Recent Studies in the Nineteenth Century

This essay does not offer anything that could purport to be an overview of recent studies in the nineteenth century. Readers who wish to deduce trends may count for themselves whatever theme or issue they wish to quantify from the list of “works received” that follows. Of course, there will anyway always be a degree of randomness to the books sent to the review editors of any journal, but I am going to indulge my own professional prejudice toward what is called—unsatisfactorily, and perhaps increasingly unsatisfactorily—“the Romantic period,” or worse, “Romanticism.” As readers might expect from someone who has just taken up a chair in eighteenth-century studies, my nineteenth century may have quite a few decades of the eighteenth in it, and not so many of the later decades of the Victorian. Even so, I begin by discussing a book devoted, if not entirely, to the Victorian period, and so default on my own default in order to bring out what seem, to me at least, some key issues for current research in the nineteenth century. These include, especially, the recent influence of book history on literary criticism, the social life of literature and literature’s relation to social life, and the continuing, if various, interest in things, sometimes via “thing theory” and sometimes via ecocriticism.

Later sections of the review will deal with two other issues: the very visible presence of Charles Dickens, although often via the invisible visible, as we will “see,” and the continued and welcome internationalization of nineteenth-century literary studies beyond narrowly construed national boundaries. Unable quite to resist counting trends, however, I can report that there were sixteen books concerned with Dickens, as it happens, compared with six for Jane Austen (three of which are editions, including a very useful teaching edition of the manuscripts from Broadview), but this inequality between two of the big hitters of nineteenth-century fiction, as with last year, must have much to do with the bicentennial of Dickens. Quite a lot of the new work on Dickens is to do with biography and commemoration. What may seem rather more surprising is the five single-author studies of William Wordsworth, if we include Mary Jacobus’s monograph on romantic things, who is also a significant presence elsewhere, including, to give just two of several instances, Reeve Parker’s Romantic Tragedies: The Dark Employments of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley and Keston Sutherland’s Stupefaction: A Radical Anatomy of Phantoms. Taken together with the revised version of Stephen Gill’s Oxford selection of the poems and prose, and two volumes on Dorothy Wordsworth, this year’s stock of monographs suggest that the Wordsworth family business retains a powerful presence on the landscape of Romanticism.

How to do Things with Books (Including Talk about Them?)

For me the most engaging of the many compelling books I read for this review was Leah Price’s How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain. A fascinating study, primarily organized around the tension between “text” and “book,” Price’s volume aims to bring book history and literary criticism into a conversation with each other. The opening chapter stakes out the issues in terms of the contentious relations between three operations concerning books: “reading (doing something with the words), handling (doing something with the object), and circulating (doing something to, or with, other persons by means of the book—whether cementing or severing relationships, whether by giving and receiving books or by withholding and rejecting them)” (pp. 5–6). Running throughout her reflections on these issues, as one might expect of such an eminent historian of the book, is the concern that intellectual history and, especially, literary criticism have always privileged the mind of the text (one might say its spirituality) against the matter of the book. Despite the recent rise of book history, I would say this remains true over the general span of books received for review this year, across whatever methodological variety they otherwise show, although the history of reading, if not always via research into actual reading practices beyond the text, is a...