Notes

INTRODUCTION: THROUGH BRIGHT GLASS

1.Eliot, Mill on The Floss, 12. Ellipsis in original.

2.James, Preface to The Ambassadors, xxiii.

3.Peter Otto has argued in Multiplying Worlds that it is in the late eighteenth century that “the virtual first becomes understood as the space of emergence of the new, the unthought, the unrealized” (191). That artworks may preserve their relationship to reality precisely by disavowing any claim to actuality is the underlying claim of work initiated by Deleuze and cogently argued in Pierre Levy’s Becoming Virtual. Levy’s notion is that “an intellectual activity nearly always exteriorizes, objectifies, virtualizes a cognitive function . . . because it is virtual, writing desynchronizes and delocalizes” (50). The book’s crucial distinction is between the possible (or potential) and the virtual. By Levy’s account, the possible is digitizable, quantifiable, renderable in statistical terms: it belongs to the “taming of chance” that Ian Hacking sees accompanying the rise of the statistical sciences in the nineteenth century. The virtual, by contrast, exists as a qualitative rather than a quantitative experience, not to be expressed as a possible percentage.

4.Conrad, Preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus, 15–16.

5.Swinburne, “Before the Mirror,” lines 47–48. The poem was written to accompany an 1864 Whistler painting of an introspective young woman, Symphony in White, No. 2.

6.The question of how mid-nineteenth-century Britons came to think differently about glass as refractive surface and as pass-thorough, as lens and window both, is extensively explored and unpacked in Isobel Armstrong’s Victorian Glassworlds, discussed in more detail in chapter 6.

7.“Virtually Being There: Edmund Wilson’s Suburbs” and “The Return of the Blob: Or How Sociologists Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Crowd.”

8.Cf. the discussion of “cognitive archaeology” and “material engagement theory” in Malafouris, How Things Shape the Mind, esp. 7–18.

9.The latter would align this book with the sort of historical taxonomy undertaken in John Bender and Michael Marrinan’s Culture of Diagram.

10.Foucault’s discussion in The Order of Things of the unreliability of a stable mimetic order in Velazquez’s Las Meninas (1656) raises somewhat related questions about how a painter understands and depicts the difficulties or the paradox that surrounds the viewer’s “entry” into the space of the painting: “As soon as they place the spectator in the field of their gaze, the painter’s eyes seize hold of him, force him to enter the picture, assign him a place at once privileged and inescapable, levy their luminous and visible tribute from him, and project it upon the inaccessible surface of the canvas within the picture. He sees his invisibility made visible to the painter and transposed into an image forever invisible to himself. . . . Perhaps there exists, in this painting by Velazquez, the representation as it were, of Classical representation, and the definition of the space it opens up to us” (3, 15). Foucault’s account is predicated upon the painting’s central aporia and its relationship to sovereignty. By contrast, my account of the semi-detached relationship that is both depicted and reflected upon in Caravaggio’s painting is predicated upon a workable representational system that nonetheless contains at its heart the awareness of what cannot be made part of a system of representations: those eyes are both alert and blank; the musician sees, and the canvas is blind.

11.Gallagher, “Rise of Fictionality,” 340.

12.Ibid.

13.Idem, 351–52.

14.Cf. Bolter and Grusin’s Remediation, which also discounts the importance of fiction’s doubleness, its capacity to seem at once made up and believable.

15.Saler, As If, 12, 17. Saler’s emphasis falls less on the Holmes stories themselves than on the advent of a fan culture around the Holmes stories, which he sees as the first manifestation of a fanatically immersive, modern-day “fan-boy” culture. To hear Saler tell it, Jane McGonigle’s Reality Is Broken, a 2011 paean to immersive video games, might have been published in 1890 with Arthur Conan Doyle’s little world of 221B Baker St. in mind.

16.The account offered here of readers’ semi-detached relationship to the fictional world is also related to the tension that Alex Woloch identifies in The One vs. the Many: between readers responding to a novel’s “character system”—i.e., the overarching structure into which each character fits—and “character space”—i.e., the person-like aspect of characters, who appear to readers to be living beings moving around in a world like the reader’s. Cf. also John Frow’s attempt in Character and Person to explain (rather than explain away) the readerly impulse to treat characters as persons.

17.Cf. Gallagher’s striking proposal that “character’s peculiar affective force . . . is generated by the mutual implication of unreal knowability and their apparent depth” culminates with an image of George Eliot’s Dorothea Brooke, yearning for the very realness that we readers possess: the result of such apparent yearning on the part of characters, Gallagher proposes, is that it “allows us to experience an uncanny yearning to be that which we already are” (“Rise of Fictionality,” 361).

18.Moretti, Way of the World, 82. Insightful recent work on the role of the episode in narrative includes Miall, “Episode Structures,” and Garrett, Episodic Poetics.

19.Or events can refuse to cohere toward an explicable telos, in which case one has, for example, serial TV. When Captain Kirk notices this failure of larger patterns to emerge in a recent Star Trek movie, he diagnoses the situation aptly: “Things are starting to feel a little . . . episodic” (Quoted in A. O. Scott, “Review: Star Trek Beyond sticks to its brand” (New York Times, July 22, 2016, C1).

20.Cf. Derrida’s notion of play as a way of understanding this looseness, the potential discrepancy that opens up between signifier and signified.

21.As I argue in chapter 6, recent works by Leah Price, Isobel Armstrong, Jennifer Roberts, and others have already helped make sense of such states of aesthetic semi-detachment, in part by undermining sharp divisions between hermeneutic and material ways of grasping the objecthood of an artwork.

22.Scott, Four-Dimensional Human, 3–4.

23.Ibid., 228.

1. PERTINENT FICTION: SHORT STORIES INTO NOVELS

1.Allen, Short Story in English, 3.

2.Poe, Review of Twice-Told Tales, 572.

3.Moretti, “Graphs, Maps and Trees,” 80. For the argument that even small inflection points in the modernist era and with the postmodernism of Borges or Barthelme have left the fundamentals of the genre unchanged, see a range of scholarly work: e.g., Pratt, “Long and Short of It”; May, New Short Story Theories; O’Connor, Lonely Voice; and Eikhenbaum, “O. Henry.” Even writers who claim to leave the 1840s far behind—e.g., Elizabeth Bowen in 1937, “The short story . . . as we now know it, is the child of this Century”—end up with nearly identical recipes for the short story’s distinctiveness: “Poetic tautness and clarity . . . self-imposed discipline and regard for form. . . . Action . . . in the short story regains heroic simplicity” (Introduction to The Faber Book of Modern, 7).

4.James, Preface to The Ambassadors, x.

5.Quoted in Korte, Short Story in Britain, 10.

6.Ibid., 9.

7.Baldwin, Art and Commerce, 1, 3.

8.Ibid., 13. Building on both Baldwin and Korte, Winnie Chan understands the 1880s upsurge and the explosion of diversity in English short fiction as a formal response to a publishing boom. In The Economy of the Short Story, Chan accordingly sees an uneasy awareness among writers in the proliferating experiments of the 1890s that demonstrates how common, and hence how vulgar and merely popular, short stories may be.

9.Cf. also Korte’s suggestion in The Short Story in Britain that English short fiction is not so much delayed as it is always already present: that is, that its genealogy can be traced smoothly back to sixteenth-century “coney-catching tales” without significant inflection points.

10.Killick, British Short Fiction, 1–2. To Killick’s point, we might also add David Stewart’s observation about “the difficulties inherent in producing writing for a mass market, rather than particular readers” which made “the Reading Public” into an inescapable preoccupation among Romantic-era writers (Romantic Magazines, 1–2).

11.Cf. also Ian Duncan’s recent argument: new work “has begun to redirect our attention from the book-based genres favored in literary history and critical canons, such as the novel, towards the other kinds and formats that made up the early nineteenth-century literary field” (“Altered States,” 53).

12.Matthews, Philosophy of the Short-Story, 73.

13.Poe, Review of Twice-Told Tales, 299.

14.For Brander Matthews, Poe’s principal acolyte, see May, New Short Story Theories, and Pratt, “Long and the Short of It.” For similar views of the genre’s key formal features and genealogy, see Eikhenbaum, “O. Henry,” and Baldwin, “Tardy Evolution of the Short Story,” 24.

15.Quoted in Killick, British Short Fiction, 14.

16.E.g., Killick’s assertion that “the relatively brief, self-contained prose fiction narrative that constitutes the modern idea of the short story does exist during the [early nineteenth century] but it is tied into a complex network of miscellaneous and comic extracts, single-volume tales, narrative essays and sketches, and other ephemeral and elastic modes of writing” (Ibid., 19).

17.For the straightforward chronicle of early short fiction in English, see Korte, Short Story in Britain. One helpful account of recent criticism that attempts to locate a long genealogy of the short-story collection as a “programmatically cosmopolitan form” is that of Johnson, Maxwell, and Trumpener (“Arabian Nights,” 247).

18.Crawford, “Bad Shepherd,” 28–29.

19.Douglas Mack has pointed out that Hogg does his best to balance the necessity and absurdity of supernatural beliefs, and Killick describes his predilection for a “zone of dispute” (Mack, “Aspects of the Supernatural”; Killick, British Short Fiction, 149).

20.Allen, “What Is a Short Story?,” 405.

21.Cecil, Introduction to The Two Drovers, viii.

22.Scott, “Two Drovers,” 259. A useful point of formal comparison may be Franco Moretti’s proposal to divide the Bildungsroman into “classification” and “transformation” novels. In the former, “events acquire meaning when they lead to one ending and one only,” while in the latter, “what makes a story meaningful is its narrativity, its being an open-ended process.” In such works, “the ending, the privileged narrative moment of taxonomic mentality, becomes the most meaningless one” (Moretti, Way of the World, 7).

23.Hogg, “Old Soldier’s Tale.”

24.McLane, Balladeering, 182. McLane sees seven often overlapping ways in which poetic authority can be generated: authority of inspiration, authority of anonymity, authority of imitative authorship, authoritative translation, editorial authority, ethnographic authority, and experiential authority. On Victorian versions of “ethnographic authority,” cf. Herbert, Culture and Anomie, and Buzard, Disorienting Fiction. Buzard’s work focuses on the “self-interrupting” narrator, a voice that creates a sense of movement between the reader’s world and a “knowable community” made up of the ethnographically grounded but quaint beliefs of various characters (34). Buzard sees such self-interruptions working in Victorian realist novels, much as free indirect discourse may, to fortify an ultimately seamless sense of realist authority.

25.Hogg, “Mr. Adamson of Laverhope,” 54.

26.Idem, “Long Pack,” 134.

27.Cf. Theissen, “Simultaneity.”

28.“Galt’s output veers disconcertingly from surges of radical, original experimentation to an all-but-mechanical reproduction of established styles and genres” (Duncan, “Altered States,” 53).

29.“Conjectural history” seems to Hewitt a more apt way to describe Galt’s fiction; he also points back to Dugald Stewart’s use of the phrase “theoretical or conjectural history” and to work on conjectural history by Mark Salber Phillips (Introduction to John Galt, 4).

30.This is sometimes ethnographic—the Scots word eydent for example inspires “the Seamstress,” a pithy Galt sketch exemplifying a particular kind of thrifty industry that Galt claims is as lacking in England as it is in English. At other times his gift is for sui generis neologism: it was in Annals of the Parish that John Stuart Mill came across and was inspired by the word “utilitarian.” (Although Mill evidently overlooks it, Bentham had used the word earlier, in 1795.)

31.Cf. Ian Duncan’s argument that “against the form of agency encoded in the entail, a teleological nostalgia that corrupts human intention, Galt poses an alternative, objective, recalcitrant narrative modality of contingency and accident” (Scott’s Shadow, 239). Ian Gordon argues that though Galt’s “photographic realism can be a snare for the reader,” a careful reading brings a strong sense of “Galt the artificer, selecting, interpreting, manipulating character and incident with . . . affection and irony, offering by implication in his picture of the small world a commentary on the impact of changing ideas in the larger world” (John Galt, 142).

32.Duncan, “Altered States,” 54.

33.On the changes c. 1830, cf. Jarrells, “Short Fictional Forms”; Killick, British Short Fiction; Duncan, “Altered States,” and Stewart, Romantic Magazines.

34.Galt, “Mem,” 8.

35.Ibid., 9.

36.Cf. the final lines of Beckett’s story “Dante and the Lobster”: “Well, thought Belacqua, it’s a quick death, God help us all. It is not.” (22).

37.Gordon, Introduction to Selected Short Stories, viii.

38.In a recent article, Matthew Wickman notes Galt’s attention in Annals of the Parish to “the great web of commercial reciprocities”; but also emphasizes that the narrator, Micah Balwhidder, is wise mainly in knowing his own ignorance of the totality: in his “comprehension of incomprehension” (“Of Tangled Webs,” 1, 3).

39.Cf. Trumpener: “Galt . . . refashion[s] the annual form to explore the temporal unevenness of development and the otherwise invisible connections between local occurrences and long-term processes, local agency, and centralizing institutions. . . . In The Entail and The Provost (both 1822) John Galt emphasizes the nonsynchronicity of historical change and the increasing invisibility of historical agency” (Bardic Nationalism, 152–53).

40.Gordon, John Galt, 133.

41.Ferris, “Scholarly Revivals,” 272.

42.Ibid., 272. “Under an emergent historicism that posited historical change as substantial rather than superficial, the reality of the past was thought to inhere in an alterity to which material remains provided access. At the same time, the truth of the past continued to be (as it always had been) a matter of present determination, that is, a function of the judgment of the historian.” These two imperatives of history—the real and the true—implied different kinds of authorship and different formal protocols.

43.A phrase that Thomas Laqueur cogently glosses in “Bodies, Details and the Humanitarian Narrative.”

44.The simultaneous advent of the Hegelian notion of “concrete universals” and the revaluing of the real or the “relic” may be germane here. Certainly it is noteworthy that the (politically reactionary) period after the Napoleonic wars (1815–30) sees a wide range of new ways in which the novel’s particularization (its turn toward realia and the documentation of unpredictably idiosyncratic moments) comes to carry a more indexical, and a more authoritative, status.

45.Hazlitt, Spirit of the Age, 87.

46.The account offered here raises some questions about Toril Moi’s claim in Henrik Isben that it is only with the naturalism of the 1890s that aesthetic idealism is dislodged as the dominant cultural form for European fiction.

47.Killick, British Short Fiction, 157, 158–59.

48.Lauster, Sketches, 12.

49.Garcha, From Sketch to Novel, 3.

50.Like Deidre Lynch’s work on eighteenth-century character and caricature in The Economy of Character, and John Bender and Michael Marinnan’s Culture of Diagram—but with a distinctive nineteenth-century focus on a more Hegelian sense of materiality, of persons as innately bodied—Lauster’s account helps readers understand what role sketches might have had in a world where urban crowding and complex economic relations impinge on the average reader’s consciousness, so that readers struggle to order their experience in new ways.

51.Garcha argues that while the fiction of the 1830s may have returned after a romantic-era detour to many of the norms of eighteenth-century fiction, it returned with some crucial differences—among them the widespread importation into the novel of the kind of description that is encoded in sketches. “Between 1820 and 1840 . . . the literary sketch’s fragmented forms and more-or-less synchronic temporality, created by ‘incomplete’ descriptive and essayistic text and a lack of plot, became more closely identified with the novel” (From Sketch to Novel, 8).

52.Poe, “Man of the Crowd,” 389.

53.Ibid., 391.

54.Ibid., 392.

55.Dickens, “Our Next-Door Neighbour,” 37.

56.Ibid., 43.

57.The utter eclipse of Hogg’s reputation between his death in 1835 and Gide’s successful championing of The Private Memoirs and Confessions in his 1947 introduction to the text is remarkable. No matter how badly Hogg’s reputation was damaged by ill-advised pruning and bowdlerizing in the posthumous The Poetical Works of the Ettrick Shepherd (1838), it seems hard to avoid the conclusion that subsequent generations of readers wanted something very different in their short fiction than what Hogg provided.

58.Korte, Short Story in Britain, 9.

59.Gallagher, “Rise of Fictionality,” 340.

60.Ian Duncan’s work in Scott’s Shadow on generic instability in the 1820s and 1830s, and Ina Ferris’s account of the shifting romantic-era relationship between the “real” and the “true” in “Scholarly Revivals” offer compelling reasons why even the most inveterate lumper will want to be a splitter in parsing the rapid transformation of British fiction, short and long form both, c. 1830. Cf. as well Hina Nazar’s recent argument that “sympathetic engagement with characters in a story, Eliot argues, encourages attentiveness to the claims of actual others” and Nazar’s interest in mobilizing “Eliot’s optimism about storytelling and a representative humanity in relation to the pessimism informing many strands of recent theory” (“Facing Ethics,” 438).

61.Cf. Andrew Miller’s The Burdens of Perfection and Rae Greiner’s Sympathetic Realism, both of which see prose fiction in the nineteenth century as deeply committed to making the reader experience what she or he comes to believe characters have themselves experienced within the novel (“Reader, I married him.”)

62.In his argument for the explosion of short stories as a separate genre post 1880, Baldwin proposes that short stories in mid-nineteenth-century Britain are dissatisfying because they aimed either to be merely descriptive sketches or “brief novels” (Art and Commerce, 10).

63.The relative paucity of Victorian stories that succeed when judged by the Poe yardstick does not mean that the readers of the day felt themselves bereft of short fiction. Ghost stories by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Sheridan Le Fanu, and others sold briskly; ethically uplifting tales like Geraldine Jewsbury’s 1857 “Agnes Lee” flourished; and there was a brisk market for short stories for children: Frances Browne’s Granny’s Wonderful Chair (1857) and Lewis Carroll’s “Sylvie and Bruno” (1895) are only the iceberg’s tip. For further examples, see the illuminating Broadview Anthology of Victorian Short Stories, ed. Dennis Denisoff.

64.Dickens, Sketches by Boz, xv.

65.Genette, Narrative Discourse Revisited, 85. Borges’s proposal that Scheherazade herself appears in one of the nested tales from One Thousand and One Nights, thus making the book’s structure truly Eschersque and recursive, belongs to the twentieth rather than to earlier centuries.

66.Aptly, the standard Oxford edition of Pickwick Papers prints a cast of “characters in the introduced stories” (Prince Bladud to Maria Lobbs), right after the dramatis personae of the novel itself (Dickens, Posthumous Papers, 33, 681, xxiii).

67.Ibid., 697.

68.Cf. Susan McNamara’s “Mirrors of Fiction” on the formal implication of overtly nested tales in Tom Jones.

69.Watt, Rise of the Novel, 285. Even critics who deny that the interpolated tales are an interruption do so by affirming that they are a feature that distinguishes eighteenth-century fiction from its aftermath: according to J. Paul Hunter, for example, “While the tales might be an ‘embarrassment’ to the expectation of organic unity, such digressive or interruptive features were not unusual in eighteenth-century narratives” (paraphrased in Williams, “Narrative Circle,” 474).

70.“The tales disrupt the conventions of formal realism, signaling instead what Roland Barthes calls the literary code. That is, while one assumes that they depict a realistic scenario of characters travelling in a stagecoach or sitting in a parlor, this representation is charged rhetorically in excess of any naturalistic scene, one which postulates a preternaturally propitious time and place for narrative to occur, the act of narrative elevated in exaggerated terms, proffered to extraordinarily receptive consumers” (Ibid., 475).

71.One noteworthy exception is Wilkie Collins’s 1859 Queen of Hearts, which, with shrewd commercial logic, transforms ten previously published short stories into a kind of novel by surrounding them with a frame-narrative and a love plot.

72.Dickens, Oliver Twist, 75.

73.Scott, Redgauntlet, 112.

74.I am grateful to David Stewart for bringing this tale to my attention. In this context, it is amusing to note that one of the fiercest critics of the use of interpolated tales in Fielding’s Joseph Andrews (1742) was Scott himself, who reported that the reader “glides down the narrative like a boat on the surface of some broad navigable river . . . [but] one exception to this praise . . . [is that] Fielding has thrust into the midst of his narrative . . . the history of Leonora, unnecessarily and inartificially” (qtd. in Williams, “Narrative Circle,” 473).

75.Dickens, Oliver Twist, 355.

76.Radcliffe, Italian, 271, 107. Leah Price pointed me to a wide range of such occasions in this text.

77.Dickens, Great Expectations, 177.

78.McNamara, “Mirrors of Fiction,” 374.

79.Dickens, Great Expectations, 456.

80.Ibid., 309–10.

81.Ibid., 413.

82.Eliot, Middlemarch, 138.

83.Ibid., 139.

84.Ibid., 169.

85.Ibid., 821.

86.Ibid., 142.

87.Williams, “Narrative Circle,” 482.

88.Cf. Nicholas Dames on the mid-nineteenth-century self-consciousness about a particular occurrence becoming a “chapter” in a life: “A group of young people spends a night at a public garden; one of them gets a little too drunk, and in the process a possible marital engagement is spoiled. It is a brief episode, ‘so short that it scarce deserves to be called a chapter at all,’ as W. M. Thackeray writes in ‘Vanity Fair.’ And yet, Thackeray continues, ‘it is a chapter, and a very important one too. Are not there little chapters in everybody’s life, that seem to be nothing, and yet affect all the rest of the history?’ Already in the eighteen-forties, the metaphor was a common one. To ‘close that chapter of my life’ with regret, to excitedly ‘start a new chapter’: these are at once experiences of reading and experiences of living. They are ways in which our lives, in fact, take on the shape of a novel” (“Chapter,” New Yorker online).

89.Moretti, Bourgeois.

90.E.g., Pratt’s thesis in “The Long and Short of It” that the story is minor, the novel its major complement.

2. MEDIATED INVOLVEMENT: JOHN STUART MILL’S
PARTIAL SOCIABILITY

1.The original Kantian impulse necessitates both an external material universe and the application, inside the mind, of the categories given by reason. Schiller’s idea of the “play drive” and the Hegelian “concrete universal” respond to the Kantian account of the imagination as that which preserves taste while nonetheless holding the original object of that taste apart from the perceiving subject.

2.Hughes, Introduction to Altrive Tales, 2.

3.Ibid., 5.

4.Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, 65.

5.Cf. Hina Nazar’s argument that in the early nineteenth century “by contrast with the a priori character it develops in many Enlightenment paradigms, judgment emerges under sentimentalism as a worldly and contingent process, one that is inextricably tied to feelings and sociability” (Enlightened Sentiments, 2). Kevin McLaughlin’s Poetic Force: Poetry After Kant offers a different genealogy of the role that Kantian aesthetics play in shaping English poetry. That account focuses on “an a priori capacity of language to free itself from having empirical content” and makes the case that “by virtue of its very ability to communicate or produce the feeling of the faculty of reason, this force of language is also accompanied by an unforce that must be felt in Kant’s writing even as it remains (perhaps aptly) unstressed” (xiv).

6.Schiller, On the Naïve and Sentimental in Literature, 42.

7.Ibid.

8.Lamb, “Dream Children,” 103.

9.Cf. Thomas Hardy’s The Well-Beloved (1892) in which a single soul seems to recur in three generations of women.

10.Schiller, On the Naïve and Sentimental in Literature, 42.

11.Mill, On Liberty, 18:220.

12.Cf. Carlisle, John Stuart Mill.

13.Appiah criticizes this aspect of Mill’s thought because it “can lead us to think that the good of individuality is reined in by or traded-off against the goods of sociability so that there is an intrinsic opposition between self and society” (“Liberalism,” 319).

14.Cf. Mill, “Coleridge.” Some recent critics stress Mill’s deep roots in Benthamite utilitarianism, while others argue that his debt to Anglo-German romanticism makes Mill value “autonomy” and the development of character as goods superior even to happiness itself. Cf. Capaldi, John Stuart Mill. There is also a recent interest in exploring Mill’s affinities with Hegelian historicism. Cf. Skorupski, “Philosophy of John Stuart Mill.” Collini provides a cogent account of Mill’s posthumous reputation in Britain in “From Sectarian Radical.”

15.Wendy Donner has aptly described Mill’s liberalism as born out of the tension between an almost monadic conception of human autonomy and a palpable yearning toward strongly knotted social ties (Liberal Self). Nancy Yousef argues that the tension in Mill’s liberalism between autonomy and the necessity for sociability was never resolved, and that it resulted in a split intellectual project. “The limited impact of Mill’s seemingly profound valuation of sociality,” she argues, is evidenced by the tension between his openness to the “light of other minds” and his craving for poetry, understood as a categorically private form of utterance (Isolated Cases, 172). This helps explain why even Habermas’s influential critique of Mill’s liberalism argues that Mill took the positive step, absent in other theorists of democracy, of arguing for the necessary rather than the contingent exclusion of the working class from suffrage.

16.Perhaps trying to have it two ways at once, Mill asserts that society “both does its duty and protects its interests” principally by not imposing its stamp on its individual members: “A person whose desires and impulses are his own—are the expression of his own nature, as it has been developed and modified by his own culture—is said to have a character. One whose desires and impulses are not his own has no character, no more than a steam engine has a character” (On Liberty, 18:264).

17.Goffman, Interaction Ritual, 5.

18.Ibid., 3.

19.Shanley, “Subjection of Women,” 398.

20.Mill, On Liberty, 18:223. The word “moral” in this context (as frequently in the “moral sciences” section of A System of Logic) is not ethical but ethnographic; Mill uses it to refer to the “self-evident and self-justifying” rules that make “custom” a “second nature . . . continually mistaken for the first” (8:220). Far from being normative, then, the “moral” instructions that society issues are liable to mold others into society’s homogeneous blueprint. By the same token, the “moral freedom” that Mill advocates for in A System of Logic consists of recognizing the ways in which one was trained, but knowing oneself capable of discarding that training should it prove inconsistent with reason: “a person feels morally free who feels that his habits and temptations are not his masters, but he theirs” (8:841).

21.Appiah, “Liberalism,” 319, emphasis in original.

22.Nightingale, “Cassandra,” 219. Although she often represents novels as enervating vessels of escapist fantasy, occasionally Nightingale will turn to the plots of novels as proof that women do in fact dream of something better than domestic confinement (cf. 226, especially).

23.Ibid., 213.

24.Mill, On Liberty, 18:260.

25.Cf. Gabriel Tarde’s discussion of “crowd and public” in his L’Opinion et la Foule and Robert Park’s Mass und Publikum in his Crowd and the Public more than three decades later.

26.Or “thought [waiting] upon feeling” (Mill, Autobiography, 1:357).

27.Amanda Anderson has discussed Mill’s commitment to the sympathy and imagination he found lacking in Bentham, the necessity of “deriving light from other minds.” She describes Mill’s final effort to reconcile the twin aspirations of justice and intersubjective sympathy as “a complex dialectic of detachment and engagement; ethical and epistemological process achieved through the flexible agency of sympathetic understanding” (Powers of Distance, 17).

28.Mill, letter to Thomas Carlyle (March 9, 1833), Earlier Letters, 143.

29.Carlyle, letter to Mill (February 22, 1833), Collected Letters, 328–39.

30.Mill, letter to Thomas Carlyle (March 9, 1833), Earlier Letters, 143.

31.In the “mental crisis” chapter of the Autobiography, Mill describes the despair he felt realizing that “to know that a feeling would make me happy if I had it, did not give me the feeling,” and his discovery that “the habit of analysis has a tendency to wear away the feelings” (1:141).

32.Compare Williams: “We are concerned with means and values as they are actively lived and felt . . . specifically, affective elements of consciousness and relationships: not feelings against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as thought” (Marxism and Literature, 132).

33.Carlyle described Mill as such a machine in a letter to his brother John.

34.Mill, “Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties,” 1:349.

35.Arendt, Life of the Mind, 216.

36.Mill, “Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties,” 1:348.

37.I am grateful to Lauren Goodlad for a vigorous response (Notre Dame, March 2008) to an earlier version of this chapter and to Elaine Hadley for subsequent discussion. Both offered insights that aided me in exploring Mill’s conflicted commitment both to the realm of reading and to the realm of direct political action.

38.Lisa Gitelman’s notion of the negotiation that occurs at moments of paradigm shifts between media helps clarify how profoundly antimodernist Mill is in one key regard. He conceives of lyric utterance as a pure conduit between the author’s feelings and the reader’s (Always Already New). He sees lyric poetry not as capable of noting and responding to its own materiality, but as a genre in search of divested, immaterial intimacy. On the interplay of solitude and necessary interaction, see Donner’s discussion of “the intersubjective dimension” of Mill’s thought (Liberal Self).

39.Mill, “Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties,” 1:348, originally published in Monthly Review, January 1833, as “What Is Poetry?”.

40.Yousef, Isolated Cases, 170–97.

41.Mill, Autobiography, 1:45. The portions of the Autobiography describing Mill’s early years were written between 1851 and 1853, but then extensively edited and revised by Mill and Harriet Taylor Mill together in 1854: her penciled notes are all over the manuscript (Robson and Stillinger, Introduction to Collected Works, 1:xix–xxv). It was also extensively revised in 1861, two years after Harriet’s death, at which point many of the more personal details were edited out (1:xxv–xxvii). One effect of this is to make the published version of the Autobiography seem oriented a great deal more toward books, and away from personalities, than earlier versions. However, some of the revisions actually have the effect of concealing how strongly Mill had stressed his formative experiences as a reader in the 1851 version. For example, there is a notable passage in the 1851 manuscript in which Mill boastfully compares himself to Plato, which he revised to a general statement about the Platonic method for the 1873 edition (Autobiography, 1:24–25).

42.When Mill fondly recalls meeting Saint-Simon, for example, he omits any personal description, instead avowing enthusiastically that “the chief fruit which I carried away from the society I saw was a strong and permanent interest in Continental Liberalism” (Ibid., 1:44). This is reminiscent in some ways of Cobbett’s Rural Rides, in which every natural detail he glimpses reminds him of some political debate raging at the time: crows look like unscrupulous bankers, starlings remind him of pensioners who eat up the national budget, etc.

43.The correspondence with Carlyle provides another useful way to think about Mill’s odd views of friendship and the role letters or printed matter could play in it. Carlyle regretted the fact that their friendship had to be carried on by letter: “We are so like two Spirits to one another, two Thinking-Machines” (Collected Letters, letter of September 24, 1833 [6:445]). By contrast Mill, in his correspondence with Carlyle and with other friends as well as in the Autobiography, sees letters and essays as the logical medium for forging a friendship; even a debate that takes place in articles published in rival journals he frequently depicts as a kind of friendly chit-chat with a kindred spirit.

44.Mill, Autobiography, 1:46.

45.Ibid., 1:47.

46.Ibid., 1:103, 105.

47.Idem, On Liberty, 18:245.

48.Ibid.

49.Ibid., 18:249, emphasis in original.

50.Mill’s On Liberty was, like his Autobiography and Utilitarianism, begun in the early 1850s, when Mill and Harriet both thought they had little time left to live, and then completed many years later. On Liberty came first in 1859; Utilitarianism and Considerations of Representative Government followed in 1861, while the Autobiography did not appear until after his death in 1873. “The death of Harriet, on 3 November, 1858 drove Mill to consider it [On Liberty] almost as a memorial to her that should never be altered by revision” (Robson, Textual Introduction to Collected Works, 18:lxxxiii). For a reconstruction of the relationship that posits a yet stronger role for Harriet in composing the works of the 1850s, see Jacobs, Voice of Harriet Taylor Mill.

51.Mill, On Liberty, 18:216.

52.Cf. Mill’s more explicit discussion of the various technical and inspirational roles that she played in the composition of the book (On Liberty, 18: 252–60). He is particularly explicit about the composition of On Liberty: “The Liberty was more directly and literally our joint production than anything else which bears my name, for there was not a sentence of it that was not several times gone through by us together, turned over in many ways, and carefully weeded of any faults. It is in consequence of this that, although it never underwent her final revision it far surpasses, as a mere specimen of composition, anything which has preceded from me either before or since” (18:257–59).

53.Ibid., 259.

54.Ibid.

55.Daston and Galison, Objectivity, 38–39.

56.Carlyle, letter to Mill (September 24, 1833), Collected Letters, 6:445.

57.Charles Taylor’s account of romanticism as a discourse of “immanent counter-Enlightenment” misreads romantic-era yearning for belief, interpreting it as a form of credulity that lacked substantial purchase in the empiricist, and even skeptical capitalist milieu characterized, from the mid-eighteenth century on, as Gallagher puts it, by “disbelief, speculation, and credit” (Gallagher, “Rise of Fictionality,”, 346).

58.Duncan, Scott’s Shadow, 120, 128–29.

59.Ibid., 120.

60.Mill, On Liberty, 18:220.

61.Cf. John Frow’s recent attempt in Character and Person to reframe the relationship between persons and characters around the questions of modes of being.

3. VISUAL INTERLUDE I / DOUBLE VISIONS

1.Summers, Real Spaces, 338.

2.Ibid., 339.

3.Ibid., 625.

4.For the particulars of how such double distance manifests in nineteenth-century unease about the impossibility of knowing in what sense an artwork claims “truth to nature,” it is worth considering Jonathan Crary’s argument in Suspensions of Perception that “attention becomes a specifically modern problem only because of the historical obliteration of the possibility of presence. . . . An immense social remaking of the observer in the nineteenth century proceeds on the general assumption that perception cannot be thought of in terms of immediacy, presence, punctuality” (4).

5.Cf. also the odd placement of hands on ledges at the picture’s bottom in Memling’s 1475 Portrait of a Man Holding a Letter, Portrait of the Young Pietro Bembo (1504–5), and Portrait of a Man (1465–70), though in all those cases there is a palpable mimetic ledge on which the fingers rest, unlike the Christ, whose fingers actually seem to rest on the painting’s own frame. Memling’s Portrait of a Young Man before a Landscape (1475–80) and Portrait of a Young Woman (1480) are more ambiguous; in the latter, the fingertips clearly spill over onto the fake marble that forms the interior frame of the painting. Similarly, in his Jans Floreins Triptych (1479), the brown robe of a supplicant spills out onto the frame without covering the text painted there and the halo of the Virgin glows like gold on top of the mundane street scene that is glimpsable in the two open windows behind her.

6.A similar logic, perhaps, to that found in his contemporary Andrea Mantegna’s almost trompe-l’oeil Mourning over the Dead Christ in which we gaze up at the prone Christ’s body from just beyond his massive, inescapably corporeal feet. As Summers puts it, “The body of Christ, acknowledgement of whose suffering was the first step in the salvation of the mediator, is shown with a kind of iconic centrality and with a kind of semi-independence, since his body does not lose dimension at the same time that his appearance is determined to the point of misshapenness by his relation to the viewer. The dead Christ is presented with an insistent physicality, which is both in light and in defiance of the laws of optics” (Real Spaces, 526).

7.Ibid., 30.

8.The role played by this spectral gesture (like the spookily foreshortened gesturing hand in “Virgin of the Annunciation” in Memling’s 1475 counterpart’s painting, Messina) is illuminated by Susie Nash’s argument that Memling’s paintings of mirrors and “reflections are often complex and clever. . . . [He seems] less interested in making a point concerning his facture of these works and their artificiality as created image, and more interested in a clever expansion and explication of his invented space and the figures in it, using them to suggest the continuation of his images beyond the painted surface” (Northern Renaissance Art, 123). Nash adds that “Memling’s paintings have settings that are so carefully and logically constructed that viewers can picture themselves in relationship to the images with some precision and even mentally enter the scene, imagining themselves walking around or through the buildings represented” (277).

9.Fried’s “Caillebotte’s Impressionism” offers one lapidary account of his overall project:

Courbet was one of two culminating figures, the other being Manet, in what I describe as an antitheatrical tradition that lay at the heart of the evolution of French painting between the middle of the eighteenth century and the advent of Manet and his generation in the 1860s. At the core of that tradition was the demand, first articulated theoretically by Denis Diderot in his writings of the 1750s and 1760s on the theater and painting, that a picture somehow establish the metaphysical illusion that the beholder does not exist, that there is no one present before the canvas. In the work of a succession of major figures from Jean-Baptiste Greuze to Jean-Francois Millet, this was to be done by closing the representation to the beholder, above all by depicting figures wholly engrossed or absorbed in actions or states of mind, who therefore were felt to be unaware of being beheld. By the 1840s and 1850s, however, [in France] the resort to absorption increasingly fell short of producing the desired effect; the figures in question tended more and more to be perceived not as truly given over to what they were doing, thinking, or feeling but as merely wishing to appear so, which, far from persuading the beholder that he had been forgotten, positively confirmed the suspicion of theatricality that the absorptive strategy had been mobilized to defeat. [And a generation later] . . . absorption’s dependence on effects of inwardness and closure on a metaphorics of “depth” was in tension with Impressionism’s emphasis on surface liveliness and what as early as 1874 was called decorative unity (4–5, 18).

10.Williams, “Bloomsbury Fraction,” 231. In 1884, William Morris called him “a genius bought and sold and thrown away” (Collected Works, 16:xx); in 1922, Beerbohm added fuel to the fire in Christmas Garland with a witty, cruel cartoon imagining the shock that the young Millais would have had confronted with “Cherry Ripe” and his older self. Cf. Debra Mancoff, “John Everett Millais,” on the rise of an account of Millais as an artist whose only greatness lay in his early commitments to a new sort of realism in art.

11.Cf. Lisa Tickner’s recent call to appreciate the ways in which Victorian art was modern by rejecting both “a modernist account of the avant-gardes (which puts English artists into a continental shadow)” and also “an eccentric genealogy of Englishness—Blake, Burne-Jones, Spenser, Bacon, Freud—largely regionalist and biographical” (“English Modernism,” 30). It also accords with Barlow’s argument that scholars should not assume that “Millais’s collusion in social convention negates the worth of his art, turning it into a mere historical document” (“Millais,” 52).

12.Cf. Tim Barringer’s gloss of Millais’s 1857 Autumn Leaves as “prophetic of artistic developments of the next two decades, as the Pre Raphaelites explored new forms of expression turning away literary narrative” (Barringer, Rosenfeld, and Smith, Pre-Raphaelites, 156).

13.This account of Millais understands him as part of the PRB impulse to, as Raymond Williams puts it, “[try] to find new and less formal ways of living among themselves . . . a corresponding rejection of the received conventions . . . [coupled with a] positive aim [of] truth to nature” (“Bloomsbury Fraction,” 230). This means attending not only to their professed aim to “have genuine ideas to express” and “to study nature attentively,” but also the Athenaeum’s pronouncement that 1856 “exactness is the tendency of the age” and to Tim Barringer’s compelling account of the impact upon Ruskin, upon Millais, and indeed upon Millais’s painting of Ruskin, of a “key aspect of the painter’s realism . . . learned from the camera” (“Antidote to Mechanical Poison,” 21). To this might be added Lindsay Smith’s argument that “the invention of the camera . . . signalled an unprecedented disturbance in a range of cultural investments in the visual” with eventual repercussions including “radical interrogat[ion of] the means by which vision is made possible,” “fascination with perceptual aberration,” and among the Pre-Raphaelites, “a more hesitant and provisional account of vision . . . with [an] odd blend of empiricism and transcendentalism” (Victorian Photography, 1–4).

14.Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance.

15.Ibid.

16.Compare Prettejohn’s recent argument that in Ford Madox Brown’s view, “a genuinely adequate history painting must not only deal with a present-day perspective and a time-based past; it must also reckon somehow with the timeless” (“Ford Madox Brown and History Painting,” 252–53).

17.Although it does not seem to have become a more widespread preoccupation in the nineteenth century, such interstices, doomed spaces in which unrecoverable events occur, are an interesting kind of narrative annex-space: there is a John Galt story from the 1830s told from the perspective of a daughter of Noah who gets left behind (“The Deluge”).

18.Hence, presumably (since numbers 1 to 4 came out between January and April 1850) written in early 1850.

19.Millais, Life, 1:67.

20.Millais was very fond of Keats, and especially of The Eve of St. Agnes: he painted Keats’s Madeline, both drew and etched Tennyson’s “St. Agnes,” and in the first days of the PRB, assisted Hunt in finishing his “The flight of Madeline and Porphyro during the drunkenness attending the revelry (The Eve of St. Agnes)” (1848). It is possible to see in this not-quite-story the lineaments of that poem’s plot.

21.Helmreich, Nature’s Truth, 23.

22.On photography and the Pre-Raphaelites, see Barringer, “Antidote to Mechanical Poison,” and Roberts, “Certain Dark Rays”; on the epistemic virtue of objectivity see Daston and Galison, “Objectivity.”

23.Pamela Smith has recently asked, “Why did naturalism in painting arise simultaneously with the new science?” and answered by positing an “artisanal epistemology” that was “incorporat[ed] into the new science of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries” (Body of the Artisan, viii). It may be worth looking at the Pre-Raphaelites as early practitioners of a new “objective epistemology.”

24.Cf. Jennifer Roberts’s recent analysis of how nineteenth-century American paintings register their own materiality and the challenges associated with their movement through the world: “Art history needs to look beyond the theories of illusion, representation, and iconography that underlie its formation as a modern discipline and confront the unavoidable material basis of its referential operations, the weight and heft of which its images are made. Likewise, although material culture offers inroads to the interpretation of things, it reaches a methodological impasse with representation, which by definition signifies something beyond the material specificity of the work” (Transporting Visions, 162–63).

25.Times, May 5, 1860.

26.Millais, Life, 145.

27.Roberts, “Certain Dark Rays,” 64.

28.Ibid.

29.Barlow, Time Present, 18.

30.This aligns with an observation Julie Codell makes about Millais’s project of conveying the inward experience of fleeting moments of intense emotion: “The Virgin’s off-balance leanings and Christ’s angling towards her for a comforting kiss are [an] emphatic rendering of bodily motion for which they were sharply criticized as displaying an eccentric predilection for joints” (“Empiricism,” 122–23). Codell’s account of Millais’s struggle to depict “the fugitive nature of emotions” explicitly links the PRB with ongoing empirical investigations into the transitory nature of emotions among scientists of the day.

31.“Pathological Exhibition at the Royal Academy (Noticed by our Surgical Advisor),” Punch 19 (May 18, 1850): 198.

32.Giebelhausen, Painting the Bible, 101, summarizing contemporary critical reception.

33.“Royal Academy Exhibition,” Builder (June 1, 1850): 255–56.

34.I am grateful to Nicholas Robbins for comments about those shavings during a presentation of this work at the Yale Art History Department, November 2015.

35.“Pictures of the Season,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (July 1850): 82.

36.Qtd. in Marsh, Pre Raphaelites, 32.

37.Qtd. in Andres, Pre-Raphaelite Art, 9

38.Dickens, “Old Lamps for New Ones,” Household Words 12 (June 15, 1850): 12–14.

39.Bullen’s points out that Dickens’s piece differs from the immediate wave of reviews in being “a meditated and carefully targeted attack,” in being written about only a single painting, and in being virtually a unique foray into art criticism by a writer, as Bullen puts it, “whose knowledge of painting was self-confessedly limited” (Pre-Raphaelite Body, 15).

40.Ibid., 17.

41.“Physiognomic immediacy,” Bullen goes on to argue, “was interpreted by Dickens and his contemporaries in entirely negative terms” (Ibid., 16, 17). Interestingly, Landow argues that Millais “turns the coarse details of genre painting into spiritual fact” (Victorian Types, 123); is this a possibility that Dickens overlooks, or one that outrages him because it points toward, as Bullen suggests, a taste for “grotesque physiognomy” that Dickens links to “Catholic art”? (Pre-Raphaelite Body, 19).

42.Giebelhausen hears Dickens responding as if to blasphemy: “The temple has been desecrated” (Painting the Bible, 105). Cf. Giebelhausen’s idea that Christ in the House of His Parents “mobilized a defense strategy that relied on the key values of academic theory—nature and beauty. They provided strong moral categories when turned into their opposites: Unnatural and ugly. Both terms possessed great potential for metaphorisation through which the periodical press pathologised the Pre-Raphaelite project. In the morally charged language deployed to defend the established orthodoxy, the alternative aesthetic of the Pre-Raphaelites was conceptualised as heresy” (“Academic Orthodoxy,” 176).

43.We are very far, at this moment, from George Eliot’s 1873 praise of Burne Jones, “Your work makes life larger and more beautiful to me”; Thomas Hardy’s 1878 journal entry, “To Grosvenor Gallery. Seemed to have left flesh behind and entered a world of the soul”; far even from Gaskell’s 1859 letter to Charles Norton: “I am not going to define and shape my feelings and thoughts at seeing either Rossetti’s or Hunt’s pictures into words; because I did feel them deeply and after all words are coarse things” (all qtd. in Andres, Pre-Raphaelite Art, xvi).

44.Qtd. in Ackroyd, Dickens, 463.

45.Buchanan, Fleshly School of Poetry, 34.

46.Barlow, Time Present, 18.

47.Prettejohn, Art of the Pre-Raphaelites, 189–90. Pursuing this line of thought even further, Giebelhausen stresses how “ambiguous and demanding” Millais’s painting is, and makes the case that “the demands this picture makes of the viewer are diametrically opposed to those traditionally associated with high art. Millais inverted Reynolds’s famous dictum of painting’s inferiority to poetry: “what is done by painting, must be done at one blow” (Painting the Bible, 114).

48.Prettejohn, Art of the Pre-Raphaelites, 190.

49.Cf. Prettejohn’s recent argument that Brown’s paintings offer an avenue toward religious experience (a supplement or a replacement) by letting you see something that exists only within your own retrospective conception of the event—the holiness marked by those halos (“Ford Madox Brown and History Painting,” 244).

50.Giebelhausen intriguingly links the way that Millais “combined deliberate anachronisms with an aggressive realism that flew in the face of academic conventions” to Anna Jameson’s praise, in her 1848 Sacred and Legendary Art, for “so-called anachronisms in devotional subjects, where personages who lived at different and distant periods of time are found grouped together” (Painting the Bible, 114). Lindsay Errington’s conclusion that Christ in the House of His Parents “suffers from his multiplicity of purpose” is perhaps an extension of just this contemporary unease with Pre-Raphaelite experimentation (Social and Religious Themes, 247).

51.Prettejohn discusses ways in which Ford Madox Brown’s history paintings (e.g., Cromwell on his Farm [1874]) made viewers simultaneously aware of the past, the present viewing scene, and a kind of timeless space of art: “Besides the timed and the timeless, then, there is a third temporality at work: the perspective of the modern artist, or spectator, from which either the timed or the timeless aspect of the subject is necessarily viewed simultaneously” (“Ford Madox Brown and History Painting,” 252). On the one hand, Brown spent a great deal of energy trying to enter into the mindset of Cromwell at this moment of retreat, on the other hand, in his essay of 1850, “On the Mechanism of a Historical Picture,” Brown advises that when it comes to impersonating historical figures one should study the character by acting it out in a looking-glass. So Cromwell is a portrait of Brown himself. This is not mere vanity, but a curious kind of invitation: you, too, should imagine your own face in this position as you undergo a moment of tribulation—your seeing my face on Cromwell is in fact an invitation to you to put your face and your own feelings there, as well.

52.Leonard, “Picturing,” 266.

53.Ibid.

54.Helsinger, “Listening,” 409.

55.Prettejohn, Art for Art’s Sake, 7–8; Alma-Tadema is not mentioned in the book.

56.In understanding Alma-Tadema’s relationship to the commercially successful painting of his day and to movements like the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, I have profited from Elizabeth Prettejohn’s account of Leighton as both aesthete and academic painter. Rather than disavowing Leighton’s connection to the Academy, Prettejohn argues that figuring the academic “as a theoretical category . . . can open fresh perspectives on the aesthetic debates of the nineteenth century—particularly debates involving formalism and intentionality. . . . Leighton’s academic position can help us to rescue current art history from its recidivist bias toward Modernist aesthetics” (“Leighton,” 34). Although I do not pursue the argument about Alma-Tadema’s cultural prestige and its relationship to his academic orientation here, Prettejohn’s analysis seems to me to open the door for a helpful attention to the intentions and the formal conceptions that motivate what Alma-Tadema describes as his “antique genre” paintings as well as the “flawless” or “polished” surfaces that drove Fry to excoriate him in 1913, declaring that Alma-Tadema “caters with amazing industry and ingenuity . . . for an extreme of mental and imaginative laziness” (“Case of the Late Sir Lawrence,” 666.)

57.Prettejohn, “Lawrence Alma-Tadema,” 125.

58.In a preparatory sketch, the three listeners, all female, recline against one another, with the third figure actually playing the lyre that rests against the wall in the finished painting. Reproduced in Barrow, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, 124; dated 1884–85.

59.Alma-Tadema owned a photographic reproduction of the ancient statue in question.

60.That absent third, the subject of the rivalry, may also (as Kate Flint acutely pointed out to me) be implicitly referenced by the presence of the Three Graces high up on the wall to the right.

61.On the general implications of painting names in the Victorian period, see Ruth Yeazell, Picture Titles.

62.Eliot, Middlemarch, ch. 81.

63.Ibid.

64.Cf. David Kurnick’s account of Middlemarch’s “conflation of detachment and surrender, of inattention and over-attentiveness” (“Erotics of Detachment,” 587). Kurnick’s intriguing notion of critical detachment as itself a compulsion of the flesh resonates with my own account of those moments in which detachment looks like something that occurs only in situ, and only to characters who are grappling as much with physical and social anchors as with their own mental processes.

65.Mill, “Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties,” 1:362.

66.Browning, Men and Women, 183.

67.Cf. Sider’s recent account of Browning’s relationship to a “Victorian discourse of exemplarity, in which public address and personated intimacy commingle.” He sees Browning’s poems as offering “a fantasy of relation . . . in which the character’s way of imagining his or her transmission and reception anticipates the transmission and reception of the poem itself as a public and circulated object” (“Dramatic Monologue,” 1137).

68.The poem’s narrator even addresses distant Galuppi from modern England—“I was never out of England—it’s as if I saw it all”—even though Browning probably wrote the poem while in Venice (Browning, “Tocatta,” 39–42 in Men and Women, line 9).

69.Ibid., lines 19–21.

70.The poem ends by ejecting the speaker into a disenchanted world:

Dear dead women, with such hair, too—what’s become of all the gold
Used to hang and brush their bosoms? I feel chilly and grown old.

(Ibid., lines 44–45)

There’s no hair to hang the tale on. Like the wrenching perspective shift that leaves everything “cold” at the end of Keats’s The Eve of St. Agnes (“And they are gone: ay, ages long ago / These lovers fled away into the storm”), Browning’s ending suggests that poems impersonate the palpable presence a thing ought to provide—but ultimately, insidiously, undermine just such solidity.

4. VIRTUAL PROVINCES, ACTUALLY

1.Gallagher, “Rise of Fictionality,” 340.

2.There are various ways to understand how fiction departs from and returns to the purposive, developmentally ordered world. In the spirit of Anne-Lise Francois’s fascinating notion of literature’s capacity to register or produce “desistance” from “heroic, goal-oriented energies” (Open Secrets, 33), Elisha Cohn’s recent Still Life approaches the question of the relationship between novel and actual world by emphasizing “a common structure of evasion—a quiet rhythm or ‘visionary hollow’—in the story of development, where the burdens of self-making are held at bay” (184). Cohn sees a wide array of novelists who “propose a non-instrumental understanding of narrative by limiting the novel’s efforts at theorizing the mind, and instead put narrative in a lyric mood” (Ibid., 6).

3.Mitford, Works of Mary Russell Mitford, 7.

4.Ibid.

5.Austen, Janes Austen’s Letters, 468–69.

6.Buzard, Disorienting Fiction, 3–18.

7.Mitford, Works of Mary Russell Mitford, 7.

8.Bakhtin, “Forms of Time,” 248, 229.

9.Distinct from the metropolis—that is, I have argued that in the regional novel, an intriguing variant of the provincial novel, the world is marked as peculiarly distinct from other provinces, as well (Plotz, Portable Property, 93–121).

10.Duncan, “Provincial or Regional Novel,” 320–26.

11.Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees, 52.

12.Joseph Rezek has recently offered a somewhat different reading of provincial literature, stressing romantic-era instances to different effect: “A paradox arises throughout modernity: that a great work of literature is both particular and universal, that it arises from a distinct context defined by a unique worldview with its own internal values, and also that it transcends that context, that worldview, and those values. . . . The opposed concepts mutually inform each other in a profoundly circular logic: the representation of particularity provides access to a universal truth, while universality accrues meaning and importance to the particular. . . . Caught in an impossible wish that their works be accepted as both national and universal, provincial authors offered powerful claims for the unique place of literature in society. . . . The aesthetics of provinciality consists of a range of representational modes, derived from geographically inflected cultural subordination, that vacillate between national and universal conceptions of art; it takes refuge in the belief that literature enjoys an exalted role in human affairs” (London, 14–15). The appeal of Rezek’s model of provinciality is that it allows him a way out of a narrowly nationalist conception of literary production in a period in which questions of attachment to the metropolitan center and its near monopoly of the means of literary production is paramount: thus, Rezek’s claim to map Casanova’s model of early twentieth-century Paris to early nineteenth-century London. One potential drawback to this model’s application to the Victorian era is that it proves an imperfect predictor of the ways that literary production develops in the intervening half century. Specifically, the provinciality that so offends Arnold is also, for a writer like Eliot, a strangely empowering position. The same “Greater Britain” (cf. Duncan Bell’s recent work) that generates distance effects also generates a sense of omnipresent attachment: a society of mediation in which anyone anywhere has a differentiated but also a potentially common access to the culture’s finest products. The life of the provinces is shaped by being a life that is available in the metropolis, as well: this is an economy that satisfies both the provincial and the urban cosmopolite, because there is enough shared experience for the differences to be (pleasingly) visible.

13.Trollope, Barchester Towers, 1.

14.Recent criticism has stressed the distinctive features of Victorian serial fiction; I have argued against projecting backward onto Victorian fiction too many of the formal features of the serial forms of our own day (Plotz, “Serial Pleasures”).

15.Locke, Essay, 100.

16.Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees, 53, 54.

17.Chapter 7 discusses the rise of the frequently map-centric genre of “secondary world” fantasy, of the Tolkien variety. For a discussion of one of the rare exceptions to that rule, see Joanna Taylor’s recent article, “(Re-)Mapping the ‘native vale,’” on a hand-drawn map that accompanies the ms. of Sara Coleridge’s 1837 Phantasmion.

18.Cf. on novelistic reverie, Arata, “On Not Paying Attention.”

19.Review of Dracula, 363–64.

20.Stevenson, Letters, 151.

21.Qtd. in Sweet, Introduction to The Woman in White, xvi.

22.“Eliot invites us into an imaginative space that is characterized not as a state of mind but as a location” argues Alison Byerly, as part of her persuasive claim that in the period a “booming market developed for realistic representations of popular locations, and new ways of representing place . . . seemed to offer themselves as substitutes for actual travel” (Are We There Yet?, 28).

23.Gaskell, Wives and Daughters, 3; idem, Cranford, 1.

24.Eden, Semi-Detached House, 223. Emily Eden also deserves ancestral credit and acknowledgment in this book for coining the word “semi-detached” in 1859 to describe houses that share a “party” wall (less successful was her suggestion that people living on the other side of your house should be called your “semi-detachment.”)

25.Williams, Country and the City, 197–215.

26.Trollope, Warden, 18.

27.Reprinted in Smalley, Trollope, 509–10.

28.Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, 277.

29.Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 35.

30.Ibid., 33, 51.

31.Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees, 52–53.

32.Arnold, “Literary Influence,” 46.

33.Cf. Rezek: “In Romantic-era Scotland, provinciality was a productive state of mind for novelists, not one to be lamented in the name of an indigenous national tradition. They played around with the idea of the London book trade as much as they played with the idea of a distinctive national culture, and the idea that literature transcends nationalized definitions of culture. . . . The same is true for American novels from the 1820s that stage the union of an English or Anglicized figure with an American one. . . . It is the explicit nature of its reckoning with English readers that assigns to provincial literature an important role in the consolidation of Romantic idealizations of the literary” (London, 147–48).

34.Larkin, “I Remember,” 82.

35.See Coriale, “Gaskell’s Naturalist.”

36.Menely, “Travelling in Place.”

37.Eliot, Middlemarch, 483.

38.Ibid.

39.Hardy, Tess, 37.

40.Idem, Jude, 87.

41.Ibid., 324.

42.Eliot, Middlemarch, 484.

43.Wells, “Plattner,” 38–39.

44.“Even with a microscope directed on a water-drop we find ourselves making interpretations which turn out to be rather coarse; for whereas under a weak lens you may seem to see a creature exhibiting an active voracity into which other smaller creatures actively play as if they were so many animated tax-pennies, a stronger lens reveals to you certain tiniest hairlets which make vortices for these victims while the swallower waits passively at his receipt of custom. In this way, metaphorically speaking, a strong lens applied to Mrs. Cadwallader’s match-making will show a play of minute causes producing what may be called thought and speech vortices to bring her the sort of food she needed” (Middlemarch, 58–59).

45.My account is based on a close acquaintance with only about a tenth of her published work, including The Chronicles of Carlingford (i.e., Salem Chapel, The Rector, The Doctor’s Family, The Perpetual Curate, Miss Marjoribanks, and Phoebe Junior), A Beleaguered City, Hester, and Kirsteen.

46.Cf. Langbauer’s description of Oliphant, along with Charlotte Yonge, as a writer of “domestic realism” for whom “the everyday seems to refuse ideal solutions. It insists that there is no utopia outside of ideology’s confines” (Novels of Everyday Life, 58). My account of Oliphant as aware of what it means to be trapped in unwelcome circumstances, forced to act according to predetermined patterns despite one’s own awareness of what a better path may be, is also indebted to Langbauer’s astute analysis of the way that the cyclical and the “spiraling circuit” can seem to those readers and critics who dislike “trivial” or “domestic” and quintessentially “feminine” writing with the erosion of any “essential meaning or value”; a “limbo” of “spiraling circuits” (Ibid., 52).

47.Elsie Michie’s recent analysis of the motivations—both noble and carnal—of Oliphant’s heroines describes Phoebe as acting from “both altruistic and self-interested” motives, which strikes me as a description that applies to a much broader range of Oliphant’s protagonists than one would expect of a canonized, “reputable” novelist of her day (Vulgar Question of Money, 168). As Michie puts it, Oliphant is interested in “the ideological crossover between the two courses that have been represented as polar opposites in the traditional marriage lot: wealth and virtue” (170).

48.Oliphant’s own life as a perpetually straitened professional writer, robbed of the freedom both to reflect at leisure and to relax, living always within earshot of domestic travail, able only rarely to achieve the partial separation that let her write what she wanted, must have played a crucial role in both what is most memorable about her fiction—and in her bitter envy of Eliot.

49.Oliphant, Autobiography, 15. Joanne Shattock’s insightful and astute account of the negotiations between Oliphant and John Blackwood during the composition and publication of The Perpetual Curate makes an explicit comparison between the “criticism and even interference” that Oliphant learned to bear “with a minimum of fuss, and the delicate and it would seem more deeply sympathetic relationship that developed between George Eliot and her first publisher” (“Making of a Novelist,” 121). The differences between Eliot and Oliphant were not then simply about pay-scale (Eliot earned at least three times as much per novel as Oliphant [122]) but also about the insulation of the novelist’s prose and plotting from editorial intrusion—which is just the sort of irritating, meddling incursions that Oliphant so astutely anatomizes in her work.

50.This accords with Valerie Sander’s notion that “Oliphant’s novels are concerned with distinguishing between the theatrical gestures performed by women who make a drama out of a crisis, and the secret inner lives of those who truly feel” (“Mrs. Oliphant,” 188). I don’t feel confident enough in relating fiction to fact to share Sanders’s judgment that “the novels suggest Oliphant saw freely displayed emotion, especially in women, as a sign of weakness” (183). Sanders’s observations are a response to Oliphant’s interest in characters who register the gap between what their social role demands of them and what they can safely display of their own feelings. It is also worth remarking that characters who feel and keep silent provide valuable occasions for Oliphant to explore the gap, ever fascinating to her, between subjective experience and outward action.

51.Oliphant continues: “You may sneer at the common place necessity, yet it is one; and it is precisely your Zenobias and Holingsworths your middle-aged people who have broken loose from family and kindred and have no events in their lives, who do all the mischiefs, and make all the sentimentalisms and false philosophies in the world. When we come to have no duties, except those that we ‘owe to ourselves’ or ‘to society’ woe to us!” (“Modern Novelists,” 96.)

52.Langland rightly stresses the social protest woven through Oliphant’s novels—and the price they paid in prestige and reputation for “challenging . . . so many Victorian sacred cows—romance, angels, feminine duty, innocence, passivity, and the separation of home and state” (Nobody’s Angels, 153).

53.Elisabeth Jay captures the mixed motives that shape Frank Wentworth’s actions before his aunts: “His decision to abide by his principles, even though they have been foolishly invested in non-essential symbols, has little to do with spirituality and everything to do with that dangerously nebulous, characteristically nineteenth-century concept: Conduct becoming in a gentleman” (Mrs Oliphant, 85).

54.Oliphant, Perpetual Curate, 1:60.

55.Levine, “Reading Margaret Oliphant,” 236.

56.Banfield draws on a modified version of Chomsky’s generative grammar to suggest that there has always existed within language a potential that is more perfectly exercised in the written word than it could ever be in speech: the potential to create an entirely constative utterance unassociated with any identifiable speaker. Banfield is rigorous about separating out the two forms of language: “It is in the language of narrative fiction that literature departs most from ordinary discourse and from those of its functions which narrative reveals as separable from language itself. . . . In narration language can be studied not as a system of signs or communication but in itself. . . . In narrative, subjectivity or the expressive function of language emerges free of communication and confronts its other in the form of a sentence empty of all subjectivity” (Unspeakable Sentences, 10). Banfield’s account of the role played by free indirect discourse is useful in understanding this kind of moment in Oliphant because it clarifies what it might it mean for characters not to be sure of their own perspective.

57.James, “London Notes,” 455.

58.James acknowledges the tension here: he is praising her for moments where she pushes beyond what her readership expected of her, and faulting her for providing the kind of product her audience sought and paid for: “She worked largely from obligation—to meet the necessities and charges and pleasures and sorrows of which she had a plentiful share. She showed in it all a sort of sedentary dash—an acceptance of the day’s task and an abstention from the plaintive note from which I confess I could never withhold my admiration” (Ibid., 453). James’s tone throughout is complex: ambivalent admiration from a distance. He praises Oliphant as a writer who can court difficulties like Wentworth’s sermon. Yet he also notes, with a mixture of admiration and disdain, her prudent professional reasons sailing out of those complications again, seemingly without a backward glance.

59.Oliphant, Autobiography, 155.

60.In that sense, I grant Oliphant more credit than Levine recently has: “While I do not claim that her work pushes the limits of Victorian form—in the way that, obviously, Charles Dickens and George Eliot do—Oliphant often explores consciousness with a subtlety and intricacy that the apparently easy lucidity of her style can disguise” (Reading Margaret Oliphant, 233).

61.This account aligns well with D’Albertis’s view of how subjectivity is depicted in Oliphant’s novels: “In eschewing depths, the romantic model of subjectivity offered both by Charlotte Brontë’s domestic fiction and George Eliot’s novelistic art, Oliphant rejected neither literary meaning, nor the personal, but a particular way of creating value out of these things” (“Domestic Drone,” 825).

62.Quoted in Jay, Mrs Oliphant, vii.

63.Oliphant, Autobiography, 14.

64.Oliphant’s novels, then, merit the praise Corbett lavishes on her (posthumously published) Autobiography, because the novels, too, make clear the struggles of “middle-class women who worked for money, who spoke out publicly, and who tried to represent the difficulties of doing so even as they sought a form and idiom that would enable them to represent themselves” (Representing Femininity, 106).

65.Cooper, Scenes from Provincial Life, 45.

66.Amis, Lucky Jim, 24.

67.See both the introduction and the conclusion for discussion of the advantages and pitfalls of offering a decade-by-decade genealogy of shifting ideas about aesthetic semi-detachment and partial absorption.

5. EXPERIMENTS IN SEMI-DETACHMENT

1.“Plato states that artisans cannot be put in charge of the shared or common elements of the community because they do not have the time to devote themselves to anything other than their work. They cannot be somewhere else because work will not wait” (Ranciere, Politics of Aesthetics, 7; emphasis in original).

2.Dickens, Hard Times, 35.

3.There is a longer genealogy to this approach, partially rooted in British cultural studies, especially in Raymond Williams’s account of culture as base rather than superstructure. Williams’s preoccupation with how the “common people” were integrated into, or written out of, the aesthetic realm led among its intellectual descendants to a two-pronged project (or perhaps a double-edged one) in Victorian studies over the past three decades. One strand led to the evidentiary project of finding stories not told, or not retold; and of recovering by way of textual analysis lives and experiences lost (cf. David Vincent, Bread, Knowledge and Freedom, Jonathan Rose, Intellectual Life, and Ian Haywood, Revolution in Popular Literature, as well as such textual history as Seth Koven’s recent Match Girl and the Heiress). The other strand led to projects that struggled to make sense of the representation of “the people” within the aesthetic sphere. Bruce Robbins’s 1986 The Servant’s Hand and Alex Woloch’s 2003 The One vs. The Many epitomize two decades of attempts to grapple with the role played within nineteenth-century fiction by depictions of “the worker” and the implications that such depictions have for the sorts of freedom and access to power that are possible for actual working-class subjects.

4.Ranciere, Politics of Aesthetics, 41.

5.There are inklings of this idea already in Ranciere’s Nights of Labor, his account of Fourierist utopic thinking among French artisans, c. 1830.

6.Conrad, Lord Jim, 4.

7.Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, 299–300.

8.“Dickens’s additions are often to do with two connected matters: with temporal shifts and with added meta-levels, offering a double density of story-forward and recall—backward in emphatic denial of the simple linear straightforwardness of time, of sentences, and of narrative” (Davis, “Deep Reading,” 67).

9.Bender and Marrinan, Culture of Diagram, 81.

10.Austen, Emma, 24.

11.Bender and Marrinan, Culture of Diagram, 81.

12.Lukacs, “Ideology of Modernism,” 19–20.

13.Ibid., 20.

14.Williams, Country and the City, 165.

15.Ibid., 180.

16.James, Review of Middlemarch, reprinted in George Eliot: Critical Heritage, 357.

17.Eliot, Middlemarch, 36.

18.Ibid., 354.

19.Ibid.

20.Welsh, “Later Novels,” 62.

21.Eliot, Middlemarch, 354.

22.Cf. Andrew Miller’s discussion in The Burdens of Perfection of the optative in Victorian fiction, esp. 198.

23.Eliot, Middlemarch, 93.

24.Ibid., 772.

25.Ibid.

26.Cf. Plotz, “No Future? The Novel’s Pasts” for another version of this argument, via a reading of Our Mutual Friend.

27.Eliot, Middlemarch, 188.

28.Ibid., 271–72.

29.Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such, 3.

30.Ibid.

31.Ibid., 100.

32.Ibid., 101.

33.Merton devotes a fascinating paragraph and footnote to delineating, enviously, fiction’s capacity to “capture” consciousness. “To capture all the details of an individual’s definition of a situation would presumably require a complete and literal recording of his responses as they occur. The technique of the interior monologue—codified if not invented by the symbolist Edouard Dujardin and brought nearer to perfection by James Joyce—is one kind of literary device designed for the purpose of describing, in cinematic style, the imagined details of ongoing human experiences. In place of literary craft, we can conceive a technological contrivance—an introspectometer, say—which would record, in accurate and intimate detail, all that the individual perceives as he takes part in social interaction or is exposed to various situations. . . . Since no such device exists at this writing, the nearest equivalent available to the interviewer is to have each subject act as his own introspectometer during the interview” (Merton, Fiske, and Kendall, Focused Interview, 22–23). For a further discussion of Merton’s introspectometer, cf. Lemov, Database of Dreams, 232.

34.Proust, “Preface to Sésame,” 112.

35.Ibid., 100.

36.Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 12.

37.James, Preface to The Ambassadors, xxiii.

38.James, Ambassadors, 325–26.

39.Joyce, “Dead,” 166.

40.Cohn, Transparent Minds, 11–13.

41.Cameron, Thinking in Henry James, 1.

42.John Frow’s recent acute discussion of the different “modes” of life that belong to actual human beings and to literary characters has been extremely helpful to me on the questions this section explores. Cf. inter alia, “Characters and persons are at once ontologically discontinuous and logically interdependent” (Character and Person, vii).

43.James, “Noble Life,” 277.

44.Idem, Preface to The Ambassadors, xix.

45.Ibid., xxiii.

46.In his “Notes for The Ivory Tower,” James stresses the importance of “joints” in writing fiction; that is, sites at which force traveling in one direction is transformed into a transverse force. (e.g., “What I want is to get my right firm joints, each working on its own hinge, and forming together the play of my machine: they are the machine, and when each of them is settled and determined it will work as I want it. The first of these, definitely, is that Gray does inherit, has inherited” [223].) This is a helpful analogy with which to think of James’s interest in how events are translated into experiences, and how the event of reading a novel is transformed into a reader’s experience of that novel. The image of “joint” also sheds light on the relationship that James imagines in the New York edition between the prefaces and the novels themselves.

47.Preface to The Ambassadors, xxii.

48.This differs from the account offered by Bersani (“Jamesian Lie,” 143).

49.A complementary notion—that the novel makes visible facts about other minds and even one’s own mind that the linguistic exchanges of everyday life never could—is central to Ann Banfield’s account, in Unspeakable Sentences, of the valuable light that fiction, and specifically free indirect discourse, can shed on modern notions of subjectivity. Mikhail Bakhtin’s account of the novel’s capacity to record sociolects (the polyglossia of the real world) hinges on the novelist’s capacity to notice and record actually occurring linguistic interactions and deformations. By contrast, Banfield stresses the novel’s capacity to capture nuances of subjective orientation toward any given statement, which she understands as qualitatively distinct from what happens in spoken interaction. Just because we recognize something as subjective does not mean that we automatically assign it to a particular person. In ordinary speech, this dissociation is impossible to discern, because any utterance is automatically pegged to a speaker unless disavowed. In a novel, though, utterances can become detached from their speakers in ways that ordinary speech will not (normally) sustain.

Through narrative, language is revealed to contain another sense of subjectivity than the one directly displayed by the act of saying “I.” The particular expressive elements and constructions are in the sentences in which they appear as the traces of this subjectivity (Unspeakable Sentences, 97).

By Banfield’s account,

It is narrative style which strips the social mask for the self and shows behind the speaking I the silent shifting point of consciousness which is the I’s special reference. In narrative then, language can be seen as the repository of an objective knowledge of subjectivity (Ibid.).

Banfield’s argument makes sense of the ways in which James tests the limits of the novel’s capacity to make present a “silent shifting point of consciousness” that makes the voice of his novels at once personal and impersonal—that explains the wry semi-detachment of a corrective utterance like “that indeed might be.” While key “scenic” business gets accomplished, narrative prose (thanks to its introspective “representative” capacity) can move the reader inside the mind of a character who is watching crucial scenic matters unfold—or even, as in the case of Strether, not watching what is occurring right in front of his face.

50.James, Sense of the Past, 112–13.

51.Idem, “Notes for The Sense of the Past,” 292–93.

52.In editing this passage, James added the word “warm” to the typescript, possibly in order to underscore the subjective quality of the pull Ralph is feeling (Henry James Papers for The Sense of the Past, MS Am 1237.8, Binder 8).

53.Ibid., Leaf 3; cf. Fig. 1. Cf. Thurschwell’s illuminating account of the relationship between Bosanquet and James—as well as his relationship to her typewriter. Bosanquet herself reports James saying that “he had reached a stage where the click of the Remington acted as a positive spur” and that “it all seems to be much more effectively and unceasingly pulled out of me in speech than in writing” (575).

54.Ibid., Binder 8.

55.Additional evidence that this confusion between words that belong to the novelist and those that belong to James continued in those final months of James’s life also appears in those poignant and ultimately uninterpretable final fragments that James dictated in his final two days, which Lubbock, Edel, and later interpreters have been unable to classify definitively. Did James think of them as letters to his actual siblings, were they bits of a new novel about the Napoleonic era, or were they dictated when James actually believed himself to be “Napoléone”? (Henry James Letters, 4:811; cf. Henry James Papers, 44m–456.)

56.James, “Henry James’s First Interview,” 138, 144.

57.James, “Within the Rim,” 11.

58.James, “Notes for The Sense of the Past,” 292.

59.Ibid., 291–92.

60.James mentions having recommenced The Sense of the Past in a letter that also describes his near-perpetual focus on the ongoing war as effectively annihilating his sense of self—except when writing: “Really one has too little of a self in these days to be formulated in any manner at all; one’s consciousness is wholly that of the Cause . . . save that is, for two or three hours each forenoon, when I have come back to the ability to push a work of fiction of sorts uphill at the rate of about an inch a day” (Henry James Letters, 751).

61.Its kissing cousin, rat-tat-tat, has two onomatopoetic meanings. Ever since the 1770s, rat-tat-tat has been used both for knocks on the door and small-arms fire (first usages in 1774 and 1779, respectively). One might argue, in fact, that the overlap between the sound of a knock and of a gunshot makes these onomatopoetic homonyms themselves a test of language’s carrying capacity. It is one thing for “where” and “wear” to sound the same, or for “tattoo” of a drum and “tattoo” on the skin to sound and look the same (one is Anglo-Saxon and the other Tahitian in origin); but quite another for knocks and bullets to converge on a single onomatopoetic word.

62.William is the great word-coiner in the James family, with 116 OED first-author credits, but Henry had his fair share at 38. It is, however, worth noting that none are from The Sense of the Past, that the only James coinage later than 1909 is “constation” and that approximately eighty percent of his coinages were translations from the French.

63.In addition, two colleagues (Laurel Bossen and Seth Lerer) reported hearing echoes of the opening chords of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony in the triumphantly open ending: rat-tat-tat-AH.

64.Michel Foucault’s “What Is an Author?” even adds “a laundry bill” as possibly poetical, if written by a poet (118).

65.During, “Literary Subjectivity,” 39, 49.

66.The passage continues: “All other appearances may be fallacious; but the appearance of a difference is a real difference. Appearances too, like other things, must have a cause; and that which can cause any thing, even an illusion, must be a reality.” (Mill, “Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties,” 1:343.)

67.One comic variation on the Ganymede problem of the misattributed character comes in Randall Jarrell’s Pictures from an Institution. That work features a literature professor who specializes in the eighteenth-century poet Cowper, but who finds himself—because the poet’s name is pronounced like that of James Fenimore Cooper—often invited to speak on nineteenth-century American topics. Decades later, embittered by the confusion but resigned to it, he has become a specialist in American literature—and a dean. An academic bildung, of a sort.

6. VISUAL INTERLUDE II / “THIS NEW-OLD INDUSTRY”

1.Morris, Collected Letters, 3:167; to Georgiana Burne-Jones. There is also a memorable 1869 letter from Henry James mocking Jane Morris as “this dark silent medieval woman with her medieval toothache”—and an anecdote that describes Morris discovering a fifteenth-century brass in Great Coxwell honoring “Willm Morrys . . . [and] Johane the Wyf of Willm Morrys”—and immediately putting a framed rubbing of “the dead William and Johane” in his front hall, as if to claim not only kinship but a kind of congruence with the dead (James, Henry James Letters, 23).

2.The end of 1888 and the beginning 1889 saw Morris liable to turn artistic queries into political ones: invited by an Arts and Crafts colleague to Glasgow, he replies, “I should not care to go merely to lecture about art . . . [instead] I think I can suit [the Comrades] with a lecture ‘Society of the Future’ which is not mere orthodox Socialism” (to James Mavor, January 14, 1889). Many of his 1889 letters, especially to his daughter Jenny, dwell on Blanquist triumphs, the prospect for revolution, and the coming Paris party congress. Yet his conception of his vocation is always composite in nature: Morris spends the climactic last day of that Congress taking a friend to revisit the stained-glass of Rouen, his most beloved cathedral. For further discussion of this period, see both Mackail, Life of William Morris, and MacCarthy, William Morris.

3.Cf. an 1893 interview: “If a man nowadays wants to do anything beautiful he must just choose the epoch which suits him and identify himself with that—he must be a thirteenth-century man, for instance. Though, mind you, it isn’t fair to call us copyists, for . . . this work . . . is all good, new, original work, though in the style of a different time” (“Art, Craft and Life: A Chat with Mr. William Morris,” Daily Chronicle, October 9, 1893; reprt. Pinkney, We Met Morris, 76).

4.Key works include Matthew Kirschenbaum, Mechanisms, and Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New.

5.Cf. on one side of the intentionalism wars Walter Benn Michaels’s The Shape of the Signifier, on the other side Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter and work by the proponent of object-oriented ontology, Graham Harman, including his 2012 article, “The Well-Wrought Broken Hammer: Object-Oriented Literary Criticism.”

6.Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds, 115, 362.

7.Roberts, Transporting Visions, 1–2. Roberts has the tension between painting as object and as representation in mind when proposing this corrective to her discipline:

Art history needs to look beyond the theories of illusion, representation, and iconography that underlie its formation as a modern discipline and confront the unavoidable material basis of its referential operations, the weight and heft of which its images are made. Likewise, although material culture offers inroads to the interpretation of things, it reaches a methodological impasse with representation, which by definition signifies something beyond the material specificity of the work (162–63).

8.Price casts a plague both on surface-oriented book historians and on literary critics trapped in sermonizing mode. The rift she describes is one that not just “history of books and reading” but any history of “objects and interpreters” would have to contain. One virtue of her approach is her observation that the new quasi-field of “thing theory” is the heir to a deep history of divided models for interpreting the sites at which knowledge is transmitted. She is skeptical of “oxymoronic subfields like ‘thing theory’ . . . [in which] scholars change from the freest of associators into the most slavish of idiot savants” (How to Do Things, 22). “The dethronement of reading requires an assault upon metaphor” she proposes, with one result being the worst kind of aesthetic deafness that settles over a scholarly community that formerly prided itself on identifying and responding to nuances of aesthetic value, in part by capturing and reporting on aesthetic pleasure (23). Price’s sardonic acuity about the extremes to which surface reading can bring book historians does not prevent her from indicting those Platonist close readers who still suppose that criticism can proceed without reference to the material object itself. On the one hand, book historians are the rightful heirs (and hence perhaps the likeliest explicators) of the realist novel: “Both are detail-oriented, business-minded and petty . . . inclined to privilege the mundane over the ideal, the local over the transcendent” (28). On the other, “Twenty-first century literary critics look more like heirs to the sermon. . . . From Protestant theology, secular explicators have learned to prize spirit over matter” (28).

9.Brontë, Jane Eyre,198.

10.Eliot, Middlemarch, ch. 20.

11.New York Sun, February, 12 1888.

12.Nelson, “Slide Lecture,” 418 et seq.

13.Recent scholarship has shed light on this rise in factual lantern presentations; cf. Terry and Debbie Borton’s careful study of the thrice-weekly lantern lectures (almost all studious in nature) even in the modest town of Fairfield, CT: January 8–25, 1895, for example, they report lantern lectures on “paleontology . . . English cathedrals . . . Spain . . . early oriental civilization . . . across continent . . . flower photography . . . English cathedrals” (“How Many,” 107); Deborah Harlan on the lecture slides of the Ashmolean in “Archaeology”; Lester Smith on the Royal Polytechnic Institution in “Entertainment and Amusement”; and Mike Simkin in “Birmingham” on that city’s magic-lantern shows. Substantial recent work in the history of science—including articles by Lightman, Fyfe, Iwan Rhys Morus, and other contributors to Fyfe and Lightman, Victorian Science in the Marketplace—charts the developments in popular conceptions of science that turned such presentations into a crucial conjunction of instruction and delight by the fin de siècle.

14.Helsinger, Poetry, and Arscott, William Morris, discuss Morris’s preoccupation with light and with illumination: a trip to Rheims and nearby Gothic churches in the summer of 1888 produces some of his most impassioned writing about the beauty of Gothic blue.

15.Cf. Fawcett, “Graphic,” and Stansky, William Morris, as well as Barringer, “Antidote to Mechanical Poison,” and Roberts, “Certain Dark Rays,” discussed in chapter 3.

16.The lecture has been studied in depth by such Morris scholars as Bill Peterson, Kelmscott Press, Peter Stansky, William Morris; and John Dreyfus, “William Morris.”

17.Ruskin himself experimented, as early as 1884 after various other experiments in public presentation, with lantern slide reproductions of artworks (“Fiction, Fair and Foul”).

18.Reprinted in Peterson, Kelmscott Press, 329–30. The exact magnification is not recorded, but Walker made use of varying scales, and images with single letters as large as a foot in height are conceivable.

19.Morris, Introduction to Collected Works, xv.

20.Dreyfus, “Reconstruction,” 27.

21.Morris, Introduction to Collected Works, xxiii.

22.Walker, “Relation of Illustrations to Type,” 60.

23.Ibid., 92.

24.“To illustrate his 1888 lecture, Walker combined on one slide the two subjects show opposite, thus enabling him to make a comparison between part of a page from a missal printed at Bamberg in 1481 and a Manuscript Missal written at the same period in Wurtzburg” (Dreyfus, “Reconstruction,” 33).

25.Heinrich Wölfflin, sometime after 1897 when he took over the art history chair at Basel, “is . . . credited with the practice of showing two slides at one time, the hallmark ever since, it seems, of an art historical lecture.” Nelson does note that “already at midcentury the English architectural historian Cockerell was lecturing from two large drawings” (“Slide Lecture,” 429). I have found no evidence prior to Walker’s 1888 lecture for the use of split or side-by-side magic lantern slides used to present comparative visual evidence.

26.On Cockerell, see ibid., 424.

27.Morris, Introduction to Collected Works, xxii.

28.“Walker’s enlargments provided [Morris] with a merciful release from working in a tiresomely small scale. . . . Morris then drew the designs for his own type in the same large scale as Walker’s enlargements. Next his drawings were photographically reduced by Walker to the scale in which the Golden type was to be cut. At this stage both Morris and Walker criticized them and brooded over them” (Dreyfus, “William Morris,” 77–78).

29.“The impact of Walker’s lecture was considerably extended by his personal involvement with so many of the leading typographical figures of his time. . . . He also pioneered the use of photographic techniques for helping Morris and others to produce type designs” (idem, “Reconstruction,” 29).

30.Cf. Benjamin Morgan’s intriguing recent argument, in relation to Morris’s work designing Kelmscott typefaces, that “the kind of beauty that applies to a typeface, much like the beauty of a beautiful book, falls somewhere between perception and judgment” (Outward Mind, 239).

31.Cf. Lemov, Database of Dreams, esp. 92–93, 218, and her discussion of the miniaturization experiments of John Benjamin Dancer and Eugene Power.

32.Smith, Victorian Photography, 3.

33.“The Woodcuts of Gothic Books,” Times (January 25 and 28, 1892); reprinted in Peterson, Ideal Book.

34.When Morris writes to a typographical friend about a Kelmscott book, “I hope you admire its literature,” the word literature means the typefaces employed (Collected Letters, 3:198; to Frederic Startridge Ellis, August 29, 1890). In more generalist contexts, however (e.g., in the question-and-answer session recorded in his 1892 lantern lecture on illustrated books), he goes on to distinguish between a merely “literary” appreciation of a book and a properly aesthetic appreciation—the latter requiring an appreciation not only for the printed word but also of the relationship between text and image it undertakes to create on every page.

35.Ibid., 2:493–95.

36.“The Woodcuts of Gothic Books,” Times (January 25 and 28, 1892); reprinted in Peterson, Ideal Book.

37.Helsinger, “William Morris,” notes this drive toward integrating graphic and narrative logics in Morris’s earlier bookmaking experiments, speaking of the layering of flat planes that allow for ornamental complexity without the illusion of depth.

38.Pinkney, We Met Morris, 78.

39.Skoblow, Paradise Dislocated, 187.

40.Cf. Bevir, Making of British Socialism, which characterizes the 1880s rise of both socialism and a new sort of liberalism (fueled by Jevons’s neoclassical theories) as intellectual and cultural responses to the collapse of classical, production-centric, economic theory in the 1870s.

41.Not only raucous but also, as Lynda Nead’s Haunted Gallery shows, fast-moving and with a rising sense of its own velocity: speed understood, that is, not simply as an attribute but actually a virtue of the print public sphere.

42.Morris, Prologue to The Earthly Paradise.

43.Kirchoff, “William Morris’s Anti-Books,” 96.

44.Cf. Emily Harrington’s interest in late Victorian reflections on how the site of the lyric “I” can oscillate between the represented subject of a poem and the interpolated reader, and her argument that Michael Field’s poetry “asserts not only the instability—and the portability—of the lyric ‘I,’ but that the processes of detachment and attachment are fundamental to the lyric as a genre” (“Michael Field,” 221).

7. H. G. WELLS, REALIST OF THE FANTASTIC

1.Wells, “Plattner,” 36.

2.Ibid.

3.Ibid., 38. Emphasis in original.

4.Ibid., 50–63.

5.Suvin, Metamorphosis, 32.

6.Wells, “Stolen Body,” 94.

7.Borges explicitly borrows this idea for his 1949 story “The Aleph”; it also seems likely (to me, anyway) that Tolkien likely lifted it for the “palantirs” or “seeing stones” of Middle Earth.

8.Le Guin has a helpful way of placing Wells between two worlds: “He invented a literature, because he was the first person to write fiction as a scientist” (Introduction to Selected Stories, x).

9.Delbanco in Group Portrait offers a vivid account of that literary world, its intellectually sustaining friendships, and the political and aesthetic forces that eventually broke many of its bonds in the decade before World War I.

10.Cf. Aaron Worth’s acute account of Wells’s first publishing success coming at “a time of fluid, rapidly evolving media ecologies, certainly in the industrialized West . . . [when] Britain’s empire and its media were enmeshed in a symbiotic relationship, as information technologies were . . . indispensable to projects of colonial expansion and control”; also Worth’s argument that for Wells “new media could provide . . . frames for conceiving modern imperialism” (“Imperial Transmissions,” 67, 68).

11.A key cultural precondition to Wells’s success, explored briefly in chapter 1, is the fin de siècle British short fiction explosion. Recent scholarship has explained that publishing explosion in various ways. Barbara Korte, in the latest version of the “delay hypothesis” makes a formalist argument that “the short story ‘proper’ emerged in Britain with considerable delay, not until the late nineteenth century” (Short Story in Britain, 9). Dean Baldwin argues that “the rise and fall of the British short story is intimately connected to the economics of writing and publishing” and that “between 1880 and 1950 the market for short fiction became sufficiently broad, deep[ly] varied and flexible to accommodate all writers of talent and many of very limited abilities” (Art and Commerce, 1, 3). Winnie Chan, building on both accounts, explains the upsurge and the explosion of diversity in short fiction as a formal response to the fact of that publishing boom; she sees in the proliferating experiments of the 1890s an uneasy awareness among writers of how common, and hence potentially how vulgar and merely popular, short stories may be. Chan is especially helpful on the point I want to stress: the ways that such texts themselves register the constraints of the publishing moment (Economy of the Short Story).

12.“I do not think that Mr. Wells, in his passion to make [ordinary Mrs. Brown] what she ought to be, would waste a thought upon her as she is” (Woolf, “Mr. Bennett,” 45).

13.Wells, Experiment in Autobiography, 198.

14.Sherborne, H. G. Wells, 92. There are echoes here not just of Swift’s Lilliputians but also of Darwin’s teeming bank, which seems so placid and beautiful from a benighted perspective but viewed close up is a site of carnage and ceaseless action.

15.Beaumont, Spectre of Utopia, 11.

16.What Daston and Galison have referred to as a new “epistemic virtue” of objectivity in the latter nineteenth century might in fact be thought of as shaping the aspirations not just of scientists but novelists (Objectivity, 19). Shaping those aspirations, however, in a variety of ways, some tending toward the embrace and others toward the rejection of objectivity as virtue. Both Wilde’s “Critic as Artist” on the status of Darwinian evidence and Henry Adams on the “suprasensual world” of x-rays register the effect that the epistemic virtue of objectivity had on writing well outside the scientific realm. “X-rays had played no part whatever in man’s consciousness, and the atom itself had figured only as a fiction of thought. In these seven years man had translated himself into a new universe which had no common scale of measurement with the old. He had entered a supersensual world, in which he could measure nothing except by chance collisions of movements imperceptible to each other, and so to some known ray at the end of the scale. Langley seemed prepared for anything, even for an indeterminable number of universes interfused—physics stark mad in metaphysics” (Adams, Education, 381–82).

17.Genealogical in the sense Foucault delineates, aiming to trace “dissension,” “disparity” in “an unstable assemblage of faults, fissures, and heterogeneous layers that threaten the fragile inheritor from within or from underneath” (“Nietzsche, Genealogy,” 22).

18.Todorov’s account of fantasy in The Fantastic as permanently liminal between the fabulous and the merely uncanny or psychologically explicable is relevant here. However, Todorov is committed to a notion of perpetual hovering or undecidability as genre-constitutive: there is nothing uncertain about the mix of this and other-worldly in Wells, and yet the doubleness Conrad singles out is crucial in taxonomizing not only his work but also its legacy in British speculative fiction.

19.Conrad’s praise for Wells’s successful spookiness might be counterpoised to his 1898 complaint about the naturalist Stephen Crane, whose work Conrad considers meticulously observant but lifeless because Crane lacks emotional variation: “The Crane thing is just—precisely just a ray flashed and showing all there is” (Collected Letters, 132).

20.Watt, Rise of the Novel, 117–18.

21.Conrad, Collected Letters, December 4, 1898, 106–7.

22.Ibid., 106.

23.Parrinder, H. G. Wells, 330.

24.Qtd. in Unwin, Jules Verne, 10.

25.Parrinder, H. G. Wells, 101.

26.Ibid., 70.

27.Ibid., 57.

28.Ibid., 69, 100.

29.Sherborne, H. G. Wells, 110.

30.Cf. the discussion in chapter 3 of how Ford Madox Brown conceived of his history paintings, using his own face as a model for Cromwell’s so as to encourage viewers to imagine themselves, too, as personally semi-embedded in the past.

31.Cf. Kreisel, “Discreet Charm,” 402 et seq.

32.See also Kline on the question of how late nineteenth-century mathematics, as well, was beset by new conceptual puzzles about the relationship between our actual, empirically verifiable world and by imaginable, or conceptualizable mathematical truths, especially his discussion of the implications of Cantor’s set theory (Mathematics, 213).

33.Abbot, Annotated Flatland, 22.

34.Cf. as well Wells’s “The Star,” which ends with Martian astronomers remarking on how little the Earth seems to have been damaged by a close call with a comet—how little that is when the damage is appraised from a few million miles off.

35.Markovits has recently explored their impact on the day’s verse-novels as well in “Adulterated Form.”

36.James, “Daniel Deronda.”

37.Eliot, Middlemarch, 53.

38.In chapter 5, I examine the solution that James himself seeks in his later fiction when faced with this seemingly formal exhaustion of fiction. He offers, especially in the prefaces to the New York edition, an account of fiction as innately double: both “dramatic”—showing the world of social, known shareable events—and “representative”—penetrating through free indirect discourse into characters’ idiosyncratic and concealed experiences of that world.

39.When Wells was starting out, a five-pound note from his mother was so rare and precious a gift that for greater security she divided the note in two and sent him the two halves in separate envelopes (Sherborne, H. G. Wells, 70, 63, et passim).

40.Wells, Boon, 110.

41.Wells himself notes the divergence between his way and that of his colleagues: even in his generally admiring criticism of 1895–96, Wells has begun to deplore James’s “ground-glass style” and the way in Conrad that the “story is not so much told as seen intermittently through a haze of sentences. . . . You read fast, you run and jump, only to bring yourself to your knees in . . . mud. Then suddenly things loom up again, and in a moment become real, intense, swift” (“Outcast of the Islands,” 509). For Conrad’s view of Wells, cf. McCarthy, “Heart of Darkness.”

42.Marcus sees this story and “The Door in the Wall” shaping key British meditations during the mid-twentieth century of film’s new approach to “corporeal proprioception”—that is, what it feels like to see a strange new world up on the screen (Tenth Muse, 48–51).

43.Wells, “New Accelerator,” 92.

44.Idem, “Story of the Late Mr. Elvesham,” 96–97.

45.Idem, Experiment in Autobiography, 418.

46.Idem, “A Slip under the Microscope,” 17.

47.Ibid., 20.

48.Sherborne, H. G. Wells, 61. The Bromley-born Wells himself (whose parents were servants and whose father moonlighted as a professional cricketer) earned a scholarship to study under Thomas Huxley at the Normal School of Science in South Kensington between 1885 and 1887.

49.“Epistemic virtue” is a category central to Daston and Galison’s Objectivity. Gavin Dawson, Jonathan Smith, and others writing in the wake of Gillian Beer have shown how thoroughly Darwinian scientific naturalism was woven inextricably into all aspects of British intellectual life starting in the 1860s—in ways distinct from the later and more narrowly focused impact that versions of “social Darwinism” had in France, America, and elsewhere.

50.Sherborne, H. G. Wells, 94.

51.Augustin Filon, writing in 1904, was astute in pointing to the “severe and somber grandeur” that connects The War of the Worlds to Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year (Parrinder, H. G. Wells, 54); it was Filon as well who argued in 1902 that Wells’s writing avoided the two “usual English” vices of “imperialism and insularity” on account of its ties to “London and science” (101). An 1898 Spectator review also invokes Defoe and Swift in calling Wells more “human” and imaginative than the pedantic and mechanical Poe (63).

52.Wells, “Door in the Wall,” 5. Readers may think here not only of James Thurber’s later dream-hero, Walter Mitty, but also of Wells’s own version of inveterate Quixote in The History of Mr. Polly (1909). As a child, Mr. Polly “shot bears with a revolver—a cigarette in the other hand . . . thought it would be splendid to be a diver and go down into the dark-green mysteries of the sea. . . . Engaged in these pursuits he would neglect the work immediately in hand, sitting somewhat slackly on the form and projecting himself in a manner tempting to a schoolmaster with a cane. . . . And twice he had books confiscated” (History of Mr. Polly, 13–14; last set of ellipses in original).

53.Wells, “Door in the Wall,” 19.

54.Ibid., 23.

55.Ibid., 24.

56.These intuitions of a life elsewhere do not disappear in Wells’s later work. They do, however, transmute into more of a hectoring jeremiad to coincide with his self-anointed role as despairing prophet of an age unable to grapple with the implications of its scientific progress. His 1936 The Croquet Player is, for instance, poised between the present-day reality of the ordinary “unusually banal” life of a croquet player (who also dabbles in bridge, archery and correspondence chess) and the grim atavistic urges that emanate from the sleepy provincial backwater of “Cainmarsh,” where the murderous stone-age past of humanity comes looming close to the surface of life, making the residents drink heavily, mutilate sheep, shoot scarecrows, and eventually do away with themselves. Cainmarsh atrocities are depicted not as an anomalous Twilight Zone but omnipresent, under different names: the narrator muses about “little children killed by air-raids in the street” and men “killed in Belfast and Liverpool and Spain” (70). I am grateful to Sarah Cole for several productive exchanges on this topic, and for generously sharing her own forthcoming work on Wells.

57.A line from Invisible Man (the one written not by Wells but a half century later by Ralph Ellison) may sum it up best: “And it is this which frightens me: Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?” (9).

58.Chu, Do Metaphors, 73; cf. as well Beaumont, Spectre of Utopia, and Parrinder, Utopian Literature.

59.Tempting also to include on that list a boy who in 1889 was a pupil of Wells: A. A. Milne (Sherborne, H. G. Wells, 89).

60.Sayeau, Against the Event, 40. This reading of Adorno resonates with Esty’s account of “English modernism [as] a compromise formation, a semi-modernized modernism” (Shrinking Island, 5).

61.Qtd. in ibid., 39–40.

62.Williams, English Novel, 129–30.

63.John Attridge has recently argued that Ford Madox Ford was moving from ethnographic work toward subjectivist impressionistic fiction between 1905 and 1915, “The Soul of London (1905)—the first volume of a trilogy of social criticism and a breakthrough work for his literary career . . . [to] his novel Mr. Apollo (1908)” (“Steadily and Whole,” 298) onward to the exquisite Conradian inwardness that culminates in The Good Soldier.

64.For example, the foreword to Brittain’s Testament of Youth (1933) apologizes for choosing a genre that is neither novel nor diary—as a way of summing up her generation’s youth. Brittain goes through the alternative genres she might have used: fiction is too detached, a diary would entail the use of fake names, etc. She undertakes neither reportage nor diary, she asserts, because a testament allows her to represent her own feelings only insofar as they are “typical” of someone undergoing the Great History of her generation. That is, she claims that the testament is semi-detached in a formal sense: it depends both upon the subjective purchase allowed by access to her own feelings (like young Pip in Great Expectations) and upon the distance allowed by her retrospective detached survey of a generation. Four years later, when George Orwell published his own experiment in bad form, Road to Wigan Pier, it is possible to imagine him going through a similar sort of choice, faced with various formal alternatives that the Wells generation had shown to be unsatisfactory.

65.Farah Mendelsohn proposes taxonomizing some related sorts of fantasy as liminal and portal-quest (Rhetorics of Fantasy, xix–xx, xx–xxi). Her categories however seem to me to obscure rather than clarify the formal and genealogical links between various writers of fantasy; the issue is that she deploys an ahistorical litmus test, grouping writers based on her outward reading of their tropes.

66.Read, English Prose, 131.

67.Ibid., 131, 132.

68.Cf. Sandner: “Fantastic literature emerges as a site for critical debate in the eighteenth century, partly as a result of increasing disbelief in but continued fascination with the supernatural, partly as a negative byproduct of arguments for the realistic novel and, perhaps most importantly, as a vital component of the emergent discourse of the sublime” (Introduction to Fantastic Literature, 6). Jamie Williamson’s The Evolution of Modern Fantasy traces the roots of modern Anglophone prose fantasy (of the Morris and Tolkien family) not in the novel, but rather in the scholarly work of “the eighteenth century, the period when the retrieval of, and construction of modern mediated texts derived from, traditional literatures was inaugurated under the aegis of antiquarianism” (34).

69.There is, for example, a revealing paucity of maps in the century of fantasy prior to Tolkien: none in George McDonald, for instance, nor Wells; even in William Morris’s late strange prose romances, the only map appears in the posthumously published The Sundering Flood.

70.Underground Man, a 1904 satire by French sociologist Gabriel Tarde (Wells himself wrote the preface to its 1905 English translation) plays around darkly with the Wells notion of what might living underground will do to future human culture.

71.Forster, “Machine Stops,” 37.

72.Williamson also astutely notes the influence of the four Edith Nesbit books (Five Children and It, The Phoenix and the Carpet, The Story of the Amulet, The Enchanted Castle) that between 1902 and 1907 “center on the impingement of the magical on realistically drawn ‘modern’ children” (Evolution of Modern Fantasy, 130).

73.Cf. Williamson’s recent helpful genealogy/taxonomy of the genre that comes to be known as fantasy only in the late 1960s, with the appearance of Lin Carter’s Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series (Ibid.).

74.A wittily updated Ovidian metamorphosis tale, Lady into Fox, includes a remarkable scene describing the eponymous fox that was formerly a lady staring hungrily at a caged dove while her husband reads Clarissa out loud. Garnett, born in 1892, grew up in Kent in the company of Wells, James, and Conrad, all close friends and correspondents of his parents Edward and Constance Garnett. Wells in 1934 opined that his own early stories were best understood by comparing them to The Golden Ass and “some admirable inventions by Mr. David Garnett, Lady into Fox for instance” (reprinted in Haining, Jules Verne Companion, 62).

75.West, Return of the Soldier, 176, 179, 184. That trope of the wounded warrior laid out into a kind of amnesia-shrouded Elysium, the past depicted as a visitable foreign country, also seems a promising way to approach both the shell-shocked Tietjens in Parade’s End and the bizarre plot of Ford’s 1911/1935 Ladies Whose Bright Eyes, in which the seeming detour into medieval times is revealed at the novel’s end to have been the product of a modern-day nurse whispering stories into the ear of the immobilized hero. See Saint-Amour’s recent persuasive account of the allure and limitations of encyclopedic form in Ford and the challenge posed to such encyclopedism by wartime trauma.

76.Warner, Lolly Willowes, 133; final lines.

77.Benson, Living Alone, 190.

78.Ibid., 191.

79.Ibid., 264.

80.Mitchison, You May Well Ask, 130.

81.In introducing this idea that the war revivifies the realm of faery, Living Alone marks an intriguing reversal of direction for Benson’s relationship to realism. Her first novel, This Is the End (1917) begins by invoking a desirable realm of fantasy “system is a fairy and a dream. . . . I should not really be surprised if the policeman across the way grew wings, or if the deep sea rose and washed out the chaos of the land” (1). But in that novel, with World War I “the secret world died and there is nothing left. . . . There are no secret stories, there is no secret world, there are no secret friends” (233). Striking then that only two years later Benson has so fully developed an account of the capacity of World War I to bring the secret system of witches and faeries back to life.

82.Benson, Living Alone, 264.

83.Rorschach first published his blots in 1921; on his ideas about the ways in which objective blots could elicit “deep” subjective responses, see Galison, “Image of Self.”

8. OVERTONES AND EMPTY ROOMS: WILLA CATHER’S LAYERS

1.Willa Cather, World and the Parish, 2:624.

2.Ibid., 2:625–26.

3.Idem, “Nebraska: The End of the First Cycle.”

4.Idem, “Miss Jewett.”

5.Critics who emphasize Cather’s capacity for subversion and reinvention and those who instead hail her as prairie regionalist make their respective cases by excluding half the Cather story; both locality and mobility are indispensable.

6.Her editorial role, for example, meant that Cather in 1909 not only acquired work by London and Dreiser but also met H. G. Wells, along with Ford Madox Ford and Lady Gregory (O’Brien, Willa Cather, 289).

7.1924, in O’Connor, Willa Cather, 213.

8.Ahearn, “Full-Blooded Writing,” esp. 144.

9.Cather, World and the Parish, 2:747.

10.Winkler, “Naturalism,” 919.

11.Zola, “Experimental Novel,” 2.

12.The literary criticism of the latter twentieth century frequently drew an explicit link between French and American ideas of “social Darwinism” and naturalism (Bannister, Social Darwinism). Compare as well Bender’s argument that in parsing London and his peers, “it helps to realize how much of the evolutionary puzzle in literature can be traced back to the theory of sexual selection . . . [in which] the season to live is that of battle” (“Nature in Naturalism,” 56). But it may be that Peter Bowler’s Eclipse of Darwinism has had the unfortunate effect of discouraging recent scholars from analyzing how that connection developed during the last few decades of the nineteenth century.

13.Arguably a third criterion might be added: Jennifer Fleissner has recently made the case that American naturalism persistently struggled against the narrative temporality of realist fiction by showing characters, women especially, trapped in time, compulsively repeating the same set of mechanical gestures (Women, Compulsion, Modernity).

14.Norris, “Plea for Romantic Fiction,” 22.

15.Ibid., 23.

16.Cather, My Antonia, 290.

17.I am grateful to Sean McCann for reminding me that the exclamation point in the title relates to its being a quotation from Walt Whitman. Though most early reviews praised this early novel for accuracy of social observation (“the fidelity of a Kodak picture or a graphola record” [Cooper, in O’Connor, Willa Cather, 49]), some contemporaries perceived Cather’s interest in blurring lines between figure and ground: Gardner Wood in McClure’s, for instance, writes of “the soil dominating everything, even the human drama that takes place upon it” (in O’Connor, Willa Cather, 45).

18.Cather, World and the Parish, 1:150.

19.Hardy’s relationship to naturalism is examined in more detail in Plotz, “Speculative Naturalism.”

20.Hardy, Jude, 37–38.

21.The magic lantern’s role in shaping fin-de-siècle ideas about fictionality and translucency is explored in greater detail in chapter 6.

22.“My idea of success,” [Selden] said, “is personal freedom.”

“Freedom? Freedom from worries?”

“From everything—from money, from poverty, from ease and anxiety, from all the material accidents. To keep a kind of republic of the spirit—that’s what I call success” (Wharton, House of Mirth, 108).

23.Jameson, Antinomies of Realism, 46. While noting the difference between Zola and his realist antecedents and modernist successors, Jameson is reluctant to accord naturalism’s distinct status as anything more than a “mass culture” autonomy, arguing that Zola’s “codification of the naturalist novel as a form then serves as a standard for the practice of mass culture and the bestseller up to our own time and all over the world” (45). Yet he also affirms Zola’s “unrequited claim to stand among Lukacs’ ‘great realists’” against “generations of critics intent on somehow separating Zola from the mainstream of nineteenth century realism” (Ibid.) and accuses those who separate him from modernism of being conservative.

24.Ibid., 46.

25.Ibid.

26.Cf. another image from Wharton’s House of Mirth, as Lily loses her privileged insider status and begins to see her social world as an outsider: “Lily had an odd sense of being behind the social tapestry, on the side where the threads were knotted and the loose ends hung” (445).

27.Cather, Professor’s House, 222.

28.Cather, My Antonia, 865–66.

29.Compare Virginia Woolf’s analogous account of meaning “descending” symbolically then vanishing again in To the Lighthouse:

And suddenly the meaning which, for no reason at all, as perhaps they are stepping out of the Tube or ringing a doorbell, descends on people, making them symbolical, making them representative, came upon them, and made them in the dusk standing, looking, the symbols of marriage, husband and wife. Then, after an instant, the symbolical outline which transcended the real figures sank down again, and they became, as they met them, Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay watching the children throwing catches. (114–15)

30.When the critic A. Hamilton Gibbs proclaimed, “Presumably one should expect a queer, unusual book from Willa Cather,” this seems to be the sort of work he had in mind (1925, reprinted in O’Connor, Willa Cather, 233).

31.Cather, Selected Letters, 199. For further discussion, see Plotz, “‘On the Spot,’” 21.

32.Cather, Song of the Lark, 340–41.

33.Ibid., 467–68.

34.Idem, My Antonia, 936.

35.Such communicable incommunicability also lies at the core of Cather’s late poignant story, “Two Friends.” Looking back at the gulf that opens up in her childhood when two older men, her “heroes” quarreled and stopped spending their evenings together, she characterizes the lost “mathematical harmony which gave a third person pleasure” as made up of “the silence,—the strong, rich out-flowing silence between two friends, that was as full and satisfying as the moonlight” (688).

36.Cather charges Lawrence with “literalness” and “reduc[ing characters] to mere pulp” by making a “laboratory study of the behavior of their bodily organs under sensory stimuli” (“Novel Démeublé,” 837). As Cather sees it, her work is separated from the follies of Lawrence’s naturalism by use of the form to suggest an evanescent and recessive second life beyond the printed page, a life of emotions rather than mere impulses, of words unspoken rather than those that find direct utterance.

37.Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 35.

38.“It was through giving up and blindness that [Cather] was able to speak in a way that often reveals to the reader something extraordinarily valuable that seems to have been in his mind always” (Van Ghent, Willa Cather, 44).

39.Cather, “Novel Démeublé,” 837.

40.The early reviewer who praised Cather for “sparseness of detail . . . absoluteness of phrase” [reprinted in O’Connor, Willa Cather, 182) was presumably responding to this emptying-out.

41.Cather, “Katherine Mansfield,” 878.

42.Ibid.

43.Ibid.

44.New York Times Book Review, reprinted in O’Connor, Willa Cather, 79.

45.October 6, 1918; reprinted, ibid., 81.

46.Cf. Van Ghent: “It is as if the aridities of her girlhood, and the drudgery that followed, had left her with a haunting sense of a ‘self’ that had been effaced” (Willa Cather, 8).

47.Song of the Lark, 703. The epilogue is heavily pruned in Cather’s 1937 revision of the novel.

48.Ibid., 706.

49.Cather, “On The Professor’s House.”

50.In Cather’s “A Wagner Matinee” (1904), a young man struggles to describe the transformation he sees coming over his aunt’s face when she listens to Wagner after long years trapped on the prairie:

From the trembling of her face I could well believe that before the last number she had been carried out where the myriad graves are, into the gray, nameless burying grounds of the sea; or into some world of death vaster yet, where, from the beginning of the world, hope has lain down with hope and dream with dream and, renouncing, slept. (109)

Here art is impersonal, deadly, and irresistible: it is tempting to think of these lines somehow shaping the final lines of James Joyce’s “The Dead” a decade later. Hence the aunt’s reluctance to return to the prairie life sketched grimly in the story’s final line: “naked as a tower, the crook-backed ash seedlings where the dishcloths hung to dry; the gaunt, molting turkeys picking up refuse about the kitchen door” (110). However, this is youthful writing; Cather’s later fiction accepts, sometimes even rejoices in, the semi-detached vantage that a provincial life offers, its way of allowing characters like Thea’s Aunt Tillie to enjoy triumphs vicariously and from afar.

51.North, Reading 1922, 173.

52.Ibid., 180.

53.Cather, Lost Lady, 44.

54.Qtd. in Fanny Butcher, “Willa Cather Tells Purpose of New Novel,” Chicago Tribute, September 12, 1925 (in O’Connor, Willa Cather, 238). Interestingly, H. L. Mencken made almost the same point: “The Professor’s House is a study of the effects of a purple episode upon a dull life—perhaps more accurately, of the effects of a purple episode upon a life that is dull only superficially, with purple glows of its own deep down” (November 6, 1925, reprinted in ibid., 258).

9. VISUAL INTERLUDE III / THE GREAT STONE FACE

1.Like all of Keaton’s silent features and many of his shorts from the 1920s, Seven Chances is in the public domain and readily available on YouTube and elsewhere. This particular shot begins 10 minutes and 15 seconds into the movie; the crucial part lasts about 30 seconds.

2.I am indebted to Lyn Tribble for the suggestion that such moments of sudden awareness—I thought I was in one world but I am actually in another—are somehow related to the unfakeable startle reflex; cf. her discussion of the topic in Macbeth (Tribble, “‘When Every Noise Appalls Me,’” 81–82).

3.Keaton as filmmaker I will refer to as “Keaton,” but I will refer to his on-screen persona as “Buster.”

4.For example, Robinson argues—against a longstanding critical tradition that stressed the sheer novelty of film—that “the first filmmakers did not suddenly invent a new form. Rather they relied upon existing patterns and analogies” (From Peep Show, 69). Münsterberg, Photoplay, and Lindsay, Art of the Moving Picture, are both intriguing early contributors to this “straight from the forehead of Zeus” debate about the rapidity of film’s rise.

5.Subsequent scholarship seems in agreement with Gunning’s revisionist insight that prior to 1907 cinema is dominated by “a conception that sees cinema less as a way of telling stories than as a way of presenting a series of views to the audience, fascinating because of their illusory power . . . and exoticism”; and that “the cinema of attraction does not disappear with the dominance of narrative, but rather goes underground, both into certain avant-garde practices and as component of narrative films” (“Cinema of Attraction,” 61). Cf. also Musser, “Moving Towards Fictional Narratives,” as well as the influential 1990 collection, Elsaesser, Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative (especially contributions by Gunning, Gaudreault, and Musser) and that volume’s 2006 successor, Strauven, Cinema of Attractions Reloaded.

6.The Cameraman, the final major Keaton film, was made in an uneasy arrangement with MGM. After 1928 the MGM years and the advent of the talkies and the studio system were generally disastrous for Keaton.

7.Tilly, Popular Contention, 41. Tilly argues, for example, that the Chartists developed new varieties of public-square protests like—the analogy is Tilly’s—jazz musicians riffing on an extant musical vocabulary.

8.Various “influence studies” (e.g., Kramer, “Battered Child,” and Jenkins, “‘Fellow Keaton’”) stress Keaton’s debt not just to Arbuckle’s comic shorts of the 1910s but also the vaudeville shows that Keaton had performed in ever since he was a child. Cf. also Robinson’s argument that Griffiths was “working from his love of Victorian painting” when he “showed that the screen image was not just two-dimensional but had a background and a foreground” (From Peep Show, 128).

9.In Film and Attraction, Gaudreault offers the idea of “cultural series” that looks backward from the moment a film was made in order to understand what the filmmaker would have had to hand, and in mind, when filming. Gaudreault’s point is that film history ought not be merely retrospective: as he, Gunning, Burch, and others have argued, film scholars long misread the early years of Hollywood by telling a retrospective tale about the inevitable rise of narrative film, at the expense of the precinema era of attraction/spectacle films. Still, looking forward has its virtues. By Tilly’s account, repertoires (he makes the analogy to improvisatory jazz as opposed to classical music) do mutate, and openness to future innovation is actually part of any given move’s significance and its meaning, even at its introduction.

Although there is not space to explore this idea further here, it is worth noticing that a surprisingly wide and wide-ranging collection of Keaton’s filmic ideas—techniques, tricks, formal strategies—flourished even as his own career declined. For example, the afterlife of Keaton’s famous “stone face” is visible in the films of Armenian-born Rouben Mamoulian, despite the fact that Mamoulian positioned himself as bringing the prestigious cultural power of European theater into what had before him been a merely a debased popular art form. In the final shot of Greta Garbo in his Queen Christina (1933), Garbo stands wind-whipped in the ship’s prow, as Mamoulian had instructed her to, with a face like a “blank sheet of paper.” “You do nothing,” he told her. “You don’t act. You don’t have a thought nor a feeling, In fact, try not to blink your eyes. Just hold them open. Make your face into a mask” (Qtd. Luhrssen, Mamoulain, 72). There are dozens of reasons why Queen Christina is not part of the Keaton “cultural series,” which more logically should run through from the Marx Brothers to Laurel and Hardy, to Peter Sellers’s Inspector Clouseau films straight through to Jackie Chan, who has reported that his earliest, deepest inspiration was The General. And yet, in a Mamoulian melodrama that succeeds by tugging on emotional strings Keaton himself never cared to touch, Garbo’s blankness does exactly what Keaton’s stone face did—it lets the viewer move into the character’s world at precisely the moment where the character herself is moving away. Just as Lillian Gish lent her para-smile to Keaton, the Great Stone Face has a worthy successor in Garbo.

10.Anne Hollander’s argument in Sex and Suits about the stylishly unstylish nature of male garb is germane here.

11.The scene begins 17 minutes into Our Hospitality and lasts about a minute.

12.In the twilight to which he was relegated after 1929, when the talkies and the MGM-dominated studio system put an end to his brilliant career as an director/star in collaboration with his brother-in-law Joseph Schenk, his porkpie became more than a trademark, it actually became a kind of salvific fetish. (Benayon’s book is replete with photographs of porkpie Buster.) You might say that his porkpie persona (along with his famously impassive expression) is what enabled him to wait out the bad years and seize the roles that began, finally to reappear in the 1960s, when his sad, mad, bad drinking days were well behind him.

13.Fatty Arbuckle-style clowns in the comic shorts of 1915–25 always look at the camera to make sure the viewer gets the point of the gag. By contrast, the typical dramatic film of the 1920s is played with full absorption: actors behave as if the camera didn’t exist. Keaton, though, offers you even in such a simple-seeming shot as this one, a subtle twist on that convention, one that manages to preserve what would seem to be incompatible virtues: “Fourth wall” absorption and vaudevillian knowingness.

14.Keaton rejects the easy joke of having the hat crumple into the proper shape. Instead after being symbolically beheaded, smudges still visible on his forehead, he pulls out of a carpet bag a perfect porkpie. We even get to see it serve its purpose, as Keaton reacts with a quick eye-roll upward to its not crumpling against the roof of the train.

15.There are many such burlesqued endings, including the decorated gravestone in Cops and the sudden appearance of twin babes in the arms in Sherlock Jr., but my favorite Keaton burlesque of the “happily ever after” ending is a dizzying set of shots that ends College: wedding; grumpy old couple by the fireside; matching gravestones.

16.Keaton’s success has accordingly been described as principally the product of an anomalous moment in the history of Hollywood film, when what Harris has dubbed the “operational aesthetic” of farcical performers, their vaudevillian orientation, was giving way to the oppressive narrative drive of the studio system era: Buster the performer forced to give way to Jimmy Durante the actor (and Hitchcock the auteur).

Neil Harris coined the phrase operational aesthetics to explain why the displays in Barnum’s Museum were so appealing to audiences: “They exposed their process of action . . . an approach to experience that equated beauty with information and technique, accepting guile because it was more complicated than candor” (Humbug, 57).

17.James Agee’s 1949 “Comedy’s Greatest Era” is an important point of departure for much of the work since; David Robinson’s Buster Keaton (1969) insightfully explored Keaton’s nostalgic cinematography. Recently, Michael T. Smith has offered a Merleau-Ponty–inflected account of Keaton’s bodily self-awareness, arguing that “Keaton’s motion is an impossibility that is directly reflective of the impossibility of film motion itself.” (“Notes,” 101).

18.Cf. Roland Barthes’s rigidly structuralist account of the “Fashion System” in his 1985 book of the same title.

19.Tracing the cultural series that Gaudreault sees underlying the evolving form of narrative film can take us, via Keaton, into unexpected places. For example, in “McCay and Keaton,” Crafton has recently examined possible public performances on stages where work by early cartoonist Windsor McKay was also screened between 1900 and 1915. Keaton’s influence forward on modernism, surrealism, and other high-cultural forms has also been traced extensively, most recently in Barea, “Buster Keaton.”

20.The scene starts 12 minutes and 30 seconds into The Boat and lasts about 45 seconds.

21.This doubled frame for Buster—he understands how picture and wall go together, but fails to grasp how things change when the wall is also the side of a boat—taps into a basic rule of how subjectivity gets registered in moving pictures, going back to the first Lumiere story-film “the sprinkler sprinkled”: the camera informs viewers of some basic facts that a character within the depicted world does not grasp, even though that fact is completely pertinent to that oblivious character and about to become even more pertinent.

22.Parshall for instance reads Keaton’s feature films as trapped between “farcical and comic space”; sometimes, he is a vaudevillian physical comic, at other times, he’s uneasily entering into a more cloistered bourgeois interior where the romantic plot will tame him (“Buster Keaton,” 34).

23.Peter Kramer has made the case that even in his 1920 leading-man debut (in the forgettable The Saphead), Keaton is already developing a persona who is oddly, almost pathologically cut off from the immediate ebb and flow of other’s social ease: “Keaton’s deadpan performance not only serves to characterize Bertie as an intellectually and emotionally retarded young man, but also highlights Keaton’s own distance from the fiction, his irreducible and transgressive presence as a comedian in the universe of serious drama” (“Making,” 284). The movie’s most memorable scene, which was choreographed by Keaton himself, shows him flung around the floor of the Stock Exchange, suspended above a hostile sea of greedy traders.

24.The way that Keaton’s Buster moves in and out of touch with the actuality that surrounds him bears an interesting relationship to Daniel Morgan’s idea that in certain films of the 1930s the camera signals a “dual attunement”—seeming to oscillate, that is, between being linked to an individual character and being linked to that character’s social milieu. Keaton’s movies all struggle with (i.e., make gags out of) the way that his style depends on his doing his very best to fit into whatever world he is thrown into, but always finding himself a half-step off, syncopated into a strange and memorable rhythm when striving most desperately for simple conformity. King Vidor’s The Crowd (1927) explores what it means for an individual to succumb to the pull of the masses, of life within a homogenous crowd. Vidor, unlike Keaton, stages it as the tragedy (or tragi-comedy) that threatens us all.

25.Keaton is no overt rebel, but his changing relationship to a uniform (and often, given the importance of soldiers and police in his films, literally uniformed) world has something in common with the punk rocker “subcultures” analyzed by Dick Hebdige in the late 1970s. Hebdige famously describes, among those subcultures, a style that turns “a smile or a sneer,” or even “a safety pin, a pointed shoe, a motorcycle” into a “gesture of defiance or contempt.” But equally worth remarking is his notion that such bits of social graffiti are “an expression both of impotence and a kind of power.” That is, a subcultural style works by indicating both awareness of the constraints on any exercise of autonomy and willingness to test that constraint’s limits in unexpected and perforce innovative ways. (Hebdige, Subculture, 2–3).

26.Proust, “On Flaubert’s Style,” 263.

27.Compare Scott McCloud’s argument that heroes’ faces are often drawn as nearly blank even in comic books that render the natural world vividly and with granular details (think of Tintin)—all the better to entice readers to insert their own face into the blank (Understanding Comics, esp. 36–37).

28.Qtd. in Dardis, Keaton, 56.

29.Another example of Keaton’s indirect influence: that exact gag is resurrected by The Lego Movie.

30.This applies well beyond The General. In an early short, The Paleface (1922), Buster the lepidopterist comes into an Indian encampment and performs an array of butterfly-collecting maneuvers that are perfectly misinterpreted by his observers.

31.What Pasolini in 1965 describes as the “free indirect subjective” camera may in a sense already be present here. Pasolini means that the camera produces “constant, indiscernible movement between the objective and subjective, real and imaginary” (Gelley, Stardom, 106). Either way, what the film shows us is what it means not to realize one’s relationship to the world that is flickering by.

32.Qtd in Jay, Songs of Experience, 164.

CONCLUSION: APPARITIONAL CRITICISM

1.Galt, “Mem,” 9.

2.Ford, “On Impressionism,” 267. Cf. the discussion in chapter 3 of Prettejohn’s astute analysis of Ford Madox Brown paintings (e.g., Cromwell on his Farm) that use the trope of the blank inward gaze of the central subject as a way of formally reconciling the competing generic impulses of on the one hand history painting and on the other the PRB imperative to make “present history” palpable. Mark Phillips also describe the painting in terms that are germane to the same problem: “The blank gaze of the protagonist[] project[s] a sense of an inner state wholly disconnected from [his] surroundings” (On Historical Distance,138–39).

3.Cf. Ted Underwood’s argument in Why Literary Periods Mattered (2013) that the historical period emerged as far back as the mid-nineteenth century as the crucial category in university literature curricula, an impulse toward strict periodization that he intriguingly links to Foucault’s interest in the “episteme” as the logical unity of historical study. For the Victorian education reformer F. D. Maurice as for Foucault, Underwood argues, such sealed realms provide both the possibility of “total knowledge” and a formally advantageous historical separation between past and present: “Our failure to recognize the congruence between Foucauldian and New Critical attacks on ‘continuity’ is probably a symptom of a broader blind spot in literary history, which is, simply, a widespread amnesia about the whole history of the discipline before New Criticism” (134). Also relevant to the notion of semi-detachment is Underwood’s argument that “an organizing principle of historical contrast has been central to the prestige of Anglo-American literary culture since the early nineteenth century,” and that “the contribution [to ideas about historicism] that poets, novelists and eventually critics made was to render discontinuity imaginable and meaningful . . . not by reducing different eras to some common standard but by dramatizing the vertiginous gulfs between eras, and then claiming vertigo itself as a source of meaning” (2–4).

4.“In distinguishing between what was ancient and modern [the modern author should not forget] that extensive neutral ground, the large proportion, that is, of manners and sentiments which are common to us and to our ancestors, having been handed down unaltered from them to us, or which, arising out of the principles of our common nature, must have existed alike in either state of society” (Scott, Ivanhoe, 18).

5.This account of “Legend of Jubal” responds to and benefits deeply from an interpretation offered by Isobel Armstrong (“Plenary”; NVSA conference, April 2013, Boston).

6.For an account of critical legacies that stresses such plausible continuities between past writers and present interlocutors, see Andrew Miller’s discussion of “critical free indirect discourse” (Burdens of Perfection, 84–91).

7.Eliot has another useful apothegm on the time-boundedness of art. Even if Samuel Daniel’s poems strikes you as thin, she cautions readers of Middlemarch, remember the unrecoverable feelings that accompanied them: “Would it not be rash to conclude that there was no passion behind those sonnets to Delia which strike us as the thin music of a mandolin?” (Middlemarch, 50).

8.Felsenstein and Connolly, the architects of the database (http://bsu.edu/libraries/wmr/index.php), recently published a monograph presenting many of their demographic conclusions in What Middletown Read; I published a brief article in Slate discussing my experiment (“This Book”).

9.Deidre Lynch’s recent Loving Literature has a fascinating account of the approachability of the real, as opposed to the apparitional (esp. 194–234).

10.Ferris, “Before Our Eyes,” 73.