Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor - The Victorian Comic Spirit: New Perspectives

First published 2000 by Ashgate Publishing

Reissued 2018 by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright 2000 Jennifer A. Wagner-Lawlor

The author has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

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.

Notice:

Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Publishers Note

The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original copies may be apparent.

Disclaimer

The publisher has made every effort to trace copyright holders and welcomes correspondence from those they have been unable to contact.

A Library of Congress record exists under LC control number: 99066723

ISBN 13: 978-1-138-70108-3 (hbk)

ISBN 13: 978-1-315-20427-7 (ebk)

The aim of this series is to reflect, develop and extend the great burgeoning of interest in the nineteenth century that has been an inevitable feature of recent decades, as that former epoch has come more sharply into focus as a locus for our understanding not only of the past but of the contours of our modernity. Though it is dedicated principally to the publication of original monographs and symposia in literature, history, cultural analysis, and associated fields, there will be a salient role for reprints of significant text from, or about, the period. Our overarching policy is to address the spectrum of nineteenth-century studies without exception, achieving the widest scope in chronology, approach and range of concern. This, we believe, distinguishes our project from comparable ones, and means, for example, that in the relevant areas of scholarship we both recognize and cut innovatively across such parameters as those suggested by the designations Romantic and Victorian. We welcome new ideas, while valuing tradition. It is hoped that the world which predates yet so forcibly predicts and engages our own will emerge in parts, as a whole, and in the lively currents of debate and change that are so manifest an aspect of its intellectual, artistic and social landscape.

Vincent Newey
Joanne Shattock

University of Leicester

I would like to express my tremendous gratitude to Linda K. Sadler, Editorial Assistant at The Southern Journal of Philosophy at The University of Memphis, who took on the task of helping me edit this text. All the computer formatting was done by her, and she proofread and copy-edited each essay with care and expertise. My offer of dinner at the fancy restaurant of her choice is a poor exchange for the retention of my sanity, which I surely would have lost without her help.

I would also like to thank the following organizations for their generosity: The Johns Hopkins University Press, for permission to reprint Eileen Gilloolys essay, Humor as Daughterly Defense in Cranford which originally appeared in ELH (English Literary History) 59: 883-901; G. W. Foote & Co. Ltd., for permission to reproduce the illustrations in (Patricia Markss Tipping Mr. Punch the Haffable Wink), which originally appeared in Punch.

This book is dedicated to my husband Len, and to our son, Jonathan Lenn Lawlor.

Jennifer A. Wagner-Lawlor

The attitude of scholars and nonscholars alike to the very notion of Victorian humor is remarkably similar: that it sounds like a contradiction in terms. This can hardly be wondered at. Even Victorian scholars tend to think of the Victorian Sage before they think of a Victorian Harlequin; the stentorian genius of the former went far to define, for their own as well as for later times, the spirit of the age with a character more akin to Arnoldian-type meditations on this strange disease of modern life than to the satiric observations of Mr. Punch. Harold Orels 1961 The World of Victorian Humor, itself a serious effort to reintroduce to modern audiences some of the many lively manifestations of Victorian humor, would nevertheless take away with one hand what it gave with the other: Orel introduces his collection by stating that

[t]he miracle of Victorian humor may lie in the fact that it existed The problems created by industrialization, the conflict between men of faith and men of science, and political cross-currents were so serious that many Victorians believed humor to be inappropriate in any discussion of them. (3)

Thus does he perpetuate, however unintentionally, the general image of the Victorian period as morbid and dour that has allowed Victorian humor to remain so long unanalyzed and untheorized. But at least some commentators closer to the last century seem to have perceived things a bit differently. Stephen Leacock for example, himself a noted humorist, would write in 1935 that far from being a time of relentless seriousness, the Victorian period represents an epoch in the history of letters greater than any that preceded itnot only in the realm of pure letters, but also in the domain of humor (14). Victorian humor, both in England and America, consisted of more than verbal incongruities, he claims, the effects of jangling syllables and misused words; rather, it reached toward the higher stage of the humor of character, turning on the contrasts of incongruities that make up queer people:

[Victorian humor] finds its basis in the incongruity of life itself, the contrast between the fretting cares and the petty sorrows of the day and the long mystery of the tomorrow. Here laughter and tears become one, and humor becomes the contemplation and interpretation of our life. In this aspect the thought of the nineteenth century far excelled all that had preceded it. The very wistfulness of its new ignorancecontrasted with the brazen certain[t]y of bygone dogmalends it something pathetic. (15)

Humor, he concludes, turns on a contrast between the thing as it is, or ought to be, and the thing smashed out of shape and as it ought not to be. [T]his broadened into a general notion of contrast, of incongruity, of a disharmony between a thing and its setting (11). Most importantly, Leacock himself saw the relationship between the ambiguities of Victorian ideology and the outpouring of all kinds of humor, literary and popular, which served to portray and to satirize not merely the written books of a period but the life and manners of the period itself, particularly the defects of its noble qualities: its prudery and overdone morality, and the hypocrisy that apes the moral attitude (68-69).

Despite this early and promising assessment of Victorian humor as, in essence, politically and ideologically engaged, the critical atmosphere for analysis of Victorian humor does not seem to have arrived until recently. There were certainly exceptions to this; most notable is Robert Bernard Martins valuable and unequaled The Triumph of Wit: A Study of Victorian Comic Theory (1974). This study, while surveying the large number of essays and treatisesmany philosophical in natureon humor during the Victorian age, focuses its discussion around central distinctions in nineteenth-century humor theory between wit (central to eighteenth-century theories) and humor, and between the claims of the intellect and the imagination. Because of his explicit concern primarily with rhetorical and philosophical notions of humor, Martin necessarily underplays the theoretical connections between humor and what Umberto Eco would call cultural and intertextual frames (8), connections which make it more easily possible to look at humor as a form of social criticism by means of its challenging of cultural codes (8). This is not to fault Martins valuable study; it is a matter of emphasis and indeed Martin glimpses the social implications of his work when he observes that it was dangerous to laugh because laughter revealed the fundamental dislocation of both the individual and society (5).