Functions of Victorian Culture at the Present Time (review)

All calendar-obsessed Victorianists must have suffered a trauma in the first years of our new millennium: suddenly, more than a century separated us from the period we studied. Responding to this transition, the essays in Functions of Victorian Culture at the Present Time explore and reaffirm the afterlives of Victorian culture within our own, with varied but sometimes provocative results. The subjects and approaches of the pieces here are at least as diverse as in most edited collections; the book uses five section headings in an attempt to organize eleven articles. Yet all of the essays here are clearly written and refreshingly modest in length—although it's probably not realistic to hope, as Christine L. Krueger does in her introduction, that the book will reach many undergraduates or much of a "wider audience" beyond "Victorianists and Victorianists in training" (xiii). Since the articles tackle such different topics, it seems appropriate to discuss the most intriguing among them in terms of the general ways in which they stage the encounter between Victorian culture and our own.

One of the most popular approaches to the conjunction between the Victorian and the contemporary is simply to interpret particular present-day cultural developments and norms from a Victorianist's point of view. Miriam Bailin's witty "The New Victorians" reads neo-Victorian interior decoration through both the cultural fantasies it encodes and the real Victorian décor it displaces—for instance, stuffed or skinned domestic pets as objets d'art. Sharon Aronofsky Weltman analyzes recent dramatic representations of the story of John Ruskin and Effie Gray, concluding that—as compelling as they may be on stage—these adaptations ultimately affirm their audience's complacent sense of remoteness from a caricatured Victorianism. And Ellen Bayuk Rosenman offers a splendid two-for- one, an argument about the representation of fine objects in both Victorian novels and their recent adaptations on film and television. Her "More Stories about Clothing and Furniture: Realism and Bad Commodities" begins by skillfully scrutinizing Victorian novelists' careful disengagement from vulgar detail even as they delineate the object-world in which they set their fictions. This paradigm then helps Rosenman explore the different relationship of our sumptuous historical costume dramas (many adapted from Victorian fiction) to the world of commodities they lovingly present for viewerly delectation.

Some of the most ambitious contributions to the volume offer critical reflections on the stories we tell about history, time, or identity. Simon Joyce's astute "The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror" examines the late Victorians' (and early Edwardians') treatments of contemporary history as the pattern for a future anti-Victorianism as well as for the twentieth century's rhetoric of rupture and return to Victorian values. In a somewhat related vein, Ronald R. Thomas reads the story of the much-ridiculed Millennium Dome as a postmodern echo of Victorian efforts to exhibit and reorganize time and space via the Great Exhibition and the establishment of an international prime meridian centered on Greenwich's Royal Observatory. Other essays analyze the emergence of particular Victorian identities in the service of contemporary cultural critique. In "Wilde Americana," Jesse Matz rereads gay history through Oscar Wilde's trip to America at the dawn of corporate identity and modern marketing. Matz's audacious alignment of Wilde's prototypical gay identity in the years after his 1882 visit and the consolidation of corporate personhood (in the 1882 Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad decision) struck me as exciting but a little sketchy; more convincing are his analyses of Wilde's lessons in self-promotion and his critique of present-day alliances between corporate marketing and sexual identity. Krueger's own essay examines the place of storytelling in Victorian legal reform around the new figure of the juvenile delinquent. Her account helps explain the prominent reformer Mary Carpenter's acceptance of sensational jailhouse "memoirs" that turned out to be manifest fictions—and provides a caution to present-day...