The Oxford Handbook of the Victorian Novel ed. by Lisa Rodensky (review)

In 1971 the Oxford University Press published The Victorian Novel: Modern Essays in Criticism edited by Ian Watt whose distinguished credentials included The Rise of the Novel (1957). The word “modern” (like “recent” and “current”) is perhaps best avoided in all literary criticism titles, for what is deemed modern at any given moment is doomed to fall out of currency sooner or later. Thus, before turning to The Oxford Handbook of the Victorian Novel – and note how the word “modern” has been prudently eliminated from this title – edited by Lisa Rodensky, it will be instructive to examine the offerings of the earlier anthology.

A good place to start and pause, as the essayists in The Oxford Handbook repeatedly show us, is the paratext: the front matter, the back matter, or any matter surrounding the professed main text that may seem peripheral but is, in fact, relevant and regulates our reading. In Watt’s table of contents, readers will find a range of major authors beginning with Charles Dickens and of major works that mark the progress of the Victorian novel. A sampling of titles discloses the essays’ predominant focus on issues of theme and form: “Structure and Idea in Bleak House”; “What’s the Matter with Emily Jane? Conflicting Impulses in Wuthering Heights”; “On the Style of Vanity Fair”; “Implication and Incompleteness: George Eliot’s Middlemarch”; “Colour and Movement in Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles,” and so forth.

Here are just a few of the thirty-six titles listed in Rodensky’s table of contents: “The Victorian Novel and the OED”; “The Novel and Censorship in Late-Victorian England”; “Victorian Literature and Russian Culture: Translation, Reception, Influence, Affinity”; “The Victorian Novel and Communication Networks”; “Gentleman’s Latin, Lady’s Greek”; “The Victorian Novel and Science”; and “The Novel and Religion: Catholicism and Victorian Women’s Novels.” To round off this list with “and so forth” would be inapt, to say the least – for who would expect the essay directly after “The Novel and Religion” to be about “The Victorian Novel and Horticulture”? Lest the reader sniff at such subject matter, Lynn Voskuil’s essay on Victorian novels and gardens demonstrates not only “how closely the Victorian novelist’s enterprise was linked to that of the horticulturist” but also (to cite only one among many edifying examples) how even the common geranium, seemingly most boring of potted plants, was in its time “an exotic species imported from South Africa,” and therefore an index of British empire-building (549).

Other paratextual aspects of the two volumes differ markedly as well. In 1971, for instance, the editor and Oxford University Press did not consider it necessary to have an index. Perhaps because the essays in The Victorian Novel deal, for the most part, with individual works, the titles alone seemed to provide a good enough “road map” or reference apparatus for the reader. The scholarly paratexts of The Oxford Handbook, by contrast, include a detailed forty-two page index with double columns. The index is proportionate to the massive book that precedes it. The 2013 anthology is a match for (or, some might say, a throwback to) the triple decker: the three-volume Victorian novel. Whereas the 1971 anthology is a scant 485 pages and fits neatly into a hand or handbag, the 808-page Oxford Handbook is not a book to be held in one hand, or even in both, for any extended period without a risk to the wrists.

Why call it, then, a handbook? In the opening sentence of her “Introduction,” Rodensky explains: “‘Handbook’ as ‘guide’ or ‘compendium’ came into English (from the German Handbuch) at the beginning of the 19^th century and was then put to use, according to the OED, identifying works that offered ‘concise information for the tourist’” (1). Although the terms “concise,” “compact,” or “short and snappy” are far from denoting The Oxford Handbook, the notion of the reader as a tourist guided along untrodden...