Victorian Literature E-Book
29,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Blackwell Anthologies
- Sprache: Englisch
Victorian Literature is a comprehensive and fully annotated anthology with a flexible design that allows teachers and students to pursue traditional or innovative lines of inquiry—from the canon to its extensions and its contexts.
- Represents the period's major writers of prose, poetry, drama, and more, including Tennyson, Arnold, the Brownings, Carlyle, Ruskin, the Rossettis, Wilde, Eliot, and the Brontës
- Promotes an ideologically and culturally varied view of Victorian society with the inclusion of women, working-class, colonial, and gay and lesbian writers
- Incorporates recent scholarship with 5 contextual sections and innovative sub-sections on topics like environmentalism and animal rights; mass literacy and mass media; sex and sexuality; melodrama and comedy; the Irish question; ruling India and the Indian Mutiny and innovations in print culture
- Emphasizes the interdisciplinary nature of the field with a focus on social, cultural, artistic, and historical factors
- Includes a fully annotated companion website for teachers and students offering expanded context sections, additional readings from key writers, appendices, and an extensive bibliography
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 2443
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014
Ähnliche
CONTENTS
Cover
Wiley Blackwell Anthologies
Title page
Copyright page
Plates and Illustrations
Colour Plates
Black and White Illustrations
Web Plates and Illustrations
Preface
Abbreviations
Introduction
Victorian Representations and Misrepresentations
“The Terrific Burning”
The Battle of the Styles
“The Best of Times, the Worst of Times”
Demographics and Underlying Fears
Power, Industry, and the High Cost of Bread and Beer
The Classes and the Masses
The Dynamics of Gender
Religion and the Churches
Political Structures
Empire
Genres and Literary Hierarchies
The Fine Arts and Popular Entertainment
Revolutions in Mass Media and the Expansion of Print Culture
Part One: Contexts
The Condition of England
Gender, Women, and Sexuality
Literature and the Arts
Religion and Science
Empire
Part Two: Authors
Walter Savage Landor (1775–1864)
Charlotte Elliott (1789–1871)
John Keble (1792–1866)
Felicia Hemans (1793–1835)
Janet Hamilton (1795–1873)
Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881)
Maria Smith Abdy (1797–1867)
Mary Howitt (1799–1888)
Thomas Hood (1799–1845)
Sarah Stickney Ellis (1799–1872)
Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–59)
John Henry Newman (1801–90)
William Barnes (1801–86)
Harriet Martineau (1802–76)
L. E. L. [Letitia Elizabeth Landon] (1802–38)
Elizabeth Duncan Campbell (1804–78)
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–61)
John Stuart Mill (1806–73)
Caroline Norton (1808–77)
Charles Darwin (1809–82)
Edward FitzGerald (1809–83)
Alfred Tennyson (1809–92)
Robert Browning (1812–89)
Edward Lear (1812–88)
Samuel Smiles (1812–1904)
Charlotte Brontë (1816–55)
Grace Aguilar (1816–47)
Edwin Waugh (1817–90)
Emily Jane Brontë (1818–48)
Eliza Cook (1818–89)
Arthur Hugh Clough (1819–61)
John Ruskin (1819–1900)
Queen Victoria (1819–1901)
George Eliot (1819–80)
Anne Brontë (1820–49)
Jean Ingelow (1820–97)
Florence Nightingale (1820–1910)
Dora Greenwell (1821–82)
Matthew Arnold (1822–88)
Coventry Patmore (1823–96)
Sydney Dobell (1824–74)
William Topaz McGonagall (1825–1902)
Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895)
Adelaide Anne Procter (1825–64)
Eliza Harriet Keary (1827–1918)
Samuel Laycock (1826–93)
Emily Pfeiffer (1827–90)
Ellen Johnston (
c
.1827–74)
George Meredith (1828–1909)
Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–82)
Gerald Massey (1828–1907)
Elizabeth Siddal (1829–62)
Christina Rossetti (1830–94)
Lewis Carroll [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson] (1832–98)
William Morris (1834–96)
James Thomson [B. V.] (1834–82)
William Schwenck Gilbert (1836–1911)
Augusta Webster (1837–94)
Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909)
Walter Horatio Pater (1839–94)
Thomas Hardy (1840–1928)
Mathilde Blind (1841–96)
Violet Fane (pseudonym of Mary Montgomerie Lamb, Lady Currie) (1843–1905)
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89)
Louisa Sarah Bevington (1845–95)
Marion Bernstein (1846–1906)
Michael Field [Katharine Harris Bradley (1846–1914) and Edith Cooper (1862–1913)]
Alice Meynell (1847–1922)
William Hurrell Mallock (1849–1923)
William Ernest Henley (1849–1903)
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–94)
Arthur Clement Hilton (1851–77)
Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
John Davidson (1857–1909)
Constance Naden (1858–89)
A. E. Housman (1859–1936)
Francis Thompson (1859–1907)
Rosamund Marriott Watson (1860–1911)
Mary Elizabeth Coleridge (1861–1907)
Amy Levy (1861–89)
Henry Newbolt (1862–1938)
Arthur Symons (1865–1945)
William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936)
Lionel Johnson (1867–1902)
Ernest Dowson (1867–1900)
Charlotte Mew (1869–1928)
Supplemental Images
Index of Authors and Titles
Access the Companion Website
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Chapter 1
Figure 1 Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin (1812–52), “Catholic Town in 1440; The Same Town in 1840.” In
Contrasts
(1836, second edition 1841). Etching. 26 × 21 cm.
Figure 2 Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin (1812–52), “Contrasted Residences for the Poor” (1846). In
Contrasts
(1836, second edition 1841). Etching. 26 × 21 cm.
Figure 3 George Cruikshank (1792–1878),
The British Bee Hive
(1867). Process Engraving. 26 × 19.5 cm.
Figure 4 Society for Promoting Working Men’s Associations,
Lectures for April 1853
. Letterpress Handbill.
Figure 5 Henry Tanworth Wells (1828–1903),
Victoria Regina
(1897). Photogravure by Selmar Hess for Goupil & Co. 18 × 23 cm.
Figure 6 Thomas Allom (1804–72),
Female Influence
. In Sarah Stickney Ellis,
The Women of England
. (Illustrated edition 1845 [First ed. 1839]). Wood-block Engraving. 11 × 19 cm.
Figure 7 William Morris (1834–96),
The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer
(Kelmscott Press, 1896), with illustrations by Edward Burne-Jones and borders and type design by William Morris. Letterpress. 42.5 × 29.2 cm per leaf.
Figure 8
Order of Rocks
in Mrs Wright,
The Globe Prepared for Man: A Guide to Geology
(1853). Engraving. 18 × 14 cm.
Figure 9 Gustave Doré (1832–83),
The Monkey House
. In Blanchard Jerrold and Gustave Doré,
London: A Pilgrimage
(1872), p. 110. Woodblock Engraving. 16 × 13 cm.
Figure 10 Godefroy Durand (1832–
c.
1910),
The Imperial Institute: Opening Ceremony by Her Majesty the Queen.
In
The Graphic
(13 May 1893: Supplement). Steel Engraving. 29.9 × 22.5 cm.
Plates
Plate 1 J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851),
The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, October 16, 1834
(1834–35). Oil on canvas. 92.1 × 123.2 cm.
Plate 2 “Scientific Progress” in
Her Majesty’s Glorious Jubilee 1897: The Record Number of a Record Reign.
Plate 11. [Diamond Jubilee Special Number of the
Illustrated London News
, issued on Jubilee Day, 21 June 1897; with a text by Sir Walter Besant]. Coloured Lithograph. 40.5 × 30.7 cm.
Plate 3 Sir Luke Fildes (1844–1927),
Applicants for Admission to a Casual Ward
(1874). Oil on canvas. 137.1 × 243.7 cm.
Plate 4 Sir Edwin Landseer (1802–73),
Windsor Castle in Modern Times
(1841–43). Oil on canvas. 113.4 × 144.3 cm.
Plate 5 Ford Madox Brown (1821–93),
Work
(1852–65). Oil on canvas. 137 × 197.5 cm.
Plate 6 Alfred Morrow (1863–1927), poster for
The New Woman by Sydney Grundy at the Comedy Theatre, London
(1894). Colour Lithograph printed by David Allen & Sons. 72.4 × 50.8 cm.
Plate 7 Richard Redgrave (1804–88),
The Governess
(1844). Oil on canvas. 71.1 × 91.5 cm.
Plate 8 Robert Braithwaite Martineau (1826–69),
Kit’s Writing Lesson
(1852). Oil on canvas. 52.1 × 70.5 cm.
Plate 9 Alfred Concanen (1835–86),
Modern Advertising: A Railway Station in 1874
(1874). Frontispiece to Henry Sampson,
A History of Advertising from the Earliest Times
(1874). Chromo-lithograph. 15.5 × 31 cm.
Plate 10 William Holman Hunt (1827–1910),
The Awakening Conscience
(1853–54). Oil on canvas. 76. × 55.9 cm.
Plate 11 William Holman Hunt (1827–1910),
The Light of the World
(1851–53). Oil on canvas. 125.5 × 59.8 cm.
Plate 12 John Everett Millais (1829–96),
Christ in the House of His Parents
(1850). Oil on canvas. 86.4 × 139.7 cm.
Plate 13 Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–82),
The Girlhood of Mary Virgin
(1849). Oil on canvas. 83.2 × 65.4 cm.
Plate 14 Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–82),
The Blessed Damozel
(1871–78). Oil on canvas. 136.8 × 96.5 cm; Predella (lower panel) 35.2 × 96.2 cm.
Plate 15 Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–82),
Found
(1854–81). Oil on canvas. 76.2 × 88.9 cm. Unfinished.
Plate 16 William Morris (1834–96),
La Belle Iseult
(1858). Oil on canvas. 71.8 × 51.2 cm.
Plate 17 William Simpson (1823–99),
One of the Wards of the Hospital at Scutari
in George Brackenbury,
The Campaign in the Crimea: An Historical Sketch Illustrated by Forty Plates, Second Series; From drawings Taken on the Spot by William Simpson (
1856). Plate 34. Coloured lithograph by E. Walker after the watercolour by Simpson. 73 × 38.8 cm.
Plate 18 Axel Herman Haig (1835–1921),
The Great Indian Peninsula Railway Terminus: Victoria Station, Bombay
(1878). Watercolour on paper. 91.4 × 157.5 cm.
Plate 19 J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851),
Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying – Typhoon Coming On
(1840). Oil on canvas. 91 × 122 cm.
Plate 20 James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834–1903),
Symphony in White No. 2: The Little White Girl
(1864). Oil on canvas.76.0 × 51.0 cm.
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
Pages
ii
iii
iv
v
xlii
xliii
xlv
xlvi
xlvii
xlviii
xlix
l
li
lii
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
19
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
29
28
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
183
184
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193
194
195
196
197
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
205
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
212
213
214
215
217
218
219
220
221
222
223
224
225
226
227
228
229
230
231
232
233
234
235
236
237
238
239
240
241
242
243
244
245
246
247
248
249
250
251
252
253
254
255
256
257
258
259
260
261
262
263
264
265
266
267
268
269
270
271
272
273
274
275
276
277
278
279
280
281
282
283
284
285
286
287
288
289
290
291
293
294
295
296
297
298
299
300
301
302
303
304
305
306
307
308
309
310
311
312
313
314
315
316
317
318
319
320
321
322
323
324
325
326
327
328
329
330
331
332
333
334
335
336
337
338
339
340
341
342
343
344
345
346
347
348
349
350
351
352
353
354
355
356
357
358
359
360
361
362
363
364
365
366
367
368
369
370
371
372
373
374
375
376
377
378
379
380
381
382
383
384
385
386
387
388
389
390
391
392
393
394
395
396
397
398
399
400
401
402
403
404
405
406
407
408
409
410
411
412
413
414
415
416
417
418
419
420
421
422
423
424
425
426
427
428
429
430
431
432
433
434
435
436
437
438
439
440
441
442
443
444
445
446
447
448
449
450
451
452
453
454
455
456
457
458
459
460
461
462
463
464
465
466
467
468
469
470
471
472
473
474
475
476
477
478
479
480
481
482
483
484
485
486
487
488
489
490
491
492
493
494
495
496
497
498
499
500
501
502
503
504
505
506
507
508
509
510
511
512
513
514
515
516
517
518
519
520
521
522
523
524
525
526
527
528
529
530
531
532
533
534
535
536
537
538
539
540
541
542
543
544
545
546
547
548
549
550
551
552
553
554
555
556
557
558
559
560
561
562
563
564
565
566
567
568
569
570
571
572
573
574
575
576
577
578
579
580
581
582
583
584
585
586
587
588
589
590
591
592
593
594
595
596
597
598
599
600
601
602
603
604
605
606
607
608
609
610
611
612
613
614
615
616
617
618
619
620
621
622
623
624
625
626
627
628
629
630
631
632
633
634
635
636
637
638
639
640
641
642
643
644
645
646
647
648
649
650
651
652
653
654
655
656
657
658
659
660
661
662
663
664
665
666
667
668
669
670
671
672
673
674
675
676
677
678
679
680
681
682
683
684
685
686
687
688
689
690
691
692
693
694
695
696
697
698
699
700
701
702
703
704
705
706
707
708
709
710
711
712
713
714
715
716
717
718
719
720
721
722
723
724
725
726
727
728
729
730
731
732
733
734
735
736
737
738
739
740
741
742
743
744
745
746
747
748
749
750
751
752
753
754
755
756
757
758
759
760
761
762
763
764
765
766
767
768
769
770
771
772
773
774
775
776
777
778
779
780
781
782
783
784
785
786
787
788
789
790
791
792
793
794
795
796
797
798
799
800
801
802
803
804
805
806
807
808
809
810
811
812
813
814
815
816
817
818
819
820
821
822
823
824
825
826
827
828
829
830
831
832
833
834
835
836
837
838
839
840
841
842
843
844
845
846
847
848
849
850
851
852
853
854
855
856
857
858
859
860
861
862
863
864
865
866
867
868
869
870
871
872
873
874
875
876
877
878
879
880
881
882
883
884
885
886
887
888
889
890
891
892
893
894
895
896
897
898
899
900
901
902
903
904
905
906
907
908
909
910
911
912
913
914
915
916
917
918
919
920
921
922
923
924
925
926
927
928
929
930
931
932
933
934
935
936
937
938
939
940
941
942
943
944
945
946
947
948
949
950
Wiley Blackwell Anthologies
Editorial Advisers
Rosemary Ashton, University of London; Gillian Beer, University of Cambridge; Gordon Campbell, University of Leicester; Terry Castle, Stanford University; Margaret Ann Doody, Vanderbilt University; Richard Gray, University of Essex; Joseph Harris, Harvard University; Karen L. Kilcup, University of North Carolina, Greensboro; Jerome J. McGann, University of Virginia; David Norbrook, University of Oxford; Tom Paulin, University of Oxford; Michael Payne, Bucknell University; Elaine Showalter, Princeton University; John Sutherland, University of London.
Wiley Blackwell Anthologies is a series of extensive and comprehensive volumes designed to address the numerous issues raised by recent debates regarding the literary canon, value, text, context, gender, genre, and period. While providing the reader with key canonical writings in their entirety, the series is also ambitious in its coverage of hitherto marginalized texts, and flexible in the overall variety of its approaches to periods and movements. Each volume has been thoroughly researched to meet the current needs of teachers and students.
Old and Middle English c.890–c.1450:An Anthology. Third Editionedited by Elaine Treharne
Medieval Drama: An Anthologyedited by Greg Walker
Chaucer to Spenser: An Anthology ofEnglish Writing 1375–1575edited by Derek Pearsall
Renaissance Literature: An Anthologyof Poetry and Prose. Second Editionedited by John C. Hunter
Renaissance Drama: An Anthologyof Plays and Entertainments.Second Editionedited by Arthur F. Kinney
Restoration Drama: An Anthologyedited by David Womersley
British Literature 1640–1789:An Anthology. Third Editionedited by Robert DeMaria, Jr
Romanticism: An Anthology.Fourth Editionedited by Duncan Wu
Irish Literature 1750–1900: An Anthologyedited by Julia Wright
Children’s Literature: An Anthology1801–1902edited by Peter Hunt
Victorian Women Poets: An Anthologyedited by Angela Leighton and Margaret Reynolds
Victorian Literature: An Anthologyedited by Victor Shea and William Whitla
Modernism: An Anthologyedited by Lawrence Rainey
The Literatures of Colonial America:An Anthologyedited by Susan Castillo andIvy T. Schweitzer
African American Literature: Volume 1,1746–1920edited by Gene Andrew Jarrett
African American Literature: Volume 2,1920 to the Presentedited by Gene Andrew Jarrett
American Gothic: An Anthology fromSalem Witchcraft to H. P. Lovecraft.Second Edition.edited by Charles L. Crow
Nineteenth-Century American WomenWriters: An Anthologyedited by Karen L. Kilcup
Nineteenth-Century American WomenPoets: An Anthologyedited by Paula Bernat Bennett
Native American Women’s Writing:An Anthology of Works c.1800–1924edited by Karen L. Kilcup
Victorian Literature
AN ANTHOLOGY
EDITED BY
VICTOR SHEA AND WILLIAM WHITLA
This edition first published 2015© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd
Registered OfficeJohn Wiley & Sons, Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK
Editorial Offices350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UKThe 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 Victor Shea and William Whitla to be identified as the authors of the editorial material in 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.
Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and authors have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. It is sold on the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services and neither the publisher nor the author shall be liable for damages arising herefrom. 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
Victorian literature : an anthology / edited by Victor Shea and William Whitla. pages cm. – (Blackwell anthologies) Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4051-8865-4 (hardback) – ISBN 978-1-4051-8874-6 (paper) 1. English literature–19th century.I. Shea, Victor, 1960– editor. II. Whitla, William, 1934– editor. PR1145.V524 2015 820.8′008–dc23
2014007436
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover image: A Private View at the Royal Academy, 1881 by William Powell Frith. One of the three focuses in the painting is the group of aesthetes listening to Oscar Wilde (with notebook and sunflower in his lapel). To Wilde’s left are the actors Ellen Terry and Sir Henry Irving. Further over his opponents glower, led by the journalist George Augustus Sala (white waistcoat). To Wilde’s right is the actress Lillie Langtry, a society wit and beauty, beside William Thomson, archbishop of York (in top hat). See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Private_View_at_the_Royal_Academy,_1881.
Plates and Illustrations
Colour Plates
(Between pages 500 and 501)
Plate 1
J. M. W. Turner,
The Burning of the House of Lords and Commons, October 16, 1834 (1835)1834
(1835)
Plate 2
“Scientific Progress” (1897)
Plate 3
Sir Luke Fildes,
Applicants for Admission to a Casual Ward
(1874)
Plate 4
Sir Edwin Landseer,
Windsor Castle in Modern Times
(1841–43)
Plate 5
Ford Madox Brown,
Work
(1852–65)
Plate 6
Alfred Morrow, Poster for
The New Woman by Sydney Grundy at The Comedy Theatre
(1894)
Plate 7
Richard Redgrave,
The Governess
(1844)
Plate 8
Robert Braithwaite Martineau,
Kit’s Writing Lesson
(1852)
Plate 9
Alfred Concanen,
Modern Advertising: A Railway Station in 1874
(1874)
Plate 10
William Holman Hunt,
The Awakening Conscience
(1853–54)
Plate 11
William Holman Hunt,
The Light of the World
(1851–53)
Plate 12
John Everett Millais,
Christ in the House of His Parents
(1850)
Plate 13
Dante Gabriel Rossetti,
The Girlhood of Mary Virgin
(1849)
Plate 14
Dante Gabriel Rossetti,
The Blessed Damozel
(1871–78)
Plate 15
Dante Gabriel Rossetti,
Found
(1854–81)
Plate 16
William Morris,
La Belle Iseult
(1858)
Plate 17
William Simpson,
One of the Wards of the Hospital at Scutari
(1856)
Plate 18
Axel Haig,
The Great Indian Peninsular Railway Terminus: Victoria Station, Bombay
(1878)
Plate 19
J. M. W. Turner,
Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying—Typhon Coming On
(1840)
Plate 20
James Abbott McNeill Whistler,
Symphony in White No. 2, The Little White Girl
(1864)
Black and White Illustrations
Figure 1
Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin, “Catholic Town in 1440; The Same Town in 1840” (1846)
Figure 2
Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin, “Contrasted Residences for the Poor” (1846)
Figure 3
George Cruikshank,
The British Bee Hive
(1867)
Figure 4
Society for Promoting Working Men’s Associations:
Lectures for April, 1853
Figure 5
Henry Tanworth Wells,
Victoria Regina
(1897)
Figure 6
Thomas Allom,
Female Influence
(1845)
Figure 7
William Morris,
The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer
(title page, 1896)
Figure 8
Order of Rocks
(1853)
Figure 9
Gustave Doré,
The Monkey House
(1872)
Figure 10
Godefroy Durand,
The Imperial Institute: Opening Ceremony by Her Majesty the Queen
(1893)
Web Plates and Illustrations
Web Plates
Plate 1
Thomas Annan (1829–87).
Close Nos 97 & 103 Saltmarket, Glasgow
(1868)
Plate 2
Francis Bedford (1816–94).
Doorway and Tympanum with Seated Figure, Barfreston Church, Kent
(1862)
Plate 3
Julia Margaret Cameron (1815–79):
The Guardian Angel
(1868)
Plate 4
Julia Margaret Cameron (1815–79):
Gareth and Lynette
(1874)
Plate 5
Peter Henry Emerson (1856–1936):
Ricking the Reed
(1886)
Plate 6
Peter Henry Emerson (1856–1936):
A Stiff Pull
(1888)
Plate 7
Roger Fenton (1819–69):
The Mamelon and Malakoff, from the Mortar Battery
(1855)
Plate 8
Francis Frith (1822–98):
The Largest of the Cedars of Lebanon
(c.1860)
Plate 9
Johnson & Henderson:
Canarese Brahmins [Brahmin Students of English]
(c.1855)
Plate 10
Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904):
Daisy Cantering
(1887)
Plate 11
W. L. H. Skeen & Co. (William Lewis Henry Skeen, Active in Ceylon 1860–1903)
Ceylonese Men
(1880s)
Plate 12
William Henry Fox Talbot (1800–77):
York Minster from Lop Lane
(1845)
Plate 13
Benjamin Brecknell Turner (1815–94)
Gateway, Cathedral Courtyard, Peterborough
, (1852–54)
Illustrations
Figure 1
Statistical Society of London
: “Newspapers and Other Publications in Coffee, Public, and Eating Houses” (1839) (WEB)
Figure 2
National Charter Association of Great Britain: Membership Card
c
.1843–48 (WEB)
Preface
Increasingly scholars take a generous view of the multi-faceted term “Victorian,” dating it not only from Victoria’s reign, but sometimes from her birth in 1819 – or at least from the Great Reform Bill of 1832, when she was thirteen. Our approach to one common historical norm, the long nineteenth century (1789–1914), allows us to make contrasts and comparisons across a wide span of time and to include texts that were published before and after Victoria’s reign by writers who came into prominence during that reign.
Overview
Our selection of ninety-five authors and five contexts is combined in both printed book and webpage. We intend that the book and its website be considered a single text, a representation of Victorian literature in its variety and complexity. The Table of Contents lists the contexts in the book, the additional web context sections, and the authors in both the print book and web book. For a complete list, see the Index of Authors and Titles on the Web. Also on the Web are links to chronologies of the Victorian period, weblinks, maps, tables, illustrations, photographs, links to recorded voices, and bibliographies.
Throughout, we usually use the first published versions, representing them in the texts first read by their contemporaries. All are provided with fresh and comprehensive annotation of concepts, names, places, foreign expressions, and ideas where necessary, as well as cross-references to other texts.
Highlights, Innovations, and New Materials
Many longer texts are included complete, including short stories by Doyle and Kipling; long poems by Barrett Browning, FitzGerald, Tennyson, Robert Browning, Arnold, Dante Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, Morris, Swinburne, and Hopkins. Substantial prose extracts are also included from Carlyle, Sarah Stickney Ellis, Newman, Martineau, Mill, Darwin, Ruskin, Nightingale, and Pater.
We have also gathered materials not usually anthologized: working-class literature, including diaries and poems; writings on women’s status and campaigns, from Sarah Ellis to Martineau and Norton; writing on the Crimean War (diaries, poems, and a war correspondent’s column); poems on the theme of Sappho as model and ideal poet; comic verse and hymns; dialect and rural poetry; radical and patriotic writing; same-sex love literature; and tribute poems, from one author to another.
Contexts and Multimedia
For more than half a century, Victorian literature has been allied in college and university courses with Victorian Studies, the interdisciplinary examination of the era. It is now accepted that Victorian literature should be read within and against the multilayered cultural conditions in which the writing was produced and read. Further, many texts that were formerly relegated to “background” categories, as properly in the domain of, for instance, politics or science, religion or art history, are now accorded status within literary study itself. We have responded to this academic reality by including five categories: The Condition of England; Gender, Women, and Sexuality; Literature and the Arts; Religion and Science; and Empire. These five context sections are only a few among many possible configurations. Some subdivisions within these contexts, like Progress, Industrialization, and Reform, or the Woman Question, or Geology and Evolution are frequently anthologized; some others, like Pollution, Protection, and Preservation (WEB), dealing with environmentalism and animal rights, or Working-Class Voices protesting social conditions and advocating reform, are rarely anthologized. The sections and selections are chosen and arranged to represent particular viewpoints or are especially illuminating in a disputed, often confrontational, area. Such readings are significant in the social and cultural conditions in which they are published. Hence, our context section on Literature and the Arts includes literary controversies about the novel but extends them by emphasizing the relations between the literary and other arts. For instance, Gothic medievalism is appealed to as an ideal in architecture and life by Pugin – but also by Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites in painting, poetry, and printing – and as an occasion for sneering dismissal in Dickens. Our reading of Martineau’s painting of Kit’s Writing Lesson (see Plate 8) allows us to move beyond a simplistic view of limited disputes over literary styles or genres to consider them within wider aesthetic debates among the arts, as well as within political debates involving the impact of literacy and the introduction of universal education.
A general introduction gives an overview of the age, not only of the course of literary changes and movements but also of some intellectual and cultural cross-currents of the time.
We also include three kinds of visual and aural materials. First, the published volume is enhanced with a series of coloured and black-and-white illustrations relevant to the cultural conditions or the authors’ works. For instance, each of the introductions to the contexts begins with a discussion of a particular painting or architectural monument to highlight the materials presented in that section, like the representation of the moment when Victoria is told she has become queen, as engraved by the little-known Henry Tanworth Wells (see Figure 5) – with its significant bodily gestures serving to introduce the context of Gender, Women, and Sexuality. Second, a series of nineteenthcentury photographs from the original plates, along with Victorian writings on photography, present direct evidence of how the camera and the Victorian eye saw and interpreted the world around them. Third, thanks to improvements in camera and recording technology, we give access through the Web to early movies of the funeral procession of Queen Victoria and Victorian working and street scenes, and recordings of a number of leading Victorians, some reading their poetry, others giving portions of a speech, conducting or playing music, or recordings of characteristic sounds, like the chiming of Big Ben in 1890. Such materials greatly extend our apprehension of the age as very different from ours but also remarkably similar – and closer than we could have imagined.
The Canon and its Extensions
Literature is understood by us, as in recent scholarly discussion of the nineteenth century, in the broadest sense – literature as writing, reflected here in the range of some 100 authors, arranged chronologically by birth date, with each author’s works presented in the order of their publication. The canon of major poets and prose writers whose works have traditionally represented Victorian literature is fully included in texts by Carlyle, Tennyson, the Brownings, Mill, Ruskin, Newman, Arnold, Dante Gabriel and Christina Rossetti, Hopkins, and Wilde, to name only a dozen of what Arnold called the enduring “touchstones” of persistently and rewardingly memorable writing. We also include natural scientists and social and religious thinkers who contributed to Victorian culture. Within the authors’ section, almost half are women; many more female authors have a place in the context sections. More broadly still, we have recognized the opening up of the canon to writers not part of established culture, to those rarely included in general anthologies, and only occasionally gathered into specialized collections: dialect and regional writers, working-class men and women, writers that today would be called gays and lesbians, children’s authors, hymn writers, and writers in the empire writing about home, and those writing about their experiences in their new home, either in London or the periphery of empire.
Women’s Presence
A wide selection is included of what might be called the “new canon” of women writers – some already well-known, like Christina Rossetti, Barrett Browning, and George Eliot – others, only now coming to be recognized, like Webster and Field, and still others very little known or read, like such working-class women as Hamilton, Johnston, Luck, and Seacole. Some women writers established many of the Victorian gender codes, like Ellis and Beeton; others rebelled against the codes, like Grand and Levy; while still others, like Oliphant and Gaskell, wrote within the norms. Our authors’ list includes almost forty women and the context sections have writings by thirty-three women.
Major and Minor Genres
We cover a breadth of genres. The varieties of Victorian poetry express the continuities and innovations within the literary tradition: dramatic monologues, pastoral elegies, lyrics, and short epigrams; sonnets and sonnet sequences; long poems like In Memoriam or The Rubáiyát; the classical poems of Swinburne and Field; the working-class poetry of Janet Hamilton and Elizabeth Duncan Campbell; the dialect verse of William Barnes and Ellen Johnston; and children’s verse by Lear, Christina Rossetti, and Stevenson. We also include several varieties of prose: short fiction; autobiography and other forms of life-writing (such as diaries and personal letters); cookbooks and conduct guides; discursive prose from Carlyle, Norton, Eliot, Arnold, Newman, Pater, and others; plays by Boucicault and Wilde; and travel writing by Elizabeth Rigby, Isabella Bird, and Victoria herself. We situate controversies about these genres and their conflicting aesthetic programmes in such categories as comedy and melodrama, realism and romance, and sentiment and sensation. The dominant genre of the period, the novel, is discussed in several places: in our introductions and in the Debates about Literature section of Literature and the Arts; however, precluded by restrictions of space, we limit our selections of novels to extracts in the various context sections.
Editorial Procedures
Authors are arranged chronologically by date of birth, and selections from each author are arranged as far as possible in order of publication. Similarly, writings in the context sections are in chronological order of publication under each heading. Exceptions are explained in the notes. Poems are accorded line numbers as in the editions from which we take our copy-text. Prose extracts are not lineated.
Headnotes: Each author is provided with a short headnote giving the details of parentage, place of birth, education, course of their literary career, and other relevant biographical information. It concludes with a highly abbreviated list of references: the standard or scholarly edition, if available, the major collection of letters, a recent scholarly biography, and a reliable link to a current (where possible academic) scholarly webpage.
Annotation: We have provided useful factual information about people, references and allusions to specific works, places, events, translations of foreign words, and the sources of major ideas alluded to or not explained in the text. Occasionally, therefore, we have mentioned that such and such a text is the subject of critical or textual debate, or that this or that idea was a source of controversy to the Victorians – and often also to readers in the twenty-first century. While offering some guidance in such cases, we have generally restricted our interpretation to giving, for instance, some comment on structure, in the case of some longer poems (such as Tennyson’s In Memoriam and Hopkins’s “The Wreck of the Deutschland”), or explanations of some of the scientific or religious ideas alluded to, as, for instance, in the writings of Darwin, that might be unfamiliar to current readers. We have tried to avoid annotating words that occur in the Concise Oxford Dictionary, but occasionally have done so where a word is archaic or obsolete, or if it has a specific contextual or nineteenth-century meaning. Particular Victorian or earlier usage is identified with a reference to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). Dialect and other special uses are often indicated by marginal glosses. The first note includes brief contextual or historical explanations, comments on compositional details, and finally, publication data, including copy-text information.
Such methods of annotation draw attention to three major sources of allusion among Victorian writers, the Authorized (King James) version of the Bible, the Greek and Latin authors, and Shakespeare. We have given titles only, without the authors’ names, for well-known works by Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Dante, Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton, and we use Arabic not Roman numerals for divisions of classical and other texts. Exceptions are those Victorian texts whose sections were originally numbered in Roman numerals.
Copy-text: We have been explicit about our choice of copy-text, indicating in each author’s headnote or in the first note the source and date from which a text is derived. In almost every instance we have chosen the first published appearance in print, when it became accessible to the Victorian reading public. Problematic cases are explained in the first note. We have followed the copy-text with respect to orthography (so, occasionally, “Shakspere,” in interests of historical accuracy and contemporary controversy), contractions (such as linger’d, watch’d, and heav’n), punctuation (with the exceptions noted below), indentation and spacing (with respect to poetry), capitalization, small caps (except for the opening words of a paragraph or poem), and italics.
Emendations: Exceptions to copy-text readings, such as the addition of later and well-known titles or editorial emendations, are added in brackets [thus]. Ellipses are indicated by three or four spaced periods. Authorial ellipses are indicated by two unspaced periods. We follow American usage for quotation marks, placing terminal punctuation within quotation marks, except that [;”] has been normalized to [”;]. Translations are acknowledged when they are by specific translators; unacknowledged translations are by the editors. We have cited the King James version (with Apocrypha) of the Bible as that known by the Victorians, with the important exception of Hopkins, who used the Douay-Rheims, the standard Roman Catholic version.
We have generally ignored MS readings or textual variants throughout, except in a limited number of cases. For instance, the poems of the Brontës underwent several processes of revision, in some instances when moving from their place in the mythology of Angria or Gondal, their imaginary worlds, and in others when Charlotte edited her sisters’ poems after their deaths. In another well-known case, D. G. Rossetti revised his poems frequently in manuscript as well as in trial editions, proofs, and published editions. We have given some of these readings for “The Blessed Damozel.” We have included a range of such revisions by giving the MS or other readings, either flush-right or in footnotes. Words or letters that a writer has struck out in the MS are indicated thus: strike out. Letters over-written are indicated within parentheses and are marked with an editorial comment: Thus (This) < overwritten>. Words or letters that a writer has added to the MS above the line are indicated thus: \word added/, and those added below the line are indicated thus: /word added\. Dialect words are glossed in the margins, cued with the degree character [°].
Acknowledgements and Permissions
We are grateful to the staff and collections of the Bodleian Library, Oxford, the libraries of York University (Clara Thomas Archives and Special Collections, Scott Library, Steacie Science Library) and the University of Toronto: Architecture and Design Library, Engineering and Computer Science Library, Massey College (Robertson Davies Library), Royal Ontario Museum Library, Sigmund Samuel and Gerstein Science Library, Trinity College (John W. Graham Library), Victoria College (E. J. Pratt Library), Emmanuel College Library, and especially the Thomas Fisher Rare Books Library. We also especially gratefully acknowledge the Robarts Library of the University of Toronto. A number of individuals have given wise advice and material help concerning particular aspects of the book, among whom we include Stacey Alison-Cassin, Florence Boos, Anne Dondertman, Hildo el Blanco, Danny Dean, Paul Fayter, Barbara Gates, the late Barbara Godard, Tony Hay, Linda K. Hughes, Gregory Kelly, the late Richard Landon, David Latham, Bernard Lightman, Marilou McKenna, Margaret Norman, Mike Sanders, Ann B. Shteir, Nancy Whitla, and Lisa Wood. Ivan Vestergaard has provided invaluable technical assistance. The staff at Wiley Blackwell has been full of patience and helpful advice at the various stages of book production, from proposals through preliminary to final submissions, and through the editorial process, including particularly Emma Bennett, Ben Thatcher, Bridget Jennings, and Felicity Marsh. We are also grateful to the anonymous appraisers of early proposals, and the careful and helpful readers of successive drafts of some of the authors and context sections. The editors and publisher thank the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies, York University, for the financial support it provided to this work.
For copyright materials, we acknowledge a number of particular resources:
For materials from the Munby Collection held by Trinity College Library, Cambridge we acknowledge the kind permission of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge, and the Librarian, David McKitterick.
For Chartist materials, Mark Craik, Chartist Ancestors, and his webpage:
http://www.chartists.net/Memorabilia-and-ephemera.htm.
For advice about nineteenth-century photography and for making their collection of early photographs available to us, we are grateful to Ann and Harry Malcolmson of Toronto.
For use of the manuscripts of Charles Stuart Calverley and related materials, we are grateful to Sybil Rampen of the Joshua Creek Heritage Art Centre, Oakville, his descendant.
For permission to use materials and illustrations in the Robarts Library and the Thomas Fisher Rare Books Library of the University of Toronto, we are grateful to the late Richard Landon, former Director, and to Anne Dondertman, Director of the Thomas Fisher Rare Books Library; and to Marie Korey, former Librarian of the Robertson Davies Library and the McLean Collection of Massey College.
For the various art galleries who have graciously allowed reproduction of works in their custody, as set out in the captions to them. For plates and illustrations we are grateful to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II for materials in the Royal Collection; the Boston Museum of Fine Arts; the Bridgeman Art Library; the Delaware Art Museum; the Fogg Art Museum and the President and Fellows of Harvard College, Harvard University, Cambridge; The India Office, London; the Master and Fellows of Keble College, Oxford; the Manchester Museum and Galleries; the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the John Howard McFadden Collection; Royal Holloway College; the Tate Gallery, London; and the Victoria and Albert Museum. As well we are grateful for the collections of York University Libraries, Toronto; the Robarts Library of the University of Toronto; the Gerstein Science Library, the Thomas Fisher Rare Books Library, and Massey College Library, Toronto. We have made every effort to acknowledge copyright materials; if any have been overlooked inadvertently, the publishers will be happy to make the necessary acknowledgements at the first opportunity.
Abbreviations
?
uncertain, approximation
meaning, as in word definitions
>
that is, suggesting, as in word definitions
<
from, derived from, from the root of, in derivations of words
abbrev.
abbreviation
adj.
adjective
adv.
adverb
alt.
alternative
Anon.
Anonymous
arch.
archaic
BA
Bachelor of Arts
BCE
Before the Common Era
BCP
Book of Common Prayer (1662)
bk.
book
c.
circa
(about)
CE
Common Era
cent.
century
ch., chs
chapter, chapters
cm
centimetres
col., cols
column, columns
colloq.
colloquial
d.
died
d
.
penny, pence
dial.
dialect
Douay
Douay-Rheims Roman Catholic translation of the Bible (1582–1609)
ed., eds
edited by; edition; editors
esp.
especially
et al.
(Lat.
et alii
) and others
f.
folio
ff.
and following
fig.
figure
fl.
flourished
Fr.
French
ft.
foot/feet
Gael.
Gaelic
gen.
general
Ger.
German
Gk.
Greek
Heb.
Hebrew
i.e.
(Lat.
id est
) that is
ILN
Illustrated London News
Ital.
Italian
KJV
King James Version of the Bible (1611)
km.
kilometre
Lat.
Latin
l.
lire
/pound
l./ll.
line/s
lb.
pound/s
MA
Master of Arts
ME
Middle English
MP
Member of Parliament
MS, MSS
manuscript, manuscripts
n., nn.
note, notes
naut.
nautical usage
n.d.
no date
No.
number
obs.
obsolete
ODNB
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
OE
Old English
OED
Oxford English Dictionary
OFr.
Old French
ON
Old Norse
Op.
opus
(Lat. work)
oz
ounce/s
p.a.
per annum
, a year
para.
paragraph
passim
(Lat. here and there), throughout
pl.
plural
PRB
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
pt.
part
R.
rupee
RA
Royal Academy
s
. or /
shilling, as in 5/6, five shillings and sixpence
sic
(Lat.
sicut
) it is so (identifies unusual spelling or grammar as original)
Sc.
Scene
Scots.
Scottish dialect
sect.
section, sections
Sp.
Spanish
Sr.
sister
stz.
stanza, stanzas
s.v.
(Lat.
sub verbo
) under the word, directing a reader to a proper word entry
trans.
translated by
UK
United Kingdom
US
United States (adj.)
USA
United States (n.)
v.
(Lat.
vide
) see, see entry
viz.
(Lat.
videlicet
) namely
vol., vols
volume, volumes
vs.
(Lat.
versus
) against
Introduction
Victorian Representations and Misrepresentations
The six decades of Victoria’s reign (1837–1901) – and the longer nineteenth century (1789–1914) – witnessed tremendous changes for Britain: from rural village roads meandering around large estates to dynamic and sprawling cities; from a coach-and-four to complex, interlocking railway systems; from sail to steam; from penny post to world telegraph (see Plate 2, “Scientific Progress”). Such transformative changes brought challenging problems and multiple ambiguities. The latter prompted early twentieth-century thinkers like Lytton Strachey to use “Victorian” as a dismissive term implying over-stuffed rooms, over-zealous prudery, and over-large families – each associated with Queen Victoria and with her age.
Victorian and Victorianism have now become complex historical and cultural terms, signifying overlapping temporalities and locations. As a time-span, Victorian signifies both Victoria’s historical reign as well as a cultural period extending from late Romanticism, about 1830 or earlier, to the Edwardian era in the early twentieth century. As a geographical locator, Victorian signifies England in the nineteenth century, but may also include Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, and, certainly later in the century, the term expands to include India and the wide reaches of the British Empire.
Victorianism signifies the conventions and social expressions characteristic of either Victoria’s reign, or, more generally, of her epoch. Cultural historians try to use the terms as descriptive and value-neutral. Not tidy or neat categories, the sets of values and codes are general assumptions that allow readers to make specific connections between, for instance, literature and art, poetry and politics, novels and industry.
In a sense, Victorian also designates a set of styles, kinds of fashion and etiquette, architecture and design, and writing and speaking – the arts in general. Though not coined until about 1851, the year of the Great Exhibition, “Victorian” was applied with highest approval, celebrating enlightened national institutions, the wealth of commerce, the extension of water and steam power to industry throughout the land, and the success of international trade. Problems of definition, then, relate to the kind of “Victorian” referred to, as well as to the decade to which the term is applied.
“The Terrific Burning”
On the evening of 16 October 1834, less than three years before Victoria’s accession, an art student at the Royal Acadeny (RA) recorded in his diary that “both Houses of Parliament had been destroyed by fire. Most of the students had witness[ed] the conflagration … and they all describe it as being the most grand and imposing sight they ever saw. The appearance of the Abbey lighted up by the flames, they say, was most splendid and lately a scene of the most terrific grandeur. Some of the students who were on the river were in with same boat with Turner.” As was his custom, J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851), the greatest painter of his age, viewed the awesome yet sublime catastrophe from many viewpoints, making notes and possibly sketches, many later worked over, resulting in two famous canvases exhibited the following year.
The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, as Turner called his painting (see Plate 1), recorded what to many observers seemed apocalyptic: a divine judgement against the passage of the Reform Bill of 1832 to its detractors and a fortuitous destruction of added-on buildings of reprehensible design to others. Those Tories who feared extending the franchise had been shocked by the riots in Bristol in 1831 when over 100 houses were burned, including the Bishop’s Palace, the Mansion House of the mayor and civic government, and three jails. Such an incendiary attack by an enraged populace when their representation at the Westminster Parliament was defeated by the Lords at an earlier stage of the Reform Bill now paled when the House of Lords itself burned to the ground. Architectural opponents of earlier tampering and patchwork with the ancient Gothic House of Lords objected to piecemeal stylistic additions when the Lords had recently been demolished and rebuilt (1824–27) both in neo-Classical style by Sir John Soane (1752–1837) and in neo-Gothic by James Wyatt (1746–1813); its burning, they claimed, was one more sign of God’s displeasure with these aesthetic sins.
While rumours circulated wildly that the fire that destroyed the Palace of Westminster, as it is formally named, was purposely set, it was in fact the result of an archaic financial technology concerning the tallying up of tax accounts for the royal treasury. In a system going back to William the Conqueror (d. 1087), “tallies” were squared hazelwood sticks notched to show substantial amounts paid or deposited and then split, so that half went to the payer, usually the sheriff who collected the tax, and half to the Exchequer, marked with the names of lenders, payers, county, and when the debt or loan should be repaid. The system continued until 1826, but, despite periodical destruction of old tallies, two cartloads had accumulated in the tally-room of the old Palace of Westminster. The Board of Works eventually decided to burn them in the stoves of the House of Lords. The two workers assigned were overly enthusiastic, and, despite being warned by Mrs Wright, the housekeeper of the Lords, that two tourists she was showing about could not see the tapestries depicting the defeat of the Spanish Armada for the smoke, they continued their reckless stoking of the stoves. All left by five o’clock when Mrs Wright locked the chambers, but by six the over-heated flues ignited some wooden panelling. Within nine hours all of the medieval and later buildings were destroyed, except Westminster Hall (eleventh to fourteenth century). The burnt structures dated in part to the time of Edward the Confessor (c.1003–66), a warren of added-on buildings where Parliament and the royal courts had met since the thirteenth century.
To the artist Benjamin Robert Haydon (1786–1846) it was sublime visually and inspiring politically: “The terrific burning, . . . from the bridge it was sublime. . . . The feeling among the people was extraordinary – jokes and radicalism universal.” Thirty years later Dickens would explain the circumstances of the fire in “A Speech on Administrative Reform”:
Ages ago a savage mode of keeping accounts on notched sticks was introduced into the Court of Exchequer, and the accounts were kept, much as Robinson Crusoe kept his calendar on the desert island. In the course of considerable revolutions of time . . . a multitude of accountants, book-keepers, and actuaries were born, and died. Still official routine inclined to these notched sticks, as if they were pillars of the constitution. . . . However, they never had been useful, and official routine required that they never should be, and so the order went forth that they were to be privately and confidentially burnt. It came to pass that they were burnt in a stove in the House of Lords. The stove, overgorged with these preposterous sticks, set fire to the panelling; the panelling set fire to the House of Lords; the House of Lords set fire to the House of Commons; the two houses were reduced to ashes. Architects were called in to build others; we are now in the second million [pounds] of the cost thereof; the national pig is not nearly over the stile yet; and little old woman, Britannia, hasn’t got home to-night (27 June 1855).
At the time of the speech Dickens was writing in Little Dorrit (1855–56) about another old and useless institution, the bumbling and deliberate obfuscation of the Circumlocution Office that made impossible the proper functioning of civil society. In questioning the cost of rebuilding the Palace of Westminster, he also recognized the epochal change the fire had caused.
Among those watching the conflagration on the evening of 16 October 1834 were two observers and architects with specialized interest. One was Charles Barry (1795–1860), returning from Brighton by coach, who saw the glow in the sky from afar and hurried to Westminster to see it close at hand, realizing, as his biographer says, that while “preservation or restoration was out of the question . . . the erection of a new building was inevitable, on a scale and with an opportunity” that could scarce be imagined. Although chiefly specializing in Italianate buildings, Barry won the competition to design a Gothic Parliament. Another witness to the burning was Augustus Pugin (1812–52), a master of Gothic architecture and design. While he rejoiced, as did all of England, that Westminster Hall had been saved, he also thought that there was “much to rejoice in a vast quantity of Soane’s mixtures and Wyatt’s heresies [having] been effectually consigned to oblivion. Oh it was a glorious sight to see his composition mullions . . . and battlements flying and cracking.” The brilliant, eccentric, and short-lived Pugin feared the officials’ “diabolical plans and detestable details.” Nevertheless, he was to become Barry’s collaborator, and to him were entrusted the thousands of Gothic interior details for ceiling decorations, floor tiles, carved doorways, fireplaces, tables and chairs and desks, brass ornaments, light fixtures, wallpapers, and the tower for Big Ben.
The Battle of the Styles
The Select Committee of Parliament stipulated that the new building was to be either Gothic or Elizabethan, the two styles most strongly associated with the chivalric and romanticized past demanded by national pride and cultural mystique. They replaced the neo-Classical style that smacked of either republicanism – recently adopted by the United States in the design of the Capitol in Washington – or the debaucheries of the reigns of the Hanoverian Georges. All ninety-seven entries complied. Barry’s winning submission was clearly neo-Gothic in its detail, but it was also neo-Classical in its symmetry and balance, with the two houses of parliament and their anterooms flanking the central lobby. Pugin bemoaned the fundamentally neo-Classical arrangement of the building’s parts: “All Grecian, Sir,” he complained, “Tudor details on a classic body.” Pugin’s criticism was based on the implications of building styles: the virtues of medieval architecture, still visible in the ancient churches and cathedrals of England, for him made possible a culture united in the Catholic religion and feudal monarchy and able to care for itself by an interlocking system of rights, patronage, duties, obligations, and service. To Pugin, the defects of his contemporary society could be paralleled to the decline in architecture, to a debased and utilitarian neo-Classical functionalism. When he was deeply engaged in the first stages of the Westminster designs, Pugin set out his analysis of society and architecture in Contrasts (1836; second edition 1841), articulating the battle of the styles that would continue throughout the nineteenth century (see Figure 1 and Figure 2). The new Houses of Parliament incorporated novel engineering features while referring deferentially to England’s medieval heritage. It was both nostalgic and prophetic: the beams and girders throughout are of cast iron, supported on brick, anticipating the second great monument of the Victorian era, the Crystal Palace of 1851 by Joseph Paxton (1803–65), which was made of iron and glass. All of the glass panels of the roofs and walls of the Crystal Palace, which housed the Great Exhibition, could be installed by the glaziers on wheeled carts that ran on the ribs of the structure: it was a triumph of pre-fabricated and modular construction that prefigures the architecture of the twenty-first century.
