A Concise Companion to

the Victorian Novel

Edited by Francis OGorman

A Concise Companion to

the Victorian Novel

Blackwell Concise Companions to Literature and CultureGeneral Editor: David Bradshaw, University of Oxford

This series offers accessible, innovative approaches to major areas ofliterary study. Each volume provides an indispensable companion foranyone wishing to gain an authoritative understanding of a givenperiod or movements intellectual character and contexts.

The Restoration and Eighteenth Edited by Cynthia WallCentury

The Victorian Novel Edited by Francis OGormanModernism Edited by David BradshawPostwar American Literature Edited by Josephine G. Hendin

and CultureFeminist Theory Edited by Mary Eagleton

A Concise Companion to

the Victorian Novel

Edited by Francis OGorman

2005 by Blackwell Publishing Ltdexcept for editorial material and organization 2005 by Francis OGorman

BLACKWELL PUBLISHING350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK550 Swanston Street, Carlton South, Melbourne, Victoria 3053, Australia

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A concise companion to the Victorian novel / edited by Francis OGorman.p. cm. (Blackwell concise companions to literature and culture)

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Contents

Notes on Contributors ixAcknowledgements xiiList of illustrations xiiiChronology xiv

Introduction 1Francis OGorman

1 The sun and moon were made to give them light:Empire in the Victorian Novel 4Cannon Schmitt

2 Seeing is believing?: Visuality and Victorian Fiction 25Kate Flint

3 The boundaries of social intercourse: Class in theVictorian Novel 47James Eli Adams

4 Legal subjects, legal objects: The Law and Victorian Fiction 71Clare Pettitt

5 The withering of the individual: Psychology in theVictorian Novel 91Nicholas Dames

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6 Telling of my weekly doings: The Material Culture ofthe Victorian Novel 113Mark W. Turner

7 Farewell poetry and aerial flights: The Function of theAuthor and Victorian Fiction 134Richard Salmon

8 Everywhere and nowhere: Sexuality in the VictorianNovel 156Carolyn Dever

9 One of the larger lost continents: Religion in theVictorian Novel 180Michael Wheeler

10 The difference between human beings: Biology in theVictorian Novel 202Angelique Richardson

11 One great confederation?: Europe in the Victorian Novel 232John Rignall

12 A long deep sob of that mysterious wondrous happinessthat is one with pain: Emotion in the Victorian Novel 253Francis OGorman

Index 271

Contents

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Notes on Contributors

James Eli Adams teaches in the Department of English at CornellUniversity, USA. He has published numerous studies and reviewsdealing with Victorian literature and culture, including Dandies andDesert Saints: Styles of Victorian Masculinity (1995) and Sexualities in Victo-rian Britain (1996), which he edited with Andrew Miller. From 1993to 2000 he co-edited Victorian Studies, where he remains a member ofthe Advisory Board; he is also the General Editor of the Grolier Ency-clopedia of the Victorian Era. He is currently writing A History of VictorianLiterature, to be published by Blackwell.

Nicholas Dames is Assistant Professor of English and ComparativeLiterature at Columbia University, USA. He is the author of AmnesiacSelves: Nostalgia, Forgetting, and British Fiction, 18101870 (2001), and ofseveral articles on British and French fiction in the nineteenth century.His current project investigates the relation between novel theory andthe history of novel reading.

Carolyn Dever is Associate Professor of English and Acting Directorof Womens Studies at Vanderbilt University, USA. She is the authorof Death and the Mother From Dickens to Freud: Victorian Fiction and theAnxiety of Origins (1998), Skeptical Feminism: Activist Theory, Activist Prac-tice (2004), and editor, with Margaret Cohen, of The Literary Channel:The Trans-National Invention of the Novel (2002). Her book in progress istitled Queer Domesticities.

ix

Kate Flint is Professor of English at Rutgers University, USA, havingpreviously taught for 15 years at Oxford University. She has publishedextensively on Victorian, modernist, and contemporary fiction, paint-ing, and cultural history. Her books include The Victorians and the VisualImagination (2000) and The Woman Reader, 18371914 (1993), both ofwhich won the British Academys Rose Mary Crawshay prize. She hasedited a number of works by Dickens and Virginia Woolf, among otherauthors. Her forthcoming book, The Transatlantic Indian 17851930looks at the interaction, both actual and imaginative, between theBritish and Native Americans in the nineteenth century.

Francis OGorman is Senior Lecturer in Victorian Literature at theUniversity of Leeds, UK and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.His books include John Ruskin (1999), Late Ruskin: New Contexts (2001),and Blackwells Guide to the Victorian Novel (2002) as well as Ruskin andGender (edited with Dinah Birch, 2002) and The Victorians and the Eigh-teenth Century: Reassessing the Tradition (edited with Katherine Turner,2004). His Victorian Poetry: An Annotated Anthology appeared in 2004 andhe is currently writing about Victorian poetry and immortal life.

Clare Pettitt is Lecturer and Director of Studies in English Literatureat Newnham College, Cambridge, UK. Her book, Patent Inventions: Intellectual Property and the Victorian Novel, was published by Oxford University Press in 2004.

Angelique Richardson is Senior Lecturer in Victorian Culture at theUniversity of Exeter, UK. She has published widely on nineteenth-century culture and science and is currently working on a study ofHardy and the unconscious. She is the author of Love and Eugenics inthe Late Nineteenth Century: Rational Reproduction and the New Woman(2003), editor of Women Who Did: Stories by Men and Women, 18901914(2002), and co-editor of The New Woman in Fiction and in Fact: Fin-de-Sicle Feminisms (2001). She is also on the editorial board of CriticalQuarterly.

John Rignall is Reader in the Department of English and Compara-tive Literary Studies at the University of Warwick, UK. He is the authorof Realist Fiction and the Strolling Spectator (1992) and numerous articleson nineteenth-century fiction; he has edited George Eliot and Europe(1997), and is the General Editor of The Oxford Readers Companion toGeorge Eliot (2000).

Notes on Contributors

x

Richard Salmon is Senior Lecturer in the School of English, Univer-sity of Leeds, UK. He is the author of Henry James and the Culture of Publicity (1997), William Makepeace Thackeray (2003), and various articles on Victorian fiction, periodicals, and cultural history. He is currently writing a book on the disenchantment of the author in Victorian literary culture.

Cannon Schmitt, Associate Professor of English at Wayne State University, USA, and editor of the journal Criticism, is author of AlienNation: Nineteenth-Century Gothic Fictions and English Nationality (1997)as well as essays in Victorian Literature and Culture, ELH, Genre, and else-where. At present he is at work on a book-length project titled SavageMnemonics: South America, Victorian Science, and the Reinvention of theHuman.

Mark W. Turner is lecturer in English at Kings College, University ofLondon, UK. He is the author of Trollope and the Magazines (1999) andBackward Glances: Cruising the Queer Streets of New York and London(2003), and the co-editor with Caroline Levine of From Author to Text:Rereading George Eliots Romola (1998). He also co-edits the interdisci-plinary journal Media History. Current research projects include a studyof time, memory, and serial narratives in the nineteenth century.

Michael Wheeler is an independent scholar and lecturer, currentlywriting The Old Enemies: Catholic and Protestant in Nineteenth-CenturyEnglish Culture for Cambridge University Press. He is Visiting Professorof English at the Universities of Southampton and Surrey Roehamp-ton, and Honorary Professor of Lancaster Universitys Ruskin Pro-gramme. Formerly he was Director of Chawton House Library andProfessor of English Literature at the University of Southampton, andbefore that Professor of English Literature and founding Director of theRuskin Programme and Ruskin Collection Project at Lancaster, leadingthe campaign to build the Ruskin Library.

Notes on Contributors

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to friends who have been encouraging during the completionof this book, particularly Professor Dinah Birch, Professor David Fairer,Dr Juliet John, Dr Gail Marshall, Dr Clare Palmer, and Dr Helen Small.Gratitude also to my parents, John and Joyce OGorman, and mybrother Chris OGorman; to Emma Bennett from Blackwell publish-ing too. Many thanks to Dr Clare Pettitt and Dr Cristiano Ristuccia fortheir hospitality in Rome, and to Dr Mark Batty and Dr John McLeodfor good cheer in Leeds. Im especially grateful for the friendship andgenerosity of the dedicatee.

Francis OGormanLa festa del Redentore, 2003The School of English, University of Leeds

xii

List of Illustrations

Figure 1 Am I Not a Man and a Brother? Punch, 6 (1844) 217

Figure 2 Photograph of Galtons Anthropocentric Laboratoryat the International Health Exhibition, SouthKensington Museum (18845) 221

Figure 3 Advertisement calling for people to be measured atGaltons National International Health Exhibitionof 1884 222

Figure 4 Illustration from the 1885 reprinting of CharlesKingsley, The Water-Babies: A Fairy Tale for aLand-Baby, with 100 illustrations by LinleySambourne 224

xiii

Chronology

1830Death of George IV; accession of William IV; Wellingtons Toriesoppose electoral reform; Tory government falls; Whig administra-tion commences, sympathetic to reform though not united; openingof Liverpool and Manchester railway; Charles X of France refusesto accept election results that have returned a majority liberal opposi-tion, precipitating riots and eventually his abdication; replaced byLouis Philippe, the citizen king; various European revolutionsfollow (Belgium, Italy, Poland).

1831Reform crisis continues.

1832Greys Whigs succeed in passing the Great Reform Act, increasingthe electorate to around 700,000 men, abolishing rotten boroughs andincreasing the representation of cities.

1833John Keble preaches the Assize Sermon in St Marys, the UniversityChurch at Oxford, inaugurating the Oxford Movement; FactoryAct prohibits children under 9 from working in textile mills andrestricts those between 9 and 13 from working more than 8 hours aday; end of the institution of slavery in British colonies.

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1834Poor Law Amendment Act (New Poor Law) shifts responsibilityfor poor relief to unions of parishes administered by boards ofguardians; it insists that all able-bodied poor could receive relief onlyin workhouses; Tolpuddle Martyrs: six agricultural labourers fromTolpuddle, Dorset, are sentenced to 7 years transportation for unlaw-fully joining a trade union; the national outcry leads to the men beingpardoned 2 years later.

1835Henry Fox Talbot begins to experiment with paper repeatedly coatedwith salt and silver nitrate to improve the earliest photographictechniques.

1836First train in London between London Bridge and Greenwich.

1837Death of William IV; accession of Victoria (1901).

1838Anti Corn-Law League founded. The Corn Laws which fixed theprice of corn and impeded free trade have become symbolic of aris-tocratic privilege and maladministration. Brunels Great Westerncrosses the Atlantic, the largest wooden ship then afloat; ThePeoples Charter issued (foundational document of Chartism),which calls for universal adult male suffrage; secret ballot; abolition ofproperty qualifications for MPs; payment of MPs; equal electoral dis-tricts; annual parliaments.

1839Abortive Chartist riots; Fox Talbot and Daguerre announce rivalprocesses for taking photographs.

1840Penny post introduced by Roland Hill, the first pre-paid postal servicein the modern world; marriage of Victoria and Albert; internationalAnti-Slavery Convention held in London; difficulties for womendelegates attending lead Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton toformulate the idea for a womens rights convention in the USA, amajor initial step in the womens rights movement.

Chronology

xv

1841First paperbacks published by Tauchnitz Verlag, Germany.

1842Chartist riots after the rejection of the Chartist petition, containingsome 3 million signatures (not all authentic); Chartism provingimmensely important in forming members of the working class into apolitical organization; Mudies Lending Library opened, the self-appointed guardian of bourgeois family values.

1843Wordsworth becomes Poet Laureate on the death of Southey.

1844Factory Act further shortens the working day for children andincreases the amount of mandatory schooling; makes women textileworkers into protected persons, giving them additional rights in law;the electrical telegraph is used to announce the birth of Victoriassecond son, Alfred Ernest.

1845John Henry Newman converts to Roman Catholicism, a blow to theOxford Movement; Irish Great Famine (184551) caused by potatoblight and inept government attempts at relief; 1 million people die.

1846Ragged School Union founded to provide education to theextremely poor and potentially criminal children; a later ragged schoolteacher was Dr Barnardo; repeal of the Corn Laws, a major advancefor the free traders; railway boom underway.

1847There are now 4,000 miles of telegraph lines in Britain, owned bythe Electrical Telegraph Co.; 10 Hours Factory Act establishes themuch-desired 101/2-hour day; James Young Simpson announces thesuccess of chloroform as an anaesthetic.

1848European revolutions in favour of liberal reform; election in Franceof Louis Napoleon Bonaparte as president of the republic; failure ofthe second Chartist Petition; serious cholera outbreak; formation ofthe Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

Chronology

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1849Siege of Rome and the subsequent restoration of Pius IX; Disraelibecomes Conservative leader.

1850Tennyson becomes Poet Laureate on the death of Wordsworth;North London Collegiate School (for girls) founded by educationalpioneer Frances Mary Buss; Pius IX restores Roman Catholic ecclesi-astical hierarchy in England; Public Libraries Act permits citiesand towns to provide a library service funded by local taxes if theywish.

1851Great Exhibition opens in London; Louis Napoleons coup dtatrestores the Empire; ratified by a plebiscite the following year (hebecomes Napoleon III); invasion anxieties in England.

1853Turkey declares war on Russia to commence the Crimean War(1856); Britain, anxious to avoid a Russian presence in the Mediter-ranean, joins forces in due course with France, the Ottoman empireand Sardinia to attack Russia.

1854The Times (established 1785) now selling 50,000 copies a day;Working Mens College London founded; disastrous charge of theLight Brigade at Balaclava; Queen and Prince Albert open theCrystal Palace containing material from the Great Exhibition; it islater moved to Sydenham.

1855Abolition of the remaining newspaper duty, which has impededgrowth; papers such as the Liverpool Daily Post, Manchester Guardian andthe Daily Telegraph are able to come into existence; Scottish mission-ary and explorer David Livingstone discovers Victoria Falls as partof the extensive exploration of Africa, then largely unknown inBritain; formation of the Langham Place Group of feminists urgingchange in marriage law.

1857Indian Uprising (Indian Mutiny), the most serious threat to date toBritish rule in India. The Uprising (18578) leads to the replacement

Chronology

xvii

of the rule of the English East India Company by the British govern-ment direct, and reform of military and civil services. MatrimonialCauses Act allows women limited access to divorce; right of access tochildren extended and women are able under certain circumstances torepossess their property after separation or following the husbandsdesertion.

1858Darwin and Wallace present joint paper on evolution; Jewish Dis-abilities Act allows Jews to take their seats in both Houses of Parlia-ment without having to swear a Christian oath; abolition of theproperty qualification for MPs allows working-class candidates forParliament.

1859J. S. Mill, On Liberty; Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species; Mrs BeetonsBook of Household Management.

1860T. H. Huxley v. Bishop Wilberforce debate in the Oxford Museumwidely viewed as a victory for evolutionary science; Garibaldi takesNaples leading to unification of Italy; Bradlaugh founds the secu-larist/atheist National Reformer.

1861Beginning of the American Civil War (to 1865); death of PrinceAlbert and Victorias withdrawal into mourning; William Morris andothers form interior design company (Morris, Marshall, Faulkner &Co.), a key moment in the Arts and Crafts Movement; Criminal LawConsolidation Act reduces the large number of capital crimes to four:murder, high treason, arson in a royal dockyard, piracy.

1862London Exposition, showcasing many international developmentsin science and technology.

1864First of the Contagious Diseases Acts, controversial efforts to controlprostitution more effectively; Louis Pasteur invents pasteurization,a breakthrough in food safety; Geneva Convention establishes RedCross.

Chronology

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1865Abolition of slavery in the USA at the end of the Civil War; Gover-nor Edward Eyre viciously suppresses a slave revolt led by Paul Bogleprompting both outcry in England and support from leading intellec-tuals (Carlyle, Dickens, Kingsley, Ruskin, Tennyson).

1866Second Contagious Diseases Act; first petition to Parliament forfemale suffrage; first functional underwater telegraph cable laidbetween North America and Europe.

1867Second Reform Act raises electorate to around 2 million; Marx, DasKapital (vol. 1); Nobel invents dynamite.

1868Trades Union Congress formed in Manchester; Society of Mission-aries for Africa founded; W. E. Gladstone begins first term of office asLiberal prime minister (186874, 18805, 1886, 18924).

1869Girton College Cambridge for women founded; Suez Canalopened; Third Contagious Diseases Act; margarine invented;Arnold, Culture and Anarchy; J. S. Mill, Subjection of Women.

1870William Forsters Education Act creates school boards to examine theprovision of elementary education across the newly created school dis-tricts (c.2,500); women are allowed to serve on the school boards, animportant step in recognizing womens ability in public administration;Married Womens Property Act allows women to keep earnings,property acquired after marriage and open a separate savings account.

1871Religious tests abolished at Durham, Cambridge and Oxford; FACup established (Wanderers beat Royal Engineers 10 in the first final[1872]).

1872Girls Public Day School Trust established for independent girlsschools.

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1873Population of the UK at 26 million.

1874Womens Trade Union League formed; first Impressionist Exhi-bition in Paris.

1875Public Health Act requires a Medical Officer and a sanitary inspec-tor for each district and gives councils powers to build sewers, drainsand public toilets; Third Republic proclaimed in France.

1876Alexander Graham Bell patents the telephone; Cruelty to AnimalsAct provides for protection for all vertebrate animals, requiring licens-ing of vivisection and inspection of facilities.

1877Queen Victoria crowned Empress of India; Edison perfects thephonograph (early sound recording device); Grosvenor Galleryopened in London (centre of Aesthetic Movement art); William Morrishelps found the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings;first public telephone; frozen meat first shipped across the Atlantic;first All-England Lawn Tennis championship at Wimbledon.

1878Paris Exhibition (Exposition Universelle) of arts, science and tech-nology; English Men of Letters series begun by John Morley; SecondAfghan War (18789); Lady Margaret Hall founded as a college forwomen in Oxford.

1879Somerville Hall founded as a college for women in Oxford; defeat ofthe British Army at Battle of Isandhlwana (South Africa); RorkesDrift (some 150 British soldiers defend remote outpost against 4,000Zulu warriors, a celebrated incident of British Army history); Battleof Ulundi (Zulu army defeated by Britain to bring an end to the warwidely seen as caused by Sir Bartle Frere).

1880First Anglo-Boer War (18801); Owens College Manchester granted

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a Royal Charter as the Victoria University (later Manchester Uni-versity); Elementary Education Act (Mundellas Act) extends theprovisions of 1876 Act about compulsory school attendance for chil-dren aged 5 to 10 years; Greenwich Mean Time adopted officiallyby British Parliament; now 30,000 telephones in use around the world.

1881Pretoria convention recognizes independence of Transvaal andOrange Free State.

1882Recognition of British protectorate over Egypt; commercial domes-tic lighting used for the first time (Central Station, New York); LeslieStephen begins to edit the Dictionary of National Biography; PhoenixPark Murders (Lord Frederick Cavendish, British secretary forIreland, and Thomas Henry Burke, his undersecretary, are stabbed todeath by Fenian splinter group in Dublin); Society for PsychicalResearch founded by group of Cambridge scholars to examineallegedly paranormal phenomena in a scientific and unbiased way.

1883Womens Cooperative Guild founded.

1884Third Reform Act, extending franchise to most adult males; Murraybegins Oxford English Dictionary (to 1928); Fabian Society formed(socialist society committed to gradual rather than revolutionary socialreform, named after Roman general Quintus Fabius from his strategyof delaying battle until the right moment); machine gun invented;petrol engine invented.

1885Motor car invented; first electric tramway at Blackpool; death ofGeneral Gordon at Khartoum.

1886Repeal of Contagious Diseases Acts; Gladstones first Irish HomeRule Bill (fails).

1887Queen Victorias golden jubilee.

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1888Kodak box camera invented; Dunlop patents pneumatic tyre; CountyCouncils Act establishes County Councils (system of voting enfran-chises unmarried women); match girls strike at Bryant & Maysmatch factory against use of fatal red phosphorus, long hours and poorpay (prominent early instance of organized industrial action).

1889London Dock Strike (part of a wave of strikes following the matchgirls involving new role for unions); Board of Education established;35,000 unique telegraphic addresses are now registered with BritishPost Office.

1890Tennyson makes wax cylinder recordings; Frazers The GoldenBough (1915) begins.

1891The great Trans-Siberian Railway begins; International Copy-right law.

1892Coal miner, unionist and journalist Kier Hardie becomes first Inde-pendent Labour MP; last major outbreak of cholera in Europe(Hamburg); first automatic telephone exchange.

1893Ford builds his first car; diesel engine patented; second Irish HomeRule Bill (fails).

1894Armenian massacres, a great liberal cause in the UK.

1895Marconi sucessfully transmits a dot-dot-dot radio signal (Morse codefor S) the beginning of radio communication; the Cin-matographe, based on Edisons experimental Kinetograph, is used byLouis and Auguste Lumire in Paris (the beginning of movingimages); Oscar Wilde imprisoned for homosexual offences.

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1896First modern Olympic Games (Athens); Wilhelm Conrad Rntgen(18451923), experimenting on cathode rays in December 1895, isamazed to see the bones in his own hand; in January 1896, heannounces publicly the discovery of X-rays; Lord Northcliffe foundsDaily Mail (founds Daily Mirror in 1903); Alfred Austin is, to the dis-appointment of many, appointed Poet Laureate.

1897Queen Victorias diamond jubilee; Workmens Compensation Actinsists employers compensate injured workmen and dependants ifkilled; gold discovered in the Klondike (Seattle, USA).

1898M. and Mme Curie discover radium; Zeppelin builds airship.

1899Second Anglo-Boer War (1902); International Womens Con-gress, London; aspirin invented; first international radio trans-mission.

1900Formation of Labour Representation Committee (predecessor ofthe Labour Party); black body radiation explained by Max Planck (astep towards quantum theory).

1901Death of Queen Victoria, accession of Edward VII; population ofGreat Britain 32 million.

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1

Introduction

Francis OGorman

History leaves its mark on writing, and it is part of the historical criticstask to reconstruct as far as possible the conditions both of a texts creation and its consumption. The meaning and significance of writingcan only begin to be understood in relation to its cultural environment(where cultural signifies the fullest complexity of human society). Toread historically does not mean denying that a text can speak to thepresent, that it cannot enter a form of meaningful dialogue of differ-ence and similarity with the contemporary moment. But texts can onlybe said to speak as themselves at all if the nature of their relationshipwith and their intervention into their own times is comprehended asfully as historical distance permits.

Recognizing historical difference is a prerequisite for beginning tointerpret the texts of the past. Judging history from the perspective ofthe current moment is a peril that warps critical authority. Presen-tism, the readiness to find the past lacking because it fails to fulfil thecriteria of the present, compromises historical criticism. The most critically enabling assumption about the past its events, personali-ties, texts is that it was always more complicated than it now appears;the most rewarding first question to ask is always whether our viewof history is being distorted by inappropriate assumptions from ourown time.

To read a text historically is not to confine it to the showcases of amuseum, nor is it to fix its meaning as some single, inflexible truth.Literary texts are works of the imagination, and the imagination opens

up possibilities rather than closing them down. Reading the Victoriannovel requires knowledge of the culture from which it emerged. Yetif history is essential to reading, a literary work of any merit is alwaysmore than its context. The novels of the kind discussed in this studyare far from interpretively exhausted by an archival investigation oftheir cultural environments: the critical essays included here do notdetermine interpretations but endeavor to identify the terms withinwhich interpretation can begin.

The task of the historicist reader of the Victorian novel for whomthis collection is intended is to try to understand the historical para-meters within which the nineteenth-century literary imaginationplayed. But those parameters are always beyond full description. Thehistoricist project to recuperate the coordinates of the past is predi-cated on an acceptance of permanent incompletion. Yet it remains anessential critical business.

This study includes discussion of contextual domains that, in thecurrent critical environment, are well recognized as central to thereading of Victorian fiction. Class, sexuality, empire, biological science,psychology, material culture, and religion, for instance, would be con-spicuous in their absence from a volume of this kind. But it alsoexplores contextual areas newly rising to prominence in contempo-rary Victorian literary studies visuality, Europe, law, authorship andone, the affectivity of literary fiction, that is infrequently treated withthe seriousness it deserves. There are many significant omissions pol-itics being the most obvious, and music, economics, commerce, busi-ness, medicine, landscape, the city, the idea of Englishness, the ancientclassical world, and popular culture being a tiny number of the others.There is also a (modern) emphasis on identity politics class, gender,cultural identity and on science and technology. The aesthetic contextis almost entirely missing except in the bravura consideration of thenovels relation to the visual arts in chapter 2 and in the deft surveyof legal arguments about the aesthetic object in chapter 4. Victorianfictions place in the history of the novel as genre, its relation to philo-sophical debates about the aesthetic, its relation to the developmentof Victorian poetry, are but three aspects of the novels aesthetic historywhich are regrettable causalities of space here.

As biblical criticism suggested the interpretive consequences of rec-ognizing the historical nature of scriptural texts in the nineteenthcentury, many unexceptional Victorian Christians came to realize theextraordinary and often destabilizing affects of reading texts while possessing knowledge of the culture that produced them. Contextual

Francis OGorman

2

interpretation in contemporary literary studies disturbs no bedrock ofnational religious faith, but it is an inheritor of that disturbing, sur-prising, and challenging reading practice nonetheless. The texts con-sidered in this book belong neither to the ancient world nor to thecanons of sacred scripture but their interpretation is unquestionablyand dramatically influenced when the marks that history left on themare, to the best extent, acknowledged and explored. It is in this spiritof sympathetic but searching historicism that this books investigationof some of the most arresting imaginative creations of Victorian Britainis offered to its readers.

Introduction

3

4

Chapter 1

The sun and moonwere made to givethem light: Empire inthe Victorian Novel

Cannon Schmitt

The following famous passage appears early in the first chapter ofCharles Dickenss Dombey and Son (18468):

The earth was made for Dombey and Son to trade in, and the sun andmoon were made to give them light. Rivers and seas were formed tofloat their ships; rainbows gave them promise of fair weather; stars andplanets circled in their orbits, to preserve inviolate a system of whichthey were the centre. Common abbreviations took new meanings in his[Dombeys] eyes, and had sole reference to them. A. D. had no concernwith anno Domini, but stood for anno Dombei and Son. (p. 2)

A concise rendering of Paul Dombey Sr.s sense of himself and hisimportance, this passage appears to epitomize the imperial attitude.Dombey runs a trading firm based in London. As a consequence, thatgreat metropolis constitutes the center around which all else revolves.Other parts of the globe are significant only insofar as they relate toDombey and his pursuits. Not even mentioned by name, they are rep-resented by and assimilated into a natural world (earth, rivers, seas,rainbows) made expressly for Dombeys use. The diction, cadences,and sentiment of the passage are Biblical, reminiscent in particular ofthe first chapter of the Book of Genesis: And God said unto them, Befruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and havedominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and