George P. Landow - Victorian Types, Victorian Shadows (Routledge Revivals): Biblical Typology in Victorian Literature, Art and Thought

The importance of typology in the study of early modern literature has long been accepted, yet students of Victorian culture have paid little attention to it. First published in 1980, this study demonstrates how biblical typology, an apparently arcane interpretative mode, had profound effects on the secular culture of the Victorian age: its art, literature and thought. George Landow considers the way in which the average English believer learned to read their Bible in terms of the types and shadows of Christ, the various ways in which Victorian poetry and hymns employed certain imagery, and the use of typological symbolism in narrative poetry, prose fiction, dramatic monologue and non-fiction. In a concluding chapter, he investigates the particularly complex, and often ironic, combinations of typological image and typological structure.

Victorian Types,
Victorian Shadows

Biblical Typology in Victorian Literature,
Art and Thought

George P. Landow

First published in 1980
by Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd

This edition first published in 2014 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

1980 George P. Landow

The right of George P. Landow to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

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A Library of Congress record exists under LC control number: 81179246

ISBN 13: 978-1-138-79614-0 (hbk)
ISBN 13: 978-1-315-75803-9 (ebk)

VICTORIAN TYPES
VICTORIAN SHADOWS

BIBLICAL TYPOLOGY IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE, ART, AND THOUGHT

GEORGE P. LANDOW

ROUTLEDGE & KEGAN PAUL
BOSTON, LONDON AND HENLEY

CHAPTER ONE
TYPOLOGICAL INTERPRETATION IN THE VICTORIAN PERIOD

CHAPTER TWO
THE SMITTEN ROCK

CHAPTER THREE
TYPOLOGY IN FICTION AND NON-FICTION

CHAPTER FOUR
TYPOLOGY IN THE VISUAL ARTS

CHAPTER FIVE
POLITICAL TYPES

CHAPTER SIX
TYPOLOGICAL STRUCTURES: THE EXAMPLES OF GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS AND DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI

CHAPTER SEVEN
THE PISGAH SIGHT TYPOLOGICAL STRUCTURE AND TYPOLOGICAL IMAGE

(between pages 146 and 147)

In proper Victorian fashion this study of the art and literature of the period will begin with a tale of conversion. I was originally, before my second birth, quite skeptical about the importance of this mode of biblical symbolism to any Victorian writer but John Ruskin, whom I considered an anomaly. I have since realized that typology helps us to understand other major figures in both Victorian literature and art. Although students of English and American literature of the seventeenth century have demonstrated the importance of biblical typology in their fields for more than a decade, students of Victorian culture have paid little attention to it. Typology (or typological symbolism) is a Christian form of biblical interpretation that proceeds on the assumption that God placed anticipations of Christ in the laws, events, and people of the Old Testament. When I wrote The Aesthetic and Critical Theories of John Ruskin (1971), I was most concerned to explain the basic nature of the Evangelical Anglican form of this exegetical mode and then demonstrate how Ruskin moved from it to his own peculiar kind of allegory. While writing this book about Ruskin in 1968, I became aware that it was the critics emphasis upon elaborate symbolism that so excited Hunt and his Pre-Raphaelite associates, and this recognition led to an essay on William Holman Hunts The Shadow of Death in the 1972 Rylands Library Bulletin (and later to William Holman Hunt and Typological Symbolism, 1979). By the time I began to work on Pre-Raphaelite theories of realistic symbolism, I saw that Ruskin, Hunt, Rossetti, Millais, Collins, and other members of their circle drew heavily upon this supposedly arcane theological matter, and I concluded that it possessed more importance than I had earlier thought possible. Earl Miners gracious invitation to take part in the 1974 Princeton conference on literary typology, which took place while I was at work on William Holman Hunt and Typological Symbolism, encouraged me to look more widely than I had done for evidence of typology in Victorian literature. By the time I wrote my position paper, which later appeared in Professor Miners Literary Uses of Typology from the Late Middle Ages to the Present (1977), I had become convinced that, with the obvious exception of Arnold, every major Victorian poet employs typology in some manner.

When I first began to investigate this subject some fifteen years ago, there was little available to the literary student other than essays by William Madsen and Northrop Frye on Milton. Such lack of studies of literary typology has proved an unexpected benefit albeit in a rather backhanded sort of way. Since I was unable to learn much about typological readings of the Bible during the Victorian period from histories of theology or from accounts of the Evangelical movement, I began a course of reading sermons, tracts, hymns, biblical commentaries, and devotional poetry. Although this manner of proceeding required a great deal of time, it had the obvious advantage of forcing me to confront Victorian materials directly before formulating any broad generalizations. Fortunately, Ruskins favorite preacher (whom, as I later learned, Browning and Gladstone also admired) was Henry Melvill, Canon of St Pauls, sometime chaplain to the Queen, and one of the most popular preachers of his time. My more recent investigations have required that I make myself acquainted with a far wider range of dissenting, Broad Church, and High Anglican applications of this exegetical mode. The advantage of going directly to major Victorian preachers and Bible commentators is not only that one makes some unexpected discoveries of unexpected talents Melvill, for instance, often writes finer sermons than Newman but that one does not risk basing assumptions about Victorian typology upon the theory and practice of other ages and other arts. One can learn much about typology in Gothic architecture from Emile Mles