The Victorian Newsletter (Spring 1988)

The Victorian Newsletter is sponsored for the Victorian Group of Modern Language Association by the Western Kentucky University and is published twice annually.Inventing Victorians: Virginia Woolf's "Memoirs of a Novelist" / Mary Kaiser Loges -- Distortion Versus Revaluation: Three Twentieth-Century Responses to Victorian Fiction / Jerome Meckier -- The Dover Bitch: Victorian Duck or Modernist Duck/Rabbit / Gerhard Joseph -- Carlyle's Denial of Axiological Content in Science / Charles W. Schaefer -- Mixed Metaphor, Mixed Gender: Swinburne and the Victorian Critics / Thaïs E. Morgan -- The Humanities Tradition of Matthew Arnold / William E. Buckler -- Oliver (Un)Twisted: Narrative Strategies in Oliver Twist / Joseph Sawicki -- Representation and Homophobia in The Picture of Dorian Gray / Richard Dellamora -- Coming In The Victorian Newsletter -- Books Receive

Trollope, Orley Farm, and Dickens' marriage break-down

Anthony Trollope’s Orley Farm (1861-2), the plot of which the novelist thought the best he had ever conceived, is peculiarly aware of Charles Dickens, the seemingly unsurpassable celebrity of English letters in the 1850s. This essay firstly examines narrative features of Orley Farm that indicate Dickens was on Trollope’s mind—and then asks why. My first answer is simply that Trollope was, as he began Orley Farm, remarkably and newly confident and was ready to test himself against the towering presence of Dickens. My second answer is that Dickens was on his mind for a different reason. Orley Farm, I propose, covertly responds to the public revelations in 1858 of Dickens’ marriage break-down and, presently, his affair with a much younger woman. Trollope plots this, implying a coded rebuke to Dickens and sympathy for his abandoned wife. But this element of Orley Farm is also, I conclude, a coded admonishment to himself since he was conscious of his affection for the much younger Kate Field, whom he had met the year in which he signed the contract for the new novel. A Dickensian text in form, appearance, mode, and plot, Orley Farm is also an unusual essay for Trollope on marital infidelity that was, I think, prompted by his cloudy anxiety about the implications of Kate and, more clearly, by his vexation with what he perceived to be Dickens’ shameful disloyalty

Hidden Rivalries in Victorian Fiction: Dickens, Realism, and Revaluation

Victorian fiction has been read and analyzed from a wide range of perspectives in the past century. But how did the novelists themselves read and respond to each other’s creations when they first appeared? Jerome Meckier answers that intriguing question in this ground-breaking study of what he terms the Victorian realism wars. Meckier argues that nineteenth-century British fiction should be seen as a network of intersecting reactions and counteractions in which the novelists rethought and rewrote each other’s novels as a way of enhancing their own credibility. In an increasingly relative world, thanks to the triumph of a scientific secularity, the goal of the novelist was to establish his or her own credentials as a realist, hence a reliable social critic, by undercutting someone else’s—usually Charles Dickens’s. Trollope, Mrs. Gaskell, and especially George Eliot attempted to make room for themselves in the 1850s and 1860s by pushing Dickens aside. Wilkie Collins tried a different form of parodic revaluation: he strove to outdo Dickens at the kind of novel Dickens thought he did best, the kind his other rivals tried to cancel, tone down, or repair, ostensibly for being too melodramatic but actually for expressing too negative a world view. For his part, Dickens—determined to remain inimitable—replied to all of his rivals by redoing them as spiritedly as they had reused his characters and situations to make their own statements and to discredit his. Thus Meckier redefines Victorian realism as the bravura assertion by a major novelist (or one soon to be) that he or she was a better realist than Dickens. By suggesting the ways Victorian novelists read and rewrote each other\u27s work, this innovative study alters present day perceptions of such double-purpose novels as Felix Holt, Bleak House, Middlemarch, North and South, Hard Times, The Woman in White, and The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Jerome Meckier is professor of English at the University of Kentucky. He has published extensively on the Victorians and on modern British and American literature. A fascinating, informative book. . . . Much of the territory which it covers is either hitherto unexplored or revealed to posses features previously unnoted. —Dickens Quarterly Lively and assertive. —Key Reporterhttps://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_english_language_and_literature_british_isles/1089/thumbnail.jp