Approaching Apocalypse: Unveiling Revelation in Victorian Writing (review)

Kevin Mills's Approaching Apocalypse is a long overdue general study of an important subject: the widespread significance of biblical apocalyptic thought to Victorian literature. It is focused most importantly, of course, on Revelation. In his introduction, Mills wisely distances himself from the approach of simply listing and identifying scriptural allusions, instead preferring to explore texts that exemplify "a kind of affinity with the genre," and tracing how some of the concepts and themes that order apocalyptic literature play out across a range of materials (14). His chapters consider, respectively, the hazy border between the human and non-human; the trope of the desert as contrasted with (but paradoxically encountered within) the city; the idea of veiling and unveiling; the apocalyptic conception of time; and what Mills calls the "central margin" of apocalyptic, its self-identification and preoccupation with liminal spaces and states of being (20).

The result is eclectic and exciting. Mills states at the outset, a touch apologetically, that the pursuit of deeper, less evidently elective affinities has led him "to produce detailed readings of texts whose relative unfamiliarity may appear to render their selection either arbitrary or even downright contrary" (31). This is in fact one of his study's strengths, with works such as James Thomson's The City of Dreadful Night (1847), Florence Nightingale's Cassandra (1852), and Marie Corelli's The Sorrows of Satan (1895) receiving fruitful attention. Having said this, some of Mills's most persuasive and suggestive readings are of texts that would fall within almost any account of the Victorian canon, such as Far From the Madding Crowd (1874) and Jane Eyre (1847). So convincingly, in fact, does Mills make the case for the instrumental presence of Revelation in Charlotte Brontë's novel that he somewhat undermines his claim to eschew direct allusions in favor of less obvious apocalyptic "images and tendencies" (21).

In fact, the risk in Mills's approach is not so much that he loses sight of what is central in Victorian literature as that he periodically loses sight of his own theme altogether. Chapter 1, for instance, purports to be about the apocalyptic blurring of the human and non-human (think here of the "living creatures" of Revelation 5:7; of Christ as variously man, lion, and lamb; of the beast of Revelation 13:1; and so on), a trope which Mills sees as inescapably bound up, for the Victorians, with Charles Darwin's re-imagining of natural history. So central, however, is Darwin to Mills's understanding of this theme that much of the chapter is given over to a discussion of the epistemological problems suggested by evolutionary theory and an extended meditation on the "tree of life" metaphor in On the Origin of Species (1859), leading ultimately to some remarks on the nature of metaphor itself and its relation to the analogical methodology of natural science (48). These are related issues, certainly, but for pages at a time the ostensible theme falls into the background. Similarly, much of chapter 2, on the trope of "the desert at the heart of the city" (18), is taken up discussing the literary uses of insomnia in The City of Dreadful Night and the possible literary and scriptural ramifications of sleep.

This is not to say that these digressions are failures. On the contrary, they can be read with pleasure and profit: Mills's writing is often at its most lucid, searching, and forthright as he pursues these sidelines, and it is when we feel him pulling himself back to the framework of his argument that he can feel labored. While chapters 3 through 5 stay much more resolutely on topic, these early divagations are more than merely incidental, pointing to a fundamental aspect of Mills's understanding of Victorian apocalypticism: its rangy connectivity and protean capacity for multiple significations. A phrase in his reading of Christina Rossetti is suggestive in this respect: "the rhetoric of depths appears subject to the kind...