Introduction: Family Ties

What is fascinating about a genealogy, however, as anyone knows who has ever attempted a family tree, is the speed with which it sprouts branches and twigs, endless varieties of great-aunts, stepbrothers-in-law, and third cousins twice removed. Nothing like a line—straight or crooked—a family tree merges complex systems at every reproductive node, and these mergers result in multiple descendants open to their own future mergers. Equally compelling, however, is what any reconstituted genealogy hides and excludes.

(Engelstein 6)

In February 2017, an international group of scholars gathered at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand, for the symposium, "Family Ties: Literary Kinship and Creative Production in Nineteenth-Century Britain," organized by Ruth Knezevich and me. This special issue of Victorians Journal features essays stemming from the symposium's explorations of a variety of literary and artistic families. The essays offer a range of approaches to and interpretations of kinship, familial influence, and artistic creation in the long nineteenth century. What largely links them all is the idea that close attention to the family ties of artists and writers, and the influence of family ties on artistic production, are fruitful and overlooked areas for nineteenth-century scholarship.

This approach should not be imagined as embracing either outdated Victorian notions of "hereditary genius" made popular by Francis Galton (1), or the "intellectual aristocracy" once proposed by Noel Annan (243–44). It does, however, suggest that families constituted one of the most important frameworks for literary and artistic production, and that families like the Brontës and Rossettis should not be considered unique or particularly unusual. It is our hope that this collection will encourage more comparative research on the importance of family networks in shaping the art and literature of Victorian Britain.

Scholars of British Romanticism provide useful models for this kind of research. Work on Romantic-era literary families developed out of a wider interest in the various writing communities of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. While the interactions of the Lake Poets and the writers gathered at Villa Diodati in 1816 have long fascinated readers, recent scholarship focuses attention on Leigh Hunt and writers of the Cockney School (Cox, Roe), on the writing friendships around Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Taussig) and Charles Lamb (James), and on the lively communities of writers in Dissenting circles (White). A related strand of Romantic scholarship examines Britain's wider networks of conversation and sociability (Gilmartin, Mee, Russell and Tuite). This body of scholarship has had a profound impact on the way Romanticists imagine the era. The image of the solitary genius has been re-evaluated, as has the single author monograph. Furthermore, it no longer seems strange for an essay or book-length study to place canonical figures of British Romanticism beside nearly forgotten ones, as scholars increasingly attend to the richness of exchanges between notable figures, some of whom interacted with one another on a daily basis. Writers and artists rub shoulders with publishers, editors, actors, pamphleteers, and sermon writers.

Recent Romantic scholarship also analyzes the networks of literary and artistic families. Here, too, there are famous examples: William and Dorothy Wordsworth; Charles and Mary Lamb; and most of all, the Wollstonecraft-Godwin-Shelley family. But a growing body of scholarship focuses attention on lesser-known family networks: the Barbauld-Aikin circle, Sarah and Hartley Coleridge, the Edgeworths, the Porters, and the Hunter-Baillies, among others. Several studies have put these various families in dialogue with one another. Michelle Levy's Family Authorship and Romantic Print Culture and Scott Krawczyk's Romantic Literary Families examine the familial communities that shaped British Romantic writing and publishing. Both scholars suggest the benefit of studying these creative families in relation to one another, thinking in terms of networks of kinship, rather than considering the family as inward-looking or isolated. According to Levy, "family authorship came into its own in the Romantic period" (3), while Krawczyk sees the literary family as the "predominant mediating network for Romantic collaboration" (x).

The Victorian era, too, has its famous examples of literary and artistic communities (Cambridge Apostles, Pre-Raphaelites, and Punch Brotherhood, to...