French Novels and the Victorians by Juliette Atkinson (review)

Juliette Atkinson's French Novels and the Victorians illustrates the ways in which the abiding Victorian appetite for contemporary French fiction provided the basis for a critically engaged, self-reflective debate on evolving literary and cultural controversies over the period 1830 to 1870. Judiciously covering a large, even enormous literary field, Atkinson's study aims to provide a more complete picture of what has been coming into focus only through more isolated critical efforts focused on individual authors or subgenres. Blending the approaches of book history, reception studies, and comparative criticism, French Novels and the Victorians establishes itself as the authoritative source on its subject and one that should prove highly accessible to students or readers with little familiarity with nineteenth-century French literature.

The first two chapters of the book, forming a section on "Disseminating French novels," are in many ways its most exciting and innovative. Publishers' records and advertising provide one window into this topic, but Atkinson devotes equal attention to libraries, especially the London Library, founded in 1841, for which issue records for most of its first decade survive. Patrons such as the Carlyles, John Stuart Mill, the sculptor Susan Durant, and the queen's physician Dr. William Baly were regular borrowers of French fiction. Their records, Atkinson acknowledges, provide insight into only a small, elite segment of London society. She fortifies this research by comparing it with titles available through circulating libraries such as Mudie's, where "the sheer volume of French novels to be found . . . do[es] much to question the enduring use of Mudie as a symbol of Victorian prudishness" (46). London booksellers also readily provided cheap editions of the latest fiction through established contacts on the Continent. The roles of translators, editors, and reviewers both English and French—who contributed often to English journals, sometimes posing as English reviewers—complete this picture of the ways in which French novels were introduced to and framed for English consumption. Atkinson also reminds us of the rapid, transnational context of periodical publication at the time, where English reviews of French novels and vice versa were available to readers across the channel within a day or two of publication.

How does one square the apparent popularity of French fiction across a broad demographic of readers with the mostly hostile tone one sees in contemporary reviews, or the typically negative portrayal of readers of French fiction in English literature at the time? The book's next section, "The dangers of French novels," unpacks the complex, often performative nature of this response in public and private discourse. Elizabeth Barrett Browning's 1840s correspondence with Mary Russell Mitford, for instance, who herself served as a translator and reviewer of French fiction, formed a virtual epistolary salon where they traded opinions on the works of George Sand, Paul de Kock, Honoré de Balzac, and Eugène Sue, among others. Defending the free range of her tastes, Barrett Browning grouped herself with that "small class of persons who can abstract the art of books from their moral expression," thus anticipating similar moves made by aesthetic-minded authors later in the century (qtd. in Atkinson 172). Public commentary on French fiction was slower to come around to this way of thinking, but it should not be regarded as uniformly negative, Atkinson cautions. Even John Wilson Croker's 1836 Quarterly Review essay "French Novels," which has since served literary historians as a synecdoche of Victorian moral outrage at the French, must be understood "as the produce of a transnational critical discourse coming to terms with an explosive and provocative French literary generation" (163). Croker echoes similar reservations from French critics, Atkinson points out, and they were both soon opposed by other influential essayists offering a more appreciative understanding of French fiction, including Charles Sainte-Beuve and George Henry Lewes. This section of the book also examines the many guises assumed by fictional readers of French novels, most notably in works by William Makepeace Thackeray...