The Victorian Novel (review)

The overcrowded textbook market of the twenty-first century, fuelled not only by the Blackwell imprint but also increasingly by the Oxford and Cambridge University Presses, makes the task of writing a student guide that is in any way fresh or new a daunting undertaking. Louis James, bringing years of erudition and scholarship to this most recent study of the Victorian novel, nicely balances the demands of coverage with some genuinely important, searching reflections on the cultural, social, and political contours of one of the nineteenth century's most popular literary forms.

Addressed to a wide readership ("aimed at graduates and postgraduates . . . it should be of interest also to members of reading groups, and to all who enjoy Victorian literature" [xi]), half of the book comprises a directory of "Key Authors," "Key Texts," and "Topics." The range is impressive. The "Key Authors" section, comprising (on average) 300–word entries, includes Marie Corelli, C. P. R. James, and William Hale White as well as Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy; the "Key Texts" section, comprising 300–500–word entries, includes G. W. M. Reynolds's The Mysteries of London (1849–56), Ouida's Under Two Flags (1867), and R. D. Blackmore's Lorna Doone (1869), as well as Oliver Twist (1838), Middlemarch (1871–72), and Portrait of a Lady (1881); and the fourteen two-page entries in the (confusedly titled) "Topics" section range across children's novels, historical novels, colonial novels, New Woman novels, and so on.

As a directory, the second half of the book takes the reader on an intellectually sound whistle-stop tour of authors, novels, and fictional genres that students or the interested general reader may wish to pursue. The book's intellectual meat, though—and this is what will be of interest to an academic readership—is to be found in its first one hundred pages. James's introduction bears the hallmarks of the author's important earlier work on popular culture and on nineteenth-century reading practices. Having described Walter Scott's role in establishing the novel as a respectable popular pastime and emphasising the continuities between fictional, historical, and journalistic writing in the period, James reminds us that of the more than sixty thousand novels published in volume format (this doesn't include those novels published only in magazines or periodicals) the most popular—in terms of sales—have now largely disappeared from view. Somewhat in contrast to his nuanced account of Victorian reading and publishing practices, James sets up a highly conventional historiography of the Victorian period: 1830–46 he sets up as the "Prelude" to the Victorian age proper; 1847–49 is cast as a "revolutionary" period in novel writing; 1850–70 as the age of "equipoise"; the post-Reform Act 1870s as a decade that anticipates the fin de siècle; and 1881–1901 as a transitional moment between Victorian modernity and the modernism of the twentieth century. While the dismantling of grand historical and cultural narratives that was one of the projects of late-twentieth-century criticism and theory leaves James's literary and historical chronology looking a little crude, his own historical sense is far too highly developed for this to have been a naive decision: arguably students of the Victorian period need to have access to traditional accounts, and James's book subsequently demonstrates the complexities of the cultural continuities across the century as well as the significance of its major cultural ruptures.

In "The Modality of Melodrama," one of the intellectually substantial chapters, James traces the absorption of melodrama into the middle-class novel and argues for the centrality of the melodramatic mode in Victorian culture more generally. The chapter points out that even "intellectual" writers such as Eliot and Henry James had an enthusiastic interest in theatre that percolated into their fiction. Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Pygmalion (1770) is named as the first "mélodrame"; it was, though, the post-revolutionary Gilbert Giles de Pixérécourt's plays that properly imported...