Modern Victoriana
BELL, PEARL K.
Writers & Writing MODERN VICTORIANA BY PEARL K. BELL The comfortable pomp and cluttered circumstance of Victoria's England-so close to us in historical time, so many light-years distant in...
...In the end, he has made less of the Great Victorian Collection than meets the allegorical eye...
...As Maloney naively wonders before his dream turns into a waking torment: "Was this the beginning of some new stage in human history, a time when objects from former eras would begin to materialize, piling up on people's front doorsteps...
...or prize ring...
...The result of these endeavors is an esoteric ploy, reproducing the thieves' cant of the period, which Crichton glosses only when the meaning is entirely beyond contemporary reach: screwsman for an expert in keys and safe-cracking...
...We forget how extraordinarily cluttered Victorian rooms were," Crichton expounds in one of his quick-and-easy flash cards of social history...
...While most reviewers have praised the book for its irresistible tug of suspense, I found it on the whole easier to put down than to pick up and read...
...Inexorably, as Maloney becomes "the prisoner of what he had wrought," the collection itself begins to fade, crack and decay...
...This summer we are offered two more contributions to the bulging shelf of works based in varying ways on the scandals and physical ephemera of 19th-century England: Michael Crichton's frankly lightweight The Great Train Robbery (Knopf, 266 pp., $7.95) and Brian Moore's The Great Victorian Collection (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 213 pp., $7.95), a mysteriously suggestive fantasy totally unlike anything this fine and insufficiently recognized novelist has done before...
...the Sepoy Mutiny in India...
...wave lag for sailor's accent...
...Twenty years after reading his harrowing portrait of an Irish spinster, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, I still remember it with the ineradicable immediacy of nightmare...
...He has made cunning use of Henry Mayhew's invaluable first-hand account of the grimy underside of Victorian prosperity, London Labour and the London Poor, published in 1861-62, and drawn as well on such recent studies of Victorian crime as Kallow Chesney's The Anti-Society...
...Almost immediately, predatory newspapermen and TV reporters, skeptical professors, Madison Avenue hustlers, parapsychology investigators, FBI agents, and an endless stream of gawking tourists descend on Maloney, who desperately tries to defend his miraculous resurrection against Disneyland desecration...
...It is a witty conceit to have a vast assemblage of Victoriana, created in a damp, foggy and class-bound island, miraculously appear under the hot sun of free-wheeling California...
...His lavish use of criminal slang, amusing at first, eventually becomes a wearisome kind of gamesmanship, and he entirely fails to illuminate the sinister complications of Edward Pierce's intriguing character, providing us instead with a deft cartoon...
...Moore seems to hint that contemporary man, smugly preserving and accumulating antiques without regard for their beauty or usefulness, has become such a monster of indiscriminate inventories of knowledge and possessions that the past is no longer allowed to sift decently and naturally away...
...Crichton, a nonpracticing young doctor who made a mint with science fiction (The Andromeda Strain) and popular medical journalism (Five Patients), moves into even greener royalty fields with his new book...
...On the most obvious level, of course, Moore has produced a bitterly comic satire about the malignant doom of European culture transplanted to alien American soil...
...Behind false walls and trompe-l'oeil panels lies the pornographic obverse of Victorian prudery-velvety rooms lavishly equipped for Sadean orgies-and, in a staggering abundance of hidden drawers and double-door bookcases, secret fortunes in coins so prudently squirreled away "that they remained undiscovered after their owners' untimely deaths...
...Yet more profound currents of thought run beneath the shallow Jamesian opposition of Europe and America, of culture and materialism...
...Maloney soon dies, a martyr not to art-he was only the medium for the wonderfully ornate objects-but to the literalism of his imagination...
...pogue for a pickpocket's snatch...
...snakesman for a cat burglar...
...miltonian for policeman (because when John Milton worked for Oliver Cromwell two centuries earlier, he lived in Scotland Yard, originally just the name for an area of Whitehall containing many government buildings...
...Upon awakening, he sees the objects of the dream literally spread out, like an open-air museum, in the parking lot beneath his window: stalls, booths and showrooms crammed with Victorian objets dart, furniture, tea and breakfast services, paintings, jewelry, scientific instruments, toys, even the locomotive immortalized by the Great Train Robbery...
...Industrious and precocious, he has artfully reconstructed the outrageous heist of 1855, in which 12,000 of gold bullion, en route from London to the Continent to pay the British troops fighting in the Crimea, was spirited off the Folkestone Express of the South Eastern Railway...
...the century's phobia about premature burial...
...and the liberal myth that crime was invariably the poisonous fruit of poverty...
...Not all that different, it would appear, from a very smart, very cool writer of well-oiled best-sellers...
...While we are obsessively anxious about sincerity and authenticity, getting it all together, letting it all hang out, the Victorians were skilled at the duplicitous tricks of the double life...
...Anthony Maloney, a young Canadian professor of modern English history on a visit to California, stops for the night in a Carmel motel and dreams of stumbling upon a fabulous exhibition of Victoriana...
...When pressed at his trial to give some motive for the crime, Pierce was shamelessly blunt: "I wanted the money...
...Some of these helpful historical hints are relevant to his plot, some not, but no matter...
...Crichton's attempts to parody the pompous rhetoric of Victorian journalism are clumsy, and his simplistically formulated thoughts about crime and society are more opportunistic than instructive...
...Nevertheless, a shopping complex is hastily erected near the freeway, complete with Gladstone restaurant and Oscar Wilde Way Out menswear boutique, and it quickly outdraws the treasure trove of the professor's dream...
...Today we despise the era's hypocrisy-assaulted by John Fowles in The French Lieutenant's Woman-and laugh at its taste, but the Victorians' brazen agility at keeping one set of habits closed off from the other has aroused a kind of grudging wonder in a recent torrent of books, both serious and whimsically campy, about Sherlock Holmes, Victorian art and the seemingly unbroken stride of British imperial progress...
...Moore's tenth novel, the most incautious risk of his career, describes a visionary, perhaps supernatural miracle...
...What does this eerie fable mean...
...Though the thieves were eventually caught and tried, Edward Pierce, the satanically ingenious aristocrat manque who masterminded the "crime of the century," escaped without a trace on his way to prison, and not a penny of the haul was ever recovered...
...Innumerable hiding places were provided by the prevailing decor of the period...
...Unfortunately, if this is indeed the thrust of Moore's vision, he has failed to do it justice in his austerely compressed and elliptical novel...
...Crichton, pedantically reluctant to waste a drop of his research, also pads his cliff-hanger with freshman-survey Lessons from Victorian History on the powerful role of the railroads in British economic growth...
...Most astounding of all, the collection contains treasures that Maloney had not actually seen in the course of his scholarly research...
...Their empire-building vigor and confident public aspect, the claustrophobic fussiness and propriety of their domesticity, concealed, as Steven Marcus has shown in The Other Victorians, an energetic prurience and promiscuity that never for a moment succeeded in ruffling them in their righteous condemnation of "compromised" women and philanderers caught in the act...
...the widely held delusion that venereal disease could be cured by intercourse with a virgin...
...This sly love of concealment within the busily indulgent profligacy of Victorian ornamentation is crucial to Brian Moore's enigmatic and disappointingly truncated tale, although any resemblance between the Victorian obsessions of Crichton and Moore is, as novelists impudently like to claim about their most libelous stories, purely coincidental...
...Writers & Writing MODERN VICTORIANA BY PEARL K. BELL The comfortable pomp and cluttered circumstance of Victoria's England-so close to us in historical time, so many light-years distant in customs, values and political attitudes-hold an odd fascination for present-day novelists and social historians...
...To flesh out the dusty bones of this caper, Crichton has dug long and hard in midcentury newspapers and the voluminous trial records...
...Moore, a native of Belfast who now lives in the United States, is a superbly gifted artist-disturbingly percipient, original and witty...
...the illegal popularity of the P.R...
...and voker romeny for criminal argot...
Vol. 58 • August 1975 • No. 16
