Politicians, Poets and Con Men: Emotional History in Late Victorian America by Burton Raffel (review)

Shorter Book Reviews 267 We can understand poems and define styles by how they use these six, as with Eliot's Icon-his reaction to the world as a waste land, whose sterility and confusion seem symptoms of his emotional state. Stevens seems to use few factual Indices, Omens or Examples, which may explain why his poems so often use negations and such markers of fictions as as if; his poems seem a retreat from the world's connections, and Brogan's explanations of language's connections too incomplete to serve as the theory of language her sub-title promises. Robert Ian Scott Department of English University of Saskatchewan Burton Raffel. Politicians, Poets and Con Men: Emotional Hist01y in Late Victorian America. Hamden: Archon Books, 1986. xi + 220 pp. Burton Raffel's book is a collection of ten brief biographies of men and women whose careers in politics, journalism and literature blossomed during the late nineteenth century. Raffel's purpose in this study, as in its predecessor, American Victorians: Explorations in Emotional History, is "to re-enter a vanished emotional world ... [in order] to make the boundaries and something of the nature of that world clear to our own time'' (ix). Raffel' s is a valuable endeavour and the monograph he has produced is subtle and frequently illuminating. The author focuses upon a handful of lesser-known individuals, although these are offset by the inclusion of a few more prominent persons, such as Rutherford B. Hayes and P.T. Barnum. Throughout, the emphasis is upon his subjects' view of themselves, gained from a close reading of their diaries and personal correspondence . The profiles which emerge are varied in texture and sometimes contrast vividly with the traditional view. Hence, through Raffel's lens, Hayes emerges as "a man of unusual sensitivity and, considering his times, of unusually free, even radical sentiments" (I). Unlike many subsequent historians, Hayes' own contemporaries were usually quite positive in their assessment of the man; his private writings suggest a complex and winsome personality. Other chapters present sketches of, among others, Harriet Blaine (wife of Republican "politico" James G. Blaine), editor Richard W. Gilder and poet James W. Riley. Mrs. Blaine's letters provide insights into late Victorian attitudes toward sex roles and class distinctions, and are a revealing account of how one individual perceived and coped with the restrictive features of Victorian culture. Similarly, Raffel's handling of Century editor Richard W. Gilder sheds some light on an important cultural custodian of the era. Like many of the persons in this 268 Shorter Book Reviews book, Gilder was well-known and influential during his lifetime, but has often been ignored by historians. As one might expect from a defender of the Genteel Tradition, Gilder's viewpoint was prudish but his private writings reveal another, more attractive side. The reflections of family members suggest that Gilder was a sincere idealist and an energetic (if often nai:ve)reformer. Raffel' s explorations similarly show Riley to have been an earnest sentimentalist. While Riley's work was "exceedingly thin" and "highly artificial" (135), the poet himself genuinely longed for the simple joys of the childhood he romanticized, while he remained unfulfilled by the wealth and popularity his poems earned him. These are sensitive and sometimes revealing miniatures. Raffel' s highly sympathetic approach and thoughtful reading of the sources contribute some new insights. Yet the author has, on the whole, settled for far too little. Raffel disclaims any "overarching thesis" (ix) and asserts a seemingly artificial (and, I fear, ultimately untenable) distinction between "internal" and "external" history (ix). Thus, there is almost no effort made to set these individuals into the broader social and intellectual context of Gilded Age America. This reluctance to locate his subjects properly sometimes leads Raffel astray, as when he misreads Hayes' comment during the issueless 1852presidential campaign about the day's important political questions being settled. Moreover, Hayes' later egalitarian rhetoric sounds strangely radical to Raffel when not understood as a natural product of his antebellum free-labour ideology. If Raffel's main point is to discover "the dominant emotional makeup of the time" (4), this effort is vitiated by his blinkered perspective and failure...