Farewell, Victoria!: English Literature 1880–1900 by Stanley Weintraub (review)

“Farewell, Victoria!”; and perhaps we should also say “Farewell, Stanley Weintraub,” for this collection of articles seems to be a well-deserved tribute to a Victorian scholar who has been publishing in the field of Victorian and early twentieth-century studies for almost fifty years. Professor Emeritus of Arts and Humanities at Pennsylvania State University (which published Shaw and Other Matters: A Festschrift for Stanley Weintraub on the Occasion of His Forty-Second Anniversary at The Pennsylvania State University in his honor in 1998), Weintraub is the author of more than fifty books and a noted biographer of the Rossettis, Benjamin Disraeli, Queen Victoria, James McNeill Whistler, and George Bernard Shaw, among others.

All of these subjects appear in Farewell, Victoria!, which is an eclectic collection of Weintraub’s previously published essays, some of which had appeared as early as 1964. His essay output exceeding one hundred journal publications on a myriad of topics, it is unclear exactly why these thirteen particular essays were selected (Weintraub’s previously published essays on Edward Elgar and J. M. Barrie might have been interesting inclusions, for example). Further, despite the book’s title and cover image, Victoria never takes center stage beyond the first essay, “Exasperated Admiration: Bernard Shaw on Queen Victoria”; the title merely recognizes that these essays address literature at the end of her reign. That literature is far-reaching, from the poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti to Aubrey Beardsley, artist and contributor to the periodical The Yellow Book. Regrettably, women’s artistic and literary contributions at the end of Victoria’s reign are scantily acknowledged except for passing references to Christina Rossetti (in the second essay, focused on William Michael and Dante Gabriel) and writers like Sarah Grand and Marie Corelli (in “Reclaiming Late-Victorian Popular Fiction”); Mary Kingsley is the subject of the eleventh essay but only as prototype to Shaw’s Lady Cicely, not as a writer. The balance of authors is questionable as well: Disraeli and Shaw rate two essays; Oscar Wilde and Beardsley each merit three, while there is only one essay on the Rossettis and on Whistler, for example. Further, Whistler’s essay comes between two on Wilde, oddly; between this, and the lack of connections made between essays, the book’s flow is uneven at times. In all of the essays, Weintraub’s focus is less theoretical or even literary-critical than biographical and historical.

These cavils and observations aside, there is much to enjoy in this collection, from nicely illustrated essays to interesting stories about these famous Victorians that might, by extension, help us to appreciate their art. Dante Gabriel Rossetti comes across as fairly unstable when compared to the brother who kept him financially and physically alive at times (“His Brother’s Keeper: William Michael and Dante Gabriel Rossetti: 1828–1919”). Weintraub convincingly argues that Disraeli was a major influence on Wilde’s most memorable fictional character (“Disraeli and Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray”), and also that Wilde had true literary-critical skills (“The Critic in Spite of Himself: Oscar Wilde”). As Weintraub wittily sums up this essay: “A critic in spite of himself, then critic to explain himself, Wilde sought to bring art into harmony with his life, and his life into harmony with art. It is a paradox entirely consistent with his life that such criticism has proved to be as enduring as it is entertaining. But like his John Worthing (who was Ernest in the country), Wilde might have confessed his surprise ‘to find out suddenly that all his life he has been speaking nothing but the truth’” (143–44).

The three essays on Beardsley are especially elucidating: “Beardsley Before The Yellow Book,” “Another Look at The Yellow Book,” and “Beardsley and The Savoy.” The first essay explores Beardsley’s early influences, familial to sexual, and his constantly impaired health as he struggled with tuberculosis all the while developing his unique, controversial style of visual art (here the book...