Victorian Interpretation

An Overview

M An Overview It is one of the characteristics of recent thought that it distrusts its own activity,” wrote Henry Jones, a professor of philosophy at University College, in 1891. “Thought,” he continued, “has become aware of its own activity; men realize more clearly than they did in former times that the apparent constitution of things depends directly on the character of the intelligence which apprehends them.”1 We might almost take his words to be a description of current intellectual and cultural discourse rather than an account of Victorian thought. In contemporary debate, self-reflexivity about the processes of understanding is pervasive: knowledge is historically and culturally situated, facts are theory dependent, subjectivity is involved in all representation; in short, interpretation is always at work. What is not so often noticed is that the Victorians were equally concerned with the general character of human knowledge and understanding. They were, after all, post-Kantians, and many of those who considered such questions believed that knowledge was not an unmediated perception of things, but rather that the mind partly constitutes what we know. It is commonly acknowledged that the Victorian period saw the rise of historical consciousness. Knowledge, it might be said, became aware of its historical and cultural constitution. An important consequence of the recognition of the influence of the knower on the known was a growing concern with the processes and role of interpretation in every discipline. As Jones put it, the philosopher, the scientist, the poet—“All alike endeavor to interpret experience” (35). 1 This study examines the importance of the concept of interpretation in Victorian culture and traces the emergence of a general hermeneutics in Britain. It argues that hermeneutics, or the theory of interpretation, is far more central to Victorian thought than has been recognized, and that Victorian speculation on interpretation has important resonance in contemporary debate, where its presence has been misperceived or altogether missed. The Victorians, as this book will demonstrate, contributed significantly to the development of a secular hermeneutic tradition. Historical overviews of hermeneutics have focused on Germany, where the major systematic accounts of a universal linguistic hermeneutics were produced in the early nineteenth century, and an established hermeneutic tradition followed. That focus is not surprising, since hermeneutics underwent significant changes at the start of the nineteenth century when German Romantic hermeneutics shifted the study of interpretation from the attempt to establish specific interpretive rules for particular disciplines to a general concern with textual interpretation and understanding . This study seeks to show that an equally strong concern with interpretation—although less systematic than that which manifested itself in German nineteenth-century hermeneutics—emerged in Victorian England. The interest arose in part through the influence of German thought, but largely because cultural and historical factors similar to those that led to the development of a general hermeneutics in Germany were also present in Britain. This book does not so much offer a history of influence as a parallel story of a preoccupation with interpretation that takes its own particular form in Victorian England. My argument is built on a study of Victorian speculation on interpretation and meaning, its connection to broader ethical, epistemological, and linguistic questions, and the ways in which that speculation is embodied in Victorian literary texts. While there have been studies of the intersections between Victorian scriptural exegesis and literary texts, there has until now been no sustained account of the pervasive concern with interpretation in the period, nor has there been an attempt to represent Victorian views on interpretation in the context of current hermeneutic controversies. This book offers such a representation. My initial task is to consider how hermeneutics entered Victorian debates on religion and secularism. As a consequence of the weakening of religious authority, scriptural hermeneutics attempted to establish new grounds of authority and new principles of interpretive constraint by revising traditional modes of exegesis. I will be following the development and transformation of hermeneutics from a religious to a secular (and particularly literary) context. The narrative I 2 Victorian Interpretation construct is twofold. First I trace the transition from scriptural to secular hermeneutics. With the spread of theories of biblical exegesis that regarded the Bible as a historical document, scriptural interpretation moved out from the church to become more humanistic, and the boundaries between biblical and other texts began to dissolve. Another transformation was to come at the end of the century with what I...