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HIGH VICTORIAN CULTURE Also by David Morse and published by Falgrave Macmillan AMERICAN ROMANTICISM, Volume 1: From Cooper to Hawthorne AMERICAN ROMANTICISM, Volume 2: From Melville to James ENGLAND'S TIME OF CRISIS: From Shakespeare to Milton PERSPECTIVES ON ROMANTICISM ROMANTICISM: A Structural Analysis High Victorian Culture DAVID MORSE Lecturer in English and American Studies University of Sussex M MACMILLAN © David Morse 1993 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1993 978-0-333-46811-1 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 9HE. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. First published 1993 by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world ISBN 978-1-349-38872-1 ISBN 978-0-230-37806-3 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230378063 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. For Carole Contents Author's Note viii 1 Introduction 1 2 England 47 3 The Menacing World: Dickens, Emily and Charlotte Bronte, and Thackeray 122 4 Keeping the Faith: Newman, F. D. Maurice, Tennyson and Trollope 218 5 Victorian Intellectuals and their Dilemmas: Mill, Huxley, George Eliot and Matthew Arnold 299 6 The Necessity of Art: Browning, Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites 394 7 Breaking the Silence: Collins, Meredith and Hardy 478 Notes 531 Bibliography 539 Index 548 vii Author's Note Although, as I point out in the first chapter, the primary focus of this study of Victorian culture is on the first four Victorian decades, I have not hesitated to go beyond these limits where it seemed appro priate to do so-most notably in the case of Thomas Hardy, where, rather than break off the discussion of his fiction after The Hand of Ethelberta or The Return of the Native, it seemed more appropriate to conclude with Jude the Obscure. I should like to thank my Sussex colleagues Alan Sinfield, Norman Vance, Lindsay Smith and Frank Gloversmith, for reading and com menting on sections of the manuscript. viii 1 Introduction High Victorian Culture is a study of the first four decades of Victorian Britain, from Victoria's accession to the throne in 1837 to her procla mation as Empress of India in 1877-or, to transpose the chronology into a more literary key, it covers an era that runs from Dickens's first novel, The Pickwick Papers (1836-7), to George Eliot's last novel, Daniel Deronda (1876). There has never really been much argument that from the 1870s onwards the landscape of Victorian England is so significantly altered as to make 'late Victorian' an indispensable modification but this has had the unfortunate effect of developing an binary opposition between early and late Victorian, as a result of which several decades between 1850 and 1890 have a way of drop ping out of the picture. This problem has been addressed by the simple and useful expedient of introducing the term 'mid-Victorian' to refer to the 1850s and 1860s, but the danger here, I feel, is of over periodising, of developing a chronological framework that is at once too specific and too unwieldy. The merit of the designation 'High Victorian' from my point of view is that it permits a more detailed, sustained exploration of mid-nineteenth century Britain, whilst hope fully it averts the danger of generalising about 'the Victorians' as if Bulwer-Lytton and W. B. Yeats, Robert Owen and Beatrice Webb somehow inhabited the same cultural world. If it further implies both that this is a period of great literary and intellectual achieve ments and also that they originate from within a relatively homoge neous middle-class elite, amongst whose ranks are many who were fearful of the development of mass culture, then those additional resonances will not be inappropriate. In general, Victorian culture is extraordinarily difficult to generalise about, because of the sheer pace of industrial and social change, and because differences be tween different social classes and between different sections of the British Isles are sharply intensified. An exploration of Victorian 'at titudes' or of a Victorian 'frame of mind' can help to clarify our perceptions of what issues are perceived as being at stake by a middle-class reading public, but there is a great need to ensure that 1
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