‘We Other Victorians’: Literary Victorian Afterlives

There is a narrative that constructs the demise of the Victorians through Bloomsbury’s Oedipal murder. Lytton Strachey lambasted Victorian biography as ‘[t]hose fat two volumes [. . . ] with their ill-digested masses of material, their slipshod style, their tone of tedious panegyric, their lamentable lack of selection’.¹ Somerset Maugham breathed some life back into the corpse, though, in Cakes and Ale (1930), a fictional and critical engagement with biography that critiques the Moderns’ construction of the Victorians, restricted as they are by the demands of their own contemporaneity. The ‘last’ of the great Victorians (who is and is not Thomas Hardy in the novel) is anatomised between one mode of memoir that pits the sexual candour of the Victorians against the demands and expectations of the modern biographer who must conceal its truth. The ‘great Victorian’ afterlife, we come to see, is vulnerable to, because constructed through, specific modes of twentieth-century taste.

The appetite for retrieving the Victorians was prompted by nostalgia and by the desire for a mordant redress to their values in the works of two early twentieth-century writers. John Galsworthy valiantly brought the Victorians back in The Forsyte Saga: published as a trilogy in 1922, the volumes claimed that he had had a vision of the return of the Victorian three-decker novel, a counterblast to Modernism’s cynical (as he saw them) tendencies. Virginia Woolf batted back with a family saga that did to Galsworthy’s trilogy of three-deckers what Strachey’s Eminent Victorians did to Victorian biography: She took around 300 pages to traverse roughly the same 50-year period as all three of Galsworthy’s 900 page trilogies.² Her hatred of, and boredom with, the social etiquette of the mid-Victorians are avenged as she sends old Lady Warburton to bed at the end of a party, figuratively laying the old nineteenth century to rest. But it is never really that simple. Woolf’s writing reveals an ambivalence that both requires even as it repudiates the Victorian past. The Years, written in 1937, begins in 1880 and explores the fashioning of subjectivity by the familial past. If the mores of that past suffocate forms of self-expression, the effects are also recuperated in those momentary revelations of private consciousness (‘a sudden, revealing searchlight into obscure recesses’, as Strachey described his new methodology).³ What cannot be said comes to define a particular mode of Modernist representation, closing a gap between historical past and literary present. In the end, Woolf never gave up on it: right up to her death she went back to her Victorian beginning in her memoir, ‘A Sketch of the Past’, and in her last novel, Between the Acts, which affirms that ‘1839 was true in 1939’ (an affirmation echoed by Orwell in ‘Inside the Whale’ when he suggests that we are no different in 1940 than we were in 1840).

For other writers in the 1930s, the Victorians (or aspects of them) were easy targets, figures (or an age, as G.M. Young named it in 1936⁴) now socially and politically out-moded. In Walter Greenwood’s Love on the Dole (1933) three old Victorian women appear almost as comic turns, cut loose from the new political urgencies of the early 1930s in their nostalgic yearnings for the random philanthropic largesse of the old aristocracy. Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies (1930) celebrates (admittedly bleakly) the speed and incessant movement of the Bright Young Things while the elderly mid-Victorians are consigned to Anchorage House and Doubting Hall, anachronisms in the twentieth century, their once-prized virtue and respectability derided in the naming of characters like Fanny Throbbing, mother of the homosexual Miles Malpractice. Woolf launched her most vicious salvo in Three Guineas (1938) where she argued that one of the most insidious (her peers claimed invidious) examples of Victorian afterlife was the fascist bully, heir, she argued, to the Victorian patriarch.

The desire for a rupture between the Victorians and the Moderns is perhaps most consciously expressed in Strachey’s new biography. But Strachey, along with Woolf and Maugham, wrote with an...