The Nineteenth-Century Novel 1820–1880: The Oxford History of the Novel in English, Volume 3 ed. by John Kucich and Jenny Bourne Taylor (review)

At the end of her chapter “The Novel and Empire,” Elaine Freedgood says of her chosen title, “Its grammar is that of any entry in this kind of reference book” (389). Hence the thirty-one chapters in this multi-authored collection include “Readers and Reading Practices,” “Theatricality and the Novel,” “Religion and the Novel,” “Science and the Novel,” and fifteen others held together by “and,” plus eight more chapters describing subgenres such as “The Silver Fork Novel,” “The Newgate Novel,” and so on. This is then, after all, a reference book, and one which no one will be able to read as a whole.

Patrick Parrinder, the general editor of the series, claims that the twelve volumes will make up “a detailed history of the novel,” “useful to students and specialists” as well as “accessible to a wide and varied readership,” and forming “a record of the extraordinary adaptability and resilience of the novel in English, its protean character, and its constant ability to surprise” (xvi). But there is not much surprise for a wide and varied readership in this present volume. Many of these chapters are routine summaries, at a considerable professionalized distance from the actual experience of reading and thinking about Victorian fiction. Too often the writers use their sense of history to factualize and close down thought.

Here then is one contributor writing off the domestic novel by characterizing it as being “reasonably certain that middling folk—defined as hard-working, accomplished, substantial and familial—should be at the centre of things” (184). Here is another dismissing Charlotte Yonge’s Heir of Redclyffe (1853) as offering “sentimental scenes of deathbeds and heroic invalids, along with heart-warming resolutions of misunderstandings, most of which took place against a background of Church of England fundraising projects” (35). Here is a third summarizing the whole enterprise: “The novel colonizes our imaginations by telling us the same stories over and over again: a middle-class aspirant to greatness settles, settles down, settles for social life and security rather than loneliness of some sort of freedom; settles for what has already been rather than for what might happen if plots veered off in directions the novel does not typically allow” (391). So much for the novel’s protean character and its constant ability to surprise.

In what is a good introduction to this volume, its distinguished editors, John Kucich and Jenny Bourne Taylor, do stress “the centrality of emotional life in fiction from the 1820s onwards,” arguing also that “many novelists were psychological pioneers in their own right” (xxiv). But there is little that is excitedly respectful of emotional life—or moral life, or religious life—in what follows. That is to say, not many of the chapters attempt to do what Dinah Birch perceptively says George Eliot does: “she connects the power of fiction with the depth of a lifetime’s learning. More than any other writer of her generation, she demonstrated that fiction could be animated by new ideas, without losing its hold over the reader’s imaginative and emotional life” (235). This is because too often the writers in this volume already know what they think and are quick to categorize their accessible ideas. There is very little attempt to move exploratively from how things are done to what they then might mean. Too often, in a way that is fundamentally unliterary, the “what it all means” is imposed from above and from the very start.

There are signs of what a more “how”-oriented thinking might be like, nonetheless. Susan Fraiman, for example, is the only contributor to use Alex Woloch’s excellent idea of character-systems in The One vs. the Many (2003)—on that jostling for space that determines the emergence of a major or...