French Novels and the Victorians by Juliette Atkinson (review)

In Victorian Britain, French literature was seen by many as explosive material, a source of "corruption and immorality," a product of an "unstable and dangerous" society that threatened the equilibrium of the Victorian home in book form (266). Some Victorian book lovers even advised their friends to burn French novels directly after reading them. This anecdote from the introduction to Juliette Atkinson's French Novels and the Victorians—which leads her to wonder if any French novel "escaped conflagration"—is exemplary for this well-written and equally well-researched book that draws the reader into a world of authors, translators, publishers, readers, and reading habits (2). From a transnational perspective, it makes a strong case for re-evaluating the role of French fiction in Victorian Britain in the mid-nineteenth century.

Atkinson makes three broad claims that correspond to the three parts of the book. Countering previous claims about the perceived literary "insularity of the Victorians," such as those made by Franco Moretti in his Atlas of the European Novel (1998), the first part demonstrates "the omnipresence of French novels [in Britain] between 1830 and the early 1870s" (20). The next two chapters reconsider the negative status of French novels in Victorian society and study the impact of this status in theory and practice. The final part describes how the reception of French literature, far from being a one-sided and passive process, was the result of a transnational literary culture in which the judgment of French writers and literary critics played an essential role.

The first part of the book offers insights into Victorian reading habits that will excite even those who have little interest in the lures of Gallic literature. How could French novels be obtained and how did they circulate? Three suppliers—libraries, bookshops, and periodicals—are the focal point of the first chapter. Studying the issue books of the London Library, Atkinson concludes that, despite constant attempts of dissuasion from the library itself, French literature was heavily borrowed. Between May 1841 and March 1849 over 4,000 loans of popular French novels were issued: Paul de Kock was the most popular author (900 loans), closely followed by Alexandre Dumas (820), Honoré de Balzac (780), George Sand (650), and Eugène Sue (530). In this period, over two-thirds of all library patrons borrowed at least one French novel. Because the London Library might be seen as "an island of cosmopolitan interest in an insular nation," Atkinson shows that popular circulating libraries, such as Mudie's, similarly stocked and lent French books (45).

One easily stumbles upon serialized translations of French novels while studying Victorian periodicals, and Victorian readers must have had the same experience. While library patrons and bookshop customers deliberately set out to procure French fiction, the large audiences of popular Victorian periodicals such as the London Journal and Cassell's Illustrated Family Paper were involuntarily exposed to it. Translations were repackaged "to meet the requirements of different readerships" and, as a result, easily "crossed class and gender boundaries" (28). Noting how periodicals veered between "revealing and concealing" the French origin of these stories, Atkinson describes how Ainsworth's Magazine introduced Dumas as a character in his Gabriel Lambert (1843) and how Blackwood's turned Balzac's Le Père Goriot (1835) into a select translation of only five pages (66).

The second part of the book reconsiders British condemnations of French novels as immoral and dangerous. The third chapter focuses mainly on John Wilson Croker's 1836 condemnation of French novels in the Quarterly Review, which is still seen by many researchers as the emblematic Victorian response to French literature. Innovatively, Atkinson discusses the article in the context of an Anglo-French world of periodicals, arguing that it should not be seen as a typical British reaction to French literature but rather as an outspoken opinion in a transnational debate about literature. Croker's article was translated, plagiarized, and, most importantly, discussed in France, making his condemnation "in some ways...