Addison and the Victorians

The masculine world of Addison’s eighteenth-century ‘republic of letters’ was mirrored by that inhabited by Victorian ‘Men of Letters’, and hence much of the lively interest taken in him by nineteenth-century cultural commentators and makers of (and historians of) public opinion. The agnostic manliness of such men as Leslie Stephen and W. J. Courthope informed the way they wrote about Addison, whose Christianity they tended to slight and who was described by them as ‘delicate’. Macaulay had been more admiring of Addison as a Christian gentleman, while Thackeray praised him as an English humorist. Pope and Swift continued to enjoy an ascendancy in eighteenth-century English literary history, with Addison and Steele appreciated more for having been ‘characteristic’ of their age than as acting in any way as intellectually innovative figures. Matthew Arnold was notably critical of Addison, whom he found provincial and narrow. Both Addison and his Victorian critics were subjected to feminist criticism by Virginia Woolf, who happened to be Stephen’s daughter, but she in her turn slighted the most significant early Victorian study of Addison, the life written by the Unitarian Lucy Aikin. The ‘long nineteenth century’ in the English literary history of the eighteenth century is thus bookended by studies of Addison by women, and it is time that justice was paid to Aikin’s pioneering and still valuable study, submerged as it has been by readers of Macaulay’s essay on Addison, which was ostensibly a review of Aikin’s exercise in literary biography.

Norwid’s Roma antiqua in its full version

Magdalena Karamucka’s book Antyczny Rzym Norwida [Norwid’s Ancient Rome] is the first monographic study of the problem addressed in the title. Ancient Rome is presented in this valuable study from different perspectives: as a geographical, historical and cultural reality and as a literary topos. The starting point for the discussion is a chapter devoted to a Roman episode of Norwid’s biography and his Roman readings. Another subject of analysis are the poet’s political, religious and historiosophical reflections about Rome and his remarks on literature, art and Roman theatre. The main, comparative part is devoted to a meticulous analysis of reminiscences, quotations (paraphrases), titles, etc. taken from works of Roman authors (including Catullus, Horace, Juvenal, Ovid, Virgil), Norwid’s translational work and his Roman correspondence. However, Norwid’s Roma antiqua presented in the monograph is not frozen in a dead form. The author shows in an interesting and convincing way how this romanitas becomes a starting (or reference) point for the author of Quidam in his reflections on almost all aspects of his contemporary times.

Review: Asthma: Attitude and Milieu

Winnicott’s review of Asthma by Aaron Lask. Winnicott finds this a valuable study of 100 asthma patients, noting that Lask and his colleagues are to be congratulated on this fruitful application of what Balint is trying to teach to general practitioners.