Marcus Waithe

The Stranger at the Gate: Privacy, Property, and the Structures of Welcome at William Morris's Red House

ince the early 1970s, a succession of critics has sought to describe and decode the Victorian ideology of domesticity. Beginning with such groundbreaking studies of etiquette as Leonore Davidoff’s The Best Circles (1973), this interpretative project has since been extended through the work of, among others, Nancy Armstrong, Mary Poovey, Elizabeth Langland, and George K. Behlmer. Their largely feminist accounts of the household realm have achieved a great deal in refining our understanding of the public-private divide as it developed in nineteenth-century Britain. And yet, despite the existence of so many thorough and insightful studies, important lines of inquiry remain unexplored. Perhaps most surprising is the absence of any sustained analysis of hospitality, both as a concept and as a Victorian ideal. With the notable exception of Peter Mandler, historians of the nineteenthcentury household have made only limited reference to the construction of this important domestic virtue. It is also surprising that scholars of the Gothic Revival have not paid more attention to the movement’s recurrent emphasis on the idea of welcome. The links between socialism and radicalized medievalism—of the kind pioneered first by William Cobbett, and then by William Morris—are well documented. And it is not difficult to see how a preoccupation with sociability formed a bridge between these two positions. It is especially hard, then, to understand why no attempt has been made to explore or to account for the equalitarian strand emerging from the paternalism of antique hospitality. Scholars working in the field of utopian studies have been comparably slow in recognizing this Victorian enthusiasm as an opportunity to explore the formation of an alternative utopian tradition, one that seems to place a premium on openness, tolerance, and pluralism. 1 Even

Introduction: Literature and Labour

The Introduction describes the conceptual and historical issues that frame the book’s investigation into the relationship between labour and literature in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain and France. It considers what might be gained from this specifically cross-cultural approach, as well as how the respective contexts of British and French politics, culture, and industry inflect the book’s central questions. This wide-ranging discussion takes in key theoretical and critical reference points, as it explores the economic, political, ethical, and personal ambitions and anxieties that underpinned the association of literature and labour in this period.

Epilogue: Work Ethics, Past and Present

Since the near collapse of the Western financial system in 2008, and the subsequent nationalization of failed banks, an awareness has grown that the speculative activities of the City of London and Wall Street are not ‘private’ at all, but effectively underwritten by the state. This, in turn, has fostered new interest in the relationship between private goods and public benefits, and in the nature of transactions—or forms of work—previously supposed invisible. The ‘credit crunch’ that precipitated Britain’s ‘lost decade’ had causes distinct from those that led to recession in France and the much of the Eurozone. But the ‘austerity’ policies enacted to contain these different crises have involved a similar calculus, one that pits supposedly productive activities against social and cultural programmes deemed expendable. Difficult decisions, in both cases, have re-opened questions of definition and value.

‘Strenuous Minds’: Walter Pater and the Labour of Aestheticism

In his late essay on ‘Style’ (1889), Walter Pater wrote that ‘To really strenuous minds there is a pleasurable stimulus in the challenge for a continuous effort’. He installs in the process a set of artisanal conceptions that qualify the contemplative model of artistic experience set out in The Renaissance (1873) and Marius the Epicurean (1885). More broadly, Pater issues a challenge to the familiar view that Aestheticism exchanged the work ethic for a leisure ethic. This discussion focuses on his admiring account of Gustave Flaubert’s working habits, and his account of composition as a laborious, indeed, a strenuously muscular activity. It argues that this French influence helped Pater reabsorb the working imperatives of mid-Victorian moralists, albeit critically and selectively.

John Ruskin and the Victorian Theatre by Katherine Newey, Jeffrey Richards (review)

ViCtOriAn StUDieS / VOlUme 55, nO. 2 Great Shakespeareans, not necessarily disloyal to Shakespeare, when he observes here and there that George eliot may have also been influenced by the Bible, as well as by Homer, Sophocles, Aristotle, John Bunyan, and wordsworth. the general editors Peter Holland and Poole state that the purpose of the series should be not merely to demonstrate Shakespeare’s vast following but also to show how those followers help us understand Shakespeare. i certainly agree that the latter is worth undertaking. it requires uphill going, however, that is scarcely encouraged by the series’ format. Here we are treated to four measured horizons of Shakespearean influence. the second purpose of the project needs to concentrate more on the vertical timelines—Shakespeare, subsequent novelist, Shakespeare again—and to deliver more detailed understanding of the relations between individual works. there is little room for that here. Alexander Welsh Yale University

The Pen and the Hammer: Thomas Carlyle, Ebenezer Elliott, and the ‘active poet’

A university-educated man of letters, whose social connections in London were decidedly aristocratic, Thomas Carlyle is not generally thought of as a ‘labouring-class’ writer. The reality is that his origins were decidedly humble. Born in a modest ‘arched house’ in the unprepossessing village of Ecclefechan, Carlyle spent his early life in the Calvinistic labouring and farming community of the West of Scotland.1 He was the son of James Carlyle, a poor man who began his working life as a jobbing stonemason, before becoming a local builder, and then a farmer. Rather than focus on the question of class, critics have tended to concentrate on the religious and aesthetic legacy of this background. Ian Campbell identifies the strict Calvinism of Carlyle’s father as the source of his lifelong doubts about the value of poetic expression, while David DeLaura observes that ‘Poetry is a revealing test-case of Carlyle’s uneasiness with virtually all contemporary creative work’ (Campbell, 1974, p. 7; DeLaura, 2004, p. 32). My contention is that Carlyle’s inherited anxiety about ‘eloquence’ was not simply a product of narrow doctrine. In his youth, he had been a fervent champion of Burns, Goethe and Schiller; and while in the grip of this idealist phase, he applied the term ‘poet’ as a mark of philosophical distinction. The rule-breaking mechanisms of poetry were even considered useful, in peeling back the ‘sham’ of appearances to unveil the ‘real’ (Carlyle, 1898, pp. 176–7).

The Reading World

PHILIP WALLER’S Writers, Readers, and Reputations offers an impressively comprehensive account of British ‘literary life’ between the years 1870 and 1918. In the course of a chapter on the subject of ‘Reviews and Reviewers’, Waller makes the observation that ‘Virginia Woolf divided the task of reviewing into two operations: “gutting” (summarizing contents) and “stamping” (affixing a seal of (dis)approval)’ (p. 152). Woolf ’s operational distinction may not be serviceable or even desirable, but the process of ‘gutting’ assumes special importance in the present case. At 1,181 pages, Waller’s own offering represents a mammoth compendium of topics, whose worth inheres as clearly in the sheer detail and range of subjects addressed as in the critical position it assumes. Waller divides his study into four parts, ‘The Reading World’, ‘Writers and the Public: The Price of Fame’, ‘Best-Sellers’, and ‘Writers and the Public: Penmen as Pundits’. Under these broad headings, twenty-eight chapters address the book’s central contention that ‘The late Victorian period ushered in an unprecedented phenomenon, a mass reading public’ (p. 3). Indeed, Waller argues that the development of ‘cinema, telephone, and wireless’ (p. 3) ensured that ‘this was both the first and the only mass literary age’. Thereafter, ‘audio-visual communication was ready to fetter the written word and to contest its supremacy over the imagination’ (p. 3). Without offering any particular explanation for his order of discussion, Waller opens with an account of the relations between literary works, authors, and the cinema. In the increasingly lucrative royalty cheques issued by film companies, in what Somerset Maugham alludes to as the ‘horror mitigated only by the fifteen thousand dollars’ (p. 15), we read the decline of the literary world surveyed throughout the rest of the book. The reader is thenceforth plunged into a succession of topics, many of which might alone supply ample material for a monograph. Waller