Voice and the Victorian Storyteller (review)

Ivan Kreilkamp's focus in Voice and the Victorian Storyteller is the role of "voice" in Victorian literature, and his guiding idea is that "an imaginary storyteller acquires symbolic power within Victorian fiction as that which redeems fiction from the guilt of participating in a bureaucratic modernity" (3). In consequence, criticism should spend less time trying to hear voices in texts and more tracing the "development of a logic" according to which voice is constructed, valued, and variously deployed (29). Kreilkamp accomplishes this through a series of strong, clear readings: of On Heroes (1841) and Hard Times (1854); Sybil (1845), Mary Barton (1848), and Samuel Bamford's poetry and prose; David Copperfield (1849–50) in relation to Charles Dickens's mastery of shorthand; parts of Great Expectations (1860) and The Pickwick Papers (1836–37) in relation to Dickens's speeches and public readings; Jane Eyre (1847) and Villette (1853); The Ring and the Book (1868–69); and "Heart of Darkness" (1902) in relation to Thomas Edison's invention of the phonograph.

Kreilkamp pursues his theme with care and acuity, and he succeeds in giving new salience to many parts of the texts he explores. He is quite right to suggest that, in The Ring and the Book, Pompilia's "whiteness" (167) has to do with her ignorance of writing and print culture as well as her virginity. Likewise, the attention he gives in his account of Mary Barton to the wadding paper in the gun John Barton uses to murder Harry Carson is illuminating: it is a half sheet of a valentine on which a poem by Samuel Bamford has been copied, and it thus suggests a potential for violence even in writing by a politically moderate working-class figure and even when that writing is in verse connected (albeit accidentally) to romance. Again, Dickens's long-running attempts to control his readership and audience—to configure them as family rather than as crowd—provide a suggestive backdrop to the speech act, so forceful and yet so impotent, printed in Household Words as an attempt to quiet scandal about the breakdown of his marriage: "I most solemnly declare, then . . . that all the lately whispered rumours touching the trouble at which I have glanced, are abominably false" (qtd. in Kreilkamp 112).

It is a sign of Kreilkamp's honesty that he pursues his chosen track even when the critical consequences are not startling. Few would dispute his assertion of Dickens's "urge to vocalize writing and to write voice" (78) nor his claim that, in Villette, Lucy Snowe "acquires value by refusing to narrate" (145). The discussion of Jane Eyre, on the other hand, is genuinely trenchant. Kreilkamp distinguishes a kind of speech subordinate to written texts, for instance the conversations between Helen and Miss Temple who "spoke of books" (132), from "a remainder of vocal expression that cannot be wholly subsumed into writing" (138). He convincingly argues that the novel is not, as is usually said, a vindication of Jane's voice tout court but only of that variety of speech that obeys "the lessons reading and writing have taught her" (136).

The clarity of Kreilkamp's explanatory framework, and the consistency with which he applies it, means that one sometimes hears the protesting squeak of material being squeezed to fit. For instance, it can't be right that the audiences for Dickens's public readings, who often knew by heart the texts that were going to be performed, were in "the same position" as Dickens's children who, on the texts' first publication, "overheard" their father reading to himself before he read aloud to them: in the supporting evidence cited on page 114, what is overheard is not the whole text but just their father's semi-stifled giggles and "occasional shouts." Again, it is clearly in line with the "logic" of Kreilkamp's argument that, in Hard Times, the dying Stephen should speak with "prophetic meaning." But the words Stephen utters don...