Aestheticism and the Victorian Present: Response

The NAVSA 2008 conference, held at Yale University, was premised on the belief that a direct engagement with material traces of Victorian Britain holds distinctive value for our field. Yale's collections—spread across several museums and a plethora of libraries—contain significant holdings in this area, even if many were acquired (like the British Empire) in a fit of absent-mindedness. In almost thirty "Material Study Sessions" at NAVSA 2008, small groups of Victorianists from around the world gathered to discuss clusters of objects carefully selected from the archive, in the company of leading specialists. Victorian periodicals, illustrated books, Socialist materials, children's texts, musical instruments, prints, drawings, and watercolors took their place alongside more overtly spectacular objects such as Pre-Raphaelite paintings and Whistler's Nocturne in Blue and Silver (c. 1872–78). Music, too, played a larger part than in earlier NAVSA conferences, through the inclusion of analytical and historiographic papers, the examination of historical musical instruments, and a crowning performance by student forces including Victorian partsongs and Edward Elgar's monumental Symphony No. 1. (This work was admittedly first performed in 1908, but its likely roots lie in the composer's admiration for General Gordon and it uses sketches dating back to the 1880s.) Emerging from discussions over wine and canapés was a clear overall sense that the experiential possibilities opened up by the conference—an engagement with the Victorian as much sensuous and aesthetic as intellectual, but authentically historical—could invigorate and enrich scholarship.

It is no surprise that Aestheticism emerged as one of the abiding themes of the meeting, not only as the subject of many important formal papers, but also in private discussions spilling beyond the seminar rooms. This was amplified by our choice of plenary speaker, Elizabeth Prettejohn, whose magisterial Art for Art's Sake has at last provided a comprehensive and ambitiously argued art-historical account of the phenomenon in the 1860s, with substantial discussion of each major figure in the fields of fine arts and art criticism. This, along with Caroline Arscott's William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones: Interlacings, moves to redress a historiographic imbalance in which coverage of the literary culture of Aestheticism has for long overshadowed that of the visual. The decorative arts provide perhaps the most prominent aspects of Victorian Aestheticism still alive in today's consumer culture—in the form of omnipresent William Morris wallpaper designs purloined for plastic tote bags, mugs, and mousepads—and yet analysis in this key area remains perfunctory. While significant scholarship has recently emerged on Christopher Dresser and E. W. Godwin, there is as yet no adequate synthetic account of the Aesthetic interior, its theoretical underpinnings, and its major components. The catalog of the major forthcoming exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum may fill this lacuna.

NAVSA 2008, overall, brought forward a group of interrelated, urgent subjects of investigation: the physical and emotional impact of things of beauty; the interactions between art forms and across media; the synergies and divergences between poetry and art, between painting and music, art and politics; the persistence but also the necessary reimagining of the classical and the gothic. These, of course, are the central avenues of Aesthetic thought. Aestheticism, moreover, is itself inherently interdisciplinary; Dante Gabriel Rossetti was painter and poet; an important group of his poems specifically bear the designation "songs"; Oscar Wilde was a master of all literary trades and in his own person an artifact of Aestheticism; James McNeill Whistler lectured and published on aesthetic theory in addition to his work in the studio; Frederic Leighton was an accomplished tenor and the creator of one of the finest interiors in London as well as a supremely gifted draftsman and painter; William Morris applied the aptitude and application of a dozen men across a gamut of creative practices from the epic poem to textile dyeing. Aesthetes, too, were collectors of objects of all kinds, formulating and residing in interiors which themselves were complete works of art. Particularly noticeable is a strong devotion, across the entire loose-knit movement, to music, the art to whose condition, Pater somewhat belatedly...