1 MATHILDE BLIND'S THE ASCENT OF MAN: A CASE STUDY OF THE INTELLECTUAL HISTORY, COMPOSITION, PUBLICATION, RECEPTION HISTORY AND RECOVERY OF A LATE NINETEENTH-CENTURY VOLUME OF POETRY MAIJA KUHARENOKA SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE AWARD OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DE MONTFORT UNIVERSITY July 2017 2 ABSTRACT This thesis is a case study of Mathilde Blind’s (1841-1896) volume of poetry The Ascent of Man (1889) which focuses on the volume’s intellectual history, composition, publication, and reception history, including its recent recovery by critics and scholars. Its aim is to ascertain the extent to which this kind of approach, usually reserved for canonical male writers, can produce new insights into the work of late-nineteenth-century women poets. It relies heavily on previously unpublished archival material held at the British Library, the Bodleian Library, the library of the University of Reading, and the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center of The University of Texas at Austin, which together shed light on previously unknown aspects of Blind’s work in general and The Ascent of Man in particular. The introduction to the thesis provides an overview of recovery studies and related issues, archival sources, the current state of research on Blind and The Ascent of Man, as well as explaining the reasons for the decision to focus on this volume. The first chapter dwells on the intellectual origins of the volume, including the ideas that shaped Blind’s worldview, affected her poetical sensibilities and had a direct effect on the ideas expressed in the volume. Chapter two looks at the material relating to the composition, production and advertising of the volume, establishing a timeline for The Ascent of Man and, where possible, the sequence of changes to the text between manuscript and publication, as well as exploring Blind’s working relationship with her publisher, Chatto and Windus. The final chapter investigates the reception of the volume, including posthumous reviews, with the aim of tracing the changes in its reputation and determining the reasons for Blind’s disappearance for most of the twentieth century. 3 TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 4 INTRODUCTION: MATHILDE BLIND, THE ASCENT OF MAN AND RECOVERY 5 Sources and their Trustworthiness 45 Abbreviations 57 CHAPTER 1: INTELLECTUAL ORIGINS OF THE ASCENT OF MAN 59 1.1. Giuseppe Mazzini: a Modern Prophet 71 1.2 Percy Bysshe Shelley: ‘Our Beloved Poet’ and Blind’s Poetic Role Model 92 1.3. Evolution: The Ascent of Man, The Origin of Species 114 1.5 Conclusion 143 CHAPTER 2: COMPOSITION AND PRODUCTION OF THE ASCENT OF MAN 147 2.1. Timeline 149 2.2. Composition 159 2.2. History of Production, Publication, Advertising and Sales 178 2.4. Conclusion 194 CHAPTER 3. RECEPTION OF THE ASCENT OF MAN 197 CONCLUSION 221 BIBLIOGRAPHY 229 (i) Archives 230 (ii) Other Sources 232 APPENDICES 256 Appendix 1: List of dates from the commonplace book 257 Appendix 2: Garnett’s Letters with Corrections 258 4 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My thanks go firstly to my supervisor Professor Joseph Phelan, whose guidance, encouragement, patience and support over the course of this project have greatly enriched this thesis. I am also grateful to my second supervisor, Dr. Deborah Mutch, for her support during the project. I would also like to thank the staff at the British Library, University of Reading Library’s Special Collections, Harry Ransom Centre and City University of London Library whose assistance in locating and providing copies of letters by and addressed to Blind was invaluable. Last but not the least, I would like to thank my parents, Tatjana and Mikhail Kuharenok, and my partner, Danny Halas, for their unconditional support and care during these years. 5 Introduction: Mathilde Blind, The Ascent of Man and Recovery Recovery … is a re-gaining—regaining of a clear view. I do not say “seeing things as they are” and involve myself with the philosophers, though I might venture to say “seeing things as we are (or were) meant to see them”—as things apart from ourselves. ‘On Fairy Stories’ J.R.R. Tolkien 6 Each day he would look up in the doctor’s face to discover how long he should live. He would say, “how long will this posthumous life of mine last?” That look was more than we could ever bear. The extreme brightness of his eyes, with his poor pallid face, were not earthly.1 This extract from Joseph Severn’s letter to John Taylor, which speaks of the last days of Keats’s life, is often used to address the posterity of poets and their works. An example can be seen in Robert Douglas-Fairhurst’s book Victorian Afterlives: The Shaping of Influence in Nineteenth-century Literature, which uses this quotation to open its discussion of writers’ heritages and the ways in which they interact with each other. The question of an author’s posthumous life and the issues connected with this are at the heart of recovery studies. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the most typical uses of “recovery” are connected with the ‘[s]enses relating to gaining or regaining possession, esp. of something lost or taken away’; what is more, these meanings ‘relat[e] primarily to immaterial things.’2 ‘Regaining possession’ or, as Tolkien put it, ‘regaining of a clear view’, is at the core of what most of the recovery studies aim to do: give a voice to previously under-represented authors, who were neglected for a variety of reasons including gender, class, ethnicity, and sexual orientation. This process, as Steven J. Belluscio notes, ‘begins with an eerie silence.’ 3 He exemplifies this by referring to Alice Walker whose interest in recovery ‘began after graduating … and realizing that she had encountered no early African American women writers in her education.’4 1 Letter from Joseph Severn to John Taylor 6 march 1821, in John Keats, Selected Letters of John Keats, ed. Grant F. Scott (Cambridge, MA, London: Harvard University press, 2002, revised ed.), pp. 510-2, p. 511. 2 ‘Recovery, I’, Oxford English Dictionary, www.oed.com, accessed on 15/10/2016. 3 Steven J. Belluscio, To Be Suddenly White: Literary Realism and Racial Passing (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006), p. 248. 4 Ibid., p. 248. 7 Regarding the recovery of Victorian women poets, the last three decades have seen a number of projects aiming to recover missing voices. These years saw the publication of several studies formative for the development of the field, with one of the ground-breaking books being Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic (1979). Amongst other notable works that pursued this cause are Ellen Moer’s Literary Women (1963), Elaine Showalter’s A Literature of Their Own (1977), Angela Leighton’s book devoted to the lives of women poets Victorian Women Poets: Writing Against the Heart (1992), and a collection of essays edited by Isobel Armstrong and Virginia Blain, Women's Poetry, Late Romantic to Late Victorian: Gender and Genre, 1830-1900, published in 1999.5 Armstrong and Blain’s preface to the last of the works mentioned above contains a comment that sums up the state of recovery up to the time when their collection was published. Observing the variety of themes and authors covered in the essays as well as referring back to the ‘Rethinking Women's Poetry 1730-1930’ conference which preceded this volume, Armstrong and Blain note that there are ‘more papers on single authors … than [on] theoretical approaches’.6 For example, the volume contains essays on the works of such poets as Amy Levy, Caroline Norton, Felicia Hemans, Emily Pfeiffer and Christina Rossetti. Such focus on individual authors, according to Armstrong and Blain, implies ‘that each poet demands a discrete form of analysis’, with essays ‘exploring how poets evolved unique, sometimes idiosyncratic discourses, athwart or 5 Ellen Moers, Literary Women (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963). Angela Leighton, Victorian Women Poets: Writing Against the Heart (New York; London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992). Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997). Isobel Armstrong and Virginia Blain (eds), Women's Poetry, Late Romantic to late Victorian: Gender and Genre, 1830- 1900 (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1999). 6 Isobel Armstrong and Virginia Blain, ‘Preface’, Gender and Genre pp. viii-xiv, p. ix. 8 oblique to cultural norms and expectations.’7 Another element that stands out in this collection is that a number of articles group the poets either according to the themes in their works or other elements that unite these authors including science, religion, national identity or sexuality. This suggests that at the time Armstrong and Blain wrote their introduction the field had surpassed the initial development stage that identifies the “key players” and moved on to begin to establish a broader and more inclusive context for the investigation. The following two decades demonstrate growing interest and attention to previously forgotten authors. As Lyn Pykett observes, during the past three decades a considerable number of previously forgotten women authors ‘working in a range of forms and genres have been restored to view’ and mentions a number of issues such as ‘feminism, socialism, …, eugenics, class’ that are used in the explorations of ‘their [women poet’s] lives and works’.8 Pykett’s essay provides a reasonably comprehensive overview of the development of the field of Victorian Women’s poetry. From her observations as well as from surveying a number of similar sources we can observe that even if the studies emphasise different aspects of the recovered poets’ work, questions of gender and of literary and cultural tradition are still seen as dominant factors in the discussion of the poems.