The Cambridge History of Victorian Literature ed. by Kate Flint (review)

As Kate Flint notes in her introduction to this volume, it seems somewhat shocking that the ancestor of this work was published in 1916 in the fifteen-volume Cambridge History of English Literature. Flint’s magisterial contribution to the New Cambridge History of English Literature promises to be the standard reference work to which students, scholars, professional academics, and all those who remain fascinated by the fecundity and variety of Victorian studies and, in particular, its literary output, will turn to orient themselves. No mere introduction, Flint has assembled a series of essays that offer the distilled wisdom of distinguished careers. On studying the contents, I found myself eager to see how a scholar such as Gillian Beer was going to present her unparalleled contributions on the topic of “Science and literature” in a twenty-page version, and likewise Mary Poovey on “Economics and finance,” Leah Price on “Victorian reading,” and Claudia Nelson on “Writing for children” (to mention just four of the book’s thirty-three excellent essays). Since most will use this volume as a reference work, it is important to note that each of the chapters is accompanied by a bibliography on the topic. In all cases, I found these to be as thoughtfully constructed and comprehensive as the essays themselves, listing standard works as well as the most contemporary scholarship.

Flint is to be highly complimented on her sensible organization of the volume—no mean feat when approaching a period that was boastfully aware of the manner in which its unprecedented textual production, in terms of both numbers and diversity, rivaled industrial achievements in other fields. I found her decision to begin with a brief section on the media ecology of Victorian print—“Authors, Readers, and Publishers”—an important point of reference not only for introducing the shape of the period’s literary economy, but also for reflecting our disciplinary moment and the exciting return, spurred by the digital revolution, to the history of the book. The essays in this section chronicle the rise of mass literacy and the explosive growth of print in a manner that does justice to the significant differences in how, where, and—in the most concrete of fashions—what a range of audiences actually read.

The second section, “Writing Victoria’s England,” is as brief as the first one and provides a necessary historical overview of Victoria’s lengthy reign, dividing the period into the conventional triad of its expansive, high, and decadent phases. The essays in this section show the nuances of distinct periods in a fashion that thankfully refuses to sacrifice attention to exemplary characters. David Amigoni, for instance, mobilizes Thomas Carlyle and Henry Mayhew to introduce a number of threads that give shape to the early years of the period.

Flint’s longest two sections, “Modes of Writing” and “Matters of Debate,” comprise two-thirds of the volume’s essays. It took me some time to understand the brilliant editorial tactic embodied in the former category, which at first I was inclined to read as a survey of important genres in the period. Despite the high quality of the essays, I initially questioned the decision to include some, such as Flint’s own contribution on “Sensation” or Carolyn Williams’s essay on “Melodrama,” and leave out others. There is, for example, no essay on important late-Victorian genres such as the detective novel or the New Woman novel. However, I eventually realized that Flint made a wise decision to abandon a doomed attempt at generic inclusiveness. Instead, by focusing on modes such as “Lyric and the lyrical” and “Comic and satirical,” as well as the sensational and melodramatic, she covered a much wider and ultimately more comprehensive range of writing than a focus on genre would have enabled. As she explains, the contributors’ “preoccupations are linked to both conventionality and experimentalism in language and form, as a means of investigating how ideas spill over and...