A History of Victorian Literature (review)

Herbert F. Tucker’s foreword to James Eli Adams’s History of Victorian Literature waxes lyrical about its achievement in terms extravagant enough to arouse suspicion. After relatively conventional praise for the work as “a signal work of literary historiography,” Tucker’s conclusion is self-consciously hyperbolic: “It has been many decades, and several major reorientations in critical scholarship, since we last saw a literary-historical synopsis on this scale. Rejoicing to imagine this book representing our generation’s Victorianism to posterity, we must admit that to have Adams as our spokesman feels a little like boasting” (viii). Having spent days immersed in Adams’s History—this is a book that cannot properly be rushed and read—it is difficult to disagree with Tucker’s hymn of praise. This is a beautifully written, truly intelligent book that understands the Victorians. Reading this volume was a pleasure that brought home rather forcefully the relatively functional nature of so much professional academic prose.

Part of the appeal of Adams’s History resides in the self-effacing way in which he situates the book as somewhere “between chronicle . . . and the ‘guide’” (ix). This book is explicitly about Victorian literature and only implicitly about professional Victorian studies and Adams’s stake in it. Key methodological questions are thus treated with common sense and a light touch. On the vexed question of how the term “Victorian” is defined, for example, Adams concentrates on the period between 1830 and 1901, but he makes no inevitably superficial claims for these dates as bookending the real history of Victorian literature, beginning the book with the death of Byron in 1824 and ending it with Anne Frank’s March 1944 diary entry: “Daddy read out loud to us from Dickens” (qtd. in Adams 433). Likewise, a decision seems to have been made throughout to associate the term Victorian with British literature written during this time, though authors and literatures from beyond the British Isles are included when they are judged to have significantly affected the history of Victorian literature. Again, though the volume is first and foremost A History of Victorian Literature, Adams clearly understands the extent to which the very idea of “Literature” was (and is) a shifting cultural construct: his text is thus very much a history of Victorian literature and culture, and could indeed have been so titled. Key to this metamorphic sense of Victorian literary culture is Adams’s decision to pay “a great deal of attention to Victorian reviews of major writers” (ix). Reviews enable us, Adams argues, to “crystallize what seems distinctive, sometimes strange, in Victorian structures of feeling” and to “see literary careers less as unbroken, fixed expanses and more as ongoing, changing constructions, within which Victorian readers confronted phenomena very different from what we encounter in our Penguins” (ix–x, x).

Adams is honest about the study’s limitations: indeed, his regret about “not having more space for journalism, the economics of publishing, history, literature by working-class authors, science writing, and writing from and about imperial dominions” perhaps underplays the extent to which these subjects are in fact discussed (x). The only note in Adams’s preface that jars a little is his intention “to give sustained attention to lesser-known authors and forms—most obviously, sensation fiction and the ‘new woman’ novel—not only because they change our understanding of more familiar landmarks, but because they offer neglected intrinsic pleasures” (xi). To describe sensation fiction and the New Woman novel as “lesser-known” and “neglected” seems a little outdated when in many universities, such texts—particularly sensation fiction—have been more of a staple of Victorian curricula than the Victorian “sages” for at least a decade. But this book has no doubt been a long time in the making.

Though respectful of the traditional literary history of the period, and indeed of the Victorians’ own scales of literary value (which elevated sagacity over sensation), Adams’s History is generally far from outdated, however...