Lecture 2

Victorian Nostalgia

In the present context, what I mean by ‘Victorian nostalgia’ is not our desire to return to the Victorian period, perhaps to play the violin with Sherlock Holmes. The nineteenth century itself was nostalgic for earlier ages. The reasons for this are clear: in a time of rapid social and technological change, many Victorians felt that valuable elements of culture were being lost.

Social Changes

The British aristocracy had seen what could happen in a revolution. Having quite literally kept their heads (unlike their French counterparts), they felt that at the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815 that life could return to normal. But political pressure began to build from the slowly growing middle and merchant classes who felt that the existing ‘rotten borough’ system denied them a parliamentary role. The 1832 Reform Bill had made parliament slightly more representative by eliminating most of the rotten boroughs, but had made clear to the aristocratic types that governmental control was clearly passing out of their hands. Even the semi-feudal aspects of country life came to an end as ‘commons’, areas shared by the local aristocrat and general populace became ‘enclosed’, often being purchased by new money.

Through the century many felt that the coming world of industry and commerce was ‘coarse’; that a life devoted to counting money and persuading other people to part with their wealth was not necessarily the most noble way to spend one’s life. Observers such as Matthew Arnold wrote in Culture and Anarchy about the narrow and philistine middle class who had neither taste nor an inclination towards intellectual activity. Even educational institutions which were rapidly improving in many ways, seemed to be wiping out something of the imaginative legacy of western culture. In Hard Times, Dickens creates the schoolmaster Thomas Gradgrind, who sees his occupations to be to produce children who can remember lists and numbers by rote. See the Victorian Web page at http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/dickens/hardtimes/pva121.html for a summary of Gradgrind’s utilitarian philosophy.

In response to this onslaught of pragmatic, hard and unimaginative modernity there was nostalgia. Many writers, painters and architects found their models in the gothic style, which more or less reproduced styles from the medieval period. Many buildings that you probably think of as old fashioned are in fact deliberately so, as C19th builders laboured to reproduce the features of gothic architecture, though not always successfully.

Architecture

As the excellent site on gothic architecture at http://www.britainexpress.com/architecture/gothic-revival.htm notes, the 1840s gothic revival architecture did not take place because of the wild enthusiasm of architects. Instead, it developed because of a number of artists and thinkers who held that the middle ages married society and religion in a near perfect way. Their architecture had been that of the great cathedrals which inspired one with awe. Could not modern architecture capture some of that spirituality and combat the deadly pragmatism of the Victorian age?

Gothic revival architecture was given an early try out when the Palace of Westminster burned to the ground in 1834 and A.W. Pugin had the opportunity to design a new one. His design was originally controversial but was soon accepted -- Westminster today has the highly recognizable ornate design, with a crenellated roof line and stonework characteristic of the gothic. Pugin felt that society had reached its highest point during 1280-1340.

That people beginning to feel the benefits of industrialized ‘civilisation’ could look back with envy at the middle ages as the highest point humanity has reached may seem absurd to us, but we need to remember that most architecture was still severely pragmatic, mostly ugly and was instrumental in despoiling large swathes of countryside. The medieval age had been the age of craftspeople who had a personal, artistic interest in their work. The C19th, on the other hand, was the age of industrialized production where the worker was alienated from his or her product, seeing only a part of it, having no creative input and possibly being unable to afford it. John Ruskin, the famous artist and critic bemoaned this loss of a craft relationship with the object being produced, and the ornate, decorative designs that he championed were an attempt to return this craft to the production process. Q did this succeed?

Art

You should have had a chance to look in the nice colour booklet that came with the anthology. The personalities involved in the pre-Rapahelite brotherhood (PRB) are covered in some detail at http://www.victorianweb.org/painting/prb/1.html

What we need to know it that the PRB rejected the conventional academy taste in painting, like extreme and realistic detail combined with complex symbolism. Many of the subjects were borrowed from the Bible, Shakespeare and contemporary poets such as Keats and Tennyson. Along with the later generation of aesthetes such as Edward Burne-Jones, they tended towards medieval figures in their paintings. For example, above is J. Waterhouse’s painting of The Lady of Shalott is drawn from the Tennyson poem, which is itself drawn from Shakespeare.

Literature

Published in 1764 Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto started a vogue for gothic novels. These gothic works, usually set in the middle ages, featured dark passageways, owls, creaking doors, dungeons, blameless young women, tyrannical fathers and the usual assortment of questionable nuns and priests. Immensely popular in their day, they depicted the mind under extreme conditions; they were fictional investigations of the operation of the less well-understood parts of the mind, later called the unconscious. The Romantics borrowed some of the images and preoccupations of gothic literature. Coleridge’s poem ‘Christabel’, for example, is set in a medieval world, and involves a strange temptress who is in possession of some hideous secret. But John Keats is the Romantic poet most influenced by the gothic -- you can see this in poems such as ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ (painted above by F. Dicksee) and ‘The Eve of St Agnes’, which depict the kinds of medieval romance with which we are familiar. In the first, a knight is besotted by a beguiling woman who abandons him, leaving him forlorn. The second is a story of two Romeo and Juliet-like lovers, who must escape the castle and the medieval feuds it represents. Pre-Raphaelite artists often used Keats and other authors as a source of inspiration.

Keats’ enthusiasm for the middle ages caught on more generally as the C19th progressed. One myths which had been perennially popular was that of King Arthur. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is an early telling of one tale -- look out for the famous translation by Tolkien. Thomas Malory had written Le Morte D’Arthur which was published by Caxton in 1485 building on already extant myths of the legendary British King. One can imagine why these tales were popular in the Victorian period. The misogynist unhappy under the reign of the Queen could look back at a period (however imaginary) of heroic and masculine monarchs. The idealists could regard Arthur and his knightly court as embodying high ideals of gentlemanliness, selflessness, piety, nobility etc. The poetic imagination was excited by the tragedy of Arthur’s fall from grace, Guinevere’s adultery, and the mysticism of the sword in the stone.

But the most important reason that the Victorians were nostalgic for a medieval age was that many felt that something was being lost by the modern, mercantile and industrial society then under construction. Ideals of chivalry, service, loyalty, self-sacrifice and so on seemed to have no place in the world of aggressive capitalism.

The Arthur stories are really a group of interweaving characters and sub-plots that an author can relate in a number of ways. Tennyson wrote ‘The Lady of Shalott’ in 1833 before he had read Malory, but the setting in the medieval period is quite clear. The Lady of Shalott  awaits the arrival of Sir Lancelot. Yet unlike the traditional tales (so well satirized in Shrek) the arrival of the knight does not result in a happy ending but in the death of the Lady. Lancelot’s reactions seems rather shallow to say the least -- he is not moved to fear as are the other observers but merely comments on her attractiveness. Many artists were similarly moved and you can see their paintings of the Lady at http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/tennyson/loslist.html.

‘The Lady of Shalott’ raises some important questions of interpretation. She is really pretty voiceless and her only expression or public appearance comes with her death. Yet she obviously has powerful desires and would like a chance to express the. Does she represent the position of the Victorian woman? Is this poem a critique of this, or does it support it is a misty, sentimental way? Is it a criticism of Lancelot? Here is a chatty page with a copy of the poems, paintings and interpretastions at the end: http://www.pathguy.com/shalott.htm

Tennyson read Malory and then decided to embark on his own Arthurian cycle. The Idylls of the King (1859-85) follows the construction of the realm of the round table and then its gradual disintegration causes by infighting, treachery and adultery. Most of the 12 stories of the Idylls position Arthur as a peripheral figure but our reading from page 1295-1303 concerns Arthur’s death and the relationship with his last surviving knight Bedivere. If you want to get a sense of an Arthurian world without all this troublesome reading see the John Boorman film, Excalibur.

‘The Lotos Eaters’ is not set in the medieval era but in classical times. You will remember (from the recent movie) that Odysseus, or Ulysses as he is called was the King of Ithaca who fought against Troy. He then returned to Ithaca but it took him 10 years because he became distracted... One of these distractions was the island of the lotos-eaters, described in book nine of The Odyssey. The Lotos, a delicious flower, provides a temptation for the sailors in the poem who wish only to relax. Odysseus has to force them back on the boat, pointing out that there are challenges still to be met.

This idea of  permanent idleness was anthema to Victorians who worshipped the idea of work. Work was seen as a virtue in its own right -- money, respectability etc might come from its but labour itself was a moral duty. This sense of work as a virtue was closely tied to earnestness and religion. Serious, earnest people new that they had God-given talents and even a God-given mission that it was their duty to carry out through their efforts. Satan was a big fan of ‘idlenss’ as it gave him occasion to tempt a person into sin. Thus the island of the Lotos-Eaters is a terrible danger tempting though it may be.

The Victorians would want you to work hard in this course...

Tennyson’s poem ‘Ulysses’ follows this classical figure as he plans to leave Ithaca one last time. He does not want to surrender to old age. In ‘Tithonus’ we have a classical figure (brother to Priam, King of Troy) who had granted to him eternal life but not youth. The poem points out that though regrettable, death is a necessary part of the circulation of life.

The last poem is Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s ‘The Blessed Damozel’. He conceived of this poem as a sequel or counterpart to Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Raven’, in which a man laments for his ‘lost Lenore’. In Rossetti’s poem the woman is in heaven longing for her partner to join her -- it is therefore rather more optimistic than Poe’s poem. Whereas C20th literature in which heaven plays a part is usually comedic, Rossetti is very serious and pious in his joining of religious to romantic love.

As some added fun, get a copy of Poe's 'The Raven' for next week. Also see Dante Rossetti's 'My Sister's Sleep' (Norton 1578-79)