The Victorian Baby in Print

The Victorian Baby in Print: Infancy, Infant Care, and Nineteenth-Century Popular Culture explores the representation of babyhood in Victorian Britain. The first study to focus exclusively on the baby in nineteenth-century literature and culture, this critical analysis discusses the changing roles of an iconic figure. A close look at the wide-ranging portrayal of infants and infant care not only reveals how divergent and often contradictory Victorian attitudes to infancy really were, but also prompts us to revise persistent clichés surrounding the literary baby that emerged or were consolidated at the time, and which are largely still with us. Drawing on a variety of texts, including novels by Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Mrs Henry Wood, and Charlotte Yonge, as well as parenting magazines of the time, childrearing manuals, and advertisements, this study analyses how their representations of infancy and infant care utilised and shaped an iconography that has become definitional of the Victorian age itself. The familiar clichés surrounding the Victorian baby have had a lasting impact on the way we see both the Victorians and babies, and a close analysis might also prompt a self-critical reconsideration of the still burgeoning market for infant care advice today.

Sir Walter Scott and the Medievalist Novel

This chapter focuses primarily on Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1819) and the novels—including Scott’s subsequent crusading fictions—that paid tribute to it through their engagement with roughly the same period of English history. In the hands of writers such as Edward Bulwer-Lytton and Charles Kingsley, the historical novel after Scott tended to present the Norman invasion as an enduringly formative moment in the making of modern imperial Britain. Popular fictions by Charlotte Yonge and G. A. Henty, composed for child readers, were similarly inspired by Scott, though in their reductive rewriting of Ivanhoe they further contributed to Scott’s ‘descent to the school-room’. Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Black Arrow (1883), by contrast, I will argue in conclusion, recovers the playfully reflexive scepticism of Ivanhoe and detaches the adolescence of its confused hero from any idea of an analogous national emergence.

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.

Testing

This chapter sets aside questions of textual excess to discuss mass assessments and the production of literary knowledge or literary information. As the rise of liberal meritocracy in the Victorian period increasingly required bureaucratic impersonality and quantitative metrics, standardized literature tests negotiated between aesthetics and information during the formation of literary studies as a discipline. Literature exams from normal schools, the British Civil Service, and the US Bureau of Indian Affairs reflect broader controversies over what constitutes literary knowledge and whether it can be systematically assessed. Such concerns involve epistemological problems, as well as social questions. Race, gender, and class inflect depictions of standardized examinations in novels by Charles Dickens, Emily Brontë, Anthony Trollope, Fanny Fern, Frank Webb, Charlotte Yonge, Louisa May Alcott, and others. These and other texts anticipate aspects of the current crisis in the humanities—accountability through testing, the corporatization of education, and the instrumental value of the literary.

The Influence of the Oxford Movement on Poetry and Fiction

In this chapter the author explores the influence of the Oxford Movement on literature by examining a number of lesser-known works of poetry and fiction within the larger context of Victorian culture. The authors considered include Arthur Cleveland Coxe, Cecil Frances Alexander, Charlotte Yonge, Felicia Skene, John Mason Neale, and Margaret Oliphant. The religious elements of their poetry and fiction expressed a critical relationship to Victorian culture, lending their works a radical edge. The content, form, and style of these writers had a marked impact on the literature of their period, whether later writers were following them or reacting violently against them.

Scripture and Biblical Interpretation

The Tractarians were deeply committed to Scripture. They insisted that every doctrine had to be proved from the Bible. Writing biblical commentaries were among their main literary projects (this is true even for laywomen such as Christina Rossetti and Charlotte Yonge). In contrast to the surrounding Protestantism, however, the Tractarians denied the right of private judgement, insisting that patristic exegesis should be the authoritative guide. The Tractarians were emphatically opposed to the non-traditional conclusions of modern biblical criticism and unabashedly in favour of retaining allegorical readings. This chapter describes these commitments while also observing how they changed in the second generation of the movement.