Literary Meaning and the Question of Value: Victorian Literary Interpretation

Recent attention to the institutionalization of English literature has reminded us that the academic study of literature has a short history, with literature entering the universities as a subject only at the end of the nineteenth century. It is worth remembering that what we do now in the classroom has a history, one that has consequences for our classroom practice. We take it for granted now, however much concern for context and culture has become part of our practice, thatinterpretation is one of the fundamental responsibilities of the critic. But widespread interpretation of secular texts has a relatively short history and grew out of a tradition of Biblical hermeneutics. In considering that secular transition, I want to suggest that our practice in teaching both the Victorians and the history of criticism needs to be modified to come to terms with the literarysophistication with which the Victorians are rarely credited, and, more important yet, to throw light on our current critical practice by showing the kinds of problems literary interpretation faced as it developed out of the religious hermeneutic tradition.

It is sometimes assumed that interest in the theory of literary interpretation is a twentieth-century phenomenon. Anglo-American critics in earlier periods did not reflect on the problems of interpretation; they simply took meaning for granted and pushed on straightaway to make evaluative or ethical judgments on a text's literary merits or content. Discussing eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British criticism, for instance, K. M. Newton (1990: 1-2) writes: "No distinction would have been made between reading and understanding and interpretation. . . . A major difference, then, between modern literary criticism and literary criticism of earlier eras is that in most criticism of the past interpreting the text is not seen as being different from reading and understanding it." ¹ While it is true that a great deal of literary criticism written in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries concerned itself with evaluative questions rather than interpretive ones, twentieth-century literary interpretation was crucially shaped by interpretive theories that were articulated by Victorian critics.

Of course, earlier cultures had been concerned with the interpretation of texts other than the Bible, as we can see, for instance, in Plato's Ion or in the Stoics' interpretations of Homer's epics. But an extensive and specifically literary hermeneutics emerged in modern British culture only after the German romantic hermeneuticists' attempts to formulate general theories of linguistic understanding had been absorbed into the culture, and only after the reconception of the Bible as literary text was accomplished. Only then did literary texts widely attract the methodologically self-conscious theorizing that had been reserved for so long for sacred or legal texts. The history of this development makes apparent how closely current literary interpretation is modeled on late-nineteenth-century literary studies, itself in many ways shaped by biblical exegesis. ² In the literature of the late Victorian period, we can watch literary interpretation as we practice it today in the classroom develop in debates on English literature among literary societies and in the texts of the first British professors of literature.

The abundant criticism that preceded this methodological turn—sufficiently abundant, indeed, to induce Thomas Carlyle to remark in 1831 that "by and by it will be found that all Literature has become one boundless self-devouring Review" (Gross 1969: 2)—was primarily concerned with questions of literary merit and standards of taste. Much of the literary criticism that Carlyle was complaining about in the early nineteenth century followed an eighteenth-century model and was not concerned with the interpretive processes that underlay critical judgments; statements on the principles of interpretation were infrequent and usually made only in passing (though Carlyle himself had more to say on interpretation than most). A number of critics adopted in an offhand way the historicist principles that informed romantic hermeneutics, philology, and the new criticism of the Bible; so that George Henry Lewes (who was surprisingly unconcerned with...