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Victorian Studies 43.4 (2001) 673-676



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Book Review

The Victorian Comic Spirit: New Perspectives,


The Victorian Comic Spirit: New Perspectives, edited by Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor; pp. xx + 252. Aldershot and Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 2000 £49.50, $86.95.

"If you promise me faithfully not to mention it to a single person, not even to your dearest friend," W. S. Gilbert once confided, "I don't think Shakespeare rollicking" (qtd. in Goldberg, The Story of Gilbert and Sullivan [1928] 473). In the midst of Victorian Bardolatry, which held Shakespeare to be the quintessence of cultured comedy, it is somewhat surprising to find one of the leading humorists of the age dissenting from the established [End Page 673] creed. But Gilbert's contrariety serves to underline what is perhaps the sole unexceptionable assertion one can make about comedy: it is a subject upon which unanimity is unimaginable.

Nevertheless, Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor, the editor of this collection, claims to have discovered complete concord among her twelve contributors:

What ties each of the essays to the other, no matter what the particular subject of analysis, is a common supposition that there exists a dialogic interchange between the humorous text and its culture. These essays assume, in other words, that humorous and comic representations function politically by revealing contradictions in ideological discourses, by exposing repressed illogicalities and prejudices [. . .] attendant to nineteenth-century ideologies of gender, class, race, nationalism. (xvi)

But, as Oscar Wilde observed, the truth is rarely pure and never simple. To be sure, the tradition of humor as social and intellectual scourge was vigorously and variously maintained in the Victorian period--but this was also the era that saw the proliferation of nonsense verse, and of pun-laden plays which derived their popularity from their pointlessness. Examples gross as earth exhort us: in the most notorious couplet of the nineteenth century, William Brough has King Henry, in The Field of the Cloth of Gold (1868), describe his Channel crossing thus: "Yesterday all was fair--a glorious Sunday, / But this sick transit spoils the glory o' Monday" (English Plays of the Nineteenth Century [1969] 5: 301). Harley Granville-Barker, in his survey of mid-Victorian burlesque, aptly dubs this passage and its ilk "simple foolery" ("Exit Planché--Enter Gilbert," The Eighteen-Sixties [1932] 127); in other words, if there is a political subtext here, it is buried very deep indeed.

Nor do all the essayists in this volume toe the party line proclaimed by the editor. Some do: thus, in "Humor as Daughterly Defense in Cranford," an admirably close reading of Elizabeth Gaskell's text, Eileen Gillooly locates the narrator as "a younger, marginal participant" (116) in the society of the novel, and effectively argues that her subtle humor "discloses itself as a strategy of protection and retaliation against parental authority--authority that the humor reveals as arbitrary, tyrannical, and ultimately destructive of female selfhood" (122). But Abigail Burnham Bloom, in "Transcendence through Incongruity: The Background of Humor in Carlyle's Sartor Resartus," shows that Carlyle aimed to use humor for neither attack nor defense; rather, according to the ideal that he derived from reading Jean Paul Friedrich Richter, "The humorist exalts, loves, and raises the ordinary towards a higher level. Like William Makepeace Thackeray, Carlyle believes that humor produces compassion" (163). As Bloom notes, Carlyle was frequently disappointed that his work failed to realize this benign ideal (as, for that matter, did Thackeray's)--but the fact remains that he held humor to serve a function radically remote from that of "revealing contradictions in ideological discourses" and "exposing repressed illogicalities and prejudices." Indeed, Wagner-Lawlor herself acknowledges that "[t]hese essays show us that during the Victorian period the use of humor is not uniform in either its strategies or effects" (xx)--though it is not quite clear how to reconcile this statement with the more monolithic view quoted above.

Wherein, then, does the coherence of this collection consist? Any answer is vexed by a couple of items in the Table of Contents. In "Arnold's Irony and the Deployment of Dandyism," the few verbal...

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