ARMSTRONG

BAKER and
Essays, short stories and poems by eminent creative writers, legenda is a joint imprint

Form and Feeling in Modern Literature

critics and scholars from three continents celebrate the lit­ of the Modern Humanities
erary achievements of Barbara Hardy, the foremost exponent Research Association and
of close critical reading in the latter half of the twentieth Routledge. Titles range
century and today. Her work, as the essays in the volume bear from medieval texts to
witness, encompasses 19th and 20th century British fiction, contemporary cinema and
poetry, and Shakespeare. In addition to an introduction form a widely comparative
outlining and assessing Hardy’s career and writing, there is view of the modern
an extensive bibliography of her work. Comparatively short, humanities.
concise essays, stories and poems by twenty distinguished
hands express the eclectic nature of Barbara Hardy’s work and
themselves form a many-faceted critical/creative gathering.

Form and Feeling

Form and Feeling moves away from the traditional festschrift
to create an innovative critical genre that reflects the variety
and nature of its subject’s work.

in Modern Literature
In addition to Barbara Hardy’s own writing, authors and
subjects treated include Anglo-Welsh poetry, nineteenth
century fiction, Margaret Atwood, Wilkie Collins, Ivy
Compton Burnet, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Elizabeth
Gaskell, G. M. Hopkins, Wyndham Lewis, George Meredith,
Alice Meynell, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Shakespeare, and
W. B. Yeats, amongst others. Essays in Honour of Barbara Hardy

Edited by William Baker with Isobel Armstrong

ISBN 978-1-907975-37-0

cover illustration: Front: Gustave Doré (1832–83),

plate ix, canto iii, from Dante’s Inferno, translated by the
Rev. Henry Francis Cary (1857). Above: Barbara Hardy
9 781907 975370 in 1989, by kind permission of Kate Hardy. Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge

Baker-9781907975370-cover.indd 1 19/1/13 00:22:19

Form and Feeling in Modern Literature
Essays in Honour of Barbara Hardy
 LEgEnda
legenda , founded in 1995 by the European Humanities Research Centre of
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 Editorial Board
Chairman
Professor Colin Davis, Royal Holloway, University of London

Professor Malcolm Cook, University of Exeter (French)

Professor Robin Fiddian, Wadham College, Oxford (Spanish)
Professor Anne Fuchs, University of Warwick (German)
Professor Paul Garner, University of Leeds (Spanish)
Professor Andrew Hadfield, University of Sussex (English)
Professor Marian Hobson Jeanneret,
Queen Mary University of London (French)
Professor Catriona Kelly, New College, Oxford (Russian)
Professor Martin McLaughlin, Magdalen College, Oxford (Italian)
Professor Martin Maiden, Trinity College, Oxford (Linguistics)
Professor Peter Matthews, St John’s College, Cambridge (Linguistics)
Dr Stephen Parkinson, Linacre College, Oxford (Portuguese)
Professor Suzanne Raitt, William and Mary College, Virginia (English)
Professor Ritchie Robertson, The Queen’s College, Oxford (German)
Professor David Shepherd, Keele University (Russian)
Professor Michael Sheringham, All Souls College, Oxford (French)
Professor Alison Sinclair, Clare College, Cambridge (Spanish)
Professor David Treece, King’s College London (Portuguese)

Managing Editor
Dr Graham Nelson
41 Wellington Square, Oxford ox1 2jf, UK

www.legendabooks.com
Barbara Hardy, photographed in 1989
By kind permission of Kate Hardy
Form and Feeling in Modern Literature
Essays in Honour of Barbara Hardy

Edited by William Baker with Isobel Armstrong

Modern Humanities Research association and Routledge

2013
 First published 2013

Published by the
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 Contents
❖

Acknowledgements ix
Notes on the Contributors x
PART I: THE WORK OF BAR BAR A HARDY
1 Introduction 2
isobel armstrong
2 A New Voice in Criticism: The Early Work of Barbara Hardy 11
sybil oldfield
PART II: THE ART OF NARR ATIVE
3 The Shakespearean Nights of Robert Louis Stevenson 20
peter l. caracciolo
4 Wilkie Collins’s Basil: A Story of Modern Life: An Author’s Search
for an Appropriate Form 29
william baker
5 The Absent Dog: Great Expectations 43
beryl gray
6 Moments of Suspension in Dickens 51
john rignall
7 Hamlet’s Revenge; or, Mr Q Strikes Back 59
michael slater
8 The Mill on the Floss and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism 63
george levine
9 Scenes of Reading Romola 75
margaret harris
PART III: THE ART OF POETRY
10 Aesthetics, Visuality and Feelings in the Natural Theology of
Gerard Manley Hopkins and Alice Meynell 88
hilary fraser
11 The Wanderings of Yeats and Oisin 100
ronald schuchard
12 Poetry and Magic; or, Thinking through Form and Feeling; or,
The Uses of Unpleasure 111
deryn rees-jones
viii Contents

PART IV: WRITING WOMEN AND CHILDR EN

13 Misogyny on Trial: Shakespeare and Honour Killing 122
loraine fletcher
14 Jeanie Deans and Narrative Method in The Heart of Mid-Lothian 132
martin dodsworth
15 Abjection and the Nineteenth-Century Novel: When is a Human
Not a Human? 145
isobel armstrong
16 The Image of Childhood in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss and
Silas Marner 152
alain jumeau
17 Tellers and Listeners: The Narrative Imagination of Carol Shields 160
coral ann howells
PART V: FICTIONS
18 Eleanor Mear’s Tea Party 172
janet el-rayess
19 The Tailor’s Dummy 177
sue roe
APPENDIX: BAR BAR A HARDY
20 A Short Biography 184
21 A Primary and Secondary Bibliography 1948–2012 185
william baker
Index 204
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
v

The editors wish to thank all the contributors for their help and encouragement
with this volume. Thanks are also due to G. R. Ronald Barshinger and colleagues at
the Northern Illinois University Libraries Information Delivery Services, Professor
Donald Hawes and Professor Hilary Fraser of Birkbeck College University of
London for their wise advice concerning problems that arose, Kelsey Ann Williams
of Northern Illinois University for sensibly and intelligently helping prepare the
text for the publisher, and to Graham Nelson of Legenda for being such a patient
and understanding publisher. Of course it goes without saying that this volume
would not have been possible without the life and work and inspiration of Barbara
Hardy.

w.b. & i.a., November 2012

 Notes on the Contributors
v

ISOBEL ARMSTRONG is a Fellow of the British Academy and Emeritus Professor

of English (Geoffrey Tillotson Chair) at Birkbeck, University of London. She
has published widely on nineteenth-century literature and culture and feminist
thought. She has lectured and taught in many contexts, including Harvard and
Johns Hopkins University. Among her works are a critical history of Victorian
poetry (1993) and a co-edited anthology of nineteenth-century women’s poetry
(1996). Her most recent book, Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the Imagination,
1830–1880, won the Modern Language Association’s James Russell Lowell Prize
for the best book of 2008. Poems by her appeared in an anthology of poetry by
women, edited by Carrie Etter, Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by U.K. Women
Poets, (Shearsman, 2010).
WILLIAM BAKER is Distinguished Research Professor, and University Board
of Trustees Professor, Northern Illinois University. His current projects include
completing the fourth volume of The Letters of George Henry Lewes, with New George
Eliot Letters and editing George Henry Lewes’s Diaries. He was a student of Barbara
Hardy at the University of London from 1966–70, where she supervised his Master
of Philosophy dissertation on George Eliot and Judaism. He is the author, co-author
or editor of more than 25 books and over 140 refereed articles, and co-edits The
Year’s Work in English Studies and edits George Eliot–George Henry Lewes Studies. His
critical work ranges from books on Wilkie Collins to studies of Harold Pinter, Jane
Austen and Shakespeare.
PETER L. CARACCIOLO was Senior Lecturer in English at Royal Holloway
College, until 1998, and during 2000–01 was Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute
of English Studies, Senate House, University of London. Subsequently a member
of an international forum on The Arabian Nights based at the School of Oriental
and African Studies, London, he retains an active interest in Oriental inf luences on
English Literature. Since its first appearance in Middle Eastern Literatures (Volume
7, 2004), his essay on the debt that the novel genre owes to the Nights, ‘The House
of Fiction and le jardin anglo-chinois’, has twice been republished. However, because
of failing sight, his attention is now largely focused on the elephant in the room of
Modernism and he is preparing a study of Wyndham Lewis and Cosmic Man.
JANET EL-RAYESS was a student of Barbara Hardy at Birkbeck College, London,
from 1975–79, and later worked for several years as her research assistant. She
became a member of the Birkbeck Poetry Workshop, founded by Barbara in 1983,
and has had poems published in magazines and anthologies in Britain and America.
Her poetry collection Summer Visitors came out in July 2012. She translated Il Ricordo
 Notes on the Contributors xi

della Basca: Remembering the Basque Girl, a collection of short stories by Antonio
Delfini, and some of the translated stories were published in Volumes 9, 10 and
12 of the Cork Literary Review. She is currently completing a collection of her own
stories and novellas.
LORAINE FLETCHER took her BA at Reading University (1962), her MA at
Arizona State University (1985) and her PhD with Barbara Hardy at Birkbeck
(1993). Her thesis, on the late-eighteenth-century poet and novelist Charlotte
Smith, was made into a book, Charlotte Smith: A Critical Biography. She has published
mainly on Austen and other woman writers of the Romantic period, and also on
Shakespeare and Stevenson. She has taught for most of her life, most recently at
Reading University, and is now retired.
HILARY FRASER is Geoffrey Tillotson Professor in Nineteenth-Century Studies
and Executive Dean for the School of Arts at Birkbeck College, University of
London. She is Director of Birkbeck’s Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies and
Editor of its online journal ‘19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth
Century’. Her most recent book is Gender and the Victorian Periodical, with Judith
Johnston and Stephanie Green (2003). Earlier books include Beauty and Belief:
Aesthetics and Religion in Victorian Literature (1986), The Victorians and Renaissance Italy
(1992), and, with Daniel Brown, English Prose of the Nineteenth Century (1997). She is
currently working on an AHRC-funded project Gender, History, Visuality: Women
Writing Art History in the Nineteenth Century.
BERYL GRAY lectured for many years for the Faculty of Continuing Education at
Birkbeck, University of London. She is the co-editor of The George Eliot Review.
Her publications include George Eliot and Music, and a wide range of articles
relating to George Eliot, Dickens, and Jane Carlyle. She has a special interest in the
perception and place of the dog in nineteenth-century culture and in the writings
of particular Victorians, and is completing a book on Dickens and dogs, to be called
Curs and Companions: The Dog in the Dickensian Imagination.
MARGARET HARRIS is Director of Research Development in the Faculty of Arts
and Social Sciences at the University of Sydney, and formerly Challis Professor of
English Literature. She edited The Journals of George Eliot, with Judith Johnston
(1998), and has published extensively on Victorian fiction and Australian literature.
Barbara Hardy supervised her PhD thesis on George Meredith.
CORAL ANN HOWELLS is Professor Emerita of English and Canadian Literature,
University of Reading, and Senior Research Fellow, Institute of English Studies,
University of London. She has lectured and published extensively on contemporary
Canadian women’s fiction in English. Her first book, Love, Mystery and Misery:
Feeling in Gothic Fiction (1978; 2nd edn 1999), was based on her PhD thesis with
Barbara Hardy; her other publications include Private and Fictional Words (1987),
Margaret Atwood (1997; 2nd edn 2005), Alice Munro (1998) and Contemporary Canadian
Women’s Fiction: Refiguring Identities (2003). She is editor of the Cambridge Companion
to Margaret Atwood (2006) which won the Atwood Society Prize for Best Book in
2007, and co-editor with Eva-Marie Kroller of the Cambridge History of Canadian
xii Notes on the Contributors

Literature (2009). She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and is currently
co-editing a volume of the Oxford History of the Novel in English.
ALAIN JUMEAU, a former student of the École normale supérieure, is Emeritus
Professor at the University of Paris-Sorbonne, director of the international journal
Études Anglaises and Honorary President of the Society of French Victorianists
(Société Française d’Études Victoriennes et Édouardiennes). He has published
widely on several Victorian prose-writers and novelists (particularly on George
Eliot, his major interest). He has also translated into French George Eliot’s The
Mill on the Floss (Gallimard, 2003) and Daniel Deronda (Gallimard, 2010), other
nineteenth-century novels by Walter Scott, R. L. Stevenson and Anthony Trollope,
together with short stories by Thomas De Quincey and Arthur Conan Doyle.
GEORGE LEVINE is Professor Emeritus, Rutgers University. Currently at work on
a book on money in Victorian fiction, he has written extensively on the Victorian
novel (The Realistic Imagination, How to Read the Victorian Novel) and on the relations
between science and literature, particularly in regard to Darwin (Darwin and the
Novelists, Darwin Loves You, and Darwin the Writer). Among his other work are
Dying to Know, and many edited volumes including, most recently, The Cambridge
Companion to George Eliot and The Joy of Secularism.
SYBIL OLDFIELD is Research Reader in English, University of Sussex and Hon.
Research Associate, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Her books include:
Spinsters of This Parish: The Life and Times of F. M. Mayor and Mary Sheepshanks
(1984); Women Against the Iron Fist: Alternatives to Militarism, 1900–1989 (1989);
Collective Biography of Women in Britain, 1550–1900 (1999); Women Humanitarians: A
Biographical Dictionary of British Women Active 1900–1950 (2001); Afterwords: Letters
on the Death of Virginia Woolf (2005) and Jeanie, an ‘Army of One’: Mrs Nassau Senior,
1828–1877: The First Woman in Whitehall (2008).
DERYN REES-JONES is Professor of Poetry at the University of Liverpool. A poet
and critic, her most recent books are Consorting with Angels: Modern Women Poets
(2005), an edition of Marie Stopes’s novel, Love’s Creation (2012), and Burying the
Wren (Seren, 2012), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. In 2010 she received
a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors, for lifetime achievement in
poetry.
JOHN RIGNALL is Emeritus Reader at the University of Warwick. His publications
include Realist Fiction and the Strolling Spectator (1992), George Eliot: European Novelist
(2011), and, as editor, George Eliot and Europe (1997) and the Oxford Reader’s
Companion to George Eliot (2000).
SUE ROE is a biographer, poet and novelist. Her latest book is a group biography,
The Private Lives of the Impressionists, which has been translated into seven languages.
She is also the author of Gwen John: A Life. Her poetry is published regularly in
literary journals including Agenda.
RONALD SCHUCHARD, Goodrich C. White Professor of English, Emeritus, at
Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, and member of the American Academy of
 Notes on the Contributors xiii

Arts and Sciences, is the author of numerous studies of modern authors, particularly
T. S. Eliot and W. B. Yeats. His The Last Minstrels: Yeats and the Revival of the Bardic
Arts (2008), won the Robert Rhodes Prize. His Eliot’s Dark Angel (1999) won the
Robert Penn Warren-Cleanth Brooks Award for Outstanding Literary Criticism
and the annual SAMLA Studies Award for the best book published by a member of
the South Atlantic Modern Language Association. He is the editor of T. S. Eliot’s
Clark and Turnbull Lectures, The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry (Faber and Faber,
1993; Harcourt Brace, 1994), and co-editor with John Kelly of The Collected Letters
of W. B. Yeats, Volume 3 (1994), Volume 4 (2005), which won the Modern Language
Association’s Morton N. Cohen Award for a Distinguished Volume of Letters, and
Volume 5, which will appear in 2013. A former director of the Yeats International
Summer School, he is founder-director of the T. S. Eliot International Summer
School at the Institute of English Studies, University of London.
MICHAEL SLATER lectured in English at Birkbeck College, University of London,
from 1965, retiring with title of Emeritus Professor of Victorian Studies in 2001.
Barbara Hardy was one of the contributors to his first book on Dickens, Dickens
1970 (1970). Since that date he has published many other books on Dickens as well
as editions of works by him, including Dickens and Women (1973) and Charles Dickens
(2009). He also published Douglas Jerrold, 1803–1857 (2002). Between 1990 and 2000
he edited, in four volumes, The Dent Uniform Edition of Dickens’s Journalism (vol. 4
with John Drew). He is a Past President of the International Dickens Fellowship and
the Dickens Society of America. His latest book, The Great Charles Dickens Scandal,
was published in autumn 2012.
 part I
v

The Work of Barbara Hardy

 — 1 —

Introduction
Isobel Armstrong

On 5 November 2011 a conference on the Brontës was held at the University of

London Institute of English Studies. I heard the contribution Barbara made to it.
Quite distinct from the mark of the formal academic paper, her contribution was a
stunning reading from her recently published collection of short stories, Dorothea’s
Daughter and Other Nineteenth-Century Postscripts. This collection weaves haunting
narratives from the lacunae, loose ends, and unspoken possibilities in the endings
of the great novels of the nineteenth century — the forever hidden narrative secrets
in Mansfield Park, Jane Eyre, The Mill on the Floss, Middlemarch, for example. Her Jane
Eyre story, the one she read on that occasion, was about the forgotten history of
Adèle, Rochester’s illegitimate daughter. What happens to her? Jane and Rochester’s
baby son grows apace, but what of the illegitimate child in this triad? Barbara’s story
wonderfully intuits Rochester’s egocentric uneasiness about his daughter, a feeling
that has been lying in Charlotte Brontë’s narrative, awaiting development. In
another marvellous reading of the unsaid, she picks up on one of the final sentences
in the Conclusion to The Mill on the Floss. One of the two men who visited the
tomb of Tom and Maggie Tulliver ‘visited the tomb again with a sweet face beside
him’. The unwary reader, and the reader longing to assuage the pain of this novel,
might assume that the ‘sweet face’ was that of Lucy, accompanying Stephen Guest
on his pilgrimage of love and penitence and expressing her own forgiveness. But not
Barbara. She understands George Eliot’s reticence, her refusal of easy gratification,
and builds imaginatively upon it.
Barbara’s presentation was not a simple, straightforward reading of her paratext.
She commented upon her narrative step by step, speaking of her choices, her
reading of the novel. It was a rigorous analysis of narrative art, both that of Brontë
and her own, a revelation of the complexities of feeling and form. Her stories come
from a lifetime of absolute immersion in the fiction of the nineteenth century, its
tellers and listeners, its feeling and form, and what can only be described as the sheer
joy of imaginative and analytical discovery.
Because of this buoyant, bold, and ever-present creativity, the customary words
that give homage to an illustrious and majestic scholarly career are hardly adequate
for this ever-inventive scholar-creator. Beginning with The Novels of George Eliot, in
1959, Barbara is the author of countless critical studies. But we need to remember,
to understand the richness of her criticism, that the energy that made that first book
a great and innovative work has also been the impetus for two collections of poetry,
The Severn Bridge (2001) and The Yellow Carpet (2006), a novel, London Lovers (1997),
 Introduction 3

an autobiography, Swansea Girl (1993), and the short stories of 2011 with which I
began. She has just completed a cycle of poems on Dante, based on reading Dante
in the original, a labour of six years.
It is appropriate that Barbara’s most recent post has been as a lecturer in creative
writing at the University of Sussex. She is a great teacher. For years she has run a
very democratic Poetry Workshop at Birkbeck, and has also convened a Writers’
Workshop with a rather different remit. Birkbeck, the London college that has been
her home for most of her career, both as lecturer and professor (apart from a short
period as Professor of English at Royal Holloway College), is a perfect fit with her
socialist and egalitarian values, since its mission is to give a new chance to students
who have been excluded from higher education. Birkbeck was also a good context
for breaking the mould of women academics. As a mother and a teacher when this
combination was rare and even shocking, Barbara has been a role model for women
working in the universities. Her feminism shines in her life and work. The Welsh
background that is such a powerful part of her life as a writer and academic, gave
her, I think, a liberating sense of belonging to a rich culture that was to the side
of English academic mores and conventions. It meant that she could maintain a
buoyant, vigorous independence that challenged the unexamined assumptions of
academic life.
Her first book, The Novels of George Eliot, burst upon a critical community
preoccupied either with belles lettrist criticism or with highly prescriptive empi­
rical historical scholarship. It had a liberating effect. No one before this had
attempted to take the close reading strategies of Leavisian criticism into a detailed
and comprehensive reading of the fictional oeuvre of a nineteenth-century novelist.
It was a first, an imaginative and original work that initiated the now enormous
field of George Eliot studies. This book has been such a profound inf luence on
the reading of George Eliot and its canonical views have been so assimilated
into critical discussion that people quote them without realizing their source
in Barbara’s critical imagination. The famous paired scenes in Adam Bede, for
instance, when Dinah looks outward through her window, and Hetty gazes into
the mirror, were first discussed in detail by Barbara. Likewise, her formal analysis
of Middlemarch in terms of rotating plots and parallelism was the first to understand
this pattern.
The Novels of George Eliot was sub-titled A Study in Form. Form and what it means
has fascinated Barbara throughout her writing life. A pre-established account of
form as a kind of skeleton was not to her purpose, but she insisted that James’s image
of the nineteenth-century novel as a loose baggy monster was also misleading:
instead it was necessary to elicit the ‘highly complicated and intricate organizations’
and patterns of Eliot’s novels from the ‘human material it is shaping’.1 To recognize
Eliot’s formal power ‘we must put aside the simple notions of the lucid or single
well-made story, and recognize that the form of the novel can mean the cooperation
of a large number of forms within the novel. The form of the novel must certainly
be thought of in terms of its f low and continuity, though this is by no means the
only way of approaching narrative form’ (p. 5). The arousal of ‘narrative curiosity’
(p. 5) is bound up with narrative form. Barbara’s interest has always been in a double
4 Isobel Armstrong

relationship, the writer and the reader. This commitment to the reader accounts for
the exemplary clarity and boldness of her writing style, which always honours the
reader’s need to be invited into discussion.
Her book on Eliot went way beyond the accepted categories of character and plot
current at the time. She considered the novel as tragedy, for instance, the patterning
of character, and its moral implications (not merely character as psychological
Bildung), the status of the authorial voice, and the scene as image — the pathetic and
the ironical image. In this way her ground-breaking writing opened out for critics
a multitude of ways of reading and thinking that have found their place in critical
analysis of the nineteenth-century novel ever since.
Barbara is a prolific critic. She has written on individual writers and poets
throughout her career. William Baker’s bibliography shows the range of her
concerns. She will always be identified with George Eliot, but another of her loves
is Charles Dickens, on whom she has produced two critical books (1970 and 2008).
She has written books on Thackeray (one of the few books to catch Thackeray’s
strange mixture of satire and sensuousness, and one of the few that see him as a
radical writer), Jane Austen, Henry James, Thomas Hardy, and Dylan Thomas. She
has written Introductions and edited texts, from Helen Zenna Smith’s war novel,
Not so Quiet: Stepdaughters of the War, to Lawrence’s The Rainbow. We should not be
surprised by the amplitude and range of these interests: The Novels of George Eliot
begins with a comparison between James Joyce and Eliot.
Over and above these wonderfully particular studies, Barbara has conducted a
long enquiry into the nature of form, the narrative imagination, form and feeling,
form and lyric, the teller of stories and the listener to those stories. Culminating
in Shakespeare’s Storytellers in 1996, this enquiry crosses the novel, drama, and lyric
poetry. Every ten years or so, this intense concern generated another book. She
developed a tripartite relationship between the form of the text, the feeling bound
up with form, and the listener’s part in responding to the creation of narrative and
story. The affective grip of the tale and its structure, whether in fiction or lyric
(for a lyric is a condensed story) is at the heart of her work. This group of studies
begins with The Appropriate Form in 1964, a title that picks up on this phrase in
the Introduction to her first book on Eliot. Tellers and Listeners followed in 1975,
The Advantage of Lyric: Essays on Feeling in Poetry, in 1977, and Forms of Feeling in
Victorian Fiction in 1985. Throughout this enquiry, what Barbara termed the ‘human
material’ shaped and shaping form, is a pre-eminent concern.
The first book in what I have called Barbara’s enquiry, The Appropriate Form,
together with Tellers and Listeners, and The Advantage of Lyric, are particularly
arresting. The Appropriate Form ranges from Defoe to Anna Karenina, and takes in
Henry James Hardy, Charlotte Brontë, George Meredith, D. H. Lawrence, and
E. M. Forster. It is almost impossible to detail the figures in Tellers and Listeners as
it sweeps from Milton to Joyce, taking in Waugh and Huxley, Proust, Woolf and
Wordsworth, wonderfully embracing prose and poetry. I can only give the briefest
account of these unique studies here, but all of them begin from the seemingly
simple premise of The Appropriate Form — ‘The novelist [and we might include the
narrative of the poet], whoever he is and whenever he is writing, is giving form
 Introduction 5

to a story’ (p. 1) — and proceed to deepen and elaborate this statement.2 In The
Appropriate Form she again differentiates herself from a Jamesian account of form as
unity: ‘Looked at another way, it is an assertive display of form which is common
in music and the plastic arts, and rare in fiction’ (p. 5). And form, if it can be
appropriate, can also be inappropriate, wrenched, as when she discusses the dogma
of the providential plot.
She seeks a reading of form that does not become distorted by dogma and rigid
classification. She works inwards from the novel rather than prescriptively outwards
to it. In the course of this she rejects the term ‘realism’ and looks to ‘truthfulness’
instead. This truthfulness means that we ‘look also for the form of particularity’
(p. 3). This does not mean emptying form of its meaning, but finding a new way
to give what she calls ‘individual presences and moments’ (p. 3) in the novel a
structural significance. I will set out two quotations from this fruitful book to
indicate how Barbara can move from particularity in an individual moment to
particularity organized in larger patterns. The first is when she writes of Will
Ladislaw in Middlemarch, the second is when she speaks of the inconspicuous
patterns of Anna Karenina.
Those critics who find Ladislaw a weak romantic conception, the under-
distanced product of the author’s fantasy, might ref lect on the fact that few
Victorian heroes are shown as contemplating adultery [with Rosamond], and
so coolly and miserably, in the moment of passionate commitment to the pure
heroine. (p. 129)
Not only is the novel inconspicuously divided, not only does it constantly
compare as well as contrast, it cannot be said to insist even on the pattern
which does emerge. It is a pattern which we may very well not be strongly
aware of until the end, when we may go back and see it embedded in action
which strikes us in its particularity rather than its resonance. Levin’s reaction
to his child does not remind us of Karenin’s, both are striking in themselves. It
is rather that all the characters are subjected to similar tests, the common tests
of fatherhood, profession, and faith, and that the parallelism is often scarcely
noticeable. (p. 198)
The packed and fecund discussions of Tellers and Listeners start from categories of
tales embraced by the narrative imagination rather than from particularities, the
other way on from the previous book. But her fresh narrative categories always
lead to specificity and not to abstraction. These are Fantasy and Dream, Memory
and Memories, Abuses of Narrative, Good Stories, Good Listeners — yet these new
formal categories do not of themselves convey the fertility of the forms of narrative
imagination, which include rhetoric, confession, gossip, the yarn, the lyrical story,
the collective myth, community tales, the fairy tale, autobiography. Her intricate
readings of the teller’s tale and the listener’s response, not forgetting that our stories
gratify ‘the listener within ourselves’ have a specificity and detail that is always
gripping.3 The juxtaposition of references and comparison is often thrilling. On a
single page one can encounter Fanny of Mansfield Park, Mrs Dalloway, Krapp of
Krapp’s Last Tape, William Carlos Williams, and The Mill on the Floss (p. 61). Rival
stories, the painfulness of listening, memory and fantasy — the book documents
and explores an almost infinite number of forms of telling and listening. The
6 Isobel Armstrong

condensed and eloquent chapter on Dickens illustrates something of the richness of

this book.
Just as a dramatist tries to squeeze in as many histrionic opportunities as
possible, so a great story-teller naturally seizes every chance to tell a story.
Dickens’s novels are full of travellers’ tales, confessions, lies, reports, warnings,
autobiographies, tall stories, anecdotes, narrative jokes, books, readings and
fairy tales. (p. 165)
Barbara’s criticism is the work of a critic who is a great storyteller herself. In The
Advantage of Lyric (1977) she continues to meditate on what defines form, but here
the lyric is her theme. Form in the lyric is constituted by ‘its concentrated and
patterned expression of feeling’.4 She writes unequivocally of lyric that ‘what it
does provide is feeling alone, without histories or characters’ (p. 1). Nevertheless,
in clarifying that feeling, which is the project of lyric, a form of ‘buried narrative’
(p. 3) can be present. ‘Although lyric poetry is not discursive, it is capable of
speaking its feelings intelligently, so as to speak about them. The double voice
of feeling can speak in a single form, fusing ref lection or even analysis with the
stirring passion’ (p. 3). The phases of feeling in a lyric poem, its oblique allusion
and unfolding of metaphor, create an indirect narrative structure even when we are
presented with ‘feelings without histories’ (p. 4). In her introduction to this book
she discusses what no one has done before or since, the poems made and thought
about by characters in novels, Will Ladislaw in Middlemarch and Stephen Dedalus
in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, where we see feeling coming into being and
structured as ‘Feelings are evoked and shaped, then worked up and worked out into
larger feelings. The result is a generalization of character but a vivid particularity
of feeling, present, active, neither imitated nor revived’ (p. 9). Conscious brooding
and the instant of emotion come together in lyric poetry. She evolves a theory of
poetry here that is significant for her own poems. A Wordsworthian ‘overf low’
is mediated by brooding and ref lection. ‘Ref lection of this kind, itself part of the
affective experience inside and outside poetry, is not discussion’ (p. 11).
This book again illustrates Barbara’s prolific range. She moves from the poems of
John Donne to Arthur Hugh Clough (one of the best essays ever on this poet), to
Gerard Manley Hopkins, Yeats, W. H. Auden (two chapters), Dylan Thomas and
Sylvia Plath. Throughout, her concern is to meditate on the way intense personal
feeling is formed and structured, whether it is through the small conversation of
the lyric f loated on narrative, as in Clough’s work (p. 41), or, ‘minimal anecdote’,
as in Auden’s love poetry (p. 90), or ‘brilliant linguistic impersonation’, as in Plath’s
‘The Applicant’ (p. 137).
As I write Barbara’s writing is ongoing. But it is interesting that she has returned
in ever-fertile ways to authors about whom she has written earlier. She has returned
to Dickens and to George Eliot, the novelist with whom she has such extraordinary
inwardness, and a marvellous way of showing us aspects and details of this novelist’s
work that we have never noticed until she points them out. Her recent biography of
George Eliot, George Eliot: A Critic’s Biography (2006), which once, in conversation
with me, she called her ‘anti-biography’, is entirely original. It is not structured
round the temporal progression of George Eliot’s life, the familiar procedure of the
 Introduction 7

biographer, but according to an entirely different taxonomy — family, travel, love,

friends, objects. Each chapter brings out something important about Eliot — for
example, the travel chapter, documenting the many different places she spent time
in, brings out her remarkable independence and her European consciousness, and
gives a new cosmopolitan dimension to the novels. Moving from biography to the
novels and back, this reading of George Eliot has a delicacy and intimacy that we
do not often find in biographical writing. There is a sense in this book of a writer
freely sharing a critical passion for George Eliot with her readers. For Barbara,
criticism is always a matter of collaboration between tellers and listeners. I will
end by quoting a short sentence about George Eliot and Sara Hennell that suggests
this shared reading. It was a friendship sometimes strained, but Barbara recognizes
an important bond, evoking in a single sentence a shared passion and a whole
nineteenth-century intellectual milieu of intensely felt humanistic agnosticism:
‘The friends shared a love of Feuerbach’s passionate humanism and his lyrical
tenderness for discarded faith’ (p. 115).
* * * * *
The following essays, written as a tribute to Barbara, range as widely as she does
over the nineteenth-century and modernist periods. We have grouped these
into five sections. The first, Barbara’s Work, contains this Introduction and Sybil
Oldfield’s essay on the early criticism, ‘A New Voice in Criticism: The Early
Work of Barbara Hardy’. Discussing the work of the early years round George
Eliot in particular, Sybil Oldfield describes the liberating effect this had. She
also finds herself in fruitful debate with Barbara, a great testimony to her mentor,
since Barbara has never shirked debate. Barbara’s inspirational inf luence on young
academics comes over warmly in this essay, in Sybil’s case a lasting inf luence, for it
led to the uncovering of the importance of Jane Senior, Eliot’s friend and possibly
the ‘prompt’ for Dorothea (an interest shared by my co-editor, William Baker).
We titled the following sections The Art of Narrative, The Art of Poetry, Writing
Women and Children, and Fiction. It is a great pleasure to us that this last section is a
tribute to Barbara’s own creative writing, containing two pieces of original writing
by Janet El-Rayess — ‘Eleanor Mear’s Tea Party’, a short story — and Sue Roe —
an extract from a larger work, ‘The Tailor’s Dummy’. There are seven essays in The
Art of Narrative. Peter L. Caracciolo’s ‘The Shakespearean Nights of Robert Louis
Stevenson’ opens the group with a wide-ranging reading of a narrative form prior
to the nineteenth century, the 1001 Nights. He examines the potent inf luence of the
1001 Nights on the work of Robert Louis Stevenson, and the way different Victorian
translations of this great series of narratives shaped his youthful and later response to
these tales. Though Richard Burton’s translation provoked a sharp recoil from the
tales on his part, Caracciolo shows how ‘Stevenson’s approach to writing was deeply
receptive to the narrative dynamics of the great story collection’. The following
essays consider the Victorian novelists whom Barbara has done so much to make
canonical reading. In ‘Wilkie Collins’s Basil; A Story of Modern Life: An Author’s
Search for an Appropriate Form’, William Baker examines some of the important
revisions and changes that occurred between the manuscript of Basil and the final
8 Isobel Armstrong

printed version. He demonstrates that the changes show Collins as artist controlling
his material. Collins does not develop a possible incest theme, for example, and
though references to the Irish question and to the Chartist Ernest Jones appear in the
manuscript, in the interests of coherence they are not pursued in the final text. In a
very different mood, Beryl Gray writes of ‘The Absent Dog: Great Expectations’. No
real dogs appear in the novel, but she shows that dogs haunt its text’s imagination, as
the material of narrative within narrative or metaphor, evoking, fear, loathing, and
fantasy, the stuff of adult threat, of the child Pip’s surrealist fiction, and the grown
Pip’s metaphors of physical disgust. John Rignall continues the Dickens theme
with ‘Moments of Suspension in Dickens’. This essay ranges from A Tale of Two
Cities to Edwin Drood, and argues that moments of pause, calm and silence punctuate
the often frenetic movement of Dickens’s novels, deliberately change their pace and
effect many kinds of important narrative transformation, from implicit political
allusion to proleptic intimations of disaster. Michael Slater’s ‘Hamlet’s Revenge; or
Mr Q strikes back’, illustrates how the tangled anecdotes — and their motivation
— in letters about and by Dickens, by Putnam, his secretary on his visit to America,
and John Forster, create rumour and myth round the figure of Dickens. It is the
letter as narrative, where rival narratives compete.
We end this section with essays on two of George Eliot’s most important novels.
George Levine boldly re-reads The Mill on the Floss through the lens of Max
Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism. Money and the importance
of money to the Dodson and Deane clans, and the absence of it in Maggie’s
imagination, create a tragic dialectic and a highly critical reading of capitalism
that nevertheless repudiates the repudiation of money. The appearance of money,
he argues, almost always intimates a narrative and moral crisis. It is unusual to see
critical work on George Eliot’s Romola (1862), a novel about which most critics,
including Barbara, are circumspect. Margaret Harris’s fascinating ‘Scenes of
Reading Romola’ reads the novel through Henry King’s movie of 1924 and the movie
through the novel, not giving priority to the ‘logocentrism’ that would make the
novel the authoritative text. Starring Lillian Gish as Romola, the cinematography
of this film, Harris shows, shares conventions both with classic realist narrative
and stage melodrama. The search for authenticity and verisimilitude, visually and
historically, uncannily parallel Eliot’s researches for her text. The methodology of
‘intertextual citation’ that Harris adopts uncovers the subtle parallels and differences
between film and novel form.
The third section of this collection, The Art of Poetry, consists of three essays
that consider texts that Barbara has discussed, and others that she has not, though
following through her aesthetic principles in the analysis of these. Hilary Fraser’s
‘Aesthetics, Visuality and Feelings in the Natural Theology of Gerard Manley
Hopkins and Alice Meynell’ makes a reading of these two poets through the
phenomenological work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, arguing that his vision of
Cezanne, a contemporary of both poets, converges with their aesthetics and their
reading of the visual, enabling them to ‘re-articulate the vision of modernity in
their own art’. In his closely argued and historically detailed essay, ‘The Wanderings
of Yeats and Oisin’, Ronald Schuchard charts the evolution of Yeats’s commitment
 Introduction 9

to the visionary. From the point when Yeats dissociated himself from the Christian
mysticism of his friends in an essay on ‘Magic’ in 1901, through the automatic
writing of his wife, Georgie, to the achievement of ‘All Soul’s Night’ in 1920 (a
poem later appended to A Vision in 1925), Yeats pursued a richer and deeper account
of the visionary than his contemporaries afforded him. ‘The poem is, in effect, a
new manifesto, a reaffirmation of his belief in the magical, visionary mind in times
of turbulence and destruction.’ Deryn Rees-Jones’s essay makes a detailed reading
of Edward Thomas’s ‘Rain’. Deryn invokes Barbara’s poetics when she refers to
her insight into the inarticulacy of lyric, which has to use ‘touch, gesture, look’ to
convey feeling. As this essay is a poetic rendering of poetics, direct quotation from
it is the most appropriate way of conveying its theme: ‘Poetry as protection. Poetry
to bring us to our senses? To restore or conjure love. Poetry, to bring us back to
ourselves, to bring back the dead?’
A group of essays stood out as concerned with women and children, so they
belong to our fourth section, Writing Women and Children. In a bold and outspoken
essay, which echoes so much of Barbara’s characteristic tone, Loraine Fletcher’s
‘Misogyny on Trial’: Shakespeare and Honour Killing’, re-reads some familiar
Shakespeare plays through this important theme. Her account of Much Ado About
Nothing is chillingly perceptive. With the changing practices of arranged and
consensual marriage historically in the melting pot, she argues that Shakespeare
wrote against not with his culture. From Shakespeare to Scott, in ‘Jeanie Deans and
Narrative Method in The Heart of Mid-Lothian’, Martin Dodsworth scrupulously
defends Scott’s narrative art. He is suspicious of historical readings of the novel,
and instead sees Jeanie as its moral centre, asked to question and revise her
understanding of shame through successive incidents throughout the text, and
in particular through the parallelism between her sister and Madge Wildfire,
the wild gypsy. Alain Jumeau considers the neglected inf luence of Rousseau on
George Eliot’s understanding of children, arguing for a richness and depth in her
portrayal of childhood in The Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner that we have not
sufficiently recognized up to now. ‘Abjection and the Nineteenth-Century Novel:
when is a human not a human?’, by myself, Isobel Armstrong, considers Jane
Eyre, and the way it provided a model of dispossession, ultimately political, for
women giving birth to illegitimate children or being themselves illegitimate, for
subsequent novelists. Jane Eyre is one of the novels with which Barbara takes issue
in The Appropriate Form, classifying it as a dogmatic novel (along with Robinson
Crusoe and others), where an ideology of Providence is imposed on the text and
insufficiently fused with the development of the character’s psychological and moral
experience. I can see that these gaps and lacunae exist, almost as if the novel is made
up of different tectonic plates. I guess I decided to focus on one of these narrative
plates, accepting inconsistency, but I recognize that it is there. Finally, Coral Ann
Howells reads the feminist narratives of Carol Shields through Barbara’s Tellers and
Listeners. Her accounts of the novels indicate how the principles of this book can be
extended and relocated in analyses of writers beyond the corpus examined there.
Her words fittingly end this introduction: ‘While discussions of narratology and
the critical vocabulary associated with it may have changed since the 1970s [...] the
10 Isobel Armstrong

principles and the discipline of critical analysis so brilliantly demonstrated in Tellers

and Listeners have not changed at all.’

Notes to the Introduction

1. The Novels of George Eliot (London: Athlone Press, 1959), p. 5.
2. The Appropriate Form: An Essay on the Novel (London: Athlone Press, 1964), p. 1.
3. Tellers and Listeners: The Narrative Imagination (London: Athlone Press, 1975), p. 172.
4. The Advantage of Lyric: Essays on Feeling in Poetry (Bloomington and London: Indiana University
Press, 1977), p. 1.
 — 2 —

A New Voice in Criticism:

The Early Work of Barbara Hardy
Sybil Oldfield

Barbara Hardy’s first book, The Novels of George Eliot: A Study in Form, for which
she was awarded the British Academy’s Rose Mary Crawshay Prize, had a vital
impact on my life long before I read it. It was Winston Rhodes, my Professor of
English at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, who had read it as soon as
it came out from the University of London’s Athlone Press in 1959 and been hugely
impressed. He himself was a Marxist who believed in literature for life’s sake, but
he was nevertheless also very interested in the structuralist formal criticism of R.
S. Crane and the Chicago School, and he immediately recognized that here was a
new voice in criticism. So impressed was he by the young Barbara Hardy’s fusion
of psychology, ethics and social analysis in her championing of George Eliot’s
hitherto disregarded formal mastery, that he suggested I should apply to take up
my Commonwealth postgraduate scholarship to do doctoral work (on the comedy
of E. M. Forster) with her, rather than at Cambridge. And it was just two weeks
after my arrival at Birkbeck in October 1960 that I attended Professor Tillotson’s
coffee party for English post-graduates and there met both Barbara Hardy herself
and my future husband, Derek Oldfield. Derek was an older postgraduate student
of Barbara’s, working on style in Middlemarch. That evening she asked the two of
us to give postgraduate seminar papers on The Golden Bowl — papers that would
integrate an analysis of the novel’s meaning with different aspects of its fictional
form. We turned to each other for a bit of moral support — much as we would find
ourselves doing for the next forty-eight years.
When I did come to read The Novels of George Eliot: A Study in Form, I was amazed
by its breadth and depth. Although her Introduction stated that the study was ‘not
an attempt at a full commentary on George Eliot’s art and thought’, that in fact is
what it is. For, as Barbara Hardy herself went on to say, it is ‘difficult to abstract
strictly formal features like development, or contrast or symmetry from such things
as plot and character and language.’ Her emphasis was on George Eliot as a writer of
‘the tragedy of ordinary life’ for which the novelist would find expression that was
appropriate — a key term in Barbara Hardy’s approach to criticism: ‘comprehensive
rather than selective, tentative rather than dogmatic’. She dared to take on Henry
James as she set out to counter his view of Victorian novels in general as ‘large
baggy monsters’ and of Middlemarch in particular as ‘a treasure house of detail but
12 Sybil Oldfield

an indifferent whole’. On the contrary, for Barbara Hardy’s George Eliot, spirit and
form were one.
One constant feature of Barbara Hardy’s criticism is her wealth of literary
comparison. Already in The Novels of George Eliot we find her referring the reader to
Richardson, Emily Brontë, Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Melville,
James, Proust, D. H. Lawrence and Joyce — not in order to show off her reading
but rather to point to some significant, analogous strength in George Eliot. Indeed,
at a time when George Eliot was still treated with some condescension for her
perceived ponderousness and lack of art, it was Barbara Hardy who convincingly
demonstrated that she belongs among the very greatest of the world’s novelists.
In her first chapter ‘The Unheroic Tragedy’ she pointed out that in Eliot’s fiction
the humble character, who may be dull or even repulsive, ‘gradually makes way
for the character with sensibility and intelligence’. However, ‘the simple soul is
[still] almost always present’, arousing pity rather than admiration and existing to
universalize the tragedy:
It might be said that George Eliot makes us see a tragedy which is too big for
her characters. The claim for sympathy [...] has to be made on behalf of the very
absence of tragic response. Pity lies in the way the sufferers fail to rise to their
tragic occasion [... and the] refusal to make Hetty a tragic heroine [...] makes of
the tragedy a generalization of humanity as a whole.
Gradually George Eliot would turn from ‘the [ordinary human being] struggling
with tragedy to the extraordinary man and woman struggling with ordinary life’.
Not only is Barbara Hardy’s early criticism full of such acute perceptions and
helpful analysis, it is also masterly in its pinpointing of essential passages for
quotation and ref lection. Thus she highlights Adam Bede’s moment of revelatory
anguish over Hetty:
It seemed to him as if he had always before thought it a light thing that men
should suffer: as if all that he had himself endured, and called sorrow before,
was only moment’s stroke that had never left a bruise.
‘O God,’ Adam groaned, as he leaned on the table, and looked blankly at the
face of the watch, ‘and men have suffered like this before... and poor helpless
young things have suffered like her.... (Ch. 42)
Barbara Hardy then quotes George Eliot’s own subsequent profound ref lections on
the lasting impact that this suffering over another’s suffering had on Adam:
It would be a poor result of all our anguish and our wrestling, if we won
nothing but our old selves at the end of it. [...] Let us rather be thankful that our
sorrow lives in us as an indestructible force, only changing its form, as forces
do, and passing from pain into sympathy — the one poor word which includes
all our best insight and our best love.
Barbara Hardy makes her readers think not how wonderful Barbara Hardy is, but
how wonderful George Eliot.
In her chapter on the tragic heroines, for whom ‘character is destiny — but
not quite’, Barbara Hardy anticipated the later feminist critical approach of Jenny
Uglow and Gillian Beer.1 Well before the ‘second-wave feminism’ of the late 1960s
 A New Voice in Criticism 13

and 1970s, Barbara identified the heroines’ shared disability as being rooted in their
gender, causing them all to be either under-educated or even mis-educated, without
any hope of access to meaningful work appropriate to their particular gifts. But
she also insisted that George Eliot’s feminism was a humanistic feminism, seeing
the waste of women’s potential as an outstanding example of the many frustrations
of the human condition, experienced also, if not equally, by men. And far from
idealizing her tragic heroines, George Eliot successfully demonstrated that they
were all, however pitiable and admirable, nevertheless also egoists in one way or
another. Like us. For ‘[we] are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as
an udder to feed our supreme selves.’
After some very convincing chapters on ‘Character and Form’, ‘Plot and Form’
and ‘The Scene as Image’, always pointing out the formal subtlety of George Eliot’s
patterns of comparison and contrast, Barbara Hardy’s concluding chapter in The
Novels of George Eliot addressed the novelist’s underlying beliefs. Acknowledging
Basil Willey’s work on the inf luence of Feuerbach and Joan Bennett’s suggestions on
the lasting inf luence of the Christian teaching on love of one’s neighbour, Barbara
Hardy, in her Conclusion, stressed George Eliot’s anticipation of twentieth century
humanism. For the agnostic Eliot, ‘humanity could be its own providence, [...] an
honest and tentative faith [she] called meliorism.’ The emphasis is on ‘tentative’.
Like the modernist novelists who succeeded her, hope of loving union comes
only in fragments, but unlike them, she lays more emphasis on the importance of
social, not just psychological, determinants and outcomes. And the social can be
changed. Barbara Hardy acknowledged that George Eliot was ‘insistently didactic’
but insisted that she was never merely diagrammatic. ‘She shows all the human
var­iables’, mirrored in a corresponding ‘f luidity and expansiveness’ of narrative
form. Published in 1959, The Novels of George Eliot is a fine practical example of a
critical approach that fuses interpretation and aesthetics; it anticipated by a gener­
ation Wayne Booth’s magisterial work of 1988, The Company We Keep: An Ethics of
Fiction where he encouraged the reader to ‘abandon the notion that an interest in
form precludes an interest in the ethical powers of form.’2
Barbara Hardy’s next work on George Eliot, her edited symposium of Anglo-
American essays, Middlemarch: Critical Approaches to the Novel (1967), ‘probably
registered the high-water mark of Middlemarch’s modern reputation’, according to
David Lodge.3 She herself called Middlemarch ‘George Eliot’s most Shakespearean
novel’ (Introduction) . Her own contribution to this essay collection was an analysis
of the ‘The Surface of the Novel’ as seen in the book’s Chapter 30. She chose
Chapter 30 at random ‘since any part will do to represent the continuous surface of
the novel’. But it is ‘an interestingly mixed chapter [...] relaxed and heterogeneous’.
In it, Dorothea is told that Casaubon’s illness is terminal, she reaches out to Lydgate,
and Brooke decides to invite Ladislaw to Middlemarch. Barbara Hardy notes a
typical structural pattern: ‘overlap or coincidence of time, foreshortening by a past-
continuous, movement [of action] within rather than between [...] chapters. [...] All
the characters in Chapter 30 watch and wait [except Brooke the non-committed
fool]’. There is a continuum of perfectly ordinary action and yet it still allows for
a tremendous emotional climax — Dorothea’s direct cry to Lydgate: “Think what
14 Sybil Oldfield

I can do.” All the realistic detail pertains to feelings, not to any described objects,
achieving a subtle, complex continuity that prepares the reader for all that follows.
I myself have a particular interest in this essay collection on Middlemarch in that
it included my late husband Derek Oldfield’s analysis, ‘The Language of the Novel:
The Character of Dorothea’. When I first met Barbara, she told me that Derek was
writing what would be a very good thesis on George Eliot’s style, and she proved
the value she saw in it by publishing this essay. He, a totally unknown Birkbeck
postgraduate student, then working as a lecturer at a teacher training college,
was invited to join some very distinguished company indeed, including Mark
Schorer, W. J. Harvey, J. M. S. Tompkins and Barbara herself in this symposium.
His meticulously nuanced analysis of diction and tone, including that of the
commentating narrator, in the creation of a great fictional character, has become
something of a classic. It throws ‘light not only on Dorothea but on George Eliot’s
method as a novelist.’4 It was chosen by Arnold Kettle for inclusion in his important
collection for the Open University, The Nineteenth-Century Novel: Critical Essays
and Documents (1972). It was acknowledged — and quite heavily used — by David
Lodge in his discussion of mimesis and diegesis in fiction in After Bakhtin (1990);5
and Philip Davis has singled it out for praise as ‘a good introduction to the technical
means of the conveying of mentality’ in his The Victorians.6 Derek himself said no
one had been appointed to so many jobs on the strength of one essay!
In 1970 Barbara Hardy, by now Professor of English at Royal Holloway College,
University of London, asked Derek and me to write a joint essay on ‘Scenes of Clerical
Life’: The Diagram and the Picture’ for her collection Critical Essays on George Eliot.
We were concerned to emphasize the profound intellectual debt that George Eliot
owed to Ludwig Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity, which she had translated from
the German in 1854, saying to a friend ‘with the ideas of Feuerbach I everywhere
agree’.7 However, although we too agreed with Feuerbach and were moved by both
the intellectual perceptiveness and the emotional climaxes that are the highlights
of this, George Eliot’s first fiction, we were also quite forthright about the stories’
shortcomings. We noted, for example, their frequent embarrassing lapses into
sentimentality, especially concerning mothers and children. Nevertheless, we had
no doubt but that these early stories repaid careful re-reading, above all for their
tension between optimism and pessimism:
[Life] is not going to turn out ideally for any of us [...].George Eliot has
described herself as a meliorist, but she insists that we, as well as her characters,
should live without the opiate of false optimism. Human wishes are not vain,
but neither will they be fulfilled.8
In Barbara Hardy’s Introduction to this essay collection, she sees her own chapter
on The Mill on the Floss as ‘reversing the balance of honest realism and meliorism’
that we had seen in the Scenes, ‘but showing the same tension between the novelist’s
desire to tell the whole truth about life and the novelist’s ability to tell consoling
lies.’ It is the ending of Mill on the Floss, of course, that presents the most difficulty.
Is it a consoling lie, a merely self-indulgent, melodramatic fantasy? As at the end of
Jane Eyre and David Copperfield, there is ‘triumphant reconciliation after pain’ [and]
‘the triumphant discovery of meaning’, as Tom Tulliver discovers ‘the depths in life’
 A New Voice in Criticism 15

to which he had been blind. But for once Barbara Hardy is fiercely antagonistic
to what George Eliot is doing, even going so far as to accuse her of ‘bad faith’,
of sacrificing authenticity to wish-fulfilment. And for once I cannot agree with
Barbara Hardy. Yes, Maggie is granted the yearned for reconciliation with her
brother, but only at the tremendous price of life itself. There is no unconvincing
opiate ending that hints at an eventual, even if less than perfect, marriage, or just
simply at some satisfying work for her. And we have been prepared for the tragic
waste of this nineteen-year-old from the beginning; time and again we have
been shown that there was no place in her world for such a passionate, searching,
uncompromising and often self-destructive girl. It hurt George Eliot very deeply
to kill her — Lewes complained that she wept for days afterwards — but the
novelist could not deceive herself, or her readers, that a Maggie Tulliver could have
survived as her real self then. (And hence we feel impelled to change the world to
accommodate the Maggies.)
That I dare to argue back with Barbara Hardy is itself a great tribute to her. When
I first encountered her as my Doctoral Supervisor in 1960, she was wonderfully
un-frightening. She might so easily have paralysed me with her cleverness; but
instead of squelching me, she seemed eagerly interested in my unbaked twenty-
two-year-old’s ideas, and thereby she enabled me to have ideas, to have the courage
to think for myself and to write. That is true encouragement. She said to me as she
did to so many of her other postgraduate students what Buber said in Between Man
and Man: ‘You are able.’
Her most recent spurring on of me has been in relation to George Eliot’s friend,
Jane Senior. In March 2001 she had successfully invoked ‘the Waverley guidelines for
considering the export of cultural property, which has historical national, aesthetic
and scholarly value’,9 in order to defer and eventually prevent the Government’s
acquiescence in the export of a newly discovered batch of letters from George
Eliot to Jane Senior. All the other George Eliot letters, of course, are held in the
Beinecke Library at Yale and this might well have been the very last chance to hold
any George Eliot letters at all in Britain. The British Library was thereby enabled
to buy them without foreign competition. A celebratory seminar was held at the
University of London to mark that acquisition and I was invited to give a paper
there on ‘Mrs Nassau Senior, “that fair, bright, useful woman” ’. That seminar was
attended by Jane Senior’s great-granddaughter who, having vetted me, then made
it possible for me to have unfettered access to all the Senior family papers. Again
encouraged by Barbara Hardy, with whom I shared all the ensuing George Eliot
discoveries in the correspondence, I produced the first full biography of Jane Senior,
who was — both she and I agree, as does Rosemary Ashton — almost certainly the
‘prompt character’ for Dorothea.10
L. C. Knights has said that ‘criticism at its best promotes the idea of litera­t ure
as a nourisher of life’s energies and [sees] very clearly the relation between alert
and engaged reading and the “background reality” in which all men share.’11
Bar­bara Hardy is certainly a critic who sees very clearly the relation between
reading and reality. In none of her books has this been more obvious or more
compellingly rendered than in The Appropriate Form: An Essay on the Novel (1964).
16 Sybil Oldfield

Coleridge’s dictum that ‘No great work of art dare want its appropriate form’ is her
concern here. I consider her Introduction to this study one of the most helpful and
stimulating critical essays she has ever written. Her starting point is her definition
of what makes a novel a novel and not something else:
The novelist, whoever he is and whenever he is writing, is giving form to a
story, giving form to his moral and metaphysical views, and giving form to his
particular experience of sensations, people, places and society [...].
[Every] story [...] entails clarity, continuity, and a rising curve of expectation.
[...]
In telling his story [...] the novelist is also organising his criticism of life. He
may be fitting the complexity and contradictoriness of life into a predetermined
dogmatic pattern, like Defoe and Charlotte Bronte and Hardy. He may be
using dogmatic patterns in order to test and reject them, like George Eliot and
Tolstoy and Lawrence [...]. [But] the moral view is always present.
However a novel is not, of course, just an abstract analysis of moral categories.
Instead, it is constantly informed by the vivid individuality of character and
circumstance which must strike the reader as being ‘true’ even if hitherto unfamiliar
and even painful. ‘Telling the truth in fiction is not invariably different from telling
the truth in life, though our response to a novel involves both the comparison
with the world we know and the new apprehension of the world we do not know.’
Barbara Hardy is a ‘both/ander’ in that she appreciates the achievement of both the
great realists and the aesthetic masters of the novel like Henry James: ‘We can, I
suggest, recognize both his triumph and the triumph of George Eliot and Tolstoy
[...] what is important is the individual achievement, not the competition between
narrative forms.’ But we must not try to squeeze our analysis of the Victorian novel
into Jamesian aesthetic criteria. In contrast to the New Critics, Barbara Hardy
does not deny that George Eliot and Tolstoy are indeed ‘large and loose’ but that
is precisely what allows them ‘to report truthfully and fully the quality of the
individual moment, the loose end, the doubt and contradiction and mutability’.
‘Fluid’, yes, ‘pudding’, no. As for D. H. Lawrence, he
is the most complete antithesis to James, for he rejects external formal principles,
demands the right to make the novel ref lect the illogicality, absurdity, and
intransigence of life, eschews finality, and usually defies the diagrammatic
forms of fable. [But] compared with George Eliot and Tolstoy, [he can also
show] occasional lapses into that very schematism he attacks most fiercely in
theory.
Fiction being ‘the most various and least aesthetic moral art’, we encounter
the artist and moralist who is prepared to disprove, not only to prove, his
hypotheses, though at times it is hard to say whether he is open-eyed or
unaware.
After this most suggestive Introduction, there follow stimulating and provocative
readings of a wealth of novelists including Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Henry
James, Hardy and Lawrence, and ending with Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina.
‘A book of criticism’ wrote L. C. Knights, ‘is an offer of conversation. Taken [...]
as incitement to re-read and re-think, it has its place in the endless complex process
through which literature is kept alive.’12 Barbara Hardy’s ‘offer of conversation’ has
 A New Voice in Criticism 17

been indeed such an incitement from the first. A lifelong socialist, her writing is
deep down egalitarian. Like Dr Johnson, she rejoices to concur with the Common
Reader — while at the same time helping the Common Reader to read. Hence,
despite her quite exceptional capacity for holding whole, huge classics of prose
fiction in her head, tracing unifying symbols, motifs, images, patterns of action and
reaction as though they were great symphonies, Barbara Hardy has managed to stay
lucid and intelligible.13 She has never taken off into realms of theoretical, mystifying
abstraction where few, if any, are able to follow. We are fortunate indeed that she
has offered us her conversation, staying with us on the terra firma of our shared,
however disparate, experience of life.

Notes to Chapter 2
1. See Gillian Beer, George Eliot (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1986); Jennifer Uglow, George Eliot
(London: Virago; New York: Pantheon Pioneers, 1987).
2. Wayne Booth, The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University
of California Press, 1988), p. 7.
3. David Lodge, After Bakhtin: Essays on Fiction and Criticism (London and New York: Routledge,
1990), ch. 3 ‘Middlemarch and the Classic Realist Text’.
4. The Nineteenth Century Novel: Critical Essays and Documents, ed. by Arnold Kettle (London:
Heinemann and Open University Press, 1972), p. 7.
5. See Lodge, op. cit. chs. 2 and 3.
6. See Philip Davis, The Oxford English Literary History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002),
vol. viii: 1830–1880, p. 576.
7. Letters of George Eliot, ed. by Gordon Haight (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1955), ii,
153.
8. Derek and Sybil Oldfield, ‘Scenes of Clerical Life’: The Diagram and the Picture’, in Critical
Essays on George Eliot, ed. by Barbara Hardy (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), pp.
1–18 (pp. 17–18).
9. See Barbara Hardy, George Eliot: A Critic’s Biography (London and New York: Continuum, 2006),
ch. 4 and p. 131 n. 4.
10. See Sybil Oldfield, Jeanie, an ‘Army of One’: Mrs Nassau Senior, 1828–1877: The First Woman in
Whitehall (Brighton and Portland, OR: Sussex Academic Press, 2008, 2009), ch. 9 ‘George
Eliot’s Dorothea?’
11. L. C. Knights, ‘Cambridge Criticism, What was it?’ New Universities Quarterly (Spring 1984),
28–42.
12. L. C. Knights, Some Shakespearean Themes (London: Chatto and Windus, 1960), p. 11.
13. In addition to The Appropriate Form, I would instance here her Tellers and Listeners: The Narrative
Imagination (London: The Athlone Press, 1975).
 part I I
v

The Art of Narrative

 — 3 —

The Shakespearean Nights of

Robert Louis Stevenson
Peter L. Caracciolo

There is one book [...] more generally loved than Shakespeare, that captivates in
childhood, and still delights in age — I mean the Arabian Nights (IX, 141).1

Among the works of Stevenson, the reader often comes across disconcerting para­
llels drawn between the creations of the Eastern story-teller and the Renaissance
play­w right, such as this comparison in ‘A Gossip on Romance’ (1882). On further
ref lection, though, it becomes clear that the success enjoyed by The New Arabian
Nights (1878) was hardly a surprise, justifying as it did Stevenson’s confidence in an
educated Victorian public. A reading public whose sophistication may be gauged
(just one example will suffice because it is a test case) by the subtle fashion in
which Elizabeth Gaskell — Dickens’s ‘Dear Scheherazade’ — weaves an intricate
arabesque narrative web that helps to shape, characterize and amplify the concerns
of North and South (1855).2 Such an audience could be relied upon to recognize the
affinities between The Arabian Nights Entertainments and the Shakespearean canon,
most particularly, A Winter’s Tale.
Twentieth-first-century readers of Stevenson being generally less familiar with
‘Nocturnal Poetics’ (as a modern Iraqi scholar has dubbed this ancient yet ever
adaptable narrative art), therefore, some may find it useful to trace the similarities
between these medieval and Jacobean masterpieces. It is intriguing, for instance,
that the title of each work associates a period of darkness with vital sessions of story-
telling. In both, misogynistic tyrants are finally cured by brave and resourceful
women. Similarly in A Winter’s Tale, as in The Nights, this deadly marital discord,
extending over years, provides the frame for many interweaving tales, stories within
stories that, however fragmented, continue to echo or mirror the outer narratives.
Told in prose and verse, these stories range across space as much as time, linking
the Orient with north-western Europe. In both romances, human emotions are
expressed through a mix of realism and fantasy. As an anxious yet observant ruler
and his trusted adviser wander undetected through the realm, a disguised prince is
discovered courting a long-lost princess. Even the most cursory of analyses tends to
corroborate Stevenson’s comparison: the concerns and shape of A Winter’s Tale do
seem to have much in common with those of the Arabian Nights Entertainments.3
Therefore, it should come as no great surprise to discover from explicit allusions
 The Shakespearean Nights of Robert Louis Stevenson 21

in the first two chapters of Prince Otto (1885) that the basic structure of yet another
of Stevenson’s fictions derives from an impulse so characteristic of this writer’s
way of seeing things. ‘He read in a search for patterns and examples that his own
writing could learn from’, as Jenni Calder points out in her perceptive biography.4
Even as an adolescent, Stevenson had worked out for himself how he would achieve
his ambition. He immersed himself in foreign as well as English writers. Yet he
was eager to do more than just savour literature. Significantly, in ‘An Autumn
Effect’ (1875), an early essay about a walking tour that he had made, Stevenson first
describes the Chiltern Hills. The way that Far Eastern aesthetics were reshaping
the vision of the Impressionist painters inf luences his own view of ‘a long line
of trees thrown against the customary sunset of a Japanese picture with a certain
fantastic effect that was not to be despised’ (XXII.114); later, at an inn, Stevenson
does not miss the chance to hint at the tradition which he aims to extend, noting
the links between an earlier phase of Europe’s hankering after Oriental art and such
literary eccentricities of the eighteenth century as the arabesque Tristram Shandy:
‘there was a Turkey carpet on the f loor, so old that it might have been imported
by Walter Shandy’ (p. 127).5 Still further evidence of Stevenson’s eye for intricate
structure is to be found in the way these references to the significant patterns of
Japanese woodcuts and Middle Eastern textiles frame literary allusions, references
that move from Florizel and Perdita’s courtship (p. 117) to ‘going about behind the
scenes of life with the Caliph and the serviceable Giaffar’ (p. 121). Likewise incognito,
Stevenson and his characters go on learning, not just about how others live, but
more importantly, they also discover what others think of them.6 The meaningful
patterns of Asian artefacts recur throughout Stevenson’s career, and more often than
not these allusions are associated with the consciousness- raising Nights.7
The manse of Stevenson’s grandfather at Colinton was ‘filled with trophies from
the East [...] which gave it an exotic f lavour’.8 There it was that the future novelist
had one of his most formative literary experiences. In ‘A Penny Plain and Twopence
Coloured’, a potent memory of childhood re-surfaces:
that was the night when I brought back with me the Arabian Entertainments
in the fat, old, double-columned volume with the prints. I was just well into
the story of the Hunchback, I remember, when my clergyman grandfather (a
man we counted pretty stiff ) came in behind me. I grew blind with terror. But
instead of ordering the book away, he said he envied me. Ah, well he might.
(IX, 118)
Stevenson’s choice of the word ‘Hunchback’ here might suggest that what the young
Louis was reading was a reprint of that anonymous eighteenth-century version of
Galland’s Les Mille et Une Nuits.9Elsewhere in this 1884 essay, recalling the delight
that as a child he had taken in ‘Skelt’s Juvenile Drama’ (p. 116), Stevenson uses the
vocabulary of the early Victorian translation that Edward Lane had prepared for
family reading. Remembering how he had felt irresistibly drawn to that Edinburgh
‘stationer’s shop’ which stocked ‘toy-theatres’, Stevenson recalls the story of the
Third Calendar’s shipwreck on the Magnetic Rock ; but where the anonymous
Grub Street version had ‘adamant’, Stevenson here follows Lane in describing the
22 Peter L. Caracciolo

deadly rock as of ‘loadstone’ (p. 117). The text of the Nights which the young boy
would have been allowed to read must have been Lane’s bowdlerization. Indeed,
further drastically adapted for young children, the 1853 juvenile version of Lane
best matches other details in Stevenson’s recollection, being reduced to a single fat
volume with the text in double columns, the ‘woodcuts’ evocative yet unlikely to
offend.10
Details like these emphasize the fact that the case of Stevenson offers almost the
paradigm of the Nights’ impact on Victorian culture. Stevenson’s own experience
of them was inf luenced by the two most celebrated translations from the Arabic
that the period saw, the impressions of the child being later reshaped when the
adult read a startlingly different version. As Lane had produced his three volumes
between 1839 and 1841, so in the penultimate decade of the century there appeared
John Payne’s comprehensive translation which Burton appropriated, adding his own
sensational commentary.11 It was almost to be expected that Stevenson’s writings
should exhibit many of the features typical of the genesis of arabesque-shaped
constructs. The circumstances in which his writing was produced point to the
impact on him of a range of those stimuli that typically tend to reactivate in an
adult’s recollections of the magical first encounter with Scheherazade’s tales. These
stimuli can vary: new translations of the Nights, or new illustrations of them; new
shows dramatizing stories from the Arabian Entertainments, whether mounted on the
pantomime stage or in the toy theatre; drugs such as the widely available opium;
new oriental fashions in the visual arts (the applied as much as the fine arts); foreign
travel, especially to exotic destinations in Asia and beyond; and not least the prior
example of earlier writers who have habitually made use of the Nights to assist their
own invention.12
As Stevenson himself struggled to become a writer, the inf luence of the Nights
manifested itself in a number of specific ways. Book-design is an obvious example.
In the decades preceding ‘An Autumnal Effect’ (1875) there had appeared two out­
standing examples of illustrated versions based on the ‘Grub Street Galland’. Firstly,
the years 1863–65 saw the serialization of Dalziel’s sumptuous edition. A decade or
so later, in the 1874 version that Cassell brought out, Gustave Doré characteristically
substantiates the fantastic elements in the Nights by locating their marvels in exotic
topographies.13 Again, in the year immediately after the publication of ‘An Autumn
Effect’, there came Walter Crane’s exquisite Aladdin’s Picture Book (1876). Of the
latter, certainly, Stevenson took note, because three years later his own Travels with
My Donkey was published with a frontispiece by Walter Crane.14
Playing at toy-theatres with young Lloyd Osbourne in 1880 had the effect on the
stepfather of recalling his own childhood games of make-believe. Subsequently, the
novelist revisited in memory other realms of ‘child’s play’.15 Some enchanting lines,
in A Child’s Garden of Verses (1885), recreate the geography of boyhood in terms of
the Nights:
Here is the sea, here is the sand,
Here is simple Shepherd’s Land,
Here are the fairy hollyhocks
And there are all Ali Baba’s rocks. (XIV, 50)
 The Shakespearean Nights of Robert Louis Stevenson 23

Other factors rendered such oriental mapping of childhood still easier. In 1883 at
Chalet La Solitude, Hyeres, decorating the new matrimonial home as she would its
successors, Stevenson’s wife ‘experimented with the oriental styles then becoming
popular with those of sophisticated taste’.16 Marriage reproduced yet another aspect
of that early environment where he first became acquainted with the Arabian
tales; for 1884–85 saw also, in their collaboration on The Dynamiter, Fanny literally
playing Scheherazade to her sick husband.17
Such was the writer’s chronic ill health that it is tempting to see the comparison
between the great heroine of 1001 Nights and this writer’s career as going beyond
the Stevensons’ expedient for coping with just one crisis. Muhsin Jassim Ali per­
suasively argues that throughout his life Stevenson ‘continued to derive [...] an
antidote to pain’ from the Nights.18 Moreover, there is evidence that use of the
Victorian pharmacopoeia also may have inadvertently provoked recall of these
tales. Since 1873, bad health had led the writer to start taking opium for medicinal
pur­poses;19 and as long ago as 1857 Fitzhugh Ludlow’s The Hashish-Eater had drawn
attention to the possibility that marijuana, and other drugs, might produce effects
akin to the marvels found in the Nights. Among the many literary predecessors
whose use of the Arabian tales inf luenced Stevenson, the careers of at least three —
Scott, Dickens, and Wilkie Collins — provide confirmation of this link between
the Nights and narcotics.20
The use of the Nights by such writers was most obvious in the ironical applications
of the Arabian tales to nineteenth-century society. This is a satirical thrust faintly
sensed in Thackeray’s genial jeu d’esprit ‘Sultan Stork’ (1842) with its passing mockery
of French cuisine;21 an impulse that more fully emerges as the broad attack on the
British government’s appalling mismanagement of the Crimean War which Dickens
launched in ‘The Thousand and One Humbugs’ (1855);22 and a tendency towards an
arabesque critique of contemporary culture which mutates thence into The Shaving
of Shagpat (1856), Meredith’s profounder allegory on the perennial threat to liberty
that illusion poses.23 Like such precursors, Stevenson seems to have found in the
Nights’ encyclopedia of genres an irresistible prompting to experiment.24
In her study of their inf luence on the Victorian age, Margaret Annan argues that
the novelist’s reversals of the Arabian tales in The New Arabian Nights have about
them ‘a whiff of travesty upon the [...] Nights themselves’.25 Perhaps it would be
truer to say there are elements of Cervantesque parody in Stevenson’s glances at
Lane’s annotation and bowdlerizing.26 For the most part The New Arabian Nights
seems to bear much the same relation to the great Middle Eastern story collection
that Pope’s The Rape of the Lock does to classical epic. The reader is disturbed by
unexpected depths amid the apparently whimsical ironies about Victorian manners
and mores. Delicious parody of the methods by which an older generation’s ‘best-
sellers’ deploy arabesque allusions becomes the vehicle of subtle and penetrating
satire: those nineteenth century Scheherazades, their voices heard in novels such
as Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone,27 are sent up in a way that enables Stevenson
to make elegant fun of contemporary tendencies towards decadence, a pessimism
that could end in suicide, anarchistic bomb-plots, and even to hint at some unease
about the future of the Empire.28 Such concern with an imminent fin de siècle had
24 Peter L. Caracciolo

been foreshadowed in the ironically portentous title Latter Day Arabian Nights,
which originally he gave the first group of collected tales on their serialisation in
1878. These presentiments of the Judgement Day echo apocalyptic stories among
the Nights, especially a doomsday narrative found in one of the most celebrated
tale-groups belonging to the cycle about legendary Caliph Haroun al-Raschid.
Stevenson recognized that in the Nights there are two saviours, the great story-
teller herself, and one of Scheherazade’s most complex characters, the melancholy
Caliph. As with the Haroun cycle, so the stories in Stevenson’s miniaturization
revolve around a regal protagonist; additionally, though, Stevenson combines the
Caliph and the similarly disguised prince of A Winter’s Tale with Edward, that late-
nineteenth-century heir apparent who frequented a Bohemia somewhat different
to the pastoral scenes of Shakespeare’s Romance.29 The hint of the numinous in
Florizel’s alias, ‘Mr Theophilus Godall’, is deceptive. Lacking much of the authority
appropriate to the Caliphate’s ‘Commander of the Faithful’ or even that belonging
to the Renaissance ‘Defender of the Faith’, Florizel can lay scarcely more claim to
the divine right of kings than could Victoria’s dissolute Prince of Wales. So, whereas
Haroun plays a prominent role in much of his medieval cycle, Florizel tends to lurk
in the background of these new Arabian stories. Unfortunately reminiscences of
these memorable tales do not succeed in transforming The Dynamiter (1885) as they
had Stevenson’s earlier collection.
During the Eighties there was a decisive change in Stevenson’s attitude to the
Nights. In that acknowledgement of the tales’ abiding attraction, evident in ‘A
Gossip on Romance’ (Longman’s Magazine, November 1882), there is not a little
con­des­cension. Obviously the recent experience of entertaining his stepson with
the toy theatre had distorted Stevenson’s memories of his own first encounter with
the Nights themselves:
you shall look there in vain for moral or intellectual interest. No human face
or voice greets us among that wooden crowd of kings and genies, sorcerers
and beggarmen. Adventure, on the most naked terms, furnishes forth the
entertainment and is found enough. (IX, 141)30
By 1887, though, even the novelist’s ideas concerning ‘moral and intellectual interest’
had grown more cosmopolitan, and Stevenson now finds the characters of these
Middle Eastern stories somewhat disturbing. The explanation for this shift is clear
enough; over the first half of the decade a new and more ‘adult’ translation, with
its transgressive accompanying notes revealed a darker side to the Nights. This had
gradually claimed the initially scandalized public’s attention. During a discussion
about his favourite reading (Shakespeare, one or two of the works of Scott and
Meredith, all these inf luenced by the Nights), in ‘A Gossip on a Novel of Dumas’s’
(Memories and Portraits, 1887), Stevenson contrasts the ‘wholesome morality’ of The
Vicomte de Bragelonne with what the new translation of the Nights appeared to reveal.
Out of those ‘who have dipped into Sir Richard Burton’s’ The Book of the Thousand
Nights and a Night:
a reader, undismayed by ‘the animal details’, finding them ‘harmless even
pleasing’, shall yet have been shocked in his turn by the rascality and cruelty of
all the characters. (IX, 129)31
 The Shakespearean Nights of Robert Louis Stevenson 25

The vital Shakespearian impulse to The Master of Ballantrae is presented up front in

the novel’s subtitle ‘a winter’s tale’, whereas an explicit Arabian allusion is teasingly
delayed. Yet its startling appearance does eventually suggest that we shall not have
far to seek for more extensive and disturbing arabesque traces thereabouts and
further afield through the novel. The hint is dropped during the episode when
in eighteenth-century India, a cockpit where the French and British struggle for
colonial hegemony, the desperate Chevalier Burke has a prophetic reunion with
his old companion. The Master is not only disguised as a native but is offensively
incommunicative. The Irish rebel explains:
I was for all the world like one of those calendars with whom Mr Galland has
made us acquainted in his elegant tales. These gentlemen, you will remember
were for ever falling in with extraordinary incidents. (XI, 147)
Expressive of empire building (first literally Islamic, then metaphorically British),
and being itself one of the most coherent, poetically realistic, politically and
socially aware of the story-groups among the Arabian tales, ‘The Porter, the Three
Royal Calendars, and the Ladies of Baghdad’ had already supplied Wilkie Collins
with much of the structure, characterization and evocative symbolism for The
Moonstone. As in the Arabian stories, so in these novels by Collins and Stevenson,
the consequences of international politics, to some degree, are played out on a
domestic stage, the arabesque precedents making possible the setting of multi-vocal
stories about sibling rivalry and criminal detection in an exotic, indeed, global
dimension.
Although the debt to the Nights is acknowledged in both Collins’s and Stevenson’s
novels, this disclosure is teasingly delayed and more or less hidden.32One of the
principal differences between The Moonstone and The Master of Ballantrae lies in
the greater degree of supernatural threat suggested, in this reworking of the Jacob
and Esau story, by allusions to the well-known Arabian tale of Sidi Numan’s wife
Amina, whose lover was ‘a ghoul’.33
In 1891 at Vailima on Samoa, once again Fanny’s interior decorations helped to
conjure up the presence of Scheherazade. Aptly so, because on his sailing voyages
across the Pacific Stevenson had been delighted to discover favourite tales awaiting
his various landfalls. In the South Seas ‘the Arabian Nights were named as having
pleased extremely’ (XVIII, 201).
During his exploration of Polynesia, there were moments when Stevenson
‘experienced a coming together of South Pacific and Scottish elements’.34 Therefore,
as ‘the author of Waverley’ had combined Shakespearean echoes with allusions to the
Arabian Entertainments in order to explain Highland resistance to Hanoverian rule,35
so Stevenson recognized that he could employ reminiscences of the Arabian tales to
suggest the fatal impact of Europeans on the South Seas. The Shakespearian parallel
being obvious there is scarcely need to allude overtly to The Tempest. The tradition
which he was now endeavouring to expand, however, is blazoned in the title given
to the 1893 story-collection. Endeavouring to do for the Pacific what he had done
for London, Stevenson alerts the reader of ‘The Beach of Falesa’ by an explicit
allusion to the opening story in the ‘Hunchback’ cycle (XVII, 269). The other two
tales in Stevenson’s own collection lavishly combine motifs from ‘Aladdin’, ‘Prince
26 Peter L. Caracciolo

Ahmed’, ‘the Fisherman and the Genie’ with Polynesian lore. However in the late
romances which precede and follow the Island Nights Entertainments, the allusions to
the Nights are more subtle. While in The Wrecker (1892) he delays the explanatory
parallels between ‘the romance of business’ and ‘its Arabian tale’ (XIII, 351), in ‘The
Ebb-Tide’ (1894) Stevenson drops the hint earlier; still this proleptic reference is
complex, alluding not only to the full story of the Flying Carpet but also to those
inexhaustible food bags of Judar’s which likewise arouse jealousy within the social
group. In these late fictions (with their reminiscences of Shakespeare’s plays), the
writer gives to his uneasy arabesque allusions a moral purpose and narrative reach
which so far transcend their original significance that Stevenson seems almost to
foreshadow Conrad’s mastery of oriental narrative modes (both sacred as well as
secular traditions) and his ability to combine these exotic cultural borrowings with
the European traditions.36
It is clear that from an early age Stevenson’s approach to writing was deeply
receptive to the narrative dynamics of the great story collection whereby the
perilous frame-tale situation of The 1001 Nights is taken up and tellingly developed
with ingenious variations in the subsequent narratives, profiting from the multiple
ways in which the stories within stories reconfigure, complicate and amplify
the initial problem. Stevenson’s preference for the Nights over Shakespeare led
him time and again to fruitfully rework The Winter’s Tale in terms of what (as I
hinted earlier), Ferial Ghazoul has called, in a brilliant extension of the critical
vocabulary, ‘Nocturnal Poetics’.37 Intriguingly, in her collection which uses as title
that same phrase, Ghazoul re-prints her discussion about similarities between ‘The
Sleeper Awakened’ and The Taming of the Shrew. May one be permitted to imagine
Stevenson’s delight at finding a scholar from Bagdad and Cairo investigating ‘The
Arabian Nights in Shakespearean Comedy’?

Notes to Chapter 3
1. References in the text are to R. L. Stevenson, Works, Swanston Edition (London: Chatto and
Windus, 1911–12).
2. Gaskell’s extraordinarily telling narrative spiral of mises en abyme is explored in Peter L.
Caracciolo’s forthcoming essay ‘The Enemy’s Sum of All Destructions: The Picasso-esque
Reconfiguration of George Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell in Wyndham Lewis’s Self Condemned’.
3. See The Arabian Nights in English Literature, ed. by Peter L. Caracciolo (London: Macmillan,
1988), p. 2, p. 62 n. 5. Hereafter references to this work are given as ANIEL. On the Nights as
one of the sources of the Novel genre, and the process of the Nights’ assimilation into British
culture see also Peter L. Caracciolo, ‘The House of Fiction and Le Jardin anglo-chinois’, in New
Perspectives on Arabian Nights, ed. by Wen-chin Ouyang and Geert Jan van Gedder (London:
Routledge, 2005 ), pp. 67–80.
4. Jenni Calder, R L S: A Life Study (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1980), p. 50.
5. On Stevenson’s interest in Hokusai, see Roger G. Swearingen, The Prose Writings of Robert
Louis Stevenson (London: Macmillan, 1980), p. 86; a good modern collection illustrative of the
books of manga that Stevenson himself possessed is Hokusai’s Sketchbooks, selected by James A.
Michener (Tokyo: Tuttle, 1958). On the more general inf luences from Asia, see e.g. Le Japonisme,
an exhibition catalogue (Paris: Éditions de la Réunion des musées nationaux, 1988).
6. Stevenson’s continuing interest in A Winter’s Tale, see Swearingen, pp. 17, 40, 81.
7. Stevenson’s ‘verbal art’ has been compared with ‘a figure in a Persian carpet’; see Robert Kiely,
Robert Louis Stevenson and the Fiction of Adventure (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
 The Shakespearean Nights of Robert Louis Stevenson 27

1964), pp. 47–48. See also Donald King and David Sylvester, The Eastern Carpet in the Western
World (London: Arts Council, 1983); likewise relevant to any discussion of the significance of
oriental textiles in nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels is the magnificent and instructive
exhibition catalogue Woven from the Heart, Spun from the Soul: Textile Arts of Safavid and Qajar Iran
16th –19th centuries (Washington, DC: The Textile Museum, 1987).
8. Calder, pp. 37–38.
9. Since in the first great Victorian translation from the Arabic, ‘humpback’ is used; see the ‘Story
of the Humpback’, in The Thousand and One Nights commonly called in England The Arabian Nights
Entertainments, trans. by Edward William Lane (London: Charles Knight, 1839), vol. i, ch. 5.
In 1995, Robert L. Mack did an excellent scholarly edition of the first English translation, ‘the
Grub Street’ for World’s Classics; in 2005 Penguin published The Arabian Nights Tales of 1001
Nights, an impressive new translation by Malcolm C. Lyons with Ursula Lyons, introduced and
annotated by Robert Irwin. Helpful guides to this labyrinthine story-collection accumulate,
among which I have found especially useful Robert Irwin, The Arabian Nights: A Companion
(London: Allen Lane, 1994) and Ulrich Marzolph and Richard van Leeuwen, The Arabian Nights
Encyclopedia (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC Clio, 2004); because of partial blindness, beyond glancing
at her remarks on Stevenson, I have not yet had the opportunity to read Marina Warner, Stranger
Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights (London: Chatto and Windus, 2011).
10. On the history of the ‘new edition’ (1853) of Lane, see the ‘Introduction’ to ANIEL, pp.
21–22.
11. See the ‘Introduction’, ANIEL, p. 36.
12. On the relation of these stimuli to ‘the themes of the self ’, see ‘Introduction’, ANIEL, pp. 19,
67 n. 47 and Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. by
R. Howard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1973), pp. 146–47.
13. For some account of these illustrations of the Nights, see Brian Alderson, ‘Scheherazade in the
Nursery’, also the ‘Introduction’, ANIEL, pp. 38–42 and ch. 2. Likewise see Robert Irwin’s
sumptuous Visions of the Jinn: Illustrators of the Arabian Nights (London: Studies in the Arcadian
Library, 2011).
14. Calder, p. 121 and Swearingen, p. 34.
15. Calder, pp. 157–58.
16. Calder, pp. 193, 198. Indeed, as Stevenson notes in ‘A Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured’,
at Hyeres ‘in the garden of the Hotel des Iles d’Or, you may behold <Skelt’s> blessed visions
realised’ (IX, 121).
17. See Swearingen, pp. 86–87.
18. See Muhsin Jassim Al’s invaluable Scheherazade in England: A Study of Nineteenth-Century English
Criticism of the Arabian Nights (Washington, DC: Three Continents Press, 1981), p. 61.
19. Calder, pp. 59, 75, 80.
20. See Alethea Hayter, Opium and the Romantic Imagination (London: Faber, 1971), e.g. pp. 128, 207,
247; also Peter L. Caracciolo, ‘Wilkie Collins and the Ladies of Baghdad’ in ANIEL, ch. 6, and
‘Introduction’, pp. xiv, xxi–xxii, 27–28, 69 n. 65.
21. Repr. in William Makepeace Thackeray, The Sultan Stork and Other Stories and Sketches (London:
George Redway, 1887), p. 8.
22. See Michael Slater, ‘Dickens in Wonderland’ in ANIEL, ch. 5, esp. pp. 139–40.
23. See Cornelia Cook, ‘The Victorian Scheherazade: Elizabeth Gaskell and George Meredith’,
ANIEL, ch. 8, esp. pp. 201–08.
24. See Ferial Jabouri Ghazoul’s enlightening The Arabian Nights: A Structural Analysis (Cairo: Cairo
Associated Institution for the Study and of Presentation of Arab Cultural Values, 1980), pp.
16–23.
25. Consult Margaret Cecilia Annan’s unpublished doctoral dissertation, ‘The Arabian Nights in
Victorian Literature’ (Northwestern University, IL, 1945), pp. 331, 339. Invaluable as is Annan’s
account of Stevenson, Leonee Ormond’s more extensive interpretation is often closer to the
Nights, see her ‘Cayenne and Cream Tarts: W. M. Thackeray and R. L. Stevenson’ in ANIEL,
ch. 7 esp. pp. 189–95. In this essay I am greatly indebted to the work of both these scholars, as I
am to Mia Gerhardt’s illuminating study, The Art of Story-Telling (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1963); but
one of the greatest inspirations for my studies in this field has been Barbara Hardy’s essay on the
28 Peter L. Caracciolo

arabesque in George Meredith: ‘ “A Way to your Hearts through Fire or Water”: The Structure
of Imagery in Harry Richmond’, Essays in Criticism, 10 (1960), 163–80.
26. On the repute of Cervantes see e.g. Fatma Moussa-Mahmoud, ‘English Travellers and the
Arabian Nights’, ANIEL, ch. 3 esp. p. 98, and elsewhere in this volume pp. 12, 169 n. 15, 264.
27. The arabesque nature of Wilkie Collins’s masterpiece is examined by Caracciolo in ANIEL, ch.
6.
28. See Swearingen, p. 30, also John Stokes, In the Nineties, (1990), ch. 5 and p. 188.
29. See Annan (pp. 343–56) and Leonee Ormond (p. 191).
30. Although this view of the people of the Nights here accords with an inf luential modern view —
see Tzvetan Todorov, La Poétique de la Prose (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1977), ch. 5 — not all the
stories in the Arabian Nights are susceptible to structural analysis, these exceptions being largely
concerned with emotional relationships, a point that should have been elaborated in Caracciolo’s
‘The House of Fiction’.
31. In this revulsion from Burton’s ‘translation’, Stevenson had the support of both W. E. Henley
and Henry James, two close friends whose advice he respected, see the ‘Introduction’, ANIEL,
pp. 36–37, also p. xiv.
32. Ormond points out that while Stevenson makes specific references to Nights less frequently
than do predecessors like Thackeray and most of his generation, Stevenson is responsive to
its structural qualities (ANIEL, p. 188). These are subtleties in the use of the arabesque which
Stevenson shares with Dickens and Collins; see the comments on Hard Times in Introduction,
and on The Moonstone in ANIEL, pp. 24–25 & ch. 6.
33. See e.g. ANIEL, pp. 20, 27, 29, 33, 45; Marryat also deploys this story in The Phantom Ship
(1839).
34. See Calder, pp. 297–98.
35. See the ‘Introduction’, ANIEL, pp. 1–19.
36. Also on the inf luence of the Nights, see Robert G. Hampson, ‘The Genie out of the Bottle:
Conrad, Wells and Joyce’ , ANIEL, ch. 9; also Caracciolo, ‘Introduction’, pp. 38, 42; likewise
Caracciolo and Hampson ‘Money Turned to Leaves: Conrad, Collins, Dickens and the Barber’s
Fourth Brother’, Notes and Queries, 36.3 ns ( June 1989), 193–96 (p. 193). On the inf luence of
the related traditions of Buddhist and Hindu story-telling, see Peter L. Caracciolo, ‘Af loat on
the Sea of Stories: World Tales, English Literature and Geopolitical Aesthetics’, in Comparative
Criticism 22, East and West: Comparative Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2000), pp. 3–20.
37. See Ferial J. Ghazoul, Nocturnal Poetics the Arabian Nights in Comparative Context (Cairo: The
American University in Cairo, 1996).
 — 4 —

Wilkie Collins’s
Basil: A Story of Modern Life
An Author’s Search for an Appropriate Form

William Baker

Basil: A Story of Modern Life is Wilkie Collins’s second published novel. It lacks, to
use Barbara Hardy’s words ‘the depth and intensity of the allusions’ found in later
work such as The Women in White (1860) and The Moonstone (1868). Responding to
an email asking whether she had written about Collins, and if not why not, she
replied: ‘No, I haven’t written about Collins at all, though I read and re-read him,
and admire his self-analysing narrative technique and his brilliant plotting. Don’t
know why — he writes sufficiently well but isn’t as good, not as intellectually and
imaginatively demanding, as everyone else I’ve written about at length.’ Barbara
Hardy adds that she has ‘always admired the characters, narrative form and plot’.1
In her Dickens and Creativity Barbara Hardy observes that Dickens made ‘objections
to conspicuous and over-deliberated art in the novels of his friend and collaborator
Wilkie Collins, admired by modern critics for the sophisticated elaborations and
variations of the narrator.’ She notes Dickens’s comments on The Woman in White
in which he criticizes Collins’s ‘disposition to give an audience credit for nothing’.
This ‘necessarily involves the forcing of points on their attention.’ As Collins’s
editor, Dickens found ‘it hard to suggest an editorial cut because the habit seems to
belong so integrally to Collins’s “habits of thought and manner of going to work”.’2
In spite of such objections, discussion and analysis of an early Wilkie Collins
manuscript for his second novel shows that he was very much preoccupied with
finding the appropriate form for his creative genius. Basil: A Story of Modern Life was
published in three volumes by Richard Bentley and was dedicated to Collins’s friend
and protector, Charles Ward. The fact that Collins in this novel is so concerned
with the art of writing, is revealed in its arresting brief opening sentence ‘What am
I now about to write.’3 This eminently self-conscious and personal question can be
seen as expressing considerable self-doubt. It is as if the narrator is feeling his way
towards a fictional form.
In his lengthy ‘Dedication’ to the novel dated ‘November 1852’ Collins alerts
the reader that he has ‘not hesitated to violate some of the conventionalities of
sentimental fiction’ (I:xi:iv). Such a remark has resulted in Basil being regarded as an
illustration, if not the earliest illustration, of the sensation novel. In his ‘Dedication’
Collins writes that he believes ‘that the Novel and the play are twin-sisters in the
30 William Baker

family of Fiction’ (I:xiii:v). He is particularly anxious to claim that the central event
of Basil was founded on something which he personally was aware of although
he does not make the particular fact explicit. Collins could of course be referring
to the secret marriage of Edward and Henrietta Ward who married against their
respective parents’ wishes. The fictional Basil, like the real Wilkie Collins, has a
snobbish father who misunderstands him and tries to dictate his way of life. The
fictional Basil like the real Wilkie Collins chooses to be a lawyer, which he uses as
a stepping stone to find his way into literature.
Contemporary reviewers accorded Basil a mixed reception. For Dickens ‘the
story contains admirable writing’. He added ‘I have made Basil’s acquaintance
with great gratification.’ On the other hand, for The Athenaeum’s reviewer the
novel was ‘a tale of criminality, almost revolting from its domestic horrors’. The
Westminster Review describes the novel in strong language, as ‘absolutely disgusting’.
The somewhat puritanical Mrs Oliphant found Basil ‘a revolting story’. According
to rumour, subsequently Wilkie Collins was ‘accustomed to buy up and destroy
a copy of the three volume edition if it came his way’.4 His ‘Preface’ to the 1862
Sampson Low single-volume edition vigorously defended what he referred to as
the ‘purity’ of the novel. He added that ‘slowly and surely, my story forced its way
through all adverse criticism, to a place in the public favour which it has never lost
since’ (viii–vii). The one-volume edition published by James Blackwood in 1856,
the subsequent Sampson Low 1862 edition and the Smith, Elder edition of 1865–72,
provide evidence of shortening of the text with many small amendments and larger
cuts, mainly focusing upon modulating what was perceived as the violence of the
three-volume edition. Dorothy Goldman in her ‘Note on the Text’ to her World’s
Classics edition, writes that ‘Collins’ 1862 revisions involved over a thousand
deletions — of single words, phrases, and paragraphs, and of page-length and longer
passages.’ These include ‘two lengthy scenes (on the omnibus just before Basil
sees Margaret for the first time, and when Basil walks through London awaiting
Margaret and Mannion’s departure from her aunt’s party’.5
Recently Wilkie Collins’s second novel has received more sympathetic critical
attention. Graham Law and Andrew Maunder, in their excellent Wilkie Collins: A
Literary Life, write that ‘there are good reasons for studying the novel, not least for
the way in which it rehearses the main concerns of Collins’s later and better-known
work.’ They go on to spell out what these qualities are: ‘the challenges to identity,
sanity, and self-hood posed by unscrupulous relatives and scheming acquaintances,
the disjunction between appearance and reality, particularly in middle-class homes,
plus the suggestion that violence is not confined to the rough London streets but
forms part of the fabric of suburbia.’ They also draw attention to the fact that ‘Basil
was [...] the first Collins novel with a contemporary setting and a realistic approach:
before publication Richard Bentley had insisted that the narrative be toned down
— cleaned up is perhaps a more accurate description — in a number of places.’
Very little attention has been paid to a study of Wilkie Collins’s writing habits
or close examination given to his manuscripts. There are of course exceptions. Sue
Lonoff ’s Wilkie Collins and his Victorian Readers: A Study in the Rhetoric of Authorship
offers some account of his working habits, but does not provide a sustained analysis
 Wilkie Collins’s Basil 31

of the manuscripts. Lillian Nayder’s excellent Unequal Partners: Charles Dickens,

Wilkie Collins and Victorian Authorship is very much concerned with the complex
relationship between Dickens and Collins. Nayder’s focus is primarily upon their
collaborative work for Household Words and All the Year Round. Neither Nayder or
Lonoff pay much attention to Wilkie Collins’s actual working fictional methodology
using manuscripts as evidence of a careful novelist at work.6
The manuscript for Basil, or to be more accurate, the manuscript for part of
Basil, is now in the British Library (Add. MS 41060, ff. 1–86).7 It was purchased at
Hodgson’s Auction Rooms on 6 December 1923; at that sale it was lot 2148. The
mss had been lot 16 at the dispersal of Wilkie Collins’s books at the sale of his
Library by the London auctioneers Puttick and Simpson, on 20 January 1890.8 A
typed note with the manuscript observes that ‘it is evidently an earlier draft, and
not the copy sent to the printer. “Basil” is called Philip throughout the greater part
of the manuscript.’ The writer also notes that the openings of the various chapters
differ and that there is no numbering to chapters in the manuscript. Additionally
‘a sketch for a dialogue on the verso of a leaf near the end, referring to boils, seems
to belong to some other work.’ The typed notes also draw attention to the fact
that ‘on the verso of the first leaf of the end of the’ first volume Chapter 10 of
the printed text ‘is a long passage, wishing that Clara were married etc., which is
omitted in the published version. The verso of the second leaf has (reversing the
volume) a passage from some political tract, mentioning Ireland. That of the third
leaf has three sketches of figures.’ The manuscript includes alternative titles for what
became Basil: A Story of Modern Life. These range from ‘A Cloud on the Household’,
‘A Young Man’s Confession’, ‘Leaves from the History of a Young Man’s life’ to
‘The Love-Secret’.
The manuscript is unwatermarked and lacks printers’ markings. Wilkie Collins
writes mainly on the recto side with some revisions and amendments on the verso
side. He uses black ink. The handwriting is miniscule and exceedingly difficult to
read. Considerable bleeding in the manuscript has taken place and it is laminated.
Reproduction would not be practical, although Kenneth Robinson’s 1951 biography,
Wilkie Collins, has a facsimile of the first folio facing p. 71.9
There are 101 folios. In order to show Wilkie Collins the writer struggling with
his chosen artistic form, what follows is an attempt to convey some of the more
significant revisions and additions which are found in this manuscript. These are
passages which have not seen the light of day to the present and they, it must be
said, reveal that at times Wilkie Collins seems to be writing a totally different
novel from the one which emerges as the printed Basil: A Story of Modern Life.
Indeed the decision to use the title or even the character Basil isn’t revealed by the
manuscript, demonstrating the problems of Collins creative struggle. These are
ref lected physically in the manuscript. At one point it is turned upside down and
Collins indicates a time lapse — perhaps his own time lapse rather than the stories
time lapse — by writing ‘ about six weeks’ and a title ‘Lanreath; | or The Cloud
of the Household | By W. Wilkie Collins. | Author of Antonina &c. &c.’ He then
writes ‘May I not write things such as style is this? | In such a method too, and yet
not miss | My end thy good? Why may it not be done? | Dark clouds bring waters
32 William Baker

when the brightest none.’ He identifies these as lines from ‘John Bunyan’s Apology
for the Pilgrim’s Progress | Volume I.’
The opening of the manuscript is different from that of the printed editions.
Following the title ‘Lanreath’ there appears ‘Part First. In Cornwall’ as if Collins is
writing a memoir. This begins ‘The task appointed to me is a hard one to fulfill’
followed by an incomplete date July 18—’. The text is melodramatic, replete with
Biblical echoes and solipsistic, revealing a punctuation device, the overuse of the
parenthesis:
Alone! — at the age of twenty three alone in the world! I have but began my
life; and already I stand [apart: erased]10 as a stranger [from: erased] among my
fellow creatures- already see my work [life: erased] onward pilgrimage traced
out before me as a lonely pathway that seems by the side of the populace high
road but never joins it. Rather the vision of a heavy calamity to cast resist this
stealthy poison of bad remembrances to resist the guilt of evil thought and evil
acts to atone and I must do this unaided young and handicapped and I dare not
expect sympathy ask for help.
No! My consolation my hope, I must trust to myself. From the dross of
my errors should spring the purity of my repentance; from the gloom of my
affection should arise the brightness of my better life. Should! Let me say shall!
Let me neither falter nor dispair out of the Darkness that was upon the face of
the deep [sprang: erased] came the light of the first morning.
What noble [more] occupation for heart and mind than this which I have
set myself to perform? To trace my own way back through all difficulty and
danger, to the high place from which I am fallen after having sunk down at the
threshold of life, to rise and begin the journey anew — to grow courageous
from long disaster — to know myself deceived, deserted and yet not to lose
hope and ambition for the future — Let me but have the life and strength to
perform these duties; and I [shall: erased] can meet the perils and trials that may
yet be to come, and I shall meet them strong to bear and firm to resist.
I have taken refuge from guilt and persecution — from the anger and
misery of others — from my own weakness and woe, in this remote corner of
England, in the little village on the Cornish coast. Perhaps, I ought in regard
to my own safety, drag on even further — to have hidden myself securely in a
foreign land — But when I went out homeless from my father’s roof — When
first are voices a voice that I may never hear again, comfort to me and bid me
farewell — which I remembered that I had given me first best, purest love had
been turned into my curse and my shame — that I had only found the better
joys, and happier occupations of life were lost and gone to me, and festered at
my heart — When I felt all this, there grew within me a yearning towards my
own country — a wild, forlorn, helpless attachment to the soil on which I had
been born — the soil which I thought [if I am: erased] a nursing mother to
me in my friendliness and my grief, my loneliness and my danger. So I went
on past town and village, moor and meadow while I hid myself there among
the hills of my native land — hid myself, as a child angered by contradiction.
For solace and security, or affrighted by objects around [them: erased] it, hides
[there: erased] its face in its mother’s breast.
Well then, I remain to learn endurance and to conquer grief. But there is
one obstacle within me to that [perfect: erased] purification of my heart — and
that strengthening of my mind which is now the last best object of my life to
accomplish.
 Wilkie Collins’s Basil 33

The remembrance of the calamity I suffered never deserts me — it not only

darkened the whole current of my existence and changed every purpose for
which it is once my conviction to live — it burns in upon my memory — all
the smallest slightest circumstances [constructed] with it are as present to me to
now, as when they first occurred — it burns my thoughts by day and inspires
my dreams by night. If I am first upon the hill-tops and look abroad over the
rolling sea my mind even amid the greatest aspects of Nature is still occupied
with the miserable and irrevocable Past. If I set down to my books, my attention
wanders away from the loftiest thoughts of others to my own bitter experiences!
I have endeavored to write myself; but whatever the subject on which I try
my pen, the fatal inf luence of my own story more or less surely guides it. My
mind is infected by the moral disease within me — the plague-spot fastens and
expands — Is there no help no remedy against this?
I know of but one. It is to exhaust my recollections [erased unreadable
passage] for a time — by writing down the narratives of what has befallen me
and in all its details. If I can [pull] my mind to wear itself [out on the subject
— I may yet hope to [stir] it with higher and better ref lections — the anguish
which this effort will cause me must end by weaning my restless thoughts into
repose — by emptying my full heart of all that was dross and polluted. What
confession is] to the penitent the confession of these pages may be to me.
I may be morbid and weak — I may be wrong in my present convictions —
but, God help me, I have no other choice than to follow them! Solitude I can
bear — but inaction — or what is worse the resisted effort to be occupied —
these are burdens too heavy for me. I must employ [myself: erased] my mind
— I work it out wearily [indecipherable word] tranquility — or I shall lose my
reason. I have tried hard to [erased indecipherable passage] but in vain. I know
no occupation that it is fit for but this that I propose to myself -and this I will
once begin.
It would be incumbent not to admit to myself — and this it once begun
— at the outset that I contemplate the publication of the narrative I am now
about to write. [I hope and trust that it may be printed: erased] after my death,
I hope and believe that it will be printed. To some it will be a [indecipherable
word] to others a study of human nature — to all it should be interesting for the
simplest and the strongest reason — it is true. Some men I once knew have left
directions in their wills that [their] body should be anatomised for [the benefit
of: erased] science — so, I leave my heart in these pages to be anatomised [for
the benefit: erased] as an offering to human nature.
But before, I occupied myself with the past, it is fit that I should linger a
moment over the present. A few words about this place of repose, about the
life that I now live in it shall serve as the preface to my narrative. If I am [that:
erased] I should know first for what I am now — I can more easily and freely
proceed to confess what I was.
These paragraphs with more than eleven hundred words cramped on the first folio
are not in the printed versions. However words and passages on the second folio
found their way into print, not at the beginning of Collins’s novel but towards
its end. In the third volume of the first edition Basil has a ‘Journal’ that starts on
‘October 19th ’ and he describes his first days in Cornwall. The use of the same
words in print and in the manuscript is indicated by the use of italics although word
and phrase placement is different in the first and subsequent editions:
34 William Baker

[f2] II
The little hamlet where my life has been passed for the last month, is on the
southern coast of Cornwall — not more than a few miles distant from the Land’s End.
The cottage I occupy has but two rooms, I have no furniture, but my bed my table
and my chair. Some half dozen fishermen and their families are my only neighbours. Not
two months back I should have scrupled to [indecipherable word] the door in
such a place as I now inhabit — I should have spent as pocket-money the lowly
pittance on which I now exist.
When I first came here, my arrival produced both astonishment and suspicion.
The primitive [simple: erased] people could not reconcile my pale worn face with
my youthful years — they looked on my loneliness on my worn face with my
[superstitious] eyes — they and children had an awe of me at first, as of some
unknown being who had come among them to waste away under a curse and die
mysteriously and secretly among them. They waited day after day, when I was first
installed in the cottage to see my friends join me, and none came — to see a letter
sent me! and no letters arrived. When I paid them money for my new joinery
they questioned the lawfulness and safety of receiving it. The fisherman’s wife, who
prepares my food confessed to me but yesterday — good kind soul! with many
contrite tears and much shame that she had looked at my few books in my
absence — to see if there were any strange magic [potions] in them — anything
like the witchcraft which she had heard about in our old Cornish legends.
This deepened the mystery to their eyes. They began to recall to memory old
Cornish legends of [solitary secret people] who had lived for years in different parts of
the country [ — coming, none knew whence] [The very simplicity of my answer] that I
had only come to Cornwall to live in quiet so to regain my health perplexed them afresh.
All these particulars I have gathered from the fisherman’s wife who prepares
my food and who with much contrition — good simple soul! that she had even
looked among the few books in my absence to see whether they did not exhibit
some startling supernatural peculiarities. Her sister had listened at my window
late at night to be assured that I did not utter in a magic tongue — either to
myself or worse still! to some [formidable] spirit who visited me.
This magic superstitious curiosity is now wearing off among my poor
neighbours. They are getting used to my solitary studious — and (to them)
inexplicable mode of existence. One little service of kindness that I have been
enabled to render to their children have worked wonders in my favour. I am pitied now,
rather than distrusted. Offers have been made to go some distance away, and send
for the doctor or the clergyman to do me good. When the results of the fishing are
particularly abundant a little present is often made to me. Yesterday, when I went
out in the morning, I found some gulls? eggs placed outside my window. They had
been placed there by some of the children, as an ornament for my cottage — the only
ornament they had to give, the only ornament they had ever heard off.
During my long walks by myself the grief and despondency that I cannot as
yet always subdue or conceal no longer excite either suspicion or surprise. I can
go out with my Bible or my Shakespeare in my hand and direct steps up the ravine in
which our hamlet is situated towards the old gray stone Church that stands solitary on
the hill-top surrounded by the lonesome moor — If any children happened to be playing
among the scattered [mossy] tombstones they do not start and run away when they see me
sitting on the coffin-stone at the entrance of the churchyard, or wandering around the solid
granite tower reared by hands that have mouldered into dust centuries ago. My approach
is no evil omen now for my little neighbours. They look up at the face for a moment
with bright smiles, and then go on with their game.
 Wilkie Collins’s Basil 35

From the churchyard I [can: erased] look down the ravine on fine days to the sea,
mighty piles of granite soar above the fishermen’s cottages on each side. The little strip of
white sand beach which they [shut] in glows pure in the sunlight — the inland streams
that trickle down through the bed of the rocks sparkles at places like a stream of silver
fire — The round white clouds with their violet shadows and their bright wavy edges
tower up and roll as majestically all above me: the cries of the seabirds the murmur of the
surf the far music of the wind among the ocean caverns, fall now together now separately
to my ear. Nature’s bounteous voice and Nature’s beauty soothing and purifying angels
of the soul speak to me tenderly of such times as these of that [this better world
when the: erased] end of mortal hope which is the bright beginning of eternal
[peace]!
Oh my heart, my heart! I can feel it sometimes within and heaving within
me when I pause and rest at sunset on the granite [works] that are scattered
over the inland moss- When they [indecipherable word] tranquillity awful
in the wide solitude and [bids me: erased] in the loneliness think of all I have
suffered, of all that I may yet have to bear! When I rise again, and walk in the
loneliness homeward through [five erased words] young as I am the graves have
a welcome and a promise for me as I pass through the darkening church yard.
It is worse with me, when the rain and wind and sea arise together, and
sheltered among caverns at the side of the precipice, I look out upon the leaping
waves and the wild driving spray. Then the [meaning] of a danger that hangs
over my head — then the threat of deadly enemy vowed to pursue me to ruin
madness death assails me in all its horror. I see the dim ghostly personification of a
fatality, brightens and darkens as a weird dot of its own over the wide heaving ocean
— Then, the winds growling and thundering behind me in the hollows of a cave that
have a voice of woe and warning to [indecipherable two words] Lament! Thou
hast f lown from the doom that followed thee — and lo, go where thou wilt
now, thou shalt find it ever more in thy path!
Those are my thoughts; but they cannot quell me. I may lose hope; but never
patience — despair may overwhelm me; this Sister Fury but guilt shall never
follow in his track. My outward life in this seclusion is a blank — a few lines
may tell it. In the morning I am always near my cottage content to watch the
toils and cares and recreation of the little community among whom I live. In
the afternoon I extend my wanderings — in what direction I care not so long as
I can [indecipherable word ] my round into comparative oblivion, by weaving
my body into absolute fatigue — by the evening when I cannot sleep, I read —
when I can do neither, when late at night darkness and wakefulness have their
vague terrors for me, as if I was a child again, then I think and suffer until the
mornings.
Is this [function] a criminal inaction — is it a morbid capitulation of the
citadel of the heart at the first ceremony of departure and suffering? Wait until
my story is told; and then say, could you do otherwise?
It is eight o’clock, the morning sun shines out auspiciously from banks of
purple rainy clouds, the fishermen are spreading their nets to dry on the lower declivities
of the rocks, the children are playing about the boats drawn up on the beach — the sea
breeze blows fresh and pure towards the shore — all objects are bright to look upon, all
[the: erased] sounds are pleasant to hear, as I open my paper [and prepare: erased]
to begin my narratives.
III
My family is, I believe, one of the most ancient in England. I am the second son.11
36 William Baker

At this point with a few verbal changes the manuscript (f.2) is as the printed text
which reverts back from the close of the third volume to the opening.12 Evidently
Wilkie Collins chose to change the openings of his novel focusing upon ‘Basil,
hero of the eponymous Basil, the sexually and financially dispossessed second
son of an English gentleman of large fortune.’13 For John Kucich, in his ‘Collins
and Victorian Masculinity’, Basil ‘is one of the most antiheroic, debilitated male
melancholics in Victorian fiction. Presenting the pages of his narrative as an
expiation — the confession of “an error” that he hopes will be read after his death
“as relics solemnized by the atoning shadows of the grave”.’14 Kucich adds that
‘Basil’s melancholia follows an increasingly precipitous downward spiral. At the
beginning of the narrative proper he still enjoys his “earliest ambition” to become a
novelist — a vocation that defines his manly independence, since it f louts his father’s
wish that he pursues her political career. But Basil quickly abandons novel writing,
along with every other pleasure in his life.’ In short ‘Basil embodies melancholia
taken to extremes and stripped of any narcissistic compensation.’15 Reading Basil
from this perspective, clearly the opening and concluding section found in the
manuscript is too stark, too obsessive and had to be revised.
The manuscript in the British Library is littered with other changes too. At the
opening of the novel the narrator Basil describes his alienation from his father and
their frequent arguments. He is not alone in arguing with his father. His brother
Ralph also had a negative relationship with the father and left the country on
several occasions to avoid him. The description of Ralph’s second leaving in the
manuscript is different from that in the printed text. In the latter the reader is told:
‘Shortly after that second departure, we heard that he had altered his manner of
life. He had contracted, what would be termed in the continental code of morals, a
reformatory attachment to a woman older than himself, who was living separated
from her husband, when he met with her. It was this lady’s lofty ambition to be
a Mentor and mistress, both together! And she soon proved herself to be well-
qualified for her courageous undertaking.’
In the manuscript the wording is rather different:
Since that time, we have heard that he has a little altered his manner of life.
He has contracted [what in] the continental code of morals would be termed
a reformatory attachment to a woman much older than himself who was
separated from her husband when he met her. It is the ladies ambition to be his
Minerva as well as his Venus — to be his Mentor and Mistress together. She has
certainly not failed in the undertaking: Ralph does not spend half the money he
did. He has given up his [post] at the [embassy] and is travelling quietly in Italy,
with no other companion than the fair friend who is working his reform.
When he will return to England — whether he will ever become the high-
minded high-principled country gentleman that my father...
At which point the narrator continues with his focus on his brother Ralph and
then turns his attention to his sister, Clara. Again there are differences between the
manuscript and the printed text. The manuscript continues:
I have sketched my elder brother’s character as I knew and shall probably
never have another opportunity of altering or completing the outline. Let me
 Wilkie Collins’s Basil 37

turn to the subject that is nearer to my heart — dear to me as my last loved

remembrance — precious beyond all treasures to me, in my solitude and my
exile from home.
My sister! Well may I linger over your beloved name, ever fair angel —
character — in these melancholy pages — a little further on and the darkness
of crime and woe will encompass me [indecipherable passage]. Recollections of
you kindle like a pure light in my heart, doubly bright by contrast with what
is to come here, ever the downward shame that are to come as dimmed and
distanced, this purity and the love that shines like a halo around them.
My sister! — Why should I be ashamed to confess it? When these pages are
seen by other eyes than mine, the world and I shall parted for ever, — and ever
were it not so will be parted at [under] from ever by the great gulp of Death.
At the top of the verso of his manuscript folio[6] Collins inserts:
When I have but casually mentioned her the pen has trembled in my hand —
here, when all recollections of the person are to me an association my tears
gather fast and thick beyond control and for the first time since I began my task
my courage and my calmness fail me. I must close these leaves for the day; and
go forth together strength and resolution for the tomorrow, as the hill-tops that
overlook the sea.
Textually this is transformed into the more disciplined, controlled and amplified:
Whether he will ever become the high-minded, higher-principled country
gentleman, that my father has always desired to see him, it is useless for me to
guess. On the domains which he is to inherit, I shall never perhaps set foot
again: in the halls where he will one day preside as master, I shall never more
be sheltered. Let’s me now quit the subject of my older brother, and turn to
a theme which is nearer to my heart; dear to me as the last remembrance left
that I can love; precious beyond all treasures in my solitude and my exile from
home.
My sister! — Well may I linger over your beloved name in such a record
as this. A little further on, and the darkness of crime and grief will encompass
me; here, my recollections of you kindle like a pure light before my eyes —
doubly pure by contrast with what lies beyond. May your kind eyes, love, be
the first that fall on these pages, when the writer has parted from them for
ever! May your tender hand be the first that touches these leaves, when mine is
cold! Backward in my narrative, Clara, wherever I have but casually mentioned
my sister, the pen has trembled and stood still. At this place, where all my
remembrances of you throng upon me unrestrained, the tears gather fast and
thick beyond control; and for first time since I began my task, my courage and
my calmness fail me.
It is useless to persevere longer. My hand trembles; my eyes grow dimmer
and dimmer. I must close my labours for the day, and go forth to gather strength
and resolution for to-morrow on the hill-tops that overlook the sea.16
Perhaps Wilkie Collins deliberately wished to suppress his hero’s obsession with his
sister owing to its strong sexual element. There is no suggestion in the printed text
that Clara is married or to be married. However such a suggestion is to be found
in twenty-nine lines of holograph text on the verso of folio 16. This is difficult
to read as bleeding has taken place. However, as it suggests a path not taken, a
narrative strand undeveloped by Collins, it is worth transcribing not least because
38 William Baker

its omission from the printed text shows Collins the artist controlling his material
and omitting leads:
I who had hitherto one thought of my sisters possible marriage — as a necessary
calamity which would mournfully alter our relation with each other — how I
wished her marriage to take off his attention from me — insatiable selfishness
of love! Vain delusion to all — a passion generous which inevitably and
invariably demands the sacrifice of other affections purer though less powerful
than itself — Does it not! Do the claims of dear kindred and kind speaks to
you in the same voice after marriage that they spoke in before — are your good
old friendships the same friendships, after you were married than they were
before! No. Some of our emotions mean more to us with a love [than before]
[Eden still lingering about them: erased] has ever lingering about it a taint of
the air as this [side paradise Arcadia: erased] in which it first grew — an earthy
shadow cast on it, by the physical instinct in which deify and idealize it, as we
may — it takes its rise.[indecipherable passage]. Am I [soured] to say with our
evil experience in writing this! I remember a girl we once knew — who fell in
love with an officer at a ball — He was in every respect an excellent match —
but the girl’s father was very old — and he objected to it for one reason — the
officer was about return to India to remain, as his military interest required,
for a long period of years. The father could not hope ever to see the daughter
again, in the course of nature. She was his idol — his pride — But she would
marry. He fell ill and took to his bed in despair — and she was married —
and went away. His father never held up his head again — he dropped — his
character altered completely — Who pitied or understood him? He could not
complain — the marriage was excellent. His daughter had exercised a natural
right and instinct, which his children would exercise in their turn — yes but
[deity exalt] this instinct — this passion — this devotion, above all others — it
is beneath many in this world — it is counted as nothing in the next. Leave
father’s and mother’s and cleave to your wife is a commandment divine in its
sense and necessity — but how many wants have been withered and broken in
the keeping of it!
At the foot of his manuscript leaf Wilkie Collins writes: ‘hope and Vanity were
ministering to Love and the smoke in their incense [indecipherable word] my heart
into oblivion of all external inf luences — even to the [long-loved] inf luences of
the old familiar home’ [f.16].
This passage is of some importance. Clara his sister is significant to Basil yet she
is not the focus of the narrative. The focus is upon Margaret Sherwin, the daughter
of a linen-draper. Basil quickly discovers after their marriage that Margaret has
taken a lover. Masochistically Basil eavesdrops on the lovers in the neighbouring
room of a cheap hotel. His father disowns him for having married beneath his class.
Margaret’s lover is Mannion, the man from whom Basil is f leeing and whom he
regards as his mortal enemy. Mannion, of course, has sexually humiliated Basil and
takes delight in taunting him that Margaret only married him for his social position.
Mannion has been read as much more mature than Basil. He is, in fact, old enough
to have deceived Basil by acting as his second father. Kucich argues that ‘the glaring
opposition between Basil’s melancholia and Mannion’s grandiosity obscures the
striking similarities that define these two characters as spirit halves of a single male
ego. Both characters try and fail at authorship; both are dismissed from respectable
 Wilkie Collins’s Basil 39

households because of their social disgrace; both are morbidly sensitive about social
and personal liabilities; and both suffer at the hands of the same excommunicating
patriarch.’17
Ironically, the narrative reveals that Basil’s father has, long before the narrative,
given testimony against Mannion’s father, revealing that he forged his name on a
bond. This testimony helped to hang Mannion’s father. For Kucich this ‘symbolises
the crippling exclusion from patriarchal power, authority, wealth and love that
torments all the novel’s male characters.’18 With such a reading in mind it would
not be too fanciful to suggest that there is the possibility that Basil’s sister could be
sexually seduced by Mannion. Wilkie Collins, as has been remarked, does not go
down that road.
Basil’s father saw a career for him in politics, though the political subjects that
would preoccupy Basil are not fictionally spelt out. Interestingly, the manuscript
shows evidence of contemporary political concerns, as a digression reveals that
Wilkie Collins was distracted as he was writing the novel. On the verso of folio 17,
with the manuscript turned upside down, in a passage that is very difficult to read,
and in places does not make sense, he writes:
The English people on the contrary we expressly described that people as
tolerating a foreign [erased: indecipherable words] suffer such glorious oppor­
tunities for elevating the inf luence of England to the highest pinnacle in Europe
and for establishing the [peoples] of mankind beyond the power of absolutely
two [indecipherable]
But these considerations do not apply to the Irish Question. This case is that
of men which have [hunted] whether [there] had been in their hands at that
moment or not little signifies — to open warfare against the government of a
country. They therefore are [indecipherable word] the penalty of a [defeat] with
its consequences — and we hold that it is too [affirm] a very mistaken [position]
if a [defeated can’t respect or even demand viz but of concession. — from the
circle we hold that even has known no ground for complaint]. It may form a
ground for [renewal] insistence where that is found which it may be a motive
to [supplant] but under no circumstances can complaints be otherwise than is
generally made. No [circumstances] can the [sanguine: indecipherable words:
for the victory without: erased] existing independently
If we were to [suggest] a parallel between the [Sectarianism Authoritarianism]
of the Continent and the conduct of our Government we should find it rather
in the case of Ernest Jones and his fellow prisoners. We have not heard [that]
in his confinement [he]was subject to anything which could be called [cruelty]
expressively and that they would cause [Smith & Brown] repelled spontaneous
offer of indulgence of Mr. Jones and his fellow prisoners was very different. It
was a continuance of studied cruelty not the less.
Wilkie Collins most notably wrote about political and religious matters, especially
religious ones, in his friend Edward Piggott’s radical The Leader between 1852 and
1855. The Irish question, although dominant in English politics in the nineteenth
century, did not occupy the forefront of Wilkie Collins’s fictional concerns.
Difficult as it is to read, his brief manuscript excursion is of interest as it is on the
Irish question.
Ernest Jones (1816–1869) is today a largely forgotten figure. In 1846 he joined the
40 William Baker

Chartist movement and became a follower of Fergus O’Connor, the radical Chartist
leader. Jones was arrested on 6 June 1848 for seditious speech and was sentenced to
two years in the notorious Tothill Fields prison in London. The conditions were
notoriously bad: placed in solitary confinement, his health was affected for the rest
of his life. Supported by his friends whilst in prison, Jones kept writing. Released
in July 1850 he returned to radical journalism and edited the People’s Paper. This
ceased publication in 1858 but had vigorously opposed the Crimean war. Jones
stood unsuccessfully as a radical parliamentary candidate. In 1860 he returned to
his career as a barrister specializing in defending radicals such as a group of Irish
Fenians charged with murder. He also wrote novels. Why Wilkie in the middle of
his manuscript should be thinking of Jones is something of a mystery, but worth
recording.19
There is not space here to document all the differences between the manuscript
of Basil and its printed incarnations. It is interesting to note that it is not until
the verso of folio 86 that a title Basil; or Pages from the Story of a Young Man’s Life
emerges. There were, as has been indicated, alternative titles too: Basil; a Young
Man’s Confession; Basil; or Leaves from the History of a Young Man’s Life; Basil; or the
Love-Secret; Basil; or The Cloud on the Household. What is clear is that this manuscript
is evidently an early draft and not the copy that was sent to the printer. The
manuscript lacks watermarks: throughout ‘Basil’ is called ‘Philip.’ To repeat, the
opening two manuscript chapters are very different from the printed edition. There
is no numbering in the manuscript to chapters, but presumably the ‘III’, ‘IX’, ‘X’
that are indicated in the manuscript correspond to print sections. A sketch for a
dialogue on the verso of leaf 8 refers to ‘boils’ and seems to belong to some other
work. As pointed out, on the verso of the first leaf of twenty-six is a lengthy passage
wishing that Clara were married. This is omitted in the published versions as is
the passage from a political tract mentioning Ireland (f17v). Sketches of figures, not
uncommon throughout Wilkie Collins’s manuscripts, may be found on the third
leaf. On folio 18 there are three sketches of males, two have hats, the other has not.
One has a walking stick and all three are fully dressed in walking attire.
Other interesting features found in the manuscript include on the verso of folio
65 the beginning of another story with the title:
Nine O’clock!
The night of 30th of June, 1793, was a memorable night in the prison annals
of Paris. The Deputies who represented the Department of the Gironde in the
French Parliament had been thrust aside to make way for the sanguinary career
of Robespierre, and his colleagues of the Reign of Terror — the twenty-one
leading men of the famous ‘Girondi’ party, were condemned to the guillotine.
Their last night in prison was the night of the 30th: on the morning of the 31st
they had ceased to live.
At this point the manuscript stops. Basil was published by Richard Bentley in
three volumes on 16 November 1852. ‘Nine O’Clock!’ was a short story published
in Bentley’s Miscellany (August 1852) set at the time of the French Revolution. It is
noteworthy for being one of Wilkie Collins’s earliest tales using the supernatural.
The opening of the printed text is very similar to that of the manuscript:
 Wilkie Collins’s Basil 41

The night of 30th of June, 1793, is memorable in the prison annals of Paris, as
the last night in confinement of the leaders of the famous Girordin party in the
first French Revolution. On the morning of the 31st, the twenty-one deputies
who represented the department of the Gironde, were guillotined to make way
for Robespierre and the Reign of Terror.20
In conclusion, there are other features of interest in the manuscript. Folio 57 is
dated ‘W.C. Dec.1851.’ On the verso of folio 8 there are dates probably connected
to the three-volume publication and composition of Basil. Thus ‘20th Sept’ may well
refer to the first volume. On the verso of the second leaf there are some sketches
and imitations of the signatures of Wilkie Collins’s close friend, Douglas Jerrold
(1803–1857), the novelist, dramatist and journalist who died suddenly,. Dickens and
Collins raised funds for his widow and Collins wrote: ‘Douglas Jerrold was one of
the first and dearest of my literary friends.’21
For Peter Ackroyd in his Wilkie Collins, Basil is ‘a novel of fatality and obsession
that might almost earn a place beside the great Russian novels of love and madness.’
Ackroyd adds that Collins ‘began writing it at white heat, filling his square sheets
with tiny handwriting.’ He cites Collins, who in 1862 observed: ‘I knew that Basil
had nothing to fear from pure-minded readers. Slowly and surely, my story forced
its way through all adverse criticism, to a place in the public favour which it has
never lost since.’22 It is clear from an examination of the manuscript of Basil and of
the printed texts that we gain an insight into Wilkie Collins’s working habits. We
can get closer to him as a conscious creative artist framing and manipulating his
narrative. Manuscript inspection shows him to be a careful writer, aesthetically very
much concerned with his art and artistic endeavour — with the dictates of his form.
Basil is only his second novel and clearly he was to refine his novelistic techniques.
From the writing of Basil it is evident that Wilkie Collins was a skilful and careful
manipulator of his art: a writer for ever seeking his appropriate form.
Notes to Chapter 4
1. Email to William Baker, 21 May 2012.
2. Barbara Hardy, Dickens and Creativity (London: Continuum, 2008), p. 23.
3. I:27:1: References to Basil: A Story of Modern Life, are to the first edition, 3 vols (London:
Richard Bentley, 1852) and also to the reprint (New York: Dover Publications, 1980), whose
page numbers are shown last. The reprint is ‘an unabridged and unaltered republication of the
1862 edition of the work as published by Sampson Low, Son, & Co., London, which includes
the author’s revisions in both Dedication and text of the original (1852) edition’ (p. ii). Further
citations of passages from Basil: A Study of Modern Life are followed by page numbers in
parentheses, given in the text.
4. Cited Andrew Gasson, Wilkie Collins: An Illustrated Guide (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1998), p. 14.
5. Wilkie Collins, Basil: A Story of Modern Life, edited with an introduction by Dorothy Goldman
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. xxiii.
6. Graham Law and Andrew Maunder, Wilkie Collins: A Literary Life (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2008), 65; Sue Lonoff, Wilkie Collins and his Victorian Readers: A Study in the Rhetoric
of Authorship (New York: AMS Press, 1982); Lillian Nayder, Unequal Partners: Charles Dickens,
Wilkie Collins and Victorian Authorship (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 2002).
My own paper, ‘The Manuscript of Wilkie Collins’s No Name’, Studies in Bibliography, 43 (1990),
197–208, contains a detailed account of differences between the holograph manuscript of No
Name and its printed versions.
42 William Baker

7. I should like to thank Faith Clarke née Dawson, the great-granddaughter of Wilkie Collins
and Martha Rudd, for her kind permission to publish hitherto unpublished Wilkie Collins
material. Thanks are also due to the Department of Manuscripts, the British Library. And to
Donald Hawes, Paul Lewis and Patrick Scott for their judicious comments on various drafts of
this essay.
8. See my Wilkie Collins’s Library: A Reconstruction (Westport, CT, and London: Greenwood Press,
2002), pp. 5–14.
9. Kenneth Robinson, Wilkie Collins: A Biography (London: Bodley Head, 1951).
10. Square brackets are mine and represent a conjectural reading or a raised word.
11. III: 223–29; 312–14.
12. I:29: 2.
13. Rebecca Steinitz, Time, Space, and Gender in the Nineteenth-Century British Diary (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 173.
14. I:26–27:1.
15. John Kucich, ‘Collins and Victorian Masculinity’, in The Cambridge Companion to Wilkie Collins,
ed. by Jenny Bourne Taylor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 128–29.
16. I:68–69:17–18.
17. Kucich, p. 131.
18. Ibid.
19. See <http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/CHjones.htm> and John Saville’s entry on Jones in
ODNB <http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/15000>.
20. Wilkie Collins: The Complete Shorter Fiction, ed. by Julian Thompson (New York: Carroll, 1995),
p. 90.
21. Gasson, p. 87.
22. Peter Ackroyd, Wilkie Collins (London: Chatto and Windus, 2012), pp. 49, 52.
 — 5 —

The Absent Dog:

Great Expectations
Beryl Gray

No actual dog participates in the action of Great Expectations (1861), yet the idea of
the dog is essential to it.
The weekly instalments of the novel began appearing in Dickens’s periodical All
the Year Round on 1 December 1860, approximately ten years after the last (double)
monthly Number of David Copperfield was issued. Pip, the hero of the later work,
follows David’s example in unfolding the history of his own development from
childhood to mature manhood; but though Dickens conceived him as ‘a boy-
child, like David’,1 and though both David’s and Pip’s narratives are charged with
elements of their creator’s autobiography, there is nothing of the character and social
circumstances of one narrator in the characterization and social circumstances of
the other. As one Dickens biographer has said, ‘Great Expectations shows no trace
of David Copperfield’s self-pity’; ‘Pip [...] is much less literally a portrayal of Dickens
than David Copperfield was.’2 Moreover, Pip’s childhood experiences of love and
harshness are quite distinct from David’s experiences of love and brutality. Fright,
however, is something to which both boys are subjected, and Pip’s terror in the
churchyard in the first chapter of Great Expectations, when he hears the ‘terrible
voice’ of the ‘fearful man’ threatening to cut his throat, does recall David’s alarm in
the first number of his novel, when an unknown black dog (installed by Murdstone)
springs at him from the dog-kennel in the house-yard. Pip’s shock is the more
overwhelming, for the function of the dog who threatens David is limited to
corroborating that which has already been understood: he is a representative of the
evil that has entered the child’s home, not its perpetrator. Pip’s encounter with the
convict, on the other hand, is in every sense momentous, since the course of his
life will evolve from it; and it is one of the novel’s ironies that, when he returns to
the desperate man the next morning, it is his dog-like behaviour that helps Pip to
lose his fear of him.3
Pip regards the cold and starving, hobbled creature in the Battery to whom he
delivers the ‘wittles’ he has taken from his sister’s pantry, and the file he has taken
from the forge, with growing fellow-feeling. Though his conscience — personified
by the accusatory cattle he has had to run past — assails him, and though he has
been alarmed by a second convict, whom he believes to have designs on his heart
and liver, he displays what he has brought collectedly enough. He is also moved
to address Magwitch sympathetically — as Joe will, too, when the re-captured
44 Beryl Gray

convict apologizes for having eaten the pie he claims to have stolen himself — while
observing the persecuted manner in which he gobbles ‘mincemeat, meat bone,
bread, cheese, and pork pie, all at once: staring distrustfully while he did so at the
mist all round us, and often stopping — even stopping his jaws — to listen.’4
Pitying his desolation, and watching him as he gradually settled down upon
the pie, I made bold to say: ‘I am glad you enjoy it.’
‘Did you speak?’
‘I said I was glad you enjoyed it.’
‘Thankee, my boy. I do.’
I had often watched a large dog of ours eating his food; and I now noticed
a decided similarity between the dog’s way of eating and the man’s. The man
took strong sharp sudden bites, just like the dog. He swallowed, or rather
snapped up, every mouthful, too soon and too fast; and he looked sideways here
and there while he ate, as if he thought there was danger in every direction of
somebody’s coming to take the pie away. He was altogether too unsettled in his
mind over it to appreciate it comfortably, I thought, or to have anybody to dine
with him, without making a chop with his jaws at the visitor. In all of which
particulars he was very like the dog. (p. 15)
We are never directly introduced to the ‘large dog’ belonging to the forge of whose
manner of eating Pip is here reminded; and yet, though this gendered but unnamed
animal is conjured only through Pip’s mind’s eye, and recollected by the narrating
adult during one relatively short paragraph, the frequency and attentiveness
with which his child self is remembered to have observed the forge dog’s way of
devouring his food, and the accuracy with which the process is described, results in
a true behavioural study. The study is of course Dickens’s own.
By the time Dickens conceived his idea for the story that was to develop into Great
Expectations, Gad’s Hill Place — the house that it had been his childhood dream to
possess, and which stood a mere seven miles away from the Kent marshes that had
been his childhood terrain, and were now also Pip’s — was his home. Outside in
the stable-yard were his two big dogs, Turk (a mastiff ) and Linda (a St Bernard),
both acquired in 1857, the year following Dickens’s purchase of the house. If he
drew on his own remembered imaginative susceptibility for his creation of Pip, so
too did he draw on his observations of these guardians of his achieved property, or
at least of one of them, for his presentation of Magwitch. He thus established a kind
of con­nection between the imaginary forge, and Gad’s Hill. Dickens paid close
attention to how the creatures around him took their nourishment; for his friend
Frederic Lehmann, who by then had presented him with a splendid Newfoundland
dog called Don, he even took the trouble to write out his recipe for his own dogs’
meals, and to say how often they were fed. He and his son Henry found it ‘amusing’
to watch the ritualistic ‘trial of wits’ between Turk and the resident raven — one
of a series of ravens Dickens kept, all called ‘Grip’ — when the dog was brought
his food: ‘the raven, alert and waiting, would hop at once on to the dish with his
eyes fixed sideways on the dog and take his fill, entirely undisturbed, while the
dog dare not approach the tin until “Grip”, with an air of triumphant repletion,
had hopped away.’5 Though the forge dog’s manner of eating, like the convict’s,
is more reminiscent of the raven than of Turk, the purloining bird’s habitual
 The Absent Dog: Great Expectations 45

sideways watchfulness transfers itself effortlessly to the forge dog, and thence
to Magwitch.
It is on the verisimilitude of this study, which is presented in stages so as to
enforce the similarity between each of the convict’s actions as he ate, and those
of the dog as he ate, that our sense of the man’s condition, and Pip’s transmission
of his own understanding of it, hinges. The convict’s ‘strong sharp sudden bites’
(their urgency accelerated by the absence of commas between the adjectives), and
his way of swallowing, ‘or rather snap[ping] up, every mouthful, too soon and too
fast’, as well as those suspicious sideways looks, make the study very exact. His
ravenous hunger strongly recalls that of the shivering, drenched murderer — the
protagonist’s father — in Barnaby Rudge (1842), who in Chapter 17 of that novel
demands meat, bread, brandy, and water from Barnaby’s mother, which he proceeds
to eat and drink ‘with the voracity of a famished hound’. The crucial distinction
is that, whereas the ‘famished hound’ used to describe the criminal’s feeding in
Barnaby Rudge (written before Dickens became a dog-owner) could be any hound,
for the expression does not derive from focused observation, the dog that is brought
to Pip’s mind is a specific individual. In the earlier novel, the omniscient narrator’s
hound-reference conveys the intensity of the criminal’s hunger without making
any appeal to the reader on behalf of him. Pip’s autobiographical observations, on
the other hand, are affective because they are offered in a context that has already
admitted pity.
There is just one further reference to this dog (if indeed Dickens even had the
same one in mind). This occurs in Chapter 18 (the penultimate chapter of ‘THE
FIRST STAGE OF PIP’S EXPECTATIONS’), when Jaggers — wanting Joe to
understand that he can never rescind his avowal to demand nothing for releasing
Pip from his apprenticeship — peremptorily asks the blacksmith whether he keeps
a dog. ‘Yes, I do keep a dog’, says Joe. ‘Bear in mind, then, that Brag is a good dog,
but that Holdfast is a better’, Jaggers instructs him. ‘Bear that in mind, will you?’
This dog, whose nonce existence so conveniently facilitates Jaggers’s use of the
adage, is never heard howling or barking or growling; never seen wagging his tail,
or fawning — or doing anything at all (except eat) that dogs (especially dogs in
Dickens) do. We know nothing of his type, his coat, or his colour. Even if he is
the same large dog whose manner of eating is described by Pip in Chapter 3, we
learn nothing more about him in Chapter 18; and as All the Year Round carried no
illustrations, there could be no artist’s depiction to impress itself on the reader. He
is, in fact, an authorial phantom. He has no more substance than the four immense
dogs fighting over veal cutlets out of a silver basket that, along with Miss Havisham’s
black velvet coach and the cake and wine on gold plates, are part of the impromptu
fable or ‘gorgeous lies’6 (as Barbara Hardy appropriately extols them) with which,
in Chapter 9, in the kitchen at home, the young Pip attempts to satisfy his sister’s
and Mr Pumblechook’s bullying curiosity after his first visit to Satis House.7 The
inspired fairy-tale that Pip develops is tarnished not because it hoodwinks Mrs
Gargery and Pumblechook and triggers their mercenary speculations, but because it
defrauds Joe, marvelling at what he believes is the literal truth. It is Joe’s trustfulness
that invokes Pip’s penitence at having lied. Attempting to come to terms with the
46 Beryl Gray

boy’s private confession to him in the forge that the description of his visit was a
fabrication, Joe expresses the profundity of his disappointment by trying to elicit
from Pip an acknowledgement that there was at least something that was real in what
he had presented; and that hoped-for reality is canine.
‘But at least there was dogs, Pip? Come, Pip,’ said Joe, persuasively, ‘if there
warn’t no weal-cutlets, at least there was dogs?’
‘No, Joe.’
‘A dog?’ said Joe. ‘A puppy? Come!’
‘No, Joe, there was nothing at all of the kind.’ (p. 60)
Although the dogs are only part of the fabrication Pip presented in the kitchen,
they had evidently achieved factual status in Joe’s mind; for while his wife ‘stood
out for “property” ’ as the most likely result of Miss Havisham’s interest in Pip, and
Mr Pumblechook favoured ‘a handsome premium’ for binding the boy to a trade
such as his own, ‘Joe fell into the deepest disgrace with both, for offering the bright
suggestion that I might only be presented with one of the dogs who had fought
for the veal-cutlets’ (pp. 59–60). These dogs come to symbolize the threat that
Pip’s damaged integrity presents to his relationship with Joe. Later in the novel,
after his sister has been felled to the ground by a leg-iron, Pip’s horror at the idea
that he had provided the weapon for the attack is compounded by his inability to
relieve his burden of secrecy by telling Joe about his encounters with the convict.
He cannot resolve his moral dilemma and ‘dissolve that spell of [his] childhood’,
because the truth might lead to their alienation if Joe believed it, or — even more
to be dreaded — if he did not believe it, ‘but would assert it with the fabulous dogs
and veal cutlets as a monstrous invention’ (p. 107).
As Joe’s hope for Pip’s moral deliverance falters, the dogs dwindle from four, to
one, to a puppy, until his imagination is forced to relinquish them, but with the
focus and urgency of his appeal transmitted through Pip’s account of the interview,
the illusory animals become imbued with an actuality, or presence, which accords
with that of the forge dog, who though supposed to exist, likewise has no defined
image, and takes no direct part in the action of a novel in which he is nevertheless
referentially significant.
As we have seen, the function of the referent for Pip’s — or Dickens’s — per­
ception of Magwitch is not to reduce the convict to canine status, but to help
define his humanity. The function depends for its effectiveness on the dog’s insub­
stantiality. Any defined embodiment of him would have over-weighted his recol­
lected inf luence on the child Pip’s imagination, which becomes liberated as pity
overcomes fear, and emboldens him to tell the man that he is glad that he enjoys
his food. It is through the civility of the convict’s response — ‘Thankee, my boy.
I do’ — rather than through his physical wretchedness or self-pity that his human-
kindness is established. Once established, it is sympathetically upheld in the series
of particularized comparisons of his way of eating with the dog’s way; for each
of his mannerisms is registered before its dog-like nature is corroborated, so that
the evocation of the dog illuminates the man’s image without assimilating it, or
degrading it to that of a brute.
Magwitch retains his association with the dog figure for most of the novel. In
 The Absent Dog: Great Expectations 47

fact, it is he who makes the first uses of canine metaphor, addressing the terrified
Pip in Chapter 1 as ‘You young dog’ as he contemplates the boy’s edible cheeks
while consuming the bread he has shaken from Pip’s pocket. And then, in Chapter
3, when Pip brings him the provisions from Mrs Joe’s larder, he suspends his
distrustful gobbling to demand Pip’s assurance that he is ‘not a deceiving imp’.
Persuaded by Pip’s earnestness, his faith is bolstered by reason: ‘You’d be but a
fierce young hound indeed’, he concludes, ‘if at your time of life you could help to
hunt a wretched warmint, hunted as near death and dunghill as this poor wretched
warmint is!’ Reinforcing each other, the convict’s images of deceit and betrayal
return to Pip two chapters later when, with Joe and Mr Wopsle, he finds himself
part of the manhunt on the marshes, and wonders whether, if found, his particular
convict will think him responsible for bringing the soldiers to where he is hiding.
‘He had asked me if I was a deceiving imp, and he said I should be a fierce young
hound if I joined the hunt against him. Would he think that I was both imp and
hound in treacherous earnest, and had betrayed him?’
In his desolation Magwitch perceives himself (and in Chapter 39, on his return
from Australia, is to recollect himself ) as a persecuted ‘dunghill dog’ — not without
reason, for, as we are shown, it is like dogs that convicts were treated in the early
decades of the nineteenth century, when the action of the novel is set.8 In Chapter
5, as Magwitch waits to be rowed by fellow convicts to the prison hulk after his
capture, ‘somebody in the boat growled as if to dogs, “Give way, you!”, which was
the signal for the dip of the oars’. Twenty-three chapters later this scene revives in
Pip’s imagination when he is on his way to re-visit Satis House. It is triggered by
learning from the conversation he has overheard between the two chained convicts
placed behind him on the coach that the one-pound notes he had been given in
the Three Jolly Bargemen in Chapter 10 came from his convict. Filled through
this knowledge with an undefined but great dread as he alights from the coach, he
completes in his mind his fellow travellers’ journey to the river, seeing in his fancy
‘the boat with its convict crew waiting for them at the slime-washed stairs’, again
hearing ‘the gruff “Give way, you!” like an order to dogs.’ Treated, as was every
convict, like a dog, it is nevertheless Magwitch who has become a canine man-
hunter, triumphant in pulling down the other fugitive on the marshes (whom we
later know to be his enemy, Compeyson), ‘like a bloodhound’.
After his reappearance, when he has appalled Pip with his revelations, and stands
in his protégé’s room drinking rum and eating biscuit, it is the ‘convict on the
marshes at his meal again’ (p. 288) whom Pip sees before him. In the light of morning
Magwitch looks even worse, and worse still when he attacks his breakfast:
He ate in a ravenous way that was very disagreeable, and all his actions were
uncouth, noisy, and greedy. Some of his teeth had failed him since I saw him
eat on the marshes, and as he turned his food in his mouth, and turned his head
sideways to bring his strongest fangs to bear upon it, he looked terribly like a
hungry old dog. (p. 293)
As Barbara Hardy shows in her discussion of the moral values associated in the
novel with ‘the giving, receiving, eating, and serving of food’,9 the ‘uncouth
eating, the hunger, the sideways movement, and the comparison with the dog are
48 Beryl Gray

repetitions from the early scene which emphasize the distance between the child
and the man;’10 yet, despite Pip’s ‘insurmountable aversion’ (p. 293), that direct
comparison to a (now generalized) ‘hungry old dog’ makes an appeal to our sym­
pathies — paradoxically, but again, allowing Magwitch his humanity. For while
the experience of the reunion is recounted from the viewpoint of Pip as a young
adult, Dickens’s artistry in controlling the narrative enables the reader — who has
no shaming connection with the convict, and therefore no reason to be repelled
by the image — to see what at that stage in Pip’s development he cannot see: that
the convict has retained a kind of innocence along with his gratitude to, and great
expectations for, the ‘gentleman’ he has created.
The dog figure is, then, one of the ways in which Dickens binds Pip to
Magwitch. (Pip even feels ‘rather like Mother Hubbard’s dog whose outfit required
the services of so many trades’ (p. 135) as, newly conscious of the power of money
and the deference it attracts, but misguided as to the source of the funds at his
disposal, he goes from the tailor’s to the hatter’s to the bootmaker’s to the hosier’s
as he equips himself for the second stage of his expectations.11) It is introduced
into two other rituals of giving and taking meals, when it is Pip who is fed out
of doors. In Chapter 8, at the end of his first visit to Satis House, Estella famously
hands him his bread and meat in the yard ‘without looking at me, as insolently as if
I were a dog in disgrace’; at the end of the second visit, in Chapter 11, he is again
‘taken down into the yard to be fed in the former dog-like manner’. This subjective
disgraced-dog image — supplied as meeting Pip’s experience of Estella’s scornful
treatment — brings to mind the dog-like status of the convict crew in Chapter 5;
but there is an important distinction. Pip’s humiliation is the culmination of the
self-shame — shame of his labouring-boy’s coarse hands and thick boots, and of the
lack of gentility with which he considers himself to have been brought up — that
he has already begun to feel in Estella’s presence; the shame that has already begun
to disgrace his better feeling. The convict’s dog-like status (as distinct from his dog-
like manner of eating), on the other hand, equates with the enforced ‘degraded and
vile’ (p. 201) condition that was the condition of all convicts.
In the Satis House scenes, the stress is on the manner of presenting food, not
on its consumption (when Pip recovers from the fit of crying and wall-kicking
that Estella’s insolence has brought on, he finds the meal acceptable enough). The
mutual courtesy and human recognition that are engendered by the giving and
devouring of food in the Battery, on the other hand, betoken the generosity and
loving-kindness that are gradually to displace Pip’s shame of, and in, the convict,
and that characterize the men’s relationship it its last phases: towards the end of
the novel, in Chapter 56, when Magwitch lies placidly waiting for death in the
prison hospital, the words he uses to acknowledge the fidelity he attributes to the
grown-up Pip movingly echo the response he had made to the boy Pip’s expressed
satisfaction in watching him enjoy the stolen pie. To Pip’s assurance that he always
waits at the hospital gate so as not to lose a moment of visiting time, the dying man
replies, ‘Thank’ee, dear boy, thank’ee’(p. 410).
The idea of the dog — this time not the particular, studied dog, but a conven­
tionally figurative one — attaches itself to Bentley Drummle, when in Chapter 38
 The Absent Dog: Great Expectations 49

Pip is unable to bear the thought of Estella ‘stooping to that hound’. It is given to
Jaggers — who himself employs ‘a little f labby terrier of a clerk with dangling hair’,
whose cropping, Dickens cannot resist fancifully and irrelevantly adding, ‘seemed
to have been forgotten when he was a puppy’ — to develop a canine metaphor for
Drummle, although it is somewhat at odds with the lawyer’s own term — ‘the
Spider’ — for Estella’s follower. ‘A fellow like our friend the Spider’, Jaggers tells
Pip in Chapter 24, ‘either beats or cringes. He may cringe and growl, or cringe
and not growl; but he either beats or cringes.’ While spiders are — like Drummle
— predatory, it is difficult to imagine one either beating or cringing; but the
insistence on the image creates a thread that connects Drummle to the community
of speckled-legged, blotchy spiders that run in and out of the cobweb-shrouded
épergne on Miss Havisham’s wedding-breakfast table, an image which is in turn
spun from ‘the damp lying on the bare hedges and spare grass, like a coarser sort
of spiders’ web; hanging itself from twig to twig and blade to blade’ that the guilt-
stricken boy notes as he runs towards the marshes with ‘Somebody-else’s pork pie’.
Pip is himself caught in this extended web, while Drummle is the Spider rewarded
with the prey Miss Havisham has cultivated. In his cringing propensity, however,
Drummle is the archetypal cur of (morally) low degree.
Great Expectations is, then, a novel that is without a fully-realized canine
character, but that is replete with canine imagery and canine allusion — even
to the precisely remembered, clearly (but anachronistically) mass-produced ‘four
little white crockery poodles on the mantelshelf, each with a black nose and a
basket of f lowers in his mouth, and each the counterpart of the other’ (p. 18) in
the forge’s ‘state parlour.’12 Like everything else in the room, these ornaments
(which perhaps engendered Pip’s imaginary dogs fighting over a basket of veal
cutlets), are kept emblematically shrouded in silver paper except on Christmas Day.
But it is principally through the character of Magwitch that the sense of a canine
presence establishes itself. As has already been suggested, the convict’s reclamation
as a man begins with the sympathy that arises from observing the correspondences
between the way he takes his food, and the way the forge dog consumes his. In
each case, anxiety accompanies the assuagement of hunger, but whereas the dog’s
suspiciousness is represented as habitual, the convict’s draws attention to the reality
of his predicament. He behaves here like a particular, blamelessly hungry dog,
and his presentation relates to the evocation of that dog; but he is not a dog, even
figuratively. Fittingly, therefore, the forge dog does not exist on the page as a fully-
realized persona, but solely in his condition of consumer: envisaged, but not drawn,
he is evoked only in that capacity. Fleetingly individualized as ready to make ‘a
chop’ at a dining companion (which potential gesture indicates that he exists for
Dickens), there is nevertheless no hint of savagery attached to him, or anything of
the fiendish black dog in David Copperfield. Created for the creation of the convict,
he signals an assurance that the desperate figure with whom he is juxtaposed in the
child’s empathetic imagination is essentially benign.
50 Beryl Gray

Notes to Chapter 5
1. The British Academy Pilgrim Edition of the Letters of Charles Dickens, 12 vols, ed. by Madeline
House, Graham Storey, Kathleen Tillotson et al. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965–2002), IX, 325.
2. Edgar Johnson, Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph, 2 vols (London: Victor Gollancz, 1953),
ii, 982.
3. While the knowing adult reader can concur with Dickens’s own view that the novel’s opening
chapters are ‘droll’ (Pilgrim, IX, 325), the child’s terror is allowed to be absolute.
4. Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, ed. by Robin Gilmour (London: J. M. Dent, 1984), p. 15.
Further page references to the novel will be to this edition, and given in the text.
5. Henry Dickens, Memories of My Father (London: Victor Gollancz, 1928), p. 12.
6. Barbara Hardy, Dickens and Creativity (London: Continuum, 2008), p. 73.
7. The anxiety-imagery of Pip’s broken sleep during his last night at home, during which ‘there
were coaches [...] going to wrong places instead of to London’, and wrong animals — ‘now dogs,
now cats, now pigs, now men — never horses’ (p. 141) in the traces, seems to evolve from this
fantasy.
8. See Mary Edminson, ‘The Date of the Action in Great Expectations’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction,
13 (1958), 22–35. Robin Gilmour brief ly discusses the implications of the historical perspective
in his Introduction to the novel.
9. Barbara Hardy, The Moral Art of Dickens (London: Athlone Press, 1970), p. 139.
10. Ibid, p. 146.
11. In Mr Dick’s Kite, 84 (September 2010), MV [Maggie de Vos] points out that Dickens alludes
to Mother Hubbard’s dog again, ‘though this time slightly uncertainly, in Our Mutual Friend
(Chapter 6, Book IV)’.
12. Although the poodle had made the transition from gun-dog to pet by the beginning of the
nineteenth century, ‘its popularity seems not to have taken off until after about 1830. It was only
after that date that porcelain replicas came to be reproduced in quantity’ (Dennis G. Rice, Dogs
in English Porcelain of the 19th Century (Woodbridge: Antique Collectors’ Club, 2002), p. 40). The
opening chapters of Great Expectations are set before 1810.
 — 6 —

Moments of Suspension in Dickens

John Rignall

In the third chapter of A Tale of Two Cities, the ‘Night Shadows’ of the title which
surround the travellers on the Dover Mail are both external and internal, as Mr
Lorry, slipping in and out of uneasy sleep, is beset by nightmarish dreams of
digging a man out of a grave. The confused images in Lorry’s anxious mind ‘serve
the novelist’s purposes’, as Barbara Hardy aptly puts it, ‘in tense anticipation and
preparation, a foreboding prospective movement which is to become habitual in
the story and a sounding of its resurrection theme.’1 But what immediately follows
is not a fulfilment of the foreboding but an escape from it, and a change of mood
and narrative pace as disturbed dreams give way to the light of the rising sun; and
Mr Lorry lowers the window of the coach to look out onto a restorative scene of
rural tranquillity:
There was a ridge of ploughed land, with a plough upon it where it had been
left last night when the horses were unyoked: beyond, a quiet coppice-wood,
in which many leaves of burning red and golden yellow still remained upon the
trees. Though the earth was cold and wet, the sky was clear, and the sun rose
bright, placid, and beautiful.2
The scene marks a pause in the urgent onward thrust of Dickens’s dramatic tale;
it is one of those moments of suspension which punctuate his narrative and create
one of its rhythms — not the rhythm created by repetition that Barbara Hardy
writes about,3 but one generated by a sudden shift from what Garret Stewart terms
Dickens’s ‘fever style’ to ‘a quiet, lucid prose that increases greatly the potential
for that alternating momentum which is the very life of Dickens’s story.’4 It is
such moments that I wish to examine here, not only for their contribution to
the ‘alternating momentum’ of Dickens’s narratives, but as strongly visual scenes
whose pictorial qualities are of interest in their own right as one of the distinctive,
if often undervalued, strengths of his writing. As John Sutherland has pointed out,
Dickens often thought of himself as a maker of pictures and criticism may do him
a disservice by taking a devisualized approach to his works: Dickens ‘hangs the
pictures: should not the reader deign to look at them?’5 And to look closely at such
scenes as this is to gain some insight into the peculiar power of Dickens’s writing,
its ability not only to change momentum but to charge commonplace details with
strange suggestiveness and to create visual images that reveal the familiar world in
a bright new light.
The plough in this vivid scene may recall George Orwell’s identification of
the ‘unnecessary detail’, with no discernible narrative or dramatic function, as
52 John Rignall

the distinctive mark of Dickens’s writing, although the imaginative overf lowing
suggested by what Orwell terms ‘a f lorid little squiggle on the edge of the page’ is
absent on this occasion.6 The plough is less like the ‘f lowering annuals’ with which
Mr Pumblechook’s mouth is comically stuffed by his attackers to prevent him
from crying out in Great Expectations, and more like one of those ‘détails inutiles’,
resisting interpretation and the attribution of meaning, that Roland Barthes sees
as serving only to create a sense of reality, what he calls ‘l’effet de réel’.7 After Mr
Lorry’s fevered dreams of digging out a man buried alive, the plough under the
rising sun certainly has the effect of returning the narrative with relief to the real
workaday world of the ordinary countryside. At the same time this glimpse of the
landscape is marked by a sense of aesthetically satisfying composition and painterly
f lashes of colour, and these pictorial qualities take it beyond the ordinary and accen­
tuate a sense of suspended motion that contrasts strongly with the momentum of
the coach journey. Altogether this moment of rural English peace stands out against
the dark background of Mr Lorry’s urgent mission to retrieve Dr Manette from the
tyrannical injustice of the French ancien régime.
The plough is not one of those ponderous symbols that Dickens’s imagination
in its slacker moments sometimes has recourse to, but it does carry some power
of suggestion. Unlike the other agricultural machinery mentioned in the opening
pages of the novel, the ‘rude carts’ in the ‘rough outhouses of some tillers of the
heavy lands adjacent to Paris’ (p. 36) that are destined to serve as the tumbrils of
the Revolution, it is innocent of any historical destiny, and its turning of the earth
stands in marked contrast to Mr Lorry’s nightmare digging and the sinister work of
the resurrection men later in the novel. The ‘Farmer, Death’ (p. 36) has no use for
this implement even though its work is part of the process of sowing and reaping
that is Dickens’s historical theme. Associated here with the dawn of a new day, it
implies a beneficent sowing which affirms the possibility of rebirth for individuals
such as Dr Manette, for nature and, indeed, for nations.
Standing ‘where it had been left last night when the horses were unyoked’, the
plough also speaks of work done and to be continued, and it implies the human
labour that is absent from the dawn landscape. That absence is the subject of a note
in Dickens’s Memorandum Book a few years earlier about the English landscape in
general which has a bearing on many of its literary and pictorial representations, as
well as, most signally, on the work of eighteenth-century landscape-gardeners and
the vistas they created:
The beautiful prospect, trim fields, clipped hedges, everything so neat and
orderly — gardens, houses, roads. Where are the people who do all this? There
must be a great many of them, to do it. Where are they all? And are they, too,
so well kept and so fair to see?8
The labouring many are not seen, but it is not in the nature of Dickens’s imagination
or his understanding of society to take their work or their lives for granted. The
unyoked plough is as eloquent testimony to their presence and importance as
the undifferentiated faces, voices and footsteps that crowd around the principal
characters of the story are to the presence and historical significance of the masses.
 Moments of Suspension in Dickens 53

Work may be suspended in this scene but it is not ignored or dismissed. The absent
labourers are present by implication.
The contrast is with the French landscape, marked by its beauty but at the same
time by its poor husbandry — ‘a beautiful landscape, with the corn bright in it, but
not abundant. Patches of poor rye where corn should have been, patches of poor
peas and beans [...]’ (p. 143). There is an implied contrast, too, with the French
peasantry, whose exploitation is central to Dickens’s perception that ‘the fall of
the ancient regime is the result of a neglected and pitifully meagre agriculture’.9 The
im­pover­ish­ment of the land is a consequence of the impoverishment of those who
work upon it. When Monsieur the Marquis drives back from Paris to his château
in the country, he stops in a village on his estate where his blank gaze registers
the presence of the peasants washing leaves and grasses at the fountain to serve as
food:
[...] Monsieur the Marquis drew up in his travelling carriage at the posting-house
gate. It was hard by the fountain, and the peasants suspended their operations
to look at him. He looked at them, and saw in them, without knowing it, the
slow sure filing down of misery-worn face and figure, that was to make the
meagreness of Frenchmen an English superstition that would survive the truth
through the best part of a hundred years. (p. 145)
Work is again suspended, but although the workers are in view, their presence
to the Marquis is a form of absence. His unknowing gaze does not perceive their
manifest distress and he remains as oblivious to their lives and their needs as he was
to the presence of the vengeful figure of retribution riding beneath his carriage.
Before that retribution is enacted, there is another quiet moment of all but
suspended motion as the carriage nears the château:
The burst with which the carriage started out of the village and up the rise
beyond, was soon checked by the steepness of the hill. Gradually, it subsided
to a foot pace, swinging and lumbering upward among the many sweet scents
of a summer night. The postilions, with a thousand gossamer gnats circling
about them in lieu of the Furies, quietly mended the points to the lashes of
their whips; the valet walked by the horses; the courier was audible, trotting on
ahead into the dim distance. (p. 147)
Once again a quietly lyrical prose takes over. The scents and stillness of the summer
night mark a pause in the action and provide respite from the satirical exposure of
feudal autocracy. With postilions, valet and courier all in their appointed places and
quietly performing their duties, the old order seems for a moment to be intact and
undisturbed, and only the allusion to the Furies hints ominously at what is to come.
This peacefulness may be a prelude to violence but it does not follow that its only
function is to create suspense and foreboding. The scene stands slightly apart from
the historical process of escalating bloodshed that is heading relentlessly towards the
novel’s ending on the revolutionary scaffold. The allusion to the Furies belongs to
the main track of that story but the ‘gossamer gnats’ seize attention in their own
right. The incidental details bring the scene to life, as the novelist’s imagination,
momentarily distracted from the unfolding drama of oppression and retribution,
54 John Rignall

pauses to register the sensuous appeal of the natural world in the scented stillness
of a warm summer night. The effect of the real created here is one that transcends
the historical setting.
How such moments may detach themselves from the temporal process and
imprint themselves on the memory is suggested in a comparable scene from Bleak
House where Esther recalls Richard Carstone, on a similar summer night, poised
to drive away to self-destruction in pursuit of his claims in the Chancery suit. She
and Ada accompany him to the top of a hill where he has ordered a gig to wait
and find it with a man holding a lantern ‘at the head of the gaunt pale horse [...]
harnessed to it’:
I never shall forget those two seated side by side in the lantern’s light; Richard,
all f lush and fire and laughter, with the reins in his hand; Mr Vholes, quite still,
black-gloved, and buttoned up, looking at him as if he were looking at his prey
and charming it. I have before me the whole picture of the warm dark night,
the summer lightning, the dusty track of road closed in by hedgerows and high
trees, the gaunt pale horse with his ears pricked up, and the driving away at
speed to Jarndyce and Jarndyce.10
Memory freezes the moment into a picture which, rather like a Victorian genre
painting, spells out the story of what is to come: the Mephistophelian Vholes and
the gaunt pale horse suggest a Faustian pact that can only end in death. But the
symbolic dimension of the scene, with its vivid contrasts of fire and silent blackness,
is not ‘the whole picture of the warm dark night’, for the less dramatic details of
summer lightning, dusty road, hedgerows and high trees make an equally important
impression on the memory and have the effect of grounding the gothic moment
in a real landscape. In a characteristic yoking together of opposites, Dickens’s
imagination blends the intensely dramatic — with the lantern serving as a form of
stage-lighting — and the quietly descriptive, to create a scene which momentarily
suspends the action before driving it on again at full speed.
In Esther’s own desperate journey with Inspector Bucket in search of Lady
Dedlock there is another scene which imprints itself upon her memory when the
action is suspended. While they are changing horses at a lonely inn, she is invited
by the motherly landlady and her pretty daughters to rest in a warm room:
It was at the corner of the house, I remember, looking two ways. On one side,
to a stable-yard open to a bye-road, where the ostlers were unharnessing the
splashed and tired horses from the muddy carriage; and beyond that, to the bye-
road itself, across which the sign was heavily swinging: on the other side, to a
wood of dark pine trees. Their branches were encumbered with snow, and it
silently dropped off in wet heaps while I stood at the window. Night was setting
in, and its bleakness was enhanced by the contrast of the pictured fire glowing
and gleaming in the window pane. (p. 839)
In a journey of nightmarish strangeness amid rapidly changing, and to Esther incom­
prehensible, scenes, the view from the window captures the alienation and anxiety
she feels in a tableau of loneliness and desolation — the swinging sign and empty
bye-road, and the dark trees with thawing snow slipping from them in an ominous
decline. The moment marks a pause for ref lection, both literal and metaphorical,
 Moments of Suspension in Dickens 55

and the contrast of warm domesticity and a bleak landscape — a contrast that is
recurrent in the novel and figuratively related to the emotional emptiness of Lady
Dedlock’s life in particular — brings home to Esther her mother’s predicament in
a new and frightening way:
As I looked among the stems of the trees, and followed the discoloured marks
in the snow where the thaw was sinking into it and undermining it, I thought
of the motherly face brightly set off by daughters that had just now welcomed
me, and of my mother lying down in such a wood to die. (p. 839)
The sharply observed details of discoloured snow, of sinking and undermining,
suggest what is going on in her mind, and the juxtaposition of images saps her emo­
tions so powerfully that she passes out. The moment of suspended action becomes a
physical syncope, a suspension of consciousness that prefigures a greater finality.
Esther consciously draws the contrast between the two sets of mothers and
daughters but the emotional force of the ref lection is conveyed by the visual
images of winter landscape and domestic warmth. Their superimposition in the
windowpane is a characteristically Dickensian way of expressing the workings of
the mind, not through the analytic discourse of a knowing narrator but by the
description of details of the external world. As John Bowen has put it, ‘Dickens is
interested in processes above and below the level of the conscious subject, in which
the boundaries between public and private, self and other, material and immaterial
[...] break down’.11 In this scene of waiting and looking, what Esther sees is eloquent
testimony to her inner life of fears and feelings, and it is the pause in the desperate
journey that provides the space for those feelings to emerge.
These moments of suspended action, then, work in different ways to different
ends but they all repay close examination for their power of suggestion. There is
also a common pattern that connects them. The journeys of both Richard and
Esther, like that of the Marquis, are heading towards a death, and these scenes serve
to tighten the spring of the action before releasing it. This pattern of a pause before
an untimely death is given its fullest orchestration in Bleak House in the great set-
piece description of a moonlit landscape that immediately precedes the murder of
Tulkinghorn. Where Esther’s first-person narrative was used to suggest the workings
of memory, Dickens exploits the freedom and mobility of the disembodied third-
person narrator, able to ‘pass from one scene to the other, as the crow f lies’ (p. 55),
to project a panorama of the land lying still and silent under the moon:
A very quiet night. When the moon shines very brilliantly, a solitude and
stillness seem to proceed from her, that inf luence even crowded places full
of life. Not only is it a still night on dusty high roads and on hill-summits,
whence a wide expanse of country may be seen in repose, quieter and quieter
as it spreads away into a fringe of trees against the sky, with the grey ghost of
a bloom upon them; not only is it a still night in gardens and in woods, and
on the river where the water-meadows are fresh and green, and the stream
sparkles on among pleasant islands, murmuring weirs and whispering rushes;
not only does the stillness attend it as it f lows where houses cluster thick, where
many bridges are ref lected in it, where wharves and shipping make it black
and awful, where it winds from these disfigurements through marshes whose
grim beacons stand like skeletons washed ashore, where it expands through
56 John Rignall

the bolder region of rising grounds rich in cornfield, windmill and steeple,
and where it mingles with the ever-heaving sea; not only is it a still night on
the deep, and on the shore where the watcher stands to see the ship with her
spread wings cross the path of light that appears to be presented to only him;
but even on this stranger’s wilderness of London there is some rest. Its steeples
and towers, and its one great dome, grow more ethereal; its smoky house-tops
lose their grossness, in the pale effulgence; the noises that arise from the streets
are softened, and the footsteps on the pavement pass more tranquilly away.
In these fields of Mr Tulkinghorn’s inhabiting, where the shepherds play on
Chancery pipes that have no stop, and keep their sheep in the fold by hook or
by crook until they have shorn them exceeding close, every noise is merged,
this moonlight night, into a distant ringing hum, as if the city were a vast glass,
vibrating. (pp. 718–19)
In the stillness of the moonlit night all action seems to be suspended, and the world
is brought to life and laid to rest in the same act of the imagination. In one long
complex sentence the land is traversed by a sweeping gaze that registers differences
of terrain and habitation from inland hilltops to seashore, and from countryside to
capital city, and captures them simultaneously, as it were, in a single moment. The
encompassing vision of the whole novel, with its crowded canvas of characters and
classes and manifest ambition to describe the state of the nation, is replicated here in
miniature, though with softer lighting. Rather as the country, seen in repose, ‘grows
quieter and quieter as it spreads away’, the dramatic intensity and satirical sharpness
of a novel which seeks to expose the injustices and iniquities of its time gives way
here to a quietly lyrical prose whose effect is consoling rather than mordant. Even
London, famously excoriated in the novel’s brilliant opening, loses its grossness and
is transfigured into something more ethereal. The transformation of the steeples,
towers and dome recalls Wordsworth’s 1803 sonnet ‘Composed Upon Westminster
Bridge’, although it is effected not by his glittering ‘beauty of the morning’ (l.
5) but by a stranger nocturnal light that does not allow the city to be so readily
accommodated to a pastoral vision. Where his city lies ‘open unto the fields’ (l.
7), the only fields here are those of Lincoln’s Inn upon which Dickens plays with
punning irony, invoking pastoral with a comic awareness of its inappropriateness to
the urban setting and the rapacious practice of the law. Yet even the irony is gentler
here and does not entirely subdue the pastoral sense of the panorama, whose overall
effect remains oddly elusive.
It serves, of course, as a means of creating dramatic suspense through an ironic
prelude to the fatal gunshot which shatters the nocturnal peace, but as Graham
Storey has argued,12 irony is not the whole story here, for the lyrical scene is
significant in its own right as a vision of a peaceful, pastoral world in which human
activity, so often injurious in this novel, is radically diminished and which can
thus stand as a rebuke to the discordant, chaotic state of society that is the target
of Dickens’s satirical scorn. His claim ‘to have purposely dwelt upon the romantic
side of familiar things’ (p. 43) is fully borne out by this vision of a familiar English
landscape that is transformed in ways that recall Romantic art. Not only are there
apparent echoes of Wordsworth, but the figure of the watcher on the shore gazing
at a ship in full sail crossing the path of light brings to mind paintings by Caspar
 Moments of Suspension in Dickens 57

David Friedrich, such as ‘Moonrise over the Sea’. There is a distinctly Romantic
power and pathos in this vision of a world transfigured.
The power of this passage can be measured against Dickens’s less successful return
to the pattern of a quiet pause before a violent end near the conclusion of Little
Dorrit. As Amy and Mrs Clennam walk back to the Clennams’ house to confront
Blandois-Rigaud, just before he meets a fitting death in the violent collapse of
the old building, the teeming streets of London lie quiet in the long twilight of a
summer evening. Once again the city is transfigured and loses its grossness under
a serene and beautiful sky:
As they crossed the bridge, the clear steeples of the many churches looked as
though they had advanced out of the murk that usually surrounded them and
come much nearer. The smoke that rose into the sky had lost its dingy hue and
taken a brightness upon it. The beauties of the sunset had not faded from the
long light films of cloud that lay at peace in the horizon.13
But then, as a final f lourish, there is a strained and awkward elevation of description
into religious allegory:
From a radiant centre, over the whole length and breadth of the tranquil
firmament, great shoots of light streamed among the early stars, like signs of
the blessed later covenant of peace and hope that changed the crown of thorns
into glory. (pp. 805–06)
The peacefulness that is left to create its own aura of suggestiveness in Bleak House
is here forcibly harnessed to a Christian idea of redemption, and the leap into
transcendence with a portentous simile loses contact with the London world that
the novel has brought so vividly to life. By contrast, the striking simile of the ‘vast
glass vibrating’ is both aurally precise and figuratively appropriate, conveying at
the same time the distinctive sound of the city at night and the fragility of this
moment of peace before the suspended action resumes again with the murder of
Tulkinghorn.
At their best these moments of suspension are exemplary illustrations of the
power of Dickens’s writing, its ability to change pace and tone to striking effect
and create arresting visual images that bring the world to life charged with strange
suggestiveness. The last of such moments, one which again immediately precedes an
untimely end, this time Dickens’s own, is the much-cited description of Cloister­
ham cathedral in the last chapter of Edwin Drood, written ‘ “in excellent spirits” on
the fine June morning that preceded his fatal attack.’14 In the deepening mystery of
Edwin’s disappearance, of Princess Puffer’s presence in the cathedral and Datchery’s
investigations, there is a pause to register the beauty and promise of the summer
morning:
A brilliant morning shines on the old city. Its antiquities and ruins are
surpassingly beautiful, with the lusty ivy gleaming in the sun, and the rich trees
gleaming in the balmy air. Changes of glorious light from moving boughs,
songs of birds, scents from gardens, woods, and fields — or, rather, from the
one great garden of the whole cultivated island in its yielding time — penetrate
into the Cathedral, subdue its earthy odour, and preach the Resurrection and
the Life. The cold stone tombs of centuries ago grow warm, and f lecks of
58 John Rignall

brightness dart into the sternest corners of the building, f luttering there like
wings.15
The Christian doctrine of resurrection is here firmly grounded in the carefully
observed effects of sunshine and balmy air on the ancient building with its earthy
odour and cold stone tombs, and, as in the moonlight scene in Bleak House, the
perspective widens to embrace the ‘whole cultivated island’ of the country itself in a
celebration of its natural beauty. Like the plough in A Tale of Two Cities, seen against
the background of leaves of burning red and golden yellow in the bright light of
dawn, the cathedral in the warm sunshine, with f lecks of brightness f luttering in
its sternest corners, conveys the idea of life’s capacity for renewal through striking
visual images that show Dickens responding for a final time to the sensuous appeal
of the natural world and demonstrating what Chesterton called his ‘incomparable
hunger and pleasure for the vitality and variety, for the infinite eccentricity of
experience.’16

Notes to Chapter 6
1. Barbara Hardy, Dickens and Creativity (London: Continuum, 2008), p. 72.
2. A Tale of Two Cities, ed. by George Woodcock (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), p. 48. Further
page references to this edition are given in the text.
3. Hardy, Dickens and Creativity, p. 137.
4. Garret Stewart, Dickens and the Trials of the Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1974), pp. 237–38.
5. John Sutherland, ‘Visualizing Dickens’, in Charles Dickens Studies, ed. by John Bowen and
Robert L. Patten (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 111–30 (p. 113).
6. George Orwell, ‘Charles Dickens’, repr. in The Dickens Critics, ed. by George H. Ford and
Lauriat Lane Jr (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1961), pp. 157–71 (p. 159).
7. Roland Barthes, ‘L’Effet de Réel’, Communications, 11 (1968), 84–89.
8. The Letters of Charles Dickens, ed. by Walter Dexter, 3 vols (London: The Nonesuch Press, 1938),
iii, 788.
9. Gareth Steadman-Jones, ‘The Redemptive Powers of Violence?’, in Charles Dickens, ‘A Tale of
Two Cities’ and the French Revolution, ed. by Colin Jones, Josephine McDonagh and Jon Mee
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 41–63 (p. 55).
10. Bleak House, ed. by Norman Page (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), p. 591. Further page
references to this edition are given in the text.
11. John Bowen, ‘Dickens and the Force of Writing’, in Charles Dickens Studies, ed. by Bowen and
Patten, pp. 255–72 (p. 265).
12. Graham Storey, Charles Dickens: Bleak House, Landmarks of World Literature (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 36.
13. Little Dorrit, ed. by Angus Easson (London: J. M. Dent, 1999), p. 805. Further references to this
edition are given in the text.
14. Andrew Sanders, Charles Dickens Resurrectionist (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1982),
p. 217.
15. The Mystery of Edwin Drood, ed. by Arthur J. Cox (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), p. 278.
16. G. K. Chesterton, Charles Dickens (London: Methuen, 1913), p. 212.
 — 7 —

Hamlet’s Revenge; or,

Mr Q Strikes Back
Michael Slater

Among the treasures to be found in the collections of the Charles Dickens Museum
are several presentation copies of Dickens’s books. These include the inscribed copy
of American Notes that Dickens entrusted to Longfellow to carry across the Atlantic
to give to George William Putnam (1812–1896) who had acted as his secretary on
his 1842 American tour. The inscription reads: ‘Charles Dickens. To his faithful
friend and fellow-traveller G. W. Putnam. Nineteenth Oc O tober 1842’. Like most
of the other presentation copies held by the Museum, this one came to it through
the munificence of the great Dickens collector Comte Alain de Suzannet. With it
Suzannet kept a curious letter written by Putnam many years later to Benjamin P.
Cheney, one of the early directors of Wells Fargo and also of the firm that became
American Express.1By this date (1885) Cheney, who had amassed a considerable
fortune, was helping Putnam to bring before the public a certain kind of fire escape
that he had invented.2 Cheney had evidently asked Putnam for a Dickens letter
and Putnam was now sending it to him (the letter, the original of which seems to
have been lost, is the one Dickens sent to Putnam on 4 March 1842 and is printed
in the Pilgrim Edition from a transcript made by Suzannet’s friend Walter Dexter,
then editor of The Dickensian). Most of Putnam’s letter to Cheney, which is dated
28 October 1885, relates to his model fire escape but the last paragraph contains the
following astonishing outburst:
As to Charles Dickens — had he been a temperate man he would no doubt
have been living now. I am well convinced from what I know of his life and
character intemperance was his only vice — all the jeers and flings of the world
notwithstanding! [This is probably a reference to all the scandal about Dickens’s
relationship with the young actress Ellen Ternan that became rife after his
separation from his wife in 1858.] One of the great misfortunes of his life was his
close intimacy with the low and brutish ‘John Forster.’ This individual being
low in his taste knew nothing of Dickens except as a most merry fun making
and fun loving boon companion over their cups! He had not the slightest
comprehension in his own mind of the nobler traits of the ‘Great Author’
or power to comprehend his stupendous mental abilities, and consequently
did Dickens no justice in his Biography. Constant indulgence in intoxicating
drinks had brought all his [i.e., Dickens’s] little meannesses to the surface and
Forster chronicled them all, and thought them the very essence of true wit! For the
sake of making sport for himself and others Dickens ridiculed his best friends.
He caricatured the Rev Thomas Binney and Geo Cruikshank in his account
60 Michael Slater

of the funeral of the Author Hone to such an extent that the friends of Mr
Binney took up the matter, and Cruikshank indignantly denied his statements
in the public press. Dickens made shipwreck where so many great men have
made it through intemperance. But as time passes his follies will be forgotten,
his surpassing genius will be more honored than ever and his good traits of
character will be appreciated.
This description seems a very remarkable contrast to the unqualified reverence
for Dickens Putnam showed in the reminiscences about their association that he
published in The Atlantic Monthly just after Dickens’s death. In these he claimed
to have seen in Dickens’s mode of being ‘the daily and hourly exhibition of the
finest and noblest feelings of the human heart’ and towards the end of his second
article he wrote: ‘Only those whose opportunities brought them in close contact
with Charles Dickens can know the full beauty and purity of his nature, and how
intensely he loathed all that was coarse and low.’3 He had, in fact, seen his former
employer only once since 1842 and that was during Dickens’s American Reading
Tour of 1867/68 when, on 3 December, he called on him at the Parker House Hotel
in Boston. Dickens wrote to his son Charles Junior that it was ‘quite affecting’ to
see Putnam’s ‘delight in meeting his old master again’ and that he had ‘laughed and
cried together’ when he heard about Anne Brown’s having got married (she was
Catherine’s maid and had accompanied the Dickenses and Putnam on their arduous
journey) and also about Dickens’s being now a grandfather.4
In the absence of any other evidence, and taking note of Putnam’s violent
animus against Forster, whom he had never met, we must think it most probable
that, as was first suggested in 1978 by Engelina Davids writing in the short-lived
John Forster Newsletter, Putnam’s changed attitude was a response to the fact that
Forster presents him in the Life of Dickens, referring to him as ‘Mr Q’, as very
much a figure of fun. It is Dickens himself who is the perpetrator of the comic
portrait rather than Forster, however. What Forster does is simply to quote at length
from one of Dickens’s wonderful letters to himself which describes Putnam as a
languishingly sentimental figure wearing a cloak like Hamlet’s (most of Dickens’s
allusions to Hamlet, it is worth noting, are comic), also ‘a very tall, big, limp, dusty
black hat which he exchanges on long journeys for a cap like Harlequin’s’. He is
‘irresistibly absurd’ in his efforts to get Dickens to ask him to sing. ‘In some of
our quarters,’ Forster quotes Dickens as writing, ‘when his bedroom has been near
ours, we have heard him grunting bass notes through the keyhole of his door, to
attract our attention’. After being told that Catherine Dickens played the piano,
Putnam apparently said to Dickens: ‘Oh indeed Sir! I sing: so whenever you want
a little soothing —’. At this point Forster added in the first edition of his biography a
mocking marginal note: ‘Frightful suggestion’. In the same letter that he is quoting
Dickens, he jokes about Putnam’s ludicrously botched attempts at painting, his
fondness for telling an old-chestnut comic anecdote ‘as something that occurred in
his own family’, and his penchant for imitating animal noises, especially those of
cows and pigs. Dickens does, however, add that Putnam is an ideal secretary as well
as a rich source of entertainment: ‘I could not by possibility have lighted on any
one who would have suited my purpose so well.’5 Yet this did not prevent him from
 Hamlet’s Revenge; or Mr Q Strikes Back 61

subsequently indulging in some gentle mockery of Putnam in Chapter 22 of Martin

Chuzzlewit. While in America, Martin receives a letter from the ‘young, and ardent’
Putnam Smif who tells him that he ‘aspirates’ for fame. It is ‘it is my yearning and
my thirst’, he announces, and asks Martin to help him find sponsorship for a visit
to England — also to send him some ‘critical observations’ on Cain: A Mystery by
‘the Right Honourable Lord Byron’ (like Hamlet, admiration for Byron is always
good for a laugh in Dickens).
To judge by Dickens’s description of the reunion scene between the two of them
in Boston, in 1867, Putnam did not hold this in-joke about himself in Chuzzlewit
against his former employer. Forster’s publication of Dickens’s comic portrayal of
him in a private letter evidently touched him on the raw, however. For him it was
typical of the distorted and unworthy picture of Dickens given to the world by
his ‘low and brutish’ friend and biographer and represented the kind of thing that
Dickens did under Forster’s inf luence. This does not seem to account, however,
for Putnam’s strange assertion that Dickens was ruined by intemperance. A clue is
provided, I think, by his reference to the controversy that had been stirred up by
Forster’s quotation of another great comic Dickens letter to himself (one that had
already been published elsewhere, in fact).6 This was the letter about Cruikshank’s
eccentric behaviour at the funeral of the satirist William Hone in 1842. As was well
known, Cruikshank, having been notorious for his extravagant behaviour as a result
of drunkenness in his earlier years, became a fanatical teetotaller in late middle
age. He had been mocked for this by Dickens in his weekly journal Household
Words.7 This, as well as Cruikshank’s claim, completely ridiculed by Forster in the
first volume of his Dickens biography, that he provided Dickens with the idea for
Oliver Twist, would have given a definite edge to the letter of Cruikshank’s to The
Daily Telegraph (23 November 1872) to which Putnam refers — a letter in which
Cruikshank fiercely rejects Dickens’s account of his ludicrous behaviour at Hone’s
funeral which Forster had seen fit to quote in his Life of Dickens.8
We do not know if Putnam himself was ever a teetotaller. His devoting himself
in the years following his time with Dickens to strenuous campaigning for
Abolition certainly suggests that he was a man with strong religious views and it
seems more than likely that he was, like Cruikshank, a temperance campaigner.
And his outburst in the letter to Cheney would seem to suggest that he aligned
himself with those who believed — on no other evidence than all the joyous
descriptions of convivial drinking in Dickens’s novels — that Dickens himself must
have been intemperate in his habits (there is ample evidence in reports of Dickens’s
behaviour both in public and in private that this was not the case — though he does
seem to have had to rely considerably on alcoholic stimulants to get him through
the ordeal of his American readings tour). He does not exactly say that Dickens
must have been drinking when he created the comic pen-picture of himself that
Forster has now had the bad taste to publish, but he makes it clear to Cheney that
his resentment is directed towards Forster rather than towards Dickens, who was
merely pandering to Forster’s ‘low and brutish’ tastes. We, on the other hand —
remembering Dickens’s notorious exploitation of the peculiar characteristics of his
old friend Leigh Hunt when depicting the odious Skimpole in Bleak House — may
62 Michael Slater

think that Putnam should have been glad that his one-time boss did not choose in
Martin Chuzzlewit to develop the ‘young and ardent’ Putnam Smif into one of his
major American grotesques.

Notes to Chapter 7
1. See item J.57 in my Catalogue of the Suzannet Charles Dickens Collection, Sotheby Parke Bernet
Publications Ltd., 1975. Putnam’s letter was given by one of Cheney’s daughters to F. W. C.
Hersey, Instructor in English at Harvard, who presented it to Suzannet in the spring of 1939,
though with some misgivings. His first thought, he tells Suzannet, had been that the letter
‘with its exaggerated charges of Dickens’s drinking to excess’ ought to be destroyed ‘so that no
sensational writer should use it to besmirch Dickens’s memory. The scandal-mongers have been
attacking him so frequently recently, and I understand a new book is coming out this spring with
very distressing revelations [...].’ He is evidently here referring to the forthcoming publication
of Gladys Storey’s Dickens and Daughter with its sensational revelation that Dickens’s daughter,
Kate Perugini, had confided in Storey that Dickens had been Ellen Ternan’s lover and had had
an illegitimate child by her.
2. According to Noel C. Peyrouton’s article, ‘Dickens’s American Secretary’, The Dickensian, 59
(1963), 156–59, Putnam’s father had also been an inventor, famous especially for his ‘stone drain
pipes’.
3. Putnam’s 1842 and 1870 comments are quoted in Dickens: Interviews and Recollections, ed. by
Philip Collins, 2 vols (Totowa, NY: Barnes and Noble, 1981), i, 57, 60.
4. Pilgrim Edition of The Letters of Charles Dickens, ed. by Graham Storey, 12 vols (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1965–2002), xi (1999), 495.
5. John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens, ed. by J. W. T. Ley (New York: Doubleday, Doran and
Company, [1928]), p. 274.
6. By James T. Fields in The Atlantic Monthly, July 1871. Vol. ii of Forster’s Life, in which the letter
appears, was published in 1872. See the Pilgrim Edition of Dickens’s Letters, vol. iii (1974), 454
n. 4.
7. See Dickens’s depiction of Cruikshank as ‘Mr Monomaniacal Patriarch’ in ‘The Great Baby’
(Household Words, 4 August 1855; reprinted in my Dent Uniform Edition of Dickens’s Journalism, 4
vols (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1994–2000), iii (1998), 311–18.
8. See Robert L. Patten, George Cruikshank’s Life, Times, and Art, vol. ii: 1835–1878 (Cambridge:
Lutterworth Press; New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996), p. 185f.
 — 8 —

The Mill on the Floss and the

‘Spirit’ of Capitalism
George Levine

There is no more difficult test of a writer’s imagination than money — an old

subject, but too important to take for granted. Money is a symptom, and an
embarrassment, to Victorian writers, even to George Eliot; it is also the essential
subject of Victorian realism. Even in contemporary cultures dominated by money,
it is harder to be absolutely frank about it than about sex (these days, it is no doubt
much easier to talk about sex). It was particularly difficult for the Victorians, whose
society was being reshaped by money, but by understanding its importance and its
difficulties one is in a strong position to understand not only the implications of
(and problems with) the social and moral assumptions governing Victorian novels,
but the very form of the novels. Nothing more thoroughly exposes and tests crucial
if often unacknowledged attitudes towards almost everything important, from
marriage to God, than money.
In George Eliot’s work, even in The Mill on the Floss, one doesn’t have to look
far for it. That novel dramatizes a crisis of money typical of the Victorian novel
in general and of her own work from Silas Marner to Middlemarch. Appropriately,
the heroine, Maggie, values it not at all, even though the crisis of her life develops
from her father’s bankruptcy and that event determines the very shape of the novel.
Pointedly, Maggie’s imaginative life never once lingers on money, except insofar
as she hopes Tom will succeed in paying off Mr Tulliver’s debts. Early on, in her
only dramatized money negotiation, to compensate for the loss of the poor ignored
rabbits, Maggie offers her money to Tom, who refuses it, telling her that boys have
more money than girls. Money would seem beside the point when Maggie tries to
live according to the precepts of Thomas à Kempis, or when, as Ruskin put it, she
forgets herself in a boat, or when she sets out to rescue Tom from the f lood. This
absence of money from Maggie’s imagination and ideals is particularly significant
when juxtaposed with the novel’s almost obsessive and appalled concern with it
— money lost, money gained, money earned; chapter after chapter is filled with
chatter about it: in its registration of a way of life the book is veined with money.
Elusive as it can be, it is so fundamental to people’s daily life that, while it may
serve as an instigator of plot, as a moral marker and stand-in for powerful emotions,
as a pivot for narratives, or as a means to concluding them, it is always and also
an unavoidable reality beyond the control of the imagination and desires of the
characters. The most ideal characters may not care about it, but they cannot live
64 George Levine

without it — or if they do, they will have to either suffer or die. As Victorian fiction
shifts its sights to the middle and lower classes, financial constraints become a major
part of almost every narrative, and Victorian realism and George Eliot are on their
most fertile ground.
Almost every appearance of money intimates a narrative and moral crisis. Even
while novelists are writing for money, and some, like George Eliot, were making
a lot and making awkward fusses about getting it, virtue almost always manifests
itself in the renunciation of money. Follow the money, and you are likely to be able
to follow the threads of moral significance that give structure and drama to the
books. Follow the money and you are likely to run into contradiction and crisis in
the very form of the fiction. How does one write a novel with a happy ending if,
as they must, the protagonists reject the money they need to survive?
George Eliot answers this question by way of fable in Silas Marner, but The Mill
on the Floss, generically, while it can self-consciously allude to fable, cannot indulge
it. The fable — the legend of St Ogg — stands as contrasting moral centre of the
book, and, as Maggie becomes a modern-day St Ogg, rescuing people from the
river, the novel, as critics have suggested from the start, shifts from its brilliant
realist manner. If something goes wrong with The Mill on the Floss, it might be said
to be its implicit indulgence of the fable mode at the crisis. But even then, against a
conclusion so inconsistent with the texture of the rest of the book, in the integrity
of her art, George Eliot cannot write a happy ending. Living happily ever after
while indifferent to money is conveniently possible in a fable like Silas Marner; in
a novel like The Mill on the Floss, it is not really possible. The fable it incorporates
becomes tragic, but an unfabulous Mill on the Floss would, as Henry James wished,
have become tragic in a very different way. The more Victorian fiction faces its
difficulties with money, the more it inclines away from its comedic norms and leans
toward tragedy.
As Christopher Herbert puts it, money in the Victorian novel is ‘filthy lucre’,
an object of fascination and revulsion. Herbert cites Freud’s point that in primitive
thinking, ‘gold is seen in the most unambiguous way to be a symbol of faeces’; it
is ‘the taboo object par excellence’.1 In primitive cultures, the taboo partook of the
nature of the divine; the divine and the dirty were equally objects of reverence,
or at least awe. But, Herbert claims, in Victorian culture, the divine and the dirty
were rigidly, even ferociously separated, and ‘money, given its symbolic proximity
to the most repugnant of all things, will be bound to become an object of at least
subconscious aversion and repression’ (p. 187). There is, in any case, no doubt that
in Victorian fiction money has something about it of the sacred, it is so sought after
and almost worshipped;2 but it is also despised. It has something about it of faeces,
or at least of Boffin’s dust-heaps in Our Mutual Friend.
In The Mill on the Floss, the dualism Herbert marks emerges in ‘unconscious
aversion’, and in the very shape of the story, through the portrait of Maggie. The
converging stories of Tom and Maggie provide the form and the drama: one a
creature of the hard materialist world of the Dodsons, the other the inheritor of that
aspect of her father’s character given to metaphor and intense feeling. One mark of
the dualism Herbert discusses is just the absence from Maggie’s imagination (and
 The M ill on the Floss and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism 65

George Eliot’s imagination of Maggie) of concern for money. Against the grain of
what George Eliot claimed she was intending when she insisted that ‘Tom is painted
with as much love and pity as Maggie’,3 readers have found Tom’s Dodsonian coldness
and materialism profoundly unsympathetic. Maggie is a sympathetic heroine just
in that she cannot measure her life and behaviour by that standard; her innocence
about money is a mark of the virtue that underlies her many very serious mistakes.
Against the force of the money world that crushes her father, destroys the Tulliver
family, and drives her away to work as a governess, she plays out the virtue of
feeling — feeling for the arts, sympathy with others’ pain, and then finally the force
of love itself. John Kucich claims that the novel is marked by a ‘sustained attack on
the runaway commercialism — and the related cultural narrowness — of English
life’, and, in the treatment of the Dodson’s it is ‘a bitter satire on rural materialism’.4
Those ‘black ships laden with the fresh scented fir-planks, with rounded sacks of
oil-bearing seed, or with the dark glitter of coal’ are not entirely benign.5 The
intermingling of the commercial with the natural can seem threatening — not least
in a novel that will conclude with the crashing of machinery on the f looded river
into the little boat guided by Tom and Maggie. What destroys Maggie literally is
the material culture in which, George Eliot shows, she is inextricably involved,
even as she lives out the virtue of her separateness.
In The Mill on the Floss, we can watch dramatized what Max Weber was to
describe as the connection between Calvinist moral virtues — surviving in a St
Ogg’s of very attenuated religious intensity — and the society’s acquisitiveness.
George Eliot’s lifelong and often desperate effort to imagine those religious values
remain­ing somehow fundamental to the workings of a secular world, even unto the
nost­a lgic representation of the skinf lint but honourable Mrs Glegg, suggests how
finally impossible it was to sustain them in a world given over to money. In the end,
Weber described the capitalist world grown from religious disciplines and virtues
as a ‘monstrous cosmos’.6
George Eliot admires those virtues, which are embodied in large part in the
Dodson family. But the narrative is torn, just as Herbert might have predicted,
between the story of Maggie’s aspiration to some higher, non-materialist culture and
spiritual fulfilment and redemption there, and the story of economic transformation
and material redemption — that is, paying off debt through commercial success.
One plot explores the workings of money — how to acquire it, what to do with
it, what sorts of power it exercises, what the consequences of losing it are — and
the other explores the possibility of an emotional and spiritual liberation from that
sort of materialism. Part of what redeems the book from a simple dualism is that
George Eliot, like Becky Sharp, knows that the ideal cannot be separated from the
real, that the real inhabits not only the culture in which the ideal is cultivated, but
the very body of the idealist.
But money seems to me to be to blame for George Eliot’s failure fully to confront
the dualism and its consequences. Is there a space in this realist world for the kind
of pure spiritual aspiration, inattention to the calls of the body and the context in
which it lives, to which Maggie aspires? George Eliot seems to imply ‘no’ in her
moving and yet ironic exploration of Maggie’s youthful efforts at full austerity.
66 George Levine

But it was a difficult ‘no’ for her to affirm, in part because she certainly knew
in her imagination of Maggie what the austerity and self-denial Maggie sought
would really entail. Will the ‘growing good of the world’ be compatible with the
practical world of money that her heroines learn to reject but that even George
Eliot desired?7
The Mill on the Floss confronts the options that most mid-Victorian novels, in
their revulsion from money, evade. One way to account for its tragic form is that,
in imagining a heroine free from the materialist values that anchor the life of the
Dodsons and St Ogg’s, it does not imagine a way to survive with those values, and
recognizes, as Maggie only very partially does, the penetration of the ideal by the
material. The Dodsons can (in line with Weber’s theory) sustain a rigorous moral
bearing and respectability and still value money overtly and highly. But Maggie
thinks and feels beyond respectability and honour. Focusing on feeling and personal
relations, she sees nothing in terms of money. Without regard for the money that
drives Tom and the new economy of the town, Maggie must live an alienated
and deprived life. I do not mean to suggest that this is the moral of George Eliot’s
story or of the portrait of Maggie, but neither is it an accidental consequence of the
values imputed to Maggie and the hostility to a culture so constrained by money
and possessions. Maggie’s vagaries are simply not comprehensible to a culture in
which the spirit of capitalism is afoot in the hard morality and austere devotion to
work and honour that Weber was to analyse fifty years later. The novel constantly
dramatizes, in the naïve Maggie’s misadventures and moral mistakes, the price
of failure to acquiesce in the kind of respectable Dodsonian materialism that is
described sometimes almost with affection — an affection, however, tinctured with
a not entirely repressed horror.
In discussing the novel and in the text of the novel itself, George Eliot wanted to
insist on the conf lict of generations, implying that the Dodson mode was a thing
of the past, something that the younger generation, of which Maggie and Tom
are representative, are supposedly destined to outgrow. But what is dramatized is
something different. Not only does Tom not outgrow the Dodson values, but with
the help of his uncle, Mr Deane, he carries them closer to a full-blown capitalism.
Listening to Mr Deane, the most successful and modern of the family, feels a lot like
listening to an only slightly chastened Mr Bounderby. It is also like overhearing a
conversation with Weber’s ears:
I’ll tell you how I got on. It wasn’t by getting astride a stick and thinking it
would turn into a horse if I sat on it long enough. I kept my eyes and ears open,
sir, and I wasn’t too fond of my own back, and I made my master’s interest my
own. [...] Why sir, I hadn’t more schooling to begin with than a charity boy,
but I saw pretty soon that I couldn’t get on far without mastering accounts, and
I learned ’em between working hours, after I’d been unlading. [...] When I was
sixteen my jacket smelled of tar and I wasn’t afraid of handling cheeses. That’s
the reason I can wear good broadcloth now, and have my legs under the same
table with the heads of the best firms in St. Ogg’s. (II, 5, 189)
That broadcloth and that table are money. And success in Deane’s and Tom’s world
is measured in trade brought in by those charming ships described in the first
 The M ill on the Floss and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism 67

chapter. The Malthusian Mr Deane preaches the virtue of trade, ‘as honourable a
position as a man can hold, to be connected with it’.
He points to a newer generation, replacing the old wealth in land with the new
wealth in commerce: the world of St Ogg’s is transforming because of commercial
expansion. But this can hardly be the generation in conflict with the Dodsonian
values. Most of the Dodsons are slower, more cautious, pre-capitalist, but they share
with the newly developing culture a very strong sense of possessions. It is true that
the capitalism replacing their cautious miserliness will dislodge some of the peculiar
Dodsonian rigidities, but the materialism and commitment to hard work are passed
on, leaving Maggie far from both generations. Tom, meanwhile, is happy to seek
the honourable position Mr Deane describes.
One would expect from a story of generational conf lict that Maggie, ahead of her
time, would anticipate values — gradually, at least — that are becoming pre­domi­
nant, as money culture is displaced by a higher culture. But nothing in the book
prepares that kind of development. Nothing suggests that it is written from within a
culture thus transformed. The conf lict, though George Eliot almost wishes it away
with her tragic ending, is between brother and sister, capitalist and romantic. Maggie
is out of temper not only with the older property-oriented materialist generation,
but with the newer trade-oriented capitalist one. The material of the new money, of
‘commerce’, machinery from one of the wharves, smashes her boat on the f looded
river. That Tom is destroyed by the same forces is evidence not of his incom­
patibility with them but of George Eliot’s hostility to them, and desire in some way
to allow Maggie to emerge morally confirmed. It will not happen if she survives.
Although George Eliot complained to Blackwood, ‘I am so far from hating the
Dodsons myself, that I am rather aghast to find them ticketed with such very ugly
adjectives’,8 she herself said in a letter that Maggie belongs to ‘a higher culture’. If
the book is concerned with how a younger generation in that culture ‘comes into
collision with the older’, it is surely not Tom who is colliding. As Tom diplomatically
avoids conf lict with the Dodson sisters (and their husbands), and works according
to the business ideals of Mr Deane, he is recognized as a true Dodson. And the
depiction of a true Dodson, as David Malcolm implies, is part of a ‘forceful attack
on the materialism and inhumanity’ of the St Ogg’s culture, a ‘critique of those
corner-stones of mid-nineteenth-century laissez-faire society, individualism and the
success ethic’.9
Like Max Weber’s incipient capitalist, Tom has, as George Eliot describes him, a
‘practical shrewdness’, which ‘told him that the means to such achievements could
only lie for him in present abstinence and self-self-denial’. There is, moreover,
Tom’s very Samuel-Smilesian anger at Maggie’s insistence on ‘feeling’, which, as
Malcolm reminds us, leads him to respond to her at a crucial moment: ‘ “Yes, I
have had feelings to struggle with; but I conquered them. I have had a harder life
than you have had; but I have found my comfort in doing my duty” ’ (VII. 1, 393).
His capacity to delay pleasure, to renounce, his determination to work hard, his
tenacity, his absolute honesty, all match the characteristics of Weber’s capitalist and
Samuel Smiles’s George Stephenson. Certainly, these are virtues that George Eliot
would admire, but they are held and expressed with a severity that almost excludes
sympathy.
68 George Levine

In expelling Maggie from their home when she returns from her misadventure
with Steven, Tom shows himself to be one of those men of maxims who cannot
recognize ‘the mysterious complexity of our life’, and who ‘repress all the divine
promptings and inspirations that spring from growing insight and sympathy’ (VII,
2, 403). Tom’s literal correctness and righteousness, essential for a respectable
capitalism, entirely miss the cultural and moral point of Maggie’s passionate and
mistaken behaviour. The narrator claims that we feel ‘an instinctive repugnance’
to these men of maxims. Why not, then, to Tom himself? All of this is tied to a
preoccupation with imagination and metaphor announced in the book’s first scene.
The literalist materialism of the Dodsons makes Tom incapable of those thrusts of
sympathy that in George Eliot’s imagination transcend the limits of the material.
So while there is, as the narrator says, ‘a terrible cutting truth in Tom’s words’, it
is ‘that hard rind of truth which is discerned by unimaginative and unsympathetic
minds’ (VI, 4, 318). The Dodson lack of metaphorical imagination is linked to their
literalist attachment to money and the rules of property that govern it. Anchored in
the material, the Dodsons fail at metaphors as they fail at sympathy, but are strictly
right on all matters of money.
The book embodies a deep (if, following Herbert, we are willing to call it
unconscious) revulsion from Dodsonian materialism and the dualism Herbert
describes is played out in the contrasts between Maggie and Tom. Money almost
takes on the quality of the totem. It serves as object to be striven for, as obstacle to
happiness, as token of a revered past, and implicitly as something that both marks
the moral condition of the characters and replaces feeling.
The scene of the family council in which the Dodsons gather to discuss the selling
up of the Tulliver household while Mr Tulliver is in a coma upstairs dramatizes
these qualities. It is hard not to cheer the misguided Maggie when, in response to
chatter about which of Mrs Tulliver’s household items to buy, or whether to buy
them, and in response to the Dodson sister’s refusal even to consider the kind of
help that would really matter, she bursts out:
‘Why do you come, then’ [...] ‘talking and interfering with us and scolding us, if
you don’t mean to do anything to help my poor mother — your own sister — if
you’ve no feeling for her when she’s in trouble, and won’t part with anything,
though you would never miss it, to save her from pain? Keep away from us
then, and don’t come to find fault with my father — he was better than any of
you — he was kind — he would have helped you, if you had been in trouble.
Tom and I don’t ever want to have any of your money, if you won’t help my
mother. We’d rather not have it! We’ll do without you.’ (III, 3, 177)
Maggie’s passion is not merely impractical, but a ref lection of her and the novel’s
commitment to the overriding value of feeling and loving attachment, even as
its inadequacy to the scene is manifest. Maggie’s outburst can only intensify the
Dodson sisters’ righteous clinging to what they regard as proper and what they
regard as their own.
The outburst is juxtaposed to Tom’s earlier far more diplomatic version of what
might seem like the same position: ‘then aunt, if you think it’s a disgrace to the
family that we should be sold up, wouldn’t it be better to prevent it altogether?
 The M ill on the Floss and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism 69

And if you and my aunt Pullet [...] think of leaving any money to me and Maggie,
wouldn’t it be better to give it now, and pay the debt we’re going to be sold up for,
and save my mother from parting with her?’ (III, 3, 176).
Substantively, the request is the same as Maggie’s but it is entirely different, for
it is put in terms of exchange of money, of practical means to avoid a fall without
changing the actual amount of money expended. There is no explicit renunciation
of money at all, although Tom is willing to sacrifice his inheritance for his mother.
But Maggie is asking for something else, an absolute exclusion of the ethic that
requires precise and rational dealing with money. She simply cannot imagine that
loving sisters would fail to make their sister’s happiness their first priority. Tom,
however, is thinking in terms of debt, is alert to the question of money, and looks
for the best way to get it:
It was a significant indication of Tom’s character, that though he thought
his aunts ought to do something more for his mother, he felt nothing like
Maggie’s violent resentment against them for showing no eager tenderness and
generosity. There were no impulses in Tom that led him to expect what did not
present itself to him as a right to be demanded. Why should people give away
their money plentifully to those who had not taken care of their own money?
Tom saw some justice in severity; and all the more, because he had confidence
in himself that he should never deserve that just severity. (III, 5, 185)
Tom, responds Mr Glegg, has ‘some notion of things’; Maggie doesn’t.
But even Tom’s practical plea is ineffectual in the family council because it isn’t
quite practical enough. In response to Tom’s offer, Mr Glegg replies: ‘there’s the
interest, you must remember...your aunts get five per cent on their money, and
they’d lose that if they advanced it — you haven’t thought of that.’ While this would
be comic if there weren’t so much at stake, it is simply monstrous. Tom, undeterred,
counters that he would work to pay that interest, but Mr Glegg’s approval of that
idea evokes something yet worse from Mrs Glegg:
It’s pleasant work for you to be giving my money away, as you’ve pretended to
leave at my own disposal. And my money, as was my own father’s gift, and not
yours, Mr Glegg; and I’ve saved it, and added to it myself, and had more to put
out almost every year, and it’s to go and be sunk in other folks’ furniture and
encourage ’em in luxury and extravagance as they’ve no means of supporting,
and I’m to alter my will, or have a codicil made, and leave two or three hundred
less behind me when I die — me as have allays done right and been careful,
and the eldest o’ the family and my money’s to go and be squandered on them
as have had the same chance as me, only they’ve been wicked and wasteful [...].
(III, 3, 180)
Mrs Glegg and Tom think the same way, even if Mrs Glegg’s sense of money is
behind the capitalist times. In either case, however, you don’t give money away,
and you certainly don’t give it to people who have been ‘wicked and wasteful’.
The phrase is redundant, for money is moralized both in the Dodsons’ and George
Eliot’s worlds, and Mrs Glegg’s moralization of money is in fact typical of the way
it is understood, by and large, in most Victorian novels. This tragic-comic scene is
a piece of brilliant anthropology and George Eliot’s readers rightly responded to the
comic aspects of Mrs Glegg’s feistiness and rigorous adhesion to an ideal of Dodson
70 George Levine

respectability and moral rigor. But it is just that rigorous attention to material
embodiments of ‘doing right’, that translation of money into something as solid
as Mrs Tulliver’s ‘chiny’, and something as isolating as Silas’s coins, that Maggie
instinctively resists and is repelled by.
Georg Simmel argues that money rationalizes relationships by becoming a
standard of measure, and it distances things (and people): ‘our contact with them is
broken and we experience them only by means of mediation that does not allow
their complete, autonomous, immediate existence to gain full expression.’10 Money
trumps love of sister for sister, and certainly love of wife for husband.
Maggie’s story is persistently about this kind of resistance to money-mediated
relationships. The ‘higher culture’ to which she instinctively responds does not
worry about rates of interest, and engages others directly outside the market place.
George Eliot seems to aspire to that condition but cannot fully believe in it or dra­
ma­tize it. When Maggie enters a world in which the money culture is not as overt
as it is among the Dodsons, and in which she can give vent to those cultural aspir­
ations that have spurred her since childhood, she is unprepared, and ultimately lost.
It is not that money disappears from the narrative in the last two hurried books, but
that it is hidden, not very well, under just those qualities of high culture to which
Maggie is so excessively sensitive. Money mediates even when it is not mentioned.
As many critics have felt since the first appearance of the novel, its most aestheti­
cally disturbing moment comes as Book Six opens. Turning the page after the
moving scene between the dying Mr Tulliver and his two children, who will
shoulder his inheritance of bankruptcy, loss, and vengeance, one enters ‘a well-
furnished drawing-room with the open piano and the pleasant outlook down a
sloping garden to a boat-house’ (VI, 1, 293). In all its languid luxuriousness, the
scene makes a violent break that seems to be from another novel than the one that
climaxed with Tulliver’s unremitting anger at the ‘raskills’, and his touching last
words: ‘Does God forgive raskills?... but if He does, He won’t be hard wi’ me’ (V,
7, 292). There seem no raskills in that drawing room, and nothing of the brilliantly
imagined Tulliver/Dodson culture. From a tragic-comic narrative that explores
with moral and psychological intensity and with anthropological acuity a narrowly
materialistic culture that constrains the possibilities of its young, we have moved
into a drawing-room drama populated by spoiled and trivial young people.
The jarring effect cannot be erased by George Eliot’s effort at insinuating un­ob­
vious continuities. A more or less grown-up Lucy Deane (who nevertheless has
been a minor figure in the early parts of the book) makes some connection, but
so too, and more disturbingly, do the reasons Stephen chooses her for his wife:
he thinks of her as ‘quite the sort of wife a man would not be likely to repent for
marrying’ and chooses her chief ly because ‘she did not strike him as a remarkable
rarity’ (VI, 1, 299). His condescension to her moderate prettiness, and his failure
to understand her real qualities are no more forgivable than Mr Tulliver’s choice of
the least talented of the Dodson sisters, just because she would be unlikely to give
him trouble.
But the most important continuity is, once again, money, however disguised.
When we meet the lounging Stephen, ‘whose diamond ring, attar of roses, and air
 The M ill on the Floss and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism 71

of nonchalant leisure, at twelve o’clock in the day are the graceful and odoriferous
result of the largest oil-mill and the most extensive wharf in St. Ogg’s’ (VI, 1, 293),
readers can be no more prepared than Maggie. The introduction of this moneyed
fop is hardly attractive and the satirical tone helps explain why critics have often
found Maggie’s infatuation with Stephen evidence of an aesthetic lapse. George
Eliot may well have been counting on the shock in the sudden juxtaposition of these
‘sophisticated’ and self-indulgent young people with the traditional, conservative,
and plain lives of the Dodsons and Tullivers. It seems a long way from Mrs Tulliver’s
incomprehension of her husband’s instinctively metaphorical and homely language
to this highly educated and playful toying with Lucy Dean’s scissors and the
conversation of young well-to-do lovers, who pass the time singing high-culture
songs to each other.
But this is no place for Maggie Tulliver. Returning from the constraints of her
work as governess, to which she has been forced by lack of money, she encounters
expensive attar-of-rose odours. The scene’s refinement disguises the fact that it
is the product of the Bounderby ethic that Mr Deane preaches to Tom; it is the
‘broadcloth’ he can afford now, even though he began his career smelling of tar.
The drawing room is the embodiment of money, and the revulsion readers are
likely to feel from all the charming and luxurious patter is certainly an aspect of
that aversion from money that the portraits of the Dodsons, in a very different way,
had intimated in the first five books. The foppish Stephen, in those first moments,
makes Mrs Glegg look good. Maggie enters defenceless:
Maggie was introduced for the first time to the young lady’s life, and knew what
it was to get up in the morning without any imperative reason for doing one
thing more than another. This new sense of leisure and unchecked enjoyment
amidst the soft-breathing airs and garden scents of advancing spring, — amidst
the new abundance of music and lingering strolls in the sunshine, and the
delicious dreaminess of gliding on the river — could hardly be without some
intoxicating effect on her, after her years of privation. (VI, 6, 324)
In all her time in the leisured, luxurious circumstances of Lucy’s drawing room,
and on the excursions or music playing of the young people, her visceral excitement
about art and music and literature are given free play: ‘She felt the half-remote
presence of a world of love and beauty and delight, made up of vague mingled
images from all the poetry and romance she had ever read, or had ever woven in
her dreamy reveries’ (VI, 3, 311). This is an English version of a Madame Bovary
moment; it is a touch of Don Quixote’s enchantment. The very sensuousness that
George Eliot so carefully evokes, and for which Maggie is utterly unprepared, is
made possible by money.
The central drama of this second part of the novel plays out the crisis of
ambivalence about wealth that marks George Eliot’s life and writing. Here she
dramatizes the attractiveness of wealth as though it were an intoxication; it is a
version of the old temptation, offering Maggie a leisured pleasure utterly unknown
to her, and that in Thomas-à-Kempis moments she had renounced. The power
of the attraction of these things, this art, this music, suggests again the deep
ambivalence that George Eliot felt in relation to money. She, like Maggie, does
72 George Levine

indeed love what money can buy, and knows it well enough to criticize, if lovingly,
Maggie’s earlier attempt at Christ-like austerity: ‘the battle of her life was not to be
settled in that short and easy way — by perfect renunciation at the very threshold
of her youth’ (VI, 3, 311–12).
The strategy of these more hastily written last books is to dramatize Maggie’s
intoxication, this seduction into the pleasures and the high culture that money
can buy so decorously and respectably. Readers’ refusal to accept that Maggie
would really have fallen for Stephen seems to me to result just from this strategy
of unprofessed shock: the contrast is too strong; Stephen’s shallowness is too self-
evident. As one critic put it, ‘nothing is shown us in Stephen, except his own
admiration for her, to account for it’.11 And I cannot resist Swinburne’s outraged
description of him as ‘a cur so far beneath the chance of promotion to the notice
of [a man’s] horsewhip, or the elevation to the level of his boot’.12 But George Eliot
insisted that she knew what Maggie would feel, and she was certainly right. Maggie
is ‘intoxicated’ by pleasure; it is because this world is absolutely foreign to her
that a space opens for her own sensuousness, as it does for the equally unprepared
Dorothea in Middlemarch, suddenly overpowered, when the sunlight hits them, by
the stunning beauty of the jewels she is renouncing. More comfortable and sweet-
smelling than anything Maggie had known before, it also seems to lower the moral
stakes on all actions. The suddenness is to become a kind of excuse for the lapse
which, consistent with her behaviour throughout the book, was bound to come.
It is not that she is seduced by money and wealth; but she is seduced by forces in
herself she does not understand, and that are elicited just by the products of money
and wealth.
This whole sequence takes place within an unavoidable context of economic
privilege. So while it would seem that Maggie’s misstep has nothing to do with
money, the community’s reaction to it has everything to do with money: ‘What
a wonderful marriage for a girl like Miss Tulliver — quite romantic! Why young
Guest will put up for the borough at the next election. Nothing like commerce
nowadays’ (VII, 2, 397). But not making a poor girl’s advantageous marriage implies
for the community some other wickedness: she had come back ‘in that degraded
and outcast condition to which error is well known to lead; and the world’s wife,
with that fine instinct which is given her for the preservation of Society, saw at
once that Miss Tulliver’s conduct had been of the most aggravated kind.’ Money is
the implicit measure here, distancing the real Maggie from the community. Who
but a degraded person would return from such a venture without a trousseau, when
the seducer is so wealthy and such a good catch? And yet it is only because money
doesn’t enter her thinking for an instant that she comes back without a trousseau.
In this respect Maggie is a characteristically Victorian heroine who, like Dorothea
Brooke or Amy Dorrit, demonstrates her virtue by renouncing money, or regarding
it as irrelevant. Dodsonian society cannot read such a move.
The major criticism of the book has always circled around its wonderful ending.
The first time I read it I cried, and at the same time found myself angry at being so
moved because I knew even with tears in my eyes that something had gone wrong.
While it is brilliantly and powerfully done, it feels, aesthetically, like a surrender.
 The M ill on the Floss and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism 73

In a characteristically understated way, Henry James gets to what I take to be the

fundamental problem: ‘For my part, although, as long as humanity is subject to
f loods and earthquakes, I have no objection to see them made use of in the novels,
I would in this particular case have infinitely preferred that Maggie should have
been left to her own devices.’13
Instead, the novel resorts to those devices of fable, resolving an irresolvable crisis
by making the world conform to the protagonist’s and the novelist’s desire. Maggie’s
condition was clearly intolerable, not only to herself but to George Eliot as well.
But the genre-change is announced as the f lood begins to lap at Maggie’s feet just
as she exclaims, ‘O God, if my life is to be long, let me live to bless and comfort
[...].’ This is roughly equivalent to the way George Eliot berates ‘favourable chance’
in Silas Marner and then uses favourable chance to rescue the protagonist. Maggie’s
prayer implies a different literary genre — a sustained examination of a constrained
and impoverished life. The f lood becomes the answer to the awful truths Maggie
had been facing: a long life of isolation and fear of her own weaknesses. ‘Am I to
struggle and fall and repent again?’ Fortune answers her, kills her, redeems her.
But James wants to know, and so do I, what would it have meant to live within
the community that has exiled her? How, left to her own devices, might she have
managed? What sort of novel would it have produced?
The question returns us to the matter of money. The apparent irrelevance of
money to the moral triumph of Maggie’s rescue of her brother does not disguise
the importance of the role money would have played, had Maggie been left as
James would have preferred. To have lived would have meant returning to the
social judgment of the men of maxims, a society that judges within the norms of
material wealth, and cannot read other motives or desires. It would have meant
going back to a novel from which the fable is pointedly absent and whose focus
would have to be on the morally unresolved labour of day-to-day survival, on a life
led simply making a living. The f lood makes literal the fact that there is no place in
St Oggs society for someone whose values are not linked to possessions and money.
We have become familiar enough with Tom’s moral hardness to be aware that love
between brother and sister can only be sustained through melodramatic rescue
and death.
Much of the power of the book derives from the brilliant representation of
Maggie’s inner life as she struggles against a social context of the sort that George
Eliot, as a realist, felt herself bound to represent. It is an inner life that knows
virtually nothing of money but that is constantly assaulted by its demands. The
fable-like conclusion provides the only space in the St Ogg’s world where the
values that imply resistance to money, or utter disregard for it, can be triumphantly
affirmed. The narrative, Maggie herself, and the reader all recognize that she is
doomed, if she lives, to struggle and repent, over and over again. Maggie has, like
most good Victorian heroines, renounced the money she might have got in marrying
Stephen. Eliot refuses to write the novel that, like James’s Portrait of a Lady, moves
away from fable by studying the implications of possession of money, so she does
not allow to Maggie the likes of Isabel Archer’s windfall inheritance of £70,000.
What are the consequences of living with money? Or, in Maggie’s case, what are
74 George Levine

the consequences of living without it, requiring an entirely different exploration of

the significance and pressures of money on moral choice? She did not write a novel
in which St Ogg’s remained St Ogg’s and we are led to follow the internal struggles
that would be the dreary consequences of life alone and in poverty.
To avoid such catastrophe in her last novel, seeking a morally satisfactory solution
to the question of whether it is possible to imagine a comic ending to a novel that
deals frankly with the problems of money in contemporary England, George Eliot
had to abandon Maggie’s determination to stay at home, abandon Gwendolen
Harleth, and send Daniel Deronda to Palestine. But it should be clear that Daniel
had plenty of money with which to go.

Notes to Chapter 8
1. Christopher Herbert, ‘Filthy Lucre: Victorian Ideas about Money’, Victorian Studies, 44 (Winter
2002), 185–213 (p. 187).
2. For a brilliant and complex handling of the way money (particularly ‘debt’ money) serves as a
kind of replacement for the divine, see Philip Godchild, The Theology of Money (London: SCM
Press, 2007).
3. The George Eliot Letters, ed. by Gordon Haight, 9 vols (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1978), iii, 299.
4. John Kucich, ‘George Eliot and Objects: Meaning as Matter in The Mill on the Floss’, reprinted
in The Mill on the Floss: A Norton Critical Edition, ed. by Carol Christ (New York: W. W. Norton,
1994), p. 561.
5. George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, Ch. 1, 7.
6. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism, ed. by Peter Baehr and Gordon C.
Wells (London: Penguin Books, 2002), p. 13.
7. George Eliot’s own ambivalent relation to money is played out in her negotiations with Cornhill
magazine and her leaving the Blackwoods in publishing Romola. There is no space here to
consider the episode, but it is more than ironic that in the Blackwoods’ correspondence, George
Eliot is discussed almost as though she were a Dodsonian skinf lint.
8. George Eliot Letters, ed. by Haight, iii, 299.
9. David Malcolm, ‘The Mill on the Floss and the Contemporary Social Values: Tom Tulliver and
Samuel Smiles’, in The Critical Response to George Eliot, ed. by Karen L. Pangallo (Westport, CT:
Greenwood Press, 1994), pp. 73–79 (p. 74).
10. George Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, trans. by Tom Bottomore and David Frisby (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978).
11. ‘Unsigned review, Guardian’, in George Eliot: The Critical Heritage, ed. by David Carroll (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971), p. 130.
12. ‘Swinburne, “the hideous transformation” ’, in Critical Heritage, ed. by Carroll, p. 164.
13. Henry James, Essays on Literature: American Writers, English Writers (New York: The Library of
America, 1984), p. 930.
 — 9 —

Scenes of Reading Romola

Margaret Harris

It is a commonplace that Romola, George Eliot’s fifth work of fiction, cost her
untold pains in the writing. John Cross reports her as saying: ‘I began it as a young
woman, — I finished it an old woman’.1 In this novel she moved away from her
family memories and the relatively recent English past to Savonarola’s Florence, and
a massively studied argument about the Renaissance. Some of her contemporaries,
and many readers since, have deplored this shift: we readily recall lapidary phrases
like Henry James’s ‘it smells of the lamp’, forgetting that this comment follows his
description of Romola as ‘on the whole the finest thing she wrote’.2 It is this novel
too which generated Barbara Hardy’s famous observation: ‘Romola is undoubtedly a
book which it is more interesting to analyse than simply to read’.3
Critical analyses for the most part proceed along particular trajectories. Though
James was not alone in finding George Eliot’s erudition stif ling, R. H. Hutton in
his Spectator review is exemplary in discerning the rationale for her scholarship and
the ambition of the novel: ‘The great artistic purpose of the story is to trace out the
conf lict between liberal culture and the more passionate form of the Christian faith
in that strange era, which has so many points of resemblance with the present.’4 In
referring to George Eliot’s negotiation of past and present, so powerfully figured
in the ‘Proem’, Hutton stakes out a ground which has been well worked over in
the century and a half since he wrote, in discussions including those by Felicia
Bonaparte. J. B. Bullen, and Joseph Wiesenfarth, which consider George Eliot’s
appropriation of her sources and the implications for mid-nineteenth-century
Britain of her analysis of the intellectual and political currents of the Renaissance.5
Discussion has also gone beyond the life of the mind to take up aspects of Romola in
the marketplace.6 In considering George Eliot’s own ‘present’ in writing the novel,
Miriam Allott’s diagnosis of it as a menopausal work has been supplanted by Nancy
Henry’s astringent reading, which finds analogies between the author’s ‘betrayal’ of
her original publisher John Blackwood by being induced to sell the novel elsewhere,
and Tito’s various betrayals.7
Beyond such discussions again, ‘past’ and ‘present’ have shifted from a stable
binary to being a dynamic set of relationships. Rather than assuming that the
meaning of a text is fixed at the time of its creation, which must somehow be
re-created by the reader, it is now accepted critical practice to articulate explicitly
con­sciousness of the present that readers inhabit, and the various contexts operating
there, as a method of developing an interpretation of the text. In George Eliot’s case,
such an approach is provided (and naturalized) by Margaret Reynolds’s introduction
76 Margaret Harris

to a recent Penguin Classics edition of Adam Bede, which takes into consideration
an unauthorized 1862 stage version, and a 2001 BBC radio adaptation. Reynolds’s
point is that ‘new set[s] of historical and cultural forces at work’ at different times
[...] make George Eliot’s novel [...] subject to revision and change’, particularly in
the characterization of Hetty, who survives in both adaptations — in the 1862 play
she is married to Arthur all along, and innocent of infanticide (the baby was stolen
by gypsies), and in the 2001 radio version ‘an independent woman, with a strong
sense of self ’.8
I propose to follow suit, in a discussion of the 1924 silent film of Romola, directed
by Henry King, produced by Inspiration Pictures and distributed by Metro-
Goldwyn Corporation — and starring the iconic Lillian Gish. George Eliot’s novel
was adapted by Will M. Ritchey, with Jules Furthman and Don Bartlett supplying
the intertitles. (It is worthy of note, since on one level Romola is concerned with
signs, circulation of texts and reading, that I was able to buy a videotape of the
film from amazon.com). Inevitably, part of my discussion analyses ways King’s
film deviates from George Eliot’s novel, but I plead not guilty to adopting blindly
a method which practitioners of the newly f ledged discipline of adaptation studies
fairly regard as simplistic and unregenerate. Logocentrism — the ‘belief that words
come first and that literature is better than film’ — is deplored by Deborah Cartmell,
Timothy Corrigan and Imelda Whelehan in their manifesto leading off the journal,
Adaptation.9 I plan to go beyond logocentrism to interrogate and demonstrate some
of the propositions they lay out about adaptation studies, mindful both of recent
attempts, in Simone Murray’s words, ‘to reconceptualize adaptation as a process of
endless intertextual citation’, and to take into account also her further argument
that both films and novels are driven by institutions and networks the interactions
of which cause some texts and not others to be adapted.10 In a consideration of
historical and social scenes of reading, I will situate Henry King’s Romola in a set of
contexts that cast light both on it, and on George Eliot’s Romola.
It should be borne in mind that of all George Eliot’s texts, Romola from the outset
has been the most evidently commodified, and hence the one where her authority
is most explicitly destabilized. In its print form, material conditions of publication
and distribution were explicitly in question. Romola was the occasion of ‘the most
magnificent offer ever yet made for fiction’11 by which the entrepreneurial London
publisher George Smith lured her away from the Edinburgh house of Blackwood. It
appeared in monthly parts in the Cornhill Magazine from July 1862 to August 1863,
with illustrations by Frederic Leighton, already an established artist; and in three
volumes from Smith, Elder in July 1863.12
During 1862, there was a good deal of correspondence between George Eliot
and Leighton about his illustrations for the Cornhill serialization. Their letters are
interesting in various respects: for the exchange of scholarly detail about Florence,
for George Eliot’s comments on her own work, and for her statements about the
relation of her text to Leighton’s visual representations of it.13 For example:
I am quite convinced that illustrations can only form a sort of overture to the
text. The artist who uses the pencil must otherwise be tormented to misery by
the deficiencies or requirements of the one who uses the pen, and the writer,
on the other hand, must die of impossible expectations. (Letters, iv, 57)
 Scenes of Reading Romola 77

I take George Eliot here to be acknowledging equal and different imperatives for
artists in visual and verbal media, rather than subscribing to a hierarchy which
privileges the written word. It may be that I am wanting to see her as amenable to
countenancing adaptation as we now understand the term, though she was certainly
not so amenable in her lifetime. She was emphatic in her refusal to countenance
theatrical adaptations of her writings. In October 1879, W. L. Bicknell (author of
Sunday Snowdrops, 1874) wrote asking for permission to dramatize Romola. She
declined stiff ly:
Dear Sir
You will no doubt on ref lection appreciate as well as imagine the reasons
that must prevent a writer who cares much about his writings from willingly
allowing them to be modified and in any way ‘adapted’ by another mind than
his own. (Letters, ix, 275)14
There were no authorized stage adaptations of her works in her lifetime, and few
unauthorized ones. It is worthy of remark, however, that an American version of
Romola, by Elwyn A. Barron, toured extensively from the autumn of 1896 to the
spring of 1897, beginning in Milwaukee, going as far west as San Francisco, as far
south as New Orleans, and as far east as Philadelphia and Boston — but did not
play in New York.15
In the twentieth century, the new medium of film promptly turned to literary
sources, and a version of Silas Marner called A Fair Exchange, directed by D. W.
Griffith, appeared in 1909. Silas Marner has continued to be the most frequently
filmed of George Eliot’s works, with Giles Foster’s 1985 version starring Ben
Kingsley the most widely viewed adaptation until the BBC-PBS Middlemarch mini-
series of 1994. By contrast, Romola, along with Scenes of Clerical Life and Felix Holt,
has attracted little attention. King’s film was the second screen Romola (an Italian
version of 1911 has vanished without trace), and one of the earliest full-length
George Eliot films.16
A major question is why Romola, of all George Eliot’s novels, should have been
chosen for a full-blown Hollywood film production? The particular popularity
of Romola in the United States, from its first publication in 1863, may be a factor.
American interest in Romola is usually attributed to the analogies to be drawn
between the internecine rivalries in Savonarola’s Florence, and the politics of the
Civil War. However, in significant ways the film comes out of the political climate
in the United States in the early 1920s. Conscious of significant social change after
World War I, successive Republican Presidents Harding and Coolidge were intent
on addressing law and order issues and the reform of administrative corruption.
The film industry accommodated to a puritanical standard that was largely implicit,
until the pressure for family values and wholesomeness resulted in the formulation
of the Hays Code, adopted in 1930. Named after Will Hays, president of the Motion
Picture Producers and Distributors of America, Inc., the Code encouraged movie
makers to conspire in an affirmative cultural vision in which objectionable material
was neutralized.
Such considerations can hardly have failed to inf luence some of the modifications
of George Eliot’s Romola for Henry King’s film. More generally, at a time when
78 Margaret Harris

there was a vogue for costume epic, Romola provided the opportunity to film
a quality product in an exotic locale. In particular, the decision depended on
Henry King’s passion for Italy, and Lillian Gish’s drive to establish herself as a star
independent of the inf luential director D. W. Griffith.
Henry King (1886–1982) was originally an actor, both on stage and screen, who
came to directing in 1915. Romola was the eighth of over one hundred films he
directed in his long career, covering the full Hollywood gamut of genres, including
westerns ( Jesse James (1939)) and musicals (Carousel (1956)). When a retrospective of
Lillian’s films was being prepared by the Museum of Modern Art, in New York,
King reiterated an opinion attributed to John Barrymore sixty years earlier, in
1920: ‘I consider that Miss Gish is to film what Duse and Bernhardt were to the
theater.’17
The Gish sisters, Lillian (1893–1993) and Dorothy (1898–1968), made their screen
debut in D. W. Griffith’s An Unseen Enemy (1912), and continued to appear together
under his direction on a number of occasions, indeed as sisters in Orphans of the
Storm (1921), their last film with him. For all his admiration of and attachment to
Lillian — whose star status Griffith had secured by casting her as the lead in The
Birth of a Nation (1915) — he could no longer meet her price, and in 1922 she left
Griffith and the Biograph company, in part to separate her image from the kind
of role she had always played for him — she was invariably cast as a fragile beauty,
subject to hardship and trauma, often of an extreme physical kind.
Both sisters moved to Henry King’s new Inspiration Company, where they made
two pictures, The White Sister (1923) and Romola. Then Lillian signed with MGM
for a reputed million dollars for two years, and Dorothy worked for a time with
Herbert Wilcox in England. The careers of both went into decline with the advent
of talkies: Dorothy’s never recovered, though Lillian continued to perform almost
to the end of her long life.
At this turning point in Lillian’s career, the quest for the right role was not easy.
Though she wanted to shake off her screen persona as a waif-like victim, she could
not accept any script that cast her as a racy contemporary heroine. A breakthrough
came with the suggestion of The White Sister, from a 1901 novel by Marion
Crawford. The lead character is an Italian heiress left penniless at the death of her
father by the machinations of her wicked half-sister. On hearing that her fiancé has
been killed, she takes the veil and enters a convent, only to learn that her lover is
still alive. Subsequent events include an eruption of Mount Vesuvius, an attempted
rape, and a f lood.
The White Sister was shot largely in Rome, and at other Italian locations: its
cinematography was to prove a substantial element of its box office success. Lillian
had a large part in the editing, as she had in aspects of the production and direc­
tion. The White Sister generated the momentum for a second film shot in Italy,
and Romola, set in fifteenth-century Florence, had the potential to be even more
picturesque. A third film, Romeo and Juliet, was mooted but not made. Some of the
same crew (Italian and American) worked on the new film, for which planning
overlapped with the final stages of The White Sister. Shooting of Romola was
hampered by rain, and new indoor scenes had to be written to make use of the
 Scenes of Reading Romola 79

assembled cast, including extras. Into the bargain, Kodak’s new panchromatic film
stock was used, which was expensive and difficult to handle. The delays in finishing
the film cost Lillian the role of Peter Pan in Paramount’s screen version, for which
she was J. M. Barrie’s first choice. Cost overruns were exacerbated by the need to
re-shoot the scene in which Tessa (Dorothy) drowns. ‘Naturally buoyant, Dorothy
was unable to submerge’ in the Arno, so resourceful Lillian arranged a new shoot
on Long Island Sound in freezing January weather, ‘with the help of a diver who
obligingly dragged Dorothy underwater.’18
What of the film? For all the piquant paradox that this is Romola without George
Eliot’s words, and despite the limited and highly stylized use of language in the
intertitles, Henry King’s Romola clearly manifests the affinity of silent film with
the classic realist narrative of many Victorian fictions. The plot is true to type. The
equilibrium of the fictional world, disrupted at the outset, is finally restored in a
process of cause and effect which is seen to depend in large measure on human
agency. Characterization, as well as narrative, is significant in silent film, developed
through techniques like close-up which align the audience with a character’s
point of view.
In addition to this classic realist heritage, the affinity of silent film with stage
melodrama has frequently been acknowledged.19 In Henry King’s Romola, there
are some very explicit carryovers, especially the fight at sea (not recounted by
George Eliot) which breaks out right on cue at the half-way mark in the evening’s
entertainment, following the practice in the nineteenth-century theatre, where
among various short pieces supplementary to the principal feature a naval interlude
was standard. Other conventions of melodrama permeate the film, from the use
of declamatory gesture by Savonarola in particular, to such omens as the black cat
which crosses Tito’s path as he heads towards what he thinks is safety in the climax
of the film. These non-naturalistic modes of representation go along with insistence
on verisimilitude in the Italian settings. The credits proclaim that the film’s
‘historical authenticity is attested by Dr Guido Biagi’, Director of the Laurentian
Library, Florence (who had been responsible for a two-volume Romola with copious
‘Engravings of Scenes and Characters, selected by the Editor’, published by the
London house T. Fisher Unwin in 1907). The dynamic here is less that of Jacobean
drama and the Gothic novel of the late eighteenth century, where startling events
are transposed to exotic locations, often Italian, than of the mid-nineteenth-century
sensation novel, where dreadful events occur in familiar settings.
On its initial publication in 1863, contemporary critics of Romola did not miss
its alignment with the current vogue for sensation fiction. The Times review com­
mented on ‘the heap of strange coincidences’ in Romola, and asked sternly: ‘are we
to admire that in her which we criticize in others?’20 In plot terms, the ‘sensation’
of novels like Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) derived from an
invasion of the domestic space by acts of violence such as arson, murder, bigamy —
and Romola certainly exploits a number of such elements. Moreover, critical debate
about Romola is driven by some of the same ideological concerns that circulate in
discussion of sensation fiction. A proposition particularly relevant to readings of
Romola is that sensation fiction, despite its subversion and critique of patriarchy, is
80 Margaret Harris

ultimately conservative because without fail the patriarchal family, and hence the
authority of the state, is valorized. As we shall see, for all the differences of the film
from the novel, the kinds of comment that I have brief ly rehearsed in relation to
George Eliot’s Romola resonate in relation to Henry King’s Romola also.
An important contribution to the sensation of sensation novels comes from the
authenticity of settings, which at once impresses the audience, and reassures them
of the credibility of the action. The Romola film invested heavily in authenticity.
Lillian Gish took a significant part in ensuring this, with an intensity that rivalled
George Eliot’s own. In a curious analogy with the researches undertaken by George
Eliot and G. H. Lewes, Gish spent considerable time in the major Florence galleries
studying costumes and objects. Her obsession with authenticity led to massive set
construction (alleged to cover an unlikely seventeen acres), including a replica of
the Piazza della Signoria with the Palazzo Vecchio. A full-size plaster cast of the
façade of the Davanzati Palace was made. The Florentine setting is exploited at the
beginning of the film, which moves from classic distant views of the Duomo into
the streets of the city, with King matching shots taken on set to actual scenes. The
cinematography was favourably commented on in reviews:
An elaborate and beautiful rendering of George Eliot’s fine story of 15th
century Florentine love and politics. Pictorially, the production is superb [...].
Some cutting would increase the entertainment value of the film without
marring its artistic quality [...] most suitable, perhaps, for large better-class
houses, but it is not ‘high-brow’.21
This review emphasizes the quality of the camera work ‘which has imparted to the
whole production the delicate quality of a fine steel engraving’, declaring Romola
to be ‘one of the most artistic pictures ever made by an American director’.22 The
reaction of Kinematograph Weekly was not dissimilar, and curiously reminiscent of
reviews of the novel:
This picture has more interest as a production than as an adaptation of George
Eliot’s novel. The shooting of scenes in Florence and Pisa and careful attention
to costume and other period details has given it the fascination of a travelogue,
the beauty of a faithful reproduction, but the treatment of the story is so
uninspired that one wearies of it long before the end. Drastic cutting will be
necessary if the picture is to appeal to the great majority.23
Even closer to the reactions of George Eliot’s contemporaries like Henry James was
the verdict of the New Yorker: ‘It is a beautiful and tiresome thing.’24
Among the experiments with cinematography are special effects for the pirate
attack at sea. This elaborate extended sequence runs about five minutes and involves
much action. While it is tame compared to present-day equivalents, there is com­
petent cutting from distant shots of models of galleys (nicknamed the Liliano and
the Dorotea), fairly evidently in a tank, to men fighting fiercely on life-size sets. In
a different vein, when Romola is recovering from injuries sustained in her attempt
to defend Savonarola against a mob, images of him are superimposed on her feverish
face.
And then there is the cast. Both the Bioscope and Kinematograph Weekly reviews
make special (favourable) mention of Herbert Grimwood’s Savonarola. Where
 Scenes of Reading Romola 81

Bioscope is generally commendatory of the acting, Kinematograph Weekly in its lead

review is more critical, observing that ‘The acting is good, but not remarkable’, and
finding Dorothy Gish’s performance as Tessa ‘marred somewhat by the use of stock
expressions and gestures’, while as Carlo ‘Ronald Colman has no opportunity to
show his talent’.25 This reviewer gives qualified praise to Lillian Gish in the title
role (‘a quiet, dignified performance [...] at times so very restrained that the part
becomes lifeless’).26 Others were more complimentary: the New York Times spoke of
Lillian’s ‘graceful, restrained, thoughtful, and spiritual’ performance, with ‘never a
false move or expression’, looking like some ‘wistful beauty who had come through
modern shadows’.27
Undoubtedly, the parallels between Tito’s two wives, Romola and Tessa, united
in a sisterhood of suffering, are reinforced by the fact that the roles are played by the
Gish sisters. (As things turned out, Romola was the last film in which they appeared
together.) Dorothy, a natural comedienne, enacts Tessa as a rustic clown, with big
boots, knockabout comedy routines and all. She is characterized to some extent by
stereotype, as critics pointed out. However, the representation of Tessa in this way
underscores not only Lillian’s refinement as Romola, a woman of high degree, but
also ways in which Romola is not a stereotype.
For some of the actors, notable careers lay ahead. William Powell, who played
Tito, was always a villain in silent films, but in talkies became a romantic comedian,
identified especially with The Thin Man (1934). Presumably Ronald Colman was
given greater ‘opportunity to show his talent’ when cast as a suave sophisticated
adventurer — for instance in Bulldog Drummond (1929), The Prisoner of Zenda and
Lost Horizon (both 1937), down to Round the World in 80 Days (1956).
Inevitably, there are variations of George Eliot’s text. For a start, political and
moral complexities are diluted, so that the subtleties of Florentine politics are
reduced to an opposition of freedom and tyranny. The tenor of the film is anti-
mob, pro-moderation: it valorizes, not without an element of equivocation, the
private and domestic over the public life. This emphasis is enforced by one of the
major changes, the introduction of the character of Carlo Bucellini, a young artist,
played by Ronald Colman. This non-political role combines the functions given
in the novel to Romola’s uncle and godfather Bernardo del Nero and the artist
Piero di Cosimo, neither of whom is in the film. Nor does her brother Dino, Fra
Luca, figure. Removal of these characters is an expeditious way of stripping out
the novel’s interest in the complexities of Romola’s relationships with her male kin,
including her painful tutelary relationship with Savonarola as surrogate father. Each
of these men in some way deserts or abandons her, ultimately by dying. In the film,
by contrast, the gentle Carlo’s fidelity to Romola is rewarded by his position as her
consort at the end.
Structural elements of the novel appear in a bolder form. There are symmetries
and contrasts such as that between Tessa and Romola, both wooed and deceived
by Tito; and between Bardo and Baldassarre, each a father to Tito (in-law, and
foster-father respectively) — he betrays them both, but Baldassarre gets his revenge.
Motifs of rescues and drowning, prominent in the novel, are re-deployed. For
example, early on Tito comes to the aid of Romola’s father, the blind scholar Bardo,
82 Margaret Harris

when he is caught up in a marketplace brawl, thus achieving an introduction into

the Bardi household. An explicit intertitle leaves the audience in no doubt how to
regard Tito: ‘Tito knew he was a hero by accident, but he made no protest. As the
wind blew, so blew he.’ This is representative of the treatment of the character: in
no sense is it his movie.28 His perfidy is exposed in several ways: by the kinds of
‘authorial’ judgement stated in the title quoted; by warnings in dialogue, as when
Carlo says to Romola, ‘I regret to see you and your father show so much interest in
this Greek. Are you sure he is all he appears?’; and by explicit juxtapositions — for
instance, a sequence in which he is seen ingratiating himself with both Romola and
her father, then leaving their house to rejoin Tessa who is waiting for him outside.
An even more pointed juxtaposition is a cut from Tessa playing with her baby on
the hearth ‘While the wedding bells pealed for Romola’, to the newly-wed couple,
Romola and Tito, emerging from the church.
How then is Romola portrayed? We meet her indoors, in her father’s house, as
‘the maid of Florence, learned of books but of the world untaught’. The film will
present her learning ‘from the world’, particularly her experiences with Tito. A
trajectory is plotted from her initial fascination with him, through resistance and
contempt, to her achieving (temporarily?) independent moral authority. The coding
of her development is largely conventional, based on notions of masculine space as
public, female as private. Romola is seen indoors in her father’s house for the first
three-quarters of the film: she emerges into an exterior setting only as she leaves
the church with Tito on her wedding day. He rapidly gains political preferment,
rejecting his foster-father Baldassarre, neglecting Romola, and betraying Bardi’s
trust in him by selling his library. When Romola realizes what Tito has done, she
faces him down in a powerful accusatory sequence premonitory of her final victory
over him. Her decision to leave Tito at this point is marked by her quite literally
coming out, f leeing the city ‘to hide her broken life in a strange, unfriendly world’.
On the road, she meets Savonarola and comes under his inf luence; then as she turns
back to Florence she falls in with Tessa, who, distraught by the loss of the wedding
ring used in her mock marriage to Tito, is in the process of moving into the house
in the city he has provided. When Romola finds the ring, Tessa’s baby obligingly
smiles for her.
Meanwhile, on Savonarola’s return to Florence he has been denied access to
his church and is being stoned as a heretic. Romola and Tessa appear, whereupon
Romola rushes to Savonarola’s assistance in a move onto a public stage analogous to
that of Margaret Hale coming to the defence of John Thornton against his factory
workers in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1855). Romola is injured, Tessa takes
her in and nurses her, their sisterliness reinforced by ignorance of their respective
relationships with Tito. ‘Morning found a strange silence hanging over the city — ’
as the climax approaches through a set of coincidences which, though analogous to
the events of the novel, significantly modify them. In the novel, Tito is escaping a
mob in Chapter 47; concurrently, Savonarola is undergoing torture, while Romola
is finding meaning for her life in the plague-stricken village. In the film, Savonarola
has been condemned to death; Tito is denounced as he has formerly denounced
others, and f lees to Tessa’s house where he arrives, pursued. The camera looks
 Scenes of Reading Romola 83

with him towards Tessa; then with Romola, holding the baby, at him; and back to
Romola. The shot of Lillian Gish’s ethereal face is held for what feels like a very
long time but is in fact twenty seconds. Her features barely move as the realization
dawns that her husband is no stranger to the place, and that she is nursing his
child. With immense dignity and authority, she registers contempt, gesturing Tito
towards the window. In this instance, the absence of words is powerful: what is
unspoken is the point.
Tito obeys and moves toward the window. Tessa throws herself upon him with
which they fall out into the river below. She gets her head above water long enough
to call to Romola ‘Holy madonna take care of my baby.’ There is a direct transfer
of the maternal role: through her ‘sister’, Romola becomes a (virgin?) mother, and
the implications are worked systematically in the remaining ten minutes of the film.
Tito almost makes it to shore, but Baldassarre holds him under the water until he
drowns, then goes under himself. There is a cut to Savonarola at the stake.
The image of Romola as Madonna (which in George Eliot’s text occurs in
Chapters 68–69, the episode in the plague-stricken village: see Leighton’s illustration
‘At the Well’, p. 558) occurs in the film when Romola rushes forward to intercede
for Savonarola. Chapter 65, ‘The Trial by Fire’, where rain prevents Savonarola’s
immolation, is conf lated in the film with his eventual execution in Chapter 72,
‘The Last Silence’. Up to this point the film has been implicitly anti-Catholic, with
Savonarola presented as a fanatic; but now Roman Catholicism, mysterious to the
largely Protestant American public, morphs into a benign, all-purpose Christianity.
On screen there is a deluge which Savonarola had prophesied: the intertitles read
first ‘A Miracle! A Miracle!’; then, bringing out structural and narrative symmetries:
‘Thus died a sinner and a saint, one the victim of a lie; the other a martyr to the
truth. Life inf licts no hurts life itself cannot heal. If winter is bleak, spring will be
more fair, and summer will have its rose and its romance’. Fade out to the loggia
of the Bardi house where Romola is grouped with the baby and the faithful Carlo,
the Joseph in this Holy Family, as the final title declares ‘The world will learn its
greatest lesson from women like you, Romola — women who stand at the foot of
every Cross — and teach men to be more kind.’ The reference to women at the foot
of the Cross associates Romola not only with the Virgin Mary but also with Mary
Magdalene. In the more confronting ending of the novel, Romola is a matriarch,
heading up a female household with Tessa and the children, and her aunt Monna
Brigida (not prominent in the film) — albeit a household substantially dedicated to
the education of the prince, Tito’s son Lillo.
The Romola of the film is ultimately contained, subordinated to the Christian
master-narrative — and yet despite all she has had some agency, not least and
not only through her moral victory over Tito. The film orchestrates in this
characterization an assertion of female power, at once limited and limitless, a
power construed in Christian terms of the saving grace of the Madonna and child,
supplemented by the devotion of Mary Magdalene. Some suspension of disbelief
is required, and for all these tropes, many viewers found Henry King’s Romola
lacking pace and interest. Even King was disappointed in the film, blaming ‘the
effects at the end’.29 In retrospect, Gish too was reserved, observing that ‘Romola
84 Margaret Harris

... was a good story, but it failed somehow to arouse my enthusiasm for anything
but the beauty of its period. [...] I never thought the drama matched the splendor of
the fifteenth-century backgrounds.’30 My own view is that the settings now look
stagey, while the bold plot outline is compelling and coherent almost to the end.
That said, like other adaptations of George Eliot’s works such as those of Adam Bede
to which I referred earlier, the film draws the sting of the intellectual challenge and
unorthodox moral situations developed in the novel.
There are striking similarities and contrasts in respect of their Romolas between
Lillian Gish and George Eliot, two women much concerned with their professional
personae. In the early 1920s, Gish was at a turning-point in her career, moving
to free herself from Griffith’s typecasting her as a virtuous maiden, while at the
same time preserving some elements of her image, and moving to secure herself
financially. Though not the director, she had considerable inf luence on Romola,
and it is telling that she should valorize its exotic pictorial qualities rather than the
action depicted. Her quest for authenticity in it is directed to fixing the scenes as
exotic and distant. In her novel, George Eliot too was making a conscious break:
Romola is a radical experiment — in its setting, far off in time and space, and in its
illustrated serial publication. She was paid handsomely for it. While she studied the
Florentine setting exhaustively, she used it to play out the moral and intellectual
dramas of a society and culture in f lux.
In a sense, Romola is an adaptation which celebrates its literary source: it can
be read as an hommage. The film is purposefully validating the new medium
by its adaptation of an explicitly high culture text. Many of its conventions are
recognizably continuous with those of nineteenth-century theatre, especially
melodrama, and it manifests allegiance to the narrative traditions of the Victorian
novel. But to constrain it as a work solely based on a single source-text is to ignore
the particular conditions of its production, and the ‘process of endless intertextual
citation’ in which it takes its place.

Notes to Chapter 9
Initial research for this essay was supported by an Australian Research Council Discovery Project
grant (2005–07). In addition, I acknowledge with thanks permission to use material from my paper
‘George Eliot on Stage and Screen’, Arts: The Journal of the Sydney University Arts Association, 24 (2002),
27–49.
1. George Eliot’s Life as related in her letters and journals, ed. by J. W. Cross, 3 vols (Edinburgh and
London: Blackwood, 1885), ii, 352.
2. Review of Cross’s Life, Atlantic Monthly (May 1885), repr. in George Eliot: The Critical Heritage,
ed. by David Carroll (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971), p. 500.
3. Barbara Hardy, The Novels of George Eliot (London: Athlone, 1959), p. 175.
4. Unsigned review, Spectator (18 July 1863), repr. in Critical Heritage, ed. by Carroll, p. 200.
5. Respectively Felicia Bonaparte, The Triptych and the Cross: The Central Myths of George Eliot’s
Poetic Imagination (New York: New York University Press, 1979); J. B. Bullen, The Myth of
the Renaissance in Nineteenth-Century Writing (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), and Joseph
Wiesenfarth, George Eliot’s Mythmaking (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1977).
6. Refer to n. 12 below.
7. Miriam Allott, ‘George Eliot in the 1860s’, Victorian Studies, 5 (1961), 93–108; Nancy Henry, The
Life of George Eliot: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), esp. pp. 134ff. Henry
 Scenes of Reading Romola 85

has also opened discussion of sex in this novel in ‘The Romola Code: “Men of Appetites” in
George Eliot’s Historical Novel’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 39 (2011), 327–48.
8. Adam Bede (1859), ed. by Margaret Reynolds (London: Penguin, 2008), pp. xxvi–xxvii.
Reynolds’s introduction is as much of its generation as its 1980 predecessor, by Stephen Gill, was
of his.
9. ‘Introduction to Adaptation’, Adaptation, 1 (2008), p. 1.
10. Simone Murray, The Adaptation Industry: The Cultural Economy of Contemporary Literary Adaptation
(New York and London: Routledge, 2012), p. 3.
11. The George Eliot Letters, ed. by Gordon S. Haight, 9 vols (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1954–78), iv, 17–18. Subsequent references will be included parenthetically in the body of
my essay.
12. For detailed publication history, including accounts of the various editions from both Smith,
Elder and Blackwood, see the Clarendon edition of Romola, ed. by Andrew Brown (1863;
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), esp. pp. xliii–lx; and William Baker and John C. Ross, George
Eliot: A Bibliographical History (New Castle, DE, and London: Oak Knoll Press and The British
Library, 2002), pp. 181–224. Subsequent references to the novel will be to the Clarendon edition
and included in the text.
13. Caroline Levine and Mark W. Turner’s From Author to Text: Re-reading George Eliot’s Romola
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), includes relevant discussion, especially Turner’s ‘George Eliot v.
Frederic Leighton: Whose Text Is It Anyway?’, pp. 17–35. Hugh Witemeyer discusses the
illustrations and their production in George Eliot and the Visual Arts (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1979), pp. 157–70.
14. See also The Journals of George Eliot, ed. by Margaret Harris and Judith Johnston (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 183. Earlier in her career she had been off-putting but
not so fierce: ‘Mrs. Lewes begs me to say that although she does not think her story suitable for
stage representation, yet if you think otherwise, she would be unwilling to stand in your way
by any opposition on her part’ (Letters, viii, 303).
15. See George V. Griffith, ‘Romola on the American Stage’, The George Eliot Review, 20 (1989),
23–27.
16. For further detail, see my entries on ‘film’, ‘television adaptations’, ‘theatre’ and ‘theatrical
adaptations’, in Oxford Reader’s Companion to George Eliot, ed. by John Rignall (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2000).
17. Lillian Gish (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1980), p. 26.
18. Charles Affron, Lillian Gish: Her Legend, Her Life (New York: Scribner, 2001), p. 174.
19. In this context, see Kevin Sweeney and Elizabeth Winston, ‘Redirecting Melodrama: Gish,
Henry King, and Romola’, Literature and Film Quarterly, 23 (1995), 137–45. Winston’s essay,
‘ “Taking Off ” the Neighbors: Margaret Oliphant’s Parody of Romola’, in Redefining the Modern:
Essays on Literature and Society in Honor of Joseph Wiesenfarth, ed. by William Baker and Ira
B. Nadel (Cranbury, NJ, and London: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press and Associated
University Presses, 2004), pp. 115–29, shows another aspect of the afterlife of Romola.
20. The Times, 5 September 1863, p. 11, repr. in Romola, ed. by Leonée Ormond (1863; Everyman
Paperback, London: Dent, 1999), p. 625.
21. Bioscope, 12 March 1925, p. 49.
22. Bioscope, pp. 50, 49.
23. Kinematograph Weekly, 12 March 1925, p. 58. The film in its American version was nearly 13,000
feet: it was cut for distribution in Britain, to 10,000 feet.
24. New Yorker, 25 April 1925, quoted in Affron, p. 177.
25. Kinematograph Weekly, p. 58.
26. Ibid, p. 58.
27. New York Times, ‘A Florentine Story’, 2 December 1924, p. 13, quoted in Stuart Oderman, Lillian
Gish: A Life on Stage and Screen ( Jefferson, NC, and London: McFarland, 2000), p. 123.
28. Contemporary critics of the novel thought otherwise: R. H. Hutton was one of the many to
praise the characterization of Tito (‘There is not a more wonderful piece of painting in English
romance than this figure of Tito’) and to find the depiction of Romola less successful (‘half-
revealed and more suggested than fully painted’); in Critical Heritage, ed. by Carroll, p. 203.
86 Margaret Harris

29. King to Lillian Gish, quoted in Affron, p. 177.

30. Lillian Gish with Ann Pichot, Lillian Gish: The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me (Englewood Cliffs,
NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1969), pp. 262, 264.
 part I I I
v

The Art of Poetry

 — 10 —

Aesthetics, Visuality and Feelings in the

Natural Theology of Gerard Manley
Hopkins and Alice Meynell
Hilary Fraser

Victorian Studies is having an emotional turn. After decades of critical neglect,

indeed disdain, Victorian feelings are currently the subject of intense scholarly
scrutiny in the context of a broader intellectual interest in the history of the emotions.
Even sentimentality, feeling to excess, is finally having its day, with conferences,
seminars, exhibitions and special issues of journals dedicated to taking a serious look
at literary and artistic scenes that have till now been a bit of an embarrassment even
for Victorianists.1 It is now academically respectable to try to access and analyse
those feelings that were so baff lingly alien to Virginia Woolf yet so powerfully
evoked by poetry such as Tennyson’s and Christina Rossetti’s that ‘celebrates
some feeling that one used to have (at luncheon parties before the war perhaps), so
that one responds easily, familiarly, without troubling to check the feeling, or to
compare it with any that one has now.’2 The feelings the Victorians had then and
the feelings they invoke in modern readers and spectators — for example, in this
year of rapturous global celebrations around the bicentenary of Charles Dickens,
‘Mr Popular Sentiment’ — are finally, and properly, a matter of academic debate,
not least at Birkbeck College, University of London, where Barbara Hardy held
the Established Chair of Nineteenth-Century Literature at the culmination of her
distinguished career. Far from being squeamish about the emotions, she has always
pursued the unpalatable question of Victorian feelings with passion.
It is one of her discussions of feeling in Victorian poetry that prompts the ideas
I wish to develop in this essay: the chapter on Gerard Manley Hopkins in her
book The Advantage of Lyric: Essays on Feeling in Poetry (1977), based on a lecture she
delivered to the Hopkins Society in 1970 on the topic ‘Forms and Feelings in the
Sonnets of Gerard Manley Hopkins’.3 Her focus in that chapter is on the relation of
the poet’s ‘knowledge, belief and thought to the poetic passion’. Noting ‘his refusal
to condense the difficulties of being human into a conf lict between intellect and
feeling’, she declares that ‘Hopkins is a lyric poet whose values are constantly and
intimately blended with his passions’. For Barbara Hardy, the intellectual and the
emotional are ineluctably imbricated. Hopkins’s passion was for God, and, as she
argues, sonnets such as ‘Pied Beauty’ and ‘Hurrahing in Harvest’ are ‘love-poems,
as Hopkins knew. He said that the poetic impulse was strong feeling, usually love,
 Gerard Manley Hopkins and Alice Meynell 89

and we could say of his verse [...] that it works out many different experiences and
aspects of love.’4 Hopkins’s passionate, sometimes poignantly unrequited love for
Christ, in its ‘many different experiences and aspects’, is indeed the wellspring of his
poetry and of his theology, and it is this that I wish to pursue in relation to his own
literary and religious aesthetic and also to that of a contemporary Roman Catholic
poet, Alice Meynell, for whom Christ was similarly figured as ‘the Beloved’.5 In
addition to thinking about the place of the feelings in their writing, I will explore
the role of the senses, and in particular the visual, in their experience of being in
the world and their belief in God’s spiritual and phenomenological manifestation in
that world. My interest is in how their work articulates a reconceptualized natural
theology for a post-Darwinian age; in how their experience of God involved feeling
intensely and looking intensely at the physical world; and in how the development
of an incarnational, Christocentric natural theology meshed with, and was enabled
by, contemporary transformations of visual experience that valorized affect and
embodiment.
I
Hopkins’s view, cited by Barbara Hardy, that ‘strong feeling’, ‘usually love’ is the
primary impulse for poetry, is expressed in a letter he wrote to the poet Robert
Bridges: ‘Feeling, love in particular,’ he confides to his friend, ‘is the great
moving power and spring of verse’; however, he follows this up with the painful
acknowledgement that ‘the only person I am in love with seldom, especially now,
stirs my heart sensibly.’6 The phrase is an interesting one, pointing to an intensity
of feeling, felt on the emotional pulses and by the senses, that his faith both requires
of him and fails sometimes to provide. Hopkins’s poetry and thought, the progeny
of his love affair with Christ, are shaped at once by the strenuous theological and
philosophical endeavour that characterizes his mature religious and metaphysical
beliefs, experienced as joyously intense consummation, and by an equally intense
existential perspective, which derives from a raw experience of the quotidian world
that is painfully and personally alive to the existential dilemmas and crises of his
times.7
Even the most committed Christians found that their faith was severely tested in
the middle of the nineteenth century, particularly when they sought evidence of
God’s presence in a world that seemed to belie their innermost feelings. Those, like
John Ruskin, whose faith depended on natural theology were especially challenged.
The very nature of Ruskin’s aesthetic made it vulnerable to the implications of
evolutionary science. As early as 1851 he was writing that his faith was ‘being beaten
into mere gold leaf, and f lutters in weak rags from the letter of its own forms [...]
if only the geologists would let me alone, I could do very well, but those dreadful
hammers! I hear the clink of them at the end of every cadence of the Bible verses.’8
In volume iii of Modern Painters, he complains that ‘with us [...] the idea of the
Divinity is apt to get separated from the life of nature’.9 By 1860, when he was
completing Modern Painters, his once divine landscape is invaded by evolutionary
images. Privately he wrote in 1861 to his friend Charles Eliot Norton of ‘abysses of
life and pain, of diabolic ingenuity, merciless condemnation, irrevocable change,
90 Hilary Fraser

infinite scorn, endless advance, immeasurable scale of beings incomprehensible to

each other, every one important in its own sight and a grain of dust in its Creator’s
— it makes me giddy and desolate beyond all speaking.’10
John Henry Newman felt similarly disorientated when he looked to the world
about him for evidence of its creator. He writes in his Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864),
‘Were it not for this voice, speaking so clearly in my conscience and my heart, I
should be an atheist, or a pantheist, or a polytheist when I looked into the world.’11
Like Ruskin’s, his language is saturated with Darwinian tropes — random variation,
struggle, redundancy, survival of the fittest — as he reviews ‘the world in its length
and breadth, its various history, the many races of man, their starts [...] their aimless
courses, their random achievements and acquirements, the impotent conclusion of
long-standing facts, the tokens so faint and broken, of a superintending design, the
blind evolution of what turn out to be great powers or truths, the progress of things,
as if from unreasoning elements, not towards final causes, the greatness and littleness
of man, his far-reaching aims, his short duration, the curtain hung over his futurity
[...] — all this is a vision to dizzy and appal; and inf licts upon the mind the sense of
a profound mystery, which is absolutely beyond human solution.’ Like Ruskin, he
is made giddy and desolate by the foreignness of the world around him:
I look out of myself into the world of men, and there I see a sight which fills
me with unspeakable distress. The world seems simply to give the lie to that
great truth, of which my whole being is so full; and the effect upon me is, in
consequence, as a matter of necessity, as confusing as if it denied that I am in
existence myself. If I looked into a mirror, and did not see my face, I should
have the sort of feeling which actually comes upon me, when I look into this
living busy world, and see no ref lexion of its Creator.12

II
Newman’s powerful metaphor of non-recognition here — the experience of God’s
invisibility in His world being compared with looking into a mirror and not seeing
one’s face — brings me to the central question of the role of visuality in natural
theology. The dialectical image of the mirror, a site of exchange and reciprocity,
offers an alternative visual model from that of reading the book of nature, one
that, I suggest, accords more closely with Jonathan Crary’s argument, in Techniques
of the Observer (1990), that a radical transformation of vision took place in the
nineteenth century with the emergence of a newly embodied observer for whom
the traditional distinctions between internal impressions and external signs became
unsettled. For the twentieth-century phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty,
writing on painting in his essay ‘Eye and Mind’ (1960),
More completely than lights, shadows, and ref lections, the mirror image
anticipates, within things, the labor of vision. Like all other technical objects,
such as tools and signs, the mirror has sprung up along the open circuit
between the seeing and the visible body. Every technique is a technique of the
body, illustrating and amplifying the metaphysical structure of our f lesh. The
mirror emerges because I am a visible see-er, because there is a ref lexivity of
the sensible; the mirror translates and reproduces that ref lexivity. In it, my
 Gerard Manley Hopkins and Alice Meynell 91

externality becomes complete. Everything that is most secret about me passes

into that face, that f lat, closed being of which I was already dimly aware, from
having seen my ref lection mirrored in water.13

Gerard Manley Hopkins was, like Merleau-Ponty, deeply exercised by the question
of the implication of the observer in the visible, and, for him too, seeing his own
ref lection mirrored in water provoked a consciousness of himself as both a seeing
subject and a seen object in a world of visibility. ‘What you look hard at, seems to
look hard at you’, he wrote in his journal in 1871.14 Merleau-Ponty was later to
observe: ‘Inevitably the roles between the painter and the visible switch. That is
why so many painters have said that things look at them. As André Marchand says,
after Klee: “In a forest, I have felt many times over that it was not I who looked at
the forest. Some days I felt that the trees were looking at me, were speaking to me...
I was there, listening...”.’15
Such sensuous reciprocity is articulated everywhere in Hopkins’s nature journals,
where the things he looks at seem to take on the properties of his own body (eyes,
ears, fingers) and a capacity for sight and touch, as in the following entry:
Drops of rain hanging on rails etc. seen with only the lower rim lighted like
nails (of fingers). Screws of brooks and twines. Soft chalky look with more
shadowy middles of the globes of cloud on a night with a moon faint or
concealed. Mealy clouds with a not brilliant moon. Blunt buds of the ash.
Pencil buds of the beech. Lobes of the trees. Cups of the eyes, gathering back
the lightly hinged eyelids. Bows of the eyelids. Pencil of eyelashes. Juices of
the eyeball. Eyelids like leaves, petals, caps, tufted hats, handkerchiefs, sleeves,
gloves. Also of the bones sleeved in f lesh. Juices of the sunrise. Joins and veins
of the same.16
As far as I’m aware, Hopkins and Alice Meynell never met, though they shared a
92 Hilary Fraser

close friend in common, the Catholic poet Coventry Patmore, but I am struck by
the fact that Meynell was similarly exercised by the connections between the see-er
and the seen, and by the reciprocity of visual experience. She writes in an essay on
‘The Horizon’, for example:
There is no distance except the distance in the sky, to be seen from the level
earth; but from the height is to be seen the distance of this world. The line
is sent back into the remoteness of light, the verge is removed beyond verge,
into a distance that is enormous and minute. [...] Here on the edges of the
eyelids, or there on the edges of the world — we know no other place for
things so exquisitely made, so thin, so small and tender. [...] The extremities
of a mountain view have just such tiny touches as the closeness of closing eyes
shut in.17
She, like Hopkins, is intrigued by the rhyming of the edges of the eyelids and the
edges of the world, recalling Jacques Lacan’s suggestion that the cuts and apertures
on the surface of the body — eyelids, lips — connoting edges, borders, margins,
rims, are ‘the “stuff ” or rather the lining ... [of ] the very subject that one takes to
be the subject of consciousness.’18
Both writers were fascinated by the connections between vision and consciousness.
Hopkins, for instance, speculates at length about the differences between waking
visual images and dream-images. He observe:
dream-images [...] appear to have little or no projection, to be f lat like pictures,
and often one seems to be holding one’s eyes close to them — I mean even
while dreaming. This probably due to a difference still felt between images
brought by ordinary use of function of sight and those seen as they are ‘between
our eyelids and our eyes’ — though this is not all, for we also see the colours,
brothy motes and figures, and at all events the positive darkness, made by the
shut eyelids by the ordinary use of the function of sight, but these images are
brought upon that dark field, as I imagine, by a reverse action of the visual
nerves [...] or by other nerves, but it seems reasonable to suppose impressions
of sight belong to the organs of sight — and once lodged they are stalled by
the mind like other images: only you cannot make them at will when awake,
for the very effort and advertence would be destructive to them, since the eye
in its sane waking office kens only impressions brought from without, that is
to say either from beyond the body or from the body itself produced upon the
dark field of the eyelids.19
Both writers, like Impressionist and Cubist painters, put the process of perception
itself under the microscope, making of it an object of vision; they dedicate
themselves to really looking at the world, and thinking about looking, in a way that
defamiliarizes conventional modes of perception. Hopkins in his detailed nature
journals and poetry, Meynell in her essays and poems, subject quotidian sights and
optical experiences to fresh analysis. Here is Meynell again on ‘The Horizon’:
To mount a hill is to lift with you something lighter and brighter than
yourself or than any meaner burden. You lift the world, you raise the horizon;
you give a signal for the distance to stand up. [...] You summon the sea, you
bring the mountains, the distances unfold unlooked-for wings and take an even
f light. You are but a man lifting his weight upon the upward road, but as you
climb the circle of the world goes up to face you.
 Gerard Manley Hopkins and Alice Meynell 93

Not here or there, but with a definite continuity, the unseen unfolds. This
distant hill outsoars that less distant, but all are on the wing, and the plain raises
its verge. All things follow and wait upon your eyes. You lift these up, not by the
raising of your eyelids, but by the pilgrimage of your body. ‘Lift thine eyes to the
mountains.’ It is then that other mountains lift themselves to your human eyes.
It is the law whereby the eye and the horizon answer one another that
makes the way up a hill so full of universal movement. All the landscape is on a
pilgrimage. [...] Not a step of your journey up the height that has not its replies
in the steady motion of land and sea.20
Here we notice Meynell’s emphasis on the embodied nature of vision (‘you are
but a man lifting his weight’, on a ‘pilgrimage of your body’), and on the active
reciprocity between the human eye and the inanimate landscape, which becomes
animated as part of this universal movement. Nature looks at her, speaks to her.
Elsewhere landscapes ‘show brows and hollows resembling those of a fine face after
mental experience’, or have ‘a sunburnt cheek’; she finds in waterfalls ‘the coursing
of that cold blood and the pulse of the rock’.21
Merleau-Ponty is again helpful in enabling us to distinguish such ref lexivity from
simple anthropomorphism. For him, the body is ‘a self by confusion, narcissism,
inherence of the see-er in the seen, the toucher in the touched, the feeler in the
felt — a self, then, that is caught up in things, having a front and a back, a past
and a future.’22 In his celebrated account of the materiality and embodiment of
perception, he contends: ‘Visible and mobile, my body is a thing among things;
it is one of them. It is caught in the fabric of the world’.23 Because the subjects
and the objects of perception are both constituted as matter, of the ‘same fabric’,
whether animate or inanimate, eyes or trees or mountains, observers or objects of
investigation, they share the same material being, and are in some essential way
alive to and able to recognize each other.
For Merleau-Ponty, the lived body-subject that thus experiences and relates in
a vital way to things in the world is ‘incarnate significance’.24 His incarnational
argument in the Phenomenology of Perception (1945), whilst not itself formulated in
Christian terms, helps us to think about how Hopkins and Meynell reformulated
natural theology in a way that was distinctly different from Paley’s design theory.
Visual theorist Martin Jay observes of Merleau-Ponty that ‘contact with the visible
world [...] produce[d] a sense of wonder’ that was quasi-spiritual. ‘Never fully
throwing off the Catholicism of his early training, he reveled in the richness of
created, incarnated Being available to the eyes.’25 Sometimes his language seems
very spiritual. ‘We speak of “inspiration” ’, he writes, ‘and the word should be taken
literally. There really is inspiration and expiration of Being, respiration in Being,
action and passion so slightly discernible that it becomes impossible to distinguish
between who sees and who is seen, who paints and what is painted.’26 But what is
this Being? Is it material or divine? Is it material and divine? For Merleau-Ponty,
I suggest, Being is spirituality materially embodied in the world, as for Hopkins
and Meynell it is divinity in the form, specifically, of Christ embodied in the
world; and, for all three, it is the see-er embodied in the seen. In sum, Being is the
inextricable relationship of a world and a self intercommunicating via a sensorium
in which the passions play a fundamental role.
94 Hilary Fraser

III
Hopkins was deeply committed to understanding the processes of perception, and
his ideas resonate with Merleau-Ponty’s later theories in intriguing ways. In some
notes he wrote as an undergraduate on Parmenides, he characterized the Greek
philosopher’s view of ‘the phenomenal world’ as ‘the brink, limbus, lapping, run-
and-mingle of two principles, which meet in the scape of everything’, Being and
Not-being, and wrote of the necessity of there being a ‘bridge’ or ‘stem of stress
between us and things to bear us out and carry the mind over’.27 In language that
he will later deploy to articulate his unique poetics of sprung rhythm as well as his
religio-aesthetic theories of inscape and instress, Hopkins here gestures towards
the fundamental role of the emotions in constituting the self, the world, and their
interrelationship. Central to his perception of the thisness of things was his sense
of the thisness of his own embodied, emotional self, his ‘self being’, ‘that taste of
myself ’, as he put it, ‘of I and me, above and in all things’.28 And this is what he
sought in the natural world, and found in things: ‘As kingfishers catch fire’, he
observed, ‘dragonf lies draw f lame’:
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying What I do is me: for that I came.29
But Hopkins’s understanding of the ‘bridge’ or ‘stem of stress between us and
things’, although it encompasses the material world, goes beyond a purely materialist
explanation. What unites the essential forms, or ‘inscapes’ as he called them, that
he found and celebrated in nature, the kingfisher and the dragonf ly and of course
the human observer (‘Earth’s eye, tongue [...] heart’),30 is that all of creation was
sanctified when God Himself took on a physical form. All of creation, but the ‘just
man’ especially, ‘Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is — Christ’; ‘For’, as he
so memorably expresses it, ‘Christ plays in ten thousand places, | Lovely in limbs
and lovely in eyes not his | To the Father, through the features of men’s faces.’31
Finding the incarnate deity at the heart of the material world gives him a way of
re-conceiving materiality.
Hopkins recognizes, instresses, Christ’s inscape everywhere in the beautiful
forms of nature, in a kestrel, in a tree, in the skies: ‘As we drove home’, he writes
in his journal, ‘the stars came out thick: I leant back to look at them and my heart
opening more than usual praised our Lord to and in whom all that beauty comes
home.’32 Or elsewhere, ‘I do not think I have ever seen anything more beautiful
than the bluebell I have been looking at. I know the beauty of our Lord by it. It[s
inscape] is [mixed of ] strength and grace, like an ash [tree].’33 Sometimes it was
simply a question of ‘gleaning’ Christ from, or ‘wafting Him out of ’ nature.34
Sometimes He seemed actually to be physically present: ‘And the azurous hung hills
are his world-wielding shoulder | Majestic.’35 Then at other times Christ’s inscape is
figuratively imprinted on the natural world, as when Hopkins describes an aurora:
‘It gathered [...] a knot or crown, not a true circle, of dull blood-coloured horns
and dropped long red beams down the sky on every side, each impaling its lot of
 Gerard Manley Hopkins and Alice Meynell 95

stars.’36 The embodied, feeling observer himself is a crucial presence. This is no

book of nature waiting to be quietly and passively read; it is a passionate encounter:
‘And eyes, heart, what looks, what lips yet gave you a | Rapturous love’s greeting
of realer, of rounder replies?’ For
These things, these things were here and but the beholder
Wanting; which two, when they once meet,
The heart rears wings bold and bolder
And hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off under his feet.37
The Incarnation was similarly central to Meynell’s faith, and defined her own
dynamic sensory and emotional engagement with the phenomenal world. Her
poem ‘Unto us a Son is Given’ begins: ‘GIVEN not lent | And not withdrawn —
once sent’; while another poem, ‘Christ in the Universe’, considers ‘His dealings’
with ‘this ambiguous earth’, and concludes:
Oh, be prepared, my soul!
To read the inconceivable, to scan
The million forms of God those stars unroll
When, in our turn, we show to them a Man.38
For Meynell, as for Hopkins, the continuing ‘real’ presence of Christ in the natural
world authorized a newly revitalized Christian hermeneutic by which the aesthetics
of landscape could be read in an interactive way that emphasized the dynamic
relationship between the human observer, the earth, and the heavens. To return to
the image of the mirror, this is a ref lexive relationship, like that between the water
in a well and the sky it ref lects. Meynell writes:
The hiding-place that nature and the simpler crafts allot to the waters of wells
are, at their deepest, in communication with the open sky. No other mine is
so visited; for the noonday sun himself is visible there; and it is fine to think
of the waters of this planet, shallow and profound, all charged with shining
suns, a multitude of waters multiplying suns, and carrying that remote fire, as
it were, within their unalterable freshness. [...] Round images lie in the dark
waters, but in the bright waters the sun is shattered out of its circle, scattered
into waves, broken across stones, and rippled over sand; and in the shallow
rivers that fall through chestnut woods the image is mingled with the mobile
figures of leaves.39
For Meynell, such ref lexivity is apparent in every facet of the relationship between
the observer-poet, the natural world and the divinity. Hers is, like Hopkins’s, a
sacramental universe that is revealed to be constituted by its fundamental incarnate
relatedness. God, having been made f lesh, is mediated by the natural world and
by the human body; His Word is mediated by the words of the Christian writer,
interpreting natural theology anew. Meynell asks in her poem ‘The Two Poets’ of
a beech tree swept by the wind: ‘Whose is the speech | That moves the voices of
this lonely beech?’
‘Whose is the word?
Is it I that spake? Is it thou? Is it I that heard?’
‘Thine earth was solitary, yet I found thee!’
‘Thy sky was pathless, but I caught, I bound thee,
Thou visitant divine.’
‘O thou my Voice, the word was thine.’ ‘Was thine.’40
96 Hilary Fraser

IV
In his Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty insists on the need to make a
deliberate effort to rediscover the perceived world, ‘the world in which we live,
yet which we are always prone to forget’. For him, this is a matter of engaging in
a kind of philosophical ref lection that ‘does not withdraw from the world towards
the unity of consciousness as the world’s basis’, but rather
It steps back to watch the forms of transcendence f ly up like sparks from a fire;
it slackens the intentional threads which attach us to the world and thus brings
them to our notice; it alone is consciousness of the world because it reveals that
world as strange and paradoxical.41
For Merleau-Ponty, it is modern art especially — Hopkins’s and Meynell’s contem­
porary, the painter Cézanne, in particular — that most effectively reveals the
strangeness and paradox of the physical world, and I suggest that Hopkins and
Meynell similarly re-articulate the physical world of modernity in their own art.
Meynell was very interested in and knowledgeable about Impressionist art, and
what it reveals to us about looking, and her own landscapes are shaped by an
Impressionist aesthetic that is integrated with her religious beliefs. She found ‘The
visible world [to be] etched and engraved with the signs and records of our halting
apprehension’ and notes ‘One of the most constant causes of all the mystery and
beauty of that art is surely not that we see by f lashes, but that nature f lashes on
our meditative eyes.’42 Nature f lashes for Hopkins too, and in both their work it
f lashes and crackles and sparks because they are standing back ‘to watch the forms of
transcendence f ly up like sparks from a fire’, and specifically identifying them with
the continuing presence of Christ in the phenomenal world. Hopkins finds Christ’s
fiery energy inscaped like a physical law in the natural world around him, where
[...] sheer plod makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.’43
And he writes of being saved from immolation in ‘nature’s bonfire’ by the
recognition, ‘In a f lash, at a trumpet crash’, that
I am all at once what Christ is, ‘since he was what I am, and
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd,’ patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,
Is immortal diamond.44
When he looks out into the world, it is not, as for Newman, like looking into a
mirror and not seeing his face. Rather, it is like looking into a mirror, finding,
through that ‘ref lexivity of the sensible’ it reproduces, kinship between one’s self as
visual subject and the world of visibility, and ‘all at once’ finding Christ, ‘since he
was what I am’.

V
The intimate suffering and intensely private pain of Hopkins’s late poetry provides
a poignant counterpoint to such poems of ecstatic communion. Here too, his
 Gerard Manley Hopkins and Alice Meynell 97

expression of existential alienation from his world and his God, and indeed from his
own self, is couched in terms of the senses and feelings, only now it is a language
of sensory deprivation and loneliness:
I cast for comfort I can no more get
By groping round my comfortless, than blind
Eyes in their dark can day or thirst can find
Thirst’s all-in-all in a world of wet.45
He wakes to ‘feel the fell of dark, not day’, the joyous ‘taste’ of himself that had
once given him a taste of God now turned inwards, locked into a body no longer
blessed by being loved:
I am gall, I am heartburn. God’s most deep decree
Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me;
Bones built in me, f lesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.46
The obverse of being Christ’s lover is to feel impotent, sterile, ‘Time’s eunuch’; his
love-letters become ‘dead letters sent | To dearest him that lives alas! away.’47 His
glorious identification with the natural world, sanctified by Christ’s incarnational
presence, in His absence becomes terrifying: ‘O the mind, mind has mountains;
cliffs of fall | Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed.’48
In her work on lyric poetry, Barbara Hardy invokes the work of Susanne K.
Langer, both explicitly, when she refers in her essay on Hopkins to Langer’s interest
in ‘the expressed knowledge of human feeling’, and implicitly, when she alludes
in her title ‘Forms and Feelings in the Sonnets of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ to the
philosopher’s Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art (1953). Langer and Merleau-Ponty
write on aesthetics from very different perspectives, but they share a deep interest
in the emotional content and the embodied nature of art. It is in the material form
of art, which brings together the human subject, the objective things of the world,
and the spirit, that its emotional nature is constituted. For Langer, the work of art
conveys the inner ‘life of feeling’, the ‘formulation and representation of emotions,
moods, mental tensions and resolutions’.49 For Merleau-Ponty, ‘Since things and my
body are made of the same stuff, vision must somehow come about in them; or yet
again, their manifest visibility must be repeated in the body by a secret visibility. [...]
Quality, light, color, depth, which are therefore before us, are there only because
they awaken an echo in our bodies and because the body welcomes them. Things
have an internal equivalent in me.’50 It has been my argument that, in the case
of both Hopkins and Meynell, not only does the interior life of the feelings take
form in their poetry and lyrical prose, but the embodied writer who experiences
those feelings is echoing, chiming with, and responding passionately to, something
equivalent in the external world: the presence, or the devastating absence, of Christ
incarnate, known not merely intellectually but passionately and intuitively, as that
‘bridge’ or ‘stem of stress between us and things to bear us out and carry the mind
over’.
98 Hilary Fraser

Notes to Chapter 10
1. Note the recently launched Centres for the History of Emotions at Queen Mary, University
of London, the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, and the University of Western
Australia, and, bringing together the feelings and the senses, the Amsterdam Center for
Cross-Disciplinary Emotion and Sensory Studies. On new interest in Victorian feelings and
sentimentality, see, for example, ‘Rethinking Victorian Sentimentality’, ed. by Nicola Brown,
special issue of Nineteen, 4 (2007); ‘Dickens and Feeling’, ed. by Bethan Carney and Catherine
Waters, special issue of Nineteen, 14 (2012); and the 2012 exhibition ‘Victorian Sentimentality’
at Tate Britain.
2. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own; Three Guineas, ed. by Morag Shiach (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1992), p. 18.
3. Barbara Hardy, The Advantage of Lyric: Essays on Feeling in Poetry (London: Athlone, 1977), pp.
54–66.
4. Ibid, pp. 54, 35, 54, 60.
5. Alice Meynell, Prose and Poetry, Centenary Volume, ed. by F P, V M, O S & F M [Frederick
Page, Viola Meynell, Olivia Sowerby and Francis Meynell] with a biographical & critical
introduction by V. Sackville-West (London: Jonathan Cape, 1947), p. 359.
6. The Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges, ed. by Claude Colleer Abbott (London:
Oxford University Press, 1955), p. 66.
7. See Dennis Sobolev, The Split World of Gerard Manley Hopkins: An Essay in Semiotic Phenomenology
(Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2011), p. 6.
8. The Works of John Ruskin, ed. by E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols (London:
George Allen, 1903–12), xxxvi, 115.
9. Ibid, v, 231.
10. Ibid, xxxvi, 380.
11. John Henry Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts &
Green, 1864), p. 377.
12. Ibid, p. 377.
13. The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, ed. by Galen A. Johnson (Evanston,
IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993), p. 129.
14. The Journals and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. by Humphry House and Graham Storey
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), pp. 204–05. See Figure 27 for the illustration, which is
reproduced here by permission of Oxford University Press on behalf of the British Province of
the Society of Jesus.
15. The Merleau-Ponty Reader, p. 129.
16. Ibid, p. 72.
17. Meynell, Prose and Poetry, p. 281.
18. Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, trans. by Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), pp. 314–15.
19. Hopkins, Journals, p. 194.
20. Meynell, Prose and Poetry, pp. 280–81.
21. Ibid, pp. 266, 286, 265.
22. Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, p, 124.
23. Ibid, pp. 124–25.
24. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. by Colin Smith (Atlantic Highlands,
NJ: Humanities Press, 1976), p. 166.
25. Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley
and London: University of California Press, 1993), p. 309.
26. Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, p. 129.
27. Hopkins, Journals, p. 129.
28. The Sermons and Devotional Writings of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. by Christopher Devlin
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967 [1959]), p. 122.
29. The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. by W. H. Gardner and N. H. Mackenzie (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1970 [1918]), p. 57.
 Gerard Manley Hopkins and Alice Meynell 99

30. Ibid, p. 58.

31. Ibid, p. 57.
32. Hopkins, Journals, p. 254.
33. Ibid, p. 199.
34. Hopkins, Poems, pp. 28, 38.
35. Ibid, p. 38.
36. Hopkins, Journals, p. 201.
37. Hopkins, Poems, p. 38.
38. Meynell, Prose and Poetry, pp. 377–78.
39. Ibid, pp. 270–71.
40. Ibid, p. 371.
41. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. xiii.
42. Alice Meynell, The Spirit of Place and Other Essays (London and New York: John Lane, The
Bodley Head, 1899), pp. 77–80 (pp. 78–79).
43. Hopkins, Poems, p. 36.
44. Hopkins, Poems, p. 72.
45. Hopkins, Poems, p. 69.
46. Ibid, p. 67.
47. Ibid, p. 67.
48. Ibid, p. 65.
49. Susanne K. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art
(Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, [1942] 1957), p. 222.
50. Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, pp. 125, 126.
 — 11 —

The Wanderings of Yeats and Oisin

Ronald Schuchard

In 1885, when he was merely twenty years of age, W. B. Yeats began his studentship
in the Dublin Theosophical Society, soon enrolling as a member of the Esoteric
Section and immersing himself in the meditation techniques of the magical
tradition, particularly the Cabala. The Theosophical Society became, as Roy Foster
aptly characterizes it, his university,1 and Yeats included among his extra-curricular
activities a study of the pre-Christian mythologies of ancient Ireland, the Fenian
and Red Branch cycles. He had lost his Irish Protestant faith at seventeen, bored as
he says he was by ‘a point of view that suggested by it blank abstraction chloride of
lime’ (not mentioning that chloride of lime was prized as a bleaching and fumigating
compound, used to destroy offensive odours and prevent putrefaction),2 and he had
been eagerly in search of new spiritual pathways that the Theosophists provided.
Thus, when he launched his poetic career it was as convert to a richer elixir, wholly
committed to a magical vision of spiritual life, not only for himself but for Ireland,
whose spiritually ‘sick children’, as he describes them in ‘The Song of the Happy
Shepherd’, were suffering under the sway of the ‘Grey truth’ of science and an
austere Christian dispensation.3 ‘I was unlike others of my generation in one thing
only’, wrote Yeats. ‘I am very religious, and deprived by Huxley and Tyndall [...]
of the simple-minded religion of my childhood, I had made a new religion’.4 And
with that religion the radical young Fenian and occultist boldly began to construct
a new, anti-Christian paradise by fusing the magical and the mythical in a long
narrative poem, The Wanderings of Oisin.
I often wonder how, or when, or if ever, new students of Yeats encounter this
foundational poem, especially in America, where most editions keep it out of
its canonical opening position, removing it to a neglected section of ‘Narrative
and Dramatic Poems’ at the back. There it rests in approved separation from its
dependent shorter lyrics, such as the songs of the happy and sad shepherds, King
Goll, the stolen child, and even Innisfree, lyrics that lose much in the absence of
the longer poem’s introductory context. In writing these early poems, Yeats was in
full pursuit of a visionary life, and he wrote not only The Wanderings of Oisin but
poems on Hindu and Arcadian subjects that he eventually grouped together under
the heading Crossways, because, he explains, ‘in them he tried many pathways’ (VP
845). But, whatever the pathway, he followed it with a wandering mind, a focus of
this short paper, in which I hope to answer a question that students frequently ask:
‘Do we need to read The Wanderings of Oisin?’
In The Wanderings of Oisin we see the stark polarization of his mind against the
 The Wanderings of Yeats and Oisin 101

narrowly circumscribed spiritual life of Christianity. It marks the beginning of

his life-long dialogue between poet and saint, here Saint Patrick, the patron saint
of Ireland. When the aged Oisin, ‘bent, and bald, and blind’ returns to Patrick’s
Christian land from his three-hundred-year journey with Niamh to the Danaan
land of faery, Patrick, knowing that Oisin now has ‘a heavy heart’ but still ‘a
wandering mind’, asks him with heavy sarcasm to sing of his ‘dalliance with a
demon thing’ — he who is ‘still wrecked with heathen dreams’. Dalliance? demon
things? heathen dreams? Oisin ignores the contemptuous slights to his magical
spiritual journey and describes how, upon arrival at the Danaan isle, he was taken
to the hall of Aengus, where the Druid-poet emerged from his dreams to deliver
a paean to immortal joy, proclaiming that ‘joy is god and God is joy’ (VP 19).
Aengus’s statement turns the hall into ‘a wild and sudden dance’ in mockery of
Time and Fate, Sorrow and Death, until all bend their swaying bodies down and
sing the inverse song of Aengus: ‘God is joy and joy is God’ (VP 20). After three
centuries of happiness in the land of faery, Oisin returns to the mortal world, an
austere Christian world, where, he tells Patrick, his life is now devoured by the two
things he hates the most, ‘Fasting and prayers’, aspects of Christian religious practice
alien to his own passionate spiritual life. What is striking about this dialogue is
that already, in 1887, Yeats’s dreaming persona proclaims the life-long manifesto of
the twenty-two-year-old poet’s art: “God is joy and joy is God’. Already there is
a strong poetic faith in and commitment to the belief that the human imagination
is an emanation of the divine and that the supernatural is accessible here and now
through the natural world, through the mastery of esoteric meditation techniques
that Patrick abhors.
Patrick does not come away easy with his mockery of Oisin’s ‘dalliance’ with
visionary ways. Oisin allows him but a few dismissive lines in the dialogue, and he
treats him not as a saint but merely as a ‘man of many white croziers’ — nine times
he addresses him as such — as a man holding a jewelled emblem of ecclesiastical
office, an emblem shaped like a shepherd’s crook to show that he and his bishops
are ostensibly the shepherds of the f lock of God while they ironically hold Ireland’s
f lock in spiritual enslavement and dispossess them of their heroic heritage and its
exultant song:
But now the lying clerics murder song
With barren words and f latteries of the weak.
In what land do the powerless turn the beak
Of ravening Sorrow, or the hand of Wrath?
For all your croziers, they have left the path
And wander in the storms and clinging snows,
Hopeless for ever. Ancient Oisin knows [...] (VP 42)
And since his return from the Danaan isle, Oisin has discovered that Patrick has
spread throughout Ireland another detested emblem, the ‘brazen bell’, the iron
bell that has displaced the ancient bell-branch, whose shaking casts all men into
‘unhuman sleep’ or reverie, a ‘Druid kindness’, as he called it in The Rose, ‘When her
own people ruled this tragic Eire’ (VP 129). Patrick’s bells now ring from the belfry
of every church, leaving ‘guardless the sacred cairn and the rath, | And a small and
102 Ronald Schuchard

feeble populace stooping with mattock and spade [...] with bodies unglorious [...]
their chieftains [...] caught in your net’. ‘Sorry place’, says Oisin, ‘where for swing of
the war-axe in my dim eyes the crozier gleams’ — what place here have the great
warriors of the Fianna and the kings of the Red Branch? ‘It were sad to gaze on the
blessèd and no man I loved of old there’, he says to Patrick at the end as he throws
down the rosary, ‘the chain of small stones’, that Patrick has given him to pray for
his lost soul, and he affirms his unf lagging intention forever to ‘dwell in the house
of the Fenians, be they in f lames or at feast’ (VP 63). When he finished the poem,
he wrote to Katharine Tynan that it was ‘Some thing I had to say. Dont know that
I have said it.’5 But he came to believe that his poetic personality was defined in
The Wanderings of Oisin.
It was a daring and dramatic stance for a young Irish poet in 1887 — to set an
eccentric visionary tradition against an established religious tradition, to identify
his own visionary process with that of heroic Ireland, to portray Saint Patrick’s
church and its crozier men as ruinous spiritual enslavers of the people. But it was
necessarily daring and dramatic for the allegorical presentation of his own cabalistic
pathway, which is worked out in his poetry and prose as a disciplined evocation of
images which are called up and visualized in the mind through a meditation on
cabalistic symbols and talismans. The meditation leads to a trance or trance-like
reverie, in which the mind, liberated from the will, is filled with a procession of
images that it follows, not by choosing or fixing upon an image, but by wandering
with them toward the apprehension or vision of a single Image — of the Rose, of
‘Eternal beauty wandering on her way’ (VP 101), bringing a suspended moment of
joy, of ecstasy, that is God. Essential to the achieved trance or reverie is a developed
capacity for wandering with images. There is a danger in fixing those images, or
plunging into them, for they can lead the mind astray into what Yeats calls Hodos
Chameliontos, a dark labyrinth of unintelligible images (Au 215).
In Yeats’s Danaan allegory, the journey to the Land of the Young is reached only
after Oisin’s wandering mind encounters the image of Niamh and rides with her
through a rich mental landscape in which all the objects in the natural world are
wandering free of any fixed order: the wandering foam, the wandering moon, the
wandering stars, the wandering hours, and as Oisin and Niamh approach the Land
of the Young, they hear low murmurs of unhuman sound, low-laughing rhymes,
and see dim glimmering vistas, all faint perceptions of an Immortal place where
mortals can momentarily share a timeless and deathless world, free from fears of
‘the grey wandering osprey Sorrow’ (VP 20), the first of Yeats’s birds that prey upon
images and journeys to joy. When they arrive in the hall where Aengus dreams a
Druid dream, they are met by ‘a merry wandering rout | Of dancers leaping in the
air’, mocking Death and Time ‘with glances | And wavering arms and wandering
dances’. But when Oisin took a harp and sang of [merely] human joy, ‘A sorrow
wrapped each merry face, | And, Patrick! by your beard, they wept, | Until one
came, a tearful boy; | “A sadder creature never stept | Than this strange human
bard,” he cried’, leading Aengus to raise his sceptre and describe a higher, immortal
joy: ‘ “Joy drowns the twilight in the dew” ’, he begins,
 The Wanderings of Yeats and Oisin 103

‘And fills with stars night’s purple cup

[...]
And rolls along the unwieldy sun,
And makes the little planets run:
And if joy were not on the earth,
There were an end of change and birth,
And Earth and Heaven and Hell would die,
And in some gloomy barrow lie
Frozen like a folded f ly;
Then mock at Death and Time with glances
And wavering arms and wandering dances.’ (VP 18–19)
Human hearts once had access to ‘drops of silver joy’, he laments in knowledge of
the croziered state of the mortal world. ‘But now hearts cry that hearts are slaves’,
and before he falls into a Druid swoon he declares again that ‘joy is God and God
is joy’, drops of which are always accessible to a free and wandering mortal mind.
Such is the crucial context for the wandering satellite poems that preceded The
Wanderings of Oisin, which, for the next fifteen years, provides the mythic and
heroic characters — Niamh, Aengus, Caoilte — and the themes that are developed
in the shorter lyrics from here through The Wind Among the Reeds (1899) and into
the earliest poems of In the Seven Woods (1903). Yeats’s happy shepherd, whose song
is the first encountered by most readers, carries the staff of the magician, painfully
aware that the woods of Arcady and the ancient kings of Ireland are dead, that the
‘dreaming’ that fed their ‘antique joy’ is over, now displaced by Grey Truth, so that
the ‘wandering earth herself ’ troubles the source of ‘the endless reverie’ (VP 65).
The shepherd must thus assume the role of poet-priest, declaring that ‘Words alone
are certain good’ in a world that no longer dreams. He departs to sing his ‘songs
of old earth’s dreamy youth’, commanding his listeners, ‘dream thou! [...] Dream,
dream, for this is also sooth.’ He is in sharp contrast to Yeats’s sad shepherd, a
victim of the crozier men, so befriended by Sorrow that his beseeching of the stars
and the sea to relieve his burden goes unheard as they go by laughing and singing
and ‘Rolling along in dreams’, until a lone sea shell changed all his sad song ‘to
inarticulate moan | Among her wildering whirls, forgetting him’ (VP 69). I have no
space to examine succeeding poems, but look again at the dominant image of the
poems in Crossways, at the ‘wandering hearts’ that Passion has worn in ‘Ephemera’,
at ‘The van of wandering quiet’ that traverses ‘Anashuya and Vijaya’ and how Anashuya
prays in song that her dear Vijaya ‘may ever keep a lonely laughter’. Look at the
‘whirling and a wandering fire’ that Orchil instils in King Goll’s most secret spirit
and that leads him to cast off his worldly crown and follow the ‘wandering fire’
of his mind into the woods, ‘Murmuring, to a fitful tune’, until he finally delivers
the divine phrase in song as he wanders wood and hill. See if you think that the
‘solemn-eyed’ wanderer of ‘The Stolen Child’, who is lured away from the weeping
world to a ‘leafy island’ by a faery who gives him ‘unquiet dreams’, is not enriched
by The Wanderings of Oisin; if you don’t think that ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’,
written before the long poem was published, is not a compressed magical poem in
which the Lake Isle, a local, non-mythic counterpart of a Danaan Isle, has become
a peaceful haven for vision, in which the features of midnight and noon are reversed
104 Ronald Schuchard

by their ‘glimmer’ and ‘purple glow’ and the mind is suffused by the ‘low sounds’ of
an imaginative place where the experience of joy is what sustains the ‘deep heart’s
core’ when it returns to the ‘pavements grey’ of Dublin or London. One does not
want to delay a close reading of The Wanderings of Oisin, for it is there that Yeats
defines the access to his first paradise. And it does no harm to learn that in January
1889, the month the poem and volume appeared, he met Maud Gonne, who would
become the new Niamh to set his mind wandering in the poems. He soon wishes
her, in ‘The White Birds’, to become with him, in an extension of The Wanderings
of Oisin, two white birds, f loating on the ‘wandering foam’, haunted in search of
‘numberless islands, and many a Danaan shore | Where Time would forget us and
Sorrow come near us no more’ (VP 122).
By 1892 Yeats was deeply immersed in Blake’s visionary and prophetic works,
was a Rosicrucian adept in the Hermetic Students of the Golden Dawn, and had
made the advanced study of magic and cabalistic meditation techniques his constant
occupation. If the Dublin Theosophical Society was Yeats’s university from the
mid-1880s, then the Golden Dawn was his seminary in the 1890s, when he studied
under the spiritual mentorship of MacGregor Mathers, author of The Kabbalah
Unveiled (1887). It was mainly through Mathers, affirms Yeats, ‘that I began certain
studies and experiences, that were to convince me that images well up before the
mind’s eye from a deeper source than conscious or subconscious memory’ (Au
159). His newfound belief in the existence of Anima Mundi reopened the role of
natural objects in the magical process — fish, lug-worms, knot-grass — all capable
of imaginative alchemical transformation into visionary objects. The symbols of
Anima Mundi, he wrote, ‘are of all kinds, for everything in heaven or earth has its
association, momentous or trivial, in the great memory, and one never knows what
forgotten events may have plunged it, like the toadstool and the ragweed, into the
great passions’ (E&I 65). And thus in ‘The Man who Dreamed of Faeryland’ we see
a form of natural supernaturalism: the fish are seen to sing of a ‘world-forgotten isle’
where ‘Time can never mar a lover’s vows’; the lug-worm sings of ‘a gay, exulting,
gentle race | Under the golden or the silver skies’; the knot-grass sings of a place
‘Old silence bids its chosen race rejoice [...] And lover there by lover be at peace’; and
finally the grave worms proclaim that ‘God has laid His fingers on the sky, | That
from those fingers glittering summer runs’, suffusing joy throughout the natural
world for the dreamer to behold. Why wait for the Apocalypse for the joy of God,
they seem to ask: “Why should those lovers that no lovers miss | Dream, until God
burn Nature with a Kiss?’ Failing to heed these natural songs of the supernatural
joy awaiting him, ‘The man has found no comfort in the grave’ (VP 128). Yeats
continues the natural supernaturalism in ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’, in
which the poet’s imaginative fire transforms ‘a little silver trout’ into a ‘glimmering
girl | With apple blossoms in her hair’, leading him to follow her with a wandering
mind into faeryland and pluck with her ‘till time and times are done | The silver
apples of the moon, | The golden apples of the sun’ (VP 150).
In 1892 Yeats was practising ritual magic and chanting his visionary poems with
fellow adept Florence Farr, and he wrote to his mentor John O’Leary that his
magical studies were now at the centre of everything he did (CL1 303). The primary
 The Wanderings of Yeats and Oisin 105

symbol of meditation was now the Rosicrucian Alchemical Rose, and when he
collected the poems written from 1890 to 1893 their heading was The Rose, because
it was now, he explained for his poetic self, ‘the only pathway whereon he can
hope to see with his own eyes the Eternal rose of Beauty and Peace’ (VP 846).
The conjunction of the Rose and Cross, the Rose upon the Rood of Time, would
become the permanent symbol imprinted in gold on the dark blue covers of all
editions of Yeats’s Poems. As he simultaneously immersed himself in the symbolic
and prophetic works of Blake and Swedenborg, he felt that he was now a member
of the processional order of symbolist poets and painters who had kept the ancient
visionary tradition alive since the Renaissance. Following Blake, he would mount
the ‘fiery chariot of his contemplative thought’ (E&I 151), the cabalistic chariot of
Merkebah, and ride to the heights of sephirotic vision. And yet for all his magical
pursuits of the Rose of Beauty, he refused to be seen as a poet separate from the
Irish tradition that was at the heart of his work. ‘Know, that I would accounted be’,
he wrote in ‘To Ireland in the Coming Times’,
True brother of a company
That sang, to sweeten Ireland’s wrong,
[...]
Nor be I any less of them,
Because the red-rose-bordered hem
Of her, whose history began
Before God made the angelic clan,
Trails all about the written page.
[...]
Because to him who ponders well,
My rhymes more than their rhyming tell
Of things discovered in the deep,
Where only body’s laid asleep. (VP 137–38)
In affirming that the magical process is analogous to the creative process, Yeats
further affirms that in the ‘measured ways’ of poetry the poet can ‘barter gaze for
gaze’ with the elemental creatures that he gathers to his table: ‘Man ever journeys
on with them | After the red-rose-bordered hem’, keeping the allegorical journey
in Irish faeryland: ‘Ah, faeries, dancing under the moon, | A Druid land, a Druid
tune!’ (VP 139).
While Yeats was serving as an apprentice mage in the Golden Dawn, he was also
a novice in the Rhymers’ Club, where two of his closest friends, Ernest Dowson
and Lionel Johnson, had become caught up in the Catholic revival that had made
its way through France into England, and these two rival visionary traditions
found coexistence among the intimate members of the Club. While Dowson and
Johnson immersed themselves in the Catholic Church and in the mystical tradition,
learning to annihilate images of desire and emotion in the search for divine vision,
Yeats learned how to use the will and imagination to manipulate images of desire
and passion in the service of vision. Through the cabala, which integrates passion
and ecstasy, sexuality and visionary experience, Yeats found the mental techniques
that enabled him to ward off the Dark Angel, whose ‘envious heart’, as Johnson
described it, will not ‘allow | Delight untortured by desire’. Yeats’s Catholic friends
106 Ronald Schuchard

were men of genius whose strong passions were accompanied by equally strong
spiritual drives. In their inability to annihilate desire in their search for ‘Delight’
(or joy as Yeats would have it), they became enveloped by a darkening sense of guilt
and despair. By 1895 Yeats had come to look upon the work of his suffering friends
with great interest, writing to Elkin Mathews about the ‘austerity and monotony’
of Johnson’s Poems: ‘I wonder some essayist does not make a small book of criticism
of the schools & movements of our new generation. What an interesting essay could
be made upon this Catholic school?’ (CL1 459). He would try to write that essay
for the rest of his life.
Yeats had set the stage for this ongoing dramatic dialogue in a poem entitled ‘The
Two Trees’ — the cabalistic Tree of Life, the magician’s tree, and the Tree of the
Knowledge of Good and Evil, the men of croziers tree. The Tree of Life, with its
sephirotic path to divine vision, is Yeats’s ‘holy tree’, rooted deeply in the human
heart (VP 134). ‘From joy the holy branches start’, the poet tells his Beloved. It is on
the joyous, active pathways of the Tree of Life that the poet hopes to perceive the
Alchemical Rose and experience the creative joy of embodying his vision in art. He
greatly avoids the ‘ravens of unresting thought’ that inhabit the Tree of Knowledge
and the bitter, self-mirroring pathways that lead the poet into the darker recesses
of the self, pathways that were leading his Catholic friends into morbidity and
despair — particularly Dowson and Johnson, sad shepherds, defeated followers of
the saint’s way to sanctity. Following Blake, Yeats began to prophesy the passing of
the kingdom of the Tree of Knowledge: ‘the kingdom that was coming’, he wrote,
‘was the kingdom of the Tree of Life’ (E&I 130). In his essay on ‘The Body of Father
Christian Rosencrux’ (1895), he boldly announced that ‘this age of criticism is about
to pass, and an age of imagination [...] of revelation, about to come in its place; for
certainly belief in a supersensual world is at hand again’ (E&I 197).
Yeats continued to bear witness to the devastating toll of the decade, and he had
great sympathy for those lost in dissipation and despair on the pathways of the Tree
of Knowledge. Dowson and Wilde were both dead in 1900, the year, said Yeats
from a long perspective but with no loss of exasperation, in which ‘everybody got
down off his stilts; henceforth . . . nobody went mad; nobody committed suicide;
nobody joined the Catholic church; or if they did, I have forgotten.’6 Yeats now felt
the need to dissociate himself from the Christian mysticism of his friends, and in
1901 he went public with a new essay, ‘Magic’, asserting his belief in ‘the practice
and philosophy of what we have agreed to call magic, in what I must call the
evocation of spirits, [...] in the visions of truth in the depths of the mind when the
eyes are closed’ (E&I 28). Yeats’s pronouncements were driven by real or imagined
evidence in the world of what he calls ‘a certain evil, a certain ugliness, that comes
from the slow perishing through the centuries of a quality of mind that made this
[magical] belief and its evidences common over the world.’ It was a major, new-
century declaration of his vision, and he had no reservation in asserting that it was
inextricable from his work, past and present. ‘I must commit what merchandise of
wisdom I have to this ship of written speech’, he wrote,
and after all, I have many a time watched it put out to sea with not less alarm
when all the speech was rhyme. We who write [...] must often hear our hearts
 The Wanderings of Yeats and Oisin 107

cry out against us, complaining because of their hidden things, and I know not
but he who speaks of wisdom may not sometimes in the change that is coming
upon the world, have to fear the anger of the people of Faery, whose country is
[...] ‘The land of the Living Heart.’ Who can keep always to the little pathway
between speech and silence, where one meets none but discreet revelations?
And surely, at whatever risk, we must cry out that imagination is always seeking
to remake the world according to the impulses and patterns in that great Mind,
and that great Memory? (E&I 51–52)

II
Just as the wheel of fortune had lifted Yeats into public prominence as a poet
prophetic of a new dispensation, and poised as he believed he was to effect the arrival
of a supersensual world, the wheel turned. In February 1903 he learned that Maud
Gonne, his beloved Niamh and his fellow adept in magical studies, was to marry
John MacBride and join the Catholic Church. The shock, the emotional and spiritual
devastation, of this announcement cannot be exaggerated, and his letters plead
futilely for her not to betray their spiritual marriage and spiritual goals for Ireland.
‘Your hands were put in mine & we were told to do a certain great work together’,
he wrote on 10 February. ‘It was our work to teach a few strong aristocratic spirits
that to believe the soul was immortal & that one prospered hereafter if one laid upon
oneself an heroic discipline in living & to send them to uplight the nation.’ He could
not help adding that ‘A man said to me last night having seen the announcements
in the papers “The priests will exult over us all for generations because of this.” ’7
Yeats’s paradise was suddenly lost; he plummeted from the visionary plane into
inconsolable personal grief and sorrow: ‘O heart! O heart! if she’d but turn her
head, | You’d know the folly of being comforted’ (VP 200). For the next fourteen
years the wandering ceased; there would be no visionary poems, no faint murmurs,
glimmering islands, low-laughing sounds by the shore, few dreams and reveries.
And other forces kept him down — the demands of the theatre, dissident clubs and
societies, the Playboy riots, the Hugh Lane Gallery controversy, the land agitation,
the Abbey patent, and the rise of the Catholic middle class, so that an increasing
bitterness creeps into the poetry, and the Fenian heroes are replaced by knaves,
dolts, louts, paudeens, eunuchs, fools. ‘There’s something ails our colt’, he writes in
‘The Fascination of What’s Difficult’, empty of ‘Spontaneous joy’ and feeling that
he has betrayed Pegasus, the ancient winged horse of poetry that under his ridership
‘must, as if it had not holy blood | Nor on Olympus leaped from cloud to cloud, |
Shiver under the lash, strain, sweat and jolt | As though it dragged road-metal’ (VP
260). Nothing is more telling of the def lation of spirit than the Confucian epigraph
to Responsibilities (1914): ‘How am I fallen from myself, for a long time now | I have not
seen the Prince of Chang in my dreams’ (VP 269). Now the hawks, the restless ravens
of thought in the Tree of Knowledge, have come to block the evocation of images,
to guard the wells of joy. The toll of over a decade of failed vision manifests itself
in the despair of ‘Lines Written in Dejection’, published in the first Cuala Press
edition of The Wild Swans at Coole in 1917. ‘When have I last looked on | The round
green eyes and the long wavering bodies | Of the dark leopards of the moon?’ he
108 Ronald Schuchard

asks in separation from his imaginative bestiary: ‘The holy centaurs of the hills are
vanished; | I have nothing but the embittered sun; | Banished heroic mother moon
and vanished, | And now that I have come to fifty years | I must endure the timid
sun’ (VP 343–44). His difficult love-life played its role in this: after the execution
of John MacBride following the Easter Rising, Maud Gonne again refused him,
as did her daughter Iseult, and when he married Georgie Hyde-Lees in October
1917 he felt that he had betrayed them all, darkening the mood of his honeymoon,
until Georgie sought to brighten his mind by beginning the automatic writing.
The effect was instantaneous, and he wrote to Lady Gregory at once to say that
there had been a ‘miraculous intervention’ — his spirit masters had returned to say
that they had come with new metaphors for poetry. As swiftly as he had lost it in
1903, Yeats was readmitted to the visionary plane. New poems came in profusion,
and the lost members of his phantasmagoria — Aherne, Robartes, the Fisherman,
and the new Tom O’Roughley — all who inhabit the cusp between the natural
and the supernatural worlds, came back into the poems. ‘An aimless joy is a pure
joy’, says O’Roughley, affirming the wandering pathway of the visionary mind,
‘And wisdom is a butterf ly | And not a gloomy bird of prey’ (VP 337–38).8 Yes, the
mind wanders from image to image again, like a butterf ly wandering from f lower
to f lower, displacing the preying hawk of thought that had prevented them. ‘On
the grey rock of Cashel’, says Michael Robartes in recounting his ‘double vision’,
‘the mind’s eye | Has called up the cold spirits’, spirits that are ‘Obedient to some
hidden magical breath’, real with an undeniable reality: ‘Although I saw it all in the
mind’s eye | There can be nothing solider till I die’, and in gratitude for the end
of the conf lict between thought and images, ‘I made my moan, | And after kissed
a stone, | And after that arranged it in a song | Seeing that I, ignorant so long, |
Had been rewarded thus | In Cormac’s ruined house’ (VP 382–84). It was paradise
regained, at last.

III
Even as the visionary plane was re-achieved and the automatic writing with Georgie
continued, Yeats felt a need to strengthen in his much-changed world the magical
meditation techniques with which he built The Wanderings of Oisin thirty-five years
earlier. So in November 1920 he began calling up the ghostly images and indelible
memories of magical friends, recently dead, in ‘All Soul’s Night’, written at Oxford
while Thoor Ballylee was being refurbished for him and Georgie. He would later
append the poem to A Vision (1925), informing his readers in the introduction of his
occasional ‘moments of exaltation like that in which I wrote “All Soul’s Night”.’9
Yeats’s exaltation comes in part out of his renewed magical life and his summoning
of the spirits of two magicians who had taught and practised meditation with
him, MacGregor Mathers and Florence Farr. His excitement comes in part from
his reclaimed ability to evoke images from the Great Memory and follow the
wandering mind into visionary states. But this poem is less about his friends and
more about his call upon them as spirits to help him re-master meditation in a
violent world and develop and discipline a mind that cannot be diverted from vision
 The Wanderings of Yeats and Oisin 109

by that world. After the great Christ Church bell sounds the moment for evocation
to begin, the poet, alluding to the intensified guerrilla warfare in Ireland, declares,
‘I need some mind that, if the cannon sound | From every quarter of the world,
can stay | Wound in mind’s pondering | As mummies in the mummy-cloth are
wound’ (VP 471). After calling up the images of his esoteric friends, he knows that
‘No living man can drink from the whole wine’ of the supernatural world, but he
declares again, ‘I have mummy truths to tell | Whereat the living mock’. ‘Such
thought’, he says — the thought of perceiving and telling those visionary truths,
even if less than whole truth, whole wine — such thought he will hold tight ‘till
meditation master all its parts’. And when that future mastery is achieved, he is
certain, no distraction,
Nothing can stay my glance
Until that glance run in the world’s despite
To where the damned have howled away their hearts,
And where the blessed dance; (VP 474)
In calling for this new mastery of meditation, the poet further declares that he is
prepared to follow the winding, wandering mind wherever it leads, to all visions
born of contraries — paradise and hell, the blessed and the damned, good and evil
— visions which only the living mock, visions which civil war would surely bring.
‘Such thought’, he says again in closing his invocation, ‘that in it bound | I need
no other thing, | Wound in mind’s wandering | As mummies in the mummy-
cloth are wound.’ The poet is finally exalted in the thought that vision can be
achieved and sustained ‘in the world’s despite’, excited in his belief that the self can
be suspended in a timeless moment even as the cannons roar and mankind mocks,
that imagination is superior to the mundanity of violence and mockery. That belief
is all he requires as a poet. The poem is, in effect, a new manifesto, a reaffirmation
of his belief in the magical, visionary mind in times of political turbulence and
destruction. It was thus quite fitting that three years later, his imaginative paradise
fully regained, he retrieved it as the epilogue to A Vision. If Yeats’s late wanderings
have taken him far away from The Wanderings of Oisin, they still follow the same
pathway to joy, but now in more turbulent weather. In the end, all those wanderings,
all 310 separate instances of them in his work, are of a visionary piece. And that, in
short, is why we begin this course with The Wanderings of Oisin.

Notes to Chapter 11
1. R. F. Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life, i: The Apprentice Mage, 1865–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1997), p. 46.
2. W. B. Yeats, Essays and Introductions (New York: Macmillan, 1961), pp. 428–29; hereafter E&I in
the text.
3. W. B. Yeats, The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats, ed. by Peter Allt and Russell K.
Alspach (New York: Macmillan, 1973), pp. 64–65; hereafter VP in the text.
4. The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, iii: Autobiographies, ed. by William H. O’Donnell and Douglas
N. Archibald (New York: Scribner, 1999), p. 115; hereafter Au in the text.
5. The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, i: 1865–1895, ed. by John Kelly and Eric Domville (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 93; hereafter CL1 in the text.
6. ‘Introduction’, The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1892–1935, ed. by W. B. Yeats (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1936), p. xi.
110 Ronald Schuchard

7. The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, iii: 1901–1904, ed. by John Kelly and Ronald Schuchard
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), p. 316.
8. These lines became among the most inscribed in books that Yeats gave to friends for years to
come, and the phrase ‘An aimless joy’ would continue to appear in ‘Demon and Beast’ (‘For
aimless joy had made me stoop [...] to watch a white gull’), and as a title (deleted) for section IV
of ‘Vacillation’. See Words for Music Perhaps and Other Poems: Manuscript Materials, ed. by David
R. Clark (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1999), p. 77.
9. The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, xiii: A Vision (1925), ed. by Catherine E. Paul and Margaret
Mills Harper (New York: Scribner, 2008), p. lv.
 — 12 —

Poetry and Magic; or,

Thinking through Form and Feeling; or,
The Uses of Unpleasure
Deryn Rees-Jones

Poetry is traditionally supposed to be magical. This use of the word ‘magical’

is a technical one. Magic is a system of practical techniques invented sponta­
neously by Mankind from the earliest ages right down to our own — is
one way of making things happen the way you want them to happen.1
— Ted Hughes
Poetry makes nothing happen
— W. H. Auden

I’m thinking of Auden and Hughes making things, and of poems happening, and
of nothing; of the poem as wish-fulfilment, a mode of creation which can guard
against unpleasure. And I’m thinking of magic, of the music and structure in poetry
and its relationship to meaning — and in particular of the relationship between
poetic structure and emotion as — and I think it’s this — a kind of sympathetic
magic. Which is where I might, for the sake of clarity, begin.
* * *
In this famous and much discussed phrase, ‘poetry makes nothing happen’,
Auden, in his elegy to Yeats (who for Auden is ‘a symbol of my own devil of
inauthenticity’),2 appears to be severing a tie between poetry and politics. But isn’t
he also, as well as suggesting that the poem bears its own responsibilities, away
from its author, severing a tie between poetry and magic, and the link between
symbolization and causal effect that Freud, after Frazer, sees as one of the hallmarks
of primitive thinking? It is in fact the famous Irish rain — ‘Mad Ireland hurt you
into poetry. Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still’ — subsumed into a
meteorological generality that anticipates Auden’s famously quoted phrase, ‘Poetry
makes nothing happen’; a phrase which is followed by an elegance of syntactical
delay (into, perhaps, a tributary of thinking). ‘Poetry survives’, Auden importantly
continues, ‘a way of happening, a mouth’. Poetry moves beyond us, through us,
Auden seems to write. Poetry ‘is’ but has no agency. The poem: oral or oracular?
* * *
Why would Auden want to sever the link between poetry and politics, and magic
112 Deryn Rees-Jones

and poetry in such a way? Do such severances have similar effects? Perhaps elegy,
especially when one poet remembers another, is like any other kind of magic, also
about ambivalence, and fear? Which makes me think: what kind of thing, after all,
or even what kind of nothing, might we want poetry to make happen?
* * *
It looks a little like I’m setting Auden and Hughes in opposition to each other.
Hughes, like Yeats, using magic as a mystical shorthand for the way in which poets
access their unconscious. Auden, proto-postmodernist, suggesting that the poem
has free play of authority. Is this such a difference? It is and it is not.
What then?
* * *
The creative act of the poem as an act of omnipotence (Winnicott); or reparation
(Klein); as consolation: poetry to guard the silences (Wittgenstein) or against
the silences. The lyric as something closer to the place of inarticulacy which is
substituted by ‘touch, gesture, look’ (Barbara Hardy).
* * *
Poetry as protection. Poetry: to bring us to our senses. To restore or conjure love.
Poetry, to bring us back to ourselves, to bring back the dead?
Slowly I’m getting round to this: the relationship between poetry and magic, self
and other (sympathy), cause and effect; between the felt and imagined, world and
word, word and image, word and thing.
* * *
In The Bow and the Lyre, Octavio Paz sets up the function of the image in the poem
in two ways. On the one hand the image is the poet’s ‘genuine expression of his
vision and experience of the world. This is a truth of a psychological order’. At the
same time the image in the poem produces ‘instantaneous reconciliation between
the name and the object, between the representation and the reality’; for Paz, the
image in the poem returns us to the ‘plurality and ambiguity of reality’ while ‘at the
same time, [it] gives it unity’. Ultimately for Paz poetry is ‘metamorphosis, change’
and it is for this reason that ‘it borders on magic, religion, and other attempts to
transform man and make of “this one” and “that one” that “other one” who is he
himself.’3
All the manliness aside — or perhaps sidestepping the question of whether this
kind of magic is one specifically rooted in male desires and fears (vis-à-vis for
example, Graves’s Goddess whose ability to set us — man — in a state of exultation
and horror reminds us that we have fallen out with our relationship with nature,
a relationship Hughes, for one, is anxious to regain), I want to turn to Paz again,
discussing the double function of the poetic image. On the one hand the poet
uses the image to authentically record things as the poet has seen them. And then,
perhaps more interestingly, perhaps because such thoughts go hand in hand with
the poem as recording eye, Paz discusses the kinds of reality and consistency the
poetic image can draw on: ‘the poet does something more than tell the truth; he
creates realities possessed of a truth: the realities of his own existence. Poetic images
 Poetry and Magic 113

have their own logic and no one is shocked because the poet says that water is
crystal or “the pepper tree is cousin to the willow” ’ (Carlos Pellicer). I can’t help
thinking that Paz is in synch in these thoughts with Merleau-Ponty’s concept of ‘the
imaginary texture of the real’.4 But where does the difference lie between the idea
of the world and the world as created, and an idea of the world being something
subject to the transformations of one’s desires?
* * *
While holding all of this in mind, I’m also pressing on with Freud and his account
of magic: seduced you might say by his wonderful descriptions in ‘Totem and
Taboo’. He writes of primitive attempts to create rain, magically, ‘by imitating it, or
by copying the clouds or the storm that produces it. It looks as though one wished
to “play at raining”. The Japanese Aino, for example, make rain in the following
way: some of them pour water out of big sieves, while others fit out a large bowl
with sail and oars, as though it were a ship, and pull them round the villages and
gardens like that.’5 What kind of imitation then, the poem?
* * *
I read poems about the rain and it is raining. It rains — it’s June and the rain
continues to fall, a monsoon season — and I write about rain in poems. I remember
my own poems about the rain, and poems by others about the rain. I walk out in the
rain and I remember the feeling of the rain on my skin. Inside I sit at the computer
writing about the rain and the rain becomes not simply a thing that is happening
outside, or something that has happened to me, but a feeling. What kind of magical
space — between thought and words, experience and poem, might I then in this
essay — its deliberate fragments, its ambition to speak as it were, in a series of free
associations — now inhabit?
* * *
Freud’s descriptions of the rainmakers send me instinctively to Edward Thomas’s
great poem ‘Rain’,6 though I realize that I might have chosen many other poems
— including ones by Thomas — to think about the rain. ‘To play at raining’: it
makes me want to ask in what way does Thomas want actually to play at raining with
himself and with the reader? He doesn’t really want to conjure the rain, he wants to
set up his poem against perhaps the loss of love, his impending death, playing with
love and death. Here — to begin — are the first eleven lines:
Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain
On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me
Remembering again that I shall die
And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks
For washing me cleaner than I have been
Since I was born into this solitude.
Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon.
But there I pray that none whom once I loved
Is dying tonight or lying still awake
Solitary, listening to the rain,
Either in pain, or thus in sympathy...
114 Deryn Rees-Jones

Thomas’s poem was first drafted on 7 January 1916, according to his biographer
Matthew Hollis, in a hut at Hare Hall Camp, a military base where he was in
charge of a platoon of twenty men. Once armed with this contextual information
— that this is a poem about preparing for death in war, in the context of a camp
filled with men succumbing to the measles — it changes from being a poem about
existential fear, to a poem which is also about fear in relation to a realistically
imagined future; not one or other, but both. An acquaintance tells me: ‘I know
many people who love this poem. I find it melodramatic.’ Certainly it is a poem of
heightened emotion, yet, I would argue, its internal rhymes work to structure that
emotion — literally to give weight and embodiment to words through repeated
sound. Not stereotype, not exaggeration, but emotion as thought becoming word
within the complex internal structure of a poem — metrical, musical — and, the
phrase that perhaps errantly comes to mind, William Carlos Williams’s: the poem
as a ‘field of action’.
* * *
I run my eyes across the poem, like someone with poor sight, feel my way into its
sounds and textures, run my eyes and ears like hands across it. Two things stand out
for me: the word sympathy, which I’ve left dangling there in my earlier quotation...
and the strange collocation ‘like a dark water’.
* * *
Edward Thomas and Helen Thomas. In as much as any poem has a singly
identifiable ‘I’, is it Helen the other, to whom the poem is written? ‘I am about
to die. Perhaps I have already died. I imagine you, whom once I loved, feeling
as badly as I do. Do you feel this way? I would not wish this feeling on you.’ Or
perhaps, ‘Because I no longer am able to love you, I can no longer share this feeling
with you.’ Thomas McCarthy, writing on the Romantic lyric, suggests that ‘the
lyric “I” implies the presence of a listening Other (“you, the reader”), [which]
far from threatening to absorb the reader [...] represents an emptiness — on both
personal and aesthetic levels — to be entered into by the reader through sympathy.’7
Coleridge’s ‘Dejection: An Ode’ is a poem that according to McCarthy ‘epitomizes
the Romantic lyric’s profound affirmation of the primacy of feeling. Yet the poem
hinges on, and is inspired by the failure of imagination and feeling’.8 Ditto ‘Rain’,
which also sets up that dynamic of sympathy, negated in the dialogue between self
and other in the poem, and yet so wonderfully and ironically established between
the ‘I’ of the poem and the reader. (‘My wife doesn’t understand me.’ ‘Only my
analyst/the Reader understands me.’)
* * *
‘None whom once I loved’: my friend the Frostophile remarks on the terrible
quality of that word ‘once’. He’s right of course, and almost I hadn’t noticed. ‘Once’
is the word that carries loss, much more than dying, or perhaps the loss of love
prepares us for that dying. ‘Once’ sets feeling in time, the moment immediate and
irrecoverable. ‘Like a dark water’: my friend points out as well that Thomas would
have been familiar with Frost’s collocation ‘[a]fter a rain’ in ‘Birches’, first published
in August 1915. Indeed.
 Poetry and Magic 115

* * *
Sympathy, then. That and the smallest word in the dictionary: the indefinite article
which sits somewhat oddly, but very brilliantly, in line thirteen. In this line is the
only indefinite article in the whole poem, something which strikes me as unusual,
or increasingly, as I re-read, reminds me of Roland Barthes’s definition of the
punctum in his Camera Lucida: ‘that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me,
is poignant to me)’, the ‘sting, speck, cut, little hole’ which is also a ‘cast of the
dice’.9
* * *
Not nothing, but something. Happening. The letter ‘a’, so near and yet so far from
‘o’s’ exclamatory nothingness. Solitary speck; poignant, like a clenched fist or bullet
hole.
* * *
But nothing so far on the pathetic fallacy. Inner weather? What is the function of
rain in ‘Rain’? We are not given an image of the rain; in fact, all we are told —
twice — is that it is ‘wild’. Effectively the poem conjures the rain as feeling, but
then sets against its natality — to seize, if crudely, though not thoughtlessly, a term
from the philosopher Hannah Arendt — only death.10 Is the rain here an outward
projection of an inner state? Or rather, is the rain the state of both inner and outer
wildness that the poet ‘playing at rain’ wishes for?
Here’s Hanna Segal on creativity: ‘It is not a simple omnipotent wish-fulfilment
of a libidinal or aggressive wish. It is the fulfilment of a wish to work through a
problem in a particular way’.11 Or Ken Wright, reading Winnicott: ‘The artist
lives always on the edge of a no-mother space, and hence the compulsion to go on
creating.’12
* * *
As Matthew Hollis points out, ‘Rain’ draws heavily on an experience of Thomas
being caught in the rain in 1911 and as such seems to me to be an exemplary poem
for thinking about the way in which a poem moves between time through memory
and imagination, and the way in which a single experience can be worked through
in successive poems. Longley’s notes to Thomas’s poems are filled with the prose
passages that famously anticipate the poems. The rain that Thomas writes about
in his working notebook ‘does work that will last as long as the earth. It is about
eternal business. In its noise and myriad aspects I feel the mortal beauty of immortal
things’.13 How, in fact, do we quantify what happens when a piece of writing
which began as prose transforms into a poem? It makes me want to think some
more... about the sympathy of words... then William Carlos Williams creeps up
on me again, prepared to take on for the poem Freud’s idea of the dream as wish-
fulfilment — ‘holus-bolus’, as he wonderfully puts. All said and done.
* * *
‘Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain | On this bleak hut, and solitude,
and me.’
* * *
116 Deryn Rees-Jones

The poem begins by zooming in from the universal to the particular through
a series of qualifications: rain is set in time, then place, and world and self sit at
opposite ends of the line. The solitariness of the self is also somehow placed alongside
another self in the poem which sets up the iambic pentameter the rest of the poem
will rub against. Solitude and me sit there, recalling Thomas’s prose account which
anticipates the poem where Thomas is agonized about the relationship between
himself and nature, and the words which unite the two. He writes: ‘Long I lay still
under the sentence, listening to the rain, and then at last listening to words which
seemed to be spoken by a ghostly double beside me.’ This ghostly double mutters
at some length before announcing ‘I am not part of nature. I am alone.’14No
correspondence, only death. Or, in fact, the thought of death.
* * *
And then just the sheer genius of shifting between past and future with the placing
of the word ‘shall’ in the next line: ‘Remembering again that I shall die’. This isn’t
just a case of perfectionist grammar. In ‘shall’ here isn’t there a sense of obligation?
Obligation towards mortality, as if there ever were a choice? Of course, for Thomas,
ever in love with easeful death, perhaps there was a choice, and here is an example
of the way in which the poem swerves between speaking for the individual in time,
and for the individual in a more universal way, a reversal in fact of the order in
which the poem begins.
* * *
‘Blessed are the dead’, continues Thomas, now in beatitudinal mode after the
imagining/remembering of rain’s baptismal cleansing, but his list of woes is
truncated into prayer: ‘But here I pray that none whom once I loved | Is dying
tonight or lying awake’. Thomas, of course, his own self and his other self is doing
both at once... But note again these shifts in internal rhyme, how the wordplay
anticipates the shortened ‘y’ sound of ‘dying’ and ‘lying’, setting up a parallel (or is
this cause and effect?), a synchronicity.
* * *
Holus-bolus. Hocus-Pocus. Rhyme connecting words that might be very different,
one unto another. Rhyme as a kind of free association. Rhyme itself perhaps
working like metaphor in an endless circle of referral, one thing becoming another
at the same time as it is itself. A word recalling sound, and then almost like a game
of surrealist juxtapositions, creating meaning. Is it this transformation from prose
to poetry, through Thomas’s use of form and rhyme which is where the making
— magic? — is happening, between thought, and word, words and poem... But
cause? Effect?
* * *
Affect. Rhyme as lyric embodiment.
* * *
I quoted the first eleven lines of this poem to end on that word sympathy... But
my instinct tells me that this is a sonnet, even though the numbers are wrong. At
 Poetry and Magic 117

eighteen lines, this poem stretches while retaining nevertheless something of the
sonnet’s proportions. It gestures towards the sonnet as a fourteen-line form by the
way in which it places emphasis on certain words at key points. The word ‘rain’
appears, at the end of the line, on three occasions: line one, line ten, line fifteen
(1, 10, 15 also suggests a kind of number magic, of generation, transformation in
its sequential patterning that skirts around the sonnet form... and what subliminal
connections then to the number of his hut, 51, where the poem is composed?). The
word is also repeated twice, as noun and verb in line seven, at what would be —
ordinarily, more or less — the location of the sonnet’s turn.
* * *
‘Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon.’ Here’s rain making rain happen.
Noun into verb.
* * *
Even more brilliantly, what’s noticeable is that the modulations of sound work
structurally as well as imaginatively: three ‘rains’ and then the internal rhyme
of ‘again’. The ‘rain again’, is echoed by vowel shifts as ‘cleaner’ and ‘been’ then
becomes ‘born’ and ‘upon’ at line seven. And here is the first turn of the poem
signalled by the colon. Three lines before we find the word ‘rain’ which then
becomes immediately echoed by the rhyme of ‘pain’. These shifts are an example of
form becoming feeling if ever I saw one, an ‘active demonstration that the feeling
of poetry exists in the poem, and does not stand in a passive relation to words and
structures; it is more than mere material.’15 When we hear the word rain we will
also keep understanding (hearing, feeling?) ‘pain’, and then when we read ‘rain’,
in creeps a silent underwriting of pain, such is the way in which rhyme carries us
forwards and back.
* * *
Why is the poem not a sonnet, I wonder? The first ‘like’ of the poem signals what
would normally be the end of a fourteen line sonnet, as the poem attempts to begin
again, offer a coda with what feels like a couplet extended to a quatrain:
Like me who have no love which this wild rain
Has not dissolved except the love of death,
If love it be towards what is perfect and
Cannot, the tempest tells me, disappoint.
Disappointed in love, not death. Thomas’s poem sits within a triangle of relationships
between love, death and loss whereby loss of the other is mirrored by loss of the
self. Paul Ricoeur poses the difficulty around what he calls ‘the make believe’ of
his own death whereby he sees himself dead, ‘the internalized anticipation of a
death tomorrow for which I will be dead for the survivors, my survivors.’16 While
the poem is in a state of wishing for its addressee no sympathy with his feelings, a
sympathy which leaves him ‘helpless among the living and the dead’, he thus isolates
himself wishing against his own aridity, his lack of connection with the rain.
Importantly, ‘Rain’ is a poem which is not the final attempt by Thomas of working
through of the rain symbolism. Writing about the rain is in fact the place where
118 Deryn Rees-Jones

all his poetry begins: ‘After Rain’ is the very first poem in his working notebooks,
dated 14 December 1914, and sets rain up as perpetual movement, hope: ‘Crystals
both dark and bright of the rain | That begins again.’ (CP 38). It remembers the
rain that drenched and symbolized unity of self and other and which looks back to
the rain in ‘Melancholy’ (25 April 1915) (CP 85) which Thomas begins
The rain and wind, the rain and wind, raved endlessly.
On me the Summer storm, and fever, and melancholy
Wrought magic, so that if I feared the solitude
Far more I feared all company...
And rain becomes more properly mourned and resuscitated in ‘It Rains’ (CP 121;
11–13 May 1916). Not simply the pathetic fallacy in ‘Melancholy’ here, but the
proposition that melancholy is not echoed by the rain, but magically induces it. ‘It
Rains’, composed latest of all (where rain as abstract noun has become a condition,
a verb) consists of fifteen lines. There ‘rain’ rhymes with ‘again’, and each five-line
stanza beings and ends with a couplet. Twelve lines: a poem without a final couplet.
Fifteen lines. A little song. Sonnet games. Too much for the sonnet to contain.
* * *
Again and again in ‘Rain’ Thomas uses echoes and conversations, correspondences
of rhyme to create movements of thought. And in the penultimate line of the
poem, ‘If love it be towards what is perfect and’, Thomas moves away from the
ten syllable line, the stress pattern at the middle of the line losing its iambic as the
reader must make the shift across from that eleven syllable line to a ten syllable line
that begins and ends with the off-key discomfiture of the dactyl: ‘cannot the’, and
‘disappoint’.
* * *
And what of that indefinite article, with which I think — yes — I identify, I am
a little in love?
* * *
‘Like a cold water among broken reeds’: this isn’t simply a careless desire to find the
metrication of the ten-syllable line. In fact Thomas uses eleven syllables on three,
maybe four, occasions in the poem. Because there was a choice there for Thomas,
clearly. To keep the ten syllables he might have written — and might not so many
other poets — ‘Like cold water among the broken reeds’. Instead he remains
faithful to an iambic pulse and in so doing the music and the meaning of the line
conjoin, leaving a sense of space that extends horizontally and vertically through
the imagery. Here is the still point of the poem... To think of Auden and Hughes
both, I wonder, what kind of a wish-fulfilment or working through of a problem
‘Rain’ is? What kind of happening is in process?
Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain
On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me
Remembering again that I shall die
And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks
For washing me cleaner than I have been
 Poetry and Magic 119

Since I was born into this solitude.

Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon:
But here I pray that none whom once I loved
Is dying tonight or lying still awake
Solitary, listening to the rain,
Either in pain or thus in sympathy
Helpless among the living and the dead,
Like a cold water among broken reeds,
Myriads of broken reeds all still and stiff,
Like me who have no love which this wild rain
Has not dissolved except the love of death,
If love it be towards what is perfect and
Cannot, the tempest tells me, disappoint.
Thomas’s ‘playing at raining’ defends the absence of love. The rain/love is as
well a kind of purification which can bless even the dead with its life-enhancing
possibilities. The shift from ‘Rain’ to ‘It Rains’, from noun to verb, from condition
to active verb as he continues to think about this in his writing seems hopeful in
itself, suggestive of the vitality of movement, and enough recovery perhaps to be
sad, to mourn in a way that allows the self to exist. Does Thomas in his refusal of
the company of others in his pain, refuse us, the reader. A reader? Readers? Does he
set up a series of magical wishes, against loss, as he simultaneously builds sympathy
through the aural associations and connections between words which identify with
each other?
* * *
And what of Auden and Hughes? And Auden and his weather? Intrinsically both
the quotes with which I started are also saying something about the lyric self, the
language which creates that self, and the world. For Hughes the poem makes the
self happen, his wish to return to an essential self, which is nature, and from which
he is in perpetual exile; Hughes’s discussion of magic is detailed by the example of
his working on a poem about catching fish as a way of effecting some sort of change
in both himself and his relationship to the world that (rather joyfully) subsequently
allowed him to catch salmon (Or, if we don’t believe in magic, to catch salmon
in a differently focused and mindful way.) For Auden, solitude always exists in the
context of society; the poem survives the self, reaches beyond the self, reaches out
towards other selves. Poetry survives us, a way of happening, a mouth. And in the
poem the word mouth applies equally to the human mouth as it does to the mouth
of a river. Mouth connects poem and the body, but also makes the poem something
in process, something which steers and creates its own course, is created and
received, importantly by many. Auden’s poem enacts that process though rhyme
(believing in magic in a different way): actually ‘making nothing’, or a memory of
it, creating something anew in the chiming between words.
* * *
Nothing. Mouth.
* * *
‘Lay your solitude beside my own.’ (Auden).
120 Deryn Rees-Jones

With thanks to Maurice Riordan, Jill Rudd, Anthony Rudolf, The Living with Dying
Research Network, Stephen Payne for his honest, timely, question and the rhyme of his
name; and fondly, in memoriam, James Kimmis and Miriam Allott.

Notes to Chapter 12
1. Ted Hughes ‘The Critical Forum Series’, Norwich Tapes, Ltd, 1978. Transcribed by Ann Skea,
1990 at http://ann.skea.com/CriticalForum.htm.
2. See Humphrey Carpenter, W. H. Auden: A Biography (Boston, MA: Houghton Miff lin, 1981),
p. 416.
3. Octavio Paz, The Bow and the Lyre, trans. by Ruth L. C. Simms (Austin: University of Texas
Press, 1973), p. 93.
4. Merleau-Ponty, ‘Eye and Mind’, in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting,
ed. by Galen A. Johnson, trans. by Michael B. Smith (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University
Press, 1993), p. 126.
5. Sigmund Freud, ‘Totem and Taboo. Some correspondences between the psychical life of
savages and neurotics’, in On Murder, Mourning, Melancholia, trans. by Sean Whiteside, with an
introduction by Maud Ellmann, Penguin Modern Classics (London: Penguin, 2005), p. 84.
6. See Edward Thomas: The Annotated Collected Poems, ed. by Edna Longley (Tarset, Northumberland:
Bloodaxe, 2008). Hereafter references to poems CP in the text.
7. See Thomas J. McCarthy, Relationships of Sympathy: The Writer and the Reader in British
Romanticism (Aldershot: Scolar, 1997), p. 153.
8. Ibid, p. 160.
9. Ibid, p. 160.
10. See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1999). First
published 1958.
11. Hanna Segal, Dream, Phantasy and Art (Hove and New York: Brunner-Routledge, 1991), p. 80.
12. Ken Wright, ‘To Make Experience Sing’, in Art, Creativity, Living, ed. by Lesley Caldwell
(London and New York: Karnac, 2000), pp. 75–96 (p. 94).
13. The Annotated Collected Poems of Edward Thomas, p. 155.
14. Ibid, p. 267.
15. Barbara Hardy, The Advantage of Lyric: Essays on Feeling in Poetry (London: The Athlone Press,
1977), p. 9.
16. Paul Ricoeur, Living up to Death, trans. by David Pellauer (Chicago, IL: Chicago University
Press, 2009), p. 12.
 part I V
v

Writing Women and Children

 — 13 —

Misogyny on Trial:
Shakespeare and Honour Killing
Loraine Fletcher

My title may sound opportunistic, but new shifts in political tectonics disclose new
readings of Shakespeare. One narrative thread appears in histories, comedies and
tragedies: a man or men put a woman on trial, formally or informally, with the
intention of ending her life, or at least disgracing her. She’s more innocent than
the men who judge her; it’s her judges the audience condemn. Critics of the plays
often grow up with them, and that recurrent scenario doesn’t strike us as quite
so odd or innovative as perhaps it should. They’ve analysed Shakespeare’s gender
struggles, but from too close up to elicit an honour killing pattern or to register the
men’s constant misjudgements of women that drive his narratives towards disaster.
A treatment of this large topic over many plays must be cursory and unavoidably
focused on plot, but I think it’s worth attempting.
What people call their children can be revealing. Was ‘Susanna’ Shakespeare’s
choice for his first daughter in 1583 only for its pleasant susurration, or was there
already some attachment to a story, heard first as a boy in church, that he later
rewrote in many versions? Perhaps the Old Testament story of Susanna and the
Elders fed into a growing perception of the way that thwarted or jealous men try
to destroy women. The two Elders spy on Susanna as she bathes, try to blackmail
her into having sex with them and, when she refuses, accuse her of adultery with
a third man. She’s tried and condemned to death, but Daniel establishes that the
Elders told inconsistent stories, so they’re condemned instead.
None of Shakespeare’s plots exactly replicates the Susanna story, but a man’s
impulse to protect his shaky self-esteem by destroying a woman under the pretext
of justice is central to Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, Cymbeline, and The Winter’s
Tale. That impulse is also apparent, though not central, in other plays. The
audience must consider the pathology of men who want to kill women they can’t
understand or control. Trial scenes are compelling, and there are many trials of men
in Shakespeare, notably Antonio’s and Othello’s. There are brief courts of victor’s
justice as at Shrewsbury, and trials cluster in Henry VIII, where the only woman’s
trial is a variant on the honour killing pattern. Gloucester endures an interrogation
by torture in Lear, Bolingbroke’s impeachment of Richard is climactic, and the
actions of Measure for Measure and The Tempest are prolonged trials of men and
women. But there’s even more public and private arraignment of women than there
is of men.
 Misogyny on Trial 123

When the pattern emerges in The First Part of Henry VI, written before 1592,
Joan La Pucelle is guilty of sorcery as charged: we see her demons come to her
call, though they fail her. By some standards of Shakespeare’s time and their own,
York and Warwick are right to send her to the stake, though her trial consists only
of insults. Everyone in London who could walk came to the first history plays;
Shakespeare wasn’t going to go broke overestimating public taste. But the audience,
however jingoistic, could see that the English nobles condemn Joan not because
she’s a witch but because she humiliated them in battle. This is a form of honour
killing, further justified by her accusers because the Dauphin is her lover.
Joan is one of Barbara’s few bad Storytellers,1 a compulsive liar too brusque for
eloquence. But her reductive habit of mind reaches some sane conclusions, as in the
wonderful
Glory is like a circle in the water,
Which never ceaseth to enlarge itself
Till, by broad spreading, it disperse to naught.
(The First Part of Henry VI, i, 4, 112–14)2
The men don’t know that yet. She’s broken by the end, claiming pregnancy to avoid
burning, though when she sees there’s no hope she defies her tormentors.
In her Introduction to the play in the Norton edition, Jean Howard notes that
Joan is occasionally portrayed in language used of Elizabeth I, for instance as the
daughter of Justice, Astraea. Elizabeth might also be seen as violating woman’s
subordinate place in the hierarchy. Howard adds:
While this play insistently calls attention to the dangers of civil dissention
among the English nobles, it also repeatedly stresses the danger caused to men
by powerful women, though it overtly displaces that threat onto the women of
another country.3
She suggests that the Joan passages ref lect unease about Elizabeth’s sovereignty and
perhaps unease about all women who take on dominating roles. As Barbara says,
‘In creating [ Joan’s] character, Shakespeare’s stereotyping of woman is facilitated,
and compounded, by his nationalism as he takes over the hostility of the English
historians Hall and Holinshed.’4 But many of his English nobles and clergy are
contemptible, which Joan is not.
In Henry VI, Part 2, an alliance of mutually hostile nobles traps Eleanor in order
to undermine her husband Gloucester, the regent. Eleanor wants to be Queen and
like Joan seeks help from black magic, co-opting a witch, two priests and a conjurer
to find out how long Henry VI will live. A spirit from hell rises and gives her
ambiguous answers, as the witches do to Macbeth. The nobles have set her up with
the séance, and they eavesdrop on it, writing down the prophecies — it was treason
to forecast the monarch’s death.
Eleanor is tried by the royal court while her husband stands by unable to defend
her. The witch is sentenced to burn, her associates to hang, and Eleanor to be
paraded barefoot through the London streets wearing only a sheet and a placard
proclaiming her crimes, then to permanent exile on the Isle of Man. It’s a humorous
choice of locale: Eleanor and Joan display ‘unwomanly’ ambition, and Joan dresses as
a soldier. But the men’s motives for disgracing Eleanor are themselves treasonable.
124 Loraine Fletcher

It’s true there may be crude misogyny in the early history plays that can’t be
explained away as the characters’ prejudice. Talbot may be about to commit
punishment rape on the Countess of Auvergne as Act ii, Scene 3 of The First Part
of Henry VI ends. The scene could be played like that. She mocks his unimpressive
appearance and size, and tries unsuccessfully to trap him in her castle. His ostensibly
chivalrous last speech perhaps contains a threat. He speaks of the soldier’s appetite
for food — though perhaps with a wink to the audience. The Countess is by
now as frightened as her countrymen. But like Joan and Eleanor, she isn’t created
inexplicably bad or two-dimensional. Joan grows out of the war and has her
moment of glory; Eleanor was adored once. Though they’re guilty, the English
lords and ecclesiastics are guiltier, and more dangerous to their country.
Other woman characters tried or judged harshly are innocent, the more so the
later they come in Shakespeare’s career. Much Ado About Nothing is set in Sicily with
its long tradition of honour killing. In church on her wedding day, Hero is accused
of having lost her virginity by her bridegroom, Claudio, who thinks he’s heard her
at her bedroom window talking to a lover the night before. Instead of intervening
at the time, he turns the wedding into a kangaroo court next morning.
The scene at Hero’s window is of course stage-managed by Don John, a mal­
content seething with resentment, and almost anybody would suspect him even if
they hadn’t seen the substitution of a waiting woman for Hero. But Hero’s father
repudiates her, wishing her dead. Claudio and Don Pedro, who arranged the
marriage, are determined on Hero’s public shame though the result will be her
death or consignment to a convent.
Claudio is an inadequate lover from the start. He consults Benedick and Don
Pedro about Hero instead of making his own mind up and doesn’t forget to ask
if Leonato has a son. He allows Don Pedro to court her for him, then quickly
suspects his boss is speaking for himself. He’s petulant, not grieved, and quick to
generalize:
Friendship is constant in all other things
Save in the office and affairs of love.
[...]
Let every eye negotiate for itself,
And trust no agent; for beauty is a witch
Against whose charms faith melteth into blood.
[...]
Farewell, therefore, Hero. (ii, 1, 153–60)
The commercial language and association of women with witchcraft mark the
misogynist’s reaction. Claudio soon learns that Don Pedro is not interested in
courting Hero, and a wedding day is set, but he declares himself ready to accompany
his boss and friend on a journey straight afterwards. He hasn’t begun to emerge
from the gang stage.
Here as elsewhere the cynical misjudgement of the woman comes out of a military
culture. The men are obsessed with cuckoldry and quick to find new evidence of
female deceit. In church Claudio speaks for the traditional goddess/animal view of
women. He once thought Hero like ‘Dian in her orb’ (iv, 1, 55), he says; now, he
 Misogyny on Trial 125

finds her like ‘those pampered animals | That rage in savage sensuality’ (iv, 1, 59).
Hero is of course neither. She’s a nice dull girl who’s ready to obey her father
and take Don Pedro if he offers, then seems better pleased with Claudio. But when
her life is threatened she changes, bursting out clear and furious: ‘What kind of
catechising call you this?’ (iv, 1, 77). Leonato’s betrayal is worse than Claudio’s
or Don Pedro’s, but it’s brief. When not overawed by his superiors he can think
again.
This thread in Much Ado has several sources: Shakespeare drew mainly on
an Italian novella about false accusation. The story of Beatrice and Benedick’s
courtship is original, and shines against the hackneyed parallel of the other couple.
Beatrice and Benedick have known each other a long time; in the opening scene
she’s desperate to find out if he’s alive. They skirmish through the first three acts
and are ready to drop their pretence of dislike by Hero’s wedding day.
Benedick’s remaining with the women, the priest and the old men when the
young men leave the church marks a switch of loyalties which is complete when
he agrees to Beatrice’s demand that he fight Claudio. It’s a large concession, but
the only way Hero can live on in Messina. When the Watch reveal how she was
slandered, Claudio and Don Pedro go through the motions of repenting her death,
and next morning, when ‘the wolves have preyed’ (v, 3, 25), Claudio in reparation
agrees to marry Leonato’s unknown niece; she of course reveals herself as Hero,
and Beatrice marries Benedick. The audience has seen two types of courtship and
marriage contrasted: one arranged between near-strangers by family and friends,
the other negotiated with difficulty but also with a lot of fun between the two
people concerned, and cutting across old loyalties.
Marriage was always in a state of f lux, but especially during the change from
Catholic to Protestant dispensations. When Henry VIII began his reign, almost
a third of the population was vowed to celibacy; the shift in sensibility required
by the new religion is unimaginable. Boys who liked Latin better than digging
turnips could no longer be monks or friars. Girls reluctant to marry a stranger and
die in childbirth could no longer enter a convent. Homosexuals could no longer
find refuge in same-sex communities. Celibacy was no longer a holier state than
marriage; on the contrary, marriage was now the second chance at Eden. This
understanding of marriage continued under Edward VI.
In Mary’s reign everything went into reverse for five years. Elizabeth renewed
the marriage project, putting pressure on single clergy to marry. If a Catholic were
to seize power and take the English church back to Rome, unmarried clergy could
probably make peace with the new regime and continue in their houses and livings. A
married clergyman was committed to the Protestant side, as Rome wouldn’t take him.
Simultaneously another pattern was emerging, from arranged to consensual
marriage. The Book of Common Prayer requires verbal assent from both parties,
though no form of service could prevent the application of force in private.
Aristocratic parents still tried to arrange their children’s marriages, but heirs and
heiresses wanted at least a negative vote. Enlightened gentry families gave their
daughters a choice and avoided compulsion. Juliet’s parents are exemplary at first,
allowing her to meet and make up her mind about Paris, though they’re desperate
126 Loraine Fletcher

for her to accept him. Leonato is autocratic in telling Hero, ‘you know your answer’
(ii, 1, 56) to a proposal. Among families with little money or property, there was
greater freedom.
The wit and judgment of Beatrice and Benedick make their marriage of choice
more attractive than one arranged between a father, a young man who picks a wife
for her looks and dowry, and the young man’s boss. And in a sense Hero is ‘every
man’s Hero’ (iii, 2, 88–89), willing to accept Don Pedro or Claudio as her father
directs, despite Beatrice’s belated effort to get her cousin to think independently.
The dramatic contrast between arranged and consensual marriage would be easier
to pick up in 1598 than it is now. Of course the social network brings Benedick and
Beatrice together too, but Beatrice is not coerced like Hero, and she and Benedick
are ready to break up the network altogether when Benedick undertakes a more
valid form of honour killing by a duel.
Much Ado’s happy ending smoothes over the ugliness of what the men do to
Hero, but the spring of its action appears again in Othello, Cymbeline and The
Winter’s Tale, though these plays differ so much that somebody going to one a
night for four nights in a row wouldn’t necessarily notice the similarity. In three,
the honour killers’ intended destruction of the woman for fornication or adultery
is averted. Othello sees its killing through to the end: Act V in a good production
is hard to watch. Again, a slanderer incites a man to destroy a woman he thinks
has deceived him, but Iago is more credible than Don John. The best Iagos are
large, bluff, decent chaps: it’s crazy to pick an actor who looks sinister, though
directors often do. He has several possible motives: suspicion that Othello had sex
with his wife, fury that Othello promoted Cassio not himself, perhaps desire for
Desdemona. But no one motive is sufficient, and the impulse to destroy her along
with Othello seems to need no specific motive. After a momentary f linching, with
his unexpected ‘but let her live’ (iii, 4, 477), he moves in to orchestrate the kill like
so many of Shakespeare’s men.
Othello has its formal trial, where Desdemona’s father with the Duke of Venice
and the Senate accuse Othello of enchanting Desdemona by witchcraft. She’s on
trial too, and helps to defend them both: it’s a magnificent end to Act I. But nearly
everybody except Desdemona is a racist including Othello, an early Groucho Marx
who’s easily led to think there must be something wrong with his wife if she was
willing to marry him. Shakespeare shows how deep-rooted racial stereotypes are,
since the language itself embodies good in white, bad in black, in ways the Duke
struggles with:
If virtue no delighted beauty lack
Your son-in-law is far more fair than black. (i, 3, 88–99)
Though not anti-black like its source story, Othello is ambiguous in its racial
attitudes. Eventually, though only after he’s corrupted by Iago, Othello acts just as
the audience might expect of a Muslim. Yet he’s the only man in Desdemona’s world
she could have married as an equal. Ludovico, whom she’s beginning to think of
rather wistfully when Othello treats her badly, is too frightened to intervene when
he hears Cassio being attacked in the street. Once the action moves from Venice to
Cyprus where Othello is the military ruler, Desdemona has no chance to defend
 Misogyny on Trial 127

herself in public again. Her second trial takes place in Othello’s mind only, with
none but a prosecuting council. Othello amasses the evidence, judges, condemns
and executes her alone, ‘else she’ll betray more men’ (v, 2, 6).
With its fierce concentration on one mad sexual misjudgement, this is the most
tense and linear of the honour killing plays. Desdemona wakes up in time for her
murder and tries to exonerate Othello as she dies. The single plot suddenly doubles
at the end, where Emilia’s quick unexpected stabbing by Iago can rival Desdemona’s
in horror. This might also be considered a classic honour killing if Iago believes
Emilia was unfaithful to him, but he kills in rage for her revelation of his guilt, and
to stop her giving evidence.
Innogen too is found guilty of adultery without her knowledge. When the play
opens she’s just married Posthumus in defiance of her father, and he’s banished. In
Italy at a crowded banquet he boasts about her chastity, something he’s done before,
to an Iago figure, Giacomo, who persuades him to bet on her faithfulness, offering
to try the seduction himself. If he brings back evidence of infidelity, he will win the
ring she gave Posthumus. If he fails, he must pay a ten thousand ducat forfeit and
also fight Posthumus. Giacomo goes to England and fails to seduce her, but finds an
excuse to leave his trunk for safekeeping in her bedroom. He’s inside it, and makes
an inventory of the furnishings while she sleeps.
Her tapestries illustrate the eternal either/or in early modern readings of women,
scenes of Diana bathing and of Cleopatra meeting Antony. Giacomo also notes
a mole under Innogen’s breast. Armed with this information he returns to Italy,
convinces Posthumus he’s seduced her and wins the ring. Innogen’s trial by Giacomo
is private, but its arrangement and the consequences to follow her conviction or
acquittal are public. By letter, Posthumus orders his servant Pisanio to carry out
Innogen’s honour killing, but like the woodcutter in the fairy tale Pisanio can’t do
it and helps her escape.
Posthumus’s loathing of women’s deceit and lust, like Othello’s and Lear’s, was
sometimes taken as expression of Shakespeare’s own misogyny:
Is there no way for men to be, but women
Must be half-workers? We are bastards all
And that most venerable man which I
Did call my father was I know not where
When I was stamped. (ii, 5, 1–5)
O all the devils!
This yellow Giacomo in an hour — was’t not?
Or less? At first? Perchance he spoke not, but
Like a full-acorned boar, a German one,
Cried ‘O’ and mounted; (ii, 5, 13–17)
Innogen’s angry rejection of Giacomo comes shortly before this; soon afterwards,
she learns from Pisanio that Posthumus wants him to kill her, but continues
to Milford Haven in disguise in the hope of seeing him there. The soliloquy’s
placing emphasizes the insanity of Posthumus’s distrust. With her talent for carving
vegetables into alphabet soup and willingness to forgive her husband’s attempt to
murder her, Innogen was the dearest of Shakespeare’s heroines to the Victorians.
128 Loraine Fletcher

With a few exceptions all of them, however passionate, witty and enterprising,
conform to patriarchal standards of chastity, while the men’s refusal to believe this
drives the plots.
In Much Ado, Othello and Cymbeline, a slanderer urges towards murder a fiancé
or husband already half way there on the commonplace perception of women
as deceivers. In The Winter’s Tale, again set in Sicily, there’s no slanderer and
less background misogyny. Leontes’ suspicion springs from paranoia apparently
triggered by his wife’s pregnancy. The suspect, his old friend Polixenes, runs for
it, leaving Hermione to be tried for her life just after giving birth. Despite its
supernatural element, The Winter’s Tale is about men’s domestic violence to women
and children, growing from fears of women’s sexuality that lost them their rose-
tinted childhoods, from doubts of their children’s paternity. The second, comic
half, set in Bohemia, shows in the younger generation a frank, sexy girl and a spoilt,
headstrong boy soon to go through the whole thing again.
Lear gives his daughters, not his wife, a public trial. Approaching dementia, he
wants professions of love and gratitude when he decides to abdicate and divide his
kingdom between the three. This is a variant on the honour trial of a wife’s fidelity;
it springs from quasi-sexual jealousy, and his elder daughters know what they’re
doing when they claim to love him better than anyone or anything else. Cordelia’s
question, ‘Why have my sisters husbands if they say | They love you all?’(The
History of King Lear, i, 1, 88–89) exposes the incestuous nature of his love and the
elder sisters’ ability to exploit it.
The higher-ranking British men in Cymbeline lack judgment and in Lear even
humanity, apart from Kent, and Edgar who arguably grows wiser disguised as a
beggar but who still strikes many as a strange, damaged figure. Into the gaps step
the kind and intelligent servant Pisanio, and Cornwall’s heroic, unnamed servant
who throws off a lifetime’s social conditioning to intervene when his master is
blinding Gloucester.
Lavinia’s death in Titus Andronicus follows an honour trial so laconic it’s over
before we see it coming. In the middle of his spectacular revenge on the Goths,
Titus asks the Emperor if the legendary Virgilius was right to kill his daughter,
who’d been raped. He receives an assent he translates into legal terms, a ‘pattern,
precedent and lively warrant’ (v, 3, 43), and stabs her. Lavinia’s death like the other
Senecan excesses tilts murder into comedy: the queasiness of Titus Andronicus was
finely caught in Julie Taymor’s 1999 film. The honour-killing impulse in other
plays too invites comic def lation. To Leontes’ portentous ‘We are to speak in public;
for this business | Will raise [rouse] us all’ (ii, 2, 199–200), Antigonus responds,
aside: ‘To laughter, as I take it’ (ii, 2, 200). Beatrice, Emilia and Paulina provide
derisive feminist commentaries on the craziness of male justice.
Verbal and physical violence to women is everywhere, sometimes erupting
in one or two lines, like Antigonus’ threat to ‘geld’ (iii, 1, 149) his three young
daughters if Hermione is guilty. Clitoridectomy was evidently known, or known
of, in England at this date. Sometimes violence to women sparks off the whole
action. To preserve Duke Frederick’s new honours, Rosalind is banished to what
would be certain death if she couldn’t step sideways into pastoral fiction. She’s not
 Misogyny on Trial 129

only the legitimate heiress: she’s too attractive, so too dangerous, to live. Lucrece
carries out her own honour killing, knowing it’s what the men want. Ophelia starts
out sane and humorous. A patronizing brother, a bullying father, and a lover who
attacks her contemptuously as a ‘nun’ or whore first silence her, then as the lover
kills the father, drive her to suicide. Women from Beatrice to Lavinia are silenced
in different ways.
Measure For Measure is full of interrogations; Angelo is of course guilty when
he tries to save himself by discrediting Isabella and Mariana, but less obviously,
the Duke-as-Friar’s questioning of Juliet feels intrusive and prurient, and would I
think seem so to many in the contemporary audience, with the confessional now
obsolete. The Duke’s character and motives are ambiguous throughout: he gets rid
of a dangerous rival in Angelo. Hermia undergoes an interrogation by Theseus in
the opening scene of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Her refusal to marry as her foolish
father and dogmatic ruler direct brings the standard threat of death or a convent.
Though the two boys are indistinguishable to the audience, they aren’t to the girls,
and the play vindicates the girls’ initial choices. In a parody of the jealousy and
contemptuous sexual misjudgements of the day world, Oberon condemns Titania
to mate with an ass.
Misogyny can be fatal even to men. Hotspur doesn’t suspect Kate’s fidelity, but
though spectacularly indiscreet himself he doesn’t trust her discretion: women talk.
He’s confided his plans to a friend who refuses to join him in the rebellion but, as
Hotspur belatedly realizes, will betray him to the King. Hotspur won’t confide in
Kate or have her in his bed, either because anxiety makes him impotent or because
he might talk in his sleep, so Kate never has a chance to dissuade him from his
reckless attempt; he dies at Shrewsbury before his reinforcements can arrive. Kate
is as clever as Rosalind but, trapped in a meta-world of military history rather than
released into pastoral fiction, her intelligence is useless. In this second tetralogy,
accounts of the women’s marginalized perceptiveness are extraordinarily subtle:
Richard II’s Queen senses approaching rebellion as like a phantom pregnancy of her
own, which in a sense it is, her childlessness largely contributing to it. The courtiers
glibly dismiss her fears.
Holinshed’s Chronicles tells how Katherine of Aragon was charged with an
unusual form of sexual transgression: that she’d falsely claimed to be a virgin
when she married her dead husband’s brother, Henry. She defended herself ably,
challenging Henry to say she was not a virgin when he first had her, then walked
out of the court. In Henry VIII, written over ninety years later, the crux of the
enquiry is missing, and Shakespeare’s Katherine is not required to explain where she
lost her virginity to a public court consisting of a husband determined to get rid of
her and the husband’s toadies, though Shakespeare does justice to her courage and
dignity. James I derived his sovereignty from the Tudors, and an accurate version of
Henry was not possible. Tudorland was already a popular fictional subject.
But Shakespeare has included in The Winter’s Tale what he left out of his portrayal
of Henry. The two plays are close, chronologically and in the Queens’ responses to
arraignment. Hermione is strikingly like Holinshed’s and Shakespeare’s Katherines
in eloquence, composure, pride of birth, physical frailty (though this is only implicit
130 Loraine Fletcher

in Holinshed), direct address to her husband and appeal as a foreigner to the

onlookers’ compassion. She’s accused with Polyxenes, who’s closer than a brother
to Leontes. Also like Holinshed’s and Shakespeare’s Katherines, she’s defending an
only daughter’s legitimacy and finally refuses to acknowledge the court, referring
herself to a higher power. The unpredictable cruelty to a faithful wife that couldn’t
be shown in Shakespeare’s Henry appears full-blown in Leontes.
Catherine Belsey’s Shakespeare and the Loss of Eden relates Love’s Labours Lost,
As You Like It, Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale to the Eve story in early modern
culture. The story was everywhere, carved into bedsteads, on dishes and wedding
chests, and analysed in sermons and treatises on marriage; it was the first story in
the new English Bible. It told of Adam’s Fall, brought about by the woman God
gave him. Because she listened to the voice of the serpent and ate the apple from the
Tree of Knowledge, persuading Adam to eat too, she lost Eden for all succeeding
generations. Marriage may for a while re-create a little Eden, but the original seeds
of deceit remain in Eve’s daughters.
Belsey’s book is erudite beyond anything I could attempt, but I draw different
conclusions about the relation of her artefacts and texts to Shakespeare’s plays. In
some passages she attributes the loss of the marital Eden in Shakespeare to male
jealousy, but she seems to conclude that a contemporary audience could have been
expected to empathize with that jealousy more than we can. She says:
The marriage furniture, the sermons and the secular texts together suggest
that the analysis [of the dangers of marriage] made in the plays [especially the
Last Plays] is not all that surprising, that there is a structural anxiety at the
heart of the early modern celebration of conjugal love. To counter the dangers
intrinsic to the marriage state, some of the treatises and the domestic conduct
books recommend unceasing vigilance.
[...]
Marriage is finally saved in Shakespeare’s romances not by vigilance but by
coincidences, by miracles, by divine intervention. The reunions of Innogen and
Posthumus in Cymbeline and of Leontes and Hermione in The Winter’s Tale are
an integral part of the happy ending of these plays. We are invited, in my view,
to believe in them. The official position is that marriage is an earthly paradise.
But at the same time, the clerical texts, as well as the marriage furniture and the
plays, can all be read as indicating that the conjugal bedchamber, like the God-
given Garden, turns out to be a good deal more dangerous than the official
analysis [of marriage] was formally willing to allow.5
Belsey seems to subsume Shakespeare as closely as possible into his own main­stream
culture. I believe he writes directly against it, focusing the audience’s sym­pathy
firmly onto the accused woman, making the audience assess the madness that drives
the men on. As Belsey fully shows, the church taught — and the law concurred —
that women couldn’t be trusted. As daughters of Eve, they need control by fathers
and husbands or they’ll go off with a snake. But none of Shakespeare’s women
goes off with a snake except Cressida — who has the excuse that it’s wartime, she
needs a protector, and Troilus has made little effort to keep her — and Goneril and
Regan, whose husbands have apparently been picked for them by Lear. Cleopatra
is the most obviously Eve-like of the heroines, causing Antony’s fall at Actium and
 Misogyny on Trial 131

choosing a snake to take her easily into death, but even she and Lady Macbeth are
sexually faithful. In Much Ado, Othello and Cymbeline, it’s the heroes who listen
to snakes and bring death to their worlds, while in other plays too, men are the
deceivers, if only of themselves, and distrust of the woman is unfounded.
Shakespeare’s men accuse women of deception because they’re humiliated or
irrationally jealous, and because that’s what their culture has conditioned them to
do. In a surprising reversal of the Eve story, tragedy strikes repeatedly in Shakespeare
not because men trust their women too much but because they don’t trust them
enough. I don’t suppose he wrote to a programme or for moral edification; he
wrote, I assume, for entertainment, and new dramatic concepts of sexual and
marital relationships are entertaining to both sexes. Edification followed, perhaps,
a slow shift towards enlightenment. Almost single-handedly, he replaced the Eve
story with the Susanna story in the national consciousness.

Notes to Chapter 13
1. Hardy, Barbara, Shakespeare’s Storytellers (London: Peter Owen, 1997), pp. 164–65.
2. All Shakespeare quotations are taken from The Norton Shakespeare, ed. by Stephen Greenblatt et
al. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997).
3. Howard, Jean, ‘Introduction’ to The First Part of Henry VI in The Norton Shakespeare (New York:
W.W. Norton, 1997), pp. 440–41.
4. Hardy, p. 164.
5. Catherine Belsey, Shakespeare and the Loss of Eden: The Construction of Family Values in Early
Modern Culture (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 81–83.
 — 14 —

Jeanie Deans and Narrative Method in

The Heart of Mid-Lothian
Martin Dodsworth

I
Scott’s seriousness as a novelist was disputed almost from the start. ‘This ingenious
and hitherto successful author’, said the reviewer of The Heart of Mid-Lothian in the
British Review for November 1818, ‘seems to set no value on literary reputation but
as it contributes to the sale of his books.’1 Latterly, respectability has been bought
for him, at a high price. Scott is nowadays seen as a writer whose main achievement
lies in his view of Scottish history, especially as it concerns the Union of 1707. But it
does not follow that because Scott wrote historical novels he wrote them to express
a feeling about historical change. ‘By going a century or two back’, Hazlitt thought,
‘all becomes new and startling in the present advanced period.’2 The Scottish
novels do undoubtedly and inevitably ref lect a view of Scottish history, but history
may nevertheless be seen as merely a backdrop to the ‘new and startling’ action of
individuals. David Daiches rescued Scott from the accusation that he wrote simple
adventure stories by arguing that it was ‘the complex of feelings with which [Scott]
contemplated the phase of Scottish history immediately preceding his own time
[...] that gave life’ to his best books.3 This very inf luential and ultimately unliterary
view slights the focus and achievement of Scott’s art. This is especially the case with
The Heart of Mid-Lothian, probably the best of all the Waverley novels.
Recent commentators are more cautious than Daiches in suggesting that this
book is centred on history. The editors of the excellent Edinburgh edition, for
example, conclude their judicious ‘historical note’ like this:
The Heart of Mid-Lothian is more of a chronicle than any other Scott novel, and
when viewed this way it appears that while David Deans is not the primary
focus of our interest, the revolution seen in his life and lifetime is at least one of
the underlying subjects of the fiction.4
There is a yearning here to see the novel as Daiches would, but it is nobly overcome.
The attraction of the historical reading, though it is not endorsed as a master-key,
is palpable. The Edinburgh edition does not allow room for full-scale critical
interpretation, so we are left to guess at what the novel’s other underlying subjects
might be. The suspicion remains that they would largely coincide with a reading
such as Jane Millgate’s. Her chapter on The Heart of Mid-Lothian is scholarly and
wide-ranging; ultimately she takes the historical line on Jeanie Deans’s story, and
then is disappointed by the way it works out:
 Jeanie Deans and Narrative Method 133

In The Heart of Midlothian it can, indeed, be argued that it is the private plot
that endows the public with significance and value. It is not so much that
Jeanie chooses the right side — the Union settlement — but that the virtues
of her private actions are harnessed to the projection of a positive view of
that settlement. In the process the narrative shifts away from psychological
and historical realism in the direction of stylization, validating the course of
Scottish history in a way that is essentially ahistorical.5
This passage has a representative quality in the way it arbitrarily stresses the
historical element in Scott’s novel. It is undeniable that Jeanie’s actions can be
harnessed to a view of the Union — Millgate does just that. Yet it can still be
asked whether the novel’s narrator sanctions that harnessing. We are told that ‘By
expanding the emphasis on Jeanie’s Scottishness at various points in her journey
[Scott] moves deliberately towards establishing her as a nationally emblematic figure
and transforming her achievement into a general vindication of the Union of 1707’,6
but no quotation backs this up. There is, of course, a modest emphasis on Jeanie’s
not being English, but there is an obvious explanation — that it heightens our
sense of her courage and simplicity in venturing so far into a strange land. Nothing
requires Millgate’s interpretation. As for the move ‘away from psychological and
historical realism’, the reader has first to agree that the novel displays such realism.
A character such as Bartholine Saddletree, named for his trade, suggests that any
realism is strictly limited. In Donald Davie’s view ‘the plot of The Heart of Midlothian
is a tissue of improbabilities and coincidences’7 — he is surely right. Where does
this leave Scott as a realist?
Scott’s early reviewers frequently debated the difficult relationship of history and
romance in his novels,8 a version of the conf lict between realism and implausibility.
When Millgate says that the private plot ‘endows the public with significance and
value’, the tricky point of how romance and history can be reconciled is elided.
The difficulty which was clear to Scott’s contemporaries has disappeared. Even if
we suppose that it was an imagined difficulty and are prepared to grant that in The
Heart of Mid-Lothian romance does give history its significance, we are not obliged
to give romance second place as a consequence.
Other critics try to put romance, rather than history, first in their commentaries on
the novel — Ian Duncan, for example. He views romance in frankly contemporary
terms as much concerned with patriarchy. But it is not enough for him that the
novel should be concerned with two young women confronting their destiny in a
society dominated by men. History cannot be kept in second place:
Jeanie’s pilgrimage [to London to seek a pardon from the King for her sister] fills
in the allegorical connections that give the sisters’ private dilemma its universal,
representative, archetypal status, allowing us to interpret the complaint of post-
Union Scotland as a failure or absence of patriarchy, within which women have
acquired a problematical, transgressive presence and power.9
You can certainly blame everything on the failure, or absence, of patriarchy if
you want to. You could say that Effie rebels against patriarchy as represented by
her father only to fall victim to another ineffectual male, himself the victim of
an insufficiently strong father. You could say that the law under which Effie is
134 Martin Dodsworth

condemned to death for not revealing her pregnancy and then losing track of her
baby ref lects patriarchy in its indifference to the role of the errant father. You
could say that Jeanie’s refusal to perjure herself by saying that Effie had told her
of her pregnancy is a second instance of the inf luence on his daughters of David
Deans’s malign patriarchy. But none of this requires you as a reader to generalize
the relationship between the sisters into ‘the complaint of post-Union Scotland’.
Duncan, however, moves quickly and easily to that conclusion, just as Millgate
jumped to seeing Jeanie as a ‘nationally emblematic figure’. Like her, he is a victim
of Daiches’s emphasis on history. There are other ways than this of taking the novel
seriously.

II
Scott himself suggests how his novel should be read. In doing so he makes no
reference to history or feelings about history of the kind proposed by Daiches.
He puts his emphasis on the lives of suffering individuals. The opening chapter of
The Heart of Mid-Lothian pretends to tell how Peter Pattieson, the novel’s supposed
narrator, came by the story of Effie and Jeanie Deans, but it does so in the context
of a discussion of what a novelist might gain from some knowledge of the courts.
The young lawyer, Hardie, maintains that from the volumes of State Trials ‘every
now and then you read new pages of the human heart, and turns of fortune far
beyond what the boldest novelist ever attempted to produce from the coinage of his
brain’. The history of the Tolbooth — ‘the Heart of Midlothian’ — would furnish,
he says, many such pages.
Since the novel in which Hardie figures is called The Heart of Mid-Lothian, it
is reasonable to apply his account to the story of Effie and Jeanie Deans: ‘Do you
suppose any of these deep, powerful, and agitating feelings can be recorded and
perused without exciting a corresponding depth of deep, powerful, and agitating
interest?’ He promises that ‘the blood of each reader shall be curdled, and his
epidermis crisped into goose skin’ when he treats of ‘matters so mysterious, deep,
and dangerous’ as the character of the Scots and their legal system can provide (1.15–
17). This gives us a clue as to what to look out for in the ensuing narrative — ‘deep,
powerful, and agitating feelings’, arising, no doubt, from historical circumstance
but taking precedence of it. This emphasis on feeling, largely absent from modern
commentary, is confirmed by the reactions of Scott’s contemporaries. Wordsworth
found him to show ‘that want of taste which is universal among modern novels
of the Radcliffe school’,10 clearly indicating that he thought Scott’s aim was, like
Radcliffe’s, to arouse powerful feeling, though not of a Lyrical Ballads kind.
Hardie also asks for ‘variety of incident’. The lawyer thinks of the public as
possessed of an ‘all-devouring appetite for the wonderful and horrible’, which he
is happy to go along with. He quotes Crabbe satirizing the predictability of novels
and concludes that ‘ “The end of uncertainty [...] is the death of interest, and hence
it happens that no one now reads novels” ’ (1.14–15). A successful novel, then, will
portray powerful emotions, be various in incident, and hold the reader in suspense
about what will happen next.
 Jeanie Deans and Narrative Method 135

These are not lofty ambitions, nor need we agree that Scott realized them to
perfection. Hazlitt found that ‘The intensity of the feeling is not equal to the
distinctness of the imagery’ in the Waverley novels. Many readers have felt, for
example (though this reader does not), that Scott tries too hard in his depiction of
Effie’s lover. This does not license us to ignore his intentions altogether. We should
be prepared to consider in what ways he set out to fulfil them. In Scott’s case, the
answer is more surprising than you might think. Hazlitt notes that ‘the author
himself never takes part with his characters, to prompt our affection to the good,
or sharpen our antipathy to the bad’;11 this suggests that the author’s representation
of strong feeling challenges judgement as well as sensibility. It also gives another
meaning to the remark about ‘the end of uncertainty’, which involves more than
providing a run of unexpected incident. Scott leaves it to the reader what is to be
made of his characters and what happens to them.12 (Like Hazlitt, I believe this to
be generally true of Scott as a novelist.) In The Heart of Mid-Lothian, he declines final
judgement on his story. At its end he does attach to it a moral address (‘guilt [...]
can never confer real happiness’) but then undercuts it by a further paragraph from
the book’s supposed editor, Jedidiah Cleishbotham, advertising his willingness to
‘teach the French as well as the Classical tongues’ (pp. 468–69). The reader can draw
a moral or not, as he or she pleases.13 This is characteristic of the novel as a whole;
the narrator establishes a tension between the powerful emotions to which the story
gives rise (for example Effie’s predicament in the Tolbooth) and the entire freedom
which we are offered in interpreting them. Scott follows Shakespeare not only in
taking deep feeling for his subject, but also in declining to tell us what to make
of it; this is what distinguishes him from his predecessors, who either direct the
reader from outside the story (Fielding) or compel him from within the characters
(Richardson). He creates a form of serious fiction whose point is that the reader may
take it seriously or not, rather like the reality it so strangely represents.

III
However, readers have traditionally used this interpretative freedom to make things
easy for themselves. Nowhere is this more true than in the view taken of the novel’s
heroine, Jeanie Deans. The writer in the British Review describes her as ‘virtuous
and affectionate’ and writes of her ‘heroism’;14 this continues to be her image into
the twentieth century, though style and context vary. Mrs Oliphant rhapsodizes
over her as a ‘creature absolutely pure, absolutely truthful, yet of a tenderness, a
forbearance, and long-suffering beyond the power of a man’;15 Lukács admires
‘the rich humanity and simple heroism of a really great human being’;16 Daiches
finds in it ‘the unpretentious faith and courage of a humble Scots lass’, proclaiming
‘the possibility of heroic action in modern life’;17 and for Jane Millgate, Jeanie is
‘the heroine of truth’ who journeys to London ‘determined to vindicate her faith
in authority and providence’.18 This seems to be Scott’s own view, even; in 1827
he described Jeanie as someone possessed of ‘mere dignity of mind and rectitude
of principle, assisted by unpretending good sense and temper, without any of the
beauty, grace, talent, and accomplishment, and wit, to which a heroine of romance
136 Martin Dodsworth

is supposed to have a prescriptive right.’19 Jeanie’s heroic virtue would seem to f loat
free of any criticism.
Nevertheless, she can be understood as more of a human being and less of a plaster
saint than Scott himself suggests in his introduction to the Chronicles. In any case,
his use of qualifiers in the passage quoted is significant — ‘mere dignity of mind’
may slight Jeanie’s mind as well as salute its purity. As for Jeanie’s heroism, when
Scott applies the word ‘heroic’ to Jeanie in the novel the context is very different
from that usually suggested by her admirers. What Scott emphasizes is Jeanie’s
‘simplicity’, and that is a word that is not simple at all (over two packed pages in the
OED). When Effie’s lover, Staunton (though he uses the alias ‘Robertson’ in the
first part of the novel, it seems best to refer to him consistently as ‘Staunton’) urges
Jeanie to swear she knew about the pregnancy in order to save her sister’s life, he
encounters a difficulty: ‘ “But I cannot remember,” answered Jeanie, with simplicity,
“that which Effie never told me.” ’ This is too much for Staunton: ‘ “Are you so dull
— so very dull of apprehension!” he exclaimed [...]’ (15.141, my italics). The striking
conjunction of simplicity and dullness in this exchange can act as a challenge to the
reader in assessing Jeanie and her faith. ‘ “The God, whose name I must call on to
witness the truth of what I say, he will know the falsehood” ’ (15.142). Many have
found this admirable, but it is hard to endorse their view because the law under
which Effie is to be tried is an offence to natural justice and should accordingly be
an offence to divine tolerance. Jeanie’s failure to remark this side of the question is
disheartening, and all the more so because it is not implausible. Deep and agitating
feelings are evoked in the reader but not resolved in the text.
Jeanie is not ‘hard-hearted’ (15.141); her strength of feeling is evident in the
‘agitating terror and uncertainty’ which she feels when she thinks her father is
asking her to perjure herself (20.182), and when she testifies in court. She is not
‘a peevish puritan, superstitious and scrupulous after the manner of her sect’, as
Staunton says in his letter to the Baillie (18.165); although Jeanie observes religion in
her father’s manner, she is never depicted as belonging to a community of believers
(a ‘sect’). This quality of being alone, even when with her father or her sister, is
part of what makes her problematic, together with that mixture of stupidity and
goodness which constitutes her simplicity.
Proponents of the uncomplicatedly heroic Jeanie tend to ignore the extent to
which her story is bound up with that of her sister.20 If Effie had not fallen for
Staunton, concealed her pregnancy, suffered traumatically after the birth, and had
the baby taken from her without her consent or knowledge, then Jeanie would
not have had a story of any interest at all. Jeanie’s goodness or badness is in an
intimate relationship with Effie’s. The ‘shame’ that Jeanie feels on Effie’s account is
therefore interesting. Should she feel shame, and should she feel it in the way that
she does? Although Scott does not raise directly these questions, which naturally
arise from the situations he elaborates, the four epigraphs from Measure for Measure,
all associated with Effie’s trial and its immediate aftermath (18.161; 21.184; 23.197;
26.222), encourage the reader to ref lect upon them. Effie, like Claudio, is the victim
of an unjust form of justice; Jeanie, like Isabella, could save her. The link between
Jeanie’s shame and the shame by which Isabella could save her brother does not
 Jeanie Deans and Narrative Method 137

figure explicitly, but the use of Claudio’s desperate appeal at the head of Jeanie’s
pre-trial interview with Effie (‘What sin you do to save a brother’s life, | Nature
dispenses with the deed so far, | That it becomes a virtue’) draws attention to
Jeanie’s rigour as well as Effie’s need; it does not presuppose sympathy for Isabella
or Jeanie.
At the start, when Effie returns to St Leonards after her child has been born
and lost, the narrator offers two different, un-Shakespearean formulae for Jeanie’s
understanding of her sister’s situation: ‘misfortune’ and ‘ ruin’ (10.93). Only one
of them implies adverse judgement, and neither of them is explicitly attributed to
Jeanie. The arrival of officers of the law with the warrant for child-murder follows
immediately, and devastates David Deans, the father of the family. He exclaims
at ‘the vile harlot, that has disgraced the blood of an honest man’, talks of ‘her
open guilt and open shame’ and commends ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’
(10.94). Moral outrage at Effie’s relationship with Staunton, conceived in terms of
the old code of honour, yet in a plebeian setting, combines with repudiation of
her supposed child-murder. The reader has no access to Jeanie’s thoughts until she
talks with her lover Butler after the attack on the Tolbooth; she tries to break off
her engagement on account of ‘this stain’. She thinks that Butler’s career prospects
could be damaged by association with her because she is ‘ “the sister of a — O, my
God!” ’ The phrase might be completed by ‘harlot’ or ‘murderer’, but her use of
the word ‘stain’ makes it more likely that ‘harlot’ (or some such) is the unspoken
word (12.106). When Jeanie meets with Butler again, just before her departure for
London, she still sees Effie’s supposed guilt as a barrier to their marriage: ‘ “Wha
wad mind what he said in the pu’pit, that had to wife the sister of a woman that
was condemned for sic wickedness?” ’ The wickedness cannot be confined to the
crime of presumed child-murder (though this is the sense in which Butler takes it);
it includes Effie’s supposed ruin — ‘ “ye ken it is a blot that spreads to kith and kin” ’
(28.246). Like her father, Jeanie regards Effie as a whore, though the ambiguous
language protects her from the reader’s immediate censure.
Her attitude to Effie’s ‘shame’ contrasts strongly with that of Effie herself, and
with the view of her own lover, Butler. When Jeanie visits Effie in prison after the
trial, inspired by the thought of walking to London and getting a pardon for her
sister, she exclaims: ‘ “[...] you shall not die this shameful death!” ’ Effie replies: ‘ “A
shameful death I will not die, I have that in my heart [...] that winna bide shame” ’
(13.224). Effie is innocent of her child’s death and does not regard her relationship
to Staunton as wrong. Her ‘good fame’, the loss of which she initially regretted
(7.59), no longer concerns her. It has never bothered Butler. When Jeanie first tries
to call the engagement off, he speaks of ‘your sister’s guilt, if guilt there be’ (12.106).
Whether he refers to the guilt of Effie’s relationship or her supposed murder, the
contrast with Jeanie’s ‘shame’ is striking. In their interview before her departure for
England, Butler still does not admit a fault in Effie: ‘ “I do not believe, and I cannot
believe, that Effie has done this deed [...] blame, were it justly laid on her, does na fa’
on you” ’ (28.246). Effie and Butler react in such a way as to show up the narrowness
and rigidity of Jeanie’s point of view. Neither finds her attitude culpable, but even
a sympathetic reader might think her ‘rich humanity’ diminished by it.
138 Martin Dodsworth

IV
The Heart of Mid-Lothian is not a story dedicated to the virtues, however great, of a
single heroine; it is a story about two sisters, not one. There is a ‘bad’ sister, Effie,
and a ‘good’ sister, Jeanie. Judith Wilt throws in Madge Wildfire as a second ‘bad’
woman:
Between her two dark sisters, with and against them, stands the fair one, the
heroine [...] Jeanie Deans. As heroine her job is to incarnate the still center of
the turning world, the blond domesticity that goads and rewards the hero for
his journey of self-discovery [...].21
Jeanie is not the kind of woman that Wilt approves of; perhaps this leads to some
insensitivity. There is no great emphasis on Jeanie’s fair hair, though there is
consistency in its fairness. Scott was not so consistent about Effie, in the first edition
at least. On different occasions she is described as ‘black-haired’, as having ‘ringlets
of brown hair’ and (at her trial) with ‘long fair hair’.22 The archetypal contrast of
the sisters is not completely fulfilled, as though to suggest its artificiality where
‘the romance of real life’ is concerned.23 Nevertheless it is present in the novel as a
possible way of regarding the two women whose fates are intertwined.
This is no more so than in the account of Jeanie’s journey to London (often spoken
of as a ‘pilgrimage’, since Scott uses the word himself ) and back again. The journey
to London has as its most important event Jeanie’s encounter with Madge Wildfire,
whose situation resembles Effie’s in that she too has borne a child to Staunton and
lost it. Duncan rightly calls her ‘Effie’s dark double’ — dark because she is crazy.24
Jeanie meets with Madge on her return journey also. She is in this way given two
opportunities to rethink the ‘shame’ she feels on her sister’s behalf. Her journey
is far more than a simple ‘pilgrimage’ in search of pardon, if not salvation, for her
sister. This does not entail refusing to credit Jeanie with courage and good intent;
it only involves a little healthy scepticism on the reader’s part.
Jeanie, of course, is described as a ‘pilgrim’ more than once on her journey to
London (29.250, 252; 30.259, etc.) but the word is ambiguous. We may understand,
as the OED suggests, ‘one who journeys [...] to some sacred place, as an act of
religious devotion’ (we are told that this is ‘the prevailing sense’), but we may simply
understand that she is, as the OED also suggests, simply ‘a person on a journey;
a wayfarer; a traveller’. The very undistinguished nature of the novel’s general
prose style promotes the ambiguous nature of Jeanie’s description as a pilgrim;
Scott characteristically gives no clear indication what the reader should think. If
he encourages us to think that Jeanie is in some sense holy (he talks about her
‘pilgrimage’ in the introduction to Chronicles of the Canongate,25 where there can be
no ambiguity) he also encourages us to think that she is a fool.
On her way through Lincolnshire Jeanie is waylaid by villains at the behest of
Meg Murdockson, Madge’s mother. She is helpless before them; indeed, throughout
this episode she displays all the passivity usually ascribed to heroes like Waverley
and Darsie Latimer. They demand money: ‘ “We’ll have every farthing you have
got, or we will strip you to the skin, curse me”.’ The threat of stripping is shocking
and prominent — the ‘good’ villain, Frank, proposes to dispense with ‘the stripping
 Jeanie Deans and Narrative Method 139

proof ’, but his companion protests: ‘ “We promised, you know, to strip the wench
[...]”.’ When the ruffians return to her, Meg asks ‘why they did not strip her and
turn her adrift on the common’ (30.259–61). Humiliation, with a sexual component,
is what Meg ordered; her daughter was sexually humiliated by Staunton, so why
should not Jeanie be so too? She is only saved by the ‘jark’ or pass that she bears
from ‘Daddie Ratton’, the thief turned jailer whom she regarded as ‘odious’ (26.224).
Jeanie is entering the underworld that her sister has known. By vicariously sharing
Effie’s sufferings she has the chance to come to terms with ‘shame’.
Passing from the sexual menace of the ruffians, Jeanie is thrust together with
Madge, her sister’s ‘double’, and passes to a closer view of what Effie has experienced
in the danger of childbirth and its aftermath. Madge presents Jeanie with the grave
that holds the child she had by Staunton. It is associated by the narrator with the
grave in ‘The Thorn’, evoking Wordsworth’s sympathy for the unmarried mother.
Jeanie is so moved that, instead of taking the chance to escape, she chooses to stay
by Madge for the moment.
Madge leads Jeanie to the village where Staunton’s father is rector. It is Sunday,
and Madge enters the church with Jeanie in train. The tableau contrasts the two
women. Madge is ‘grotesque [...] with half-shut eyes, a prim smile upon her lips,
and a mincing motion with her hands’, a caricature of the respectability to which
Jeanie’s shame pays homage; Jeanie has ‘dishevelled hair, downcast eyes, and a face
glowing with shame’ (32.283). She is experiencing the shame she attributed to her
sister Effie.
The pertinence of Jeanie’s adventures in Lincolnshire to her earlier troubles
with Effie is clear: the behaviour of the footpads, the overpowering hatred of
Meg Murdockson, and the mad conduct of Madge all represent aspects of Effie’s
experience. Jeanie lives through a kind of dream whose meaning she does not, or
will not, recognize. The whole experience is ‘agitating’ for her, and there is a sense
of latent ‘deep’ meaning which she does not quite grasp. Scott’s narrative technique,
which allows that meaning to go without comment, leaves it to the reader whether
it is to be recovered from latency or not.
It is also unclear whether Jeanie benefits from her experience or not. When
Madge shows her her baby’s grave, Jeanie is moved, and stoops down to speak
to her, the narrator says, ‘with an effort, which, in her circumstances, might be
termed heroic’ (31.273). This version of heroism is strikingly different from that of
the Scottish lass vindicating the Union offered by Daiches, Millgate, and too many
others. Looked at in the light of Butler’s careful refusal to attribute guilt to Effie,
Jeanie’s gesture might stand for a new attitude to her sister’s lot as well as Madge’s.
The scale of Jeanie’s heroism is, however, much reduced by her inability to
understand what Madge is showing her: it has to be explained to her. Madge,
telling her story to Jeanie, at first ref lects on it in terms like those Jeanie used about
her sister: ‘ “whenever I think about mine errors, I am like to cover my lips for
shame [...]”.’ When Madge mentions her child, Jeanie manages to offend her, and
is obliged to apologize: ‘ “I am very sorry for your misfortune — ” ’ and then to
be set right by Madge, rather as she was by Effie about her supposedly ‘shameful’
death: ‘ “Sorry? What wad ye be sorry for? [...] The bairn was a blessing [...]” ’
140 Martin Dodsworth

(31.274–75). Jeanie may have been given the chance to re-think her attitude to
Effie’s situation, but, despite her ‘heroic’ gesture, she does not take it. This appears
when what is called her consequent ‘dark insight into Madge’s history’ is given:
‘She had been seduced by some prof ligate, and, to conceal her shame and promote
the advantageous match she had planned, her mother had not hesitated to destroy
the offspring of their intrigue’ (31.276–77). This is put in the terms her father
upholds. ‘Her shame’ is probably Meg’s rather than Madge’s, and so resembles the
‘shame’ Jeanie felt on Effie’s account, but it may refer to the shame that Meg, or
Jeanie, thought Madge had incurred. The ambiguity, which might soften our view
of Jeanie, is entirely consistent with Scott’s usual practice of challenging ethical
judgement whilst withholding any view of his own. Though Jeanie treats Madge
kindly, her sympathy is in some way lacking; there has been no fundamental change
in her. The necessity for such a change is not even argued in the text, but, all the
same, rises naturally from it, posing questions for the reader about the extent of his
sympathy for Jeanie who has at least shown signs of a capacity for change. Scott is
a serious novelist here because he can be taken seriously, not because he claims to
be serious in a Jamesian way.
On the way back from London Jeanie encounters Madge and her mother once
more. This time it is a single, brief episode, but it involves feelings even more intense
than before. Implicitly, Jeanie is again offered the chance to re-think the matter
of shame. As her party reaches the outskirts of Carlisle, Meg is being hanged. The
hanging is seen in silhouette and described in a strangely effective way — strangely,
that is, if you think Scott a careless writer: ‘one of the objects, launched into air,
gave unequivocal signs of mortal agony, though appearing in the distance not larger
than a spider dependant at the extremity of his invisible thread [...].’ The ‘object’ is
Meg Murdockson, as yet unidentified, and as seen through the callous eyes of Dolly
Dutton, who “‘never seed a woman hanged in a’ ma loife”.’ ‘Unequivocal’ comes
from her eagerness to be in at the kill; ‘agony’ is the death-throe that satisfies her
curiosity and the victim’s suffering to which she is indifferent, the victim being
reduced to a spider, often regarded as simply loathsome, though also recalling here
‘The spider’s touch how exquisitely fine! | Feels at each thread, and lives along
the line’, from Pope’ Essay on Man (I.217–18). The dream-like combination of
remoteness and feeling is continued when Jeanie catches a glimpse:
The sight of a female culprit in the act of undergoing the fatal punishment
from which her beloved sister had been so recently rescued, was too much, not
perhaps for her nerves, but for her mind and feeling. She turned her head to
the other side of the carriage, with a sensation of sickness, of loathing, and of
faintness. (41.360–61)
‘Female culprit’ is the sort of thing that people object to in Scott, but it is quite
justified in the distance it establishes from ‘her beloved sister’, suggesting the
leap from Jeanie’s initial censorious observation, at much the same level as Dolly
Dutton’s, to recognition of its personal relevance, so rendering her physical reaction
vividly plausible. She feels the shock in her body, just as her f leeting sympathy for
Madge was realized by her body in the ‘heroic gesture’. The parallelism, especially
as yet again it concerns Effie in her underworld relations, would seem unmistakable.
 Jeanie Deans and Narrative Method 141

Yet the narrative does not insist upon it. Furthermore, it is, to a degree, equivocal:
is Jeanie’s ‘loathing’ directed at the physical actuality of the hanging from which
she has rescued her sister, is it directed at her sister who has required that Jeanie
expose her decency to insult on her behalf, or is it directed at herself for her part
in condemning Effie, for her notion of Effie’s ‘shame’? Jeanie’s decency and the
narrator’s own reticence yet again make it difficult for the readers to decide,
whilst inviting themselves, by the strength of situation, to come to some decisive
conclusion. Meanwhile the narrative moves on, as Jeanie sees Madge set upon by
‘a parcel of savage-looking fellows’. Madge appeals to her, and, turning to Argyll’s
man, Jeanie exclaims ‘ “Save her, for God’s sake! — save her from those people!” ’
She is ‘agitated’ and thanks to her ‘earnest and urgent entreaty’ Madge is rescued
and given shelter in the workhouse (41.363). Jeanie visits her there; though Madge
turns her back on Jeanie and dies, Jeanie’s action must be regarded as humane,
though her motive in seeing Madge has been to learn something of the whereabouts
of Effie’s child. She has hardly shown any interest in the child hitherto. So this,
again may be interpreted to Jeanie’s credit.

V
Yet the narrator hardly seems interested in whether Jeanie feels ‘shame’ still. She
returns to Scotland, is reunited with her lover and her father, learns Effie’s fate and is
settled in Knocktarlitie. There is further talk of Effie’s ‘shame’, but it is not brought
into close relationship with Jeanie’s feelings, and its nature shifts from that of an
unmarried mother to that of someone married to a murderer. Effie’s transformation
into a grand lady is not very plausible, but Jeanie’s adventures on her travels were
not plausible either. Effie’s advancement symbolizes a continuing distance between
the two sisters, related to ‘experience’ and the difference between ‘good’ and ‘bad’
sexual conduct, whatever Jeanie’s feelings may be. This distance is connected with
the undercurrent of violent passion running throughout the novel. It is linked
with natural violence and with remote and primitive societies. When Porteous
receives his reprieve, the spectators utter ‘a groan, or rather a roar of indignation
and disappointed revenge, similar to that of a tyger from whom his meal has been
rent by his keeper when he was just about to devour it’ (4.35); Meg throws her knife
at Frank Levitt ‘with the vengeful dexterity of a wild Indian’ (30.261); Staunton
speaks to Jeanie ‘stretched on his couch like the Mexican monarch on his bed
of live coals’ (34.297). The effect of these Romantic comparisons is enhanced by
their incongruity in a Scots setting; they suggest depths of human nature that the
rural simplicity of life at St Leonards and Knocktarlitie is apt to deny. The Heart of
Mid-Lothian challenges the reader’s judgement of human nature, in general (are we
‘tygers’ beneath the skin?) and in particular (is Jeanie’s ‘shame’ worthy of her?), but
the questions to which it gives rise remain unresolved throughout.
Readers have always had difficulty with the last volume’s pastoral idyll of
Knocktarlitie. Critics of the Daiches persuasion tend to justify it idiosyncratically as
an illustration of the benefits of the Union, which has enabled the Duke of Argyll to
introduce improved farming methods, or they deplore its inadequacy as a comment
142 Martin Dodsworth

on Scottish history. The main problem, though, is the slackening of narrative

tension in this part of the novel, and it is hard to find compensating interest in Dolly
Dutton or Duncan Knock. The novel is only alive in this last part when it has to do
with Effie — her entirely plausible rejection of life with her father after the pardon,
the night-time encounter with her sister in the wood at Knocktarlitie, her letter,
and her eventual arrival at the Manse. This does suggest that Scott’s real interest
was in the relationship between the two sisters, and that he had to spin things out
until they could confront each other again, this time as great lady and country girl.
Their meeting does produce some sort of resolution at the end, but so qualified as
to be almost no resolution.
In the penultimate chapter, Staunton meets his death at the hands of his own son.
He does so in circumstances that recall his youthful participation in the contraband
business; he betrays his familiarity with the dangers of the Firth of Clyde, and
Butler thinks that the ‘old shattered boat’ (52.458) drawn up on the beach where
they land has to do with contraband. In fact it has brought the brigand Donacha
and his party to where they can ambush Staunton. He dies, but there is no direct
description of his death. The last chapter explains Donacha’s motives and gives
the story of Staunton’s son, the Whistler, who has, ‘there was too much reason
to believe’ (53.465), killed his father, and is therefore tied up and left in a locked
room of the Manse overnight, to be delivered to some sort of justice the next day.
In the middle of the night, however, Jeanie, who has keys to every room in the
house, gets up to visit the ‘young savage’. She finds no promise of redemption in
him, but nevertheless cuts the ropes that bind him (‘ “he is my sister’s son — my
own nephew — our f lesh and blood — and his hands and feet are yerked as tight as
cords can be drawn [...] There may be good in him yet” ’ — this, despite her earlier
ref lection that ‘the murther he had too probably committed with his own hand [...]
was in fact a parricide’ (53.466). Jeanie is unable to control ‘the young savage’ who
takes the upper hand by starting a fire and escaping, bounding through the woods
‘like a deer’.
Jeanie acknowledges the Whistler as ‘our f lesh and blood’ and defies the law
on his behalf, reversing her earlier ‘shame’ by a criminal act. Since Effie was in
effect accused of infanticide, there is symmetry in the Whistler’s being supposed
a parricide. It would seem that by her generous but criminal act Jeanie has at last
put herself on a level with her criminal sister. Effie says she has become ‘a Lie’ as
the consequence of her relationship with Staunton; now Jeanie by ‘keeping her
secret’ participates, albeit silently, in untruth. The fire, started by the Whistler as his
reply to Jeanie’s ineffectual attempt to impose conditions on his release, evidently
connects with his ‘savage’ nature and with the wayward, self-harming passions
of Madge Wildfire, not to mention the fire by means of which those tygers, the
rioters, gain access to the Tolbooth. The Whistler, Jeanie’s ‘f lesh and blood’, escapes
to America only to lead a conspiracy in which ‘his inhuman master’ is killed; he
then disappears amongst ‘the next tribe of wild Indians’.
All this should be very satisfactory as a conclusion. It almost looks as though
Jeanie’s journey to London was a pilgrimage after all, if not in the sense of a journey
undertaken in penitence (for she never thinks she did wrong in rejecting the
 Jeanie Deans and Narrative Method 143

perjury that would have saved Effie) then as a journey towards penitence in which
the sight of Meg’s death plays a crucial role. The narrative, however, does not fully
endorse this conclusion. The Whistler’s part in his father’s death is unclear: the
narrator’s statement that ‘there was too much reason to believe’ that he had killed
Staunton has already been quoted, and also the later description of ‘the murder
he had probably committed with his own hand, but in which he had at any rate
participated’. A haze hangs over the question of his criminality. The Edinburgh
editors (pp. 492–93) think that ‘too much reason to believe’, a revision, clears up
an ambiguity about the Whistler’s responsibility for his father’s death in Scott’s first
phrasing, but even the revision is consistent with the general reluctance to direct
the reader. Jeanie’s ‘compassion to a creature so young and so wretched’ may be
seen as a reversal of Jeanie’s previous insistence on ‘shame’, but this is not endorsed
by the narrator who refers to the Whistler as ‘the child of guilt and misery’ as he
is bound and imprisoned for the night. The book ends with entirely conventional
moralizing (‘the paths of virtue, though seldom those of worldly greatness, are
always those of pleasantness and peace’) which sits comfortably with the contrast
between Effie’s f light to a convent and the consolations of Roman Catholicism and
the ‘quiet happiness’ of Jeanie and her family. There is no indication that Jeanie
has undergone any process of moral enlightenment or understood her share in the
general passions and frailties of humankind.
Some readers will regard this as evidence of Scott’s own carelessness, a disregard
for the implications of his own tale. On the other hand, we may think of it rather
as the product of a narrative method that leaves the reader free to reach his own
judgement on the ‘deep, powerful, and agitating feelings’ to which the events
described in the novel give rise. May not the ‘quiet establishment’ of the Manse
at Knocktarlitie owe its quietness to the silence of Jeanie’s guilty secret as much as
to the peacefulness of blameless lives? And might not the novelist’s ability to leave
this question hovering, like so much else in The Heart of Mid-Lothian, just above
the surface of the text — might it not be a sign of the ‘serious’ artist, rather more
than anything we may glean from the book of Scott’s views of the Union and its
merits?

Notes to Chapter 14
1. Walter Scott: The Critical Heritage, ed. by John O. Hayden (London: Routledge, 1970), p. 165.
2. ‘Sir Walter Scott’, in The Spirit of the Age, in The Selected Writings of William Hazlitt, ed. by
Duncan Wu, 9 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1998), vii, 127.
3. David Daiches, ‘Scott’s Achievement as a Novelist’, in Walter Scott: Modern Judgements, ed. by D.
D. Devlin (London: Macmillan, 1968), p. 36. The essay was first published in 1951, and collected
in Daiches, Literary Essays (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1956). Similar assumptions necessarily
underlie the accounts in Avrom Fleishman, The English Historical Novel: Walter Scott to Virginia
Woolf (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971), Harry E. Shaw, The Forms of
Historical Fiction: Sir Walter Scott and his Successors (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983),
and James Kerr, Fiction against History: Scott as Storyteller (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1989).
4. The Heart of Mid-Lothian, ed. by David Hewitt and Alison Lumsden (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2004), p. 598, my italics. All quotations from the novel refer to this edition,
giving chapter and page-number. Chapter numbers observe the through-sequence, not volume-
144 Martin Dodsworth

and-chapter. Since the editors uniquely but rightly observe Scott’s original, unrealized intention
to divide Chapter 18 in two, their chapter-numbering after that point is always one ahead of
other editions.
5. Jane Millgate, Walter Scott: The Making of the Novelist (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
1984), pp. 166–67.
6. Idem, p. 162.
7. Donald Davie, The Heyday of Sir Walter Scott (London: Routledge, 1961), pp. 15–16.
8. See Hayden, p. 12. The topic is well discussed by Patricia S. Gaston, Prefacing the Waverley Prefaces
(New York: Peter Lang, 1991), e.g. pp. 7–8.
9. Ian Duncan, Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel: The Gothic, Scott, Dickens
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 149–50.
10. Letter to R. P. Gillies, 25 April 1815, Hayden, p. 86.
11. Lecture 6, ‘On the English Novelists’, in Lectures on the English Comic Writers, in The Selected
Writings of William Hazlitt, ed. by Wu, v, 116.
12. I discuss this in ‘Scott’s Prose and the Art of Fiction’, Essays in Criticism 62 (2012), 354–72.
13. Duncan, pp. 173–75, discusses this well, though I dissent from the use he makes of it.
14. Hayden, pp. 170, 168.
15. Hayden, p. 437.
16. Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel, trans. by Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (London: Merlin,
1962), p. 52.
17. Walter Scott, The Heart of Midlothian, intr. by David Daiches (New York: Holt Rinehart, 1948),
p. viii.
18. Millgate, pp. 153, 159.
19. Walter Scott, Chronicles of the Canongate, ed. by Claire Lamont (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2000), p. 5.
20. The best of these is Robert C. Gordon, Under Which King? A Study of the Scottish Waverley Novels
(Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1969).
21. Judith Wilt, Secret Leaves: The Novels of Walter Scott (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press,
1985), p. 134.
22. See The Heart of Mid-Lothian, ed. cit. p. 253,
23. Hazlitt, The Spirit of the Age, ed. cit. vii, 128. The phrase is applied generally to Scott’s novels.
24. Duncan, p. 159.
25. Ed. cit. p. 5.
 — 15 —

Abjection and the

Nineteenth-Century Novel:
When is a Human Not a Human?
Isobel Armstrong

‘Two days are passed. It is a summer evening; the coachman has set me down at
a place called Whitcross; he could take me no farther for the sum I had given,
and I was not possessed of another shilling in the world. The coach is a mile
off by this time; I am alone. At this moment I discover that I forgot to take my
parcel out of the pocket of the coach, where I had placed it for safety; there it
remains, there it must remain; and now, I am absolutely destitute.’1
I am quoting from the start of the astonishing twenty-eighth chapter of Jane Eyre
(1847). Expressed in the present tense over the first two paragraphs — the only
time this mode is used in the text — the chapter charts three days of destitution
before Jane finds the Rivers family. It is a narrative shock, a peripeteia or generic
overturning and reversal after the dreamwork narrative of Thornfield, where so
many crises occur at the time of sleep — the fire in Rochester’s bedroom, the
attack on Mason, the bridal veil episode. ‘There are great moors behind and on
each hand of me; [...] I see no passengers on these roads; [...] not a tie holds me to
human society’ (p. 371).
The chapter tends to be elided as the bridge between one episode and another,
the move from Thornfield to Marsh House, from Rochester to St John, from
financial and sexual exploitation of the West Indies to missionary exploitation in
East India. (That’s how it is seen in the recent film.) But I suggest that Chapter 28 is
crucial — not only in its portrayal of the destitution and dispossession of the social
outcast, its material and existential condition — but because it makes a sustained
critique of conditions where some subjects are defined as not fully human. In other
words, the treatment of dereliction, starvation and beggary in the novel rescues the
lost and the defeated from history, as Paul Ricoeur so finely put it when he wrote
of ‘the necessity to save the history of the defeated and the lost’.2 But this chapter
also asks ontological questions about abjection. Moreover, this chapter precipitated
recurrent narratives of destitution in later novels that extended its implications. I
think such narratives have more to say politically than narratives of emancipation.
To return to Chapter 28: at first ‘objectless and lost (p. 371)’, Jane accepts as her
‘relative’ ‘the universal mother, Nature’ (p. 372), sleeps on the moors, and feels God’s
presence in ‘the unclouded night sky, where His worlds wheel their silent course’
146 Isobel Armstrong

(p. 373). The second day ‘Want came to me’ (p. 373); mesmerized, she watches a
lizard and a bee, ‘But I was a human being, and had a human being’s wants’ (p.
374). Approaching a village she enters a bread shop but dare not beg, wanders to
houses and asks for work — ‘the white door closed’ (p. 376) — ‘I rambled round the
hamlet, going sometimes to a little distance and retuning again [...] I [...] sat down
under a hedge’ (p. 376): the cycle repeats itself: ‘ I drew near houses; I left them,
and came back again [...] instinct kept me roaming round abodes where there was a
chance of food [...] I thus wandered like a lost and starving dog’ (p. 377). Eventually,
desperate, she tries to exchange her scarf and gloves — the mark of a lady — for
bread from the bread shop woman, and fails. Compulsively leaving and returning
to the village, longing for and yet dreading human contact — because it evokes
‘suspicion’, ‘distrust’, and the ‘shame’ of rejection, this movement from and to the
human and social is the rhythm of the chapter, the psychic rhythm of the outcast.
After the second night in a wood soaked by rain and disturbed by passers-by she
begs a little girl for the cold porridge being thrown to a pig trough — ‘ “Mother!
[...] there is a woman wants me to give her these porridge” [...] “give it her if
she’s a beggar. T’ pig doesn’t want it” ’ (p. 379). Reduced to animal status she is
handed it without a word, exiled from language, beyond the pale even of pigs: ‘I
devoured it ravenously’ (p. 379). (The porridge is a poignant comment on the earlier
Lowood school episode, when even at their hungriest the girls could not eat burned
porridge.) Jane is only just saved from death by starvation and exposure.
Finally rescued, Jane says to Diana: ‘If I were a masterless and stray dog, I know
that you would not turn me from your hearth tonight’ (p. 388). ‘Mine enemy’s dog,
though he had bit me, should have stood | That night against my fire’ (King Lear,
iv. 6. 30–31). This is Cordelia, on the terrible exposure of Lear in the storm, and
through subtle verbal convergences — ‘heath’, ‘pelt’, for example — Lear is present
in this chapter. However, Lear is a highly problematic text in this instance. Lear
has problems with what makes us fully human. Lear offers a deficit model of the
human: ‘Thou art the thing itself ’ (iii. 4. 100). Edgar as ‘unaccommodated man’
falls out of the category of the human into that of ‘thing’. Like the ‘poor naked
wretches’ (iii. 4. 28) that Lear speaks of earlier, Edgar is a ‘poor, bare, forked animal’
(iii. 4. 100–02; my emphasis). For such beings their essence is lack. Forced back into
nature, not endowed with human status, they can belong to human culture only by
fiat of the entitled. They invite arbitrary treatment, but, since lack is their essence,
their condition of depletion can never be assuaged except by being co-opted into
humanity by the sovereign. There is another complementary model of the human
in the play that is in fact just as depleting, though on the face of it this model,
‘merit’, a word Lear uses in his very first speech, looks more encouraging (i. 1. 48).
‘I shall study deserving’ (i. 1. 30), the illegitimate Edmund says to his father earlier,
and this is what Lear’s legitimate daughters are also expected to do. You can earn
human worth. You are fully human when you have shown that you deserve to
be. So the allusions to Lear here bring a problem with them. For instance, when
Jane approaches the parsonage she believes that the clergyman’s duty of aid gives
her ‘something like a right to seek counsel here’ (p. 377), that she is in some sense
deserving. ‘Right’, a natural right? A political right? How you think about this
 Abjection and the Nineteenth-Century Novel 147

has repercussions right across the novel. A number of critics have approached the
nineteenth-century novel through the emergence of human rights, but this is still
a problematical area in Brontë’s novel.3
This is terrain recently explored by Giorgio Agamben in the inf luential
Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1995, trans. 1998).4 In what he terms a
‘biopolitics’ (p. 3) he describes a violent modernity in which sovereign power and
‘bare life’ exist in a power relation. Sovereign power, that is, can exercise the ‘state
of exception’ by placing ‘homo sacer’ or bare life outside the boundary of the law
so that no form of legal entitlement or juridical process belongs to it. Not only
this, ‘homo sacer’ is outside both human and divine law. Bare life is the ‘originary
political element’ (p. 88), he says. Despite the sophisticated philological history, a
kind of philological determinism, with which Agamben introduces the key phrase
of his totalitarian vision, he exploits the emotive associations of ‘bare life’ without
seeming to recognize this. Both the English translation and the Italian phrase, ‘vita
nuda’, covertly exploit the hidden semantics of this term — bare, stripped, naked,
without. The Italian phrase is closer to the meaning of essential life than its English
translation, but the powerful connotation of being without over-rides this. That
is to say, the subject of bare life is not human until proven otherwise. Humanity
requires a supplement of humanity in order to be fully human.
The subject of bare life, ‘sacred’ by the very fact of its outcast status, can be killed
but not sacrificed: the sacrificial subject is within the bounds of the law, tradition,
form, ceremony, ritual and the forms that denote social inclusion; ‘homo sacer’,
on the contrary, is not. Sacred life ‘can be killed by anyone without committing
homicide, but never submitted to sanctioned forms of execution’ (p. 103). Agamben
has in his sights the plight of the Jews in Nazi Germany and the twentieth-century
violence and totalitarianism of the concentration camp, but his observations are
relevant beyond the twentieth century.
In an interesting moment, the only time that gender features in his book,
Agamben describes the Roman law, the ius patrium that gives the father the right of
magistracy to kill his sons, as the model of sovereignty: yet there is a large ‘but’ here:
the father’s power should not be confused with the power to kill, which lies within the
competence of the father or the husband who catches his wife or daughter in the act of
adultery (p. 88, my emphasis)
It seems that in this purely domestic context women belong to a sphere of disposability
that does not even endow them with the ‘sacred’ aura of bare life. The killing of
a wife or daughter is an unimportant matter of personal choice. Here Agamben
quite f lagrantly allows so-called ‘honour killing’ a social legitimacy. There seem to
be two kinds of irreducible biopolitics, one for men and one for women, a gender
distinction that Agamben seems unaware he has made. In this reading, in which
the subject of bare life is not human until proved otherwise, women are doubly
deprived of humanity, since they even fall outside the status of the bare life, which
is itself outside the human. Since it is the very power of sovereignty to enable the
supposition of bare life to pass over into fact by fiat in Agamben’s paradigm, this
gender issue does not trouble him. But what he presents as an analysis of the modern
condition often emerges as an acceptance of it.
148 Isobel Armstrong

It is useful to think about Agamben in relation to the forms of culturally made

abjection in the nineteenth-century novel. What is interesting is that the novel
challenges the biopolitics of bare life by demonstrating its fallacy as a category.
The novel resists ‘homo sacer’ — and the ‘sacred’ woman. From birth we are fully
human, we do not have to be endowed with human faculties to make us so. But the
novel is conscious of the need to refute the idea of ‘bare life’, that excludes persons,
or groups, from the category of the fully human. ‘Bare life’ for the nineteenth-
century novel is no metaphysical state: it is what at any given historical moment
is positioned as outside the accepted structures and (almost invariably) juridical
procedures of civil society — what Agamben calls the state of exception — and
consequently justifies a spectrum of treatment released from the obligations of
ethics, from violence and persecution to the condescension that erases subjecthood
from particular categories of person.
Persons at the margins of the social exhibit the limit case of a society’s
understanding of the human, and the nature of their abjection indicates what has
to change to transform their rejection. This is particularly the case with women
who bear illegitimate children or who are illegitimate. Jane Eyre’s intertextual
inf luence after its publication in 1847 is particularly strong here. In the time I have
left I will look at episodes in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth (1853), Wilkie Collins’s No
Name (1862) and George Moore’s Esther Waters (1894) to show this. Remember
that though illegitimacy does not feature in Jane’s experience it does in her dreams
before her wedding night. ‘I was burdened with the charge of a little child’; in the
‘ruin’ of Thornfield ‘the wall crumbled; I was shaken; the child rolled from my
knee, I lost my balance, and fell’ (p. 326). Ruin, fall, the dream emblematizes the
fallen woman.
There is a reprise of Jane Eyre’s archetypal moment of dereliction when the
teenage Ruth, in despair after losing sight of the coach in which Bellingham’s
mother hastens her lover away, turns back, utterly deserted and destitute. She is
a figure of dispossession, and Gaskell explores not only the psychology of the
aban­doned person but the material and social effects of abandonment. From the
moment of Ruth’s strange, traumatized myopia that perceives ‘a bright green beetle
meandering’ over thyme on the heath, parallel to Jane Eyre’s fascination with bees
on the heath, to her humiliated retreat from people on the road, and the discovery
of her hiding place by a crowd of children — ‘Gi me a halfpenny’ — Ruth is
outside the social order.5 In Wales, she is also outside language. The refusal of
communication with the abject is a feature of both Jane Eyre and Ruth. There are
hints of Wordsworth’s poem, ‘The Thorn’ (she sat down by the ‘roots of an old
hawthorn tree’ (p. 80)), and of the outcast mother driven mad by suffering. But
the strongest allusion is to Jane Eyre and to the destitution of Jane after her escape
from Thornfield. The mesmerized focus on small insects is a particularly close
convergence. (Gaskell follows some of the motifs of that novel, from Ruth’s lonely
gazing from the window of her employer’s house as an apprentice to the loss of a
supportive consumptive friend.)
Ruth reclaims her personhood through her child — ‘she spoke as if she had a
right to have a baby’ (p. 99), the sister of Benson, who rescues Ruth, exclaims. And
 Abjection and the Nineteenth-Century Novel 149

she is amazed to hear her brother speaking of an illegitimate child as a blessing. But
vicarious life through the child is not the answer. The answer is full social inclusion.
In her seaside interview with the returned Bellingham, now Donne, whose offer
of marriage she rejects, Ruth places herself knowingly and defiantly at the limits of
the social order: a row of black posts used for fishermen’s nets demarcate the land
from the sea; ‘the black posts there were all that spoke of men’s work or labour’ in
the seascape, ‘the eternal moan [...] made since the world began’ (p. 243). Yet though
she is at the limits of the societal boundary, she is not in fact beyond the pale. As
she and Bellingham/Donne speak the receding tide exposes the fishermen’s nets
attached to the posts (p. 247), not only reminding us of the Biblical fishers of men, a
crucially public and collective endeavour of Christian democracy, but pushing back
the boundary of land and sea. The limits of the terrain she occupies are literally
extended as she speaks, as if expanding the boundaries of Ruth’s world.
To be fully human is to belong to a collective life that recognizes that humanity.
Bradshaw and the community of the town exercise ruthless ‘sovereign’ power over
both Ruth and the Benson family by deeming them outside ethical life, incapable
of it, and depriving them of the means to live. It is only when one’s humanity is
publicly recognized by the social order that it truly exists. (We have not the power
to make our humanity alone: Ruth’s ethical accusation against Bellingham/Donne
is not ‘he seduced me’ but ‘he left me’ — alone.)
There is another reprise of Brontë in Collins’s novel. In No Name, Magdelan and
her sister are deprived of legal identity, put beyond the pale of the human, by the
legal fiction of their illegitimacy when it becomes clear their parents at their death
were not married. Collins adopts the current legal formulation of illegitimacy:
‘Mr Vanstone’s daughters are nobody’s children.’6 They ‘fall’ traumatically from
legitimacy to illegitimacy and have no legal existence. The law creates the state
of exception aided by social convention. How far is one’s humanity a creation of
the law? More extreme than Brontë, the self reduced to non-being is alienated not
only from society but from nature. The ‘Earth’, Magdelan once declared (echoing
Jane), was the only ‘Mother’ that sanctioned her illegitimacy (p. 327). But later the
‘godlike joy’ of the sea (p. 478) and ‘the pitiless happiness of the birds’ (p. 649),
confirm her alienation. ‘I have lost all care for myself ’; ‘Have I any right to call
myself a woman?’ (p. 327). Sitting at the margin of sea and land at Aldeburgh, (an
echo of Ruth) we see the undoing of the psyche. Unsexed and abandoned, picking
handfuls of grass mechanically as she speaks, Magdelan says in despair: ‘I am no
more interested in myself than I am in these handfuls of grass’ (p. 327).
Collins takes Magdelan not toward starvation and death but the collapse of her
interiority and possible suicide. In her frantic attempts to climb back into legitimacy,
Magdelan parodies in a vaudeville-like way the forms of bourgeois morality with
all the resources of the sensation novel. The project is psychically exhausting.
Effectively she is tearing up the roots of the self as she tears up the grass. Collins
switches from sensation novel strategies to the genre of psychological realism to
explore the progressive evacuation of self and hollowing out of identity that attends
Magdelan’s succession of moves into her position as social outcast. Brilliantly,
Collins exploits the very genre that explores the existential depth and fullness of
150 Isobel Armstrong

the self, the genre that puts identity at the centre of its concerns, to demonstrate the
demolition of identity that the erasure of the name ensures. The realist conventions
that are used to portray the full subject’s psyche are those that also portray its
dissolution here, and, as a result, are seen as conventions, not the ‘natural’ form of
narrative exposition. The sceptical question is: how far do social conventions create
our humanness? The question goes wider than the need to transform women’s legal
status. Another unthinkable question is forced upon the text by Magdelan’s sudden
illegitimacy and loss of fortune. Is it possible to sever identity from ownership of
things and money?
‘[A]ll that was human crushed out of her.’7 Esther’s life, supporting her illegitimate
son, is one of unremitting privation and penury. She lives in a permanent state of
exception and exclusion, created by the (mainly female) employers’ disregard for her
humanity. Moore sees the terrible logic: her gruelling work and brutalized body
keep in place the powerful, who in turn keep poverty in place. Social class and
money, aided by law, create the state of exception.
Moore reaches back to the tradition that begins with Brontë in exploring
the penury that dehumanizes the social outcast and sets them outside human
communication. Almost drained of life by exhaustion, Esther spends a night on the
Thames embankment with her baby in the company of a vagrant before setting out
for the Lambeth Workhouse. The marginal status represented by the sea for Ruth
and Magdelan is replaced by the city river — the reprise of Brontë’s night sky is
transposed to the urban scene by moonlight: ‘Her thoughts melted away. [...] A full
moon f loated high up in the sky, and the city was no more than a faint shadow on
the glassy stillness of the night’ (p. 142). Moore’s insight divines that when physical
life seems unreal to the self, perception becomes correspondingly dematerialized. A
kind of brutal transcendence is the result: ‘she longed to f loat away with the moon
out of sight of this world. Her baby grew heavy in her arms’ — and drew her back
to the material world (p. 143).
Moore insists that fin-de-siècle prosperity is founded on brute exploitation of the
body. The epitome of this is the wet-nurse, whose humanness is obliterated by the
employer. ‘It’s a life for a life’, Esther says to the upper-class woman who virtually
imprisons her as wet-nurse, refusing to allow her to go to her own sick child. She
replies:
‘He’ll only be a drag on you. You’ll never be able to bring him up, poor little
bastard child’.
‘It is wicked of you to speak like that ma’am [...]. It is none of the child’s
fault if he hasn’t got a father [...]. I see it all now; I have been thinking it out [...]
what it comes to is this, that fine folks like you pays the money and Mrs Spires
[a baby farmer] and her like get rid of the poor little things. Change the milk
a few times, a little neglect, and the poor servant-girl is spared the trouble of
bringing up her baby and can make a handsome child of the rich woman’s little
starveling.’ (p. 134)
‘I dare say you will be cruel enough to do that’, she retorts to Mrs Rivers, when told
her box will be thrown into the street. ‘I have been thinking it out’: Esther echoes
Ruth’s ‘I think once more’ to Bellingham (p. 247).
 Abjection and the Nineteenth-Century Novel 151

Thinking is not empowerment but it is the way to begin retrieving humanness.

What makes us fully human is one of the deep preoccupations of the nineteenth-
century novel. Inclusion in the category of the human is one of the underlying
principles of democracy. It is in the novel’s treatment of the dispossessed that one
finds the beginning of an inquiry into democratic possibility.
I end with a final note on form, for the novel is not simply concerned with
exploring principles but explores its concerns through the poetics of form. What in
the Poetics Aristotle called peripeteia, or reversal, a narrative upending, is a common
feature of these texts. What you expect to happen does not happen, often the very
opposite occurs. Ruth’s exposure as illegitimate mother, Magdelan’s turn from
legitimacy to illegitimacy, Esther’s unexpected marriage — such narrative jolts and
lacunae within Moore’s text have the effect of peripeteia. Reversal or upending
of this kind is not just a mechanical ploy derived from the sensation novel, or, as
Ricoeur puts it, a ‘coup de théâtre’.8 Reversal asks the reader to revalue a situation,
by entirely upending expectations. In these texts we revalue our expectations about
what is fully human.

This paper was delivered at the Institute of English Studies Brontë Conference, London,
5 November 2011.

Notes to Chapter 15
1. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (1847), ed. by Stevie Davies (London: Penguin, 2006), p. 371.
2. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, trans. by Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer, 3 vols
(Chicago, IL, and London: University of Chicago Press), i, 75.
3. See, for example, Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York and London: W. W.
Norton, 2007); Joseph R. Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and
International Law (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007). Thanks to Jan-Melissa Schramm
for these references.
4. Giorgio Agamben, Home Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. by Daniel Heller-Roazen
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).
5. Elizabeth Gaskell, Ruth, ed. by Angus Easson (London: Penguin Books, 1997), pp. 80–81.
6. Wilkie Collins, No Name, ed. by Virginia Blain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986, reissue,
2008), p. 132.
7. George Moore, Esther Waters, ed. by Hilary Laurie (London: J. M. Dent; North Clarendon, VT:
Charles E. Tuttle, 1991), p. 147.
8. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, i, 43.
 — 16 —

The Image of Childhood in

George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss
and Silas Marner
Alain Jumeau

George Eliot seems to be fascinated by childhood, and the subject would certainly
deserve a full-length critical study. Children are everywhere in her novels — more
or less, depending on which one is considered. They play important roles in her
early novels, until 1861 — in Scenes of Clerical Life, Adam Bede, and chief ly in The
Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner. In her late novels, one can still find children, like
the remarkable young Cohens in Daniel Deronda, for instance, but they tend to be
given the status of minor characters or mere utility actors. Hence the interest of
returning to the earlier part of her career as a novelist, and particularly to The Mill
on the Floss (1860) and Silas Marner (1861), two novels in which she endeavours to
give us an original and complex image of childhood.
We should start by revisiting the views of Peter Coveney in his classic 1967
study, The Image of Childhood, which is still considered a landmark ref lection on
the question. Although I agree with this critic on many points — particularly on
the way Rousseau and the Romantics pioneered a new approach to the life and
sensitivity of children, which had a great inf luence on George Eliot — I cannot
really follow him when he accuses her of maudlin sentimentality in her treatment
of children in The Mill on the Floss, which indeed seems to me one of her great
achievements. However I am willing to consider whether she reaches the same
heights in Silas Marner, and whether her image of childhood is as rich and complex
there as in her previous novel.

The Inf luence of Rousseau and Wordsworth

In his introduction, Coveney reminds us that children have always played a part in
literature, but that a better awareness of their life and sensitivity began to emerge
in the late eighteenth century. It was then that the child began to be celebrated,
as people started to believe — contrary to the teaching of the Christian doctrine
of original sin, but in accordance with Rousseau’s ideas — that children were
innocent, because they were closer to Nature:
The concept of the child’s nature, which informed the work of Blake, Words­
worth and Dickens, was of original innocence. Stemming most forcefully from
Rousseau, and in contradiction to the long Christian tradition of original sin,
 The Image of Childhood in George Eliot 153

it was this which gave the weight and edge to the general commentary of these
authors as they expressed it through the symbol of the innocent child.1
Blake’s inf luence on George Eliot, if there is any, cannot be easily pinpointed.
Wordsworth’s, however, cannot be doubted. It is often perceptible and Gordon
Haight, Eliot’s biographer, has shown us that this romantic poet remained one of
her spiritual companions, as it were, throughout her life.2 We can identify two
relevant quotations from Wordsworth in the two novels which are being considered
here: in The Mill on the Floss, the town of St Ogg’s is described as ‘a town “familiar
with forgotten years” ’,3 which is clearly a reference to The Excursion (I, 276); as
for Silas Marner, one may venture to say that the whole novel is placed under the
inf luence of Wordsworth, thanks to the epigraph borrowed from Michael, to which
we shall return later.
In her correspondence with her publisher, John Blackwood, about Silas Marner,
George Eliot even wondered whether her rather sombre narrative might interest
someone, now that Wordsworth was dead.4 She had, indeed, adopted two ideas
that were extremely dear to the great Romantic poet. To her, childhood was a vital
period in which the seeds that were to grow into a mature personality were being
sown. This is the idea associated with the memorable phrase from The Prelude:
The child is father to the man,
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.
George Eliot shared with Wordsworth this belief in the ‘natural piety’ of the child.
She too was aware that the education of sensitivity — hence of the moral sense —
begins with childhood, when the child is in close contact with nature, and that it
is associated with, and rooted in, particular places which, however common they
may seem, become forever sacred to a human being:
The wood I walk in on this mild May day, with the young yellow-brown
foliage of the oaks between me and the blue sky, the white star-f lowers and
the blue-eyed speedwell and the ground ivy at my feet — what grove of tropic
palms, what strange ferns or splendid broad-petalled blossoms, could ever thrill
such deep and delicate fibres within me as this home-scene? These familiar
f lowers, these well-remembered bird-notes, this sky, with its fitful brightness,
these furrowed and grassy fields, each with a sort of personality given to it
by the capricious hedgerows — such things as these are the mother tongue
of our imagination, the language that is laden with all the subtle inextricable
associations the f leeting hours of our childhood left behind them. Our delight
in the sunshine on the deep-bladed grass today, might be no more than the faint
perception of wearied souls, if it were not for the sunshine and the grass in the
far-off years which still live in us, and transform our perception into love. (MF
I, 5, 41–42)
Coveney also reminds us of Rousseau’s inf luence on George Eliot in the field of
education — an inf luence that may not be immediately perceptible, but remains
decisive: ‘His primary demand was, and it is perhaps difficult for us to see it as quite
the revolutionary idea it was, that the child is important in himself, and not as a
diminutive adult’.5
154 Alain Jumeau

In his Preface to Émile, his treatise on children’s education, Rousseau points out
that even the best educators can easily be misled as to the real nature of the child:
‘Les plus sages s’attachent à ce qu’il importe aux hommes de savoir, sans considérer
ce que les enfants sont en état d’apprendre. Ils cherchent toujours l’homme dans
l’enfant, sans penser à ce qu’il est avant que d’être homme.’6 Perhaps one should
bear in mind Rousseau’s remark, whose relevance has hardly been mentioned by
the critics, when reading Book II of The Mill on the Floss, entitled ‘School-Time’,
in which the novelist severely criticizes the totally inadequate education received
by Tom Tulliver. His teacher, the Rev. Stelling, tries to cram the elements of Latin
and Euclid into him — because these are the foundations of the educational system
he has gone through himself, and he cannot imagine any other form of teaching —
without considering the boy’s practical sense and turning it to good account:
Tom had never found any difficulty in discerning a pointer from a setter, when
once he had been told the distinction, and his perceptive powers were not at
all deficient. I fancy they were quite as strong as those of the Rev. Mr Stelling;
for Tom could predict with accuracy what number of horses were cantering
behind him, he could throw a stone right into the centre of a given ripple,
he could guess to a fraction how many lengths of his stick it would take to
reach across the playground, and could draw almost perfect squares on his slate
without any measurement. But Mr Stelling took no note of these things [...].
(MF II, 1, 139)
Moreover, Eliot’s criticism bears on a system which teaches only boys, although
they may not be too keen to benefit from it, while girls, who may be eager for
learning, are debarred from it, because their intelligence is supposed to be quick but
shallow, as the Rev. Stelling declares rather pompously (MF II, 1, 150). Her stricture
may also be aimed at Rousseau. Although he is often credited with being one of the
first educationists to advocate a similar education for boys and girls, he was ready
to admit, in fact, that girls should first be given a special training for their future
domestic tasks, as the reader realizes when he takes into account the education
devised for young Sophie, who is going to be Émile’s female companion for life.

The Complex and Original Image of Childhood in The Mill on the Floss
Coveney’s remarks on George Eliot’s place within the general ideological movement
originating in the eighteenth century that sought to re-evaluate the part assigned to
children in society and literature cannot be disputed, for they are well documented
and convincingly argued. But difficulties arise when Coveney considers The Mill on
the Floss with preconceived ideas. Like many other critics, he regards the novel as
partly autobiographical, particularly in the first volume dealing with the childhood
of the young Tullivers and the close relationship that Maggie has with her father,
and her brother Tom. There he identifies signs of weakness on the part of the
novelist, who is taken to sentimentalize her own life and fall into self-pity when
writing the history of Maggie:
If Dickens’s self-involvement with his own childhood led to his sentimentalizing
of the romantic image, the same factor led George Eliot into comparable
 The Image of Childhood in George Eliot 155

sentimentality. The children of The Mill on the Floss are as important to the
development of the Victorian world-picture of the child as Little Nell, Jo
and David Copperfield. Hers is another case of the weakness becoming an
unfortunate legacy. Her failure fully to control the subjective interests which
she brought to her fiction until after Silas Marner moulded the children of her
earlier novels.7
The question here is not to determine to what extent this idea of sentimentality
may be justified in the case of Dickens, but to realize that, as far as George Eliot
is concerned, it is not justified at all. Coveney seems to forget that The Mill on the
Floss is not primarily a confession but a work of fiction, whose characters may have
similarities with real people, but remain creations of the novelist’s imagination —
creations which she tries to keep at a distance and to evaluate with as much lucidity
as she can muster.
He is right to point out the recurrence of such exclamations as ‘Poor Maggie!’ or
‘Poor little Maggie!’, but he should also take into account that the novelist distances
herself from her main character through humour and irony. For instance, during
the episode of the dead rabbits, Maggie sobs and weeps, because she finds that Tom
is cruel to her, but the narrator, far from feeling excessive pity for her, points out
ironically that her character seems to enjoy her sorrow: “‘O, he is cruel!” Maggie
sobbed aloud, finding a wretched pleasure in the hollow resonance that came through
the long empty space of the attic’ (MF I, 5, 37; my italics).
Again, when Maggie rashly cuts her own hair in an act of defiance, she is laughed
at by Tom, who compares her to an idiot — a form of derision which is close to
the mock-heroic treatment of the scene by the narrator: ‘What could she do but
sob? She sat as helpless and despairing among her black locks as Ajax among the
slaughtered sheep’ (MF I, 7, 65).
Then, when Maggie f lees to the gypsies, she receives the same treatment at the
hands of the narrator. She imagines that in their world, she will be better considered
and respected, she will be able to impress them by the extent of her knowledge,
and they will choose her as their queen, but her naivety is clearly emphasized.
And her miserable return home, far from arousing pity, inspires the same mock-
heroic comments: ‘Not Leonore, in that preternatural midnight excursion with her
phantom lover, was more terrified than poor Maggie in this entirely natural ride
on a short-paced donkey, with a gypsy behind her, who considered that he was
earning half-a-crown’ (MF I, 11, 113–14). In fact, this ironical ‘poor Maggie’ seems
to ban all forms of sentimentality and rather to signal comedy, in order to reinforce
the realistic code.
Again, for the sake of realism, George Eliot seems to distance herself from her two
models in this respect, Rousseau and Wordsworth, so as to show that childhood is
far from being the time of innocence. She may not be ready to assert, a few decades
before Freud, that the child is a ‘polymorphous pervert’, but she clearly describes
Maggie’s childish behaviour as devilish. Not only is the little girl fascinated by the
picture of the devil she finds in two of her favourite books, The History of the Devil
by Defoe, and The Pilgrim’s Progress by Bunyan, but in some cases, she seems to be
literally possessed by the devil, or rather by the seven little devils of the Gospel,
156 Alain Jumeau

when she wilfully destroys Tom’s card-castles, or maliciously pushes her nice little
cousin Lucy into the cow-trodden mud, because she is jealous of the attention she
receives from her brother Tom (MF I, 9, 94 ; I, 10, 98).
However, because she aims at psychological realism and is wary of sentimentality,
George Eliot is perhaps the first novelist to take quite seriously not only the joys of
childhood (which Rousseau and Wordsworth had done before her), but its sorrows
and anguish: ‘These bitter sorrows of childhood! when sorrow is all new and
strange, when hope has not yet got wings to f ly beyond the days and weeks, and
the space from summer to summer seems measureless’ (MF I, 5, 37). She realizes that
the miseries of children are all the more unbearable, since children have a different
experience of time and cannot, like adults, imagine a more comforting future, as
she puts it two chapters later: ‘Surely if we could recall that early bitterness, and the
dim guesses, the strangely perspectiveless conception of life that gave the bitterness
its intensity, we should not pooh-pooh the griefs of our children’ (MF I, 7, 66).
This complex image of childhood — where sentimentality is always distanced
and controlled, where the notion of innocence is challenged and subverted by the
description of what is devilish in children, and the early sorrows of children are
taken seriously with a sympathy that is always tender without being maudlin —
may well account for the extraordinary fascination the novel was to have, half a
century later, on Marcel Proust, who confessed, in a letter to his friend Robert
de Billy written in 1910, that he was unable to read two pages of it without being
moved to tears.8

Towards a Less Complex Image in Silas Marner?

Compared with The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner seems to be less concerned with
giving a complex image of childhood. In this short novel, which consists of twenty-
one chapters followed by a conclusion, the reader has to wait until Chapter 12 (more
than halfway through) to be acquainted with young Eppie, a toddler of two, who
steps into Silas’s cottage. Before this crucial episode, there is that of the visit to Silas
of Dolly Winthrop, accompanied by her little boy Aaron, the other child of the
plot. And afterwards, we have a few scenes taken from Eppie’s childhood. But when
the second part of the novel begins, in Chapter 16, there is a clear time-gap and we
have left the world of childhood, since Eppie is now a charming girl of eighteen.
In fact the novel is centred, not so much on Eppie’s childhood, as on Silas’s story
— how he was betrayed by his friend, which brought about his exile, his alienation,
his gold fetishism, the loss of his gold and then his gradual redemption, thanks to
Eppie’s miraculous presence in his cottage, his decision to bring her up as his own
child, and his final integration into the Raveloe community.
In this story, Eppie does not receive the kind of treatment given to Maggie in
The Mill on the Floss. The psychological description of Eppie as a child remains
somewhat sketchy, for not only does she come late into the plot, but her character as
a child seems purely functional. She is simply the instrument of Silas’s redemption.
To Silas, she comes to embody hope and the various links connecting him with
the community of his fellow men, in keeping with the message delivered by the
epigraph borrowed from Wordsworth:
 The Image of Childhood in George Eliot 157

A child, more than all other gifts

That earth can offer to declining man,
Brings hope with it, and forward-looking thoughts.
In the secularized world in which George Eliot lives, and in the anthropological
perspective inspired by Feuerbach that she has adopted, this young child who
achieves the redemption of the dehumanized weaver plays a part that almost equates
her with the angels mentioned in the Bible or in Bunyan:
In old days there were angels who came and took men by the hand and led them
away from the city of destruction. We see no white-winged angels now. But yet
men are led away from threatening destruction: a hand is put into theirs, which
leads them forth gently towards a calm and bright land, so that they look no
more backward; and the hand may be a little child’s.9
Seeing the child as an angel is a clear invitation to read this work as a romance, or
perhaps a moral fable, in which the realistic code does not completely disappear, but
recedes into the background. In this way, the image of the child loses part of the
originality and complexity it had in The Mill on the Floss.
And yet, there are still moments of great inspiration, where all the attention
to childhood which George Eliot can muster comes to the fore again, like the
presentation of little Aaron Winthrop, ‘an apple-cheeked youngster of seven’ (SM
10, 134). The young boy is very shy and terribly impressed when he finds himself
for the first time in the cottage of Silas Marner, who has the reputation of being
something halfway between a witch-doctor and a madman in the village; but he
is eventually reassured by the presence of his mother in the cottage, he is pacified
when Silas gives him cakes, and even f lattered in his pride when the old man asks
him to sing a Christmas carol.
The first description of Eppie is less convincing. The novelist does not seem to
have a great personal experience of toddlers. Because she has no children of her own,
and also perhaps because she has not watched them closely enough, she describes the
little girl of two (SM 14, 178) as if she were still a one-year-old baby:
[...] and the little one, rising on its legs, toddled through the snow, the old grimy
shawl in which it was wrapped trailing behind it, and the queer little bonnet
dangling at its back — toddled on to the open door of Silas Marner’s cottage,
and right up to the warm hearth, where there was a bright fire of logs and
sticks, which had thoroughly warmed the old sack (Silas’s greatcoat) spread out
on the bricks to dry. The little one, accustomed to be left to itself for long hours
without notice from its mother, squatted down on the sack, and spread its tiny
hands towards the blaze, in perfect contentment, gurgling and making many
inarticulate communications to the cheerful fire, like a new-hatched gosling
beginning to find itself comfortable. But presently the warmth had a lulling
effect, and the little golden head sank down on the old sack, and the blue eyes
were veiled by their delicate half-transparent lids. (SM 12, 165–66)
The diminutive style used here (‘the little one’, ‘little bonnet’, ‘toddled through’,
‘toddled on’, “its tiny hands’, ‘the little golden head’, ‘their delicate half-transparent
lids’), and the comparison of the inarticulate child with a little animal (‘gurgling
and making inarticulate communications [...] like a new-hatched gosling’) [italics mine
158 Alain Jumeau

throughout] put the text in a state of instability, bordering on sentimentality. This

instability is increased when the novelist ventures to reproduce baby talk, as Dolly
teaches Silas how to give the child a bath:
This was the introduction to a great ceremony with soap and water, from which
baby came out in new beauty, and sat on Dolly’s knee, handling her toes and
chuckling and patting her palms together with an air of having made several
discoveries about herself, which she communicated by alternate sounds of ‘gug-
gug-gug’, and ‘mammy’. The ‘mammy’ was not a cry of need or uneasiness:
Baby had been used to utter it without expecting either tender sound or touch
to follow. (SM 14, 179)
Fortunately, this occasional lapse into sentimentality is partly compensated later on
by the sound, appropriate distance of humour, describing the malice of the child
when she is three years old. Silas believes that he is punishing her by locking her in
the coal-hole after one of her pranks, but Eppie seems to enjoy the experience, and
returns to the dark place of her own free will, just for the fun of it, thus dirtying
herself completely: ‘He turned round again, and was going to place her in her little
chair near the loom, when she peeped out at him with black face and hands again,
and said, “Eppie in de toal-hole!” ’ (SM 14, 188).

Conclusion
One can see that in Silas Marner the contraction of the narrative and its kinship
with the romance are not enough to affect the originality of the image of childhood
in George Eliot, although it is necessary to return to The Mill on the Floss to have a
more complex and subtle image, which can still surprise and move us nowadays.
Peter Coveney has shown us remarkably well the way in which George Eliot
took part in an ideological movement, born in the late eighteenth century under
the inf luence of Rousseau and Wordsworth, whose outcome was the creation of a
new image of childhood in nineteenth-century art and society. But, perhaps, this
critic has not paid enough attention to the fact that Eliot knew how to describe the
innocence of children with as much dedication as the two other writers, without
ignoring the malice that is inevitably blended with this innocence.
Last but not least, Coveney does not seem to have measured the quality, the
richness and the depth of the image of childhood in George Eliot’s fiction, together
with her depiction of the education of sensitivity, the idea that childhood is rooted
in a place which becomes almost sacred, the evocation of its dreams, its naïve
beliefs, its joys, its sorrows and its fears — all these experiences being the necessary
ingredients for a remembrance of things past, which were so vital in the genesis of
Proust’s work, thus supporting and enriching his own inspiration.

Notes to Chapter 16
1. Peter Coveney, The Image of Childhood: The Individual and Society: A Study of the Theme in English
Literature, revd edn (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), p. 33.
2. Gordon S. Haight, George Eliot: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968).
3. George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (1860), ed. by Gordon S. Haight, with an intro. by Dinah
Birch, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). Hereafter MF.
 The Image of Childhood in George Eliot 159

4. The George Eliot Letters, ed. by Gordon S. Haight, 9 vols (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale
University Press, 1954–78). Hereafter GEL.
5. Coveney, p. 42.
6. ‘The wisest among them concentrate on what is essential knowledge for men, without
considering what children are ready to learn. In the child, they always address the man, without
realizing what he is before he becomes a man’ (my translation).
7. Coveney, p. 162.
8. John Philip Couch, George Eliot in France: A French Appraisal of George Eliot’s Writings, 1850–1960
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967), p. 150.
9. George Eliot, Silas Marner (1861), ed. by Q. D. Leavis (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967).
Hereafter SM.
 — 17 —

Tellers and Listeners:

The Narrative Imagination of
Carol Shields
Coral Ann Howells

Someone asked me not long ago what I did when I was not writing or reading.
[...] I cook, shop, write notes, keep in contact with my family. Other than that,
I mostly walk around and think about narrative, about the telling of stories,
what they mean, these stories — and why we need them.1

The title of my essay is more than a nod to Barbara Hardy’s Tellers and Listeners: The
Narrative Imagination (1975); indeed it is the grateful acknowledgement of a legacy,
for that book provides the groundwork for my analysis over thirty-five years later of
Canadian writer Carol Shields’s narrative art in her short stories. Though Shields’s
eight novels may belong to the genre of domestic fiction in the realist tradition,
her three short-story collections published between 1985 and 2000 (Various Miracles,
The Orange Fish, Dressing Up for the Carnival) frequently break away from realism,
slipping between genders and genres into the surreal and the fantastic — a narrative
strategy described by Barbara Hardy in her discussion of Jane Eyre as ‘a powerful
but temporary unleashing of fantasy still basically subjected to check and control’.2
A fascination with narrative (‘Nature, not art, makes us all story-tellers’; ‘We are
narrative animals’),3 and a shared concern with the permeable boundaries between
storytelling in everyday life and its multiple fictional forms, create a mirror effect
uniting Hardy as literary critic and Shields as creative writer. Their affinity is even
closer when we consider that Hardy, like Shields, has written poetry and short
fiction, and that Shields also wrote critical essays and biography. As I shall argue,
Tellers and Listeners, with its scrupulous attention to language, textuality and literary
artifice, offers productive directions for a serious critical analysis of the products of
Shields’s narrative imagination.4
The fifty-six stories in Carol Shields: The Collected Stories (published post­hu­
mously, 2004) shows her experimenting with different narrative possibilities
through female and male storytellers, multiple narrative voices, shifting angles of
vision, and different story structures, in her unf lagging attempts either to glimpse
the mystery of other people’s lives or ‘to f loat my own story on the air’.5 The four
stories I have chosen to discuss in detail — though with a sideways glance at other
stories along the way — are all related, directly or obliquely, to the marriage theme:
 Tellers and Listeners 161

‘The Journal’, ‘Others’, ‘Hazel’, ‘Love So Fleeting, Love So Fine’. More importantly
for this essay, every story demonstrates Hardy’s contention that ‘We live in narrative
phantasmagorias as we live in countries and climates’ (T&L, p. viii). It is that
private territory which Shields sets out to explore: ‘This seems to me to be fiction’s
magic, that it attempts to be an account of all that cannot be documented but is,
nevertheless, true.’6
In many of Shields’s stories women are writers and readers, like Sally who keeps
a travel diary where she rewrites her husband Harold more satisfactorily as ‘H’
(‘The Journal’), or the recently widowed ‘Hazel’ who reads in bed, ‘reading herself
out of her own life’ (CS, p. 262). Sometimes, though, Shields includes solitary
male narrators like the fantasist in ‘Love So Fleeting’. His stories are continuously
interrupted by the intrusions of reality, but the narrative impulse is one he shares
with a woman whose stories are even more fragmented, as she memorizes French
verbs ‘in an attempt to give meaning to her life’ (p. 526). There are also stories
of married love like ‘Others’ where Shields rewrites the female romance plot
as she looks closely and ironically at what she calls ‘the chambered beginnings,
middles and ends of human encounters [...] including aberrations, nervous tics and
malfunctions of the spirit’ (p. 320). In this carnival parade of stories and storytellers
where we the readers are frequently the only listeners, Shields offers a perfect
illustration of Hardy’s contention that ‘the stories of our days and the stories in our
days are joined in that autobiography we are all engaged in making and remaking,
as long as we live, which we never complete, though we all know how it is going
to end’ (T&L, p. viii).
In ‘The Journal’, a story of a middle-aged Canadian couple travelling in France,
the main storyteller would appear to be Sally, the keeper of the journal, who
writes with ‘a steady, marching syntax, but allows herself occasional forays into
fancy’ (CS, p. 187). By this narrative activity Sally reinvents Harold as a more
dashing and eloquent figure that he actually is: ‘We extrapolate the living into
phantoms of as yet unconfirmed or unrealized potentiality’ (T&L, p. viii). The
story is peppered with extracts from Sally’s journal at the end of nearly every
paragraph: ‘H. laments the sterility of North American life’ (p. 188) or ‘H. despairs
because...’ (p. 190). However, Sally is not the only teller here, for there are two
other voices, the omniscient narrator’s and also Harold’s muted voice in his indirect
interior monologue, so that there are three narratives operating in counterpoint
throughout. While the narrator’s storytelling chronicles the empirical facts about
this married couple and their journey — the sights they see, the hotels they stay in,
the weather — that same voice registers a scepticism towards Sally’s version from
the beginning. After a particularly fulsome entry, ‘H. exclaimed how the cathedral
(Reims) is melting away on the outside and eroding into abstract lumps’ (p. 187),
the narrator wonders: ‘Has Harold actually exclaimed any such thing?’ Probably not,
for Harold’s imaginative life, unlike Sally’s, remains private and is only revealed
obliquely through what Shields calls ‘the subjunctive mode of oneself or others, a
world of dreams and possibilities and parallel realities’.7 We learn that Harold loves
the nineteenth century, which he sees as ‘an exuberant epoch that produced and
embraced the person he would like to have been: gentleman, generalist, amateur
162 Coral Ann Howells

naturalist’ (p. 190); instead, he is a schoolmaster in North America. Sally’s journal

entry (‘H. despairs because...’) is only tangentially relevant to what has just been
revealed through Harold’s private narrative.
Yet, out of this curiously cross-cut narrative, an unexpected epiphany occurs one
night in the noisy Grand Hotel in Beaune, ‘one of those rare moments of sexual
extravagance’ as the narrator describes it. This is Shields’s romance ending with
its exchange of ‘affection and trust and rhapsody’ and for once the journal keeps
its secret: ‘(H. and I slept well and in the morning ...)’ (CS, p. 191). In this wryly
comic ending, there is no rewriting of Harold and his comments at all, and that
final laconic entry reveals the reason for Sally’s previous ‘narrative phantasmagorias’
in her unarticulated sense of lack and her need for more excitement that her daily
life provides. Sally’s impulsive private storytelling in her journal is akin to gossip as
Hardy describes it: ‘Gossip is moved by a basic desire, ungoverned or ungovernable,
to see life as interestingly but as securely as possible’ (T&L, p. 139). For Shields,
‘narrative, which questions experience, repositions experience, expands or contracts
experience, rearranges experience, dramatizes experience, and which brings,
without apology, colour, interpretation, and political selection, has been with us
since the earliest stirrings of the human tongue’ (‘Narrative Hunger’, p. 24).
Hardy’s ‘gossip’ and Shields’s ‘narrative which repositions experience’ seem to
comprehend telling and listening as the distinctive mode of human exchange,
whereas for both writers the emphasis falls on tellers and telling, and though Hardy
has a chapter called ‘Good Tellers, Good Listeners’, there are not many listeners in
her study and there are even fewer in Shields’s stories. In fact, for Shields listening,
like overhearing someone else’s conversation, might be construed as an illegitimate
activity, as is the case in her story about another touring couple, suggestively
called ‘Poaching’. This may be another marriage story though that is not clear,
for Shields is deliberately unspecific about the genders of her travellers here, the
narrative ‘I’ and the partner named Dobey. As she comments, ‘the story can be
one thing or very much another, depending on whether the reader chooses to see
the narrator (or Dobey) as a man or woman’ (‘Arriving’, p. 250). That is not my
major concern here, for my interest is in this couple as listeners. Are they Good
Listeners, or is their activity rather more sinister? The story begins quite innocently
with a conversation between the pair of travellers and an innkeeper about sleeping
in King John’s bedroom and about a ghost, but once they get on the road the real
purpose of their trip is revealed. Unlike Sally and Harold, they pick up hitchhikers,
not out of kindness but out of curiosity to hear the stories of other lives. Shields
has described this addiction as a ‘narrative hunger’ or ‘a perverse pleasure to the
overfed’ (‘Narrative Hunger’, p. 22).
This first-person narrative is inevitably anecdotal as it recounts a random series
of hitchhikers and their stories, sometimes in their own voices, like the young
Canadian with a lisp who has come to England to write a thesis on Wittgenstein:
‘ “We owe tho muth to Withgenstein,” he sputtered, sweeping a friendly red paw
through the air, and including Dobey and me in the circle of Wittgenstein appre­
ciators’ (CS, p. 96). However, what makes this story so chilling is the utter absence
of sympathy in the two listeners and their refusal to engage in any mutual exchange
with their passengers:
 Tellers and Listeners 163

The trick is to put them at their ease so they’ll talk. Some we wring dry just
keeping quiet. For others we have to prime the pump. It’s like stealing, Dobey
says, only no one’s thought to make a law against it. (p. 95)
There is a coldly forensic quality about this kind of listening, when the loquacious
hitchhikers, eager to tell their stories of mishaps and adventure, have no idea that
they are being cannibalized by their hosts, who ‘live like aerial plants off the packed
fragments and fictions’ of their passengers. They prefer to pick up people who are
‘slightly distraught’ because they talk more easily, and ‘Dobey and I’ can remain
silent and detached observers.
However, as the story develops, the unfeasibility of their project begins to come
clear as signs of a rift appear between the narrator and Dobey. Narrative does
have a function ‘for the teller as well as the listener’ (T&L, p. 171), as the narrator
realizes in an urgent need to share their story of King John’s bedchamber with
one of their passengers, ‘to see if it holds any substance, to see if it’s true or the
opposite of true’. Dobey on the other hand prefers to continue with their narrative
scavenging, and the image through which that preference is phrased introduces a
darkly Gothic element into storytelling which is remarkably rare in Shields, though
not in Margaret Atwood or Alice Munro: ‘Behind each of the people we pick up,
Dobey believes, there’s a deep cave, and in the cave is a trap door and a set of stone
steps that we may descend if we wish.’ When the narrator objects that there may be
nothing at the bottom of those steps, ‘Dobey says, how will we know if we don’t
look’ (p. 99).
Hardy’s chapter on ‘The Abuses of Narrative’ discusses lies, slander and gossip
as ‘forms of illicit persuasion’ (p. 104). Nowhere does she include listening as an
abuse of narrative, though I believe that the silent predatory listening in ‘Poaching’
is shown to be a ‘form of illicit persuasion’ and therefore arguably might be added
to the list of abuses of the narrative imagination.
‘Others’ is another story of a long marriage but with a far more complex structure
than either ‘The Journal’ or ‘Poaching’, combining surface reportage with shifts in
angles of vision, shifts in tone and location, and revisions of narrative perspective
in response to changing circumstances over twenty-five years — what Shields calls
‘the biographical debris’ that accumulates around anyone’s life. The story begins
simply enough with the omniscient narrator’s recounting of an incident on Robert
and Lila’s honeymoon in France where an unknown Englishman asks them to
cash a cheque for him, and as a mark of his gratitude he has been sending them
Christmas greetings every year since then, signed ‘Nigel and Jane’ and accompanied
by a short cheery message but no return address. Arranged in twenty-five segments
with a final coda which contains a radical shift of emphasis, the narrative traces
the domestic rhythms of Lila and Robert’s married life. They move house several
times, their twins are born, midlife crises aff lict them when Lila suffers from mild
depression and Robert has an affair, after which they separate for a period but then
are reconciled in time to wish each other Merry Christmas. This chronicle of a
middle-class couple’s life forms the dominant narrative strand, but it is not the
only story being told here, as we are reminded by the annual Christmas greetings
from Nigel and Jane, which, like Sally’s journal entries, occur regularly at the end
164 Coral Ann Howells

of nearly every segment. They offer a truncated version of a second marriage plot:
‘Jane and I are both in excellent spirits’ or ‘Jane and I are seriously considering a
walking tour of the Hebrides next year’. This fragmented letter narrative has the
power to create a parallel reality for Lila and Robert, which runs as an undercurrent
to their own story. Over the years, memories of the real Nigel fade, while ‘Neither
of them could remember Jane at all’ (CS, p. 202). Their shadowy presences become
fantasy figures, those ‘others’ on to whom Lila and Robert project their secret
longings and desires. While Lila imagines how ‘it would be possible to tell Nigel
things she could never tell Robert’ (p. 304), Robert falls in love with another
woman who ‘put him in mind of Jane’ and who folded her hands ‘in exactly the
same way he imagined Jane would do’ (p. 211). This mutual exercise of the narrative
imagination where ‘we postulate pasts for those we meet and surmise futures for
them and for ourselves’(T&L, p. viii) suggests the function of fantasy and daydream
to compensate for what Lila describes here as ‘the daily erosion of what she had once
called her happiness’ (p. 208).
A cumulative sense of disappointment and loss pervades this narrative, which
reaches its crisis in the coda. Nigel’s familiar Christmas card, arriving late, contains
a shocking message: ‘Jane has been in a coma for some months now, but it is a
comfort to me that she is not in pain and that she perhaps hears a little of what goes
on about her’ (p. 215). This news is one of ‘those shifts of emphasis which throws
the storyline open to question, the disarrangements that demand new judgments
and solutions’ as Alice Munro phrases it,8 where fantasy has to give way to reality.
In their shared grief over a couple whom they scarcely knew, Lila and Robert seek
the shelter of each other’s company, sitting together in their quiet living room
in Toronto looking out at the night sky. The story ends with an edgily realistic
definition of married love:
They know after all this time about love — that it’s dim and unreliable and little
more than a ref lection on the wall. It is also capricious, idiotic, sentimental,
imperfect and inconstant, and most often seems to be the exclusive preserve of
others. Sitting in a room what was slowly growing dark, they found themselves
wishing they could measure its pure anchoring force or account for its random
visitations. Of course they could not — which was why, after a time, they
began to talk about other things... (p. 216)
In its cadences, that ending contains strange echoes of the ending of Virginia
Woolf ’s Between the Acts, where another husband and wife sit in the dining room
at Pointz Hall with the curtains open, looking out at the sky as darkness descends:
It was the night that dwellers in caves had watched from some high place
among rocks.
Then the curtain rose. They spoke.9
Shields has several times acknowledged her own Woolfian bias and the intertextual
echoes here suggest the inf luence of another woman writer’s narrative imagination
on her own, summoning up ‘the reader–writer relationship that so many of us
know and are indebted to’.10
Within that story of a marriage runs the undercurrent of a wife’s story, where
Lila’s restlessness and dissatisfaction is scarcely articulated even to herself, but it
 Tellers and Listeners 165

oozes out in her avid interest in her friends’ ‘stories of wrecked marriages and
nervous breakdowns’ (CS, p. 208) and her belief that ‘other women swallowed their
disappointments as though to do so was part of a primordial bargain’ (p. 206). A
similar sense of sadness and disappointment which spreads beyond the self into a
collective impression of women’s unhappiness and ‘our resistance to recognizing
uneasy feelings of unhappiness with one’s life as such’ is discussed by the feminist
critic Sara Ahmed in her analysis of affect in Woolf ’s Mrs Dalloway,11 and Shields
takes Ahmed’s comments a stage further in her repeated assertions of the restrictions
imposed on women’s choices:
But getting what we want requires being able to articulate that sentence, “I
want” — what? Women have not been able to make those kind of demands on
society [...] I suppose the not being able to complete that sentence, not knowing
what we want or deserve. It always comes down to that, of course, for women:
what we deserve and what’s good enough for us.12
Shields’s feminist commitment is plain in the gendered inf lection of many of her
stories: ‘As a woman who has elected a writing life, I am interested in writing
away the invisibility of women’s lives, looking at writing as an act of redemption.
In order to do this, I need the companionship, the example, of other women who
are writing’ (‘A View’, pp. 28–29). In telling the story of ‘Hazel’ she redeems
the life of a middle-aged widow which would otherwise be unrecorded, ‘a shy,
ineffectual, untrained, neutral-looking woman’ (CS, p. 262) who finally gets what
she wants by accident. Like Shields’s two most popular novels written in the mid-
1990s, The Stone Diaries and Larry’s Party, ‘Hazel’ belongs to the genre of fictive
biography, the form in which she was most interested as a means of glimpsing ‘the
inaccessible stories of others’ (‘Narrative Hunger’, p. 20). As she described it in an
interview, Shields ‘usurps’ the genre of biography, ‘appropriating it to question
the foundations on which the biographical project is structured.’13 Biography and
autobiography, factual or fictional, are concerned with the construction of the
identity of the biographical subject and her representation in the text — though,
as Shields speculates, the very concept of a woman’s identity may be a social
construction, determined by others’ expectations and assumptions. Hazel is another
of those women who ‘had not asked for enough, hadn’t known what to ask for,
what was owed her’ (CS, p. 259), and this is the story of how she stumbles towards
her reinvented identity as an independent woman. Six weeks after her unfaithful
husband’s death, Hazel surprises herself and her two grown-up daughters and her
friends by taking a job for the first time in her life with the firm of Kitchen Kult,
demonstrating cookware in department stores, and eventually becomes the firm’s
most successful saleswoman. ‘How did all this happen? How did we get here?’ (p.
270) is the question that Hazel asks herself. However, the narrative is not told in
her voice; she is too modest and self-effacing to assume the primary storytelling
role. Though her subjective experience is the centre, this is a multi-voiced narrative
dominated by the biographer’s perspective which segues from time to time into
Hazel’s indirect interior monologue, then shifts into her sales patter and the voices
of her friends and family, those ‘Job’s comforters [who] persuade and encourage,
depress, solicit, comfort and commiserate in narrative form’ (T&L, p. 4).
166 Coral Ann Howells

It is through the power of the narrative imagination — her own and in the stories
of others — that Hazel discovers her means of survival. From being a woman ‘who
swallowed her tongue’ or who sat propped up in bed reading trashy New York
romance novels or historical fiction, Hazel learns never to stop talking on her job:
That was why these crowds gave her their attention: she could perform miracles
(with occasional calculated human lapses) and keep right on talking at the same
time. Words, a river of words. She had never before talked at such length, as
though she were driving a wedge of air ahead of her. It was easy, easy. (CS, p. 257)
Her sense of exhilaration as a string of homely half-remembered phrases like ‘Sacred
rattlesnakes!’ or ‘What a devil!’ or ‘You darling, radish, you!’ pours from her mouth,
gives her a new confidence in her ability to charm and ‘hypnotize’ her audience.
As Hardy has commented, ‘Even the smallest narrative fragments have the power
to seduce’ (T&L, p. 27).
Yet, as Shields and Hardy both remind us, narrative also has the power to teach
and to warn. Why has Hazel taken a job at all, against the advice of her mother-
in-law, her daughters, and her best friend? The answer is unambiguous: ‘It was
because of the books she read, their dense complications and sharp surprises, that
she had applied for a job in the first place’ (p. 259). All those novels about women’s
lives throughout history had awakened in her a sense of panic at their shared sense
of deprivation and lack: ‘Were the queens and courtesans any happier than the
frustrated New York wives?’ (p. 258). That is the condition which Hazel wishes
to escape. Through other women’s stories she reads the story of her own life, as
a girl, then a young woman, then a wife and mother, ‘then a member of a bridge
club and a quilting club, and now [...] a widow’ (p. 259). She realizes that she needs
something big enough to fill up her vacant time, and that is an actual job. As with
Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss analysed by Hardy, Hazel’s reading and
her fantasies leave traces: ‘George Eliot not only analyses the individual qualities
of the different stories Maggie listens to and tells herself, she most subtly shows
their mutual inf luence, correction, tension and interpenetration’ (T&L, p. 27).
Simi­larly, Shields shows the ways in which fiction may be used to reshape reality
as Hazel learns to ask for what is hers by right and even to ask a few favours for
her friends as acts of generosity. In the f lush of her success, Hazel is tempted to
believe that ‘Everything could be made accountable, added up and balanced and
fairly, evenly, shared. You only had to pay attention’ (p. 270). At the same time,
she realizes that this is not the whole truth, for ‘The truthful narrative may have
to take an interrogative form’, as Hardy advises (p. 162), taking into account what
Shields calls ‘the randomness of a human life, its arbitrary and fractured experiences
that nevertheless strain toward a kind of wholeness’ (‘Arriving’, p. 249). The
story ends with a rare moment of radiance as Hazel sits in silent contemplation
in a hospital room holding the hand of her mother-in-law, now a speechless
stroke victim: ‘Everything is an accident, Hazel would be willing to say if asked.
Her whole life is an accident, and by accident she has blundered into the heart
of it’ (pp. 269–70).
Knowing that ‘a fully-furnished universe is made up of men and women’, Shields
has always been interested in writing across gender boundaries, ‘not just writing
 Tellers and Listeners 167

about the other sex, but speaking through its consciousness, using its voice’,14 as she
does in Happenstance and Larry’s Party, and in the final story I wish to analyse, ‘Love
So Fleeting, Love So Fine’. One of Hazel’s male sales colleagues once ventured the
opinion that what everyone wants is ‘Lots of love and truckloads of admiration.
Keep that in mind. People can’t get enough’ (p. 253). In this sadly comic story, a
nameless young man replaces that extravagant hunger for love with a peculiar form
of ‘narrative hunger’ as he fantasizes falling love with women whom he never meets
but whose names he sees or hears spoken, for ‘all the time the environment beckons
and assaults with its narratives’ (T&L, p. 4). It may be anything from a handwritten
notice in a shop window, to snatches of overheard conversation, or even graffiti
scribbled on a rock. This is a man seduced by words, for all these women’s names
provide a wealth of material for male romance fantasies. As the omniscient narrative
voice slips away from diurnal surfaces into something more subjective via the
young man’s indirect interior monologue, the reader is diverted away from dailiness
into his private masculine world of dreams and unspoken desires. ‘ “WENDY IS
BACK!” the sign said. It caught his eye’ (CS, p. 141). That sign in the window of an
orthopaedic shoe store in a back street in Winnipeg is probably the brand name of
a shoe, but to the young man who sees it on his way to work it reads like a coded
message stimulating his imagination. On that slender fragment of narrative he
constructs a whole story about a girl called Wendy ‘with a merry little voice’ who
has been away on holidays, possibly to Toronto or Hawaii, and who is now being
welcomed back, to the delight of all her customers, ‘a caring person. A person one
cared about’ (p. 142). By this process, he falls in love with Wendy and experiences
a moment of inexplicable joy, ‘like light spilling through a doorway’. That night,
while his wife silently reads a newspaper beside him in bed, he even examines his
own feet, contemplating a visit to the store to meet Wendy, though of course that
meeting is always deferred. As the narrator drily remarks, ‘He is a man who has been
in love many times’ (p. 144), before retailing a list of similar fantasies of courtship
and unconsummated relationships. ‘Louise’ was conjured up in a Vancouver bakery
by a fragment of conversation when two young women ordered a farewell cake
for their friend with the words, ‘So long, Louise’ spelled out in pink icing on the
top. Shields brings us close to the process of narrative fabrication as he imagines
his farewell: ‘His lost Louise. That is how he thinks of her, a woman standing in
the airport — no, the bus station...’ as she moves away forever from his never-to-
be-declared love (p. 145). ‘Sherri’ with her ‘hyacinth cologne and bitten nails’ had
been encountered on a road north of Kingston, Ontario, as a name ‘spray-painted
in red on a broad exposed rock face’ in this message: ‘HANK LOVES SHERRI
in letters that were at least three feet high’ (p. 145). Those love affairs always end
with a mixture of longing and pain: ‘What is over, is over; he is realist enough to
recognize that’ (p. 146). Hardy’s comment on Jane Eyre illuminates this young man’s
condition: ‘The sense of reality is the result of a self-consciousness about fantasy in
the presence of an inclination for dreaming’ (T&L, p. 32). Only at night lying in bed
beside his quietly snoring wife, in that liminal space between waking and sleeping
does he conjure up those shadowy presences when he can hear ‘the muted sound
of female voices and someone calling out to him by name’ (p. 147). This is a rather
168 Coral Ann Howells

eccentric and masculine version of a popular romance plot, but it is also perhaps an
affirmation of Hazel’s colleague’s assertion of the human need for love.
Interestingly, this young man’s fantasy narratives never go beyond falling in love
with phantoms who then conveniently disappear. In reality, he is already married
to a woman whose face we never see, though he has not yet learned to value the
familiarity and intimacy within a married relationship, which he views as ‘those
enemies of love’. The story of their marriage we never hear, for the young man is
addicted to those ‘wavelets of heat’ surrounding the very first stages of falling in
love, which relate once again to storytelling in the ‘subjunctive mode’, opening
up ‘a world of dreams and possibilities’ (‘Arriving’, p. 244). Alice Munro, one of
Shields’s most admired models, speaks in similar terms of the appeal of falling in
love from a woman’s point of view: ‘I think the best part is always right at the
beginning. At the beginning. That’s the only pure part. “Perhaps even before the
beginning,” she said. “Perhaps just when it f lashes on you what’s possible. That may
be the best.” ’15 Faye Hammill, in her essay on Shields’s revision of romance plots
from a male as well as a female point of view in The Republic of Love, makes a point
which is relevant here: ‘Romantic fiction generally assumes that love is the highest
good to which an individual can aspire, that a person in love is in a state of grace,
and that marriage is the natural fulfilment of love. Shields questions and tests these
assumptions, yet ultimately she upholds them all, though with certain qualifications
[...] embedding them in a more complex and self-ref lexive kind of fiction.’16
While discussions of narratology and the critical vocabulary associated with it
may have changed since the 1970s as we ‘have been inhaling the pollen of contem­
porary literary theory’, to quote Shields once again (‘Narrative Hunger’, p. 28),
the principles and the discipline of critical analysis so brilliantly demonstrated in
Tellers and Listeners have not changed at all. Nor do narratives have to ‘surrender
to deconstructive surgery and disconnect, more and more, from the texture and
rhythm of “reality” ’ (‘Narrative Hunger’, p. 28). On the contrary, we continue
‘to narrate to each other, and to ourselves’ (T&L, p. vii), for ‘we need the seeds
of stories, and [...] we need, too, to place our own stories beside those of others:
to compare, weigh, judge, forgive, and to find an angle of vision that renews our
image of where we are in the world’ (‘Narrative Hunger’, p. 21).

Notes to Chapter 17
1. Carol Shields, ‘Narrative Hunger and the Overf lowing Cupboard’, in Carol Shields, Narrative
Hunger, and the Possibilities of Fiction, ed. by Edward Eden and Dee Goertz (Toronto: University
of Toronto Press, 2003), p. 1.
2. Barbara Hardy, Tellers and Listeners: The Narrative Imagination (London: Athlone Press, 1975), p.
29. Hereafter T&L.
3. Hardy, p. vii; Eden and Goertz, eds, p. 22.
4. By coincidence, in my research for this paper I came across another example of Hardy’s pervasive
critical inf luence in Sarah Gamble’s essay ‘Filling the Creative Void’ where she notes an echo in
‘Narrative Hunger’ of Hardy’s ‘Towards a Poetics of Fiction: An Approach through Narrative’
(1968). However, that essay on narrative dilemmas and the figure of the writer in Shields’s novels
pursues a different line of inquiry from my own.
5. Carol Shields: The Collected Stories (Toronto: Random House Canada, 2004), p. 99. Hereafter
CS.
 Tellers and Listeners 169

6. Marjorie Anderson, ‘Interview with Carol Shields’, Prairie Fire, 16.1 (Spring 1995), p. 213.
7. Carol Shields, ‘Arriving Late: Starting Over’, in How Stories Mean, ed. by John Metcalf and J. R.
(Tim) Struthers (Erin, Ontario: Porcupine’s Quill, 1993), p. 244.
8. Alice Munro, ‘Simon’s Luck’, in The Beggar Maid: Stories of Flo and Rose (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1979), p. 177.
9. Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts (1941), World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1992), p. 197.
10. Carol Shields, ‘A View from the Edge of the Edge’, in Carol Shields and the Extra-Ordinary, ed.
by Marta Dvorak and Manina Jones (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press,
2007), p. 28.
11. Sara Ahmed, ‘Creating Disturbance: Feminism, Happiness and Affective Differences’, in
Working with Affect in Feminist Readings: Disturbing Differences, ed. by Marianne Liljeström and
Susanna Paasonen (London and New York: Routledge, 2010), p. 33.
12. Eleanor Wachtel, Random Illuminations: Conversations with Carol Shields (Fredericton, New
Brunswick (Can.): Goose Lane, 2007), pp. 161–62.
13. Anne Denoon, ‘Playing with Convention’, Books in Canada, 22.9 (December 1995), p. 8.
14. Carol Shields, ‘The Same Ticking Clock’, in How Stories Mean, ed. by Metcalf and Struthers,
p. 88.
15. Alice Munro, ‘White Dump’, in The Progress of Love (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1986),
p. 308.
16. Faye Hammill, ‘The Republic of Love and Popular Romance’, in Carol Shields, Narrative Hunger,
and the Possibilities of Fiction, ed. by Eden and Goertz, p. 79.
part V
v

Fictions
 — 18 —

Eleanor Mear’s Tea Party

Janet El-Rayess

Lily Paggett walked swiftly down the drive, past the creaking cedar, sniffing the
still summer air, thinking about dinner. She would call in at the post office on her
way home — it wouldn’t take a minute. It was just as well that she liked walking;
that house took so much legwork. Not that the old lady made much of a stir, but
she was a stickler. ‘Lily, you haven’t done the top of the picture — give that carpet
a shake — have you polished the door handle?’ And why, today, had there been
such a carry-on about the silver? She had made her get the tea-service down from
the cupboard. Oh, that was another thing — she must get more Silvo. Lily detested
polishing that teapot. It was such a fiddle, with its knobs and bobbles. If she left so
much as a f ly-speck on one of the legs it was sure to be noticed. You haven’t made
much of a job of this teapot, you know, Lily. But why did she want it out today?
Sometimes Lily worried about her.
She opened the gate then heaved it back on its latch. It used to be left open, but
lately she’d got in the habit of shutting it, since the village lads had taken to meeting
outside with their bikes, in case they began racing up and down the drive. There
was no knowing what that cheeky lot would get up to. It made the old lady just
that bit more secure. Especially now. One of these days, thought Lily, she would
open the door and go through, calling out in her usual way, and find her ... how?
Sometimes she tried to imagine it. And yet, there she always was, neat and upright,
reading a book, or watching some bird on the lawn.
She pushed the post office door and the bell clattered. Mrs Saunton appeared
from the back of the shop. ‘Morning, Lily, what can I do for you on this beautiful
day?’
‘I’ll have a first-class stamp, please, Mrs Saunton.’
The postmistress dumped her book on the counter and glanced at the letter. ‘Oh
no, Lily, that won’t do,’ she said, ‘nobody’ll be able to read that. You’re going to
have to start writing the envelopes for her.’
Lily glanced at the writing. She had to admit, it looked as if a spider had crawled
out of an ink-pot. She sighed, ‘I can’t suggest that, she wouldn’t like it. Anyway,
I’m never there when she writes her letters.’
‘Pass it in here, love, let’s have a look.’
Lily slid the letter under the grill.
‘Well, I can see who it’s to all right, but I can’t make out the address for the life
of me. Look — the post code’s illegible.’
‘Give it back, then. I’ll cross it out and write it again.’
 Eleanor Mear’s Tea Party 173

‘She doesn’t see much of him these days, does she?’

‘Who, Tom Mear? You’ve got to be joking.’
‘He has more important things to do up in London, no doubt. Last time he
came — when was it? Oh yes, well, you know when it was, he popped in here
beforehand. Bought her a box of chocs. To jolly her along, he said.’
‘Yeah. She gave most of them to me.’
The postmistress made a face. ‘If I were you, Lil, I’d get one of those fresh
envelopes and start again. Have it on me. She’ll never know.’
‘Oh, all right,’ said Lily reluctantly.

Eleanor Mear looked at the clock and noticed for the umpteenth time that it wasn’t
there. It had been a handsome clock with a good clear chime — ding ding ding —
she could hear it now. As regular as ... clockwork, silly. Oliver kept the key inside
the case. So they’d got that, drat them. And the barometer, the clock in the hall,
the candlesticks, and all her jewellery from inside the seaman’s chest. They didn’t
get the key of that. She still had it. And she liked ... no, she didn’t, really. She didn’t
like thinking about what they would have done to get that open. It was solid lead,
heavy as a horse. Heavier. It would take at least six strong men to heave it out. And
that’s what they’d done — dragged it, all the way down the stairs and across the
hall. They’d knocked the banisters to pieces and scarred the f loor. It was one of the
few days when she was out. So how ... ? How many times had they gone over that
one. Tom swore it was an inside job. But inside what, might one ask? ‘Who, Tom
dear,’ she had said, ‘do you suggest your “insider” was?’ Really! He ought to have
his head examined. But he was — heaven only knew what Tom was up to. Her eyes
fixed on the window and her hands, with their two remaining rings, chafed the
chair arms. Yes. There was that other clock that Lily had bought in Boots. Not bad
for — whatever it had been. Lily had shown her the bill. It even had a guarantee,
for any number of years. So what was the time? Half-past twelve. She felt a puff of
warm air on her cheek and caught a whiff of honeysuckle. The window was open.
She could see the length of the terrace. Lily had moved the chair, so she could
see the whole of the lawn and the terrace. Important today. Sometimes she made
a mental review of the bedrooms. It was well over a year since she’d seen them.
She couldn’t be bothered to climb the stairs these days. It was a big house. Well,
so what? They couldn’t have moved to a f lat, not with all their things. From Italy,
Iraq, the West Indies — all over the place. Of course the house was big. It had to
be. Now, let’s see. They moved there when Oliver retired. No. They didn’t. They
stayed on in Rome then they came back to England. Eleanor stared at a brown bird
that was pecking the lawn, jabbing its beak, scattering earth. Its round eye rested
on her ... through the open window. If she moved her hand ... yes, it could see
her. I don’t want to frighten you, bird. There, I’ve put my hand down, and I’m
not going to throw anything. I’m a silly old woman, stuck in a chair, but I like
watching you. Beak like a drill, no — what’s it called — shoemaker’s tool. Is it a
thrush, or a female blackbird? How Oliver would have scoffed. He’d have fetched
his field-glasses, not for a thrush, perhaps, but if it had been a hawk, or a buzzard.
174 Janet El-Rayess

Her hands were busy. When did they move there? Oliver retired in sixty-three.
They stayed in Rome for five years after that — she tapped the chair with the tips
of her fingers — no. She thought she was rather good at arithmetic in school, but
now she would have to ask Lily to do it.
Let’s see. Yes, it was time. She glared at the door. Lily had suggested bringing
lunch in there, leaving it on a trolley by her chair before she went home, but Eleanor
had refused. The doctor told her to walk, so walk she would. She pushed herself
on to her feet — ouch. Now, where was her stick — she wouldn’t have moved it,
would she? No, there it was. It’s all right, I have it. For a moment she stayed where
she was, straightening herself, hand on the chair arm, then shoved her left foot
forwards, reaching for the bookcase and running a hand along it till she arrived at
the next thing, sliding her feet carefully over the edge of the rug. Brown and red at
the border, then deep blue. They’d haggled for hours over it in the Baghdad bazaar.
What fun they’d had. She turned the brass door handle, hearing its rattle. Old as the
house, no doubt, which was why she liked it. She wouldn’t move to a new place,
not if they paid her. It cost a fortune to heat, but she could afford it — just. Besides,
she only heated the part she lived in. Kept the rest of the house just above freezing.
The kitchen passage, though, could be cold in winter. It was pleasantly cool now.
She went down a step and across the f lags and there — oh — there on the kitchen
windowsill was a vase of sweet peas. How she loved sweet peas. Adored their scent.
It took her back to that one time ... yes. She had never forgotten it. She must tell
Lily tomorrow how much she’d enjoyed them.
Now, what — what in the name of everything holy was the best tea service doing
in the middle of the table? There it all was, laid out on the big black tray — teapot,
water jug, sugar basin, bowl for the slops — and she’d got a jolly good shine on
it, too, bless her. How perfectly hideous it was, and hopelessly heavy. So they’d
left her that, had they. Didn’t care for it presumably. How right they were. It had
been a wedding present from Oliver’s godfather, and she’d never liked it. She tried
lifting the teapot, it lurched sideways, so she put it down. When it was full she had
to take two hands to it. And one hot afternoon she’d poured the tea all over that
extraordinary man — whatever his name was. It had gone with a whoosh all down
his beautiful kaftan. The bodyguard leapt for the teapot ... was that really what
happened? Come on, you old chatterbox, time to get on with your lunch.
A place was laid at the end of the table. A wing of cold chicken with salad was
on a plate under a lid. She poured herself water from the jug and sat down. When
Oliver was alive they were too grand to have lunch in the kitchen. But she quite
liked it. From where she sat she could see inside the barn. She remembered Dibdin
explaining about his machines. Dear Dibdin. He cared for the garden and house
much more than she did. He only came one morning a week, these days. It was just
as well. Tom was forever telling her what she could and couldn’t afford.
And it was over there, by the fence, that she had first seen her young man. She
supposed he’d walked up from the road, or from the place next door. He was one
of the Morrison boys, perhaps, who had wandered in to see the pony. She let them
keep their pony in the field. It saved Dibdin having to cut the grass. The only time
it proved a nuisance had been in the spring. She’d wanted some daffodils, and that
 Eleanor Mear’s Tea Party 175

little pony took it into its head to stop Lily picking them. How she had laughed
as she watched from the kitchen window. Lily came in, red in the face, absolutely
livid. ‘That damn pony won’t let me get at the daffs,’ she said. ‘It stands over ’em
and stares at me with its cheeky face, and when I move to another clump it comes
and stands over that too.’ Eleanor chuckled. Animals aren’t as dumb as we always
say they are.
The second time she had seen him he was on the lawn at the back of the house,
and then she knew she had made a mistake. He wasn’t from next door. The Morrison
boys would never come round to the garden without asking. And it was odd how
she had been perfectly sure he was all right. She waved to him but he didn’t see.
She even tried to go out and ask what he wanted, but wasted so much time, fiddling
with the bolts, that by the time she’d got the door open he wasn’t there.
She finished her food and took the plate to the sink. Lily would have put out
cheese and biscuits in the larder. She’d tick her off for not eating them but it couldn’t
be helped. She didn’t want them. Now, let’s see. She would go and lie down for a
bit. There would be plenty of time after that to think about tea.
She noted as she crossed the hall how quiet the house had become without the
clocks. They’d put up a picture to fill the gap, but she still caught herself listening
whenever she passed the place where the grandfather clock used to be. She slid her
hand along the window ledge, disturbing the telephone. It didn’t ring often. They’d
had an extension laid to her new bedroom in the study. Tom, on one of his rare
visits, insisted on it. She caught a glimpse of something moving through the leaded
panes, and for an instant thought she saw someone out there. This old glass distorted
the view. She could see the hives, and the awful old tree, and the stink pond. If
someone were out there, what ought she to do? Telephone? Who — Lily, or the
police? The sergeant had said they ought to fit an alarm. But she hated the things.
Feeling slightly breathless, she sat on the window seat. Wait. Give her a minute to
get her breath back.

When Eleanor Mear woke up it was past four. She’d acquired the habit of taking
an afternoon nap when they lived abroad. Out there everyone did it, even Oliver.
Emergencies didn’t happen in the afternoon heat — that was her theory. She sat
down to pull on her skirt then went to the dressing-table. How she had loved
him. He was a clever, charming man and she had loved him to distraction. She
knew now. No — she had always known it. Well, and now here she was, in her
new primrose-yellow jacket. The colour suited her, it went with her hair. And she
wanted to look her best this afternoon.
The sitting-room, when she reached it, was pleasantly airy. There was a slight
— oh, what a dunderhead she was. The window was wide open. Lily had made
her promise to shut it before going to lunch, and she’d clean forgotten. But no
harm done. She crossed the room and looked out at the terrace. It was all just
the same. Nothing had changed. Everything was as it had been in the morning,
except that the sun had moved. The lawn and terrace were empty. And yet, for
the last three afternoons she thought she had seen him, sitting on the low wall —
176 Janet El-Rayess

the closest he’d come — smoking a cigarette. Dark, sleeked-back hair, dark suit,
his legs crossed and his face, which she thought might be rather pale, half-hidden
in shade. And she had been certain he was the right young man, he looked so ...
unlike her son. He wasn’t like Tom. Or those young scarecrows, who made Lily
cross by hanging about at the gate. And yesterday when she waved she thought
he looked up. She had been so careful today not to be tired for him, and now ....
The sun had gone from that side of the house and the terrace was in shadow.
Eleanor’s face was stony as she turned from the window. She gripped her stick.
This warrior would see her through — it didn’t have a choice. She looked about.
All the old things were in their places. The portrait of Oliver, in the dark corner
where he always insisted on hanging it. The leopards above the fireplace, the Italian
table, the tapestry, its pinks and purples faded over the years. She passed her hand
over its roughness. It would have been fun showing her young man round. And he
wouldn’t have been bored. She was perfectly certain he wasn’t the sort to be bored.
She moved the hand on, following the pattern. Could she ... ?
Eleanor went back to the window. She had had a carpenter in to ease the bolts.
She drew them back with difficulty, and turned the handle; the door cracked like a
gun going off. She pushed it open and stepped out on to the stones.
 — 19 —

The Tailor’s Dummy

Sue Roe

One
Wild Bird

I had made a wild bird. My wild bird, feathered of head, with a red crest, its
body made of bits of driftwood I had picked up while beachcombing, stood on a
thick, scarlet-painted stand, its long legs straight, body arrested in almost-f light, its
feathers f lecked with brown and pink. My bird stood ready to f ly, or to pick its way
across the sand or through stones or long grass. My bird held its head at a sure angle
for hearing and seeing, my bird picked its wooden way.
In a group exhibition at the Red Tile Gallery in Sure Street, my bird stood alone
among pieces of metal and stone, ceramics gilded with gold and scrawled with
images, a black metal chimney, a Chinaman and a half-built wall. On low shelves
around the room of the gallery were a small, intentionally smashed receptacle,
signifying a ruined utensil, a little heap of distressed rings for slender hands,
decorated with hieroglyphics, a baby Buddha; a tiny prayer book made of old red
velvet, with a bald patch in the middle and a tiny tassel for marking the place,
draped with miniature rosary beads (actually book weights for use in archives, and
out of scale). A heap of crisp, gold leaves was actually made of paper. A little doll
wore dark glasses and a bandage on its arm. Small tin cars were heaped in a mock
crash, buckled and melted into car free-form. A ventriloquist’s dummy sat grinning,
its red mouth, agape, like a small ledge, no sound, no movement, just the laughing
eyes, and next to it a second dummy, that one’s gaping back turned to reveal the
space for a man’s missing hand.
In room two, the far wall was a door, a green-panelled door with an elegant,
scrolled handle. But the door was painted, as was the handle, and there was nothing
to open. The actual exit was behind a screen, masquerading as a wall. Just in front
of it was a grand piano, its lid propped open with a ladder, the keyboard entirely
missing.
My bird was in room one, next to a pile of metal junk made of rusted cans
sprayed red and gold, which from the distance of the entry door caught the light
from the spotlit ceiling and shone out in a razzle of glint and glow, like the hectic
embers of a nearly extinguished fire, suddenly aglow one last time, or the sparky
lights of a November bonfire. My bird seemed to me too tame and calm to take
its place amongst the pieces of the imaginary that made up the exhibition, too put
together with bits of real wood, still smelling faintly of damp sand, too closely
178 Sue Roe

simulating the natural world, and too much of the natural world. But my bird was
bought. My bird, on its solid piece of scarlet-painted driftwood, its pointed scarlet
crest an elegant feathered breath, had a red spot on its head from the first day. The
day following the exhibition I had no need to collect, parcel up and remove my
bird, my bird had f lown.
* * * * *
The Red Tile gallerist, Peter Frame, an old friend of mine from our college days,
advised me what to do next. He said my star was rising again. After those few
years of beginner’s luck when my paintings had caught the attention of viewers and
reviewers, after the following years when one sale from time to time had kept me
going, things had really dwindled but now, look, with the wild bird things were
taking off again. He said, what about a f lock of birds?
A f lock, I said, a f lock? I told him my bird was individual, unique, a sole piece,
signifying originality and survival. I explained that my bird meant solitude and
independence, the ability to pick my way — one’s way — alone. It was not of a
piece, I told him, it even looked out of place in the group exhibition, which was
surely why it had been singled out. Birds in f light are freedom incarnate, aren’t
they? It was unique, signalling complete self-sufficiency and ingenuity — wasn’t
that why it had been selected?
No, said Peter, that was not the reason. The reason he liked it was to do with
my sensing the zeitgeist. I have no idea what the zeitgeist is, but I know my bird
was not of it. However, Peter was of one accord with himself on this, he knew he
wanted a group installation and that this time I could be the artist and not of one
piece only but of the entire, cohesive group.
The night of the last day of the exhibition, when my bird was not there anymore,
nor back in my studio, nor safely home with me, but f lown, I thought about the
idea of a group installation. I thought about the simulated Egyptian rings, the pile of
buckled cans, the melted cars. I thought about the ceramic pots decorated with gold
leaf, the piano without a keyboard and the tromp l’œil door. I thought mostly about
the ventriloquists’ dummies, and about how exposed and peculiar they looked
two by two, the two of them impotently there, one with the red mouth hanging
open, the other with its back agape. I thought how dead they were, how dead and
mutilated, how tinny and tawdry, and how utterly dependent they were on the
human voice to make them fully uncanny. I thought how damaged, disabled and
war-torn a large group of ventriloquists’ dummies would be, and what a pile-up
even a smaller group would seem. I thought and thought about them, their scary
open mouths and shiny hair, their dreadful paralysed legs, bent at the knees, for
perpetual sitting, their holey backs, their sad, shabby suits. I thought about their
shabby suits some more. Their heads, their legs, were sad and limp, despite their
red smiles; their torsos gaping holes, from the back, though not from the front. I
thought about what natural bachelors tailors’ dummies were, how oddly executed
they were, in their profound attachment. I thought about their wide mouths, their
bewildered but still oddly knowing eyes, swiftly rotating heads and their haunting
voices, faithful and muted, soft-sounding round the edges, worn and plangent and
 The Tailor’s Dummy 179

frail. I thought about their trust, their truthfulness, their odd, uncanny fusion of
innocence and experience. I thought about their makers, and what an odd thing it
must be, to make something in the image of a person, with mock real hair, mock
real eyes, long legs, jointed knees, real clothes, with such potential for animation
and a hole, a hole big enough for a human hand to reach into, in place of the spine,
a hole big enough to accommodate a hand, which would take the place of its entire
nervous system. I wondered about cutting the hole, whether that was the last thing
the maker did, and how hard it would feel. I imagined the maker’s hand, reaching
and pulling out all the organs, lifting out the spine, but of course there would be
no need for that, the dummy, in its shabby suit, its curious eyes wide-open and
watchful, would actually be empty.
On the way home from the exhibition, walking home without my bird, I passed
a tailor’s shop. In the window was a tailor’s dummy, its stiff, upholstered calico torso
speared with a black spike, its bust corseted within itself, its invisible neck ramrod
straight, invisible head strict and far-seeing. There was a small tape measure slung
around its armless shoulders. How nearly-alive it was, in its rigidity. What a wife
it would make, for a ventriloquist’s dummy, the two of them presiding over a post
office, a library, a petrol station or a cemetery.
It was a rainy night. I let myself in and shook the great, black, folded wings of
my umbrella, then ballooned it out again, setting it on the f loor to wait for a scaled-
down photographer and model — like a crow turned backdrop. I went to bed late
that night and lay with the curtains still undrawn, watching black rain stream in
broken beaded lines down the window panes. I could hear the wind, pushing the
trees, brushing against them, shouldering them about. I must have drifted off to
sleep, because when I woke it was four-thirty and the rain had stopped. In the
strangely luminous space between sleep and waking, the nightly nothingness on
the margins of being, when the body is still given over to the unconscious and its
strange mechanisms but the mind is tipped into a dimension it thinks is clear, I saw
— that is to say, envisaged — something very precise. I saw myself in my studio
with a tailor’s dummy, its stiff torso scrawled with a number, seared with a black
metal rod like an upright pig on a spit, but headless and legless, and I thought about
smearing the calico with glue. Then, still without fully waking, I imagined sticking
on feathers, swatches of fabric, coarse wool, fine silk and velvet soft as a baby rabbit’s
first fur. I felt the sensation of harshness then softness in my fingertips as I applied
one snippet of fabric after another, layering up this piece of my installation, stiff and
headless on its metal rod, its metal stand. I could imagine a collection of dummies,
tarred, feathered and adorned, as I could not have imagined a f lock of wooden
painted birds. I got up, drew the curtains and got back into bed, closing my eyes
on an oddly nauseous feeling, green and twisted : the excitement of this new vision,
occasioned by a moment of truth and gelled in the mind so quickly, fixed in the
magic of dream so soon, then I closed my eyes.
Two weeks later my dummies were delivered to my studio. My bird had f lown
and now, out of a white van parked at the kerbside downstairs, six tailor’s dummies
were carried in, brought in over two men’s shoulders, the van doors swinging
open. I went down to the street and watched as they were carried out, two by
180 Sue Roe

two, leaving the rest still packed in there like so many shapely sides of pork. Each
was wrapped in brown paper. The delivery men swung them over their shoulders
and stumped up the stairs of the disused factory, now artists’ studios, to my studio,
no. 24. I unwrapped them one by one and stood them upright, wondering if I had
made the right decision when I ordered them without little hard, black, inanimate
faceless heads. Just the torso, on a metal stem and stand, upholstered in calico, each
numbered, was what I had ordered. They seemed to arrive, and be carried up the
stairs, in a matter of minutes, seconds, even, the two men, a dummy over each
shoulder, running down the stairs and up again, with six dummies and two spares,
which as an after-thought I had ordered straight after the others. All but one were
traditional, calico dummies, the kind you see in tailors’ shops, each amputated and
decapitated, with a number etched into her torso, and one beautiful, shiny black
one, which I did not remember ordering but which, when I saw it, I decided to
keep and incorporate into the group.
Making tea with my old, battered kettle which stood on the f loor in the corner by
the socket, dropping my teabag in my old pink mug, waiting for the water to boil,
I looked at my seven inanimate dummies, lifeless and ramrod straight. I thought
about their incorporeal uncanniness and about the suggestion I had wanted to evoke
in each of them of something magical, something half-asleep but on the point of
being unleashed. I thought about them sewn, amputated, upholstered in human
form and in some strange way reincarnated. I contemplated the sense of freaky,
arresting embodiment they all contained — life modelled after the human form,
then curtailed, arrested, having something of the school mistress, ballet teacher
or indeed seamstress — silent, inanimate mistress of the workroom — something
defunct but still present, arresting, powerful and strange.
I worked by first spreading glue over the entire dummy, then layering each
one up differently — with feathers, green and gold, little bits of lace and tulle,
tartan here, on dummy 66, moulded across the bust then decorated with a strip
of red velvet and contrasting tartan. For dummy 249 I made a mess of pale green
net, scrunched loosely into a bustle at the back. For 118, I made an epaulette of
gold, softened by a scrunch of petals on the bodice, made from raw Thai silk. I
embroidered no. 568 in a repeated motif of f leur de lys patterns and then draped
a cascade of seed pearl buttons round the stalk which stood for a neck. I made
for dummy no. 24 a single scar, etched in red stitching, an uneven diagonal in
two tones of red below the waist; tattooed number 587 in red ink, etching angels
and clasped hands into the calico, then pierced on bits of fabric, which I layered
onto the basic form, like a sculptor thumbing on pieces of clay. I bound no. 7, the
polished black dummy, in broad bands of cream and gold brocade. There would be
no possibility of making a regular shape, of course, I wanted them asymmetrical,
irregular, with decorative gestures, so that each ornament challenged the form of
the body. I have heard that when they sew human f lesh and skin after surgery they
make the scar diagonal, because if they made a vertical scar from neck to pelvis the
scar would be less f lexible and the person less able to bend, stretch or even walk. I
made a diagonal scar for no. 24 even though she will never bend, stretch or walk.
That is the kind of thing I was aiming for: subversion and decorative ornament,
 The Tailor’s Dummy 181

but still allowing for rhythm, across the installation as a whole, by introducing little
hints of articulation into each piece.
I layered them up like words in a poem, building up ornament upon ornament to
make texture, wanting to establish the feeling of blueprint; something in progress,
merely, leaving visible the structure and texture of the dummies — their ghostly
atmosphere, their uncanny power.

This piece is the introductory section of a one hundred-page work of fiction entitled
The Tailor’s Dummy. I have chosen to include it because Barbara has read the whole
work and enjoyed it and it seems the best representation of our friendship. For almost
three decades we have been talking about all aspects of creativity — literature,
painting, and clothes. Barbara knows I am passionately interested in textures and
fabrics and the ways they are made into forms, walked into life by the human form,
and we talk about all that with great enjoyment and relish. The piece is allegorical in
a number of registers — more than I realized when I first drafted it. It is always a joy
as well as fascinating to talk to Barbara, such an exceptionally learned scholar, critic
and poet, about creativity and the ways it can be lightly spun. Because I know how
profoundly Barbara values originality I am including an original rather than a critical
piece here. I hope, however modest a contribution, it will stand as a tribute to our
enduring friendship and to Barbara’s love of literature and art, which she expresses
in every conversation as well as in every one of her own great, vivacious and always
truly original works.
 APPENDIX

Barbara Hardy
 — 20 —

A Short Biography of Barbara Hardy

Birth: 27 June 1924, Swansea, Wales.
Parents: Maurice Nathan, Gladys (née Abrahams).
Education:
Swansea High School for Girls
University College, University of London: BA 1947 (First Class Honours); MA 1949
‘Coleridge’s Theory of Communication’
Appointments:
1951–65 Assistant Lecturer, Lecturer, Birkbeck College, University of London
1965–70 Professor of English, Royal Holloway College, University of London
1970–87 Professor of English, Birkbeck College, University of London
1987– Professor Emeritus, University of London
(together with innumerable visiting appointments, notably at Northwestern Uni­
versity, Evanston, IL, 1969–70)
Distinctions:
1962 British Academy Rose Mary Crawshay Prize for The Novels of George Eliot
1981 Honorary Doctorate, Open University
1982 Fellow of the Welsh Academy
1987–88 President, Dickens Society
1990–91 Director, Yeats Summer School
1991– Vice-President, Thomas Hardy Society
1991 Honorary Professor of English, University College Swansea
1997 Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature
2006 Fellow of the British Academy
Family: Married to Ernest Dawson Hardy (dec. 1977); two daughters, three grand­
children
 — 21 —

The Works of Barbara Hardy

A Primary and Secondary Bibliography
1948–2012
William Baker

The compilation of this partially annotated enumerative primary and secondary

bibliography of the creative achievements of Barbara Hardy [BH] presented some
problems, inevitably given a career of such length and productivity that extends
from the late 1940s and continues into the second decade of the twenty-first
century. Particularly difficult to document have been BH’s radio and television
appearances and reviews for weeklies such as the New Statesman and the Spectator.
The transfer in the last two decades of the twentieth century and the early years
of the twenty-first century of print materials to electronic databases led to the loss
of much information. Further, libraries increasingly move books and journals to
depositories or, as it euphemistically is said, recycle them: these processes do not
make the bibliographer’s task easier.
There will then be omissions and errors in the following bibliography. Every effort
has been made to personally inspect each item recorded although unfortunately at
times this has not been possible. Particular thanks are due to John James Aplin
and to Northern Illinois University students in the compilers Bibliography and
Research Methods course English 601. Particular mention should be made of
Miriam Fox, Amanda Roberts and Kelsey Ann Williams for their considerable
assistance. Librarians at Northern Illinois University libraries, especially Ronald
Barshinger, have been indispensable and of course the subject of this bibliography
was of considerable help too: especially, for instance, in confirming a ghost entry
attributed to her name in international databases!
The bibliography is arranged by sections and within each section items are listed
in the order of their initial publication. If publications fall within the same year they
are arranged in alphabetical order. Section A lists BH’s books and those she edited,
with (in most cases) British publication given first, followed by reviews of the
book. Section B lists articles and letters; Section C reviews by BH. Section D itemizes
BH’s poetry published in collections and Section E miscellaneous items including
speeches, addresses, and sound recordings. BH appeared regularly on BBC radio
programmes such as ‘A Word in Edgeways’ with Brian Redhead and others. These
recordings are yet to be documented. Lastly Section F contains material about BH
other than the reviews listed after her primary works in Section A. Reprints of
books and articles are largely not recorded. Material between square brackets [ ] is
the compiler’s.
186 William Baker

A. Books
A1. Books by Barbara Hardy and their reviews
(1). The Novels of George Eliot: A Study in Form (London: Athlone Press, 1959).
Anon., Times Literary Supplement (24 Apr. 1959), 239.
Bennett, Joan, ‘Homage to George Eliot’, Times Literary Supplement (24 Apr. 1959),
239.
Beaty, Jerome, Victorian Studies, 3 (1959), 310–11.
Cooper, Lettice, Listener, 61 (1959), 811–12.
Fryckstedt, O., Studia Neophilologica, 31 (1959), 255–60.
Handley, Graham, Notes and Queries, 6 (1959), 198.
Holloway, John, Review of English Studies, 11 (1960), 443–44.
Jones, John, New Statesman, 57 (1959), 698–99.
Miller, Betty, Twentieth Century, 165 (1959), 627–28.
Paris, Bernard J., Modern Language Notes, 75 (1960), 442–49.
Tompkins, J. M. S., London Magazine, 7 (1960), 82–83.
Smith, Sheila, Year’s Work in English Studies, 40 (1961), 244.
(2). Twelfth Night (Notes on English Literature) (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962).
(3). Wuthering Heights (Notes on English Literature) (Oxford: Blackwell, 1963).
(4). The Appropriate Form: An Essay on the Novel (London: Athlone Press, 1964).
Laski, Marghanita, Times Literary Supplement (31 Dec. 1964), 1177.
Blake, Caesar R., Victorian Studies, 13 (1967), 255–58.
Bradbury, Malcolm, Spectator (12 Feb. 1965), 206.
Handley, Graham, Notes and Queries, 13 (1966), 279–80.
Harvey, W. J., Review of English Studies, 16 (1965), 448–49.
Hewitt, Douglas, Essays in Criticism, 16 (1966), 92–97.
Ivy, G. S., Durham University Journal, New Series, 27 (1965), 51–52.
Killham, John, British Journal of Aesthetics, 5 (1965), 310–11.
Lauterbach, Edward S., Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 64 (1965), 714–16.
Lodge, David, Modern Language Review, 61 (1966), 119–20.
May, Derwent, Listener, 72 (1964), 948.
Taubman, Robert, New Statesman (7 May 1965), 731.
Thomson, Patricia, Studia Neophilologica, 38 (1966), 169–71.
Choice (Sept. 1965), 380.
The Virginia Quarterly Review (Summer 1965), pR138.
(5). Jane Eyre (Notes on English Literature) (Oxford, Blackwell, 1964).
Solomon, Eric, College Composition and Communication, 16 (1965), 181–82.
(6). Charles Dickens: The Later Novels. Published for the British Council and the National
Book League (London: Longmans, Green, 1968).
Robson, W. W., Dickensian, 65.2 (May 1969), 114–16.
Yarker, P. M., Year’s Work in English Studies, 49 (1968), 290–91.
(7). The Moral Art of Dickens: Essays (London: Athlone, 1970).
Anon., Times Literary Supplement (25 Dec. 1970), 1521.
Chapple, J. A. V., Year’s Work in English Studies, 51 (1970), 326.
Cribb, T. J., The Review of English Studies, New Series, 23. 91 (Aug. 1972), 372–74.
 Works of Barbara Hardy 187

Cushman, Keith, Modern Philology, 70.2 (Nov. 1972), 166–68.

Johnson, E. D. H., Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 26.3 (Dec. 1971), 349–52.
Lane, Lauriat, Jr., Dickens Studies Newsletter, 2 (1971), 47–49.
Muir, Kenneth, The Modern Language Review, 67.2 (Apr. 1972), 405–07.
Thomson, Patricia, Durham University Journal, New Series, 64 (1971) 76–77.
Wilson, Angus, Dickensian, 67.1 (Winter 1971), 45–47.
Booklist (1 June 1971), 815.
Choice (May 1971), 388.
The New York Review of Books (8 Oct 1970), 8.
Virginia Quarterly Review (Summer 1971), pR111.
Yale Review (Winter 1972), 271.
(8). The Exposure of Luxury: Radical Themes in Thackeray (London, Peter Owen, 1972; Pitts­
burgh, PA: Pittsburgh University Press, 1972).
Bishop, Morchard, Times Literary Supplement (6 Oct. 1972), 1186.
Baker, Joseph, Costerus, ns 2 (1974), 325–31.
Chappel, J. A. V., Year’s Work in English Studies (1973), 343–44.
Colby, Robert A., Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 28.3 (1973), 356–59.
Greene, Michael, Georgia Review, 28 (1974), 345–47.
Maxwell, J. C., Notes and Queries, 22 (1975), 467–69.
Stevenson, Lionel, Victorian Studies, 16 (1973), 359–61.
Stewart, Jim, The Dickensian, 69.2 (May 1973), 128–29.
Sundell, Michael G., Studies in the Novel, 5 (1973), 402–04.
Books & Bookman (Oct 1972), 91.
Library Journal (15 Nov. 1972), 3712.
Spectator (5 Aug. 1972), 218.
(9). A Reading of Jane Austen (London: Peter Owen, 1975).
Burrows, J. F., Journal of the Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association,
54 (1980), 251–54.
Chapple, J. A. V., Year’s Work in English Studies, 56 (1975), 327.
Chaudhuri, Nirad C., ‘Woman of the World’, Times Literary Supplement (16 Jan.
1976), 55.
Kaul, A. N., Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 32.1 ( Jun. 1977), 87–91.
Books & Bookman (Sept. 1979), 64.
Choice (Dec. 1976), 1296.
Guardian Weekly (8 Feb. 1976), 22.
Listener (22 Jan. 1976), 93.
The Observer (14 Dec. 1975), 24.
Spectator (10 Jan. 1976), 14.
(10). Tellers and Listeners: The Narrative Imagination (London: Athlone Press, 1975).
Beja, Morris, Dickensian, 72 (1976), 105–06.
Bergonzi, Bernard, ‘The Network of Narrative’, Times Literary Supplement (23 Apr.
1976), 492.
Booth, Wayne C., Modern Language Review, 73 (1978), 144–51.
Faulkner, Peter, Durham University Journal, 39 (1977), 117–18.
Gerhardi, Gerhard, Erasmus, 28 (1976), 342–44.
Graham, Kenneth, English, 25 (1976), 181–86.
Hagopian, John V., Studies in Short Fiction, 14 (1977), 189–90.
Hewitt, Karen, Review of English Studies, 28 (1977), 367–68.
188 William Baker

Hughes, Winifred, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 11.2 (Winter 1978), 173–75.

Hynes, Samuel, Modern Language Quarterly, 38 (1977), 212–15.
Kaul, A. N., Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 32.1 ( Jun. 1977), 87–91.
Moran, Maureen, Year’s Work in English Studies, 56 (1975), 347.
Pickering, Sam, ‘Judging the Learned Hand’, Sewanee Review, 85 (1977), 651–60.
Rodway, Allan, British Journal of Aesthetics, 16 (1976), 284–85.
Yeazell, Ruth Bernard, Victorian Studies, 21.1(Autumn 1977), 120–23.
Choice ( July 1976), 656.
Library Journal, 101 (1 May 1976), 1122.
New Statesman (24 Oct. 1975), 513.
(11). The Advantage of Lyric: Essays on Feeling in Poetry (London: Athlone Press, 1977).
Arac, Jonathan, Hudson Review, 31 (1978), 366–68.
Austin, Richard, Month, 10 (1977), 177–78.
Brownjohn, Alan, Encounter, 49.1 ( July 1977), 82–86.
Clausen, Christopher, Sewanee Review, 87.2 (Spring 1979), 314–19.
Davey, E. R., Journal of European Studies, 8 (1978), 209–10.
Grumbach, Doris, New York Times Book Review, 82 (11 Sept. 1977), 20.
Jarrett, David and Mary Jarrett, Year’s Work in English Studies, 58 (1977), 460.
Robson, W. W., English (Leicester), 27 (1978), 83–86.
Rodway, Allan, Notes and Queries, 25 (1978), 96.
Strier, Richard, Modern Language Quarterly, 39 (1978), 405–07.
Zinnes, Harriet, World Literature Today, 52.4 (Autumn 1978), 632.
Books & Bookman ( July 1978), 45.
Choice ( July 1977), 674.
Encounter ( July 1977), 82.
The Hudson Review (Summer 1978), 366.
Library Journal, 102 (15 Apr. 1977), 925.
(12). Particularities: Readings in George Eliot (London: Peter Owen, 1982).
Adam, Ian, Review of English Studies, ns 36.141 (Feb. 1985), 112–13.
Bayley, John, Times Literary Supplement (23 July 1982), 779–80.
Herron, Jerry, Victorian Studies, 27.1 (1983), 102–04.
Levine, George, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 38 (1983), 112–17.
Porter, Kathleen, George Eliot Review, 14 (1983), 23–24.
Woolley, John, English (Leicester), 36.154 (1987), 72–73.
Choice ( Jan. 1984), 704.
British Book News (Nov. 1982), 703.
(13). Charles Dickens: The Writer and His Work (Windsor: Profile Books, 1983).
(14). Forms of Feeling in Victorian Fiction (London, Peter Owen, 1984; Athens: Ohio Uni­
versity Press, 1985).
Bayley, John, Literary Review (Mar. 1985), 12–14.
Bennett, Rachel, The Review of English Studies, New Series, 37.147 (Aug. 1986),
436–37.
Boumela, Penny, English (Leicester), 36.154 (1987), 73–77.
Crawford, Iain, South Atlantic Review, 52, 1 ( Jan. 1987), 139–42.
David, Deirdre, Victorian Studies, 30.2 (1987), 279–81.
Day, Roger, Dickensian, 82.1 (Spring 1986), 53–54.
Hartveit, Lars, English Studies, 67.1 (1986), 86–87.
Henkle, Roger B., Review, 9 (1987), 317–22.
 Works of Barbara Hardy 189

Kemp, Peter, Listener, 113 (7 Feb. 1985), 26.

Kennedy, Alan, University of Toronto Quarterly, 56.3 (1987), 447–49.
Moseley, Merritt, ‘Realism and the Victorian Novel’, The Sewanee Review, 93.3
(Summer 1985), 485–92.
Murray, Nicholas, New Statesman, 109 (8 Feb 1985), 29.
Porter, Kathleen, George Eliot Review, 16 (1985), 23–24.
Pykett, Lyn, Year’s Work in English Studies, 66 (1985), 396–97.
Robson, W. W., Times Higher Education Supplement (15 Mar. 1985), 20.
Sandock, Mollie, Modern Philology, 84.4 (1987), 446–49.
Sutherland, John, London Review of Books, 7.7 (1985), 22–23.
Swinden, Patrick, Notes and Queries, 33.2 (1986), 260–62.
Wall, Stephen, Times Literary Supplement (6 Dec. 1985), 1408.
Wilt, Judith, Nineteenth-Century Literature, 41.1 (Mar. 1987), 470–73.
British Book News (March 1985), 183.
Choice, 23 (Feb. 1986), 868.
Listener, 113 (7 Feb 1985), 26.
New Statesman, 109 (8 Feb 8 1985), 29.
The Virginia Quarterly Review, 62 (Autumn 1986), 118.
(15). The Collected Essays of Barbara Hardy. Vol. 1: Narrators and Novelists (Brighton: Harvester
Press; Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1987).
Howells, Coral A., Yearbook of English Studies, 20 (1990), 350–51.
Newman, Judith, Durham University Journal, 80.2 (1988), 354.
Stoneman, Patsy, Year’s Work in English Studies, 68 (1987), 445.
(16). Tennyson and the Novelists (Lincoln, UK: Tennyson Society, 1993).
(17). Swansea Girl: A Memoir (London: Peter Owen; Chester Springs, PA: Dufour Editions,
1994).
P. W., Times Literary Supplement, 4739 (28 Jan. 1994), 28.
Belles Lettres: A Review of Books by Women, 10.2 (Spring 1995), 88.
Observer (10 Apr. 1994), 19.
Observer (17 Apr. 1994), 19.
Times Educational Supplement, 4048 (28 Jan. 1994), A12.
(18). Henry James: The Later Writing (Plymouth: Northcote House in Association with the
British Council, 1996).
(19). London Lovers (London and Chester Springs, PA: Peter Owen, 1996).
Forster, Margaret, Spectator, 276.8739 (13 Jan. 1996), 38.
Sage, Lorna, Times Literary Supplement, 4839 (29 Dec. 1995), 20.
Kirkus Reviews, 64 (15 May, 1996), 708.
Publishers Weekly, 243.24 (10 June 1996), 87.
(20). Shakespeare’s Storytellers: Dramatic Narration (London and Chester Springs, PA: Peter
Owen, 1996).
Berry, Ralph. ‘What the bard meant by before and after’, Times Higher Education
Supplement (11 Sep. 1998).
Cook, Ann J., Shakespeare Quarterly, 52.2 (2001), 296–98.
Honigmann, E. A. J., English, 49.194 (2000), 181–84.
Kingsley-Smith, Jane, Notes and Queries, 46.1 (1999), 117–18.
Potter, Lois, Times Literary Supplement (13 Mar. 1998), 9–10.
190 William Baker

(21). Dylan Thomas: An Original Language (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000).
Davies, Walford, ANQ, 15.3 (2002), 50–52.
Entwistle, Alice, Year’s Work in English Studies, 81 (2002), 852.
Lewis, Gwyneth, ‘Flowing all ways’, Times Literary Supplement (8 Jun. 2001), 25.
(22). Thomas Hardy: Imagining Imagination: Hardy’s Poetry and Fiction (London: Athlone Press,
2000).
Baker, William, Year’s Work in English Studies, 81 (2002), 714.
Cavaliero, Glen, ‘Free minds and the rebellious life’, Times Literary Supplement, 5074
(30 June 2000), 26.
Flaxman, Rhoda L., Victorian Studies, 44.3 (2002), 551–52.
Gill, Jo, Year’s Work in English Studies, 82 (2003), 704.
(23). George Eliot: A Critic’s Biography (London and New York: Continuum, 2006).
Baker, William, Year’s Work in English Studies, 87 (2008), 798.
Bodenheimer, Rosemarie, George Eliot Review, 38 (2007), 49–50.
Hounion, Morris, Library Journal (1 Nov. 2006), 77.
Jumeau, Alain, Études Anglaises, 63.1 (2010), 115–17.
Levine, George, Victorian Studies, 50.1 (2007), 99–102.
Pfeiffer, John R., George Eliot — George Henry Lewes Studies, 54/55 (2008), 164–67.
Sanders, Valerie, Women’s Writing, 15.1 (2008), 141–43.
Schor, Esther, Times Literary Supplement (12 Oct. 2007), 27.
Reference & Research Book News (Nov 2009).
(24). Dickens and Creativity (London and New York: Continuum, 2008).
Bachman, Maria K., Victorians Institute Journal, 37 (2009), 283–92.
Baker, William, Year’s Work in English Studies, 89 (2010), 717.
Jumeau, Alain, Études Anglaises, 63.2 (2010), 237–39.
McAllister, David, Modern Language Review, 105.1 (2010), 222–23.
Patten, Robert L., English Studies, 91.2 (Apr. 2010), 231–33.
Vann, J. D., Choice, 46.8 (Apr. 2009), 1498.
Reference & Research Book News (Feb. 2009).
(25). Dorothea’s Daughter and Other Nineteenth-Century Postscripts (Brighton: Victoria Secrets,
2011).
Carey, John, George Eliot Review, 43 (2012), 60–61.

A2. Books edited by Barbara Hardy and their reviews

(1). Daniel Deronda, George Eliot (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967). BH’s ‘Introduction’
(7–30), editorial notes (885–903). Reprinted as ‘Daniel Deronda’, The Collected Essays of
Barbara Hardy. Vol. 1: Narrators and Novelists (Brighton: Harvester Press; Totowa, NJ:
Barnes and Noble, 1987), 109–29.
(2). Middlemarch: Critical Approaches to the Novel (London: Athlone Press, 1967).
In addition to her ‘Acknowledgements’ (vi) and ‘Introduction’ (1–11), BH contributes
‘The Surface of the Novel. Chapter 30’ (148–71). Parts of this were reprinted in George
Eliot Middlemarch: A Casebook, ed. by Patrick Swinden (London: Macmillan, 1972),
207–24.
Hynes, Samuel L., Times Literary Supplement (18 Jan. 1968), 52.
Booth, Wayne C., Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 23. 4 (Mar. 1969), 478–81.
 Works of Barbara Hardy 191

Deneau, Danniel P., Southern Humanities Review, 3 (1969), 195–96.

Lee, Brian, Year’s Work in English Studies, 48 (1967), 308.
Lerner, Laurence, The Modern Language Review, 64.4 (Oct. 1969), 889–90.
Maxwell, J. C., Notes and Queries, 17 (1970), 398–99.
Monod, S., Études Anglaises, 4 (1968), 421–22.
Choice (Oct 1968), 952.
New Statesman (17 Nov 1967), 683.
(3). Critical Essays on George Eliot (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; New York: Barnes
and Noble, 1970).
Bennett, Joan, Times Literary Supplement (5 Feb. 1970), 116.
Chapple, J. A. V., Year’s Work in English Studies, 53 (1972), 347.
Milner, Ian, Victorian Studies, 15.1 (Sep. 1971), 99–100.
Simon, Irène, The Review of English Studies, New Series, 22.86 (May 1971), 231–33.
Booklist (15 July 1970), 1373.
Library Journal (15 April 1970), 1481.
Times Literary Supplement (5 Feb 1970), 136.
(4). The Trumpet-Major: John Loveday, A Soldier in the War with Buonaparte and Robert his
Brother, First Mate in the Merchant Service, Thomas Hardy (London: Macmillan, 1974).
BH ‘Introduction’ (11–31), notes by Laurel Brake and Ernest Hardy. BH adds a footnote
on the first page of her ‘Introduction’’: ‘I hope no one will read this Introduction
before first reading the novel’ (11).
(5). A Laodicean: A Story of To-day, Thomas Hardy (London: Macmillan, 1975). BH
‘Introduction’ (13–29), notes by Ernest Hardy.
(6). Evan Harrington, Thomas Hardy (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1983). BH
‘Introduction’ (v–xiv). Reprinted in The Collected Essays of Barbara Hardy. Vol. 1:
Narrators and Novelists (Brighton: Harvester Press; Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble,
1987), 143–51.
(7). Not So Quiet: Stepdaughters of War, Helen Zenna Smith (London: Virago, 1988). BH
‘Introduction’ (7–13).
(8). ‘D. H. Lawrence The Rainbow, Vol. 161: Everyman’s Library, D. H. Lawrence (London:
David Campbell Publishers, 1993) [Distributed by Random House]. BH ‘Introduction’
(ix–xxvii).

B. Articles and letters by Barbara Hardy

B1. Articles by Barbara Hardy
(1). ‘Coleridge and Milton’, Times Literary Supplement, 2597 (9 Nov. 1951), 711.
(2). ‘Distinction without Difference: Coleridge’s Fancy and Imagination’, Essays in
Criticism, 1.4 (Oct. 1951), 336–44.
(3). ‘Coleridge’s Marginalia on Fuller’s Pigsah-Sight of Palestine’, Modern Language Review, 47
(Apr. 1952), 299–300.
(4). ‘Imagination and Fancy’, Essays in Criticism, 2 ( July 1952), 347–49. A reply to L. J. Potts’
‘Imagination and Fancy’, Essays in Criticism, 2 ( July 1952), 345–47 which is a response
to BH’s ‘Distinction without Difference.’
(5). ‘Keats, Coleridge, and Negative Capability’, Notes and Queries, 197 (5 July 1952), 299–301.
(6). ‘Coleridge’s Marginalia on Fuller’s “Pisgah-Sight of Palestine,” ’ Modern Language
Review, 47 (Apr. 1952), 203–08.
192 William Baker

(7). ‘Walter Whiter and Shakespeare’, Notes and Queries, 198 (Feb. 1953), 50–54.
(8). ‘The Moment of Disenchantment in George Eliot’s Novels’ Review of English Studies, 5
ns ( July 1954), 256–64.
(9). ‘Form in Joyce Cary’s Novels’ Essays in Criticism, 4 (Apr. 1954), 180–90
(10). ‘Imagery in George Eliot’s Last Novels’, Modern Language Review, 50 ( Jan. 1955),
6–14.
(11). ‘Mr Browning and George Eliot’, Essays in Criticism, 6 ( Jan. 1956), 121–23.
(12). ‘The Image of the Opiate in George Eliot’s Novels’, Notes and Queries, 202 (Nov. 1957),
487–90.
(13). ‘ “I Have a Smack of Hamlet”: Coleridge and Shakespeare’s Characters’, Essays in
Criticism, 8 ( July 1958), 238–55.
(14). ‘ “A Way to your Hearts through Fire and Water”: The Structure of Imagery in Harry
Richmond’, Essays in Criticism, 10 (Apr. 1960), 163–80.
(15). ‘Formal Analysis and Common Sense’ Essays in Criticism, 11 ( Jan. 1961), 112–15.
(16). ‘The Change of Heart in Dickens’ Novels’ Victorian Studies, 5 (Sept. 1961), 49–67.
(17). ‘Martin Chuzzlewit’, in Dickens and the Twentieth Century, ed. by John Gross and Gabriel
Pearson (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1962), 107–20.
(18). ‘A Mistake in Tristram Shandy’, Notes and Queries, 9 ns ( July 1962), 261.
(19). ‘Work in Progress IV: Food and Ceremony in Great Expectations’, Essays in Criticism, 13
(Oct. 1963), 351–63.
(20). ‘Form as End and Means in Ulysses’, Orbis Litterarum, 14.4 (1964), 194–200.
(21). ‘The Reticence of W. H. Auden’, Review, 11/12 (1964), 54–64.
(22). ‘Introduction’, Middlemarch: Critical Approaches (London: Athlone Press, 1967), 1–11.
(23). ‘The Personality of Criticism’, Southern Review, 3 (Oct. 1967), 1001–09.
(24). ‘The Surface of the Novel: Chapter 30’, Middlemarch: Critical Approaches to the Novel
(London: Athlone Press, 1967), 154–71.
(25). ‘The Triumph of Dingley Dell: Some Observation on The Pickwick Papers’, The London
Review, 2 (Autumn 1967), [no other information available].
(26). ‘Towards a Poetics of Fiction: 3) An Approach through Narrative’, Novel, 2 (Fall 1968),
5–14.
(27). ‘Clough’s Self-consciousness’, in The Major Victorian Poets: Reconsiderations, ed. by Isobel
Armstrong (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), 169–95.
(28). ‘Mrs Gaskell and George Eliot’, in The Victorians, ed. by Arthur Pollard (London:
Sphere Books, 1969), 169–95. A revised and updated edition was published in 1987.
BH’s essay is on pages 173–97.
(29). ‘W. H. Auden, Thirties to Sixties: A Face and a Map’, Southern Review, 5 (Summer
1969), 655–72.
(30). Coauthored with Bernard Bergonzi, Malcolm Bradbury, Ian Gregor, Frank Kermode,
Mark Kinkead-Weekes, David Lodge, Tony Tanner, Paul Turner, Park Honan,
‘Realism, Reality and the Novel: A Symposium on the Novel’, Novel, A Forum on
Fiction, 2.3 (Spring 1969), 197–211.
(31). ‘The Complexity of Dickens’, in Dickens 1970: Centenary Essays, ed. by Michael Slater
(London: Chapman and Hall, 1970), 29–51.
(32). ‘Dickens and the Passions’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 24 (1970), 449–66.
(33). ‘The Poetry of Sylvia Plath: Enlargement or Derangement?’, The Survival of Poetry
(London: Faber, 1970), 179–80.
(34). ‘Dickens and the Passions’, in Dickens Centennial Essays, ed. by Ada Nisbet and Blake
Nevius (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 67–84.
(35). ‘Implication and Incompleteness: George Eliot’s Middlemarch’, in The Victorian Novel:
Modern Essays in Criticism, ed. by Ian Watt (London and New York: Oxford University
Press, 1971), 289–310.
 Works of Barbara Hardy 193

(36). ‘George Meredith’s Lord Ormont and his Aminta and The Amazing Marriage’, in Meredith
Now: Some Critical Essays, ed. by Ian Fletcher (New York: Barnes and Noble; London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul 1971), 296–97.
(37). ‘A New Dickens Musical: Scrooge’, Dickensian, 67.1 ( Jan. 1971), 41–42. ‘Given subject
and season, it seems Scrooge-like to call Ronald Neame’s cheery musical Scrooge the
worst Dickens film I have ever seen, but the actual quality of its badness makes that
judgment rather hard on the long creative records of Dickens screen versions’ (41).
(38). ‘Thinking and Feeling in the Song and Sonnets’, in John Donne: Essays in Celebration,
ed. by A. J. Smith (Methuen, 1972), 73–88.
(39). ‘Dickens’s Storytellers’, Dickensian, 69.2 (May 1973), 71–78.
(40). ‘Women in D. H. Lawrence’s Novels and Poetry’, in D. H. Lawrence: Novelist, Poet,
Prophet, ed. by S. Spender (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973), 90–121.
(41). ‘Passion and Contemplation in Yeats’s Love-Poetry’, Modernist Studies, 1.2 (1974),
7–19.
(42). ‘The Dubious Consolations in Beckett’s Fiction: Art, Love and Nature’, in Beckett the
Shape Changer: A Symposium, ed. by Katharine Worth (London and Boston: Routledge
and Kegan Paul, 1975), 107–38.
(43). ‘Middlemarch and the Passions’, in This Particular Web: Essays on ‘Middlemarch’, ed. by
Ian Adam (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1975), 3–21.
(44). ‘The Objects in Mansfield Park’, in Jane Austen: Bicentenary Essays, ed. by John Halperin
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 180–96.
(45). ‘Jane Austen’, in The English Novel, ed. by Cedric Watts (London: Sussex, 1976),
1–30.
(46). ‘The Lyricism of Emile Brontë’, in The Art of Emily Bronte, ed. by Anne Smith (New
York: Barnes and Noble, 1976), 94–118.
(47). ‘Middlemarch: Public and Private Worlds’, English (Leicester), 25 (1976), 5–26.
(48). ‘An Approach through Narrative’, in Towards a Poetics of Fiction, ed. by M. Spilka
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), 31–40.
(49). ‘Charles Dickens Remembered: A Toast’, Dickensian, 73.2 (May 1977), 122–26. [The
text of the Dickens toast given at the London Birthday Dinner, 1977.] BH commented
that her ‘first acquaintance with Dickens, at least in my appropriate retrospects, is
sharply visual. I remember the green cover of my mother’s copy of Our Mutual Friend,
with her maiden name inscribed on the f lyleaf. I find it unreadable but next come
across my first readable Dickens, those two enchanted stories where the children never
grow up, Oliver Twist and The Old Curiosity Shop, and perhaps — memory dims here
— David Copperfield, in rather cardboard red bindings with meretricious gold on the
spines, a black and white whorl pattern on the endpapers, borrowed from a bookshelf
in the arm of an uncle’s impressively smart thirties armchair. Perhaps it didn’t strike
me like that at the time’ (123).
(50). ‘Objects in Novels’ Genre, 10 (Winter 1977), 485–500.
(51). ‘Robinson Crusoe: the Child and the Adult Reader’, Children’s Literature in Education, 8
(Spring 1977), 3–11.
(52). ‘Under the Greenwood Tree: A Concern with Imagination’, in The Novels of Thomas
Hardy, ed. by Anne Smith (London: Vision Press, 1979), 45–57.
(53). Coauthored with J. Hillis Miller and Richard Poirier, ‘Middlemarch, Chapter 85: Three
Commentaries’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 35 (1980), 432–53.
(54). ‘The Wildness of Crazy Jane’, in Yeats, Sligo and Ireland: Essays to Mark the 21st Yeats
International Summer School, ed. by Alexander N. Jeffares (Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble,
1980), 31–55.
(55). ‘Shakespeare’s Dramatic Narrative’, in Papers from the first Nordic Conference for English
Studies, Oslo, 17–19 September, 1980, ed. by Stig Johansson and Bjørn J. Tysdahl (Oslo:
Institute of English Studies, University of Oslo, 1981), 1–17.
194 William Baker

(56). ‘Charles Dickens’, in British Writers, vol. v: Elizabeth Gaskell to Francis Thompson, ed. by
Ian Scott-Kilvert (New York: Scribner’s, 1982), 41–74.
(57). ‘Love and Sympathy in Virginia Woolf ’, in The Uses of Fiction: Essays on the Modern
Novel in Honour of Arnold Kettle, ed. by Douglas Jefferson (Milton Keynes: Open
University Press, 1982), 199–211.
(58). ‘Meeting the Myth: Station Island’, in The Art of Seamus Heaney, ed. by Tony Curtis
(Glamorgan: Poetry Wales Press, 1982; Chester Springs, PA: Dufour, 1994), 152–63.
(59). ‘William Empson and Seven Types of Ambiguity’, Sewanee Review, 90 (1982), 430–39.
(60). ‘Aspects of Narrative’, The Poetry of Dannie Abse: Critical Essays and Reminiscences, ed.
with an introduction by Joseph Cohen (London: Robson Books, 1983), 101–07.
(61). ‘The Figure of Narration in Hamlet’, Dutch Quarterly Review of Anglo-American Letters,
16.1 (1986), 2–15.
(62). ‘The Representation of Feeling in Some Modern Novels’, The Rikkyo Review, 46
(1986), 1–19.[Conrad’s Lord Jim, Virginia Woolf ’s Jacob’s Room, Joyce’s Dubliners, A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, Beckett’s More Kicks than Pricks, Malone Dies,
The Unnameable]
(63). ‘Aspects of Narration in King Lear’, Jahrbuch der Deutschen Shakespeare-Gesellschaft (West)
(1987), 100–08.
(64). ‘The Ending of Middlemarch’, in The Collected Essays of Barbara Hardy. Vol. 1: Narrators
and Novelists (Brighton: Harvester Press; Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1987), 102–
08.
(65). ‘The Figure of Narration in Hamlet’, in A Centre of Excellence: Essays Presented to Seymour
Betsky, ed. by Robert Druce (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1987), 1–14.
(66). ‘Les Liaisons Dangereuses: Transcending Pornography’, The Collected Essays of Barbara
Hardy. Vol. 1: Narrators and Novelists (Brighton: Harvester Press; Totowa, NJ: Barnes
and Noble, 1987), 54–60. [Revised version of a radio talk commissioned by the Open
University and first broadcast in 1980.]
(67). ‘A Note on Mrs Ramsay’s Stews and Stockings’, The Fiction Magazine ( Jan./Feb. 1987),
208.
(68). ‘The Poetry of Sylvia Plath’, in Women Reading Women’s Writing, ed. by Sue Roe
(Brighton: Harvester Press, 1987), 207–25.
(69). ‘The Relationship of Beginning and End in George Eliot’s Fiction’, Cahiers Victoriens
et Édouardiens, 26 (1987), 7–19.
(70). ‘D. H. Lawrence’s Self-Consciousness’, in D. H. Lawrence in the Modern World, ed.
by Peter Preston and Peter Hoare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989),
27–46.
(71). ‘Region and Nation: R. S. Thomas and Dylan Thomas’, in The Literature of Region and
Nation, ed. by R. P. Draper (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), 93–107.
(72). ‘Shakespeare’s Narrative: Acts of Memory’, Essays in Criticism, 39.2 (1989), 93–115. [F.
W. Bateson memorial lecture, 1 Feb. 1989.]
(73). ‘The Narrative Art of Charles Lamb’, English Romantic Prose (1990), 117–32 [Papers
delivered at the Bochum Symposium Sept. 30–Oct 1, 1988].
(74). ‘Hogan’s Sensuous Energy’, European Gay Review, 4 (1989), 6–13.
(75). ‘Joyce and Homer: Seeing Double’, in James Joyce: The Artist and the Labyrinth, ed. by
Augustine Martin (London: Ryan Publishing, 1990), 169–91.
(76). ‘The Talkative Woman in Shakespeare, Dickens and George Eliot’, in Problems for
Feminist Criticism, ed. by Sally Minogue (London and New York: Routledge, 1990),
15–45.
(77). ‘Verge or Limit: Responses to Simple Nature’, Yeats Annual, 7 (1990), 68–89.
(78). ‘Francis King’s Obscured Passions’, European Gay Review, 6/7 (1991), 52–67.
(79). ‘Tragedy Across the Genres’, Poetica ( Japan), 33 (1991), 1–18.
 Works of Barbara Hardy 195

(80). ‘Re-reading Berryman: Power and Solicitation’ English (Leicester), 40.166 (Spring 1991),
37–46.
(81). ‘The Poetry of Ruth Fainlight’, European Gay Review, 8/9 (1992), 244–61.
(82). ‘Telling the Future: Forecasts and Fantasies in Shakespeare’s Narrative’, in Chaucer to
Shakespeare: Essays in Honour of Shinsuke Ando, ed. by Toshiyuki Takamiya and Richard
Beadle (Woodbridge, Suffolk and Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer, 1992), 161–77.
(83). ‘Imagining R. S. Thomas’s Amen’, Poetry Wales, 29.1 (1993), 21–22.
(84). ‘Rome in Middlemarch: A Need for Foreignness’, George Eliot–George Henry Lewes
Studies, 24/25 (1993), 1–16.
(85). ‘Hawk and Handsaw’ Hamlet Studies, 17.1/2 (1995), 94.
(86). ‘Good Times in Jude the Obscure or Rereading’, in Rereading Texts/ Rethinking Critical
Presuppositions: Essays in Honor of H.M. Daleski, ed. by Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan,
Leona Toker, and Shuli Barzilai (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1997), 21–35.
(87). ‘The Miserable Marriages in Middlemarch, Anna Karenina, and Effi Briest’, in George Eliot
and Europe, ed. by John Rignall (Aldershot: Scolar, 1997), 64–83.
(88). ‘The Woman at the Window’, in Perspectives on Self and Community in George Eliot:
Dorothea’s Window, ed. by Patricia Gately, Norman D. Leavens, and D. Cole Woodcox
(New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 1997), 1–32.
(89). ‘Samuel Beckett: Adapting Objects and Adapting to Objects’, in Beckett and Beyond, ed.
by Bruce Stewart (Gerrards Cross: Smythe, 1999), 145–54
(90). ‘The Censorship of Books’, Author, 111.4 (Winter 2000), 173–74. Barbara Hardy was a
consultant to the DPP advising on the literary merit of books such as Hubert Selby’s
Last Exit to Brooklyn and works by Henry Miller. These may have been victims of the
1959 Obscene Publications Act. She did not recommend the suppression of any novel
and has become even more convinced that it is impossible to distinguish adequately
between pornography and literature.
(91). ‘George Eliot for the Twenty-First Century: Middlemarch and the Poetry of Prosaic
Conditions’, George Eliot Review, 32 (2001), 13–22 [the twenty-ninth George Eliot
Memorial Lecture].
(92). ‘Lying, Cruelty, Secrecy and Alienation in I. Compton-Burnett’s Elders and Betters’, in
The Fiction of the 1940s, ed. by Rod Mengham and N. H. Reeve (Basingstoke and New
York: Palgrave, 2001), 134–51.
(93). ‘Obituary: Kathleen Tillotson: A world authority on Dickens, she was renowned for
her scholarship and criticism’ Guardian (6 June 2001), 24.
(94). ‘Thomas Hardy (1840–1928)’, in British Writers: Retrospective Supplement I, ed. by Jay
Parini (New York: Scribner’s, 2002), 109–22.
(95). ‘Art into Life, Life into Art: Middlemarch and George Eliot’s Letters, with Special
Reference to Jane Senior’, George Eliot–George Henry Lewes Studies, 44/45 (2003),
75–96.
(96). ‘The Two Timothy Coopers’, George Eliot Review, 35 (2004), 25–28.
(97). ‘Cousin Phillis: The Art of the Novella’, Gaskell Society Journal, 19 (2005), 25–33
(98). ‘Literary Allusion: Hardy and Other Poets’, in Thomas Hardy Reappraised: Essays in
Honour of Michael Millgate, ed. by Keith Wilson (Toronto, Buffalo, NY, and London:
Toronto University Press, 2006), 55–77.
(99). ‘The Story within the Play: Fantasy and Fable’, Shakespeare Jahrbuch, 142 (2006),
34–46.
(100). ‘Writing a Critic’s Biography’, George Eliot–George Henry Lewes Studies, 50/51 (2006),
110–24.
(101). ‘Literary Allusions, Appropriations and Assimilations’, in Seamus Heaney: Poet, Critic,
Translator, ed. by Ashby Bland Crowder and Jason David Hall (Basingstoke and New
York: Macmillan, 2007), 189–209.
196 William Baker

(102). ‘George Eliot to Martha Jackson: A New George Eliot Holograph Letter’, George Eliot
Review, 40 (2009), 57–61.
(103). ‘Expressive Things in Adam Bede’, George Eliot Review, 41 (2010), 30–34.
(104). ‘A Portrait of Lucy Deane’ [story], George Eliot Review, 42 (2011), 87–92.
(105). ‘Two Women: Some Forms of Feelings in North and South’, Gaskell Journal, 25 (2011),
19–29.
(106). ‘Women in Italy: Amy Dorritt to Lucy Honeychurch’, English, 61 [235] (Winter 2012),
327-40.

B2. Letters by Barbara Hardy

(1). ‘George Eliot’, Times Literary Supplement, 3876 (25 June 1976), 783.
(2). Letter to the Editors, George Eliot Review, 32 (2001), 70.
(3). ‘George Eliot and the Harpsichord’, Times Literary Supplement, 5357 (9 Dec. 2005), 15.

C. Reviews by Barbara Hardy

(1). Rev. of The English Heritage of Coleridge of Bristol, 1798. The Basis in Eighteenth-Century
English Thought for His Distinction between Imaginations and Fancy, Wilma L. Kennedy.
Modern Language Review, 43 (Apr. 1948), 264–65.
(2). Rev. of Thomas Hardy: The Novels and Stories, Albert J. Guerard and An Introduction to
Hardy’s Novels, Orhan Burian. Modern Language Review, 46 ( July/Oct. 1951), 497–98.
(3). Rev. of Shelley: The Last Phase, Ivan Roe. Review of English Studies, 5 (Apr. 1954), 204–06.
(4). ‘Another Road to Xanadu’, rev. of Coleridge, Opium and Kubla Khan, Elisabeth
Schneider. Essays in Criticism, 6 (1955), 87–94.
(5). Rev. of The George Eliot Letters, ed. by Gordon S. Haight. Modern Language Review,
(Apr. 1956), 249–52.
(6). Rev. of Emily Brontë. Expérience Spirituelle et Création Poétique. Jacques Blondel. Modern
Language Review, 52 (1957), 301.
(7). Rev. of D. H. Lawrence: A Basic Study of His Ideas, Mary Freeman. Modern Language
Review, 52 (1957), 302–03.
(8). Rev. of Art and Reality, Joyce Cary. Modern Language Review ( July 1959), 427–28.
(9). Rev. of Biographia Literaria, ed. by George Watson. Modern Language Review, 53 (1959),
141–42.
(10). Rev. of The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Vol. I: 1794–1804, ed. by Kathleen
Coburn. Essays in Criticism, 9 (1959), 309–15.
(11). Rev. of Charles Dickens. The World of His Novels, Miller J. Hillis. Modern Language
Review, 65.3 ( July 1960), 433–36.
(12). Rev. of The Golden Key: A Study of the Fiction of George Macdonald, Robert Lee Wolff.
Victorian Studies, 5 (Dec. 1961), 171–72.
(13). Rev. of Middlemarch from Notebook to Novel: A Study of George Eliot’s Creative Method,
Jerome Beaty. Modern Language Review, 57 ( Jan. 1962), 94–95.
(14). Rev. of The Achievement of E. M. Forster, J. B. Beer. Essays in Criticism, 13 (1963), 181–87.
(15). Rev. of Bergson and the Stream of Consciousness Novel, Shiv K. Kumar. Notes and Queries,
10 (1963), 396–98.
(16). Rev. of E. M. Forster: The Perils of Humanism, Frederick C. Crews. Essays in Criticism,
13 (1963), 181–87.
(17). Rev. of The Art of Arnold Bennett, James G. Hepburn. Notes and Queries, 11 ns (1964),
397–98.
(18). Rev. of The Byronic Hero: Types and Prototypes, Peter L. Thorslev. British Journal of
Aesthetics, 4 (1964), 83–84.
(19). Rev. of Henry James and his Cult, Maxwell Geismar. British Journal of Aesthetics, 4 (1964),
381–84.
 Works of Barbara Hardy 197

(20). Rev. of John Keats, Walter Jackson Bate. British Journal of Aesthetics, 4 (1964), 379–80.
(21). Rev. of The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, G. Lukács. British Journal of Aesthetics, 4
(1964), 180–81.
(22). Rev. of Essays of George Eliot, ed. by Thomas Pinney. Review of English Studies, 16 (Feb.
1965), 96–97.
(23). Rev. of Ford Madox Ford, Carol Ohmann. Notes and Queries, 12 ns (1965), 440.
(24). Rev. of The Poetry of W. H. Auden: The Disenchanted Island, Monroe K. Spears. Essays
in Criticism, 15 (1965), 230–38.
(25). Rev. of The Caught Image: Figurative Language in the Fiction of Henry James, Robert L.
Gale. Modern Language Review, 61 ( Jan. 1966), 117–18.
(26). Review of Dickens: The Dreamer’s Stance, Taylor Stoehr. Modern Language Quarterly, 27.2
(1966), 230–33.
(27). Rev. of Dickens: From Pickwick to Dombey, Steven Marcus. Victorian Studies, 9 (Mar.
1966), 206–07.
(28). Rev. of H. G. Wells: Journalism and Prophecy 1893–1946, W. Warren Wagar. Notes and
Queries, 13 ns (1966), 431–32.
(29). Rev. of Mid-Victorian Studies, Geoffrey Tillotson and Kathleen Tillotson. Durham Uni­
versity Journal, 27 (1966), 162–64.
(30). ‘From Stereotype to Archeotype’, rev. of Images of the Negro in American Literature, ed.
by Seymour L. Gross and John Edward Hardy. Phylon, 28.1 (1967), 109–11.
(31). Rev. of Charlotte Brontë: The Evolution of Genius, Winifred Gérin. Nineteenth-Century
Fiction, 23 (Sept. 1968), 240–43.
(32). Rev. of The Form of Victorian Fiction: Thackeray, Dickens, Trollope, George Eliot, Meredith,
and Hardy, J. Hillis Miller; Experience in the Novel, Dickensian, ed. by R. H. Pearce, 65.3
(September 1969), 184–86.
(33). Rev. of George Eliot: A Biography, Gordon S. Haight. Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 24
(Dec. 1969), 366–70.
(34). Rev. of The World of the Victorian Novel, William H. Marshall. Dickensian, 61.1 ( January
1969), 44–46.
(35). Rev. of Feminism and Art. A Study of Virginia Woolf, Herbert Marder. Review of English
Studies (Aug. 1970), 377–79.
(36). ‘Seeing more in Dickens’, rev. of F. R. Leavis and Q. D. Leavis Dickens the Novelist.
New Statesman (9 Oct. 1970), 456–57.
(37). Rev. of The Letters of George Meredith, ed. by C. L. Cline. Victorian Studies, 15 (Sept.
1971), 107–08.
(38). ‘Judging and Showing’, rev. of The City of Dickens, Alexander Welsh (Oxford: Claren­
don, 1971); The Winged Skull; Essays on Laurence Sterne, ed. by A. H. Cash and John M.
Stedmond (Methuen, 1971) [Papers from the Laurence Sterne Bicentenary Conference];
Meredith: A Change of Masks, by Gillian Beer (London: Athlone Press, 1970); Hardy’s
Vision of Man, by F. R. Southerington (Chatto & Windus, 1970); Thomas Hardy: His
Career as a Novelist, by Michael Millgate (London: Bodley Head, 1971); and Thomas
Hardy, by J. I. M. Stewart (London: Longman, 1971). Encounter (Dec. 1971), 48–54
(39). Rev. of Joyce Cary: the developing style, Jack Wolkenfeld. Notes and Queries, 18 (1971),
279–80.
(40). Rev. ‘Judging and Showing: Novels and their Critics’, Encounter, 37 (Dec. 1971), 48–54.
(41). Rev. ‘Guessing Games with Ezra Pound’, Spectator (15 Jan. 1972), 75–76.
(42). Rev. ‘A New Monument to Ezra Pound’, Spectator (26 Aug. 1972), 319–20.
(43). Rev. of As If By Magic, Angus Wilson. The Dickensian, 69.3 (Sept. 1973), 182–83.
(44). Rev. ‘The Memoirs of W. B. Yeats’, Spectator (13 Jan. 1973), 42–43.
(45). ‘Figments of Femininity’, rev. of Reader, I Married him: A Study of the Women Characters
of Jane Austin, Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot, Patricia Beer, Times
Literary Supplement (13 Dec. 1974), 1408.
198 William Baker

(46). Rev. of The Violent Effigy: A Study of Dickens’ Imagination, John Carey. Dickensian, 71,
1( January 1975), 49–51.
(47). ‘All the Year Round’, rev. of Dickens Studies Annual, ed. by Robert B. Partlow. Times
Literary Supplement (23 Jan. 1976), 86.
(48). Rev. of The Literature of Fidelity, Michael Black. English (1976), 96–102.
(49). Rev. ‘Mister Quilp: a reader’s digest film’, Dickensian, 72 ( Jan. 1976), 36–37.
(50). ‘Narrative Strata’, rev. of The Readable People of George Meredith, Judith Wilt. Times
Literary Supplement (2 Jan. 1976), 4.
(51). ‘The Other Great Tradition’, rev. of The Triumph of the Novel: Dickens, Dostoevsky,
Faulkner, Albert J. Guerard. Novel: A Forum on Fiction (Aut. 1977), 77–79.
(52). ‘Strains on the Self ’, rev. of The Literature of Change, John Lucas. Times Literary
Supplement (12 May 1978), 533.
(53). Rev. of The English Auden: poems, essays, and dramatic writings, 1927–1939, Edward
Mendelson. English (Leicester), 28 (1979), 185–90.
(54). Rev. of The George Eliot Letters. Vol. 8: 1840–1870; vol. 9: 1871–1881, ed. by Gordon S.
Haight. English (Leicester) (1980), 164–69.
(55). Rev. of John Ashbery: An Introduction to the Poetry, David Shapiro. Quarto, 7 (1980), 12.
(56). ‘Revisions and Reverberations’, rev. of The Mill on the Floss, ed. by Gordon S. Haight;
George Eliot’s Middlemarch Notebooks, ed. by John Clark Pratt and Victor A. Neufeldt.
Times Literary Supplement, 4038 (15 Aug. 1980), 907.
(57). Rev. of Wallace Stevens: A Celebration, ed. by Frank Doggett and Robert Buttel. Quarto,
(1980), 15.
(58). Everyman’s Book of Victorian Verse, J. R. Watson. Browning Society Notes (1983), 40–42.
(59). ‘Gossip Made Permanent’, rev. of Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Mary Russell
Mitford 1836–1854, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ed. by Meredith B. Raymond. Times
Literary Supplement (1 July 1983), 688.
(60). ‘Long-Distance Decoder’, rev. of The Lost Flying Boat, Alan Sillitoe. Times Literary
Supplement (11 Nov. 1983), 1256.
(61). “Powers and Perils’, rev. of Lectures on Don Quixote, V. Nabokov. New Statesman (17
June 1983), 22–23.
(62). Rev. of The Secular Pilgrims of Victorian Fiction: The Novel as Book of Life, Barry V.
Qualls. Dickensian, 79 (1983), 113–15.
(63). ‘The Venetian Secret’, rev. of Johnnie Cross, Terence de Vere White. Times Literary
Supplement (7 Oct.1983), 1095.
(64). ‘A Cinderella’s Loneliness’, rev. of Hotel du Lac, Anita Brookner. Times Literary
Supplement (14 Sept. 1984), 1019.
(65). ‘Cat and Mouse’, rev. of A Bowl of Cherries, Shena MacKay. Times Literary Supplement
(19 Oct. 1984), 1180.
(66). ‘Vehicles for Meditation’, rev. of Down from the Hill, Alan Sillitoe. Times Literary
Supplement (16 Nov. 1984), 1301.
(67). Rev. of George Eliot. A Centenary Tribute, ed. by Gordon S. Haight and R. T. VanArsdel.
Review of English Studies (Feb. 1985), 143–44.
(68). ‘High f lights and dutiful dailiness’, rev. of Valley of Decision, Stanley Middleton. Times
Literary Supplement (1 Mar. 1985), 226.
(69). ‘Islanded, companionable’, rev. of Crusoe’s Daughter, Jane Gardam. Times Literary
Supplement, 4288 (31 May 1985), 599.
(70). ‘The Fruits of Separation’, rev. of The Inheritance, Susan Ferrier. Times Literary Supple­
ment (7 June 1985), 641.
(71). ‘Gloom at the Loom’, rev. of BBC1 film production of Silas Marner. Times Literary
Supplement (3 Jan. 1986), 14.
(72). ‘An Everyday Myth’, rev. of The Courtship of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett,
Daniel Karlin. Times Literary Supplement (7 Feb. 1986), 136.
 Works of Barbara Hardy 199

(73). ‘The Need for Wilderness’, rev. of The Faber Book of Twentieth-Century Women’s Poetry,
ed. by Fleur Adcock. Times Literary Supplement, 4391 (29 May 1987), 574.
(74). Rev. of Poets in Their Time: Essays on English Poetry from Donne to Larkin, Barbara
Everett. English (Leicester), 36.155 (1987), 187–90.
(75). Rev. of Dickens: A Biography, Fred Kaplan. Times Educational Supplement (9 Dec. 1988),
22.
(76). Rev. of The Dickens Index, Nicolas Bentley, Michael Slater and Nina Burgis. Times
Educational Supplement (9 Dec. 1988), 22.
(77). Rev. of A Sinking Island: The Modern English Writers, Hugh Kenner. Times Educational
Supplement (21 Oct. 1988), 27.
(78). ‘The Struggle for Language’, rev. of No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the
20th Century. Vol. 1: The War of the Worlds, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar (New
Haven, CT; and London: Yale University Press, 1988); Feminist Literary History, Janet
Todd (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988). Times Literary Supplement, 4444 (3 June 1988), 621.
(79). Rev. of English Fiction of the Early Modern Period: 1890–1940, Douglas Hewitt. Times
Educational Supplement (27 Oct. 1989), 24.
(80). Rev. of The Haunted Study: a Social History of the English Novel, 1875–1914, Peter Keating.
Times Educational Supplement (27 Oct. 1989), 24.
(81). Rev. of Keats’s Life of Allegory: The Origins of a Style, Marjorie Levinson. English
(Leicester), 38 (1989), 168–83.
(82). Rev. of The Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction, John Sutherland. Times Educational
Supplement (4 Aug. 1989), 20.
(83). ‘The Perils of Prettiness’, rev. of Journey to Paradise, Dorothy Richardson. Times Literary
Supplement (1 Dec. 1989), 1341.
(84). Rev. of Reflecting on Anna Karenina, Mary Evans. Times Educational Supplement, (27 Oct.
1989), 24.
(85). Rev. of Reflecting on Jane Eyre, Pat Macpherson. Times Educational Supplement (27 Oct.
1989), 24.
(86). Rev. of Reflecting on the Well of Loneliness, Rebecca O’Rourke. Times Educational
Supplement (27 Oct. 1989), 24.
(87). ‘A Browning Version’, rev. of Lady’s Maid, Margaret Forster. Times Literary Supplement
(20 July 1990), 781.
(88). Rev. of The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens, Claire
Tomalin. Times Educational Supplement (16 Nov. 1990), R2.
(89). Rev. of Joseph Conrad: A Biography, Jeffrey Meyers. Times Educational Supplement (9 Aug.
1991), 20.
(90). ‘To the Land of the Dead’, rev. of The Queen of the Tambourine, Jane Gardam. Times
Literary Supplement (12 Apr. 1991), 18.
(91). ‘Dabbling with the Devil’, rev. of Faustine, Emma Tennant. Times Literary Supplement
(6 Mar. 1992), 21.
(92). Rev. of G. H. Lewes: A Life, Rosemary Ashton. Dickensian, 88.2 (1992), 112–15.
(93). ‘Judging by Appearances’, rev. of Strong Representations, Alexander Welsh. Times Literary
Supplement (5 June 1992), 24.
(94). ‘Tale of a text’, rev. of Poor Things, Alasdair Gray. Times Literary Supplement (28 Aug.
1992), 18.
(95). ‘Droppings and Patchings’, rev. of Thomas Hardy: The Excluded and Collaborative Stories,
Thomas Hardy, ed. by Pamela Dalziel. Times Literary Supplement (16 April 1993), 24.
(96). Rev. of Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories, Jenny Uglow. Times Educational Supplement
(19 Feb. 1993), S10.
(97). Rev. of Literature in its Place, James Britton. Times Educational Supplement (10 Sept. 1993),
2.
200 William Baker

(98). Rev. of Shakespeare’s ’Mouldy Tales’: Recurrent Plot Motifs in Shakespearian Drama, Leah
Scragg. Modern Language Review, 89.3 ( July 1994), 724–25.
(99). Rev. of Representations of Science and Technology in British Literature since 1880, Earl G.
Ingersoll. Modern Language Review, 89.3 ( July 1994), 743–44.
(100). Rev. of Juvenilia: poems, 1922–1928, ed. by Katherine Bucknell. English (Leicester),
44.180 (1995), 248–52.
(101). Rev. of Dylan Thomas: The Filmscripts, ed. by John Ackerman. English (Leicester), 45.183
(1996), 247–51.
(102). Rev. of Sexual Politics, Kate Millett. The New York Times Book Review (6 Oct. 1996),
96.
(103). Rev. of The Way We Live Now, Richard Hoggart. Political Quarterly, 67.3 ( July/Sept.
1996), 273–76.
(104). Rev. of Virginia Woolf, Hermione Lee. Boston Review, 22.5 (1997), 53.
(105). Rev. of Art and Affection: A Life of Virginia Woolf, Panthea Reid. Boston Review, 22.5
(1997), 53.
(106). Rev. of George Eliot: The Last Victorian, Kathryn Hughes. George Eliot Review (2000),
85–86.
(107). Rev. of The Journals of George Eliot, ed. by Margaret Harris and Judith Johnston.
George Eliot Review, 31 (2000), 86–88.
(108). Rev. of Jeanie, an ‘Army of One’: Mrs Nassau Senior, 1828–1877, Sybil Oldfield. George
Eliot Review, 39 (2008), 58–60.
(109). Rev. of George Eliot: Novelist, Lover, Wife, Brenda Maddox. George Eliot Review, 40
(2009), 62.
(110). Rev. of George Eliot’s Grammar of Being, Melissa A. Raines. George Eliot Review, 42
(2011), 97–100.
(111). Coauthored with Michel Blanc, rev. of Daniel Deronda, ed. by and trans. Alain
Jumeau. George Eliot Review, 42 (2011), 101–05.
(112). Rev. of Dante in the Nineteenth Century, ed. by Aida Aideh and Nick Havely, Dante
in the Long Nineteenth Century. George Eliot–George Henry Lewes Studies, 62.3 (2012),
131–41.

D. Poetry by Barbara Hardy and its reviews

(1). London Rivers: A Collection of Poems, ed. by Kate Hardy and Barbara Hardy. Images
by Kate Hardy (Walthamstow: Paekakariki Press, 2001). [Limited edition 250 copies,
contains Hardy’s ‘Old Hungerford Footbridge’ (3).]
(2). Severn Bridge: New and Selected Poems (Nottingham: Shoestring Press, 2001).
Hughes, Siân, ‘Except for sudden darks’, Times Literary Supplement, 5147 (23 Nov.
2001), 25.
(3). The Yellow Carpet: New and Collected Poems (Shoestring Press, 2006).
 Works of Barbara Hardy 201

E. Miscellaneous other work by Barbara Hardy

E1. Thesis
(1). ‘Coleridge’s theory of communication’, MA University College London, 1949.

E2. Conferences
1). [Conference Report], George Eliot Review, 33 (2002), 70–71. An account of the
conference ‘George Eliot: Life in Letters’ at the Institute of English Studies, University
of London, 17–18 Jan. 2002.

E3. Speeches and addresses

Some may be found in other sections of this bibliography
(1). ‘Forms and Feelings in the Sonnets of Gerard Manley Hopkins’, Douglas, Isle of Man,
Island Development Company (1970). Hopkins Society Lecture.
(2). ‘Rituals and Feelings in the Novels of George Eliot’, Swansea, University College of
Swansea (1973). [W. D. Thomas Memorial lectures.]
(3). [‘Narrative Form in The Pickwick Papers’,] address given at Birkbeck College, University
of London 8 March 1986 to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the first publication of
The Pickwick Papers. See The Dickensian, 82.2 (Summer 1986), 114.
(4). The Narrators in Macbeth (London: University of London, 1987) [Hilda Hulme memorial
lecture].
(5). [‘Culinary Aspects of Oliver Twist’,] address given at Birkbeck College, University of
London 9 March 1987 to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the first publication of
Oliver Twist. See The Dickensian, 83.2 (Summer 1987), 118.
(6). ‘Talkative Women: Mrs. Nickelby’, address given at Birkbeck College, University of
London to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the first publication of Nicholas Nickelby.
See The Dickensian, 84.2 (Summer 1988), 121–22.
(7). Shakespeare’s Self-conscious Art (Lethbridge, Alta.: University of Lethbridge Press, 1988).
[Lecture.]
(8). [‘The Old Curiosity Shop’,] address given at Birkbeck College, University of London to
celebrate the 150th anniversary of the first publication of The Old Curiosity Shop. See
The Dickensian, 86.2 (Summer 1990), 123.
(9). [‘Barnaby Rudge’,] address given at Birkbeck College, University of London to
celebrate the 150th anniversary of the first publication of Barnaby Rudge. See The
Dickensian, 87.2 (Summer 1991), 124–25.
(10). George Eliot Conference at Arden House, University of Warwick, 10–12 July 1993.
See George Eliot Review, 24 (1993), 10.
(11). [‘A Celebration of Mrs Gamp’,] address given at Birkbeck College, University of
London to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the first publication of Martin Chuzzlewit.
See The Dickensian, 91.1 (Spring 1995), 66.
(12). ‘Imagining Imagination: Our Mutual Friend’, lecture given at the ‘Celebrating Charles
Dickens’ Day at Portsmouth University (27 April 1996). See The Dickensian, 92.2
(Summer 1996), 146.
(13). [‘Dombey and Son’,] address given at Birkbeck College, University of London to
celebrate the 150th anniversary of the first publication of Dombey and Son. See The
Dickensian, 93.1 (Spring 1997), 76.
(14). [‘The Talkative Women in Nickleby’] lecture given at the ‘Celebrating Charles Dickens’
Day 15 September 2001. See The Dickensian, 97.3 (2001), 268
202 William Baker

(15). ‘Conversation in Hard Times’, address given at Birkbeck College, University of London
to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the first publication of Hard Times. See The
Dickensian, 97.3 (2001), 278.
(16). ‘George Eliot: Life and Letters’, address given at the Institute of English Studies,
University of London, 17–18 Jan. 2002. See George Eliot Review, 33 (2002), 70–71.
(17). ‘Internal Narration in Little Dorrit: Forecasts and Fantasies’, address given at Birkbeck
College, University of London to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the first publication
of Little Dorrit. See The Dickensian, 98.3 (Winter 2002), 256.
(18). ‘A Tale of Two Cities: Narrations and Narrators’, address given at Birkbeck College,
University of London to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the first publication of A
Tale of Two Cities. See The Dickensian, 100.3 (2004), 256.
(19). ‘Pip’s Fancy’, address given at Birkbeck College, University of London to celebrate the
150th anniversary of the first publication of Great Expectations. See The Dickensian, 101.3
(Winter 2005), 248.
(20). ‘Italian Journeys’, address given at ’Republics of the Imagination: Dickens and Travel’:
25th Anniversary of Dickens Day at the University of London, 15 Oct. 2011. See The
Dickensian, 107.3 (Winter 2011), 261–62.
(21). ‘Jane Eyre’, address given at the Institute of English Studies, University of London,
Brontë Conference (5 Nov. 2011).
(22). ‘Birkbeck’s Dickens’, Weather Reports: A Symposium on the work of Steven Connor
(6 July 2012). Birkbeck Forum for Nineteenth-Century Studies, Birkbeck College,
University of London.
(23). ‘Her Wild Sad Life: Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857)’, addressed
to ‘London Gaskell Reading Group’ (Mon. 26 Mar. 2012). Digby Stuart College,
Roehampton University, London.

E4. Sound recordings

(1). ‘Jane Austen’, Cassette. (Santa Monica, CA: BFA Educational Media; New York: Holt
Information Systems [Sussex Tapes international]), 1972. Cassette with 10p pamphlet
in box [F12005]. [Approach to Literary Criticism Series, PR 4037.]
Discussion between David Daiches and BH on characterization and social commentary
on Jane Austen’s works. 10 page booklet containing notes on the discussion, study
questions, and bibliography laid in the container. World Cat records a copy with 1971
date. Reissued 1973.
(2). ‘George Eliot’, Cassette. (Santa Monica, CA: BFA Educational Media; New York: Holt
Information Systems [Sussex Tapes international]), 1974. Cassette with 11p pamphlet
in box [F12011]. [Approach to Literary Criticism Series, PR 4037.]
Discussion between David Daiches and BH, booklet containing notes on the
discussion, study questions, and bibliography laid in the container. Chief ly centred on
Middlemarch. Reissued 1974, 1975.
(3). ‘Emily Brontë’, Cassette (Santa Monica, CA: BFA Educational Media; New York: Holt
Information Systems [Sussex Tapes international]), 1974 [?]. With Miriam Allott.
(4). ‘Self-Consciousness in Shakespeare’s Art’, CD-ROM. (Everyman Theatre, Chelten­
ham), 1986.
(5). Lecture on Jane Austen’s Emma, Norwich Tapes [29E NORWICH TAPES [70] 01
NORWICH TAPES]. No date available.
(6). Lecture on Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, Norwish Tapes [1CA0015299 1 NORWICH
TAPES]. With Miriam Margoyles. No date available.
 Works of Barbara Hardy 203

F. Writings about Barbara Hardy

(1). Borklund, Elmer, ‘Hardy, Barbara’, Contemporary Literary Critics (London: St James
Press, New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1977), 243–45.
(2). Lorcher, Frances Carol, ‘Hardy Barbara’, Contemporary Authors. A Bio-bibliographical
Guide to Current Writers in Fiction, General Nonfiction, Poetry, Journalism, Drama, Motion
Pictures, Television and Other Fields. Vols. 85–88 (Detroit, MI: Gale Research, 1980),
241–42.
(3). Borklund, Elmer, ‘Hardy, Barbara’, Contemporary Literary Critics. Second Edition
(Detroit, MI: Gale Research, 1982), 259–62.
(4). Mink, JoAnna Stephens, ‘Barbara Hardy’, An Encyclopedia of British Women Writers.
Rev and expanded edition, ed. by Paul Schlueter and June Schlueter (New Brunswick:
Rutgers University Press, 1998), 303.
(5). ‘Election to Fellowship: Professor Barbara Hardy’, British Academy (The British
Academy, 2011. Web. www.britac.ac.uk [contains a photograph]).
(6). ‘The Writers of Wales Database’, Literature Wales (The Welsh Academy, the Society for
Writers of Wales, and Tŷ Newydd Writers Centre, 2011. Web. http://literaturewales.
org).
 INDEX
❖

Abbott, Claude Colleer 98 Beaune 162

Abbey Theatre patent 107 Beer, Gillian 12, 17 n. 1
Ackroyd, Peter 41–42 Belsey, Catherine, Shakespeare and the Loss of Eden
Adam, Fall of 130 130–31 n. 5
adaptation 76, 85 Bentley, Richard 29–30, 40–41
Aengus 100–03 Bentley’sMiscellany 40
Affron, Charles 85 Bernhardt, Sara 78
Agamben, Giorgio 147–48, 151 n. 4 Biagi, Guido 79
Aherne 108 Bible 157
Ahmed, Sarah 164, 169 n. 11 New English 130
Al, Mushin Jassim 27 Bicknell, W. L. Sunday Snowdrops 77
Alchemical, Rose 105–06 Binney, Thomas 59
Aldeburgh 149 Biograph Company 78
Alderson, Brian 27 Bioscope 80–81, 85
Al, Mushin Jassim 27 Birkbeck College, University of London 88
All the Year Round 45 Birch, Dinah 158
Allott, Miriam 75, 84, 120 Blackwoods, Publishers 67, 74, 76, 85
Allt, Peter, 109 n. 3 Blackwood, James 30
Alspach, Russell K. 109 n. 3 Blackwood, John 75
America 8, 59–62, 77–78, 80, 83, 85 nn. 15 & 23, Blain, Virginia 151 n. 6
100–01, 142, 161 Blake, William 104–06, 152–53
American, North 161–62 Bonaparte, Felicia 75, 84
Amsterdam Center for Cross-Disciplinary Emotion and The Book of Common Prayer 125
Sensory Studies 98 Books in Canada 169 n. 13
Anderson, Marjorie 169 n. 6 Booth, Wayne C. 17 n. 2
Anima Mundi 104 Boston 77
Annan, Margaret Cecilia 27–28 Boston, Parker House Hotel 60–61
Arcadian/Arcady 103 Bottomore, Tom 74
Archibald, Douglas N.109 n. 4 Bowen, John 55, 58
Arendt, Hannah 115, 120 n. 10 Bradden, Mary Elizabeth, Lady Audley’s Secret 79
Aristotle, Poetics 151 Bridges, Robert 89
Arno 79 British Library 15, 36, 41
Arts 84 British Review 132, 135
The Athenaeum 30 Brontës 2
The Atlantic Monthly 60, 62, 85 Charlotte Brontë 4, 16
Atwood, Margaret 163 Jane Eyre 2, 9, 145 n. 1, 147–51 n. 1, 160, 167
Australia 47 Emily Brontë 12
Australian Research Council Discovery Project 84 Brown, Andrew 85
Auden, W. H. 6, 111–12, 118–20 n. 2 Brown, Anne 60
Brown, Nicola 98 n. 1
Baghdad 26 Buber, Martin, Between Man and Man 15
Baker, William 4, 7, 41 n. 1, 42 n. 8, 85 n. 19 Bulldog Drummond 81
Barrie, J. M., Peter Pan 79 Bullen, J.B. 75, 84
Barron, Elwyn A. 77 Bunyan, John 157
Barrymore, John 78 Pilgrim’s Progress 32, 155
Barthes, Roland 52, 58 n. 7 Burton, Sir. Richard 24, 28 n. 31
Camera Lucida 114 Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night 24
Bartlett, Dan 76 Byron, Cain 61
 Index 205

Cabala 100, 102, 104–06 Coveney, Peter, The Image of Childhood 152, 159 n. 7
Cairo 26 Cox, Arthur J 58
Calder, Jenni 21, 26 n. 4, 27 nn. 8, 14–16, 19, 28 n. 34 Crabbe, George 134
Calvinist, moral virtues 65 Crary, Jonathan 90
Canadian 160–62 Crawford, Marion, The White Sister 78
Caoilte 103 Crimean War 23, 40
capitalism 63–74 Cross, John Walter 75, 84
Caracciolo, Peter 26, 28 Cruikshank, George 59–62 n. 7
Carney, Bethan 98 n. 1 Cuala Press 107
Carousel 78 Cubist painters 92
Carpenter, Humphrey 120 n. 2 Cyprus 126
Carroll, David 74, 84–85
Cashel 108 Daiches, David 132–33, 135, 139, 141, 143 n. 3,
Cartmell, Deborah 76 144 n. 17
Catholic 83, 89, 92–93, 98 n. 7, 105–07, 125, 143 Daily Telegraph 61
Centre for History of Emotions 98 Danaan 101–04
Cervantes, Saavedra Miguel 28 Dark Angel 105
Don Quixote 71 Darwinian tropes 90
Cézanne, Paul 96 Davids, Engelina 60
Chang, Prince of 107 Davie, Donald 133, 144 n. 7
Chartist 40 Davies, Stevie 151 n. 1
Cheney, Benjamin P. 59, 62 Davis, Philip 17 n. 6
Chesterton, Gilbert K. 58 DeBilly, Robert 156
Christ 89, 93–94, 96–97 Defoe, Daniel 16
Christ, Carol 74 The History of the Devil 155
Christ Church 109 Robinson Crusoe 9
Christian 89, 100–01 Denoon, Anne 169 n. 13
democracy 149 Design theory 92
hermeneutics 95 Devlin, Christopher 98
mysticism 9, 106 Devlin, D. D. 143 n. 3
Christianity 101 Dexter, Walter 58–59
Christians 89 Dickens, Charles 4, 6, 12, 23, 29, 41, 43–50, 51–54,
Christocentric natural theology 89 57–59, 88, 152–55
Civil War, American 77 American Notes 59
Clark, David R. 110 n. 8 Barnaby Rudge 45
Clarke, Faith 42 n. 7 Bleak House 54, 57–59
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 16 David Copperfield 43
‘Dejection: An Ode’ 114 Edwin Drood 8, 57, 58 n. 15
Collins, Philip 62 ‘The Great Baby’ 62 n. 7
Collins, Wilkie 12, 23, 27–28 Great Expectations 43, 52, 58
Basil: A Story of Modern Life 29 n. 42 Hard Times 28, 66
library 31, 42 Journalism 62
The Moonstone 23, 25, 29 Letters 50, 58–59, 62
No Name 148–51 n. 6 Little Dorrit 57–58, 72
Shorter Fiction, 42 Martin Chuzzlewit 61–62
The Woman in White 29 ‘Memorandum Book’ 52
Colman, Ronald 81 Oliver Twist 61
Confucian 107 Our Mutual Friend 50, 64
consciousness 92 A Tale of Two Cities 8, 51, 58
Conrad, Joseph 26, 28 ‘The Thousand and One Humbugs, (1855) 23
Cook, E. T. 98 Dickens, Charles, Museum 59
Cook, Cornelia 20 Dickens, Charles Jnr. 60
Coolidge, Calvin 77 Dickens, Henry 50
Cormac 108 The Dickensian 59, 62
The Cornhill Magazine 76 dogs, in Dickens 43–58
Corrigan, Timothy 76 Domville, Eric 109 n. 5
Couch, John Philip 158 Dorotea 80
206 Index

Dowson, Ernest 105–06 Foster, Giles 77

dream-images 92 Foster, R. F. 100, 109 n. 1
druid 101–03, 105 France 105, 161, 163
Dublin 104 Frazer James George 111
Dublin Theosophical Society 100, 104 French 23, 25, 40–41, 52–53, 58 n. 9, 98 n. 25, 135, 161
Dumas, Alexandre, The Vicomte de Bragelone 24 French landscape 52–53
Duncan, Ian 133–34, 138, 144 nn. 9, 13 & 24 French Revolution 40–41
Duse, Eleonora 78 French verbs 161
Dvorak, Marta 169 n. 10 Freud, Sigmund 64, 111, 113, 115
‘Totem and Taboo’ 113, 120 n. 5
Easson, Angus 58, 151 n. 5 Friedrich, Caspar David 56–57
Easter Rising 108 Frisby, David 74 n. 10
Eden, Edward 168 n. 1 Frost, Robert, Birches 114
Edminson, Mary 50 Furthman, Jules 76
Edward VI, King 125
Egyptian 178 Gad’s Hill Place 44
Eliot, George 3–4, 6–9, 16, 85 n. 14 152–59 Gamble, Sarah 168 n. 4
Adam Bede 12, 76, 84–85, 152 Gardner, W .H. 98 n. 29
Daniel Deronda 74, 152 Gaskell, Elizabeth Cleghorn 12, 20, 26 n. 2, 27 n. 23
Felix Holt 77 North and South 82
Journals 85 Ruth 148, 151 n. 5
Letters 15, 74, 80, 85, 159 n. 4 Gasson, Andrew 41 n. 4, 42 n. 21
Middlemarch 13, 63, 72, 77 The George Eliot Review 85 n. 15
The Mill on the Floss 5, 8–9, 63–74, 152–59 n. 3, 166 Gerhardt, Mia 27 n. 25
Romola 8, 74–86 Germany, Nazi 147
Scenes of Clerical Life 4, 77 Ghazoul, Ferial 26, 27 n. 24, 28 n. 37
Silas Marner 9, 63–64, 73, 77, 152–59 n. 9 Gill, Stephen 85 n. 8
Ellmann, Maud 120 n. 5 Gillies, R. P. 144 n. 10
Emotions, history of 88 Gilmour, Robin 50 n. 4
England 105, 127, 173 Gish, Dorothy 78–79, 81
Englishman 163 Gish, Lillian 76, 83–84, 85 nn. 17–19, 27,
Essays in Criticism 28 n. 25, 144 n. 12 86 nn. 29–30
Euclid 154 Godchild, P. 74 n. 2
Eve 130 Goertz, Dee 168 n. 1
Golden Dawn 104–05
Faery, land of 100 Goldman, Dorothy 30, 41 n. 5
Farr, Florence 104, 108 Gonne, Iseult 108
Fenian(s) 40, 100, 102, 107 Gonne, Maud 104, 107–08
Feuerbach, Ludwig, The Essence of Christianity 14 Gordon, Robert C. 144 n. 20
Fianna 102 Gothic novel 79
Fielding, Henry 135 Graves, Robert 112
Fields, James T. 62 great memory 104, 107–08
Firth of Clyde 142 Greek philosophers 94
fisherman 26, 34, 108 Gregory, Lady 108
Flaubert, Gustave 12: Madame Bovary 71 Griffith, D. W. 78, 84
Fleishman, Avrom 143 n. 3 A Fair Exchange 77
Florence 75–80, 82, 84: An Unseen Enemy 78
Davanzati Palace 80 The Birth of a Nation 78
Duomo 80 Orphans of the Storm 78
Galleries 80 Griffith, George V. 85 n. 15
Laurentian Library 79 Grimwood, Herbert 80
Piazza della Signoria 80
Palazzo Vecchio 80 Haight, Gordon Sherman 17 n. 7, 74 nn. 3, 8, 85 n. 11,
food in novels 47 153, 158 nn. 2–3, 159 n. 4
Ford, George M. 58 Hammill, Faye 168–69 n. 16
Forster, E. M. 4, 11 Hampson, Robert G. 28 n. 36
Forster, John 8, 59–62 n. 5 Harding, Warren G. 77
 Index 207

Hardy, Barbara 7, 11–13, 15–17, 88, 97, 112, 160–63, ‘Pied Beauty’ 88
166, 181 Sermons 98 n. 28
The Advantage of Lyric: Essays on Feeling in Poetry 6, House, Humphry 98 n. 14
88, 98 n. 3, 112, 120 n. 15 Household Words 31, 61–62 n. 7
The Appropriate Form: An Essay on the Novel 9, 15, Howard, Jean 123, 131 n. 3
17 n. 13 Hugh Lane Gallery Controversy 107
Critical Essays on George Eliot 14–15, 17 n. 8 Hughes, Ted 11–12, 118–20 n. 1
Dickens and Creativity 29, 41, 50, 58 Hunt, Leigh 61
‘Forms and Feelings in the Sonnets of Gerard Hunt, Lynn 151 n. 3
Manley Hopkins’ 88–89, 97 Hutton, Richard Holt 75, 85 n. 28
George Eliot: A Critic’s Biography 17 n. 9 Hyde-Lees, Georgie 108
Middlemarch: Critical Approaches 13
The Moral Art of Dickens 50 Impressionists 92, 96
The Novels of George Eliot 12, 84 n. 3 Incarnation 89, 95
Shakespeare’s Storytellers 4, 124–25, 131 n. 1 inspiration pictures 76, 78
Tellers and Listeners 9–10, 17 n. 13, 160–63, 166–68 Iraq 173
nn. 2–3 Ireland 31, 40, 101–03, 111
‘Towards a Poetics of Fiction’ 168 n. 4 ancient 100, 103
‘A Way to Your Hearts Through Fire or Water: civil war 109
The Structure of Imagery in Harry Richmond’ guerrilla warfare in 109
27–28 n. 25; 45, 47, 51, 75 spiritual goals 107
Hardy, Thomas 4, 16 Irish Protestant faith 100
Hare Hall Camp 114 tradition 105
Harper, Margaret Mills 110 n. 9 Irwin, Robert 27 n. 8
Harris, Margaret 8 Isle of Man 123
‘George Eliot on Stage and Screen’ 84 Italy 78, 127, 173
George Eliot’s Journals 85 n. 14
Hawes, Donald 42 n. 7 Jacobean drama 79
Hawaii 167 James I, King 129
Hayden, John O. 143 n. 1, 144 nn. 8, 10, 14–15 James, Henry 3–4, 11–12, 16, 28 n. 31, 64, 73, 75, 80
Hays Code 77 Essays on Literature 74 n. 13
Hays, Will 77 Jamesian 5, 16, 140
Hayter, Alethea 27 n. 20 A Portrait of a Lady 73–76
Hazlitt, William 132, 135, 143 n. 2, 144 nn. 11, 23 Jamesian 5, 16, 140
Heller-Roazen, Daniel 151 n. 4 Japanese Aino 113
Henley, William Ernest 28 Jay, Martin 93, 98 n. 25
Henry VIII, King 125 Jerrold, Douglas 41
Henry, Nancy 75, 84 n. 7 Jesse James 78
Herbert, Christopher 64- 65, 68, 74 n. 1 Jews 147
Hermetic Students of the Golden Dawn 104–05 Job (Biblical character) 165
Hersey, F. W. C. 62 Johnson, Edgar 50 n. 2
Hewitt, David 143 n. 4 Johnson, Galen A. 98 n. 13, 119 n. 4
Hindu 28 n. 36, 100 Johnson, Lionel 105–06
Hodgson’s Auction Rooms 31 Johnson, Samuel 17
Hodos Chameliontos 102 Johnston, Judith 85 n. 14
Holinshed, Ralph Chronicles 123, 129–30 Jones, Colin 58 n. 9
Hollis, Matthew 114–15 Jones, Ernest 8, 39–40, 42 n. 19
Hollywood 77–78 Jones, Manina 169 n. 10
homosexuality 125 Joyce, James 4, 12, 28 n. 36
Hone, William 61
Hopkins, Gerard Manley 6, 8, 88–89, 91–98 nn. 6–7, Kelly, John 109 n. 5, 110 n. 7
14, 19, 27–37 Kempis, Thomas à 63, 71
‘Harrahing in Harvest’88 Kerr, James 143 n. 3
Journals, Papers 98 nn. 19, 27, 99 nn. 32–33, 36 Kettle, Arnold 17 n. 4
late poetry 96–97 Kiely, Robert 26 n. 7
Letters 98 n. 6 Kimmis, James 120
nature journals 92 Kinematograph Weekly 80–81, 85 nn. 23, 25
208 Index

King, Donald 27 Mackenzie, N. H. 98 n. 29

King, Henry 8, 76–80, 83, 85 n. 19, 86 n. 29 magic 9, 34, 100–01, 103–09, 111–13, 116 n. 19, 123,
Kingsley, Ben 77 161, 179–80
Kingston, Ontario 167 Malcolm, David 67, 74 n. 9
Klee, Paul 91 Malthusian 67
Klein, Melanie 112 Marchand, André 91
Knights, L.C. 15–17 nn. 11, 12 Mary Magdalene 83
Knocktarlitie 141–43 Mary, Queen 126
Kodak 79 Marx, Groucho 126
Kucich, John 36, 38–39, 42 nn. 15, 17–18, 65, 74 n. 4 Marzolph, Ulrich 27 n. 9
Mathers, MacGregor 108
Lacan, Jacques 92, 98 n. 18 The Kabbalah Unveiled 104
Land of the Young 102 Mathews, Elkin 106
Lane, Edward 21 Marzolph, Ulrich 27
Arabian Nights 22–23, 28 nn. 30, 36 Maunder, Andrew 30, 41 n. 6
The 1001 Nights 23, 26, 27 n. 9 Max Planck Institute for Human Development 98 n. 1
Lane, Lauriat Jr. 58 n. 6 McCarthy, Thomas 114, 120 n. 7
Langer, Susanne K. 97, 99 n. 49 McDonagh, Josephine 58 n. 9
Latin 125, 154 McLaughlin, Kathleen 151 n. 2
Laurie, Hilary 151 n. 7 Mee, John 58 n. 9
Law, Graham 30, 41 melodrama 8, 14, 32, 79, 84–85 n. 19, 114
Lawrence, David Herbert 4, 12, 16 Melville, Herman 12
The Leader 39 Meredith, George 4, 24, 27 n. 23
Leavis, Q. D. 159 n. 9 Harry Richmond 28 n. 25
Leeuwen, Richard van 27 n. 9 The Shaving of Shagpat 23
Lehmann, Frederic 44 Merkebah 105
Leighton, Frederic 76, 83, 85 n. 13 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 8, 90–91, 93–94, 96–97, 113
Lehmann, Frederic 44 ‘Eye and Mind’ 90
Levine, Caroline 85 n. 13 The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader 98 ns. 13, 15, 22,
Levine, George 8 24, 26; 99 ns. 50, 120 n. 4
Lewes, George Henry 15, 80 Phenomenology of Perception 93, 98 n. 24, 99 n. 41
Lewis, Paul 42 n. 7 Messina 125
Lewis, Wyndham 26 n. 2 Metcalf, John 169 n. 7, 14
Liliano 80 Metro-Goldwyn [Mayer] Corporation 76
Liljestrøm, Marianne 169 n. 11 Meynell, Alice 8, 88–89, 91–93, 95–99, 98 nn. 5, 17,
Lincoln’s Inn 56 20–21, 99 nn. 38, 42
Lincolnshire 138–39 ‘The Horizon’ 89, 92–93
Literature and Film Quarterly 85 n. 19 Meynell, Francis 98 n. 5
Living with Dying Research Network, The 120 Meynell, Viola 98 n. 5
Lodge, David 13–14, 17 nn. 3, 5 Michener, James A 26 n. 5
London 2–3, 11, 14–15, 30–31, 40, 57, 76, 79, 88, 104, Milford Haven 127
123, 133, 135, 137–38, 140, 142, 151, 173 Millgate, Jane 132–35, 139, 144 n. 5, 18
Lambeth Workhouse 150 Milwaukee 77
Lincoln’s Inn 56 Misogyny 9, 122–30
Long Island Sound 79 Moore, George, Esther Waters 148, 150–51 n. 7
Longfellow, HenryWadsworth 59 Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America
Longley, Edna 115, 120 n. 6 77
Lonoff, Sue 30–31, 41 n. 6 Mount Vesuvius 78
Lost Horizon 81 Moussa-Mahmoud, Fatma 28 n. 26
Ludlow, Fitzhugh 23 Munro, Alice 163–64, 168
Lukács, Georg 135, 144 n. 16 ‘Simon’s Lunch’ 164, 169 n. 8
Lumsden, Alison 143 n. 4 ‘White Dump’ 169 n. 15
Lyons, Malcolm C. 27 n. 9 Murray, Simone 76, 85 n. 10
Lyons, Ursula 27 n. 9 Muslim 126

MacBride, John 107–08 Nadel, Ira B. 85 n. 19

Mack, Robert L. 27 n. 9 Nayder, Lillian 31, 41 n. 6
 Index 209

New Critics 16 poetry 111–20

New Orleans 77 Pope, Alexander 23
New York 77, 166 Essay on Man 140
New York, Museum of Modern Art 78 The Rape of the Lock 23
New York Times 81, 85 n. 27 post-Darwinian 89
New Yorker 80, 85 n. 24 Powell, William 81
Newman, John Henry 90, 96 Prairie Fire 169 n. 6
Apologia Pro Vita Sua 98 The Prisoner of Zenda 81
Niamh 102–04, 107 Protestant 125
Nineteen 98 n. 1 Protestant American public 83
North American 161–62 Proust, Marcel 4, 12, 156, 158
Norton, Charles Eliot 89 Putnam, George William 58–62
Puttick and Simpson 31
O’Donnell, William H. 109 n. 4
OED (Oxford English Dictionary) 136, 138 Queen Mary, University of London 98 n. 1
O’Leary, John 104
O’Roughley, Tom 108 Red Branch cycles 100
Oderman, Stuart 85 n. 27 Renaissance 20, 24, 75, 105
Oisin 8, 100–05, 108–09 Republican president 77
The Old Testament 122 Reynolds, Margaret 75–76, 85 n. 8
Oldfield, Derek 17 n. 8 Rhodes, Winston 11
Oldfield, Sybil 7, 17 n. 8 rhyme 114–20
Jeanie 17 n. 10 Rhymers’ Club 105
Oliphant, Margaret 30, 85 n. 19, 135 Rice, Dennis G. 50 n. 12
Olympus 107 Richardson, Samuel 12, 135
Original Sin 152–53 Ricoeur, Paul:
Ormond, Leonee 27 n. 25, 28 nn. 29, 32; 85 n. 20 Living Up to Death 117, 120 n. 16
Orwell, George 51–52, 58 n. 6 Time and Narrative 145, 151 n. 2, 8
Osprey 102 Rignall, John 8
Oxford 108 Oxford Reader’s Companion to George Eliot 85 n. 16
Riordan, Maurice 120
Paasonen, Susanne 169 n. 11 Ritchey, Will M. 76
Page, Frederick 98 n. 5 Robartes, Michael 108
Page, Norman 58 n. 10 Robespierre 40–41
Palestine 74 Robinson, Kenneth 31, 42 n. 9
Paley, William 93 Roman Catholic poets 89, 92
Pangallo, Karen T. 74 n. 9 Roman Catholicism 83, 143
Paramount 79 Roman law 147
Parmenides 94 Rome 78, 125, 173–74
Patmore, Coventry 92 Romeo and Juliet (film) 78
Patrick, Saint 101–02 rose 102, 105–06
Patten, Robert L. 58 n. 5, 62 n. 8 Rosicrucian 104–05
Paul, Catherine E. 110 n. 9 Ross, John C 85 n. 12
Payne, Stephen 120 Rossetti, Christina 88
Paz, Octavio, The Bow and the Lyre 112–13, 120 n. 3 Rousseau, Jean Jacques 9, 152–56, 158
Pegasus 107 Émile 154
Pellauer, David 120 n. 16, 151 n. 2 Rudd, Jill 120
Pellicer, Carlos 113 Rudd, Martha 42 n. 7
People’s Paper 40 Rudolf, Anthony 120
Perugini, Kate 62 n. 1 Ruskin, John 63
Peyrouton, Noel C. 62 n. 2 Modern Painters 89–90
phenomenal world 94–96 Works 98 n. 8
Philadelphia 77
Pichot, Ann 86 n. 30 Sackvile-West, Victoria 98
Piggott, Edward 39 St Leonards 137, 141
Pisa 80 Sampson Low 30, 41 n. 3
Playboy 107 San Francisco 77
210 Index

Sanders, Andrew 58 n. 14 The Orange Fish 160

Saville, John 42 n. 19 ‘Poaching’ 162–64
Savonarola, Gerolamo 75, 77, 79 — 83 ‘The Same Ticking Clock’ 169 n. 14
Schuchard, Ronald 110 n. 7 The Stone Diaries 165
Scotland 141 Various Miracles 160
Act of Union 132–34, 141, 143 ‘A View’ 165, 169 n. 10
Scott, Patrick 41 n. 7 Shrewsbury 122, 129
Scott, Walter 9, 23–24, 132–44 Sicily 124, 128
Chronicles of Canongate 138, 144 n. 19 silent film 76, 79, 81
Edinburgh Edition, works of 132 Simmel, Georg 70, 74 n. 10
The Heart of Midlothian 9, 132–44 Slater, Michael 8, 27 n. 22
Waverley 15, 25, 132, 135–38, 143–44 n. 8 Slaughter, Joseph R 151 n. 3
Scottish 132–33, 139 Smiles, Samuel 67, 74 n. 9
history 132–33, 142 Smith, Colin 98 n. 24
Scottishness 133 Smith, Elder 30, 76, 85 n. 12
Segal, Hanna 115, 120 n. 11 Smith, George 76
Senecan 128 Smith, Michael B. 119 n. 4
Senior, Jane 15 Sobolev, Dennis 98 n. 7
sensation novels 80 Somoa, Vailima 25
sentimentality 14, 88, 98, 152, 155–56, 158 Sowerby, Olivia 98 n. 5
Shakespeare, Susanna 122 Spectator 75, 84 n. 4
Shakespeare, William 9, 13, 20, 24 — 26, 34, 122–31 Steadman-Jones, Gareth 58 n. 6
Antony and Cleopatra 127, 130–31 Steinitz, Rebecca 42 n. 13
As You Like It 130 Stephenson, George 67
Cymbeline 122, 126, 128, 130–31 Stevenson, Fanny 25
Hamlet 59–60, 129 Stevenson, Robert Louis 20–28
King Henry IV Part I 122, 129 The Beach of Falesa 25
King Henry IV Part II 123 The Dynamiter 23–24
King Henry VI Part I 122–24 The Ebb Tide 26
King Henry VIII 122, 129 ‘A Gossip on Romance’ 20, 24
King Lear 122, 127–28, 130, 146 Island Nights Entertainments 26
Macbeth 131 The Master of Ballantrae 25
Measure for Measure 122, 129, 136 New Arabian Nights 20, 23
A Midsummer Night’s Dream 129 ‘A Penny Plan and Twopence Colonel’ 27 n. 16
Much Ado About Nothing 9, 13, 124–26, 128, 131 The Wrecker 26
Othello 126–28, 131 Stewart, Garret 51, 58 n. 4
Richard II 129 Storey, Gladys 62 n. 1
Romeo and Juliet 125 Storey, Graham 56, 58 n. 12, 62 n. 4, 98 n. 14
The Taming of the Shrew 26 Struthers, J. R. 169 n. 7
The Tempest 25, 122 ‘Susanna and the Elders’ 122, 131
Titus Andronicus 128 Sutherland, John 51, 58 n. 5
Troilus and Cressida 130 Suzannet, Comte Alain de 59, 62 n. 1
The Winter’s Tale 24–26, 122, 126–30 Swearingen, Roger G. 26 nn. 4, 6, 27 nn. 14, 17,
Un-Shakespeare 137 28 n. 28
Shaw, Harry E. 143 n. 3 Swedenborg, Emmanuel 105
Shepherd 22, 56, 100–01, 103, 106 Sweeney, Kevin 80, 85 n. 19
Sheridan, Alan 98 n. 18 Swinburne, Algernon Charles 72, 74 n. 12
Shields, Carol 9, 160–69
‘Arriving’ 166–69, n. 7 Tate Britain 98 n. 1
The Beggar Maid 169, n. 8 Taylor, Jenny Bourne 42 n. 15
Carol Shields: The Collected Shores (CS) 160–68 Taymor, Julie 128
Dressing up for the Carnival 160 Tennyson, Alfred 88
Happenstance 167 Ternan, Ellen 59, 62 n. 1
‘The Journal’ 161–63 Thackeray, William Makepeace 4, 28
Larry’s Party 165 ‘Sultan Stork’ 23, 27 n. 1
‘Love So Fleeting’ 167 Vanity Fair 65
‘Narrative Hunger...’ 162–65, 168 nn. 1, 4, 169 n. 16 Theosophists 100
 Index 211

The Thin Man 81 Winnicott, D. F. 112, 115

Thomas, Edward 9, 113 — 120 nn. 6, 13 Winnipeg 167
‘After Rain’ 118 Winston, Elizabeth 85 n. 19
‘Birches’ 114 Witemeyer, Hugh 85 n. 13
‘It Rains’ 118 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 112, 162
‘Melancholy’ 118 Woodstock, George 58 n. 2
‘Rain’ 9, 113–15 Woolf, Virginia 4, 88, 98 n. 2
Thomas, Helen 114 Between the Acts 164, 169 n. 9
Thompson, Julian 42 n. 20 Mrs. Dalloway 165
Thoor Ballylee 108 A Room One’s Own 98 n. 2
The Times 79, 85 n. 20 Three Guineas 98 n. 2
Tolstoy, Leo 12, 16 Wordsworth, William 4, 6, 134, 152, 155–56, 158
Toronto 164, 167 The Excursion 153
Tothill Fields prison 40 Lyrical Ballads 134
Tree of Knowledge 106–07, 130 Michael 153
Tree of Life 106 Sonnet ‘Composed Upon Westminster Bridge’ 56
Tudors 129 ‘The Thorn’ 139, 148, 152–53
Turner, Mark W. 85 n. 13 World War I, USA 77
Tynan, Katharine 102 Wright, Ken 115, 119 n. 12
Tyndall, John 100 Wu, Duncan 143 n. 2
Tzvetan, Todorov:
The Fantastic 27 n. 12 Yale University, Beinecke Library 15
La Poètique de la Prose 28 n. 30 Yeats, William Butler 6, 8–9, 100–12
‘All Soul’s Night’ 9, 108–09
Uglow, Jennifer 12, 17 n. 1 ‘The Body of Father Christian Rosencrux’ 106
Unwin, T. Fisher 79 Collected Letters (CL) 104, 106–10
Collected Works of, Autobiographies (AU) 10, 104, 106–10
Venice 126 Crossways 100, 103
Verne, Jules, Round the World in Eighty Days 81 ‘Ephemera’ 103
Victorian feelings 88, 98 n. 1 Essays and Introductions (E & I) 105–07, 109 n. 2
Victorian Literature and Culture 85 n. 7 ‘The Fascination of What’s Difficult’ 107
Victorian Studies 88 ‘Innisfree’ 100
Victorian Studies 74 n. 1, 84 n. 7 ‘Introduction, ’ Oxford Book of Modern Verse 109 n. 6
Victorianist 88 ‘To Ireland in the Coming Times’ 105
Virgin Mary 83 ‘King Goll’ 100
‘Lake Isle of Innisfree’ 103
Wachtel, Eleanor 169 n. 12 ‘Lines Written in Dejection’ 107
Ward, Charles 29 ‘Magic’ 106
Ward, Edward 30 ‘The Man Who Dreamed of Faeryland’ 104
Ward, Henrietta 30 Poems 105
Warner, Marina 27 n. 9 Responsibilities 107
Waters, Catherine 98 n. 1 The Rose 101, 105
Weber, Max 65–67, 74 n. 6 In the Seven Woods 103
Wedderburn, Alexander 98 n. 8 ‘The Song of the Happy Shepherd’ 100, 103
West Indies 145, 173 ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’ 104
Western Australia, University of 98 n. 1 ‘The Stolen Child’ 103
Westminster Review 30 ‘The Two Trees’ 106
Whelehan, Imelda 76 ‘Vacillation’ 110 n. 8
The White Sister 78 Variorum Edition of the Poems of (VP) 100–01, 109 n. 3
Whiteside, Sean 120 n. 5 A Vision 9, 108–10 n. 9
Wiesenfarth, Joseph 75, 84 n. 5, 85 n. 19 The Wanderings of Oisin 100–04, 108–09
Wilcox, Herbert 78 ‘The White Birds’ 104
Wilde, Oscar 106 ‘The Wild Swans of Coole’ 107
Williams WilliamCarlos 5, 114–15 ‘The Wind Among the Reeds’ 103
Wilt, Judith 138, 144 n. 21 Words for Music Perhaps 110 n. 8