Novelistic Tapestries

James Kilroy's The Nineteenth-Century English Novel: Family Ideology and Narrative Form examines how changing notions of the family, particularly the father's or patriarch's place in the family, both appear in the novel and influence its structure. In passing he draws a good parallel between changes in the novel and those in nineteenth-century genre painting—morally charged domestic scenes being supplanted by the aesthetic, say Lord Leighton's cotton-candy-like Flaming June, fluff which against all reason I adore.

For Kilroy ideology represents what critics used to call the "spirit of the age." "As Denis Jones succinctly formulates it," Kilroy quotes, "'whatever form it may take, whatever its institutional focus, however simple or complex the stories a culture chooses to tell itself, story represents an articulation elicited in response to the pressure which sexual, reproductive, necrotropic functions exert upon human collectivities and their individual members.'" Such books as Walter Houghton's The Victorian Frame of Mind and Jerome Buckley's The Victorian Temper helped a generation of students place -nineteenth century writing into historical and social contexts, while Kathleen Tillotson breathed life into the forgotten novels of the 1840s. In Dickens and Crime and Dickens and Education, Philip Collins, the Times stated in an obituary, was "responsible for the sea change in the attitude of academia towards the work of Charles Dickens during the last half of the twentieth century."

Kilroy follows in the tradition of these fine critics, except that ideology conveys a different sense than "spirit of the age"—more Procrustean, narrower, less nuanced. Novels are tapestries, and how much a novel reflects one of the spirits of an age or how much that spirit influences the novel is but a single fiber of the magic that creates enjoyment. To put this in Christmas terms, ideology smacks of grocery-store egg nog, missing all the wondrously intoxicating bourbon, rum, and brandy—the zest of tale-telling. And, of course, literary matters are more complex. As Oscar Wilde put it, sounding like a light version of Carlyle in Heroes and Hero Worship, "the longer one studies life and literature the more strongly one feels that behind everything that is wonderful stands the individual, and that it is not the moment that makes the man but the man who creates the age." Substitute book for man, and the book makes the age, not the age the book.

Such caveats aside, Kilroy's book is engagingly bright, especially when the word ideology vanishes and he reads closely, which he does splendidly. In the study Kilroy discusses eight books in detail, grouping them together in twos: Mansfield Park and Lodore (which I have not read), Dombey and Son and The Newcomes, The Mill on the Floss and The Daisy Chain, and The Master of Ballantrae and Ernest Pontifex. His chapters illustrate the movement from a father and a family that protects and shelters to the dysfunctional family and parent in Ernest Pontifex. In his analysis of Butler's novel, he writes, "Within the main development of the conventions of the novel, as in political discourse, the claim that the family is the model of an orderly society is no longer espoused. No longer can patriarchal rule, reinforced by filial and sibling support, be regarded as the template for developing political and social systems." As Butler himself puts it, writing about family, "I believe that more unhappiness comes from this source than from any other—I mean the attempt to prolong family connection unduly and to make people hang together artificially who would never naturally do so. The mischief among the lower classes is not so great, but among the middle and upper classes it is killing a large number daily. And the old people do not really like it much better than the young."

The world of Dombey and Son has not simply evolved into "Dombey and Daughter," but has become a fictional world and society in which the beneficent father and the protecting family have...