victorian in whose own home ‘the dark dullness of colour and the hangings modestly concealing every table and chair leg well reflect[ed] the prudish natures of its inhabitants’ and who, the narrator conjectures, ‘was offended that the legs of the chairs and tables [in his home] were not modestly concealed behind hangings’ (Kneale, 1992: 64, 17). In Inventing the Victorians (2001), historian Matthew Sweet devotes several pages to debunk- ing this as myth and, indeed, asserting its American, not British origins. ‘Whatever the case,’ he argues, ‘the synecdochic relationship that now exists between Victorian sensibilities and the clothed piano leg is wholly fraudulent. 186 Notes It persists, however, because the story is useful as a way of dismissing the Victorians’ experience as less honest, less sophisticated, less self-cognizant than our own’ (see Sweet, 2001: xiii–xv). 2 Despite what appears, here, as a tendency to flatten the two eras, and make them continuous, Armstrong’s analysis also points to the differences between them, the ways in which the Victorian era cannot be considered continuous with our own. 3 My examination here is necessarily selective. For a more comprehensive dis- cussion of the variety of ways in which the twentieth century has engaged with the Victorian past see Miles Taylor’s edited collection of essays The Victorians Since 1901 (Taylor, 2004). 4 This phrase was first attributed to Thatcher’s platform by Brian Waldon in an interview in 1983, although Thatcher had invoked the period in service of her politics as early as 1977 (Thatcher, 1983a). 5 Bailin takes this phrase from the website Wings and Roses, which sells period garments for everyday wear (see www.wingsandroses.com). Her argument, here, is itself perhaps implicated in nostalgia for the Victorian, producing the period as having a somehow more authentic relationship to its past than we do to ours today. 3 A Fertile Excess: Waterland, Desire and the Historical Sublime 1 This multiple definition, ostensibly taken from the dictionary, which is, as Alison Lee argues, ‘the ultimate self-referential text’ (Lee, 1990: 41) together with the second epigraph, from Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, also foregrounds the question of reference in a complicated way. The novel’s treatment of the Victorian era is referenced to a Victorian novel, suggest- ing that fiction of the period is an important source for its own depiction of the Victorian period and for the shape of the novel itself. As we shall see in more detail in Chapter 6, the use of Victorian novels as intertexts in neo-Victorian fiction foregrounds the way in which the Victorian period has entered our cultural memory via multiple sources, including its own fictions, and continues to be read, to function and to have meaning. For more detailed analyses of Great Expectations as a sub-text see Landow (Landow, 1990) and Lee (Lee, 1990: 41). 2 Price’s use of the term ‘history,’ instead of ‘world’ here points to a further resonance of the ‘End of History’. This refers to a sense of crisis in the disci- pline of history prompted by the challenge to the grand metanarratives of history, and to historiography itself, posed by postmodernism and discussed, for example, in Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992). Fukuyama argues that capitalism had reached a stage of global consensus with the fall of communism. This ended the clash of civilisations that Hegel determined as the evolutionary pattern of history and, therefore, ended history. The End of History is given further resonance in Waterland via curricular cutbacks at the hands of Thatcherite economics and at the hands of fictional headmaster Lewis who, as we shall see, views history as an irrelevance. Notes 187 3 Indeed, as we shall see, the novel’s themes also perform this rejection of linear history. In the dramatisation of abortion and incest, instead of birth, the novel brings paternity, and the notions of linearity, continuity and progress on which it rests, to an abrupt end. As Rufus Cook observes, ‘what- ever else might be said about them, experiences involving incest and abor- tion, murder and suicide and child-abduction, all have to do in one way or another with the mysteries of origin and end’ (Cook, 2004: 4). 4 While I am arguing here that there are some similarities between Tom’s ‘reality’ and Elias’ ‘History’, ‘the postmodern historical sublime’ or ‘history itself’ there is an important difference which stems from the rather loose and elusive way that Elias deploys her terms.