The Victorians and the Eighteenth Century: Reassessing the Tradition (review)

C. S. Lewis is a largely discredited critical voice in current literary studies, but his work is worth returning to for many reasons, not least his assertion that "Almost everything which my own generation ignorantly called the Victorian seems to have been expressed by Addison. It is all there in the Spectator . . . Everything the moderns detest, all that they call smugness, complacency, and bourgeois ideology, is brought together in his work and given its most perfect expression." Lewis's declaration appears at the beginning of Francis O'Gorman and Katherine Turner's collection of essays on the impact of eighteenth-century literary culture and tradition on the Victorians, and it creates a forum for a more nuanced examination of the reception history of the earlier period in the nineteenth century, very well realized by the distinguished line-up of contributors here. The volume is staged by David Fairer's suggestive preface, which insists on a more complex inheritance of Augustan classicism, clarity, morality, and empiricism. As the Victorians became increasingly uncomfortable and finally appalled with the sentimentalism and emotive expression the Augustans had forced the Romantics to embrace, they turned back to early-eighteenth-century emphases on those forms of intellect, satire, and artifice so welcomed by Modernism. Instead of regarding the Victorians as reacting to the past in a Bloomian or Freudian sense, then, the editors of the collection claim to dispense "with paradigms of simple patricide" to privilege "the hidden richness and complexity of the Victorians' settlement with the previous century" (3).

This is certainly born out by the essays within, which focus on the construction of Victorian language, morality, authorship, and history. Helen Small's opening chapter, "The Debt to Society: Dickens, Fielding, and the Genealogy of Independence," explores these themes through a lens of Nietzschian genealogy to address Charles Dickens's literary relationship with Henry Fielding. Framing Dickens's inheritance of Fielding's writerly style, internalized moralism, and authorial professionalism in terms of debt, Small argues that this sometimes burdensome metaphor is reformed by Dickens to articulate a freedom from literary predecessors. Several of the contributors enter the book's arena of debate like Small, positioning canonical eighteenth-century thinkers in relation to their Victorian legatees. In "George Eliot, Rousseau, and the Discipline of Natural Consequences," Simon Dentith suggests we read Eliot in relation to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's educational and ethical theory; O'Gorman overturns our Arnoldian understanding of Alexander Pope in order to position him instead in relation to W. M. Thackeray, Alfred Austin, Edmund Gosse, and Leslie Stephen in "The 'High Priest of an Age of Prose and Reason'? Alexander Pope and the Victorians"; and in "Departures and Returns: Writing the English Dictionary in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries," Lynda Mugglestone redresses Becky Sharpe's disposal of 'Johnson's Dixonary' at the beginning of Vanity Fair (1847–48) by heralding the influence of Samuel Johnson's critical lexicography on James Murray's Oxford English Dictionary. Like Mugglestone, Turner also works to broaden our conception of Johnson's influence in the later age in "The 'Link of Transition': Samuel Johnson and the Victorians," reevaluating his appeal to a broad range of readers.

If these chapters serve to reassess reputations of specific eighteenth-century figures, the remainder of the book works to map out the Victorian bequest of groupings, movements, or clichés embedded into literary culture by their predecessors. Carolyn D. Williams's "'The Dreams of thy Youth': Bucks, Belles and Half-way Men in Victorian Fiction," for example, argues that the supposed innovations of the Victorian novel can be traced back to those seemingly cliché eighteenth-century caricatures—"Tory satirists, optimistic bourgeois Whigs, cynical aristocrats and idealistic early Romantics"—so creatively reworked by their inheritors (73). Similarly, Elisabeth Jay examines the development of Margaret Oliphant's understanding of authorship through her spirited engagement with Thackeray and Thomas Macaulay in Blackwood's Magazine. In "The Cultural Politics of...