Victorian Interpretation (review)

Those working in the field of Victorian studies, and, indeed, those reading Victorian Studies, have good reason to feel satisfied with the field's increasingly warm embrace of interdisciplinarity over the past twenty years. There is one subject, however, that tends to be approached with rather more hesitancy by scholars and students of the nineteenth century than our counterparts working on the early modern and postmodern periods, and that is literary theory. Suzy Anger's wide-ranging and thought-provoking study is an invitation to overcome this diffidence, not by reading Dickens through Derrida and Browning against Badiou, but by coming to terms with the theoretical sophistication of a range of hermeneutics practiced and preached in nineteenth-century Britain. Anger's thesis is at its heart a relatively familiar one: that the hermeneutics and practices of literary criticism emerged from, and came to displace, a pre-existent scriptural tradition in the course of an increasingly secular nineteenth century. The intellectual courage of this book lies in its commitment to mapping out such a broad sweep of the history of ideas while gesturing to the afterlives of nineteenth-century hermeneutics in twentieth-century literary theory.

The structure of Anger's book is slightly unconventional, and thus even the table of contents insists, in a quiet way, that the reader must reflect on the process of interpretation. Anger interweaves four substantial chapters which provide detailed analyses of individual authors with three shorter "intertexts" that scan the changing hermeneutics of Victorian legal discourse, science writing, and literary criticism. The epilogue contains a fourth example of such an intertext by means of a brief and incisive discussion of nineteenth-century psychology. In-depth analyses of John Henry Newman, Thomas Carlyle, George Eliot, and Oscar Wilde are thus intercut by rapid bursts of, among others, John Austin, Sheldon Amos, William Carpenter, Karl Pearson, George Henry Lewes, F. J. Furnivall, Richard Green Moulton, and James Sully. Organising her argument in this fashion enables Anger to maintain the breadth of focus she requires to work through her thesis, while retaining the close attention to individual authors and works characteristic of literary scholarship.

The book opens with an overview of nineteenth-century hermeneutics and their legacies to twentieth-century literary theory: an overwhelming task. Rather than taking a route back from familiar territory for Victorian studies scholars, by, for example, working through to German Romantic hermeneutics via John Ruskin or Eliot, Anger starts with Friedrich Schleiermacher. The slightly hesitant assertion that this is done on the grounds that "intentionalist theories of meaning comparable to his were frequently advanced in nineteenth-century British thought" is substantiated by what follows, but is also an initial instance of how the detailed examination of particular works in this book sometimes comes at the price of mapping networks of intellectual exchange (5). Anger turns to nineteenth-century British philology and nascent literary criticism to conclude that interpretation was "pervasive" across a wide spectrum of thought in the nineteenth century, exploding the myth that a "hermeneutic turn" only took place in the twentieth century (20).

Anger contends that the revision of traditional modes of scriptural exegesis was central to the preoccupation with hermeneutics in nineteenth-century Britain. The first substantive chapter on Victorian scriptural hermeneutics thus has an important role to play in grounding the argument of the rest of the book. Anger's analysis of Benjamin Jowett's "On the Interpretation of Scripture" (1860) and Newman's Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1844) provides rich textual evidence of conflict between subjectivism, scriptural authority, and theories of development in the mid-nineteenth century. Newman's resolute defence of his hermeneutic in the face of Charles Kingsley's imputation of equivocation is also tracked with theoretical acumen. Some account of the imbrication of equivocation in the wider discourses of nineteenth-century anti-Catholicism would, however, have bedded this down more firmly in intellectual history; the urgency of such debates is rather muted in this work as a result. It is, unsurprisingly, Matthew Arnold who...