Romantic Echoes in the Victorian Era (review)

Wolverhampton Public Library was built between 1900 and 1902 and is a rather striking building with attractive quasi-medieval touches in the use of terracotta and ornamental windows. Eight of these are dedicated to the great poets of the past–Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Shelley and Byron–a list which begs many questions about late-Victorian notions of literary history and cultural worth. It is perhaps surprising that the much-mourned Laureate, Tennyson, is not commemorated, but the windows' version of Romanticism is no less unexpected. Surely, for the audience of the time, Keats rather than Byron would have been more deserving of enshrinement?

This collection goes some way to explaining why such choices may have been made, offering a useful coverage of Victorian assessments and engagements with Romantic literature. The topic of the book is, in itself, a familiar one, but the editors thankfully go beyond the well-trodden ground of the relationship between Tennyson, Keats and the Pre-Raphaelites, the reasons behind Matthew Arnold's characterisation of Shelley as the 'beautiful, ineffectual angel' or Max Beerbohm's speculations about Byron becoming 'an old gentleman with irongrey whiskers, writing very long, very able letters to the Times about the repeal of the Corn Laws'. In the last twenty years, the Romantic canon has expanded far beyond the work of the traditionally central male poets, recognising the importance of women writers, Gothic novelists, political journalism and drama, while our view of the Victorians has undergone equally radical reformulation. This book is therefore a timely round-up of contemporary views of nineteenth-century literature, as well as a series of detailed case studies that address the ways in which Victorian poets, novelists and, to a lesser extent, artists, responded to the cultural production of 1790–1830. The book aims, say the editors, 'to explore more fully how the legacies of Romanticism were disseminated and modified in Britain during the second half of the nineteenth century'.

Ashgate has a reputation for producing solid scholarly works for the academic market and this is a typical example, well produced though prohibitively expensive for many general readers. The volume's thirteen contributors (five of whom are from Durham University) all adopt the currently ascendant critical mode that mixes a strongly historicist sensibility with detailed close reading and they thankfully avoid the jargonised solipsism that made so many critical works impenetrable in the 1980s and 1990s. As is always the case with essay collections, the worth of the book will vary according to the needs and focus of the individual reader, but the standard of contributions is, on the whole, gratifyingly high.

The editors both contribute essays, but their joint introduction is more a summary of the individual chapters than a convincing rationale for the work as a whole. A footnote on pages 1 and 2 lists a number of recent books that have interrogated the Romantic-Victorian relationship and it would have been worth being more explicit about the present volume's place in this growing literature. As it is, Andrew Radford and Mark Sandy identify 'the knotty, mutually determining relationship between Romantic and Victorian literatures', talk briefly about some early twentieth-century literary histories and then devote pages 8–14 to introducing the essays that follow.

The essays themselves often make for enlightening reading. Lisa Vargo opens proceedings with a nuanced account of the ways in which Victorian biographers (mis)represented Anna Letitia Barbauld and Mary Shelley, in a piece that demonstrates how women's writing and life writing have become increasingly important aspects of the Victorian cultural world for contemporary scholars. Julie Crane then considers the treatment of Thomas Chatterton in Victorian literature and art, focusing on Henry Wallis's 1856 painting of Chatterton's death (sadly, not reproduced here) and an allusion to Chatterton in Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White (1859–60). Crane's argument is often ingenious, though we hardly need Count Fosco's passing reference to...