Review: Cousin Phillis, Elizabeth Gaskell (1864)

After months of blog posts dedicated to Neo-Victorian fiction and the publication of my debut novel, Bronte’s Mistress, I’m back with a review of an actual nineteenth-century novel, Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1864 Cousin Phillis.

This short and sweet work of Victorian realism ends abruptly (it was published in four parts, and Gaskell had apparently planned for parts five and six), but is otherwise a shining example of nineteenth-century domestic storytelling. The novel would make a great addition to student essays on Gaskell’s better-known works.

The plot is simple and undramatic. Engineer Edward Holdsworth meets Phillis Holman, the much-loved only daughter of a clergyman/farmer and his wife. But, while the young man is taken with her beauty, goodness and intelligence, he’s careless with her heart. 

More interesting is the perspective Gaskell chooses to tell the story from. Paul Manning, Phillis’s cousin and Holdsworth’s subordinate at the railway company, is our primary narrator. 

Paul’s own emotional life is never centred. He’s briefly attracted to Phillis, but soon sees her as a sister, since she is a couple of inches taller than him and better at reading Latin (!). When he meets the woman who will be his wife, he only dedicates one sentence to this momentous event. 

Paul struck me as something of a nineteenth-century Nick Carraway. And Gaskell’s skill is apparent in how she develops his character to make this short work into a bildungsroman through the lightest of touches. Paul’s error in repeating Holdsworth’s idle talk to Phillis is believable, naïve, and achingly human. The book may be quiet compared to the high drama of, say, Mary Barton (1848), but that doesn’t that its characters feel any less.

I’d love to watch the TV adaptation from 1982, but so far haven’t found anywhere to stream this particular costume drama online. 

Overall, if you love mid-nineteenth-century prose, Cousin Phillis is a worthwhile investment, even if, unlike for the century’s more famous unfinished novels, modern writers aren’t flocking to anticipate what Mrs Gaskell’s ending might have been.

Do you have a suggestion for which Victorian novel I should read, review or write about next? Let know here, on Facebook, on Instagram, or by tweeting @SVictorianist. And if you want updates on my writing and my own novel Bronte’s Mistress, sign up to my email newsletter below. 

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Neo-Victorian Voices: The Lost History of Dreams, Kris Waldherr (2019)

The latest novel I’m reviewing as part of my Neo-Victorian Voices series, on works of fiction set in the nineteenth century, but written in the twenty-first, is Kris Waldherr’s The Lost History of Dreams, which came out earlier this year.

Waldherr’s debut work of fiction will delight fans of Victorian Gothic. There’s a brooding poet, who spends most of the novel in a coffin, as his fans and relatives argue over where he should be laid to rest. Our protagonist is a post-mortem photographer who’s haunted by the ghost of his wife. And the wider cast includes women who are all afflicted by something—be that grief, madness, consumption, or preternaturally white hair.

The settings are also well wrought, adding to the oppressive mood. Yes, there’s a creepy mansion, with an abandoned wing. There are rooms so gloomy our main character can’t see whom he’s speaking to. And you can’t get much darker than a hovel in the Black Forest, where some of our characters end up. Even a chapel constructed entirely of glass and the English seaside get a Gothic makeover. This is a novel with a consistent aesthetic and this is the focus on every page.

Kris Waldherr

It’s a little harder to connect with the characters. Robert Highstead, the main character, has a tragic backstory in the loss of his wife and an academic interest in Ovid, but it’s hard to describe his personality otherwise. He’s reduced to more of a frame narrator type (think Wuthering Heights or Lady Audley’s Secret) with Isabelle, the teller of the story-within-the-story about the poet and his wife, stealing the show. This is a novel that gives more nuance to its women than the men. The poet, Hugh de Bonne, for instance, comes off as your standard-issue Gothic villain, despite the devotion he inspires in his loyal followers.

Still, if you’re looking for a great Halloween read, look no further. “All love stories are ghost stories in disguise,” Waldherr tells us, and you’ll find few historical novels this year that are better costumed.

What novel should the Secret Victorianist read next as part of my Neo-Victorian Voices series? Let me know—here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.

Art Review: J.M.W. Turner: Painting Set Free, De Young Museum, San Francisco

This week, the Secret Victorianist was in San Francisco and took the opportunity to see J.M.W. Turner: Painting Set Free, the first major survey of nineteenth-century painter Turner’s late works (1835-1850), which is currently on view at the De Young museum in the city. The exhibition was originally on show at the Tate Britain in London and was at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles earlier in the year.

Mercury and Argus (pre-1836)

Known for his unrivalled and extraordinary use of light and colour, Turner (1771-1851) was a leading, and controversial, artist in his day. His late works demonstrate his continued inventiveness, as he takes mythical and biblical incidents as subjects for artistic experimentation.

Regulus (reworked 1837)

Take his Mercury and Argus (pre-1836). Rather than as a hundred-eyed guard, Argus is represented as a small indistinct figure and Mercury has few of his usual visual signifiers. Meanwhile, only the small bell around Io’s neck sets her apart from her fellow cattle. For Turner, the idealised pastoral landscape is of greater interest than the mythic plot, although this scene’s bloody aftermath, if recalled, creates a keen point of imaginative contrast. The placement of the beam of light is also more than an excuse to experiment with the play of light. The sun suggests Zeus – the original reason for Io’s transformation. In Regulus (reworked 1837), it is unclear which of the figures is the doomed Roman general preparing to return to Carthage. Yet the blinding sun directly references the fate that will meet him there. 

The Departure of the Fleet (1850)

Similarly, in The Departure of the Fleet (one of the four scenes from Virgil’s Aeneid Turner displayed at his final Royal Academy exhibition in 1850), the figures representing Dido and Aeneas are unimportant – the focus is on the setting sun marking the end of their relationship and how it touches the city the Trojans are leaving behind, soon to be illuminated likewise by its queen’s pyre.

Fire at the Grand Storehouse of the Tower of London (1841)

The exhibition also draws attention to Turner’s unusual working habits – his hasty watercolours Fire at the Grand Storehouse of the Tower of London, painted in 1841 as the fire raged, the significant changes he made to works during ‘Varnishing Days’ at the Royal Academy when other artists were only making the minutest of alterations to their paintings. There is no greater apocryphal story demonstrating Turner’s commitment to his work than that attached to Snow Storm: Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth (1841). Turner, then 67, claimed he was tied to the mast of the boat better to understand and capture the essence of a nocturnal storm.

Snow Storm: Steam-Boat off a Harbour's Mouth (1841)

The scale and quality of the exhibition is incredible and leaving Turner’s world behind can be a little stepping back outside into a light of a disappointing and less brilliant sun.

Peace - Burial at Sea (1842)

J.M.W. Turner: Painting Set Free is on display at the De Young Museum in San Francisco until September 20^th - tickets for adults cost $20. Do you know any art exhibitions back in New York you think the Secret Victorianist might enjoy? Let me know – here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.

Art Review: Nature and the American Vision: The Hudson River School, L.A. County Museum of Art, Los Angeles

The other week, the Secret Victorianist left behind the cold of New York to visit the West Coast of the US for the first time. Although much of my visit was spent basking in the sun in Santa Monica and Malibu, there was still time to soak up some nineteenth-century culture and, ironically, to learn about a group of artists who immortalised the landscape here in the East.

'The Course of Empire: The Savage State', Thomas Cole

A special exhibition at LACMA - “Nature and the American Vision: The Hudson River School” - displays forty five landscape paintings from the New-York Historical Society collection by renowned nineteenth-century artists including Thomas Cole, Asher B. Durand, and Albert Bierstadt.

'The Course of Empire: The Arcadian or Pastoral State', Thomas Cole

The paintings are beautiful representations of an unspoiled and idealised American landscape and give a wonderful insight into the American Grand Tour, which unlike its European equivalent, focussed on natural, not manmade wonders. It as an artistic movement grappling with how to best create a national identity – borrowing from the landscapes which appear in Italian art and from Romantic styles of composition, while at the same time highlighting America’s difference, its vastness, its beauty, and the continuance of its Native peoples.

'The Course of Empire: The Consummation', Thomas Cole

This last concern can seem a bit uncomfortable when viewing the exhibition. In a collection largely devoid of human subjects, the inclusion of Native Americans in the occasional examples of portraiture can feel colonial and is a forcible reminder of how much has changed in terms of how this country is populated, as well as in how the landscape surrounding New York has changed.

'The Course of Empire: Destruction', Thomas Cole

The centrepiece of the exhibition is a wonderful series of five paintings by Thomas Cole entitled The Course of Empire (1834-6), which offers an insight into another concern which has been a preoccupation in American culture, from nineteenth-century art and literature up until late twentieth-century and contemporary apocalyptic disaster movies. Cole’s paintings trace the patterns of rise and fall in civilisations – savagery giving way to an Arcadian pastoral existence, followed by the consummation of empire, its violent destruction and finally the desolation which follows.

'The Course of Empire: Desolation', Thomas Cole

That America’s ascendency can – like other great empires - only end with a violent overthrow is a powerful idea and the series also suggests doubt as to whether romanticising America in the way this art movement does is not in some ways a contributory factor towards its eventual decline. The self-consciousness with which Cole raises this concern in these paintings is also in some ways reminiscent of Victorian approaches to literary epics (which I’ve dealt with previously).

Inside the exhibition

The exhibition is running at LACMA until June 7^th with tickets priced at $25. If you’re in LA it’s well worth a visit (even if it’s not a rainy day).

The Secret Victorianist at LACMA

Do you know of any art exhibitions dealing with the nineteenth century the Secret Victorianist should visit in New York? Let me know – here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist!

A Victorian Alphabet: S is for Swinburne, Sappho and Sadomasochism

Matthew Arnold criticised Algernon Charles Swinburne for his ‘fatal habit of using one hundred words when one would suffice’. So it is perhaps strange that Swinburne, a poet notable for his diffusiveness, should be so heavily indebted to that most fragmentary of poets, known for her enigmatic brevity – Sappho.

Sappho’s slight oeuvre is of course the result 2,600 years of imperfect transmission but the broken nature of her poetry has become one of the most identifiable reasons of its appeal. Swinburne loved and admired Sappho from his schooldays at Eton, but feminist critics have criticised nineteenth-century male poets such as Swinburne and Pierre Jules Théophile Gautier for exploiting the gaps in Sappho, inserting themselves in the silence and populating the elisions with expressions of their own sexual and poetic desires.

Swinburne certainly found Sappho spoke to him in very personal ways, encompassing, but also going beyond, questions of sexual preferences – the appeal of sadomasochism, the experience and expression of what we might label ‘bisexual’ love. Sappho is perhaps most directly prominent in Swinburne’s ‘Anactoria’ (published as part of Poems and Ballands in 1866).

In the Days of Sappho, John William Godward

Anactoria is a female lover of Sappho’s, mentioned by name in Fragment 16, but it is Fragment 31, traditionally referred to as the ‘Ode to Anactoria’ despite the lack of addressee, which informs Swinburne’s poem more directly. In Sappho’s poem it is the physical effects of love and particularly sexual jealousy on the poet herself which is the focus:

For whenever I glance at you, it seems that I can say nothing at all but my tongue is broken in silence, and that instant a light fire rushes beneath my skin. I can no longer see anything in my eyes and my ears are thundering, and cold sweat pours down me, and shuddering grasps me all over, and I am greener than grass, and I seem to myself to be little short of death.

And Swinburne’s poem, written in a voice which is later confirmed to be Sappho’s, starts in the same vein:

My life is bitter with thy love, thine eyes

Blind me, thy tresses burn me, thy sharp sighs

Divide my flesh and spirit with soft sound,

And my blood strengthens, and my veins abound.

But in Swinburne’s poem, the violence soon shifts to be directed towards Anactoria, not just caused by her: 

I would my love could kill thee; I am satiated

With seeing thee live, and fain would have thee dead.

….

I would find grievous ways to have thee slain,

Intense device, and superflux of pain;

Vex thee with amorous agonies, and shake

Life at thy lips, and leave it there to ache

This violence isn’t only the result of jealousy – rather, it is a source of pleasure in itself and the natural result of a love which is imagined as being equally painful to both parties:

I feel thy blood against thy blood: my pain

Pains thee, and lips bruise lips, and vein stings vein.

For both Swinburne and Sappho, sex and pain are inexorably linked and in both poems the natural result of love is death, but Sappho’s importance to the later poet isn’t only a question of a shared interest in sadomasochism. In a 1914 article in The Saturday Review on Sappho, Swinburne wrote:

Judging even from the mutilated fragments fallen even within our reach from the broken altar of her sacrifice of a song, I for one have always agreed with all Grecian tradition in thinking Sappho to be beyond all question and comparison the very greatest poet that ever lived.

In ‘Anactoria’ the equal pain which Swinburne imagines, is not mirrored in an equal death – Sappho will survive, while her lovers will not, because of the uniqueness of her song:

Yea, they shall say, earth’s womb has borne in vain

New things, and never this best thing again;

Borne days and men, borne fruits and wars and wine,

Seasons and songs, but no song more like mine [emphasis mine]

In his 1914 article, Swinburne continues:

Aeschylus is the greatest poet who ever was also a prophet; Shakespeare is the greatest dramatist who ever was also a poet; but Sappho is simply nothing less – as she is certainly nothing more – than the greatest poet who ever was at all.

It is this ‘faith’ of Swinburne’s in the perfection of Sappho’s poetry, rather than her sexual subjects, which cements her worth.

What should be T in my Victorian Alphabet? Let me know here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.

A Victorian Alphabet: R is for Rome

The Secret Victorianist was in Rome last week to visit the same sites admired by Byron and Shelley, but it was the reaction of a fictional character to the eternal city which was playing most on my mind. Dorothea Brooke, a central character in George Eliot’s 1871-2 Middlemarch, is less than impressed by Rome and its history when on her honeymoon tour.

Rome, Eliot argues, can only be appreciated when its viewers possess knowledge as well as ardour:

'To those who have looked at Rome with the quickening power of a knowledge which breathes a growing soul into all historic shapes, and traces out the suppressed transitions which unite all contrasts, Rome may still be the spiritual centre and interpreter of the world.’

This historical and specifically classical knowledge is precisely what Dorothea lacks. I have already posted about women’s lack of access to classical education in the nineteenth century and, as a result of this, even Rome – the centre of the classical world – becomes meaningless here in the light of Dorothea’s ignorance.

The Secret Victorianist in Rome

‘But let them [those with knowledge] conceive one more historical contrast: the gigantic broken revelations of that Imperial and Papal city thrust abruptly on the notions of a girl who had been brought up in English and Swiss Puritanism, fed on meagre Protestant histories and on art chiefly of the hand-screen sort; a girl whose ardent nature turned all her small allowance of knowledge into principles, fusing her actions into their mould, and whose quick emotions gave the most abstract things the quality of a pleasure or a pain; a girl who had lately become a wife, and from the enthusiastic acceptance of untried duty found herself plunged in tumultuous preoccupation with her personal lot.’

This passage contains a lot. The ‘gigantic broken revelations’ of Rome suggest the fragmentary nature of Dorothea’s intellectual awareness as well as the physical realities of the ruined city, made more obvious to one who can’t ‘trace out’ the past from the surrounding ruins. Meanwhile, Rome’s subsequent role as centre of the Catholic faith has profound implications for how a puritanical Protestant will respond even to its classical past, with Eliot highlighting the more lowly nature of Protestant histories and passing negative judgement on their corresponding aesthetics.

Dorothea judges everything in terms of morality – her ‘ardent nature’ is inseparable from her moral code, leaving her uncertain as to how to respond to Rome. And added to this her personal circumstances, as a bride, navigating a new life role, compounds her confusion.

Rome for Dorothea is an unreadable cipher, emphasising her comparative ignorance, and a city which is morally, as well as mentally, unsettling, given its Catholicism and the separation between morality and aestheticism found in the classical art she encounters (and in front of which Will Ladislaw first sees her). And along with both these things, this confusing city becomes a manifestation of Dorothea’s inner turmoil as she reassesses her life role, following on from her marriage.

Rome confuses Dorothea then not because she thinks too little, but because she thinks too much, making her painfully aware of the cacophony of emotions explored above:

‘The weight of unintelligible Rome might lie easily on bright nymphs to whom it formed a background for the brilliant picnic of Anglo-foreign society; but Dorothea had no such defence against deep impressions.’

Rome then for Dorothea is a ‘vast wreck of ambitious ideals, sensuous and spiritual, mixed confusedly with the signs of breathing forgetfulness and degradation’ – hardly a line the tourist board should be adopting any time soon.

What should be ‘S’ in my Victorian Alphabet? Let me know here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.