‘“The Riddle of this Painful Earth”: Late Victorian Literature and Archaeology During the Great Agricultural Depression’

Wars fought overseas had an indelible imprint on the Victorian home front and its cultural formations. In their responses to the Crimean War (1854–6), writers of middlebrow fiction promulgated the ideal of muscular Christianity, wherein might was deployed for purposes of right. This notion found popular expression in the ideal of the games ethic, which had at its core the quintessentially British notion of fair play. This became a preoccupation within late Victorian literature for young people, as well as a recurring motif in the popular press, particularly during the Second Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902). Although it would be subject to reversal during the Great War (1914–18), this idea would endure well into the twentieth century. As it traces the career of fair play, this essay seeks to understand the contours of Victorian culture in the later nineteenth century and the reverberations of Victorian values into the twentieth century.

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What Kitty Knew

Nineteenth-Century Literature ◽

10.1525/ncl.2004.59.3.372 ◽

2004 ◽

Vol 59 (3) ◽

pp. 372-403

Author(s):

ANN HEILMANN ◽

MARK LLEWELLYN

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Victorian Literature ◽

The Body ◽

Late Nineteenth Century ◽

Close Attention ◽

Reading Matter ◽

George Moore ◽

Late Nineteenth ◽

Victorian Literature And Culture ◽

Late Victorian Literature

Framed by sensational Ripper stories that turned fact into �ction and lurid murder into gripping reading matter, the extraordinary popularity of Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), George du Maurier's Trilby (1894), and Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) clearly indicate that the �n de si�cle was a time enthralled by the concept of split selves and sadistic impulses, of insidious male desires metaphorically and literally inscribed on the body of unconscious, hysterical, or hypnotized women. With his John Norton narratives of the late 1880s to mid 1890s, George Moore made a signi�cant contribution to this important cultural preoccupation in late-Victorian literature and culture. In this essay we trace the development of the theme in Moore's A Mere Accident (1887), Mike Fletcher (1889), and "John Norton" (which appeared in his collection Celibates, 1895). We read Moore's stories in the context of the emerging discourses of psychoanalysis and its reliance upon and relation to earlier work on the theories of the "double brain" and "multiplex personality". We also draw on works of late-nineteenth-century sexology-Havelock Ellis's Studies in the Psychology of Sex (1897-1910) and Richard von Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis (�rst published in German, 1886)-in order to explore the psycho-sexual nature of the malaise that af�icts the Norton character and highlight his ambivalent role in the "accident" that befalls the vicar's daughter, Kitty Hare. In addition, we pay close attention to the proto-Freudian language of dreams that haunt Kitty in the aftermath of her assault, arguing that in his "John Norton" narratives Moore engaged with the evolving concept of trauma. These stories, we argue, re�ect an important and hitherto neglected aspect of late-Victorian narrative explorations of hysteria and sexual pathology.

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