Mesmerism in Late Victorian Theatre

Originating as a medical practice and ultimately rejected as pseudoscience, mesmerism evolved into a literary symbol in the later Victorian era. This paper focuses on three plays that use mesmerism as a symbol of marital control and domination: the comedy His Little Dodge (1896), adapted from Le Systême Ribardier (1892), by George LeFeydeau and Maurice Hennequin; Trilby (1895), adapted from the novel by George Du Maurier; and, finally, Johan Strindberg’s The Father (1893). The mesmeric power one character imposes over another, overriding both consent and awareness in the trance state, serves both to reaffirm hierarchies of power and highlight anxieties about social change in the fin-de-siècle.

THE VICTORIAN GUITAR, EXOTICISM, AND EXTINCTION DISCOURSE FROM RADCLIFFE TO WILDE

This article examines the often-overlooked Victorian guitar and its place in the musicological history of the long nineteenth century and in various canonical and non-canonical literary representations from those of Ann Radcliffe and Charlotte Yonge to George Du Maurier and Oscar Wilde, in the light of some Victorian music historians’ and contemporary organologists’ search for a stringed cultural heritage extending to the far reaches of empire. Some Victorian music historians regarded instruments as developmental yardsticks, signifying a culture, nation, or people’s evolutionary progress, a process belonging to what Patrick Brantlinger has called ‘extinction discourse’. In the context of an interdisciplinary discussion of the guitar’s position amid the period’s obsession with uncovering origins and constructing archives, as well as fostering technical innovation—displayed at the Great Exhibition—and shifting modes of performance, this article argues that despite the changing instrument’s rise in status over the period, literary representations adhered to older, sentimental, exotic, spiritual, and, increasingly decadent and homoerotic associations. Anxiety about decadence in concert with calls for preservation but also rationalization of salvaged cultural forms, including musical instruments, led some to advocate a type of musical eugenics, ostensibly to facilitate the creation of a new music of the future.

“Dreaming True”: Playback, Immediacy, and “Du Maurierness”

Chapter four explores the phenomenon of “playback,” emerging into 1880s culture through the phonograph, as a wider fantasy of consumer and personal mastery. This fantasy was rooted in the longstanding idea of the mind as palimpsest and photograph, recording every single perception and experience. If true, then how could these stored memories be accessed? The cartoonist, novelist, and nonce media theorist George Du Maurier offered a literary answer in his widely cherished first novel, Peter Ibbetson (1891). The protagonist’s lover teaches him how to “dream true” or revisit his past experiences, while he is sleeping; through their clairvoyant connection, all their consumer experiences of music, food, art, and travel can be played back on demand. The conceit of disembodied playback changes the nature of human memory, converting it into information. The chapter traces Du Maurier’s fantasy of cataloging and filing experience to his career as a cartoonist for Punch. Because his cartoon aesthetic described the new breadth and immediacy of public feeling brought about by mass print media in the 1890s, it anticipates the affects that attend our own versions of playback.

Caricature and Realism

At the fin de siècle, the Victorian illustrated book experienced what some critics consider a decline and others call a third period of development. “Caricature and Realism” examines the validity of both viewpoints. Publishing trends and intertwining economic and aesthetic factors led to the decline of newly released, large-circulation fiction during the final decades of the nineteenth century in England. These include the waning of serial fiction, cost factors, a rise in literacy, the changing nature of the novel, new developments in illustration, and competition from other media. However, the Victorian illustrated book thrived in several areas—certain serial formats, artists’ books, children’s literature, and the U.S. market—and in some of these forms of material culture, we witness a reengagement with the caricature tradition as well as a continuation of the representational school. This chapter surveys late Victorian illustrated fiction marketed to different audiences according to social class, age, gender, and nation. This chapter also foregrounds two fin-de-siècle author-illustrators—Beatrix Potter, best known for The Tale of Peter Rabbit, and George Du Maurier, who gained fame with Trilby—to demonstrate continuity in the arc of the illustrated book and a media frenzy of Pickwickian magnitude.