TEXT FLY WITHIN THE BOOK ONLY 00 u<OU_1 68287 co ^ co> OSMANIA UNIVERSITY LIBRARY t*o-* 7 Alt i^- Gall No. / Accession No. Author 0ttSkts "J- . Title /v- 4he f'/* Kt^fa/iie ^rU^ r -*JU" ' This book should be returned on or before the date last marked below. THE REINTERPRETJLTION OF VICTORIAN LITERATURE THE REINTERPRETATION OF VICTORIAN LITERATURE EDITED BY JOSEPH E. BAKER FOR THE VICTORIAN LITERATURE CROUP OF THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS 1950 COPYRIGHT, 1950, BY PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS LONDON: GEOFFREY CUMBERLEGE, OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA BY PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS AT PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY PREFACE THE Victorian Literature Group of the Modern Language Association of America, at the 1939 meeting in New Or- leans, agreed to put out this volume to further the reinter- pretation of a literature of great significance for us today. The writers of Victorian England first tried* to salvage humane culture for a new world of science, democracy, and industrialism. We owe to them and to Pre-Victorians like the prose Coleridge a revival of Christian thought, a new Classical renaissance (this time Greek rather than Latin), an unprecedented mastery of the facts about nature and man and, indeed, the very conception of "culture" that we take for granted in our education and in our social plan- ning. In that age, a consciousness that human life is subject to constant development, a sense of historicity, first spread throughout the general public, and literature for -The first time showed that intimate integration with its sociafback- ground which marks our modern culture. In protest against this came the aesthetic movement, another Victorian phe- nomenon that still commands and repels so much of our modern literary mind. These "new" attitudes cannot be understood without reading the literature that made them current. The Victorians are indispensable to bridge the gap that too often yawns between the traditional thought and art of the great ages of European mankind, and the imme- diate pursuits of present-day writers and readers. That there is a place for a volume like this was first sug- gested by the success and influence of The Reinterpretation two books are not of American Literature y but the exactly in its interest. parallel, since this one is not national We have not substituted a British for an American point of view. Thackeray is our best critic concerning our own van- PREFACE ity fair; we laugh at our own quiet struggles for rank and prestige in Barchester Towers; our proletarian novel goes back to Dickens, and, further, to the humanitarian ap- proach to industrial problems developed by Carlyle. We have taken Victorian literature as the best expression in our language of certain phases of modern civilization, certain experiences common to Western man. In most libraries, the Victorians probably take up about half the space devoted to English literature before 1900, and the same is true of the past literature still indulged in for pleasure and enlightenment by the reading public. Yet only a fraction of the valuable scholarship and sound liter- ary criticism by professional men of letters has been devoted to this vast and valuable treasure. It is so unexplored that often only specialists seem to have any real knowledge of the relevant facts and significant movements, even when these come closest home to us. Those who are not specialists in Victorian research have had no adequate guide to Vic- torian scholarship available at all. Those of us who are professors of Victorian literature have suffered from a lack of general informed discussion and synthesis. But the pres- ent series of essays, embodying the latest results of study by scholars who have been working in that field, should do much to supply the needed illumination and to provide a usable map for further explorations. This book deals with specifically Victorian contributions to our culture. Hence we have not tried to sketch the his- tory of any idea or form merely because it can be found in nineteenth-century England. Still less have we wished to include studies of single authors. It has been our intention rather to offer a frame, or various frames, within which these other kinds of studies could be worked out with fresh perspective. For instance, it was in this period that fiction reached its height in the older manner, and then passed over into new forms just as the transition was being made from traditional forms of verse to "modern" poetry, and from the "essay" to our modern prose and epigram. Even important biographical facts about many of the Victorians are as yet almost unknown, and facts that have been discovered have vi PREFACE not been assimilated in adequate biographies. What could we learn about the literary background of Victorian writers and their public by investigating their school curricula? How do current news items in any given year of the Queen's reign help us to interpret the force of a political generaliza- tion, a poetic allusion, a dramatic scene, or a fictional cari- cature? British insularity came to an end for better or for worse. English literature rediscovered Italy and the Ger- manic cultures. Meanwhile, the wall of antipathy between Burke and the democratic spirit of Jefferson, Shelley, and Republican France was being broken down as Burke's tra- ditional English wisdom was made accessible to us by his Victorian successors. And to maintain the sanity -of our own culture in these trying times, it would be well to recognize that Victorian literature preserves for us a rich treasury of comedy, wit, and humor. To stimulate the widest possible range of interest in Vic- torian study, we have encouraged diversity of approach in this book. The unity that has been given it resulted from the work of the committee put in charge of this project: Joseph Warren Beach, Charles Frederick Harrold, How- ard F. Lowry, Bradford Booth, Joseph E. Baker. Each contribution was read by at least two members of the committee, often by three, and sometimes by other contrib- utors. Though most of the essays have been given final form after careful discussion, we have not felt that differences should be ironed out. It seemed a more civilized policy to leave each contributor solely responsible for the statements he chose to make and the methods he wished to emphasize. No system has been imposed, no demands made or implied, save that each should offer an invitation to further intellec- tual adventure whereby we can better appropriate to our use, enjoyment, and understanding the wealth of Victorian ' literature. J.E.B. Iowa City, November, 1948 vii CONTENTS Preface Social Background and Social Thought 3 BY EMERY NEFF The Comic Spirit and Victorian Sanity 20 BY HOWARD MUMFORD JONES The Oxford Movement: A Reconsideration 33 BY CHARLES FREDERICK HARROLD The Critical Study of the Victorian Age 57 BY NORMAN FOERSTER Form and Technique in the Novel 67 BY BRADFORD A. BOOTH Victorian Education and the Idea of Culture 97 BY WILLIAM S. KNICKERBOCKER The Development of the Historical Mind 130 BY RICHARD A. E. BROOKS The Tradition of Burke 153 BY FREDERICK L. MULHAUSER The Victorians and the World Abroad 169 BY KARL LITZENBERG New Territories in Victorian Biography 197 BY JOHN W. DODDS Our New Hellenic Renaissance 207 BY JOSEPH E. BAKER ix THE REIWTERPRETATION OF VICTORIAN LITERATURE SOCIAL BACKGROUND AND SOCIAL THOUGHt BY EMERY NEFF COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY THE Victorian poets, even more than the Romantic, felt what Keats called "the burden of society." In the diatribe in Maud against mid-Victorian evils, Tennyson charges that "chalk and alum and plaster are sold to the poor for bread." A footnote in Marx's Kapital confirms this shameful prac- tice by citing the report of the "Committee of 1855 on the 1 Adulteration of Bread/' The Parliamentary Committee heard testimony of chemical experts between July 13 and August 8 of that year; Maud was on sale in the last week of July, simultaneously with a Times editorial of July 24 sup- porting the investigation. Nothing could have been more timely than Tennyson's allusion to a national scandal in- volving a great variety of foods and drugs. His information did not come from the expert testimony, for he had sent Maud to press on July 7, six days before the opening of the hearings; but the Parliamentary Blue Book and letters to the Times correcting details in its editorial give clues to his anticipatory accuracy. The first witness before the commit- 2 tee, Dr. Arthur Hill Hassall, had published analyses of 1 More precisely, "the Select Committee on the Adulteration of Food." to (Parliamentary Papers, Session of 1854-55, vm, 221 ff.) Marx's note 51 page 138 of his first edition (Hamburg, 1867) mentions alum and chalk only, but plaster (of Paris) appears in the committee report. 2 Dr. Hassall's discovery that the microscope could detect chicory in ground coffee, which started The Lancet on its tampaign of exposure, ex- EMERY NEFF foodstuffs in The Lancet at frequent intervals since 1851 and had collected them in his book, Food and Its Adultera- tions (1855). The Lancet revelations, confirming his expe- rience with fraud as a grocer's boy, had stirred a Birming- ham physician, John Postgate, to a publicity campaign for national legislation, which gained the support of a Radical member for Birmingham who became chairman of the in- vestigating committee. It is possible that Tennyson ob- tained other information through his friend Carlyle, ever on the alert for commercial dishonesty, since he obviously borrowed from Past and Present the substance of another verse in Maud: "When a Mammonite mother kills her babe for a burial fee/' Such is the variety of relations in which a line of Victo- rian poetry may stand to the society in which it was written.