Review of 'Victorian Literary Cultures' for the TLS

Review of

Victorian Literary Cultures: Studies in Textual Subversion, ed. by Kenneth Womack and James M. Decker

 The definition of ‘subversion’ in this critical collection is, by the editors’ own admission, sprawling. The book is divided into three sections: subversive women; subversive ideologies; and subversive genres. Subversion is paradoxical. It has the simultaneous ability to critique dominant ideology as well as tending to reinforce prevailing social mores. Ranging over well known figures like Bram Stoker, George Eliot, Charlotte Bronte, Joseph Conrad, and more obscure writers, like Helen Dickens, Carlton Dawe and a selection of late 19th century Irish writers, each essay promises fresh close-readings via the paradoxical lens of subversion. 

 Certain chapters are wholeheartedly historicist and biographical in method, and, as Nancy Henry demonstrates, this forensic approach can compellingly challenge received wisdom. In her chapter on George Eliot’s adulterous relationship with George Henry Lewes, Henry undermines the common held and blindly repeated understanding that Lewes and Eliot could not legally marry (owing to Lewes’s apparent condoning of his own wife’s affair). Chapters like this make a strong case (as Henry writes) for ‘the necessity of ongoing bibliographical research’. Troy J. Bassett’s chapter on the mystery of Helen Dickens is similarly rich with investigative clout. Whilst the question of whether Helen Dickens was Charles Dickens’s sister-in-law looks as though it will never be definitively answered, the process of Bassett’s investigation shines a light on this recondite author. Unfortunately for Helen Dickens (whoever she was) her intrigue remains wedded to her name rather than her fiction, which ‘fail[ed] to rise above the most pedestrian fiction of her day’.

With its broad scope, there are chapters that feel like they hang a little outside of the book’s remit. Alexis Weedon’s study of subversive practices in cross media storytelling (between film, radio, and publishing) in the 1910s and 20s is itself a subversion of an edition that professes to be concerned with Victorian literary cultures. Tenuous inclusion aside, Weedon’s scrutiny of shifting publishing practices in the early 20th century provides a blueprint for reading trends and intersections in media publishing today.

There is little attempt to say anything definitive or singularly conclusive about subversion in Victorian writing. Rather, taking the paradoxical nature of subversion as their start point, this collection of essays offers new ways of seeing a wealth of well known texts and their authors, and, in many instances, succeeds in undermining oft-repeated claims.