A University of Sussex PhD thesis Available online via Sussex Research Online: http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/ This thesis is protected by copyright which belongs to the author. This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the Author The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the Author When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given Please visit Sussex Research Online for more information and further details Peripheral Vision: The Miltonic in Victorian Painting, Poetry, and Prose, 1825–1901 Laura Fox Gill Submitted for the examination of Doctor of Philosophy in English University of Sussex May 2017 I hereby declare that this thesis has not been and will not be, submitted in whole or in part to another University for the award of any other degree. Signature: . UNIVERSITY OF SUSSEX LAURA FOX GILL DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY PERIPHERAL VISION: THE MILTONIC IN VICTORIAN PAINTING, POETRY, AND PROSE, 1825–1901 SUMMARY This thesis explores the influence of John Milton on the edges of Victorian culture, addressing temporal, geographical, bodily, and sexual thresholds in Victorian poetry, painting, and prose. Where previous studies of Milton’s Victorian influence have focused on the poetic legacy of Paradise Lost, this project identifies traces of Miltonic concepts across aesthetic borders, analysing an interdisciplinary cultural sample in order to state anew Milton’s significance in the period between British Romanticism and early twentieth-century critical debates about the value of Paradise Lost. The project is divided into four chapters. The first explores apocalyptic images and texts from the 1820s—Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826) and the paintings of John Martin—in relation to Miltonic aetiology and eschatology. These texts offer a complex re-thinking of the relation between personal loss and universal catastrophe, which draws on and positions itself against prophecy and apocalypse in Paradise Lost. In the second chapter I address conceptual connections that cross boundaries of medium and nationality, identifying the presence of a Miltonic notion of powerful passivity in the writing and marginalia of Herman Melville and the paintings and anecdotal appendages of J. M. W. Turner. In the third chapter I consider Milton’s importance for A. C. Swinburne’s poetic presentation of peripheral sexualities, identifying in Milton’s poetry a pervasive metaphysics of bodily ‘melting’ or ‘cleaving’ which is essential to Swinburne’s poetic project. The final chapter analyses the presence of the Miltonic in the fiction of Thomas Hardy, whose repeated readings of Milton contributed to both establishing his poetic vocabulary, and prompting a career-long engagement with Miltonic ideas. The thesis refocuses attention on peripheral elements of the work of these writers and artists to re-articulate Milton’s importance for the Victorians, whilst bringing together models of influence which show the Victorian Milton to be at once liminal and galvanising. CONTENTS Acknowledgements i List of Illustrations ii Introduction 1 Milton and the Victorians 3 Selection and Structure of the Thesis 10 1 Beginning at the End: Apocalyptic Failures in 1826 15 Mary Shelley and Miltonic Beginnings 22 The Last Man as Failure 28 Fragments in the Frame: Epigraph and Introduction 34 Editing Shelley 43 Martin and Milton: False Starts and Dead Ends 47 2 ‘Only Stand and Wait’: Passive Power in Milton, Melville, and Turner 57 The Maze and the Snake: Structures of Psychic Experience 59 Milton’s Passive Power 66 Milton in Melville’s Marks and Marginalia 68 Speech and Stillness 72 Turner, Chaos, and the Anecdote 83 Conclusion 91 3 Melting Bodies: The Dissolution of Bodily Boundaries in Milton and 93 Swinburne The Miltonic and Swinburne’s Sexual Bodies 97 Milton’s Bodies, Cleaving Together 101 Swinburne’s Miltonic Melting Bodies 112 Milton’s Poetics of Melting 122 Conclusion 129 4 Milton Regained: Thomas Hardy 131 Milton’s Wessex 136 Sensation Fiction and the Myth of the Fallen Woman 144 Hardy’s Miltonic Hands 156 The Hand and the Will 170 Conclusion 174 Conclusion: Graves, Words, Images, Margins 175 Bibliography 180 i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thanks are due first to my supervisor Lindsay Smith, whose unfailing enthusiasm and encouragement have been invaluable. This project originated in your undergraduate seminars on Thomas Hardy, and it’s been a pleasure to have your guidance in developing those embryonic ideas into this thesis. I would like to thank the brilliant postgraduate community at the University of Sussex for their support and companionship, especially (though not exclusively) Camilla Bostock, Katie Da Cunha Lewin, Lana Harper, Tom Houlton, Mike Rowland, Charlotte Terrell, and Kiron Ward. I’ve learned as much from you over the last four years as from the books in this bibliography. Thanks also to family and friends outside of academia whose support I have depended on in all sorts of ways. I owe thanks to the staff at the Huntington Library and Art Collections in San Marino, California, the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, and the Dorset County Museum in Dorchester. An early version of Chapter 3 was previously published in Victorian Network 6.1, Bodies and Body Parts (2015)—thanks to the journal and to the guest editor Pamela K. Gilbert for her comments. Finally, my deepest thanks to Andrew Key, who first nudged me towards nineteenth-century literature, and who has kept me company in this endeavour even from five thousand miles away. FUNDING This work was supported by the School of English at the University of Sussex and the Arts and Humanities Research Council [grant number AH/K503319/1]. ii LIST OF FIGURES 1 William Finden after Richard Westall, ‘Milton’s reconciliation to his wife’ and 5 ‘Paradise Lost, Book X’, pub. in Paradise Lost (London: J. Sharpe, 1822) inserted into John Milton, The Paradise Lost of Milton with Illustrations by John Martin, 2 vols (London: Septimus Prowett, 1826), pl. 65 + 66. RB 110034, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. 2 Mihály Munkácsy, Milton Dictating ‘Paradise Lost’ to His Two Daughters, 1878, oil on 8 canvas, 93.5 × 122.5 cm. Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest, Collection of Paintings. Photo © Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest. 3 John Martin, The Last Man, 1849, oil on canvas, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. Photo 16 © Walker Art Gallery. 4 Louis Édouard Fournier, The Funeral of Shelley, 1889, oil on canvas, 129.5 × 123.4 cm. 20 Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. Photo © Walker Art Gallery. 5 John Martin, ‘Adam and Eve driven out of Paradise’, plate from The Paradise Lost of 49 Milton, with illustrations designed and engraved by John Martin, 2 vols (London: Septimus Prowett, 1827), mezzotint, 25.4 × 35.6 cm. Victoria & Albert Museum, London, Department of Prints and Drawings and Department of Paintings. Photo © V&A. 6 John Martin, Belshazzar’s Feast, 1820, oil on canvas, 80 × 120.7 cm. Yale Center for 53 British Art, CT, Paul Mellon Collection. Photo © Yale. 7 J. M. W. Turner, Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps, exh. 1812, oil on 56 canvas, 146 × 237.5 cm. The Tate Gallery, London. Photo © Tate. 8 John Martin, The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, 1852, oil on canvas, 136.3 × 212.3 56 cm. Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne. Photo © Laing Art Gallery. 9 Melville’s note in his copy of Thomas Beale, The Natural History of the Sperm Whale, 58 2nd edn (London: John Van Voorst, 1839), p. III. Houghton Library, Harvard College, MA. AC85 M4977 Zz839b. 002163880. Photo © Houghton Library. 10 J. M. W. Turner, ‘A Harpooned Whale’ in Ambleteuse and Wimereux Sketchbook, 1845, 61 graphite and watercolour on paper, 23.8 x 33.6 cm. The Tate Gallery, London, D35391, Turner Bequest CCCLVII 6. Photo © Tate. 11 Thomas Milton after Edward Burney, ‘Eve Tempted’, Paradise Lost (London: T. 78 Heptinstall, 1799), pl. facing p. 257. Photo © Sanders of Oxford. 12 George Jones, Turner’s Body lying in State, 29 December 1851, c. 1851, oil on millboard, 87 14 × 23 cm. The Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, Oxford. Photo © The Ashmolean. iii 13 J. M. W. Turner, Snow Storm: Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth, exh. 1842, oil on canvas, 89 91.5 × 122 cm. The Tate Gallery, London. Photo © Tate. 14 Francis Bartolozzi after Thomas Stothard, ‘Sin and Death’ in Graphic Illustrations of 115 Milton’s Paradise Lost (London: John Hill, 1818). RB 621779, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. 15 Title page, John Milton, Paradise Lost, facsimile of the 1st edn (London: Elliot Stock, 133 1877), signed by Thomas Hardy. Courtesy of the Thomas Hardy Collection, Dorset County Museum. 16 Richard Redgrave, The Outcast, 1851, oil on canvas, 78.4 × 107.1 cm. Royal Academy 147 of the Arts, London. Photo © R.A./John Hammond 17 N. Schiavonetti after Henry Tresham, ‘Illustration to Paradise Lost V.9–13’ (detail), in 163 John Kitto, and J. Gibbs, eds, The Holy Bible (The Extra-Illustrated ‘Kitto Bible’), 60 vols (London, 1835 [1850?]), II, pl. 212. RB 49000 The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. 18 John Martin, The Expulsion, 1831, mezzotint with etching, 19.5 × 29.0 cm, from 163 Martin’s Illustrations of the Bible (1831–35). Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 368.2009. Photo © Art Gallery NSW. 19 William Blake, The Expulsion (Illustration to Milton’s Paradise Lost), 1807 (Thomas set), 165 pen and watercolour, 24.9 × 20.5 cm. The Huntington Library and Art Collection, San Marino, California. William Blake Collection, 000.13 (Butlin 529.12). Copyright © Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi. Photo © The Huntington Library, 2008.