In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

30:3, Reviews Instead of presuming to direct or limit DuPlessis's approach to her subject, the editors of the Key Women Writers Series might have made the book more readable by revising unnecessarily complex sentences, removing jargon, and eliminating several other distracting traits of the dissertation style. The book can stand on the merits of DuPlessis's superb critical insights, but it should have been made a good deal less difficult to translate and a much greater pleasure to read. Fred D. Crawford University of Oregon FREDERIC HARRISON Martha S. Vogeler. Frederic Harrison: Vocation of a Positivist. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984. $49.95 Frederic Harrison was a minor Victorian eminence, and a highly typical specimen . He was bom in the purple of commerce: his father was a highly successful stockbroker and the son was accustomed to living in a town house and having (a rented) country seat. Fred, like many Victorian eminences, lived forever (1831-1923), outlived himself, in fact; he was alarmingly energetic; he sat on countless committees; effervesced in endless articles, mainly for the Westminster Review and we can trace from this dense biography his evolution from brisk young radical, supporter of Trade Unions, Home Rule, hammer of shams, religious , political and literary to the Tuetonophobia of his last years; his doubts about the Kelts' capacity to run their own affairs; his own incapacity to respond to new art and his hostility to female suffrage (though that persisted from his early years). If Harrison is remembered now, it is probably as one of those who objected to Arnold's notion of "Culture" and it is certainly to Arnold's credit that he "laughed until he cried" when he read "Culture: A Dialogue" in the November 1867 issue of the Fortnightly Review. Harrison deploys Arnolds own Arminius from Friendship's Garland to demolish the dainty sophistries and elegant religiousity of Arnold's prose. What precisely does Culture do? How does it work in the social domain? To which Arnold airily returned, that such questions involve mere "machinery." For Harrison, "Culture" was well enough in a critic of new books but leads merely to political indecisiveness. Arnold's shrugging distance from low practical fellows and his tone of "effortless superiority" earned him the phrase "Mr. Kid Glove Cocksure." Vogeler tells an amusing story which casts a rather ironic light on this. Arnold's dandiacal phase came early in his career; but Harrison was a dressy man all his life. On one occasion he travelled up to the industrial North to address a meeting. He was to be met by a local representative at the railway station. Neither man knew the other and Harrison proposed to identify himself by wearing a pair of tan gloves. Unfortunately he changed his gloves on the train for a pair of different shade or material and as a consequence missed both the man and the occasion. Gloves and 362 30:3, Reviews stick were part of the gentleman's outdoor uniform and it is understandable that in the rich smoky ambience of Victorian England it might be necessary to change one's gloves, but it is likely enough that Fred changed his rather more often than most. The dialogue form was one in which Harrison was specially apt and Vogeler suggests that his recent membership of the Royal Commission on Trade Unions, couched as it was in question and answer form, may well have been responsible for the dialogue on Culture. Harrison's prose was almost invariably limpid and graceful so that one can still read much of his work with mild pleasure, but its ephemeral objects and miscellaneous quality limit its achievement. Annals of an Old Manor House is agreeable but hardly demands consideration in any conspectus of late nineteenth-century literature. In later years, money became consistently tighter and he consistently herded together pieces from different phases of his career. Such volumes are quite devoid of unity. As an art critic, Harrison is predictably high Victorian (Art should idealise and down with the French school: subject is important, handling does not dignify ). His enthusiasm for eighteenth-century culture is refreshing but it did not extend to architecture: indeed, British architecture between Wren...

pdf

Share