Victorian Afterlives: The Shaping of Influence in Nineteenth-Century Literature (review)

The title, Victorian Afterlives, is liable to mislead the innocent reader—as it may have the art department at Oxford University Press, which has blazoned the dust jacket with a Julia Margaret Cameron photograph, entitled "I Wait," depicting a child (suitably androgynous) adorned with wings and staring into the middle distance. Robert Douglas- Fairhurst's stimulating and wide-ranging study does indeed touch on the afterlives associated with angels—or at least the typically fitful and inchoate reflections of nineteenth- century authors on what awaited them (and their works) beyond the here and now. But Douglas-Fairhurst works more prominently, and more provocatively, to conjure up afterlives in the very prime of life: his focal concern is with the protean dynamics of "influence," which he argues is a far more intricate and manifold field of force than most recent criticism allows.

Douglas-Fairhurst readily concedes the elusiveness of his topic, which seems less a single concept than "a form of cultural shorthand for the diverse relationships which shape us, and the diversity of ways in which we put these relationships into words" (4). Yet there is a special vitality, he suggests, in this very indeterminacy: "although the contingent sprawl of 'influence,' as it promiscuously mingles different concepts of power, obligation, and persuasion, illustrates the inevitable difficulty in using a shared language to identify fine distinctions of human belief and behaviour, it also accurately reflects the potential richness and messiness of our relations with one another, both on and off the page" (4). Messiness and richness likewise distinguish this study, which is nearly as varied, suggestive, and diffuse as its theme. It is most rewarding not as an argument, but as a compendium of critical encounters, which are full of brilliant close reading, suggestive aperçus, far-flung erudition, and deeply sympathetic responsiveness to the mental worlds they evoke—along with markedly less sympathetic appraisal of other critics.

The study is loosely organized around the play of influence in four central authors, John Keats, Charles Dickens, Alfred Tennyson, and Edward Fitzgerald (though it gathers in a number of other figures). A bracing analysis of Keats's "posthumous life" in Rome is exemplary in teasing out various dimensions of influence, particularly as they conjoin enigmas of personal identity with the power and limits of sympathy, which is the most important force in influence as Douglas-Fairhurst understands it. Records of Keats's last days famously evoke not only questions about "possible relations of 'mind' and 'work' which reach beyond the afterlife of an utterance, and into the empirical afterlife of its author" (4), but also conundrums of sympathy prompted by the spectacle of the body as both public and private, "our own and not our own" (17), like language itself. Keats's deathbed thus aptly introduces poetry which repeatedly explores "the twin needs we have of art—to invite our participation in other lives, and to remind us of the unbroachable otherness of those lives" (17). More broadly, Keats's insistent blurring of self and other introduces a sustained, productive appeal to analyses of personal identity in contemporary analytic philosophy. Nineteenth-century writers, Douglas-Fairhurst argues, anticipate as "a practical dilemma" accounts of selfhood offered by Derek Parfit and others, which contest "definitions of the self which consider each of us to be a unique and irreplaceable individual...rather than a being who is more porous, more unfinished, more easily divided" (21). This indeterminacy emerges in particular through a fine account of "The Eve of St. Agnes" (1820), where Keats's very syntax keeps his subjects open to conflicting responses and divergent narrative paths.

Great Expectations (1860-61) is the centerpiece of a chapter affiliating influence with "environment" and "atmosphere," those familiar preoccupations that link Victorian novels, social criticism, and intellectual authority generally. Here Douglas-Fairhurst's resourceful troping on "speck" and "dust" at times recalls J. Hillis Miller's reading...