Victorian Nostalgia
PETTINGELL, PHOEBE
Writers & Writing VICTORIAN NOSTALGIA BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL In the midst of looking into the lives of 19th-century notables for his irreverent Eminent Victorians, Lytton Strachey wrote to...
...The very first essay, on Prince Albert, aroused my suspicion...
...Strachey chose four patricians as his scapegoats because he assumed that the aristocracy (including his own family) guided the tastes of an age...
...The text proves a little slapdash—small wonder, if not forgivable, since the author has also published a biography and a no vel this year...
...The story of Josephine Butler's crusade against the exploitation of children is conscientiously told and timely, but Butler never emerges as a vivid personality...
...At the conclusion of this essay the author breaks down and confesses: "Neither as the popular vicar of St...
...Now that we have seen through the puny sophistication of Bloomsbury, he submits, it is time to recover "a common humanity with the Victorians...
...A passion for Victoriana floods contemporary culture...
...wore very thin by the time that I was about 25...
...Gaskell and Elizabeth Barrett Browning...
...Then there was the revered Florence Nightingale, made to look neurotic and manipulative by Strachey's misogynist wit...
...The arts are typified by Charlotte Brontë, the poor clergyman's daughter who became a best-selling novelist—and Julia Margaret Cameron, a pioneer of early photography...
...I finished the book feeling that Wilson lost heart somewhere along the line, that he kept finding more fascinating distractions and returning to the task at hand with a sigh...
...Each of the component biographies sparkles with anecdotes, amusing or sentimental by turns...
...He admitted that although the project began with a desire to cut Strachey "down to size," he soon found his admiration for Strachey had revived...
...In this atmosphere it is perfectly reasonable that A. ?. Wilson—who dashes off novels, biographies, essays, and reviews with the gusto of a 19th-century littérateur—decided for his latest project to take a few pot shots at Strachey by doing an "updated" Eminent Victorians (Norton, 240 pp., $25.00...
...That comes as no surprise either, given the touch of fin-de-siècle bitchiness one often detects beneath the surface of his own attitudes...
...I could have chosen a different six," Wilson says, "though I would always be sad to leave out Newman who seems, the more one thinks about him, to have been one of the most remarkable people who ever lived...
...While Charlotte Brontë fits Wilson's thesis nicely, he obviously finds her sister Emily a far more compelling writer...
...It would appear that Wilson himself grasped this fact too late to save his own book: the result is ahodgepodge of conservative nostalgia with a dollop of uneasy malice...
...Perhaps, considering Wilson's fascination with eccentricity, he would have been wiser to write a book entitled "Eminent Edwardians...
...Forster had been suggesting, for producing stunted emotions and an oversimplified view of the world...
...These cynical caricatures struck a chord with the public, and turned the writer into a household name...
...In his teenage years, Wilson tells us, he idolized Strachey's writing...
...Wilson demonstrates how much Victoria's Prince Consort remodeled the image of the British monarchy from highborn profligates to the perfect family, exemplars of middleclass morality...
...Gingerbread mansions, restored to their original mauves or pea greens (with contrasting trim) sprout Morris chintz curtains at every window...
...Yet admirable as Albert might have been, he hardly ranks as a galvanizing personality, and Wilson's attention keeps straying to the capricious Victoria...
...But Strachey's artistic sense soon recognized the problem of balancing his structure between deflation and eulogy...
...ALTHOUGH Wilson is emphatic in making his case for Victorian virtue, there are many strings to his bow...
...A generation decimated and disillusioned by the Great War, Strachey knew, would turn a jaundiced eye on the imperial grandstanding of General Gordon at Khartoum, and on Thomas Arnold's ethos of public school (read private school) honor—responsible, the novels of E.M...
...Even today, when people use " Victorian" as asynonym for "smug," "prudish" or "flowery," they are showing the impact of Strachey's satiric perspective...
...Bu t, as al way s, he teems with insights and revisionary opinions...
...Cardinal Manning's sophistry about medieval church doctrine, together with his cutthroat ambition, had fueled resentment against a religious bureaucracy that ignorantly castigated scientific discoveries and ignored the poor in favor of the establishment...
...Mary's, nor as the— dare one say it—rather prissy dignitary of the Roman Catholic Church does Newman any longer attract me...
...Nevertheless, that is precisely what has happened...
...Strachey's exposé of humbug in the preceding age set up four of its cultural heroes for ridicule...
...But the real movers and shakers of Victorian England were the emerging bourgeoisie: They swayed political elections, dictated artistic preferences, bought the products that made Great Britain prosper, and emigrated to man the Empire overseas...
...Nonetheless, something rings hollow about this enterprise...
...In part, she was selected because she is a kind of fairy godmother to Bloomsbury and brings the narrative full circle: Her niece, Julia Stevens, became the mother of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell...
...Yet once again Wilson seems of two minds...
...At the close of the piece he succumbs to the temptation of speculating about her relationship with her beloved servant, John Brown, whose portrait was buried with her, even though this rather detracts from the thrust of what has gone before...
...No English poet of the 20th century matches Tennyson, even though any schoolboy can point out Tennyson's faults...
...On the other hand, potty Mrs...
...But the honest man...
...Professors raised on Auden and the Bloomsberries now lecture on Matthew Arnold and Thackeray, not to mention Mrs...
...The new volume looks like a coffee-table book...
...Similar ambivalences crop up throughout...
...Wilson winds up with a flourish...
...which got lost during the First World War, and led to so much literature of despair, of which Strachey's [book] is but one elegant and hilarious example...
...His lightness of touch, his pure elegance, is not something which I could imitate...
...But the achievement of Dickens remains something which makes many 'better' novelists of our century seem like pigmies...
...And the author's rhetorical faculty manufactures purple passages in clever imitation of the popular writers of the era...
...Hence her extraordinary clothes, which are less those of an aristocrat than of a charwoman who has won the football pools...
...Lytton Strachey's biographer, Michael Holroyd, quotes Sigmund Freud's opinion that Eminent Victorians was designed to be "a treatise against religion...
...Writers & Writing VICTORIAN NOSTALGIA BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL In the midst of looking into the lives of 19th-century notables for his irreverent Eminent Victorians, Lytton Strachey wrote to Virginia Woolf: "They seem to me a set of mouthing bungling hypocrites...
...it is packed with gorgeous images of gothic revival buildings, majestic paintings and daguerreotypes of statesmen, writers and social reformers, as well as cheery prints depicting life in a bygone age...
...who was prepared to change the course of his entire life for what he believed will never fail to move me...
...He keeps undercutting his hero, emphasizingNewman's effeminacy, his hysteria, his penchant for snubbing old friends, without offering much to indicate his charisma, let alone his greatness...
...Wilson's purpose is exactly the opposite: He thinks his six subjects owe the greatness they possess to their "belief in divinity," and argues that even their contemporaries who claimed to be atheists "continued to believe in a moral law, in duty, and in the divine potential of human beings...
...For sheer improbability of plots, repetition, sloppy writing, it would be hard to find a writer as bad as Dickens on a bad day...
...Thousands of cameo appearances by other great figures of the age create a picture as broad and busy as one of Frith's packed paintings of 19th-century activities...
...In the ecclesiastical domain, Wilson taps Manning's arch-rival, Cardinal Newman...
...but perhaps there really is a baroque charm about them which will be discovered by our great-greatgrandchildren...
...Their triumphant progress is one of Wilson's chief themes, and influences the choice of his own eminent Victorians...
...Each was chosen with malice aforethought...
...With a deadpan humor Strachey himself might have envied, he notes that the "Queen Mum" has "become a fantasy grandmother for everyone...
...And up in heaven, Ruskin is surely gloating at his detractor Clive Bell, as PreRaphaelite canvases fetch astronomical prices at Sotheby's...
...It was this...
...However, as Wilson is quick to point out, Bloomsbury cultivated its own foibles, many of them no less obtuse than those of their parents and grandparents...
...To illustrate Evangelical religion's concern for social reform, he selects Josephine Butler, who through her work among prostitutes exposed to the general public a massive underground industry devoted to the exploitation of poor women and children...
...Proudie's soirées...
...Government is represented by Prince Albert and Gladstone, aristocrats who sympathized with a middle class intent on betterment...
...After all, the great Victorians have a sheer bigness about them which is impossible to laugh off...
...Novels by Trollope are turned into popular television series, while high school girls go to their proms in dresses that would not have looked out of place at one of Mrs...
...What each of these six possessed in common was a powerful drive toward self-improvement, together with a desire to serve others...
...For instance: "The Bloomsbury air of sniggering superiority...
...Wilson neglects to mention that Strachey had originally planned to include portraits of heroes in Eminent Victorians along with the humbugs...
...Particularly glaring was the contempt for middle-class aspirations and values...
...His book is a thousand times better than mine, and it will still be read when mine is forgotten...
...It might be supposed that in Newman's case, where the biographer's emotions are so engaged, we would at last see evidence of his ability—so often apparent in the past—to create a rounded character...
...Does he mean it...
...Only I don't believe it...
...Cameron makes an enthralling subject for Wilson because of her eccentricities and those of her Bohemian set...
...His Preface actually ended on a different note...
Vol. 73 • September 1990 • No. 11
