The Epic Tradition

Epic occupied a prominent position as the highest test of poetic genius, yet any poet imprudent enough to attempt an epic would be faced with a daunting challenge. For a Victorian poet the attempt to rival Homer or Virgil involved complex considerations of form, theme, and history. The genre was traditionally associated with heroism and masculine strength, mythology, and the shaping of national identity, religion, and war, and with the poet’s own desire to compete with and surpass his predecessors much as epic heroes seek to prove their own supremacy. The reception of ancient epic was an ongoing concern in the period, since Homer in particular was cited as a model in literature, politics, and morality. Matthew Arnold’s prescriptions for translating Homer conveyed a sense of the responsibility involved in disseminating classical texts to a new readership. The Iliad was appropriated in debates on divorce, masculinity, authorship, and the historical criticism of the Bible. The Odyssey offered an alternative, novelistic version of Homeric epic, one which prioritized domesticity and highlighted the poem’s female characters. Some of the most influential creative responses to the epic tradition were not poems in twelve or twenty-four books but verse novels, dramatic monologues, or theatrical burlesques. Others took up the challenge of writing at epic length and addressing national concerns. For aspiring epic poets, there were many choices to be made: should poetry inhabit a mythological world, whether Arthurian (Tennyson’s Idylls of the King or Swinburne’s Tristram of Lyonesse) or Norse (William Morris’s Sigurd the Volsung), or a contemporary domain like that of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh? Might the epic be used to intervene in religious controversies or political conflicts such as Chartism? Could a modern poet be the Virgil of the British Empire? Facing strong competition from the novel, ambitious Victorian poets chose to approach such questions and an astonishing range of themes in a form which evoked vast expanses of time and space, extraordinary physical and intellectual achievement, and literary renown. Yet to achieve recognition as an epic poet remains an unusual distinction. Despite recent critical attention to the proliferation of Victorian poems with epic aspirations, a small number of poems by Tennyson, Barrett Browning, and William Morris have continued to dominate accounts of the genre.

Illustration

Growing interest in book and publishing history and the mass digitization of Victorian periodicals and newspapers has given increasing scholarly significance to the study of book and magazine illustration. While some print forms in the 19th century, notably books aimed at children, comic and satirical magazines and serialized fiction, were heavily dependent on illustration for both their popularity and their formal characteristics, the graphic elements of books have been largely ascribed to a subsidiary role in which illustration reiterated text. More recent scholarship has recognized the complexities of illustrative elements beyond the decorative and become increasingly interested in the way in which images extend, elaborate, or reimagine the textual elements they accompany. In order to begin a more self-consciously analytical account of illustration, scholars have had to engage with two previously dominant traditions of approaching the topic. The first has derived largely from an immediate 19th-century recognition that, in spite of being produced by mechanical reprographic processes, often in huge numbers, illustrations might show considerable aesthetic ambition and artistic achievement. The establishment of a canon of “major” illustrative work that embodies a perception of the most artistically successful images has informed responses ever since. The study of illustration is still limited by the inherited double assumption that illustrations merely decorate texts or else form the less interesting and more commercial work of artists whose major achievements lie elsewhere. More recent work has challenged these assumptions by showing the complex and often highly self-conscious ways in which images reinterpret, restate, or even reinvent the printed words they accompany. The second established response to illustration has been more historical and sociological in its interests: how far does illustration form an accurate or historically significantly account of the society in which it was produced? Until the last twenty years or so there was a general belief that aspects of British history could be “illustrated” from graphic images through a largely unmediated reading of pictorial content. More recent cultural and social historians, however, have turned their attention to the intersection between traditional modes of historical understanding and the history of representation in order to show, sometimes in a highly theorized way, the complex social dynamics of printed images and the various ways in which illustration has been used to influence or construct social attitudes. This listing seeks to bring together entries on the mechanics of reprographic media with sources of information about its practitioners, and to suggest the ways in which recent scholarship is engaging with the key questions raised by previous commentators.

The Supernatural

The supernatural was an important aspect of Victorian society. It pervaded all forms of art and science, as well as Victorians’ daily lives, and its language and metaphors impregnated Victorian culture. The 19th-century understanding of the supernatural was hotly contested, including by theologians. As a result, the category of the supernatural was a slippery one, but it was commonly held that it encompassed both the otherwordly, the strange and the unseen, and the ordinary and the material. The supernatural was as important as the realm of the natural in Victorian times, as is proven by its relevance in political, cultural and religious history and in the incipient entertainment industry. Etymologically speaking, the term ‘supernatural’ refers to what is superior or above nature. However, there are several interpretations of the word ‘supernatural’ which are generally accepted by the critics: preternatural, spiritual or paranormal, and supernatural (the natural and the supernatural inhabit the same ontological space). In Victorian times these three interpretations coexisted. The supernatural belief was understood as a response to “Victorian crisis of faith” and also as part of a broader cultural discourse about scientific knowledge and modern society. The rapid secularization of the Victorian period also allowed for the emergence of new systems of beliefs that renegotiated ways of dealing with the spiritual and the material. In fiction, the fashion for the unknown and the otherworldly coincided with the burgeoneing interest in ghost stories, and it showed connections with sensation fiction, and the Victorian gothic. Authors such as Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, M. R. James, Rhoda Broughton, Henry James, Richard Marsh, Arthur Conan Doyle, Bram Stoker, and Vernon Lee explored the supernatural in its various guises in their works. Some of them openly expressed their belief in the supernatural. Also, the supernatural maintained close links with the professionalization of science and the establishment of psychology, and the advent of new media such as telegraphy, photography, and cinema, which were at first regarded as occult phenomena. This article mainly focuses on secondary critical material, organized in thematic sections that testify to the relevance of the supernatural in the Victorian period, from the emergence of spiritualism as a system of belief and its intrinsic connections with science and technology, to folklore, and finally to the persistence of the supernatural in contemporary imagination through the critical master trope of haunting and spectrality, as well as in “Neo-Victorianism” as examined in the article in Oxford Bibliographies in Victorian Literature by Jessica Cox.

Publishing

Over the course of the 19th century, British publishing evolved unevenly from a handcrafted industry run by gentleman publishers to the modern industrialized mass media of the 20th century. At the same time, the period witnessed a massive increase in the size of the reading public due to population growth and increased literacy. These changes affected all aspects and levels of literary production. For authors, the increase in publishing output meant more opportunities to earn a living at writing, particularly for women writers and especially in the fields of literature and journalism. For publishers, the growing demand for print materials led to the adoption of mechanized production and the cultivation of a mass market for print. For readers, the increasing abundance of print materials at decreasing prices created a mass market where thousands of publications competed for readers’ eyes and pennies. To take the novel as one example, early in the century a new novel frequently appeared in an expensive three-volume edition of 500 copies priced at 31s 6d (thirty-one shillings and sixpence) each, a price well out of the range of the majority of readers who then depended on circulating libraries for access. By the end of the century, a new novel typically appeared in a one-volume edition of thousands of copies priced at 3s 6d or 6s each, an appealing price for nearly all middle-class readers. Magazine publication followed a similar transition: in the 1830s, monthly magazines such as Bentley’s Miscellany cost 2s 6d; at midcentury, monthly magazines such as the Cornhill cost 1s; and by century’s end, monthly magazines such as the Strand cost 6d, with stark increases in circulation. Past scholarship of publishing has often focused on the history of one author’s or publisher’s experiences in publishing: for instance, the descriptive bibliography of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s editions of poems or the general history of William Blackwood’s publishing company. Based on this well-developed bibliographical foundation, recent scholarship has been influenced by the development of book history as a field—the History of the Book, sometimes called print history or print culture, focuses on the authorship, production, and reading of books as a material practice. Broadly speaking, the history of the book investigates book production as an important cultural practice: in what ways do the interactions between authors, publishers, and readers affect what print material is produced? Alternately, how do social forces—such as class and gender—affect the production and consumption of print materials? The history of the book field has greatly widened our scope of study to, among other things, the lives of lesser-known authors, the business practices of publishers, and the experiences of readers: for example, on the experiences of women authors in the literary marketplace, the adoption of steam-powered presses by magazine publishers, or the changing tastes of children readers.

Elizabeth Robins

Elizabeth Robins (b. 1862–d. 1952) was an American actress, novelist, playwright, short story author, suffragist campaigner, journalist, and theatre manager who spent most of her career in Britain. A key champion of Ibsen’s plays in England, she founded her own theatre company along with fellow actress Marion Lea in order to produce some of Ibsen’s plays, premiering roles such as Hedda Gabler and Hilde Wangel. As a dramatist, she is best known for her play Votes for Women! (1907), which played a central role in the suffrage movement. Her anonymously published and performed play Alan’s Wife (1893), coauthored with Lady Florence Bell, explored taboo themes such as infanticide, postpartum depression, and euthanasia. She wrote many works of fiction under the pseudonym C. E. Raimond. Her unpublished works, housed in the New York University Library’s Fales Collection, are extensive and largely unexplored, and include letters, diaries, journals, promptbooks, plays, novels, and other prose works. Robins was born in Kentucky, and spent much of her childhood on Staten Island, New York. Her mother’s mental health in decline (she died in an institution in 1901), Robins developed a close relationship with her youngest brother, Raymond, and also found support in her grandmother. Robins grew interested in drama and at age nineteen embarked on a stage career, first in New York and then in Boston. She married fellow actor George Richmond Parks in 1885. Two years later, he committed suicide by walking into the Charles River wearing a suit of stage armor. Robins then went on a grueling tour across the country with Edwin Booth before making England her home from the mid-1880s onward, though she remained an American citizen. Her lucky break came with the plays of Ibsen, who was then beginning to be staged in Britain. Robins’s last stage appearance was in 1902. For the remainder of her long career, Robins wrote constantly, both nonfiction and fiction, and continued to spearhead the women’s suffrage movement. She helped direct the feminist journal Time and Tide in the 1920s. Although firmly aligned with feminism and a leading New Woman writer, Robins moved in circles whose members have become part of a male-centric canon (James, Shaw, Wilde, Masefield, and many others), and critical reception and interpretation of her work have often been fractured because of this diffused identity across many different areas of work, as well as her own ambivalence about marriage and motherhood (she remained single and childless). Robins has long been studied by theatre historians, feminist studies scholars, and Ibsen specialists and is now receiving attention for her relevance to medical humanities, as her work deals extensively with hereditary disease, euthanasia, women and illness, female alcoholism, biological determinism, and mental disorder. Much scholarship still remains to be done, particularly on her prose fiction and in mining the vast archives of unpublished material in the Fales Collection.

France

What kind of knowledge did the Victorians have about 19th-century France, and what were their representations of France during a period that saw the 1830 revolution and the July Monarchy followed by the 1848 revolution, the Second Republic, and the rise of Napoleon III, which ended with the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and the advent of the Third Republic? The answer to these questions implies finding out what sources the Victorians could use to acquire this information. This, in turn, means looking at the Victorians’ distant perception of France, but also at their experience of France as travelers or residents in the country, or even at the impressions conveyed upon them by French people who, for various reasons, were led to travel or reside in Victorian Britain. Admiration, vilification, interactions, cooperation, and misunderstandings are some of the words that crop up most frequently in the bibliographical references that follow. This article will be looking at what could be read about France in Victorian literature—especially travel literature and travel guides—but also in newspapers of the time. It will also consider Victorian translations of French literature and the publishers involved in promoting French literature in Britain. The learning of French in Britain, as well as Victorian views on French education, will be taken into account, as will Victorian perceptions of French political events and representations of France and the French by Victorian visual artists. Last but not least, the role of commerce, universal exhibitions, and art exhibitions will be considered.

Ouida

“Ouida” (b. 1839–d. 1908) was the pen name of Marie Louise Ramé (altered to Marie Louise de la Ramée), one of the most prolific and popular writers of the late 19th century. Ouida produced twenty-nine novels, two volumes of essays, numerous short stories, and an extensive body of journalism, attracting a remarkably diverse, international readership that included contemporary admirers such as Oscar Wilde, Jack London, John Ruskin, and Max Beerbohm. Her early romances, which combined features of sensation fiction, the silver-fork novel, and the military adventure narrative, were prized by her readership (and derided by the critical establishment) for their scandalous, glamorized depictions of high society. Her later novels set in Italy (where she settled in 1871) drew the admiration of contemporary writers for their poetic landscapes and politically scathing portrayals of peasant suffering. Society novels from the final decades of her career presented satirical portraits of European fin-de-siècle decadence, even as her journalism took a polemical turn to such issues as the woman question, antivivisectionism, British colonialism, and Italian politics. Maligned in the popular press as a scandalous eccentric, Ouida nevertheless sustained a career as an unmarried, self-supporting woman writer that provides a fascinating window into contemporaneous celebrity culture. The damage done to her reputation by the popular press and her principal biographers, as well as the stylistic excesses of her fiction, contributed to her exclusion from the modernist literary canon. Aside from minimal interest sustained through film adaptations of Under Two Flags and A Dog of Flanders, she remained relatively unknown in the 20th century. Although her novels feature sexually transgressive, independent females and vehement attacks on the institution of marriage, Ouida was largely ignored in the feminist revision of the literary canon, primarily due to her vocal opposition to many feminist causes, best exemplified by her attack on the New Woman (which she is credited with naming in an 1894 essay denouncing the type). A few exceptional studies in the late 20th century linking her works with sensation fiction and aestheticism led to new critical interest. The 2008 centenary of her death marked the publication of the first book-length survey of her novels, as well as international conferences in England and Italy that produced outstanding volumes of essays. Subsequent Ouida scholarship from perspectives as varied as print culture studies, adaptation theory, ecocriticism, and queer theory suggests that Ouida’s oeuvre is a fertile field for academic study.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Dante Gabriel Rossetti—major founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, leader of the Aesthetic movement, a key influential figure on Victorian poetry and art—is widely recognized as the Victorian poet-painter genius who defied Victorian conventions in his life and work. Rossetti’s first book, The Early Italian Poets (1861), which includes Dante’s Vita Nuova, introduced medieval Italian poetry to English audiences; a decade later in 1874 his Dante and His Circle was primarily a revision of his early book concentrating on Dante. Beginning with watercolors, inspired by medieval literary works and paintings on religious subjects, Rossetti switched in the second phase of his career to sensuous Venetian-style oil paintings of voluptuous femme fatales distinguished by their long necks, luxuriant flowing hair, and rosebud mouths. Throughout his career, Rossetti often interwove literature and art by either seeking the inspiration of his sensuous women in literature or by composing sonnets as companion pieces to the paintings. In this respect, neither the verbal (often the spiritual or psychological) nor the visual or physical, may be interpreted in isolation; the picture poem must be experienced in its totality. Unlike William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais, Rossetti never exhibited, but he worked on private commissions. Dante Gabriel Rossetti has attracted innumerable Victorian, modern, and postmodern works on his poetry and painting, ranging from interpretive, biographical, psychoanalytical to sociopolitical and cultural studies, to name but a few. It is just about impossible to subsume all these works under categories that this iconoclastic genius (who resisted any limitations imposed by his critics) would possibly approve. Scholars interested in Rossetti’s poetry and prose may have access to various Victorian editions and modern collections. Comprehensive and authoritative, as well as an invaluable resource for beginning and advanced scholars, the Rossetti Archive includes his poetry, prose, correspondence, and strikingly beautiful reproductions of his drawings, watercolors, illustrations, and paintings. Rossetti’s eccentric lifestyle has attracted numerous biographies. Gender, race, class, and politics in Rossetti’s works, poetical and painterly, are also subjects explored by postmodern scholars. Exhibits and catalogues of Rossetti’s paintings abound, ranging from those devoted to specific time periods or subjects in Rossetti’s art—such as literary topics, his double works of art, portraiture, aesthetic representations of beauty—to the connections of his art with other Pre-Raphaelites. The reciprocal influence on other contemporary poets and artists, in particular Pre-Raphaelite painters, the impact of his art on aesthetes, symbolists, and modern artists are also subjects of interpretive criticism and exhibits. Though Rossetti did not compose music, his poetry has inspired several popular musical compositions. His notorious lifestyle, on the other hand, has been the subject of works of fiction, television, theater and film, most of which have taken liberties with biographical information in attempts to make it even more sensational to postmodern audiences.

Crime and Punishment

The study of Victorian crime and punishment is a rich area of research that has attracted the interest not only of literary scholars but also of social historians, legal historians, and criminologists. Related scholarship therefore often situates itself at the intersection of a number of traditional disciplinary boundaries, facilitating interdisciplinary conversation. Crime and punishment was a pressing issue for the Victorians and provoked a wealth of responses from contemporaneous commentators in literature, culture, science, and politics. As a new phase of industrialization brought immense wealth for some and abject poverty for others, Victorian urban centers in particular were afflicted by crime, which spurred efforts to establish systems of social regulation such as the new Metropolitan Police in 1829, a plain-clothes “detective department” in 1842, concerted efforts to set up urban police forces across the 1840s, and, after 1856, a compulsory nationwide system of uniformed law enforcement. However, without an effective system of social welfare in place, social inequality and deprivation drove women, men, and children into petty crime and more serious offenses, often resulting in severe punishment ranging from incarceration via penal transportation (abolished 1868) to hanging. Public executions, not abolished until 1868, attracted huge crowds of spectators, including authors such as Charles Dickens and William Thackeray, who wrote about these experiences. Popular street literature also conveyed, illustrated (and thus contextualized) these events for a broad, diverse audience. Execution broadsides of famous cases, printing the alleged last lamentations of convicts on the scaffold in verse, are estimated to have sold by the million. Elsewhere, new (and more expensive) periodicals and magazines, particularly from the mid-Victorian era onward, began to publish regular features that summarized the most recent criminal occurrences – not just from their local area, but from up and down the country. As the legal system itself was undergoing reform (comprising changes in legal evidence procedure, divorce law, women’s property rights, and punishment for sexual offenses, for example), sensational trials caused furor and stimulated commentary in literature and the media. Crime and punishment was discussed in a range of literary and popular genres, poetry, and reformist writing. The “Newgate School” of fiction was accused of glamorizing crime, and the popular penny dreadfuls were feared as vehicles to corrupt public morals. Sensational fiction in the 1860s, which often drew on real-life criminal cases and newspaper reports, depicted the supposedly respectable middle-class family home as a center of transgression. “Detective fiction” emerged fully and drastically diversified in this era, in some incarnations choosing to focus on crime in the world of the middle classes, while others drew upon the power of the uniformed police to penetrate and explore socially inaccessible spaces such as urban slums. For the student new to the subject of crime and punishment, therefore, this area’s interdisciplinary nature can pose an initial and substantial challenge.

Devotional Verse

Perhaps what best defines the Victorian period are the various fluctuations and developments within religious culture that punctuate its timeline. A dominant and crucial strand within Victorian society, religious culture found many expressions, particularly within the arts. The output of what we can call “devotional verse” is one very rich aspect of this culture. The most common feature of devotional verse is the presence of a speaker who seeks self-definition through a source that is felt to be external to and/or greater or other than the self. It is therefore a flexible and potentially very powerful genre—something that contributed to its wide appeal and usage during the Victorian period. A large body of religious poetry makes up this genre, and this is most frequently situated within the various branches of the Christian tradition. The broad topic of devotional verse also necessarily encompasses the huge corpus of 19th-century hymnody, which, in the Victorian period, was almost exclusively Christian. Devotional verse by general definition is, of course, not limited to the expression of religious devotion. Devotion to political causes of the period was expressed in verse form as much as devotion to a person or an idea, for example. Literary form is an important aspect of criticism on devotional verse. This is as much in the way particular forms, such as the hymn, ode, or sonnet can be identified with the devotional mode, as well as the extent to which the meaning of a poem or hymn can be shaped by its form, or indeed by its deviation from the form and its particular associations. For example, in Christina Rossetti’s Verses (Chiefly collected from her devotional writings) (1893), religious concepts and secular concerns come together in a devotional mode of delivery, and, as such, are classified as “devotional.” Many well-known Victorian poets are associated with the genre of devotional verse, such as Alfred Lord Tennyson, Christina Rossetti, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Matthew Arnold. Some of these also wrote hymns. However, as scholarship on devotional verse increases in its breadth of interest, more “devotional” aspects of poetic writing, as well as individual poets, are being paid critical attention. In a similar way, as scholarship on hymnody of the period expands beyond the well-known Victorian hymnists such as John Keble, “Mrs.” Cecil Frances Alexander, John Mason Neale, Reginald Heber, and Frances Ridley Havergal, so too do the parameters by which we measure the “traditional” hymn. Although the pursuit of reading and researching Victorian devotional verse is primary a literary one, an understanding of the unique climate of religious culture during the Victorian period is helpful. The devotional verse and hymnody of this era can be said to be characteristically “Victorian” in a number of ways, particularly in the way “devotion” takes its shape, reflecting the religious, familial, political, and sexual aspects of devotion with their particularly Victorian inflections. These features do not easily cohere and are often contradictory and even oppositional in nature, reflecting the mutable aspect and continuing debates surrounding devotional verse of the Victorian period.