Reaping Something New: African American Transformations of Victorian Literature by Daniel Hack (review)

Or something borrowed, or born again. In an age of concern over cultural appropriation, Hack offers a reminder of the potential fruitfulness of exchanges between aesthetic traditions. Like Borges’s Pierre Menard, the African American authors Hack highlights suggest the ability of identical words to acquire vitally different senses in different mouths and at different times. At their most productive, these African American repurposings of Victorian literature—which range from quotation to formal revision to (near?) plagiarism—both enrich the works in which they find themselves and invite reevaluation of their source texts. That some of these sources seem implicitly or explicitly constructed to exclude nonwhite characters and readers makes such creative recontextualizations all the more subversive.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Hack finds that African American uses of Victorian texts far outpace Victorian engagement with African American literature. His observations, however, that Dickens is known to have read and praised Frederick Douglass’s Narrative, and George Eliot to have corresponded with American abolitionist writers, invites us to consider whether or not the influence might sometimes have cut both ways. Hack is justifiably cautious in suggestions that Douglass’s narrative may have helped shape David Copperfield and that George Eliot perhaps took her pen name from a short story by the (white) abolitionist Lydia Maria Child. These notions may be just as fanciful, after all, as a nineteenth-century black critic’s contention that Tennyson plagiarized “Charge of the Light Brigade” from an African war chant. But—to coin a phrase—wouldn’t it be pretty to think so?