Dinah Birch

Conflict and difference in nineteenth-century literature

How should we understand Victorian cultural conflict? The Victorians were fiercely disputatious, divided between multiple views of the political, religious and social issues that motivated their changing aspirations. Such debates are a fundamental aspect of the literary culture of the period, and the essays in this collection propose new ways of understanding their significance. Ranging from detailed readings of key literary figures (Browning, Collins, Dickens, Eliot) to explorations of cross-period themes (the philosophical roots of conflict; dreams and psychology; consumption; imperialism and race) or specific literary movements or moments (Chartism; journalism; writing of the Afghan War; New Woman novels), they address diverse areas of intellectual inquiry about what mattered most to the Victorians. These essays speak collectively in arguing for a reinterpretation of literary and cultural conflict through a greater critical awareness of the productive analyses available within such debates over difference in the period. The aim is not to resolve conflicted cultural moments or movements, but to explore the slippages and instabilities which so fascinated, intrigued and inspired the Victorians themselves.

Introduction: On Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature

This collection explores Victorian patterns of engagement with concepts of ‘difference’ and ‘conflict’. In some respects, these terms may be defined in terms of antagonism. Benjamin Disraeli’s identification of one of the most prominent sites of division in the nineteenth century quickly became the dominant binary of the ‘Condition of England’ novel in the 1840s and 1850s, but it is just one reflection of the profound conflicts that characterized the Victorian period. From Disraeli’s ‘THE RICH AND THE POOR’ to Matthew Arnold’s ignorant armies clashing by night in ‘Dover Beach’ (1867) via Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1855) and Alfred Tennyson’s doubting belief in In Memoriam (1850), the literature of the Victorian period now seems to us to bristle with intellectual, cultural and social oppositions. Dissonance generated by forces of faith and doubt and the educative powers of science and religion, the divide between men and women, the apparent competition between loyalty to nature and industry, not to mention the party-based politics, class conflicts generated by the volatile economic situation, and the military battlefields necessary to the growth and maintenance of an empire — these features of modernity formed the lives and the writings of the Victorians. The inventiveness of the age was not built on consensus, but on conflict.

‘What Teachers Do You Give Your Girls?’ Ruskin and Women’s Education

The advocation of domestic virtue for women in Sesame and Lilies (1865) hardly seems to qualify Ruskin as a supporter of girls’ schools and colleges. If woman’s special province is to be the home, then it would seem to follow that the home is the place where they should be taught. Ruskin’s encouragement of schools and colleges for young women suggests that he didn’t think so. He was actively interested in female education throughout the 1860s and beyond. His support was often expressed in personal terms, reflected in the diverse and wide-ranging correspondence he maintained with women in the later decades of his life. To a surprising extent, however, it took the form of working with institutions founded to develop the education of girls.

Ruskin, Myth and Modernism

It has long been recognized that myth can be identified among the sources of cultural authority for writers wishing to reject Victorian literary form. In place of the fictional conventions of realism, or the historiography of progress, early modernists could perceive themselves to be constructing a syncretic and fragmentary framework grounded in myth. Writing of James Joyce’s Ulysses in November 1923, T. S. Eliot famously spoke of this ‘mythical method’. His remarks, repeatedly quoted since, seem almost to amount to a manifesto: ‘Mr Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him… It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history… It is a method for which the horoscope is auspicious… Instead of the narrative method, we may now use the mythical method. It is, I seriously believe, a step towards making the modern world possible for art.’1 But this ‘mythical method’ has a longer and more complex history than the confidently immediate tone of Eliot’s essay suggests. Some of its interwoven lines of inheritance have recently been re-examined, and the developing disciplines of ethnography and anthropology, beginning to come of age as modernist thinking moved towards self-definition, can now be more accurately identified as among its most pervasive sources.2

'THAT GHASTLY WORK': RUSKIN, ANIMALS AND ANATOMY

John Ruskin (1819-1900)—art critic, architectural historian and writer—became, in his later work, increasingly interested in the relationship between human and animal life. As an art critic, he was concerned with the representation of human and animal figures and, in particular, with anatomical studies; whilst he had a longstanding interest in scientific concepts, in particular in the ways in which evolutionary theory changed understandings of animals. This paper explores how Ruskin rejected both the anatomical approach to animals studied in art, and the dissection of animals by scientists. Instead, this paper argues, Ruskin proposed that the lives of animals should be regarded with respect, reverence and responsibility.