When Is a Victorian Poet Not a Victorian Poet? Poetry and the Politics of Subjectivity in the Long Nineteenth Century

The following books are under consideration in this review:

Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition, by Anne Janowitz; pp. xii + 278. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, $59.95.

Victorian Poets and the Politics of Culture: Discourse and Ideology, by Antony H. Harrison; pp. 181. Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1998, $32.50.

Ideologies of Epic: Nation, Empire and Victorian Epic Poetry, by Colin Graham; pp. 194. Manchester: Manchester University Press; New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998, $79.95.

Victorian Sappho, by Yopie Prins; pp. 279. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999, $18.95, paper.

Supreme Attachments: Studies in Victorian Love Poetry, by Kerry McSweeney; pp. 186. Aldershot, UK and Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1998, $68.95.

ll except one of the very significant studies under review include the word "Victorian" in their titles as an historical marker. Consider, for a moment, an alternative history. Suppose Victoria reigned from 1837 to 1852. Her male successors reigned from 1852 to 1880 and from 1880 to, say, 1915. In such a history the signifying force of "Victorian" would be dramatically different, allowing a multiplicity of paradigms to arise for a time span that could not be deemed monolithic by virtue of a long reign. It is unlikely that the epithet, "Victorian," would have become part of a cultural mythology as it is today. For in addition to being a purely descriptive historical marker it can be an insidiously homogenizing and deeply unhistorical term, encouraging the search for some quintessentially Victorian ethos. The element of distortion, crude or subtle, that emerges from such falsely unifying preconceptions is a stronger argument against using the category than republican arguments against using monarchs to denote periodization. Linda Shires's collection of essays Re-Writing the Victorians (1992), and works like it, have demystified and complicated the category and initiated new work. Nevertheless, the diversity and complexity of the period we call "Victorian," a diversity borne out by the group of books reviewed here, convinces me that we now need to jettison the term altogether. It is an irrelevant if not a misleading category. There were no typical Victorians. Nor were there "other" Victorians asserting a mirror image of the "true" figures of the time, just as there was no counter- culture in opposition to the dominant; such formulations, for all their modifications, leave the conceptualization of a homogeneous period unchanged. Even to argue that some Victorian thinking is unexpected for the period (as I have done myself), or more appalling than one would ever believe possible, such as the vicious racism that emerged in the Eyre controversy, simply reinforces the notion of an ideologically seamless historical period. It is rather a shame that the only term that would suit the fractured and diverse "long" nineteenth century, "early modern," has been quietly and cannily appropriated to replace the outmoded terms, "Elizabethan" or "Renaissance." "Antemodern" for the years 1790-1914 is the best I can do.

A number of different nineteenth centuries emerge in these five studies, often but not wholly related to the differing cultural theories, political and historical models and critical methodologies of their authors. They can be usefully put in dialogue with one another. In some ways this work constitutes an anthology of available critical procedures. Theoretical work has been a late-comer, on the whole, to the study of "Victorian" poetry, but now that it has arrived, some new and intellectually exacting questions arise, questions that could not have arisen so sharply had they been posed of texts outside the nineteenth century. This can be seen in the work of Anne Janowitz, who derives her Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition from the recent "blending" of "the insights and methods of cultural materialism and social history" and the "new group of historians of romanticism [that] has developed what...