The Idea of Music in Victorian Fiction (review)

During the past ten years considerable critical attention has centered on the intersection of music and Victorian literature. Through the work of Delia da Sousa Correa, Ruth Solie, and Phyllis Weliver, we have found a new trajectory for the study of culture and society in Victorian Britain. Sophie Fuller and Nicky Losseff's The Idea of Music in Victorian Fiction continues the course by collecting essays that examine musical themes and subtexts in Victorian novels. As the editors note, their goal is "to address fundamental questions about the function, meaning and understanding of music in nineteenth-century culture and society as mediated through works of fiction" (xiv). Drawing upon masterpieces as well as novels that orbit the margins of the Victorian canon, contributors offer unique insights into literature as well as Victorian life and culture.

The volume is divided into three sections. Under the rubric of "musical identities" we find essays on fictional accounts of working-class singers, women's musical lives, and crowd control. "Genre and musicalities" features examinations of the shifting trends in the depiction of scenes at the piano, music and melodrama, the female pastoral musician, and Sherlock Holmes's musicianship. The final section, "construction of musical meaning," explores musical themes in the works of Oscar Wilde, Gertrude Hudson, Thomas Carlyle, Richard Wagner, George Eliot, and George Du Maurier.

Eliot's fiction and critical essays provide a vast wealth of evidence regarding nineteenth-century music and musicians, and five of the eleven essays in this volume address her novels, especially Daniel Deronda (1876). In "'Cribbed, cabin'd, and confined': Female musical creativity in Victorian fiction," for example, Fuller states that Catherine Arrowpoint is exhibited as an instrumentalist rather than as a singer. Unlike the self-serving Gwendolen Harleth, Arrowpoint's voice cannot be "perceived as the dangerously seductive weapon of the siren" (37).

Further examinations of Daniel Deronda appear in Irene Morra's "'Singing like a musical box': Musical detection and novelistic tradition" and Jonathan Taylor's "The music master and 'the Jew' in Victorian writing: Thomas Carlyle, Richard Wagner, George Eliot and George Du Maurier." Morra argues that Klesmer's musical performances expose a dichotomy between his private and public self (157), while Taylor claims that the status of Mirah Lapidoth and Princess Alcharisi as "Wandering Jews" (241) is defined by their self-imposed separation from their fathers. Musical subtexts in The Mill on the Floss (1860) are explored in Jodi Lustig's "The piano's progress: The piano in play in the Victorian novel" and Alisa Clapp-Itnyre's "Indecent Musical Displays: Feminizing the pastoral in Eliot's The Mill on the Floss." Lustig's study critiques Eliot's debunking of "bourgeois courtship practice" (95), while Clapp-Itnyre examines "Maggie's aesthetic development" as a parallel to pastoral music (131).

The engaging opening essay, Losseff's "The voice, the breath and the soul: Song and poverty in Thyrza, Mary Barton, Alton Locke, and A Child of the Jago," studies the connection between music and spirituality. By focusing on the relationship "between voice, breath and soul" (4), Losseff underscores not just the physicality of the singing in Thyrza (1887) and Mary Barton (1848), but the singer's role as an air purifier in the Victorian slums. Through singing, Thyrza and Margaret inhale "the foetid, often diseased air" (10). With their lungs acting as the purification mechanism, each exhalation provides "a breath of soul's music" (10). Music thus becomes a powerful medium through which a bleak life can be transformed. Losseff also emphasizes the physical toll this takes on the singer's life as Margaret loses her eyesight and Thyrza her life (4). Little critical scholarship has been completed on working-class singers, let alone on the importance of music to their culture. It would have been interesting to hear, in Losseff's discussion of these singers, whether any accounts of performances by their real-life counterparts appeared in working-class periodicals such as...