Neo-Victorian Voices: The Solitary House/Tom-All-Alone’s, Lynn Shepherd (2012)

While all of the neo-Victorian novels I have written about so far in this series owe an enormous debt to writers who lived in the nineteenth century, Lynn Shepherd’s The Solitary House (published as Tom-All-Alone’s in the UK) is only the second to rework and borrow heavily from a famous Victorian text (the first was John Harding’s 2010 Florence and Giles which I blogged on here).

Shepherd’s mystery is a story set in the world of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1852-3), fused in the final pages with Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1859). She argues that she was able ‘to create a space between these two great novels, where [she] could locate a new and independent story of [her] own’.

Lynn Shepherd

It’s an interesting premise, but the terms of Shepherd’s experiment are slightly unclear. In some cases she borrows wholesale, especially from Dickens, using Bleak House’s most famous characters, including the lawyer Tulkinghorn, Inspector Bucket and Lady Dedlock. But elsewhere the rules are bent and characters changed to fit the new (and much more gruesome!) story. Esther becomes Hester, Mr Jarndyce Mr Jarvis, Ada Clara and Richard Rick.

As someone who knows Bleak House so well I found myself getting a little confused, unsure which plot points remained intact, and which information I was meant to be privy to as a reader, at each point. I’m almost inclined to agree with one Amazon reviewer who wrote that he/she ‘suspect[ed] someone who hasn't read Bleak House will enjoy it more than someone who has’.

Where Shepherd doesn’t turn to Dickens for inspiration is in incorporating passages of light relief. This novel is oppressively dark, without the humour offered by the Jellybys and Turveydrops. She’s at her best in graveyard scenes, grim discoveries, and action sequences. Lovers of modern crime fiction will enjoy her decidedly unsanitary London and it’s hard not to be drawn in by the sensory descriptions of this dangerous and violent city.

But whether you care about the protagonist – disgraced former policeman Charles Maddox – is another story. I don’t know if things would have been better had I read the first Charles Maddox mystery – Murder in Mansfield Park (2011), based on Jane Austen’s 1811-1813 novel – but I struggled to connect with the central character.

Maddox isn’t a brilliant detective. He is repeatedly stuck and has to go to his great uncle for help, in his slightly more coherent moments (as the older man is suffering from dementia). He is quite colourless as a character, with backstory - for instance his young sister’s kidnap - taking the place of true personality development. I think perhaps the novel suffered from the scale of its ambition in this respect. At less than a third of the size of Bleak House, The Solitary House still has a huge array of characters, making it difficult to effect the same level of intimacy with the protagonist we expect from modern detective-driven fiction.

In many of the neo-Victorian novels I’ve looked at – most recently Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White – there’s also been an interesting examination of the gender politics of nineteenth-century fiction, but, although The Solitary House is a story all about the abuse of women and children by aristocratic men, don’t expect this novel to pass the Bechdel test. If a female character is introduced, odds on she’ll be a) murdered, b) prostituted or c) abused (and probably all three), which is disappointing as much more interesting things could have been done here, even with a well-off white male protagonist.

Most unsettling of all is the character Molly – Maddox’s servant girl who is black and remains mute throughout the book. Shepherd relies on her readers’ discomfort about Molly’s position and her master’s treatment of her, but doesn’t give a satisfying conclusion to this storyline. As with the treatment of Collins’s and Dickens’s texts, I was left feeling frustrated by this aspect of the novel and a feeling that, with more care and revision, the text could have been substantially better.

If you’ve read The Solitary House/Tom-All-Alone’s, I’d love to know what you thought. And, if you have any suggestions on which neo-Victorian novel the Secret Victorianist should read next then let me know – here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist!

Neo-Victorian Voices: Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, Susanna Clarke (2004)

Next up in my very modern series is a book that isn’t Neo-Victorian at all, but rather neo-nineteenth-century. Susanna Clarke’s magical odyssey spans the years 1806-1817, as her unlikely pair of magicians help defeat Napoleon, squabble via rival periodicals, and accidentally inflict perpetual night on swathes on Austrian-ruled Venice.

Despite its early setting, I wanted to include the novel in my Neo-Victorian round-up not only due to its high quality and current popularity (given the 2015 BBC adaptation), but because, in tone, plot and structure, it stands apart from many other historical novels (and novels more generally), making it an interesting counterpoint to some of the novels I’ve previously blogged about.

Rather than trading on plot devices familiar to lovers of nineteenth-century novels (as we saw in Michael Cox’s The Meaning of Night, or even more directly, due to its intertextual interests, in John Harding’s Florence and Giles), Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell continually defies readerly expectations. Clarke’s English magicians are capable of transporting whole cities to different continents and disappearing through mirrors, and at times it feels as if she herself is achieving something similar, as the novel lurches madly but masterfully between locations, subplots and consciences.

Susanna Clarke (1959-)

If some of the Neo-Victorian writers I’ve looked at so far can seem to go a bit heavy on proving the historical verisimilitude of their texts, their literary antecedents, and their academic leanings, Clarke’s novel reads as something of a witty rebuke. Here too there are footnotes, and a deep consciousness of the novel as text, but their content is an extended joke. Clarke has created an entire academic discipline of Theoretical Magic, complete with a cast of nineteenth-century, and earlier, scholars, canonical texts with which the reader becomes increasingly familiar, and vicious intellectual debates. What’s most clever is how this ‘history’ intersects with a history of England (and particularly the North of England) made more magical. The longer you read (there are more than 1000 pages in all) the harder it becomes to distinguish between history and fantasy, as if you were trying to traverse one of Norrell’s labyrinths.

‘Footnote: In this speech Mr Lascelles has managed to combine all Lord Portishead’s books into one. By the time Lord Portishead gave up the study of magic in early 1808 he had published three books: The Life of Jacques Belais, pub. Longman, London, 1801, The Life of Nicholas Goubert, pub. Longman, London, 1805, and A Child’s History of the Raven King, pub. Longman, London, 1807, engravings by Thomas Bewick.’

One of Portia Rosenberg's illustrations

If in some ways Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell is a very different kind of novel, in others, however, it bears all the hallmarks of its literary antecedents. In style, Clarke attempts a blend of Dickensian characterisation and caricature with a rye social humour most comparable with Jane Austen. The execution is a little uneven (and works better in passages exempt from references to magic), but means that there are points at which the novel fills less like a fantasy tome and more like a social comedy.

‘Lovers are rarely the most rational beings in creation and so it will come as no surprize to my readers to discover that Strange’s musings concerning Miss Woodhope had produced a most inexact portrait of her.’

Overall, the novel is a light, but long, entertainment, designed to delight academics and the well-read, complete with cameos from the likes of Byron and Lord Wellington, and using the past as a foreign country where even the magical becomes strangely plausible. Don’t expect emotional depths, a literary response to the literary canon, or a Victorian preoccupation with the human condition and morality. Neo-nineteenth-centuryism is, for Clarke, a device for creating her very own breed of magic realism.

What novel should the Secret Victorianist read next in her Neo-Victorian Voices series? Let me know – here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist!

Neo-Victorian Voices: The Convictions of John Delahunt: A Story of Murder, Andrew Hughes (2013)

In today’s post I’m considering whether Neo-Victorian writing is simply a sub-genre of historical fiction through blogging about Irish writer Andrew Hughes’s debut novel, published in 2013, The Convictions of John Delahunt: A Story of Murder.

The pure definition of ‘historical fiction’ is a novel, or other work, where ‘the plot takes place in a setting located in the past’. Reading this, the texts I’ve looked at previously as part of my Neo-Victorian Voices series – Michael Cox’s The Meaning of Night and John Harding’s Florence and Giles – and Hughes’s novel definitely all fall into this genre.

The Convictions of John Delahunt: A Story of Murder (2013)

However, it is very noticeable that, in the case of the Cox and Harding, other important elements, which we’ve come to expect from historical fiction (at all levels of quality), are missing. First, there is the inclusion (or here exclusion) of actual historical figures. A key tenant of historical writing has been to offer a new perspective on famous historical events, or to educate the reader about events and/or people whose stories have previously been ignored. While The Meaning of Night uses the conceit of a newly discovered manuscript (labelled ‘Fiction?’), none of its events or characters have basis in truth. The novel is an escapist fantasy, and it fits self-consciously into the traditions of Victorian literary sensationism. Florence and Giles is even more indebted to a literary (rather than an historical) inheritance, as it is a reworking of a Henry James plot. There are no ‘real’ characters here – only layer upon layer of fiction and artistic response.

Hughes’s project, however, is very different. John Delahunt was a real person, hanged for the murder of Thomas Maguire (a real child) in Dublin in 1841. Hughes’s project is far removed from Cox’s or Harding’s – it’s about composing a compelling narrative from the details we know of Delahunt’s life, combined with his own imaginative embellishments. What’s more, it is presumed (correctly!) that the reader’s first response on finishing the novel will be to want to learn more about the text’s veracity – an Afterward supplies the answers we may have wondered about throughout and also adds the information (for example about the execution) which Delahunt (the narrator) cannot, in some ways acting not as a note on the text, but as the novel’s final chapter.

Along with the insertion of real people, historical fiction is also often rich in detail about the times in which it is set. Of the three novels, again The Convictions fits into this mould most comfortably. Having worked as an archivist and previously published a book on nineteenth-century Dubliners (Lives Less Ordinary: Dulin’s Fitzwilliam Square, 1798-1922), Hughes has a lot of knowledge of the period to draw upon. He does this very skilfully, with a light touch, suggesting the political milieu of the time without turning what is a suspenseful crime novel into a political history, and weaving details of forgotten ways of living seamlessly into the plot. One of the most effective passages is the partial description of a backstreet abortion, yet Delahunt’s wife’s struggles with the termination and contraception don’t just add colour – they’re integral to the story.

Andrew Hughes (1979 - )

Some details were occasionally overwhelming (although they may well be welcome to readers with a better grasp than me of Dublin’s geography!) and the inclusion of other ‘real’ characters from the period (e.g. Professor Lloyd and Dr Moore), as outlined in the Afterward, seems more like an in-joke for the author than of substantive benefit to the text. But largely, Hughes does a wonderful job of propelling us into the city as it stood in the 1840s and informing us about its society, without ever coming off as didactic.

While Florence and Giles is almost totally free from this kind of factual peppering, the level of detail in The Meaning of Night was also extraordinary, but occasionally more gratuitous than it comes off in The Convictions. For me, the distinction comes from whether there is a need to introduce a detail. (Does it advance the plot? Does it explain a character’s motivation?). Without a reason behind each detail, it risks changing the tenure of the novel, making it into some sort of immersive time travel, rather than a narrative entertainment.

So where does this leave our categorisation and definition of Neo-Victorianism? Some of the concerns of the movement I’ve discussed in previous posts (e.g. the prioritisation of previously repressed voices and the self-aware revisitation of standard Victorian literary tropes from a modern perspective) suggest something more is going on here than a spate of historical novels set in the Victorian period. If we take Neo-Victorianism as combining nineteenth-century setting with twenty-first century sensibilities and preoccupations, there is very much a space for The Convictions in this category. Hughes’s first novel is ‘historical’, but, in its very modern interrogations of personhood, morality, sexual relationships, power, and corruption, it has a strong claim to ‘Neo-Victorianism’ too.

Which novel should the Secret Victorianist read next as part of her Neo-Victorian Voices series? Let me know – here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist!

Neo-Victorian Voices: Florence and Giles, John Harding (2010)

With so many great Victorian novels out there, many of them now largely neglected, what exactly is the point of neo-Victorian fiction? Put another way – what is drawing twenty-first century writers to the nineteenth century, when there is so much drama in contemporary life?

I’ve heard multiple explanations – from a sort of collective nostalgia, to a response to social inequality post-financial collapse. Yet a key piece of the puzzle when it comes to unpacking neo-Victorianism, and something I am keen to explore further in my Neo-Victorian Voices series, is the interest these writers so often show in giving narrative privileges – a forum for self-expression – to those characters, and those sections of society, which area so often barred from ‘speaking’ or even existing in writing which actually dates from this period.

What this creates is a fertile landscape for creative exploration. Characters in neo-Victorian writing can push the boundaries when it comes to examining the period’s social strictures – their sexualities can be more directly explored and delineated, they can give us a new appreciation of the workings of race and class relations, and they can exist outside the realm of conventional morality without, necessarily, being punished for it.

John Harding joins a rich tradition of giving voice to the other side in later reworkings of Victorian novels in his 2010 Florence and Giles. But rather than giving a voice to the madwoman in the attic, or retelling a classic tale from the perspective of a servant, the particular voice he gives narrative space to is the voice of a child – a child named Florence modelled on Flora in Henry James’s 1898 The Turn of the Screw.

This Gothic tale is self-conscious revisiting of James’s classic ghost story and for a full, critical look at its intertextuality, I recommend Sandra Dinter’s 2012 essay (available here). What I want to consider here, however, is how Harding draws attention to the radicalness of what he is doing – and what neo-Victorianism often does generally – in ‘giving voice’ to a previously excluded individual.

Florence is not only a child. She is a female child and, as such, she has been denied an education and been forbidden to read by her uncle. Flouting these restrictions, however, Florence not only educates herself, but narrates the entire novel. And Harding has her do so in her own unique idiolect, never letting his readers forget Florence’s identity as a literary outcast.

This idiolect is categorised by non-standard usage of English, particularly the use of words as alternative parts of speech from those as which they usually appear. Florence tells us she lives in Blithe, ‘a house uncomfortabled and shabbied by prudence’, her brother Giles it at one point ‘suspicioned’ by their governess (where we might expect ‘suspected’), and at one point the narrator tells us she ‘smugged’ herself, to express her satisfaction.

This takes some getting used to as a reader. It is jarring at first, before you come to accept Florence as a speaker. But Harding is clear from the outset that Florence’s peculiar voice is an asset – not a weakness. This is how the novel opens:

‘It is a curious story to tell, one not easily absorbed and understood, so it is fortunate I have the words for the task. If I say so myself, who probably shouldn’t, for a girl my age I am very well worded. Exceeding well worded, to speak plain. But because of the strict views of my uncle regarding the education of females, I have hidden my eloquence, under-a-bushelled it, and kept any but the simplest forms of expression bridewelled within my brain.’

There is a tension here, between Florence’s description of herself as excelling in expression, and our reactions to her unusual English - a tension which forces us to confront our own inherited assumptions around who has the right to write a literary text. Yet, in these first few lines, Florence also demonstrates her skill for conveying a lot of information, with extreme brevity. In four sentences what do we learn?

1. Florence is telling us her story

2. Florence is confident in regarding herself as a good communicator, despite the non-standard qualities of her writing

3. Florence has been told girls should be modest

4. Florence’s life is under the control of her uncle

5. Florence has been told girls should not be educated

6. Florence’s behaviour is duplicitous as regards her level of comprehension

7. Florence is capable of extreme repression and self-control

John Harding (1951-)

This is how, at the novel’s best, Harding uses Florence-isms – as a sort of shorthand. Thus, when she believes she is being watched by ghostly apparitions of her governess in the mansion’s mirrors, Florence describes herself as being ‘unmirrored’ whenever she is in a room without a looking glass. The brevity helps avoid repeated explanations and helps the reader feel like Florence’s co-conspirator.

Their use is less successful, however, when Harding uses them for repetition and emphasis, or piles them on top of each other, as if doubting their efficacy. For instance Florence describes herself as ‘fairytaled’ in one of the mansion’s towers, but supplements this by also describing herself as ‘Rapunzelled’. And occasionally there are sentences like this, where the unusual usage is all-pervasive and irritating, without aiding pace or adding anything: ‘It didn’t matter if it blizzarded, or galed or howled like the end of the world outside, he Blithed it every afternoon for the next couple of weeks’.

Florence does not offer us any concluding statements at the end of the story. It is enough for her that she and Giles are together, without the self-conscious nod to the novel’s literariness with which it starts. As from The Turning of the Screw, we come away unsettled and unsure about what we have heard, but here two, highly connected, things are certainly not in doubt. First Florence, despite her sex, youth, and dependence, is a powerful force, who has her own agency, and second, she can channel this power through writing. And the fact that she can do so, demonstrates the ‘point’ (or one point) of neo-Victorian writing.

Did you miss the first post in my Neo-Victorian Voices series on Michael Cox’s The Meaning of Night? You can check it out here. And which contemporary writer or artist with an interest in the nineteenth century should I consider next? Let me know – here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist!