Adams - A History of Victorian Literature

BLACKWELL HISTORIES OF LITERATURE

General editor: Peter Brown, University of Kent, Canterbury

The books in this series renew and redefine a familiar form by recognizing that to write literary history involves more than placing texts in chronological sequence. Thus the emphasis within each volume falls both on plotting the significant literary developments of a given period, and on the wider cultural contexts within which they occurred. Cultural history is construed in broad terms and authors address such issues as politics, society, the arts, ideologies, varieties of literary production and consumption, and dominant genres and modes. The effect of each volume is to give the reader a sense of possessing a crucial sector of literary terrain, of understanding the forces that give a period its distinctive cast, and of seeing how writing of a given period impacts on, and is shaped by, its cultural circumstances.

Published to date

Forthcoming

This paperback edition first published 2012
2012 James Eli Adams

Edition history: Blackwell Publishing Ltd (hardback, 2009)

Blackwell Publishing was acquired by John Wiley & Sons in February 2007. Blackwells publishing program has been merged with Wileys global Scientific, Technical, and Medical business to form Wiley-Blackwell.

Registered Office
John Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK

Editorial Offices
350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA
9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK
The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK

For details of our global editorial offices, for customer services, and for information about how to apply for permission to reuse the copyright material in this book please see our website at www.wiley.com/wiley-blackwell.

The right of James Eli Adams to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books.

Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks. All brand names and product names used in this book are trade names, service marks, trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. The publisher is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold on the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Adams, James Eli.
A history of Victorian literature / James Eli Adams.
p. cm. (Blackwell histories of literature)
Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-631-22082-4 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-470-67239-6 (pbk.)
1. English literature19th centuryHistory and criticism. 2. Literature and societyGreat
BritainHistory19th century. I. Title.
PR461.A33 2009
820.9008dc22

2008031713

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This book is published in the following electronic formats: ePDF [9781444305951]; ePub [9781444354898]; Wiley Online Library [9781444305944]; Mobi [9781444321005]

Preface

This is a narrative history addressed to students and general readers wishing to learn more about the world of Victorian literature. It naturally presumes an interest whetted by encounters with that body of writing, but it does not presume close prior acquaintance with particular authors or genres. The narrative is informed by a good deal of contemporary scholarship and criticism, but I offer little explicit engagement with academic criticism (although I have done my best to acknowledge general as well as specific forms of scholarly indebtedness). Instead, I have devoted the confining space to gathering in a broader range of texts and careers than otherwise would have been possible. Ive tried to balance the claims of category and chronology, hoping to steer between chronicle (The following works were published in 1843) and the guide, organized around genre or critical theme. The volume has a strong chronological thrust, and hence the introduction will be a more rewarding point of entry than the index. At the same time, the history necessarily depends on analyses of particular episodes or developments whose significance can be elicited only through departures (sometimes extensive) from strict chronology. My aim is to sketch a complex, changing field of literary production and reception without surrendering the rich particularity of individual works and authors.

One emphasis to this end is a great deal of attention to Victorian reviews of major writers. The most obvious value of contemporary reception is its capacity to crystallize what seems distinctive, sometimes strange, in Victorian structures of feeling (in Raymond Williamss useful phrase). Reviewing also offers a means of decomposing, as it were, our existing conceptions of major authors and genres, and thereby revivifying them. We can see literary careers less as unbroken, fixed expanses and more as ongoing, changing constructions, within which Victorian readers confronted phenomena very different from what we encounter in our Penguins. From this vantage were reminded, for example, that Dickenss career in the 1830s is not that of a novelist, but of an increasingly prolific and popular writer of magazine sketches, whose writing changes the very form of the novel. Reviews also remind us of how complexly literary form and value are bound up with a broad range of social norms most obviously, the force of gender and class. Particularly in the early stages of a writers career, a review can seem an exercise much like the sizing up of strangers that is such an important experience in Victorian novels. As they try to place new or emergent authors, reviewers are especially likely to reveal their tacit norms and expectations, and thus to give us a sense of the audiences that the author is trying to reach. In the process, they offer unusually suggestive responses to a central question in any literary history: what was literature? How did one recognize it, what was it for, and how did one measure its success or failure? Reviews, finally, also remind us that Victorian engagements with these questions need not be narrowly historical or parochial; they often reveal writers of extraordinary intelligence, wit, erudition, self-awareness, and passion minds that should rebuke any inclination to patronize the past.