Homes and Homelessness in the Victorian Imagination (review)

Homes and Homelessness in the Victorian Imagination, edited by Murray Baumgarten and H. M. Daleski; pp. xx + 355. New York: AMS Press, 1998, $62.50.

Having read this set of essays, I am reminded of two characteristically Victorian and Dickensian terms: the miscellany and the curiosity. Enclosed in the volume's pages are twenty essays constituting a most miscellaneous collection that as a whole make a very curious sort of book. The book's oddity can in part be traced back to its distinctive origins, an international conference, "Homes and Homelessness in Dickens and the Victorian Imagination," held at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, under the combined sponsorship of that institution's Center for Literary Studies and the Dickens Project at the University of California. Like many conferences, this one attracted a variety of papers, several of them, apparently, only momentarily engaged in thinking about homes or homelessness or Charles Dickens or the Victorian imagination, and very few at all engaged in thinking about all of these themes simultaneously. The editors have accomplished something of a feat in finding subheadings that encompass the range of topics addressed in the volume. Subheadings range from a methodologically and topically consistent unit on "Dickens and the Idea of Home" to the ever more belabored, such as a final unit called "Other Homes, Other Places." This section includes essays on Henry James and a particularly pointed essay by Emily Budick on current political misreadings of sentimentality in Uncle Tom's Cabin (1851-52). The volume reminds me of the quotation in Jorge Luis Borges from a "certain Chinese encyclopaedia," a quotation cited by Michel Foucault in his The Order of Things (1966). In that volume, Foucault reminds us, the author toiled heroically to classify all animals: those "belonging to the Emperor," those that were "embalmed," those that were "sucking pigs," and finally a last category, "et cetera" (1973 edition, xv). In recollecting this category, I am thinking especially of Yehoshua Ben-Arieh's contribution to this collection, a well-informed commentary on "The Painting of Jerusalem in the Nineteenth Century by British Artists," the pertinence of which to homes, homelessness, or Dickens escapes me.

I emphasize the curious miscellaneousness of the book not because all the individual essays share these idiosyncracies; several of the essays are admirably scholarly in scope and depth, working from a well-researched foundation and offering new information, sometimes new insights. Michael Galchinsky's "Romancing the Jewish Home: Victorian Jewish Women Writers" will introduce Marion and Celia Moss to many readers, at the same time revealing their perplexing situatedness as both obedient Jewish women and eager members of a liberalizing England. Peter Allan Dale's "Gissing and Bosanquet: Culture Unhoused" does a fine job of articulating a second-generation liberalism that passionately committed itself to the education of the masses. In attending to Bosanquet's post-Arnoldian culture concept, Dale specifies the ambivalence that enervates Gissing's narratives. And the thoroughly researched if not always trenchant "Beauty at Home or Not? Octavia Hill and the Aesthetics of Tenement Reform," by Diana Maltz, shows how cultural studies can productively conjoin sociological and aesthetic questions. In keeping with its sponsorship, the book also provides several essays on Dickens. Those by Robert Polhemus, Patrick McCarthy, and Efraim Sicher are written with the rigorous formalist and celebratory literary historicism that those familiar with the scholarship coming out of the Dickens Project know well; for readers more engaged with newer historicisms and poststructuralist theories less focused on authorial brilliance, these essays will interest least, but they are written with style by knowledgeable Dickensians. The best of the essays--many perfectly sized for journals-- seem better suited to the expected miscellany of Victorian Studies or Nineteenth-Century Literature than to a book of collected essays and the rest, often meditational pieces, lacking in research or in their own sense of recycled argument, would have best remained as conference papers. I count among the better essays Joseph Childer's short...