Looking into the 1890s

ELT: VOLUME 34:1, 1991 Carole Silver takes up the idea broached in Donaldson that Morris is critical of nineteenth-century realism as a way into the later romances. The high points of the book, however, are Michael Holzman's discussion of A Dream of John Ball and Florence Boos's analysis of The Pilgrims of Hope. This latter sees Morris's poem as the reflection of the poles of nature and history in human life and argues that it reaffirms revolutionary commitment deepened rather than questioned by tragic loss. Thus the public history and the private love story achieve a balance of interior vision and historical reality. This is not just a good description of this poem but of Morris's socialist hterary work as a whole. Holzman confirms this depth with his commentary on Morris's great story. Showing how it gains significance by the recall of its original placing between sections of Socialism from the Root Up, and relating it in detail to Froissart, Holzman demonstrates that the dream is walled off from reality but is thereby, in its frame, a challenge to reality. In these essays we are shown again that Morris was not only a great man who devoted his splendid energy to the exposure and destruction of oppression, but also a great writer for whom Hterary strategy was part of a political act. This, in fact, is the impression left by the book as a whole. Inevitably the level of discussion is variable but it is a compliment as well as a criticism to say that there is much to disagree with. Above all, Socialism and the Literary Artistry of William Morris reflects the warmth, commitment and massive importance of its subject. John Goode University of Keele LOOKING INTO THE 1890S John Stokes. In the Nineties. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. 199 pp. $29.95 IN THE NINETIES by John Stokes addresses several key issues that preoccupied the general pubHc in the middle of the 1890s: the New Journalism and Art Criticism, music hall entertainment, prison reform, suicide and celebrity interviews. The selection of topics is based on the fact that these issues were contentiously debated in articles, editorials and correspondence columns of the popular press as well as in the works of numerous writers and artists. Of special interest to Stokes is the problem of how the discourses on and representations of these key topics 78 Book Reviews structure our historical understanding of the nineties. In order to do the decade justice, Stokes is firmly convinced that it must be approached in a broadly integrative, synchronic slice: "The essays that make up In the Nineties amount, in all, to an experiment in interdisciplinary criticism inspired by the period they study: a decade that was preoccupied by the relations between high and popular culture, one medium and another, art and Hfe." One of the book's major strengths is the fact that Stokes avoids a strictly empirical reliance on writers from the 1890s to provide his methodological cues. His interdisciplinary framework is informed by British theories of cultural studies and communications developed by writers such as Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall, and possibly by new historicist thinking which has stressed that texts refer extrinsically to the material worlds they inhabit. Discourses are analyzed as complex systems of signs that have no single meaning. In fact, Stokes demonstrates how readers and writers actively contested the interpretations of such key words as impressionism, degeneration and aestheticism. Stokes's pursuit of such theoretically informed issues through the detailed examination of specific newspapers, literary texts and images results in both a grounded form of theorizing and a critically examined array of historical evidence. Typical of this approach is the author's analysis of the contradictory authoritative and pluralistic impulses he detects in the writings of many New Art Critics (George Moore, R. A. M. Stephenson, and D. S. MacColl). Instead of simply attributing their shifting voices to a greater professional autonomy (this era saw the rise of signed articles for instance), Stokes also locates these texts in a rapidly changing publishing network wherein the economies of an increasingly centralized system of newspaper production lowered costs and democratized...