Victorian studies: Problems and prospects?

Journal of Victorian Culture

Volumn 6, Issue 1, 2001, Pages 137-161

  Hewitt, Martin ^a  

^a LEEDS TRINITY UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 79957136040     PISSN: 13555502     EISSN: 17500133     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.3366/jvc.2001.6.1.137     Document Type: Article

References (66)

1. This is not to mention long established journals such as the Victorians Institute Journal, and Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens, or the crop of new journals taking a more general nineteenth century focus, including Nineteenth Century Studies and Nineteenth Century Contexts.
2. In my conference address I used the word ‘crisis’; in response and discussion it was clear that this formulation was unhelpfully ambivalent, and I deliberately avoid it here.
3. Peckham, Morse. 1967. ‘Can “Victorian” have a useful meaning?’. Victorian Studies, March:277 and see E.H. Dance, The Victorian Illusion (London:W. Heinemann, 1928) for an early example of this conventional complication.
4. Fraser, Derek, ed. Cities, Class and Communication. Essays presented to Asa Briggs 1990London:Harvester Wheatsheaf. Dorothy Thompson, review, Victorian Studies (1998/9-1999/2000):138; James Epstein makes similar comments in his ‘Victorian Subjects:Introduction’, Journal of British Studies 34 (July 1995):296. The case against ‘Victorian’ on the grounds that it is not a sufficiently coherent period has been most fully made by Richard Price, see his ‘Does the Notion of Victorian Britain Make Sense?’, in, and in his British Society, 1680–1880:dynamism, containment and change (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1999). Yet there is little here which was not being voiced in the 1960s, see Brian Harrison, review of Marcus, The Other Victorians, Victorian Studies (March 1967), 250.
5. Armstrong, Isobel. 1999. ‘Victorian Studies and Cultural Studies:A False Dichotomy’. Victorian Literature and Culture, 27:513 For another example see the comments of Griselda Pollock on the way in which in the context of the art of the nineteenth century ‘“Victorian” is also a female naming that inflicts a gendered disability’, review of Julian Treuherz, Victorian Painting, in Victorian Studies (1993–4):598–9.
6. Kucich, John. 1999. ‘Cultural Studies, Victorian Studies and Graduate Education’. Victorian Literature and Culture, 27:477–80. See comments of
7. Gagnier, Regenia. 1999. ‘Methodology and New Historicism’. Journal of Victorian Culture, 4.1:116–22. See the surprisingly combative account in
8. Sutherland, John. 2000. “ ‘Introduction’ to Juliet ”. In Rereading Victorian Fiction Edited by:John and Jenkins, Alice. Basingstoke:Macmillan.
9. Shires, Linda K., 1992. Rewriting the Victorians:theory, history and the politics of gender London:Routledge. Ruth Robbins and Julian Wolfreys, eds, Victorian Identities. Social and Cultural Formations in Nineteenth Century Literature (Basingstoke:Macmillan, 1996); J.B. Bullen, ed., Writing and Victorianism (London:Longman, 1997); Gary Day, ed., Varieties of Victorianism (Basingstoke:Macmillan, 1998); Juliet John and Alice Jenkins, eds, Rethinking Victorian Culture (Basingstoke:Macmillan, 2000); Martin Hewitt, ed., An Age of Equipoise? Rethinking mid-Victorian England (Aldershot:Ashgate, 2000).
10. See Jerome Beaty's account of the 1968 ‘Novelists and Society in the 1840s and 1880s’ conference at Edinburgh, ‘The Interdisciplinarial Body’, Victorian Studies (1968–9):139–44, 140.
11. 1955. All in Due Time London:Hart-Davis. As observed, for example, by Humphrey House in
12. Richard, Altick's. 1982. ‘Tis Forty Years On’. Dickens Studies Annual, 10:3 gives a vivid sense of the nadir of Victorian fortunes in the 1940s and 1950s.
13. Bailey, Peter. 1998. “ ‘Introduction’ ”. In Popular Culture and Performance in the Victorian City Cambridge:Cambridge University Press. Interesting retrospectives of this period can be found in Brian Harrison, ‘Introduction’ to the revised edition of Drink and the Victorians (Staffordshire:Keele University Press, 1994)
14. Harold, Perkin's. 1968. The Origins of Modern English Society, 1780–1880 London:Routledge and Kegan Paul. Most famously of course in the long-running public debate in the 1980s over ‘Victorian values’, and more recent invocations such as Rene Denfeld, The new Victorians a young woman's challenge to the old feminist order (London:Simon and Schuster, 1995), as well as in works from to James Kincaid, Child Loving. The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture (London:Routledge, 1992).
15. William A., Madden, contribution to ‘Victorian Studies, 1957–87:An Editorial Birthday Party’, Victorian Studies (1987–88):82–3.
16. The extent to which successive editors of Victorian Studies placed interdisciplinarity at the heart of their achievement is clear in the various contributions to ‘Victorian Studies, 1957–1987’, 79–102.
17. And more latterly the history of the book, fostered by SHARP (founded at the 1991 conference of the Dickens Project at Santa Cruz).
18. To which could be added the LITIR Victorian Studies database.
19. Wolff, Michael. 1966. ‘The Uses of Context:Aspects of the 1960s’. Victorian Studies, 9:47–63. See Supplement
20. William Burgan in ‘Victorian Studies, 1957–87’, 79.
21. Kern, Stephen. 1983. The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918 London:Weidenfeld and Nicholson. For others appearing about this time see Norman Vance, Sinews of the Spirit (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1985).
22. Crosby, Christina. 1992. ‘Reading the Victorians’. Victorian Studies,:63–74. 3):, 65.
23. Mitchell, Sally. 1995. The New Girl:Girl's Culture in England, 1880–1915 New York:Columbia University Press. See, for example, Deborah Epstein Nord, Walking the Victorian Streets. Women, Representation and the City (Ithaca:Cornell University Press, 1995).
24. Moore, Keven Z., 1997. ‘Viewing the Victorians:Recent Research on Victorian Visuality’. Victorian Literature and Culture,:367–85. See the shift from, for example, George P. Landow, Victorian Types, Victorian Shadows (London:Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982); Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer (Cambridge, MA:MIT Press, 1990), to Lindsay Smith, Victorian Photography, Painting and Poetry (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1995); Carol T. Christ and John O. Jordan, Victorian Literature and the Visual Imagination (Berkeley:University of California Press, 1995); Kate Flint, The Victorians and the Visual Imagination (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2000).
25. Jordanova, Ludmilla. 993). ‘Has the Social History of Medicine Come of Age?’. Historical Journal, 1:437–49. See reworked in her History in Practice (London:Arnold, 2000).
26. It is clearly not necessary for all practitioners to agree to the validity of a single set of methodological or theoretical positions; but there must be some sense of, and grounds for deciding, what is appropriate. The less this is so, the more the field will fragment.
27. See the comment of Donald Gray, that he looked for material which would ‘tell me something about Victorian culture that will be interesting and perhaps useful to know’, in ‘Victorian Studies, 1957–87’, 87.
28. Geertz, Clifford. 1975. The Interpretation of Cultures 4London:Hutchinson.
29. For an example of this see the revealing comments of Jan R. van Meter, review of Victorian family conference, Victorian Studies (1975–6):266, that ‘Victorian studies itself often seems to lack that overall vision of what it is about’. 30. The one obvious exception is, although this, perhaps because the context in which it appeared—a volume on the evolution of literary studies—was rather narrow in its focus.
30. George, Levine's. 1992. “ ‘Victorian Studies’ ”. In Redrawing the Boundaries. The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies Edited by:Greenblatt, Stephen, and Gunn, Giles. 130–53. New York:MLA.
31. 1968. The Study of Urban History London:Edward Arnold. ‘Editorial’, Urban History Yearbook (1977), 4. As well as the regular editorials of this sort, see also volumes such as H.J. Dyos, David Cannadine and David Reeder, eds, Exploring the Urban Past:essays in urban history by H.J. Dyos (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1982); Derek Fraser and Anthony Sutcliffe, The Pursuit of Urban History (London:Edward Arnold, 1983).
32. Witness the recent discussion on VICTORIA on key texts, in which many participants offered these same texts as the key texts for 2000.
33. Harrison, J. F.C., Best, Geoffrey, and Altick, Richard. 1973. Victorian People and Ideas London:Dent. This is not to deny that some of these, for example the three-volume series on the Victorians written by The Victorian Period:Intellectual and Cultural Contexts (London:Longman, 1993), have not been impressive and perceptive accounts of aspects of the period.
34. Morse, David. 1993. High Victorian Culture New York:New York University Press. For example, two chapters of mildly Marxist ‘background’ and then a series of micro-studies which generally attempt to yoke together key literary and intellectual figures and texts in an attempt to illuminate some grand theme.
35. David, Newsome's. 1997. The Victorian World Picture London:John Murray. The fate, for example, of
36. 1979. The Madwoman in the Attic London:Yale University Press. Women's studies looks back to Gilbert and Gubar's and Vicinus' A Widening Sphere (Bloomington:Indiana University Press, 1977); the recently vibrant study of the history of gender and sexualities positions itself theoretically against Foucault and empirically against works such as Sedgwick's Between Men:English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York:Columbia University Press, 1985), or Catherine Gallagher and Thomas Laqueur, The Making of the Modern Body:sexuality and society in the nineteenth century (Berkeley:University of California Press, 1987); work on the Victorians and the wider world positions itself with reference to Edward Said's Orientalism (New York:Pantheon Books, 1978).
37. In the version delivered at Hertfordshire, I suggested the field had been characterised by ‘fractious mingling, not a smooth integration’; here again, the respondents treated the notion of ‘smooth integration’ with considerable suspicion. I omit it here without withdrawing from the position which underpinned the use of the phrase, that a scholarly enterprise which cannot achieve some form of integration of divergent scholarly protocols is doomed for ever to speaking at cross purposes.
38. 1968. Victorian Studies, March:275–6. For a good early example of this justification see ‘Editorial’ on the 1968 symposium on the Victorian city
39. Avrom, Fleischman's. 1983. Figures of Autobiography:the language of self-writing in Victorian and modern England Berkeley:University of California Press. These figures recur time and again in works such as Buckley's The Turning Key:Autobiography and the Subjective Influence since 1800 (Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press, 1984); Linda Peterson, Victorian Autobiography:the tradition of self-interpretation (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1986); Martin Danahay's A Community of One:Masculine Autobiography and Autonomy in the Nineteenth Century (Albany:State University of New York Press, 1993).
40. John, Burnett's. 1974. Useful Toil:autobiographies of working people from the 1820s to the 1920s London:Allen Lane. Such as David Vincent's Bread, Knowledge and Freedom (London:Europa, 1981), and Testaments of Radicalism:memoirs of working-class politicians, 1790–1885 (London:Europa, 1977); Malcolm Chase, The Life and Literary Pursuits of Allen Davenport (Aldershot, Scolar, 1994).
41. Steedman, Carolyn. 1992. Past Tenses. Essays on Writing History and Autobiography London:Rivers Oram Press. Though see and Regenia Gagnier, Subjectivities (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1991).
42. J.B. Conacher, William Aydelotte, and J.A. Banks, among four historians, two historians of ideas, one historical sociologist, one economic and one political historian, to balance the seven literary scholars.
43. Roughly Dyos and Wolff presented the work of 27 historians and sociologists, ten from English/Drama, and a further seven from miscellaneous backgrounds; Shattock and Wolff contained essays from nine literary scholars, three historians and three bibliographers.
44. With only a few scattered representatives, Louis James, W.J. Keith to represent literary and cultural approaches to the field.
45. DeLaura, David. 1979. ‘Nature Naturing:Literary Natural History’. Victorian Studies,:193 80
46. Tucker's Companion has 31 chapters, 30 of which are written by literary studies scholars.
47. To take the three volumes from 1990–93, of 36 articles 24 were on literary topics, the remaining 10 being divided between history (3), history of science/ideas (3), and art music and miscellaneous topics (6).
48. Stern, Rebecca F., 1998. ‘Moving Parts and Speaking Parts:Situating Victorian Antitheatricality’. ELH, 65:423–49. A good example would be
49. Jonathan Loesberg, in VICTORIA debate on Victorian Studies, 30 September 1999.
50. Had I ever read Helps, I was asked at the Hertfordshire conference, in a tone which made it clear that there were some depths to which no self-respecting scholar ought to let their tolerance descend; yet Helps was an extremely successful and widely-read author, whose writings clearly struck a chord with large sections of the Victorian reading public, and on this basis he is a case in which any serious cultural historian should be able to find or at least acknowledge some interest, whatever aesthetic judgements may be warranted by the quality of his writing.
51. See comments of James Eli Adams, in VICTORIA debate on Victorian Studies, 30 September 1999.
52. Peter Widdowson, review, Victorian Studies (1989–90):368.
53. The distinction between truth claims and objectivity claims is significant here, for what is often lost in the heat of debate within and across the disciplines, is the extent to which few on any side would now espouse a simple version of positivist epistemology, and hence the extent to which distinctions are largely based on objectivity versus subjectivity disputes which are disputes over orientations not knowledge claims.
54. Weeks, Jeffrey. 1991. ‘The late-Victorian stew of sexualities’. Victorian Studies,:409–15. 2, 411.
55. John, Schad's. 1999. Victorians in Theory from Derrida to Browning Manchester:Manchester University Press. This raises the contentious question of how far a text like recent with its self-consciously playful interchanges between fiction and theory could ever be incorporated within an interdisciplinary field.
56. Miller, Novels Behind Glass (1995), 13.
57. The practice is so universal as to make illustration superfluous, except to point out that although perhaps in origins a mode from the arts, it is increasingly being adopted within the disciplines of the humanities such as history. One example would be Barbara Caine's Victorian Feminists which essentially offers readings of the life and works of four prominent women activists.
58. This policy was deliberate, see the justification of Donald Gray in ‘Report on the Victorian Studies Alumni conference’ (February 1984), Victorian Studies (1984–5):86–7.
59. Jonathan Loesberg, in VICTORIA debate on Victorian Studies, 30 September 1999.
60. Armstrong, Isobel, ed. 1969. The Major Victorian Poets. Reconsiderations 4London:Routledge and Kegan Paul.
61. 1989. Metropolis London. Histories and Representations since 1800 6London:Routledge. Gareth Stedman Jones and David Feldman, ‘Introduction’ to idem., eds
62. Smail, John. 1994. “ ‘Introduction’ ”. In The Origins of Middle Class Culture. Halifax, Yorkshire, 1660–1780 Ithaca:Cornell University Press. For a stimulating recent contribution which posits one way of negotiating the tensions, see Adrian Jones, ‘Word and Deed:why a post-poststructural history is needed, and how it might look’, Historical Journal, 43.2 (2000):517–41; this also provides an extensive reference to the recent controversial literature. For an interesting discussion which influenced the earlier formulations of this paper, see
63. Wahrman, Dror. 1996. ‘The new political history:a review essay’. Social History, 21:342–54. See
64. Gray, Robbie. 1996. The Factory Question in Industrial England. 1830–1860 Cambridge:Cambridge University Press. For examples, none without their own imperfections, but indicating possibilities across a range of disciplines, see Diane Sachko Macleod, Art and the Victorian Middle Class:money and the making of cultural identity (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1996); Eileen Yeo, The Contest for Social Science. Relations and Representations of Gender and Class (London:Rivers Oram Press, 1996); Aled Jones, Powers of the Press. Newspapers, Power and Public in Nineteenth Century England (Aldershot, Scolar, 1996).
65. Mandler, Peter. 1997. ‘Cultural Histories Old and New:Rereading the work of Janet Oppenheim’. Victorian Studies, 41:69–105. 8)
66. Butler, Judith. 1997. Excitable Speech:a politics of the performative London:Routledge. for Victorian usages of these ideas see, for example, Jennifer DeVere Brody, Impossible Purities. Blackness, Femininity and Victorian Culture (Durham, NC:Duke University Press, 1998).