How to Read the Victorian Novel, and: Why Victorian Literature Still Matters (review)

For the already groaning shelf of parascholarly books, stuffed with introductions, companions, handbooks, encyclopedias, and anthologies of all kinds, come two new additions, both from Blackwell Publishing: George Levine's How to Read the Victorian Novel and Philip Davis's Why Victorian Literature Still Matters. Both books address themselves to general readers, but they conceive of such readers in quite different ways. In Levine's experience, general readers tend to love Victorian novels—but for the wrong reasons. They take Victorian novels to be "comfortable, quaint, and cute" (vi), and they therefore fail to recognize that the genre is "not so easy, so craftless, so mild, so tame and comfortable" as they believe it to be (vii). For such readers, Victorian novels must be defamiliarized, and Levine devotes himself to revealing all that is truly strange about the genre, in both its ideology and its form. Davis, by contrast, wants to refamiliarize. In his experience, Victorian literature already seems quite strange to general readers, stranger than it actually is. Their minds filled with half-understood generalizations, these readers speak knowingly but inaccurately about a period they believe to be entirely different from their own. And so Davis exhorts his readers to abandon all they think they know about Victorian literature and return to their own first responses, in particular to those moments in a given work that moved them most immediately and deeply. Conceiving of general readers in quite different ways, Levine and Davis go on to write quite different books.

In How to Read the Victorian Novel, Levine writes as a teacher. He is less interested in presenting his own analyses than in providing his readers with the knowledge they need to do analyses of their own. He begins with a chapter that characterizes the Victorian novel in general terms, while also acknowledging the difficulties of generalizing. Reminding his readers that the genre spans more than sixty years and embraces authors as varied as Elizabeth Gaskell and Joseph Conrad, Frederick Marryat and George Meredith, Bram Stoker and George Eliot, Levine nonetheless identifies a number of features that most Victorian novels share. Some of these features are thematic, among them, an attention to history; to social class; to vocation; and, above all, to money, with worldly success understood to be in conflict with both traditional morality and literary realism. Other features are formal, including the drawing of connections among seemingly unrelated characters and events, as well as other strategies for bringing coherence to works published in serial parts, and a conception of narration as a mode of anthropology.

After this wide-ranging introduction, the chapters that follow each focus on a single canonical novel or pair of novels in order to illustrate a more general theme. One chapter, for instance, considers The Pickwick Papers (1836–37) and Victorian publishing practices, while another considers Victorian realism and Vanity Fair (1847–48). Together, these two chapters capture the Victorian novel's double status as both popular culture and high art. The next pair of chapters, which focuses on novelistic subgenres, highlights a similar mix of high and low. One of these chapters is devoted, not surprisingly, to the bildungsroman, taking Jane Eyre (1847) and David Copperfield (1849–50) as its chief examples, while the other is devoted to the sensation novel, as exemplified by The Woman in White (1860). The pairing of these two genres might seem strange, but Levine shows that they both draw on the same subject matter and rely on the same formal techniques. The book concludes with a chapter on that most Victorian of Victorian novels, Middlemarch (1871–72), which brings together all the themes of the preceding chapters.

In Why Victorian Literature Still Matters, Davis writes as a reader. Readers, as...