Victorian Biography Reconsidered: A Study of Nineteenth-Century 'Hidden' Lives (review)

The phrase "Victorian Biography" conjures up Thomas Carlyle praising the heroic men of history, "the modellers, patterns, and in a wide sense creators, of whatsoever the general mass of men contrived to do or to attain" (On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History [University of Nebraska Press, 1966], 1-2), or Lytton Strachey damning the practice of posthumous life and letters, "those two fat volumes, with which it is our custom to commemorate the dead . . . with their ill-digested masses of material, their slipshod style, their tone of tedious panegyric, their lamentable lack of selection, of detachment, of design" (Eminent Victorians [Collins, 1959], 20). Juliette Atkinson sets out to reveal an alternative tradition of life writing. Her book considers biographies of the "hidden lives" that fascinated the Victorians and ultimately led to the inclusion of some of the nation's "forgotten benefactors" in the Dictionary of National Biography (216). A similar interest in "lives of the obscure" informed Virginia Woolf's brand of modernism (252).

Atkinson begins with Carlylean hero-worship and its influence on the so-called great tradition of Victorian biography. While acknowledging its staying power, she points to Carlyle's essay "On History" (1830), which asks its readers to "look with reverence into the dark, untenanted places of the past, where in formless oblivion, our chief benefactors . . . lie entombed" (qtd. in Atkinson 57). Similarly, in his "On Biography" (1832), Carlyle turns his attention to "a peasant who sheltered Charles I, and a prostitute briefly encountered by Johnson and Boswell" (qtd. in Atkinson 59)—both examples of "hidden lives" that aid or influence great men as they make history. Carlyle himself wrote a biography of an obscure man, The Life of John Sterling (1851), which in Atkinson's view is "the most powerful biography of an 'inglorious' life [that] pulls together the various threads of Carlyle's thoughts on biographies of hidden lives" (61). Two threads that Atkinson traces in her work are the importance of obscure men and women to the achievements of the nation, and the literary experimentation that biographers found possible when they abandoned the mode of heroic biography and the standard practice of assembling a life and letters.

As Atkinson demonstrates, Victorian biographers used the concept of obscurity for various purposes: to promote morally exemplary lives for working-class readers, as in Legh Richmond's didactic Annals of the Poor (1814); to commemorate the achievements of unknown yet remarkable working-class scientists, as in Samuel Smiles's Life of a Scotch Naturalist (1876) and William Jolly's The Life of John Duncan, Scotch Weaver and Botanist (1883); to analyze "tragic failures" and, in so doing, meditate on the obsession for public fame (112), as in Carlyle's The Life of John Sterling and Margaret Oliphant's The Life of Edward Irving (1862); to negotiate the division between private and public spheres for women, as in Elizabeth Gaskell's The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857) and Agnes Giberne's A Lady of England (1895); and to recuperate the lives of forgotten Romantic poets and restore them to the literary canon, as in Richard Monckton Milnes's Life, Letters and Literary Remains of John Keats (1848) and Alexander Gilchrist's The Life of William Blake: Pictor Ignotus (1863). Atkinson explores these purposes in chapters 3 through 6, as they uncover a widespread interest in how individual achievement relates to national greatness and, more locally, as they show Victorian biographers negotiating the paradoxes of writing about obscure yet significant lives.

Some negotiations will seem familiar—for example, the emphasis on the "quiet and uneventful" private life of a woman writer as a means of staving off accusations of an unseemly desire for public renown (146), or the impulse to praise the intellectual achievements of working-class poets or scientists while nonetheless trying "to maintain their subjects within the roles [the biographers] have provided for them" (86). Other negotiations...