French Novels and the Victorians by Juliette Atkinson (review)

It is a piquant irony of our times that at the very moment the British Government is bent on asserting national autonomy by ‘regaining control’ of the United Kingdom’s borders and values, so scholars are laying bare the complexity of the cultural fears, prejudices, and exchanges that have long characterized relations between Britain and its nearest continental neighbour. The introductory chapter to this study charts the chronology of this scholarly process, frequently offering useful thumbnail sketches of landmark works. Drawing for its perspective variously upon reception studies, book history, and comparative criticism, this accessible monograph gives almost equal weighting to English and French primary sources. Juliette Atkinson’s ability to move easily between the two languages—the frequent translations are mainly her own—has undoubtedly proved an aid to her conclusion that in considering mid-nineteenth-century book traffic, the passive model supplied by reception studies should be replaced by the more active dynamic implicit in the concept of ‘circulation’. Her extensive reading both in the fictional and non-fictional prose of the period she is discussing, supported by her consultation of a wide range of recent scholarship in this area, enables her to move engagingly between the ‘macro’ approach afforded by statistical evidence and the telling individual anecdote. Given the multiplicity of her sources, Atkinson is sensible to confine her study to the period 1830 to 1870, which not only marks a discernibly distinctive passage in French politics, but engages with period-specific critical debates about the development of this most recent and junior branch of literature: the novel. Just as the Franco-Prussian War and its aftermath marked a political turning point, so discussions of the nature, function, and potential audience of fiction changed in their emphases in the concluding portion of the century, as the generation of Hugo and Sand gave way to that of Alphonse Daudet and Zola, and that of Dickens and Thackeray to Hardy and James. The book is arranged thematically, starting by establishing evidence for the extent and reach of the dissemination of French fiction in England. The archives of circulating libraries suggest that French fiction, both in the original and in translation, perforce penetrated well beyond London’s intellectual circles, while the records of two of the capital’s booksellers suggest they found a ready niche to exploit. Scrutiny of periodicals of the day targeted at every level of society reveals considerable reliance on the serialization of French fiction, initially in piratical translations. The work of translators, editors, and reviewers in maintaining Anglo-French literary networks provides the newest part of the next chapter’s findings. The second part of the book interrogates the anxieties often on display in Victorian commentary about the ‘immorality’ of ‘the French novel’, concluding that public rhetoric was often strikingly at odds with private practice. A further chapter traces the fictional representation of this discourse. The third section deals with the distinctively literary aspects of an interpenetration that overrode social and gender boundaries and proved resistant to all attempts at imposing a moral cordon sanitaire. This book serves as a welcome antidote to the much-rehearsed cliché of a monolithic Victorian readership univocally castigating the wicked fiction of their nearest continental neighbours.