The important idea within new historicism which relates to neo-Victorianism is that of rereading and revision. Terry Eagleton states that ‘All literary works[…]are ‘rewritten’, if only unconsciously, by the societies which read them; indeed there is no reading of a
125 Raymond Williams (1973), ‘Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory’, in Debating Texts: A Reader in 20th Century Literary Theory and Method, ed. by Rick Rylance (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1987), 204-16 (pp.209).
126 Marjorie Levinson, ‘Reflections on the New Historicism’, European Romantic Review, 23.3 (2012), 355-362 (pp. 357).
work which is not also a ‘re-writing’ ’.127 Not only does this relate to the idea of a modern readership finding new meanings in canonical texts; it is also seen in the literal re-writings of texts in the work of neo-Victorian novelists such as Sarah Waters and Lynn Shepherd. These writers reread and then rewrite both Victorian history and Victorian fiction. They create the counterhistories of both representatives of groups of real-life people, such as prostitutes and lesbians, and fictional characters such as Bleak House’s Inspector Bucket. The value system of the late twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries allows them to write about those whose histories remained largely untold in nineteenth-century literature, stories which were not selected by the dominant culture of the time. These counterhistories ‘make apparent the slippages’128 in Victorian fiction and also take an approach to their subject which is a reflection of a modern consciousness or, to use Foucault’s terminology, the modern epistemic conditions. In the same way that new historicists see a dialogue between literary and non-literary texts, neo-Victorian writers, whilst also making use of non-literary texts as part of their research, engage in a dialogue with Victorian novels. Either directly or indirectly, they rewrite Victorian novels. Modern readers are unlikely to respond to Victorian texts in the same way that their original readership did; furthermore, after reading a neo-Victorian counterhistory, it seems likely that one would approach a neo-Victorian text with a somewhat altered perspective. In this way, neo-Victorian novels, are themselves part of a modern culture which leads us to reread and assign new meaning to canonical texts.
The idea of the reader bringing ideas to the text and meaning being created through the interaction of those ideas and the text itself is a central idea of reader response theory which I develop in the following section.
A further aspect of new historicist criticism which relates to the writing of neo-Victorian novels is the idea of literary realism, an idea crucial to this project. Neo-Victorian novels use their earlier texts and other non-fictional works, such as that of Henry Mayhew,129 to help to create an air of authenticity which allows the reader to enter the fictional world. Greenblatt and Gallagher state that what they wanted to recover in their literary criticism was ‘a confident conviction of reality, without giving up the power of literature to sidestep or evade the quotidian and without giving up a minimally sophisticated understanding that any text depends upon the absence of the bodies and voices that it represents’; they ‘wanted the touch of the real’ (31). Referring to non-literary texts contemporaneous with the literary ones enables Greenblatt and Gallagher to read new meaning in the works and achieve this ‘touch of the real’ in their criticism. The neo-Victorian genre draws on the above concept: its success lies partly in its ability to evoke
127 Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), p.12.
128 Gallagher, Catherine and Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000), p.17.
129 London Labour and the London Poor, first published as a periodical, 1850-2.
a clear sense of the Victorian period which is achieved by self-consciously referencing other texts. This intertextuality is often handled in a playful way, setting the reader the challenge of spotting the allusions to earlier texts. Lynn Shepherd describes her novel Tom-All-Alone’s as ‘a literary Easter egg hunt in which the more you bring, the more you find’.130 It is the readers’ knowledge of earlier texts which allows them to gain a full understanding of the new one, as well as a sense of satisfaction after having found the references to Victorian fiction.
Dana Shiller brought the term ‘neo-Victorian’ into usage and gives a helpful explanation of the dual purpose of such novels:
neo-Victorian novels are acutely aware of both history and fiction as human constructs and use this awareness to rethink forms and contents of the past […] neo-Victorian fiction is motivated by an essentially revisionist impulse to reconstruct the past by questioning the certitude of our historical knowledge, and yet I want also to claim that even as these novels emphasize events that are usually left out of histories, they nonetheless manage to preserve and celebrate the Victorian past.131
Subsequent critics have echoed Shiller’s view and used her work as the basis for their studies of novelists including Waters and Faber, as I detail below. In the inaugural issue of Neo-Victorian Studies, Mark Llewellyn considers the growing academic interest in the concept of the neo-Victorian, arguing that ‘the neo-Victorian is about new approaches to the Victorian period’ which benefit the work of both students and faculty on nineteenth-century fiction. He argues that ‘as the neo-Victorian text writes back to something in the nineteenth century, it does so in a manner that often aims to re-fresh and re-vitalise the importance of that earlier text to the here and now’.132 In this way, readers, when they engage with nineteenth century texts, may do so with a heightened awareness of certain issues or groups of people which they might not otherwise have had.
Louisa Yates states that ‘an urge to revise can be held as an approximate standard of the genre’ and then looks at how Waters’s Tipping the Velvet (1998), whilst not a revision of a specific Victorian ‘pre-text’, draws on nineteenth-century literature to tell a previously untold story: ‘The city and its inhabitants lend the novel its Victorian credentials in order to valorise a nineteenth-century lesbian experience -- in short, placing lesbians into a convincing nineteenth-century landscape.’133 In other words, if the reader accepts the
130 In ‘Recalled to Life: from Bleak House to Tom-All-Alone’s’, a paper given at the After Dickens conference at the University of York, 3rd December, 2016.
131 ‘The Redemptive Past in the Neo-Victorian Novel’, Studies in the Novel, 29. 4 (1997), 538-560 (pp. 540).
132 Mark Llewellyn, ‘What is Neo-Victorian Studies?’, Neo-Victorian Studies, 1.1 (2008), 164-185 (pp. 168-9, 170-1)
133 ‘ “But it’s only a novel, Dorian”: Victorian Fiction and the process of Revision’, Neo-Victorian Studies, 2:2 (2009/10), 186-211 (pp. 187-8).
realism of the Victorian setting, he or she will accept the presentation of the lesbian relationships involved. This is despite the fact, as Yates argues, that there may well be certain anachronisms in the text (191).
In 2010, Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn stated that the term ‘neo-Victorianism’ had previously been only ‘loosely defined’ and gave the following field-defining definition:
‘To be part of the neo-Victorianism we discuss in this book, texts (literary, filmic, audio/visual) must in some respect be self-consciously engaged with the act of (re)interpretation, (re)discovery and (re)vision concerning the Victorians’ (original italics).134 Whilst previous scholars had discussed neo-Victorianism using similar terminology, this was the first succinct definition of the field. The idea of the (re)discovery and (re)vision of the Victorian era is taken up by Maciej Sulmicki in his work on Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White. He states that the novel adheres to the ‘currently common approach of foregrounding the groups whose voices were not so often heard in Victorian times’,135 in this case, prostitutes. Indeed, the novel within the novel -- Sugar’s luridly violent account of a prostitute who murders her customers -- is comparable to Faber’s actual novel as it seeks to give a voice to someone previously denied one. Sulmicki argues that
‘a more overt treatment of -- among other things -- sex and violence’(2) is what makes neo-Victorian fiction stand apart from most of its nineteenth-century counterparts, but comments that ‘The Victorian ‘air’, however, must remain’(2). The choice of the modal
‘must’ in this statement reveals the extent to which Sulmicki sees a credible ‘Victorian air’ as an integral part of these works: the need to keep the novel within the genre of literary realism is crucial if the reader is to engage with the characters and their stories.
Charlotte Boyce and Elodie Rousselot succinctly sum up this duality: ‘Both an appreciation and a revision of the nineteenth century, the neo-Victorian adequately conveys the idea of celebrating while contesting, of looking back while moving forward.’136 They consider the way in which the term ‘Dickensian’ resonates in modern Anglophone cultures and, after looking at newspaper headlines from 2012, conclude that the signifier is ‘mutable and mobile’ as it ‘stands in the popular imagination for urban poverty, destitution and suffering’ on the one hand, but ‘on the other it is evocative of bountiful Christmases, idealised families and domestic harmony’(3).
Reviews of neo-Victorian novels often draw comparisons with Dickens; for example the Guardian reviewer’s comment printed on the back of the Canongate (2011) edition
134 Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn, Neo-Victorianism: The Victorians in the Twenty-First Century, 1999-2009 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p.4.
135 Maciej Sulmicki, ‘The Author as the Antiquarian: Selling Victorian culture to readers of neo-Victorian novels and steampunk comics’, Otherness: Essays and Studies, 2.1 (2011), 1-16 (pp. 4).
136 Charlotte Boyce and Elodie Rousselot, ‘The Other Dickens: Neo-Victorian Appropriation and Adaptation,’ Neo-Victorian Studies, 5:2 (2012), 1-11 (pp.2).
of The Crimson Petal and the White reads ‘The novel that Dickens might have written had he been allowed to speak freely’. This statement both supports the revisionist view of the genre taken by Shiller et al and assumes an awareness of Dickens on the part of the reader, and therefore creates expectations as to the nature of the novel’s content. Faber responds to the ‘mutable and mobile’ nature of the signifier Dickensian in his novel as he presents the reader with detailed images of the lives of the poor and also includes an idealised description of Christmas in Chapter Twenty-Six, complete with decorating the tree, eating delicious food, and giving and receiving special presents. Of course, both the depiction of the poor and the ideal Christmas are very much within the neo-Victorian genre and revised versions of Dickensian scenes: there is graphic detail of sexual acts in the former and the presence of Sugar, prostitute-turned-governess, in the latter.
Some critics, for example Alexia L. Bowler and Jessica Cox137, and Allison Neal138 consider why, amongst the different genres of historical fiction, the neo-Victorian is especially popular. Bowler and Cox state that ‘the Victorians are frequently constructed as our immediate ancestors whose achievements remain evident in the modern world, not only in the form of art, literature and architecture, but also political structures, social organisations and legal frameworks’(4). Society as we know it today developed due to Victorian innovations such as the railway system, child labour and education laws, and the way in which society and the class system was changed as a result of the rise of the manufacturing middle classes. Thus our sense of identity in the modern world can be traced back to the Victorian era. Spring’s account of the rise of the Labour Party in Fame is the Spur can be seen as an exploration of the origins of the modern political system for a 1940s readership. This idea of modern identity beginning in the nineteenth century is perhaps why modern writers look to that era to explore aspects of society which could not be included within novels which were published at the time. Allison Neal makes this point effectively: ‘The conceptions of race, class, and gender in neo-Victorian fiction and culture are just one way of exploring our social assumptions and categories in the twenty-first century through a prism of the neo-Victorian lens’ (70). The views held by modern readers on such issues can be both challenged and corroborated by neo-Victorian fiction.
Neo-Victorian fiction can be seen to be closely aligned with new historicism in terms of its revisionist agenda, its creation of ‘counterhistories’. It develops previously untold narratives which it is able to do as a result of both the present day’s greater knowledge
137 Alexia L. Bowler and Jessica Cox, ‘Introduction to Adapting the Nineteenth Century:
Revisiting, Revising and Re-writing the Past’, Neo-Victorian Studies, 2:2 (2009/10), 1-17.
138 Allison Neal, ‘()Victorian Impersonations: Vesta Tilley and Tipping the Velvet’, Neo-Victorian Studies, 4:1 (2011), 55-76.
of certain subjects and modern sensibilities toward different social and political issues.
New historicist criticism references other texts as a way of providing a more circumspect analysis of the literary work being read; and writers of neo-Victorian fiction reference other texts in order to create meaning, although the difference is that these are earlier works of fiction as well as non-literary discourses. Thus someone who is reading a neo-Victorian novel, and is cognisant of canonical or popular nineteenth century fiction, could be considered to be engaged in new historicist criticism, albeit in a playful way. Yet new historicism should not be seen as pertinent only to the analysis of recent neo-Victorian texts. The work done by the various scholars referenced above demonstrates that there is an intertextuality, a dialogue, between different publications belonging to the same era. In the previous section, part of my focus was to consider Trollope, Gissing and Spring in their relationship to Dickens and to the social conditions of the time, Trollope as Dickens’s contemporary, Gissing as one writing later within the Victorian era and Spring as one taking a retrospective view of the era. Below are three case studies in which I consider, in more detail, the ways in which Waters, Faber and Shepherd rewrite Victorian texts for a twenty-first century readership and the ways in which they use literary dialect to help them to do so.
4. Sarah Waters, Fingersmith (2002)