Functions of Victorian Culture at the Present Time (review)

Christine Krueger, Associate Professor of English at Marquette University, states that her vision for this collection of essays is "an Arnoldian project in its understanding of the broad relevance of Victorian culture to contemporary practices." She seeks to discuss "both the material of the academic disciplines and things that stir the greatest waves of Victorian nostalgia." In conducting the project, she finds that we have recreated a culture that represents the worst of Arnold's time: we are "disturbingly fragmented, narcissistic, jingoistic, instrumentalist, and vulgar." In other words, we are guided by images of the past and fall victim to our own nostalgic fantasy. Many of the essays engage the writings of modern writers on Victorian sexuality, concept of time, juvenile offenders, Oscar Wilde, and homosexuality. Few chapters remark directly upon the periodical press at the time, but all of the following are worth reading.

Ellen Bayuk Rosenman's essay, "More Stories of Clothing and Furniture: Realism and Bad Commodities," examines the careful positioning practiced by the Victorian novelist when it comes to consumption of goods that are marketed for the general public. Cases in point are the distances the Victorian author places between him/herself and thing-wor-ship. Tantripp describes the dress, not Dorothea or the narrator of Middlemarch. Trollope's narrator feigns ignorance of the names of fabrics and styles to avoid being overly involved in commodity worship. Of course, this distancing undergoes serious strain as his narrator delimits the area of a proper gentleman in novels such as The Prime Minister and The Claverings, but Rosenman is absolutely correct: one can almost hear Trollope grunting while restraining himself from speaking brand names, even while consistently placing characters in select streets about Mayfair. Rosenman suggests that lavish modern films based on Victorian novels stoke the modern consumer's desire to own the same lovely furnishings.

Sue Lonoff's essay charts the many ways the Victorian field of study is changing. She thinks we may have "post-ed" ourselves out, and that future students "will gleefully abandon the theories that seduced their elders." This is one of the most lively essays. In conducting a survey through the VICTORIA listserv on institutional and departmental cultures, Lonoff learns that one professor from a private liberal arts college likens her students' reading abilities to those of the workers "from the mines of the nineteenth century. Lonoff explains why: "We live in a culture that increasingly denigrates sustained, reflective reading, and students, who are very savvy customers, will rarely make efforts that yield minimal payoffs." She prescribes common sense in making our efforts valid in the eyes of the student.

David Barndollar and Susan Schorn's essay, "Revisiting the Serial Format of Dickens's Novels; or, Little Dorrit Goes a Long Way," reports on a very interesting reading experiment at the University of Texas. A small group reads Little Dorrit in parcels, month by month. Finding it "difficult" and "annoying" to read the story in Victorian-styled increments, the readers determined that they resented the doling out of the text by the all-powerful storyteller, and that it was clearer why Dickens is ultimately "celebrated for his characterization and narrative flow rather than his plot construction."

Miriam Bailin's essay, "The New Victorians," finds that abundance is what our two eras share. She finds that in particulars we diverge wildly; our tastes for what we would term Victorian country manor grandeur would be shocked by the actual Victorian estates which were, in David Cannadine's words, "cold, gloomy, eerie, filthy, smelly and unsanitary." Much to point, George Steiner once remarked, "It is not the literal past that rules us, but images of the past."

In Kate Lonsdale's essay, "Rounding Up the Usual Suspect," the nine-teenth-century press is tasked for creating a huge buzz around Jack the Ripper that lives on and still hampers police investigations. She cites the erroneous Yorkshire Ripper investigation as her...