Romantic Echoes in the Victorian Era (review)

Romantic Echoes in the Victorian Era investigates the afterlife of Romanticism in Victorian literature and culture. Some of the essays approach the topic as a straightforward question of influence: J. R. Watson on Gerard Manley Hopkins's debt to William Wordsworth, Mark Sandy on Romantic resonances in Victorian poetic birdsong, Michael O'Neill on Victorian writers' debts to Romantic notions of passion. Others complicate the Bloomian notion of influence: Sarah Wootton on "Rossetti's Romantic Keats" does so explicitly, Marjorie Stone more implicitly on Elizabeth Barrett Browning's transmutation of Mary Wollstonecraft and Lord Byron in Aurora Leigh (1857). Still others conjure how Romanticism's remainders stalk Victorian literary and cultural consciousness and so leave it never quite at one with itself: Andrew Radford's account of Thomas Hardy's Shelleyan critique in his late Wessex fictions and especially Andrew Bennett's "Dead Keats: Joseph Severn, John Keats and the Haunting of Victorian Culture." All the essays are marked by a detailed and nuanced sense of history and the textual, if not always by conceptual innovation.

It can be argued that Romanticism and the Romantic are ambiguous and contested facets of nineteenth-century thought in ways that Victorianism and the Victorian never are, despite their own unwieldy diversity. This is to be expected when a period takes its name from a long-reigning monarch rather than a mutable philosophical or aesthetic idea. Moreover, to the extent that we accept the Victorian era as the first real information age, tracking Romanticism's Victorian survival becomes a more precise venture because nineteenth-century writing undertook the very (re)constitutions of Romanticism that determine all post-R omantic debates about the period. How the Victorians spoke and speak for the Romantics means that we cannot avoid what they said when working back to their predecessors. And whom they chose to speak about, such as Byron, Wordsworth, Keats, or P. B. Shelley—the usual suspects—quickly establishes the terms of discussion, a shorthand that the current editors take on board, yet also use to map terrain less comprehensively charted.

Working in both spirits, the volume opens with two fine essays demonstrating how later Victorian writing both supports and disrupts the (a)symmetry between Romantic blindness and Victorian insight. Lisa Vargo explores how later Victorian biographies domesticate the sometimes troubling Romantic women's writing of Anna Aikin Barbauld and Mary Shelley, early- and late-R omantic bookends, to produce Victorian afterlives shaped according to separate spheres ideologies. Julie Crane reveals how Thomas Chatterton's Victorian afterlife challenges such paradigms (in the same vein I would also note James Najarian's account of Elizabeth Gaskell's remasculinization of Romantic poetry in her unfinished last novel, Wives and Daughters [1866]). The tension here is between a dead Romanticism and one that is half-dead. In the first case, however much Romantic precursors might trouble them, the Victorians get to choose how (not) to cede their desire to the Romantics. It's less easy to pin down a phantom than a corpse, which holds for the second case, in which Romanticism turns into a kind of Draculinian mist or contagion that at once champions and threatens, sharpens and obscures the authority of Victorian insight.

Put another way, those essays that attend to this latter ambivalence—like Vincent Newey's excellent account of Byron's legacy to Charles Dickens—show how the Victorians compulsively repeat as much as remember and work through Romanticism's past. Newey suggests the extent to which, if Romanticism is a more restless aspect of nineteenth-century culture that its heirs attempt to put to rest, Victorianism is always already present in a Romanticism equally concerned to quell its own unwieldy desires. Figuring the child as parent to the adult suggests a historical, cultural, or disciplinary boundary that necessarily cannot maintain itself.

More often than not, however, Romantic Echoes ends up sounding rather more, well, Victorian than the editors might have intended. In general, the essays...