Victorian Authenticity and Artifice:
Abstracts and Biographies
13-15th July 2015
Institute for English Studies, University of London
7th Annual Conference of the Victorian Popular Fiction Association
64
Counterfeit Ancestry: Heredity, Appearance and the Inscrutable Body in Grant Allen’s Fiction
Will Abberley
The author Grant Allen was obsessed with origins and the tendencies of the body to both expose and conceal them. Born in Canada to Irish, French and English ancestry, he lived among diverse peoples in various countries before establishing a literary career in London. Allen was fascinated by theories of heredity and biological disguises such as camouflage and insect mimicry. He also wrote a great deal about how languages spread across populations through history, complicating and falsifying national heritage. This paper argues that Allen’s sensation fiction drew on these interests to explore the unreliability of the body as a measure of ancestry. His novel The Scallywag revolves around a descendant of aristocrats, whose latter-day impoverishment leads society to mistake him for a commoner. Other works such as ‘The Beckoning Hand’ and In All Shades depict human bodies concealing miscegenation between races as characters’ appearances fail to register their mixed ancestry. Often, the ambiguous physical body is overridden by artificial dress, manners and culture, suggesting that ancestry is a matter of performed appearances. Similarly, tales such as ‘The Curate of Churnside’ question criminal and eugenic typologies, suggesting that beautiful bodies can hide psychopathic hereditary urges. However, Allen’s fiction equivocates on these questions, sometimes also presenting the body as an authentic index of ancestral character and origins. Allen was unconvinced by eugenic efforts to mechanically measure racial tendencies through physical bodies. However, he defended ideas of racial ‘instinct’ and ‘intuition’, suggesting that bodies read each other’s ancestry unconsciously, beneath the surfaces of social life and rational thought. In this way, his stories often depict characters recognizing hidden racial origins or psychopathic tendencies in others through moments of mystical epiphany. For Allen, bodies vacillate uncertainly between authenticity and artifice, sometimes counterfeiting hereditary origins and character, other times revealing them.
Biography
Will Abberley is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Oxford. His monograph English Fiction and the Evolution of Language, 1850-1914 is being published by Cambridge University Press this summer. His current research project explores Victorian concepts of biological mimicry and disguise, from camouflaged butterflies to racial ‘passing’.
Newgate Women: Female Criminals in Jack Sheppard and Catherine
Philippa Abbott
Among the criminals portrayed in ‘Newgate novels’ (a popular genre of fiction between 1830 and 1847) female criminals are greatly under-represented in comparison to their prosecution for crimes during the period. This paper will argue that where women, and particularly female felons, are represented in these novels, they are bound to middle-class conventions of femininity which are unsettled by the agency and energy of the fully criminal woman.
In The Hanging Tree (1996) V.A.C Gatrell highlights the fact that, during this period, the middle and upper-classes did not feel threatened by female transgression. In her article “Women Who Kill: An Analysis of Cases in Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century London” (2013), Kathy Callahan examines female perpetrators of crime between 1783 and 1815 and uses the data she collects to highlight cultural patterns to crimes committed by women, reaching conclusions similar to Gatrell. I would like to pick up on the conclusions Callahan makes in her article and link them to the under-representation of female criminals over a shorter period, with a focus on two key texts: Jack Sheppard (1839) by William Harrison Ainsworth, and Catherine: A Story (1839) by William Makepeace Thackeray.
Hostile critics, including Thackeray, gave the name of ‘Newgate novel’ to the genre, due to its subject matter and the fact that the protagonists were either taken directly from the Newgate Calendars or could easily have been part of the pages. Thackeray’s Catherine is a satire on the Newgate novel and distinguished by its female protagonist. However, Ainsworth’s text is a true Newgate novel with all the hallmarks Thackeray loathed. I will consider the effectiveness of Thackeray’s satire and contrast his female criminal protagonist with the representation of women in true Newgate novels. I will examine the ways in which each novel relates to contemporary conventions of femininity.
Biography
Philippa Abbott is 26 years old and studying part-time for a PhD at the University of Sunderland on ‘Plotting Crime Fiction 1780-1840.’ Philippa is looking to attend more conferences relating to her project in the near future and is continually looking for opportunities to share her ideas and expand her knowledge.
Kipling’s References to Theosophy in his Indian Fiction: A Charismatic Culture Broker
Mikako Ageishi
Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936), the well-known 19th century Anglo-Indian writer, once mentioned in his own autobiography, “At one time our little world was full of the aftermaths of theosophy as taught by Madame Blavatsky to her devotees.” As her contemporary, he wrote a story “The Sending of Dana Da” (1888), a parody on “Mahatma Letters” which was one of Blavatsky’s main deceptive tricks but it also mesmerized many people in its day. Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society, established in New York in 1875, then moved to India and created a foothold there where her charisma proved to be very strong, as well as her fraudulence. This was exposed by an internal informer and she was branded as a fraud by the Society for Psychical Research. Nevertheless, only 3 years after that, another branch of the Theosophical Society that was established in London, (which was in the empire which controlled India at that time) welcomed her. Why had so many people continued to be attracted and fascinated with Madame Blavatsky and her Theosophy even after her pseudo-religious philosophy came to light?
This paper will explore why Theosophy so flexibly pervaded both the Eastern and Western worlds, especially India and Britain, through Kipling’s Indian stories such as “The Mark of the Beast” (1891) and “The Return of Imray” (1888). And I will also focus on his idea of his “sending” related to Blavatsky’s “manifestation” considering the need in those days for scientifically categorizing the realm of the spirit and the human longing to see a spirit physically manifested. Tracing back historically to practices such as the “royal touch” and mesmerism, the relationship between Eastern enchantment and Western medicine will also be discussed within their colonial contexts.
Biography
I am currently an Associate Professor at Hokkaido University of Education, JAPAN. I graduated in English Literature at Tsukuba University, gaining my PhD degree before embarking on an academic career in 2003. My PhD thesis is about Rudyard Kipling and Hybridity in the Late 19th Century Western Representation.
‘So Polished and Insincere’: Silver Fork Novels and the Boundaries of the Real
Danielle Barkely
This paper will focus on the genre of the silver fork novel, a form of popular fiction that was highly visible in the early Victorian era, yet was always met with dubious critical regard. In their emphasis on representing the material details of elite lifestyles, silver fork novels quickly gained a reputation as artificial and inauthentic. I will argue here that this notion of the silver fork genre as inauthentic, which extended to debates about whether key texts could even really be thought of as ‘novels’, was shaped by assumptions about the narrative norms established by realist fiction, and the ways in which silver fork texts departed from these norms. I will focus on three main narrative conventions, illustrating each with a short case study from a silver fork novel. Part one will look at how silver fork novels violated conventions surrounding a closed and organic ending by examining Benjamin Disraeli’s Vivian Grey. Part two considers how silver forks novels deviate from expectations of multidimensional characterization through an exploration of Edward Bulwer Lytton’s Pelham and part three will look at the representation of objects through a discussion of Catherine Gore’s Mothers and Daughters. While the discussion of each novel will be necessarily brief, the paper will strive to introduce a selection of important but still understudied authors so as to provide a representative overview of the silver fork genre. By shedding light on the often unspoken assumptions about what narrative features legitimized a novel, and how the absence of those features could lead to critical neglect, this discussion touches on themes that are relevant to the study of a variety of forms of popular fiction. This paper would readily fit with the special session on genre boundaries.
Biography
Danielle Barkley holds a PhD from McGill University, where she currently works as a course lecturer. She will take up a position as a Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute for English Studies, University of London in spring 2015. Her current research focuses on the relationship between realism and nineteenth-century genre fiction.
64
No Inspector Bullock: Popular Authenticity and a Recognizable East Lynne
Lucy Barnes
One of the bestselling novels of the nineteenth century, Ellen Wood’s East Lynne (1861) was yet more remarkable as a theatrical phenomenon. During the first forty years after the novel’s publication there were at least thirty different dramatic adaptations performed in both England and America, and East Lynne’s most famous line: “Dead! dead! and he never knew me; never called me mother!” comes from T.A. Palmer’s melodrama East Lynne (1874) rather than Wood’s pen.
Theatrical adaptation is necessarily freighted with concerns about authenticity. Since East Lynne proved so fecund, this paper will use it as a case study to explore how we might determine the authentic version of a story and what it means for us to do so. Wood’s novel, after all, first appeared in serialised form in The New Monthly Magazine before it was published in three volumes. Alterations were made in the transition between the two formats: might the novel, then, be the first retelling? Does this unsettle the tendency to afford the novel pre-eminence, and allow us to consider adaptations of the story as something other than derivative and inauthentic copies of an original?
The proliferation of versions of East Lynne allows us to trace a kind of popular authentication of the story, which developed via the process of theatrical adaptation itself. By paying attention to new elements, such as the popular role of Inspector Bullock, and examining what is maintained from adaptation to adaptation, we can see which aspects of the story resonated with nineteenth-century audiences – and which, therefore, were retold. These reiterations created a popular version of East Lynne that bore, in many aspects, little resemblance to Wood’s novel, and which arguably created a greater impact, as the familiarity of Palmer’s line makes clear. These adaptations require us to consider whether authenticity is a quality inherent within a particular text, or whether it can be conferred by the recognition of a popular audience.
Biography
Lucy Barnes is in the third year of her PhD at the University of Cambridge, where she is exploring theatrical adaptations of English literature in the mid- to late-nineteenth century. This paper is taken from her research on the many stage versions of Ellen Wood’s novel, East Lynne.
Charles Dickens and the Art of Speech-Making, 1857-1870
Emily Bowles
The after-dinner speech occupied an unusual literary space for the Victorian public figures called upon to deliver them: it blurred the boundary between public and private and between fiction and non-fiction and, despite strict formal conventions, allowed some individuality and experimentation. The speech might also be circulated in pamphlets, newspapers or, in the case of Charles Dickens, from an important part of biographies for over a hundred years.
Dickens was an uncommon case among speech-makers: according to Trollope, “He spoke so well, that a public dinner became a blessing instead of a curse, if he was in the chair” (Hollington 452). However, much less attention has been paid to Dickens as a speech-maker than as a public reader, even while his earliest biographers used anecdotes from them verbatim to describe his life, taking them out of context to serve their purposes.
This paper will explore the ways in which Dickens used speech-making to shape his public image in the 1860s, at a time when his relationship with the public was on shaky ground following his separation from his wife. By exploring key speeches from this period, I will show how Dickens created a particular image of himself and his career and gave glimpses of the life he wished he had, rather than the troubled upbringing revealed in Forster’s seminal Life of Charles Dickens (1872-74). I will argue that speech-making worked with Dickens’s writing, giving him another medium with which to experiment and allowing for the particular blend of authenticity and artifice that recurs in his journalism and fiction.
Biography
Emily Bowles is a PhD student at the University of York. Her thesis focuses on Charles Dickens’s changing representations 1857-1939, exploring his self-representation in the 1860s and the development of his posthumous reputation. She is also editing Dickens’s short stories “George Silverman’s Explanation” and “Holiday Romance” (Victorian Secrets, forthcoming 2015).
Re-Visioning Harriet Coram: Tattycoram and the Art of Conversing with Dickens
Lucy Brown
Audrey Thomas’s 2005 novel Tattycoram takes a minor character from Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit and reinvents her as a heroine. As well as offering a re-visioning of the character of Harriet Coram, the novel also intersects with Dickens’s biography, with Harriet employed as a servant in the house of the novelist who eventually fictionalises her without her knowledge. Thomas’s novel, then, operates on several levels as a work of fiction in its own right, an intertextual examination of Little Dorrit, and as a conversation with Dickens and those around him. For instance, Thomas invites parallels between the treatment of Harriet Coram by Dickens and Tattycoram’s strained relationship with the Meagles in Little Dorrit. At the end of the novel, by explicitly questioning whether a genius author possesses ‘scruples’, Thomas segues into metafiction and briefly interrogates the role of the author when Dickens literally flees from the woman he has represented on the page. This paper will examine the three strands of Tattycoram with particular reference to Thomas’s depiction of the interactions between Dickens and Harriet which purport to offer an authentic vision of the author even while Harriet berates Dickens for offering an authentic vision of her in Little Dorrit.