Alison Milbank

The Victorian Gothic in English novels and stories, 1830-1880

In the gray early morning of 20 June 1837 the young Princess Victoria left her bedroom in a tumbledown St. James’s Palace, and with it the enclosure of her isolated youth under the authority of Sir John Conroy, to be greeted on bended knee by the Lord Chancellor and the Archbishop of Canterbury with the news of her accession to the throne. The Victorian age began like the ending of an Ann Radcliffe novel: the bad uncles and despotic guardian give way to the true heir, who is now able to preserve and defend her national inheritance. This moment seemed to fulfill the description of the British constitution by the jurist William Blackstone as “an old Gothic castle, erected in the days of chivalry, but fitted up for a modern inhabitant.” In time the key elements of the Radcliffean Whig Gothic suggested in the above tableau – the politics of liberty and progressivism, freedom from the past, and the entrapped heroine – would indeed be revived in Gothic writing. But in the early years of Victoria’s reign, that was not possible. To some extent this was because of the ambivalence of many social groups toward the institution of the monarchy and the gender of the new monarch, all during the 1840s. The influence of this view of the Queen upon the modes of political and literary sensibility during this time may seem surprising, but it can be amply demonstrated. While

Bleeding Nuns: A Genealogy of the Female Gothic Grotesque

Although the aesthetics of the sublime have received exhaustive treatment in relation to the Gothic novel, those of the grotesque have received scant attention, despite the fact that the whole concept of the grotesque as an artistic mode was under intense scrutiny during the period of the rise of the Gothic in the latter half of the eighteenth century, with another phase of debate and development in the writing of Hugo, Ruskin and Bagehot in the nineteenth century.1 Given the way in which the monstrous, the hybrid and the disgusting are central to the Gothic genre, this neglect by recent critics is somewhat surprising. The Gothic grotesque, moreover, as this essay will demonstrate, comes to be associated with the female, in contrast to the sublime, which from Burke’s Enquiry (1757) onwards, came to be conceived in specifically masculine terms.2 Where the Female Gothic grotesque has received some study is in an article on the southern Gothic of Carson McCullers, by Sarah Gleeson-White, in which the unruliness and gigantism of the female body becomes a mode of escape from ’southern daintiness’.3 Similarly, Mary Russo discussed the grotesque portrayal of femininity in twentieth-century Hollywood as an inherently liberatory mode for gesturing to feminist unease with ‘normality’ and the constraint of gender roles.

Book Review: The Concept of Variety: William Fitzgerald, Variety: The Life of a Roman ConceptFitzgeraldWilliam, Variety: The Life of a Roman Concept (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2016.

of theodicy, historical communities, gender issues, narrative strategies, fluidity of canon, as well as the dialogue between these texts and what was to become the Bible. Despite the careful editing job, unfortunately a number of persistent typos and stylistic errors have crept into the finished product. Yet, that does not diminish the fact that the editors have succeeded in creating a compilation that is illustrative of the continuity and the points of contact between the various communities representative of these varying traditions. As indicated by Charlesworth’s opening essay, the objective is to take the study of these variegated texts into the next phase and these contributions definitely open that new window on old texts successfully.

55/£38.50. pp. x + 243. ISBN 978-0-226-29949-5).

Eavesdropping on the conversations of others is a particularly urban pleasure, requiring the press of unknown people and propinquity for its full exercise. As the Florentine person of quality who speaks in Robert Browning’s ‘Up at a Villa – Down in the City’ asserts of the latter location: ‘Something to see by Bacchus, something to hear, at least./ There, the whole day long, one’s life is a perfect feast’. Eavesdropping activity even has pecuniary advantages: ‘You get the pick of the news, and it costs you never a pin’, as you sit ‘at the window there’. It was, of course, from a window that the grieving sighs of the bereaved Dante were overheard and overseen by the compassionate lady in the Vita Nuova; Elizabeth Barrett Browning will imitate this sympathetic stance in her poems written from the piano nobile of her own Casa Guidi in Florence. This article will explore the role that such overhearing plays in Dante’s Commedia and relate this to the role of the un-implied auditor in the poems and dialogues of several nineteenth-century British residents in Florence, with particular emphasis on their ‘watching brief ’ on the struggles for Italian political independence. In particular, I shall engage with the dynamics of the dramatic monologue as a development of a Dantesque narrative technique. Such an exercise must take account of a second influence on the nineteenth-century dramatic monologue in the classical tradition of the ‘dialogues of the dead’. Lucian of Samosata in the second century of the common era wrote a whole series of satirical dialogues, imitating Plato’s use of the genre, but for purely comic and sophistical intent. The setting, as in Dante is in the afterlife, with Charon the ferryman as both character and well-placed eavesdropper, allowing him to represent the role of the reader as ironic judge of the failings of gods and philosophers alike. In the seventeenth century, Archbishop François Fénelon developed Lucian’s satirical mode in which the celebrated learn that death is a great leveller in a didactic direction, so that his young royal charge, the Duc de Bourgoyne, might Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 2013 Vol. 35, No. 4, 385–397, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08905495.2013.822694

Eavesdropping from Casa Guidi Windows: Dantesque Overhearing in Victorian Poetry

even unearths accounts of Chesterton’s lectures at Notre Dame. Every aspect of Chesterton’s life is covered from his idyllic Kensington childhood and schooldays at St Paul’s, through the creative years as a London journalist, his conversion to Catholicism and his involvement in Distributism – a localist political philosophy, now gaining a fresh importance in these globalised times. The book contains a tremendously detailed index, which enables the reader to discover what Chesterton had to say about everything from Mussolini to virginity, taxi-cabs to wonder. This biography is stronger on what Chesterton did and said than on analysis, context and assessment. The importance of The Everlasting Man, Chesterton’s most ambitious work and a sort of universal history needs to be contextualised and linked to the comparable projects of Christopher Dawson and Jacques Maritain. Its role in the conversions of C. S. Lewis and Dorothy Sayers is ignored. Similarly, Orthodoxy uses a kind of Humean scepticism to deconstruct contemporary scientism with wit and brilliance, something that would not become apparent from Ker’s exposition Chesterton has become the catholic C. S. Lewis and therefore an institutional figure – almost a quasi-saint. He is therefore treated with restraint and respect, and what is actually most saintly about him is lost. Among the illustrations in Ker’s volume there are none of Chesterton’s comic drawings, or pictures of him in fancy-dress as Dr Johnson. The wonderful story about him having to exchange trousers with the vicar at his own wedding is left out, and Chesterton’s taking a pistol on honeymoon to defend his bride is downgraded to ‘family legend’! These stories matter because they are in accord with Chesterton’s love for the extraordinary in the mundane, his omnivorous delight in the comic and the vulgar. These loves undergird the incarnational theology, which he learnt from his Anglo-Catholic socialist friends like Conrad Noel, and which enabled his development of a specifically English Catholic vision after his conversion. Despite these cavils, the reader is in safe hands in this fair-minded biography, which tries to see all sides in the many controversies in which its subject became embroiled, notably the Marconi scandal. Chesterton’s energy is reflected in that of his biographer, and the reader is encouraged to explore further the excitement that Chesterton Western Diaspora the three most popular valid male names for Jews were Joseph, Judah, and Jacob (p. 63). For females, the popular names were Mariam, Sarah, Shabit. By contrast in the Eastern Diaspora, as presented in volume IV, the three most popular male names were Abba, Samuel, Joseph, and for females Martha, Salome, with Imma and Miriam equal in third place. However, archaeological and textual remains from the Eastern Diaspora are more sparse, with a total corpus of 2601 names being documented. It is hard to over-estimate the wealth of information, the scholarly value, and the quality of the research that stands behind these volumes. In the introduction to the first volume Ilan stated that she would need to live another forty years to complete the project. With the assistance Thomas Ziem for Part III, and Kerstin Hünefeld for Part IV the project appears to be progressing more rapidly than anticipated. The remaining volume to be published as Part II will cover Jewish names from Palestine in the period 200-650 CE. Hopefully one will not have to wait too long to see the completion of this highly significant project.

Book Review: G. K. Chesterton: a Biography: Ian Ker, G. K. Chesterton: A Biography (Oxford: OUP, 2011. £35.00. pp. 747. ISBN: 978-0-960128-8)

Despite the early admiration for British Gothic writing in France, illustrated both by celebrated remarks by de Sade and by immediate translations and imitations of Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis by French writers, French exploration of Gothic themes took a very different course.1 A great Gothic novel like Victor Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris is regarded as a work of Romantic historicism, while the prevalence of corpses, ghosts and other horrific material in the conte fantastique is accounted for as initially Hoffmannesque2 and later in the tradition of Poe, who tends to be read in France in terms of a sceptical Romantic epistemology.3 So although English Gothic is still referred to with respect in France long after its loss of status in Britain or assimilation into the sensation novel, it is hard to find a language and a mode of real congruence between the two national productions.

Huysmans, Machen and the Gothic Grotesque, Or: The Way Up is the Way Down

Ainsworth made his first venture into sensational fiction with ‘The Test of Affection’ (European Magazine, 1822), a tale that relies heavily on artificial ‘SUPERNATURAL’ devices in the ANN RADCLIFFE mode for its effect. It was followed by ‘The Spectre Bride’ (Arliss’s Pocket Magazine, 1822) and his early Gothic tales were collected in his first book, the anonymous December Tales (1823). All of this youthful work — which displays more enthusiasm than polish — was produced while Ainsworth was living in Manchester, where he had been born in 1805.