Those Fascinating Victorians

‘Victoriana’, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, denotes ‘matters relating to the Victorian period’, and ‘attitudes characteristic of that time’; also things made in the period: that is to say, furnishings or objects that have outlived their purpose and are now purely decorative, as well as buildings or architecture. From its earliest usages, the term has had a critical if not downright pejorative edge. ‘The odour of defunct Victoriana’, screeched Ezra Pound in 1918 in the Dictionary’s first example, ‘is so unpleasant, that we are content to leave the past where we find it.’ Osbert Sitwell is less vehement, but hardly more approving when in his Victoriana (1930), a compendium of quotations from people of the period, he declares an intention to present the Victorians not ‘at their wonderful best, but at their silly worst’. Unlike the overblown sub-Strachey-esque biographies that debunk former Victorian heroes, for which Sitwell identifies a new fashion in the early decades of the century, his Victoriana lets the Victorians speak for themselves – damn themselves, that is. Hence his book comprises a series of quotations that get funnier and funnier as instances of pompous bigotry and preciousness pile up. Hear Bishop Wilberforce’s ‘Everything Romish stinks in my nostrils’ (Sitwell, p. 66), or Holman Hunt’s surreal ‘I feel really frightened when I sit down to paint a flower’ (Sitwell, p. 53). Sitwell’s specimens of Victoriana are batty rather than really bad. The term Victoriana encrypts layers of critique; it is a term lathered in irony, carrying a sardonic aspect that seems typical of a certain age and a certain class of English man, like Sitwell, always already a little bit out of place. Even in its more positive usage within the decorative arts, the term Victoriana designates a kind of kitsch, as the sheer excess of it turns it into a joke – anachronistic, overblown, ironic. From our present-day perspective, these aspects of Victoriana align it with the aesthetics of late modernity – and it is no surprise, therefore, that Victoriana in its twenty-first-century guise has a somewhat different feel about it from its early twentieth-century coinage.

In calling her new volume of essays Victoriana, Cora Kaplan identifies a subject matter – the persistence of the fascination for the Victorian in our own recent and contemporary culture – but also a critical stance. Kaplan is well known for her influential work on nineteenth-century literature, as well as some acute essays on contemporary cultural politics, and is thus well placed to write this study. Her use of the term Victoriana embraces scholarship of Victorian literature and culture as well as fictions and films that have Victorian topics. The usage might strain at times, but Kaplan nevertheless presents herself as at once practitioner and critic of Victoriana, and her study as both an example of early twenty-first-century Victoriana, and a commentary on it.

The Victorians resonate less viscerally nowadays than they did for Pound, Woolf or Joyce for instance, who, at the beginning of their trumpeted new era, were eager to slay the ghosts of their immediate predecessors. The oedipal drive that generated the high Modernist’s disgust with the Victorians has been sublimated over time. But if the Victorians are more remote today in one sense, in others they are closer, indeed ever present, absorbed into our everyday culture in ways that are more complex, more opaque, more difficult to grasp than before. It is this phenomenon that Kaplan seeks to understand.

In a series of intelligent essays she analyses works of literature and film, mainly from the late 1970s to the present, that display this preoccupation with and relationship to the Victorian past; works in which it is revisited and refigured through plot, narrative form, style, motifs, characters, even writers. A long essay on the recent upsurge of interest in literary biographies of Victorian writers, and more curiously, fictions based on the lives of Victorian writers, or ‘biofictions’ (the recent cluster of works...