Beyond Arthurian Romances: The Reach of Victorian Medievalism (Studies in Arthurian and Courtly Cultures)

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Beyond Arthurian Romances

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Beyond Arthurian Romances The Reach of Victorian Medievalism

Edited by

Lorretta M. Holloway and Jennifer A. Palmgren

BEYOND ARTHURIAN ROMANCES

© Lorretta M. Holloway and Jennifer A. Palmgren, 2005. A. W. N. Pugin, Contrasts, Leicester University Press, 1992 © Leicester University Press, a Continuum Imprint. The Ladies of the Raj tilting and the three vignettes from the military Ivanhoe burlesque from The Graphic Saturday, February 9, 1889 used by permission from the Illustrated London News Picture Library. The Poems of Matthew Arnold, ed. Kenneth Allott used by permission of Longmans United Kingdom. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2005 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 1–4039–6735–0 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Beyond Arthurian romances : the reach of Victorian medievalism / [selected by] Jennifer A. Palmgren and Lorretta M. Holloway. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–4039–6735–0 (alk. paper) 1. English literature—19th century—History and criticism. 2. Middle Ages in literature. 3. Medievalism—Great Britain— History—19th century. 4. Literature, Medieval—Appreciation—Great Britain. 5. Medievalism in literature. I. Palmgren, Jennifer A. II. Holloway, Lorretta M. PR468.M53B495 2005 820.9⬘358—dc22

2004062148

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: June 2005 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

C on t e n t s

List of Illustrations

vii

Acknowledgments

ix

Notes on Contributors Introduction Lorretta M. Holloway and Jennifer Palmgren One

Two

“Standing Proof of the Degeneracy of Modern Times”: Architecture, Society, and the Medievalism of A. W. N. Pugin Corinna M. Wagner “Knight, Bard, Gallant”: The Troubadour as a Critique of Romanticism in Browning’s Sordello Britta Martens

Three Charlotte Yonge’s Victorian Normans in The Little Duke Sarah R. Wakefield Four

Five

Six

xiii 1

9

39 53

“And the golden halls were dumb”: Norse Fatalism and Mourning in Matthew Arnold’s Balder Dead Kim Zarins

73

Lessons from the Medieval Convent: Adelaide Procter’s “A Legend of Provence” Christine A. Colón

95

“The Worship of Courage”: William Morris’s Sigurd the Volsung and Victorian Medievalism Richard Frith

117

vi / contents

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

The Gallows Nightingale: Swinburne’s Translations of Villon Nick Freeman

133

Counter-Medievalism: Or, Protestants Rewrite the Middle Ages Miriam Elizabeth Burstein

147

Where Medieval Romance Meets Victorian Reality: The “Woman Question” in William Morris’s The Wood Beyond the World Lori Campbell The Performance of Victorian Medievalism Barbara Bell

169 191

Eleven What is a Man?: The Refuting of the Chivalric Ideal at the Turn of the Century Sandra Martina Schwab

217

Bibliography

233

Index

249

List of Illustrations

1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 10.1 10.2 10.3 10.4 10.5

Pugin’s Contrasted Episcopal Monuments Pugin’s New Church Competition Pugin’s Public Conduits Pugin’s Contrasting Towns 1840/1440 Pugin’s Contrasting Residences for the Poor Mr. West as Sir Kenneth of Scotland in The Siege of Jerusalem and Mr. C. Kemble as Ivanhoe Ivanhoe Playbill, Edinburgh Theatre Royal, December 13, 1823 Raj Ladies Tilting Cremorne Guards Ivanhoe Burlesque

16 19 26 27 28 194 195 205 207 210


Acknowledgments

First, we would like to acknowledge the support of both of our home institutions, Framingham State College and Saint Paul’s College. Framingham State provided faculty development money that helped obtain permission to republish some of our illustrations, and Saint Paul’s College granted professional leave. Neil Conrad, Larry Seilhamer (interlibrary loan librarians at Framingham State and at Saint Paul’s, respectively), and Marion Slack (reference librarian at Framingham State) were instrumental to our research. All small colleges deserve and need librarians who are detectives in disguise. We are also grateful for the kind assistance and helpful advice of Maryalice Mohr (archivist and records manager at the New England Conservatory of Music). A very special thanks goes to members of the Framingham State Information Technology Team. Without Christopher Mason, Gregory Merlloni, and the late William Demers, we would not have been able to put the project together. They recognize that sometimes you just have to speak slowly and start from the very basics to help others understand the obvious. We also need to thank Edwin and Anne Palmgren for providing us with a free retreat to get the book through its final stages.


This book is dedicated to our students, who continue to inspire and challenge us


Notes on Contributors

BARBARA BELL is currently Head of Performing Arts at Edge Hill College of Higher Education and has worked as an arts practitioner in Theatre-inEducation. She has published articles on The Scottish National Drama, Scottish theater, nineteenth-century theater, and contemporary playwriting. MIRIAM ELIZABETH BURSTEIN is an Assistant Professor of English at the State University of New York, College at Brockport. Her articles have appeared in Journal of Narrative Technique, Modern Philology, Victorian Literature and Culture, Huntington Library Quarterly, and the collection Silent Voices. She has recently published Narrating Women’s History in Britain, 1770–1902. LORI CAMPBELL specializes in nineteenth-century British and American literature. She is currently a lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Pittsburgh where she teaches courses in literature and composition. Her publications in the fields of children’s literature, Victorian literature, British literature, fantasy, folklore, and cultural studies include a recent article in Mosaic and the introduction to a new edition of Edwin A. Abbot’s Flatland. CHRISTINE A. COLÓN is an Assistant Professor of English at Wheaton College in Illinois where she teaches courses on English literature and women writers. She specializes in nineteenth-century English literature and has published articles on Jane Austen, Joanna Baillie, Anne Brontë, and Wilkie Collins. NICK FREEMAN is a lecturer in nineteenth century literature at the University of the West of England. He has published work on Swinburne, Grant Allen, and Arthur Symons. He is particularly interested in literary and artistic representations of Victorian London. RICHARD FRITH recently completed his PhD at Trinity Hall, Cambridge and now works in academic publishing. His doctoral dissertation focuses on

xiv / notes on contributors

the relationship between medievalism and aestheticism in the work of D. G. Rossetti, Morris, and Swinburne. He is currently planning an edition of Swinburne’s early Arthurian poem “Queen Yseult.” BRITTA MARTENS is a lecturer in the School of English and Drama at the University of the West of England. She has published articles on Browning and is currently working on a study of Browning’s poetics. She serves as the review editor for Browning Society Notes. SANDRA MARTINA SCHWAB teaches English literature at Johannes-Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany where she is currently working on her PhD on dragon slaying and gender roles. She has published articles on the motif of the dragon slayer, nationalistic–socialistic propaganda, and on Anna Seghers’s Seventh Cross. CORINNA WAGNER is currently a doctoral candidate in the Center for Eighteenth Century Studies at the University of York. Her current research focuses on politics, propaganda, morality, and the family in Georgian England. Her recent publications include articles on radicalism, revolutionary culture, and political scandal in British Association for Romantic Studies Bulletin and Review and in British Journal for Eighteenth Century Studies. SARAH WAKEFIELD is currently an Assistant Professor of English at Prairie View A&M University. Her research interests include eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women writers, fairy and folklore, children’s literature, television, and film studies. She has most recently published in Currents in Electronic Literacy and The Journal of Popular Film and Television. KIM ZARINS is a PhD candidate at Cornell University in the Department of English specializing in medieval literature. She has written an article on John Gower’s Latin Wordplay for On John Gower: Essays at the Millennium, edited by R. F. Yeager (expected date of publication, 2006).

Introduction Lorretta M. Holloway and Jennifer Palmgren

The roots of Victorian medievalism are various, but the movement largely stems from ongoing research in antiquities starting with The London Society of Antiquaries in the early 1700s.1 This interest became more intense with the popularization of the Graveyard poets, the birth of the Gothic novel, and the republication of Malory’s Morte d’Arthur2 along with the increased availability of medieval texts (mostly French, German, and Icelandic) in translation. Some relied on these translations for their work and adaptations while others, like William Morris and Algernon Swinburne, produced their own translations of original texts; however, popular culture embraced medievalism so much that the historic Middle Ages became, in many ways, of secondary importance to the majority of Victorians. In fact, most Victorians drew their impressions of the Middle Ages from Sir Walter Scott’s novels rather than from any historical medieval text.3 As Clare A. Simmons asserts, Victorian medievalism focuses on “the individual’s needs and desires” rather than in “discovering the authentic past.”4 Thus, everything about this “history” became a matter of interpretation, not an “authentic past” but an authentic fantasy. Victorians embraced all the trappings of this imagined past. Their affinity for the story of King Arthur—so much in their songs, on their stages, and in their poetry—fit how the Victorians imagined and recreated the Middle Ages for themselves. They could make Arthur up or into anything they wanted or needed, and they did.5 However, Victorian medievalism grew bigger than its love for the Round Table, and the title of our collection, Beyond Arthurian Romances: The Reach of Victorian Medievalism, reflects this broader view. From literature to religion to social services to gender expectations, the essays in our collection address the pervasive and diverse interest in medievalism at all levels of Victorian society and the truly disparate areas in Victorian life and philosophy it touched. Victorians often looked to the Middle Ages to find resources for faith, patriotism, or leisure. Many

2 / lorretta m. holloway and jennifer palmgren

used the Middle Ages as an anchor in a time of stormy upheaval. Yet the anchor moved, changed shape, and/or altered its material properties, depending on who needed it at any given moment. This metaphor of an amorphous anchor captures the paradox of Victorian medievalism, a movement which was at the same time both individual and collective in its possibilities. Writers, painters, architects, and social commentators were among those who looked to the period for examples of leadership, vocation, social structure, and faith. Thus, Victorian medievalism influenced the way people worshipped, played, and treated each other. According to A. Dwight Culler in The Victorian Mirror of History, the Middle Ages had such an appeal because of its own varying nature: The Medieval period was large enough, various enough, sufficiently unknown and mythical, that each person could find there what he wanted—a hierarchy, a community, a code of conduct, a form of hero-worship, a system of ritual, a charitable establishment, a style of architecture, a resplendent wardrobe.6

Thus, the Victorian medievalist allowed him/herself to go beyond or to completely dismiss true historical study of the period to focus on what fit his/her current imagination and taste. These individual responses became part of a larger societal conversation in which the Middle Ages provided the Victorians with a common imagery that they used in everything that could be argued about, bought, or sold. This one size fits all medievalism would seem to lend itself to generic actualization, and undoubtedly there was an overabundance of knight errant motifs in the period. However, instead of becoming merely a one-dimensional trope, Victorian medievalism spread itself over and through all topics in the Victorian period from the debate over the Poor Laws to the debate over proper sport for women. Because medievalism in the Victorian period crossed class, religious, and political boundaries, one cannot narrow the field and describe its participants in any one way. For every secular feudalist like Carlyle, there was a fervent religious counter-feudalist like Kenneth Digby. For every Cardinal Newman who was looking for the embrace of a collective society through common values and faith, there was a John Stuart Mill focusing on the Middle Ages as a time that promoted individuality. For every Ruskin or Rossetti who used medievalism to promote high art and artisanship, there were five to ten Daniel Terrys who used it to sell theater tickets, songs, or soap. Several contributors to this volume discuss the relationship between nostalgia and medievalism. Victorian medievalism could be simply described as nostalgia if there were any direct links between the two historical periods. Can one be truly nostalgic for an era that no one alive remembers? The centuries in between eliminate any actual memory of this past, so some of the blatant errors made and poetic license taken should not be surprising. More

introduction / 3

than a matter of error or license, however, nostalgia proved an essential tool for many Victorian medievalists, one they used consciously and effectively. For example, in this collection Nick Freeman examines Swinburne’s willingness to play on his audience’s nostalgia. Though used for a variety of ends, the movement’s evocation of nostalgia provided Victorians with a sense of shared connection to their past. It made possible the representation of the Middle Ages in a collective memory of their own making. This collective understanding did not arise overnight, nor did every medieval-based work automatically contribute to it. For it to become a part of the culture, Victorian audiences had to believe that they recognized a connection between the medieval and their own lives, whether or not such a connection existed.7 For example, Britta Martens’s “ ‘Knight, Bard, Gallant’: The Troubadour as a Critique of Romanticism in Browning’s Sordello” discusses how Browning uses his thirteenth-century protagonist’s encounter with the common people to express changing nineteenthcentury ideas about the role of the poet in society. According to Martens, Browning uses the medieval imagery of the common people in a most unmedieval way, using, naturally, those tropes that best spoke to Victorian ways of seeing the world.8 Thus, the Victorians re-invent the Middle Ages rather than return to them. Although they employed a common imagery, not all who utilized the Middle Ages fall into “the dream of order” that Alice Chandler so aptly describes. Some, like Matthew Arnold, utilize the deeper darkness of the “dark ages” to refute its violence, while others, like August Swinburne, prefer the seedier side as more natural to the human state.9 Even someone as seemingly anti-medieval as William Makepeace Thackeray uses medieval imagery to comment on the naiveté of those who romanticize the Middle Ages: You, who wish to keep your skins, be thankful that you are not called upon to go out and fight dragons. Be grateful that they don’t sally out and swallow you. Keep a wise distance from their caves, lest you pay too dearly for approaching them. Remember that years have passed, and whole districts were ravaged before the warrior came who was able to cope with the devouring monster. When that knight “does” make his appearance, with all my heart let us go out and welcome him with our best songs, huzzas, and laurel wreaths, and eagerly recognize his valour and victory. Countless knights were slain before Saint George won the battle. In the battle of life are we all going to try for the honours of championship?10

The question that Thackeray poses goes beyond wondering about the Victorian, or our own, ability to fight and sacrifice for justice, but includes the question of how much “real” medievalism people could take. The (in)famous Eglinton Tournament held in 1839 started out with thirty-five


“knights” ready to engage in jousting and other medieval events, but by the end of the day there were only thirteen knights and ten knight visitors remaining (no one seemed prepared for the weight of the armor).11 Critics of the movement claimed that medievalists conveniently ignored the serious social, political, and economic inequities of the times for a cleaned up version of the period. Instead of pestilence and peasant revolts, the Victorians found glorious knights and fair ladies more interesting and more marketable. Belief in the ideal of a unified medieval church overshadowed the medieval period’s religious intolerance. Even the dangerous capriciousness of feudal lords was overlooked in favor of envisioning them as benevolent keepers of the community. In a period threatened by political, economic, and social revolution, this image of the Middle Ages was heady stuff indeed. The choice of the Middle Ages to fulfill and reflect so many of the Victorians’ core desires has lasting repercussions as the medieval period remains in the cultural consciousness. Throughout the twentieth century there occur countless medieval movies, television shows, novels, and even games (like the role-playing video game Lords of the Realm in which players get to design and construct their own castles and cathedrals and wage war with their own knights). The phenomena of the Lord of the Rings, with its saga of Middle Earth,12 swept the Oscars and the world from New Zealand to the North Atlantic. Interestingly, the recent movie King Arthur (2004) was distributed by Touchstone, a subsidiary of Disney, and directed by an African American from Los Angeles, Antoine Fuqua, making it a production about as far away geographically, racially, and philosophically from the Middle Ages as one can imagine. Though critics regularly predict the death of medievalism, it seems entrenched in the culture. This extended popularity, the reflection of twenty-first-century fantasies of a period that the Victorians partly created, represents what we find the most interesting in Victorian medievalism. In fact, one could argue that current popular conceptions of the Middle Ages derive from the Victorians in the way that theirs derived from Scott. As a result, although contemporary medievalism has distinct characteristics, its assumptions about medieval culture are often rooted in Victorian portrayals of the medieval world. This influence need not be negative; however, it requires examination. Our collection places itself alongside other texts that have explored the phenomenon of medievalism and the Victorians’ relationship to it. The seminal work on the subject is Alice Chandler’s A Dream of Order: The Medieval Ideal in Nineteenth-Century English Literature (1970), which establishes the framework for all subsequent study of the medieval revival. With chapters focusing on the medievalist establishment—Sir Walter Scott, Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, and William Morris—Chandler’s text focuses on the creation of the mythic medieval ideal and still provides one of the best

introduction / 5

introductions to the topic. Like Chandler, Kevin Morris’s The Image of the Middle Ages in Romantic and Victorian Literature (1984) explores nineteenthcentury medievalism as a whole, but it focuses on religious medievalism and those who sought refuge in an imagined religious past. In The Victorian Mirror of History, A. Dwight Culler discusses nineteenth-century reactions to various periods, and he includes a chapter on the Middle Ages showing how perceptions of the period reflect differing Victorian political theories.13 Politics also plays a role in Clare A. Simmons’s Reversing the Conquest: History and Myth in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (1990); however, as her title suggests, this study focuses on medievalism in terms of the increasingly scientific, nineteenth-century approaches to historical study. Two important essay collections begin to address the interdisciplinary nature of medievalism. Florence S. Boos’s widely used History and Community: Essays in Victorian Medievalism (1992) has the approach closest to our own, with essays addressing literature, politics, and popular culture. Clare A. Simmons in Medievalism and the Quest for the “Real” Middle Ages (2001) collected essays that address medievalism from the late sixteenth century through the Victorian period, and in her introduction provides an intriguing discussion of the conflicts between medieval studies and medievalism, two topics that she thinks can no longer be separated. Our text continues this interdisciplinary approach, adding an increased cultural focus to the discussion of Victorian medievalism. The goal: to reflect how medievalism permeated Victorian society. Although complete coverage is impossible in any one volume, this collection contains essays that span the period, from A. W. N. Pugin’s Contrasts (1836) to the beginnings of the Boy Scout Movement (1908). These essays address both the many aspects of Victorian society that use medievalism and the various competing (and often blatantly contradictory) visions of the Middle Ages prevalent in the Victorian period. For example, Kim Zarins’s “Norse Fatalism and Mourning in Matthew Arnold’s Balder Dead ” discusses how Arnold rewrote Norse mythology to work against the tendency of the Victorians to idealize its violent heroism. Instead, Arnold makes his hero a poet and a prophet who finds more peace in hell than in a heaven full of warriors. Conversely, we include Nick Freeman’s “The Gallows Nightingale: Swinburne’s Translations of Villon,” which also focuses on a poet who found romanticized medievalism distasteful but who believed the “scabrous underbelly” of the Middle Ages more entertaining and revealing.14 We hope to convey how this phrase “entertaining and revealing” accurately describes Victorian medievalism in general. For even a writer like Charlotte Yonge, whose High Church moralism would abhor Swinburne’s indecency, tried, as Sarah Wakefield writes, “to bring the past to young readers in a pleasing package.”15


Because of the overlapping and contradictory nature of the topics involved, we see this as a text of interest not only to students majoring in literature, but also to students in art, religion, history, gender studies, and general cultural studies courses. In collecting and selecting these essays, we kept in mind that we wanted a text for these types of interdisciplinary humanities courses, majors, and programs. We organized the essays chronologically according to the dates of the major works or events they discussed; however, many of the essays lend themselves to organization by discipline and/or theme.16 In programs on gender studies, one could use not only Lori Campbell’s “Where Medieval Romance Meets Reality: The ‘Woman Question’ in William Morris’s The Wood beyond the World,” but also Christine Colón’s “Lessons From the Medieval Convent: Adelaide Procter’s ‘A Legend of Provence,’ ” which discusses Procter’s tale of the options for women that medieval convent life provides, or Sandra Schwab’s “What is a Man?: The Refuting of the Chivalric Ideal at the Turn of the Century.” For sociology or government programs, one could use Corinna Wagner’s “Standing Proof of the Degeneracy of Modern Times”: Architecture, Society and the Medievalism of A. W. N. Pugin to discuss how community design affects community policy and compare it to the idealized warrior community discussed in Richard Frith’s “ ‘The Worship of Courage’: William Morris’s ‘Sigurd the Volsung’ and Victorian Medievalism.” Of course, the intriguing thing about any text addressing various disciplines is how interdisciplinary the individual essays reveal themselves to be. All of the essays we include could work in a variety of venues; for example, Miriam Burstein’s essay “Counter-Medievalism; Or, Protestants Rewrite the Middle Ages” could be utilized in courses focusing on religion, literature (including children’s literature), politics, or gender. Because we were constructing a text for many different types of academic readers (from the advanced undergraduate student, to the graduate student, to the seasoned cultural scholar), we wanted to avoid specialized language or theoretical approaches that would make the essays less accessible across disciplines. However, we also did not want entries that were too general even if we thought that the background provided would be useful to our students. These requirements formed the collection in ways that we did not foresee. For example, although several essays in the collection discuss the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood indirectly,17 we have no essay with the PRB as its focus. This decision allowed us to include essays devoted to lesser known works or individuals. By attempting to address the famous, the everyday, and those in between, we aim to begin the dialogue again for a new audience and to widen the conversation with the old, allowing students who are beginning to specialize a glimpse of the many avenues of Victorian medievalism in one text and to remind us all of the intricacy, fury, and

introduction / 7

humor in Victorian medievalism. Eclectic at its best and eccentric at its worst, the movement supported the Victorian need for reform and reverence, deep faith and spectacle.

Notes 1. See Alice Chandler, A Dream of Order: The Medieval Ideal in NineteenthCentury Literature (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1970), 15–20. 2. See A. Dwight A. Culler, The Victorian Mirror of History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 153–154. 3. Five of our eleven contributors comment on Scott’s influence on their particular topic. In our opinion, Scott’s influence is one of the reasons so many texts that address medievalism of the time try to cover the entire nineteenth century, for one cannot talk about medievalism after Scott without Scott. For more information about Scott’s influence see Chandler. “Origins of Medievalism: Scott,” the first chapter in A Dream of Order 12–51; Kevin Morris, The Image of the Middle Ages in Romantic and Victorian Literature (London: Croom Helm, 1984), 184; Peter Mortensen, “The Descent of Odin: Wordsworth, Scott, and Southey Among the Norsemen,” Romanticism. Edinburgh 6, no. 2 (2000): 211–233; Hal Orel, The Historical Novel from Scott to Sabatini: Changing Attitudes Toward a Literary Genre, 1814–1920 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995). 4. Simmons, ed. “Introduction,” Medievalism and the Quest for the Real Middle Ages (Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 2001), 1–28. 5. See Stephanie Barczewski, Myth and National Identity in Nineteenth-Century Britain: The Legends of King Arthur and Robin Hood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) and Marc Girouard, The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981). 6. Culler, Victorian Mirror, 159–160. 7. See Kim Zarins, “Balder Dead,” chapter four in this volume for a speculation that the Victorians had trouble connecting with this work because they found its ideology alien. 8. See Lori Campbell, “Where Medieval Romance Meets Victorian Reality: The ‘Woman Question’ in William Morris’s The Wood Beyond the World,” chapter nine, in this volume and Charles Dellheim, “Interpreting Victorian Medievalism,” in History and Community: Essays in Victorian Medievalism, ed. Florence S. Boos (New York: Garland, 1992), 39. 9. See Kim Zarins, “And the Golden Walls Were Dumb”: Norse Fatalism and Mourning in Mathew Arnold’s Balder Dead, chapter four, this volume, and Nick Freeman, “The Gallows Nightingale: Swinburne’s Translation of Villon,” chapter seven, this volume. 10. William Makepeace Thackeray, “De Juventute,” in The Wolves and the Lamb, Lovel the Widower, Denis Duval, Roundabout Papers, ed. George Saintsbury. The Oxford Thackeray with Illustrations vol. XVVII (London: Oxford University Press, 1908), 420–435.

8 / lorretta m. holloway and jennifer palmgren 11. There were many published accounts of this tournament, see Barbara Bell, “The Performance of Victorian Medievalism” in this volume which discusses many of the accounts and newspaper stories about the event and Mark Girouard, The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981) for some of the negative responses. 12. The Old English word for “the world” or “the earth” is “middan(g)eard.” J. R. R. Tolkien was, of course, a medieval scholar. 13. The chapter is titled “Ruskin and Victorian Medievalism,” 152–184. 14. See Freeman, chapter seven, this volume. 15. See Sarah R. Wakefield, “Charlotte Yonge’s Victorian Normans in The Little Duke,” chapter three, this volume. 16. The only essay that did not fit into this paradigm is Bell’s, for she starts actually before the Victorian period. We put her near the end because her essay ends with events at the end of the period. 17. See particularly Richard Frith, chapter six, this volume and Nick Freeman, chapter seven, this volume.

Ch ap t e r O n e “Standing Proof of the Degeneracy of Modern Times”: Architecture, Society, and the Medievalism of A. W. N. Pugin Corinna M. Wagner

Architect, artist, antiquary, designer, and critic A. W. N. Pugin was not always an agreeable man. In private and in public, he lashed out mercilessly, often venomously, at the “degraded” state of architecture, at contemporary culture, and at religious and political figures, past and present. “I as you know,” he stated unequivocally in one letter, “abominate the world & fashions & the emptiness of Society.”1 His personal correspondence catalogues the various religious denominations and political associations that he held responsible for the deplorable state of modern culture and society. Among them were Pagans, “hereticks,” infidels, “Mahometans,” Puritans, Calvinists, Methodists, Lutherans, Dissenters, deists, Baptists, “Westleyans,” Anglican “schismaticks,” and also rationalists, republicans, socialists, democrats, liberals, “Levellers,” and “revolutionary radicals.”2 As these competing sects “struggle for superiority,” they obliterate any semblance of cultural unity and religious concord, thus rendering the nation a house divided that must necessarily fall.3 Similarly, Pugin’s 1836 design treatise Contrasts: or, A Parallel between the Noble Edifices of the Middle Ages and Corresponding Buildings of the Present Day—a text often identified as the catalyst for nineteenth-century Gothic Revivalism—was “so strongly seasoned with personal abuse” that finding a publisher proved impossible.4 When Charles Dolman did agree to publish the book’s second (1841) edition, he urged Pugin to at least excise the passages critical of the monarchy.5 But within the pages of Contrasts, the recently

10 / corinna m. wagner

departed king is condemned for his paucity of taste and his shameful neglect of architectural conservation projects. Apathetic monarchs are castigated for living “a mere routine of fashionable luxury” and for choosing dining as their “principal occupation.”6 And as for the nation’s most “distinguished personages,” Pugin fumed, they should be censured for freely squandering their money and attention on “the performances of a learned monkey, or equestrian evolutions,” while they neglected the “sacred fabric” of the “restingplace of their ancestors,” Westminster Abbey.7 Using a language dripping with sarcasm, he goes on to suggest that “a visit to the neglected and desecrated pile of Westminster” would provide the court with “the instructive lesson that royalty departed is easily forgotten” (42). As one of the most venerable sites of English antiquity, Westminster could also furnish fellow artists with much-needed design lessons. Indeed, Pugin envisions a rather severe corrective for the well-respected sculptor Sir Francis Chantrey. For having committed the crime of installing a rather large secular sculpture (of inventor James Watt) in one of the Abbey’s chapels, Chantrey deserved to “be crushed under . . . [the] great pedestal” of one of his own monuments (40). As an exemplar of the English Gothic style, the Palace of Westminster also provided an instructive standard for modern architects. It was a measure against which modern designs could be gauged: for instance, a building like the newly erected Buckingham Palace was seen to form “a most lamentable and degenerate contrast” against such architectural excellence (10). While the new palace displayed a jumble of “pagan” or classical influences that had no connection to English identity and history, the ancient Westminster was infused with distinctly English religious and historical iconography. Its decorated walls depicted the heroic feats of St. George and St. Edward, national heroes “whose names in moments of desperate peril have oft animated the English in sustaining many an unequal fight with foreign foes.”8 According to Pugin, Westminster was the architectural manifestation of the sensibilities and principles of the deeply devout and unified communities of thirteenth- and fourteenthcentury England. A national touchstone, it embodied those particularly English qualities—courage, loyalty, kinship, duty—which had formed the foundation of medieval society. Westminster favored Britons with perhaps its greatest architectural lesson when its Houses of Parliament caught fire on October 16, 1834. Counting himself “fortunate enough” to be among the witnesses to the event, the overjoyed Pugin hastily penned an exclamatory letter to a colleague.9 Its frenzied pace and eccentric syntax attest to his delight, as he describes how the productions of neoclassicist John Soane and “improver” James Wyatt—two figures whom Pugin would count among the greatest enemies

pugin’s architecture, society, and medievalism / 11

of architecture—were consumed by flames:10 a vast quantity of Soanes mixtures & Wyatts heresies have been effectually consigned to oblivion. oh it was a glorious sight to see his composition mullions & cement pinncles & battlements flying & cracking While his 2 [shillings] 6 [pence] turrets were smoaking Like so many manufacturing chimnies till the heat shivered them into a thousand pieces . . . brick walls & framed sashes slate roofs &c. fell faster than a deck of cards.11

This scene of devastation is, for Pugin, a baptism by fire that purges Britain’s seat of government of its classical influences and dispatches to oblivion its cheap, commercially produced materials. But although the more modern buildings are consigned to ashes, the medieval Westminster Hall is left standing “triumphantly amidst this scene of ruin” (42). For Pugin, this is a “miraculous” sign from God, which confirms his dedication to the revival of Britain’s medieval past, not only in terms of its architectural principles and craftsmanship, but also in terms of the values and sentiments that it embodies (42). Surviving time, political conflict, and cultural change, the Hall is a monumental reminder of a national past steeped in religious devotion, aesthetic beauty, and communal harmony. Medieval buildings were collective projects: it was “the faith, the zeal, and above all, the unity, of our ancestors,” Pugin writes, “that enabled them to conceive and raise those wonderful fabrics that still remain to excite our wonder and admiration” (21, 6). As “the result of modern feelings,” however, nineteenth-century buildings were “meagre and poor in the extreme” (43). Products of a schismatic and tumultuous era, they had grown out of an age divided by Protestant sectarianism, stratified by socioeconomic disparity, steeped in consumerist greed, and governed by an ethic of individualism. The tremendous aesthetic and sociocultural disparity that Pugin identified between ancient (or Catholic) architecture and modern (or Protestant) design gave rise to such contentious statements as, “everything glorious about the English churches is Catholic, everything debased and hideous, Protestant” (51). For Pugin, Britain had been transformed “from pagan obscurity” to a learned, cultivated nation by Catholic progenitors who had bestowed on succeeding generations “all we have yet left that is glorious, even to our political government and privileges.”12 As might be expected, this type of barbed commentary provoked intense debate among contemporaries who took to periodical, press, and pamphlet to register their support for, or objections to, Pugin’s statements. One 1843 contributor to the Artizan accused Pugin of attacking fellow architects with “hot and hateful sentiments” and in 1837, the Athenaeum took issue with the “splenetic animosity” he had directed at John Soane in particular.13 Pugin’s detractors variously characterized him as “an insolent reviler” and as


“a harum-scarum mad-cap,” while they described his “dictatorial” writing style as a “torrent of rabid gall.”14 But it was Pugin’s religious enthusiasm— his “outrageous” zeal—that garnered him the most hostility.15 Referred to, by some of his critics, as “Pope Pugin” and as “a very clever and cunning Jesuit,” he was accused of disingenuously professing to speak about architecture when his real aim was to proselytize “popery.”16 Even among fellow Gothic revivalists, there was a sense that his religious passion, and consequent religious intolerance, compromised his artistic vision. The July 17, 1841 Atlas proposed that “the school of Mr. Pugin” had become so zealous that they were now reading “sermons in stones.”17 Even his supportive first biographer, Brian Ferrey, argued that Pugin’s “great fallacy” was a belief that “no work of high art can be produced by any one not within the pale of the Roman Catholic Church.”18 Since the nineteenth century, Pugin has been consistently identified with religious and artistic exclusivity and characterized either as a “frenzied” religious crusader or as a “romantic” and an “escapist” who “took refuge in Gothic phantasy.”19 Recently, Clive Wainwright has taken up the theme of Pugin’s romanticism and has contended that: Certainly his love of all things medieval is not an intellectual one, but it has the passionate character of the Romantics. It is closer to the ethos of Keat’s “St. Agnes Eve” and Scott’s Ivanhoe, than Carlyle’s Past and Present. . . . [H]e was the lone romantic genius working himself to death in his Gothic house on the cliffs . . . in an attempt to change the world of architecture and design.20

Unlike the comprehensive social criticism associated with Victorian medievalists Thomas Carlyle and William Morris, Pugin’s project is generally considered in purely aesthetic terms, as detached from wider social and political issues. Scholars view Pugin’s particular brand of medievalism as paralleling his allegedly self-imposed insulation: he might want to change the world of art but had no interest in changing the world. Although this is, in many ways, a credible interpretation, a great deal of evidence suggests that Pugin’s texts were very much grounded in the political events and social movements of his day. Indeed, the “disagreeableness” he expressed toward such groups as Puritans, Anglicans, neoclassicists, and rationalists stems from a conviction that nineteenth-century society was a world alarmingly divided. His artistic exclusivity stemmed, too, from a sense that modern taste was the product of, among other things, an ambitious and self-seeking utilitarian consumerism. If we read Pugin’s texts only as religious treatises or as indulgent Romantic excursions, we risk missing a whole subtext of significant statements on the relationship between architectural principles and social values. In fact, Pugin targets certain design trends—imported foreign styles, pretentious architectural fakes, historically


inaccurate and vulgar memorials, and utilitarian designs—not simply because they are aesthetically unappealing but because their aesthetics both reflected and fostered modern disaffection. All Britons, regardless of religious and political persuasion, faced a “tide of popular innovation that . . . threatened . . . common destruction” in architectural and in social terms.21 Presupposing that architecture actively contributed to the creation of the values of its age, Pugin contended that to resurrect the designs of a cooperative, socially harmonious past would also be to resurrect its values. The past could act as a foil and as an antidote to the social ills of the industrializing, capitalizing, secularizing nineteenth century. Those honorable qualities that currently faced extinction in the modern world, like mercy and forgiveness, could “only be produced on the mind by [gothic] buildings.”22 In turn, he proposed that the revival of piety, charity, and what he calls “the energies” of times past, would naturally spark an interest in conservation and the reestablishment of architectural integrity.23 A return to architectural greatness was dependent on social renewal while great architecture would naturally inspire social amelioration; as such, Pugin’s treatises target both sides of this equation. Cultural Cohesion and the Discursiveness of Buildings Pugin argued that an edifice should be understood as an embodiment of a nation’s religion, customs, social and political priorities, as well as a product of its landscape and climate. Art, he wrote, “is a grand expression” of “the distinct character” of an era; therefore, it follows that “different circumstances and systems must generate different expressions of art.”24 This design axiom heralded a shift in Western understandings of the relationship between society and architecture. In previous eras, building design had generally been understood as something detached from society, or to use Kenneth Clarke’s phrase, as “something imposed, so to speak, from without.”25 Following Clarke, Raymond Williams notes that this novel design concept revolutionized nineteenth-century architectural theory before becoming, in the twentieth century, “a matter of intellectual habit.”26 But Williams also recognizes the contradictions inherent in a revivalist movement, which, paradoxically, conceived of art as an articulation of its own age. Although Pugin—and fellow medievalists John Ruskin and William Morris— promoted this axiom, they also contradicted, or at least complicated it by rejecting much of society’s tastes and technologies, as well as much of its values, customs, and opinions. Nineteenth-century architecture, they argued, bore particularly ugly witness to a commercial, industrial age. As Morris expressed it, modern architecture “was not what civilization aimed


at in its struggling days”; rather it expressed “a blind brutality which will destroy art at least, whatever else it may leave alive.”27 In other words, architecture was, by its nature, a culturally expressive form, but more than that, in the modern era, it contributed to the creation of the very “brutality” that threatened its existence. Moreover, one would assume that as a staunch revivalist, Pugin would detest the idea of an architecture that embodied a nation’s customs, for this would necessarily be an organic and illogical style. Indeed, he utterly rejected the trend to import architectural influences from such places as India and Egypt, though this taste would be a natural expression of the current commercial, colonial age. However, the contradictions make sense if we read Pugin’s design axiom as a prescriptive statement. He contends that modern architecture should arise out of a certain type of national spirit and that it should express certain “distinctly English” values. The idea is that modern design did not express a true national spirit, but instead reflected a sort of fraudulent, simulated spirit, twisted by the greed and selfishness of modern capitalism. Ironically, as the offspring of “speculators,” modern buildings were, in one sense, erected “in accordance with the spirit of the times,” yet they were, at the same time, “not the expression of existing opinions and circumstances, but a confused jumble of styles and symbols borrowed from all nations and periods.”28 As such, the current generation would be unable to “hand down to posterity any certain clue or guide to the system under which it was erected.”29 Thus, architects had an obligation to seek out and actively promote those sentiments that had been lost in a confused age. In fact, Pugin announces rather grandly, “national feelings and national architecture are at so low an ebb,” that it is “an absolute duty in every Englishman to attempt their revival.”30 This cultural resurrection was only possible because Pugin understood architecture and society as existing symbiotically: architecture could not only contribute to the brutalization of society, but it could also contribute to its revival and salvation. Tellingly, Pugin’s patron, Lord Shrewsbury, observed of St. Giles, Cheadle, one of Pugin’s most successfully designed churches, that as a “text book for all good people” it had the capacity to “improve the taste of young England.”31 Shrewsbury’s comment suggests that the power of architecture lay in its narrative or discursive quality. Indeed, Pugin’s treatises seem to measure a building’s aesthetic beauty and cultural power by its ability to act, in some sense, as a text. Architectural elements and motifs, such as spatial arrangement, decoration and detailing, arches and planes were in effect a complex of messages meant to be read. From these, individuals could intuit a nation’s customs and priorities and gain a sense of its historic evolution. Parish churches, for instance, with their heraldry and stained glass windows, were for Pugin, the real record of a village and its inhabitants. Adorned with


religious iconography, the church’s memorials to departed ancestors marked “the link of communion between the living and the departed.”32 The heraldry and national symbology that decorated the parish church and its monuments formed part of its lexicon—a vocabulary that Protestants and Catholics alike shared with their common ancestors. Britons of the past had shared one God, one faith, and one nation before their rites were abolished and their architecture deformed by foreign influence and deteriorated by modern life (42–43, 45). But, according to Pugin, the paganism embodied in classical architecture had actually leached into modern society and culture. Disease-like, it had become “discernible in modern manners and government” and had even “invaded the ordinary forms of speech.”33 Proponents of neoclassicism or “the revived pagan principle” were not only advocating a transplanted, simulated style that had nothing to do with England’s communal history or national identity, but they were also promoting cultural confusion, not cohesion.34 Classical design glorified a mythical ancient Greek and/or Roman past, which was socially, politically, and religiously divergent from the past of Britons. Classical friezes, for instance, were decorated with the heads of sheep or oxen, to signify animal sacrifice to a panoply of gods. Similarly, the ancient proclivity for funerary urns was appropriate for a culture that practiced cremation. Southern cultures also had very different basic material requirements: the flat roofs of Greek buildings might be perfectly “fit” for warm Mediterranean climates, but English roofs needed to be pointed to survive snowy winters.35 Further, English religious practice dictated that these roofs be punctuated with towers to house the bells that called the community together to worship.36 Any attempt to adapt “pagan” details to suit English lives invariably resulted in such “gross inconsistencies” as a Grecian colonnaded temple with a bell tower and a pitched roof (46). The trend to create classic–Gothic hybrids was much more pernicious than simply copying a foreign style—it was, in Pugin’s opinion, to produce the worst species of “anachronisms and anomalies” (62). Modern memorials, in particular, were anachronistic monstrosities, which, according to Pugin, had infested Europe’s most venerable cathedrals. Even beneath “the grand vaults of a Westminster,” Pugin writes, “the inverted torch, the club of Hercules, the owl of Minerva, and the cinerary urn, are carved, in lieu of saints and angels, on the tombs of . . . bishops, kings, ecclesiastics, statesman and warriors” (12). His representation of Contrasted Episcopal Monuments (figure 1.1) pits the sublime medieval monument, with its intricately rendered images of saints and ornate Gothic detailing, against the contemporary memorial and its mishmash of jarring, eclectic “pagan” symbols. Contemporary taste sought after trivial imported ornamentation such as hearts, cherubs, and national crests tied with bows, but

16

Figure 1.1 Pugin’s Contrasted Episcopal Monuments (from A. W. N. Pugin, Contrasts, Leicester University Press, 1992 © Leicester University Press, a Continuum imprint).


these details had nothing to do with English history and culture. As such, these memorials could neither elicit an affective response nor forge an intellectual connection with their beholders. As this image demonstrates, without such a connection, visitors had to be instructed “not to walk about and talk during divine service or to deface the walls.” Yet, the most solemn and sacred of spaces is littered with the pasted-up signs and the graffiti of an estranged and uncaring people. What “must be the moral and religious state of a country,” Pugin writes, “where the churches are obliged to be fastened up to prevent their being desecrated and destroyed by the people?” (36). Modern Britons had become a “heartless throng” of individuals who did not feel a “spark of . . . love of country and pride of nation” (37). This destructive tendency germinates in a society of individuals who conceived of themselves as “tourists” within historic buildings that were, essentially, their own birthright. England’s “own children,” Pugin argues, were disconnected from “the land of their fathers,” and as a result had left the “most beauteous works unnoticed and despised, to catch at foreign ideas,” which were “unsuited to their county, and . . . its national traditions.”37 Rekindling the national spirit of Britons required an architectural purification of sorts. The landscape needed to be purged of its neoclassical buildings and rebuilt in the true English Gothic style. The ancient buildings that dotted the English landscape had a greater power to communicate truths than contentious politico-religious treatises. “An Englishman needs not controversial writings to lead him to the faith of his fathers,” Pugin writes, for the history of the English Catholic community was “written on the wall, on the window, on the pavement, by the highway.”38 Of course, this objective is founded in a nostalgic—and certainly somewhat fallacious— conception of a linguistically pure and culturally unsullied era in England’s past. The gothic community was, in Pugin’s imagination, a self-sufficient and inward-looking society that maintained its integrity and ensured its survival by maintaining at least some degree of cultural exclusivity. As Chris Brooks puts it, Pugin’s “emphasis upon architecture as language” is founded in a belief in the existence of a “lost world of gothic community, where everybody, as well as every building, spoke the same tongue.”39 Modern buildings should be modeled on the Gothic buildings of the medieval past, since, he claims, they were the artefacts of a community of worshipers who “borrowed their ideas from no heathen rites, nor sought for decorations from the idolatrous emblems of a strange people.”40 This exclusivity was necessary because, although outsiders might be able to appreciate English culture, they could not make it fully, affectively, their own. Understandably, “foreign brethren” tended to show “little feeling for the sanctity of the temple of God,” Pugin argues, since medieval edifices, like medieval communities, spoke a language that was inherently alien to them.41


“It is modern & smells of humbug”: Public Taste and the Design Trade Crucially, the rage to consume ever-increasing amounts of novel and exotic goods continued to grow in accordance with the degeneration of public taste and the fashioning of design into a mere trade.42 Not just middle-class entrepreneurs, but even religious leaders—who were supposedly beyond the tentacles of the market—had bowed to its dictates. Consumer demand had induced the dean of Westminster, for instance, to render the Abbey a “show-place more attractive to holiday visitors” for whom the site’s sacred memorials and medieval feats of engineering were not enough.43 To entertain “the mob,” Pugin sneers, admission was being charged for a puppet show “in the largest church of the metropolis, the mausoleum of our kings; a place rendered of the highest interest by the art of its construction, and the historical recollections attached to it” (41). Much of the blame for the deplorable state of public taste was placed at the feet of pseudo-architects who were guided by their egos and their pocketbooks. These money-men had effectively rendered the world of art a “Babel of confusion” by producing absurd “mongrel compositions” in hopes of enticing paying customers.44 The entrepreneurial individuality that infused wider society had found a collateral cultural expression in an art scene where “private judgement r[an] riot” (1). Pugin’s illustration of the design trade (figure 1.2) depicts how architects searched increasingly far afield for inspiration in order to satisfy erratic and misguided public tastes. Architects adopted styles as their fancy and as the market dictated without a thought to their origin, aesthetic significance, or cultural meanings. They then executed them without precision, understanding, or care. As the figure indicates, egoism and ignorance translated into such distorted eyesores as “a Moorish fish market with a literary room over an Egyptian marine villa,” “a gin temple in the baronial style,” and a monument for Westminster “in the Hindoo style.” In this way, the architectural trade pandered to, and encouraged, a profound social and cultural dishonesty. Design had historically been the “grandest of sciences” but in modern consumer culture it had “fallen to a mere trade conducted not by artists, but by men of business.”45 These so-called architects were outright impostors, unqualified “errand boy[s],” and ineffectual “milk-and-water men” who “deserve[d] drowning in their own compositions.”46 A modern architect did not painstakingly and thoughtfully craft and construct a building as one might expect, Pugin argued, but simply chose “a disguise with which to invest the building he erect[ed].”47 The trade had become chaotic, theatrical, artificial, and insubstantial. Indeed, using a whole range of theatrical terms, Pugin likens architects to

19

Figure 1.2 Pugin’s New Church Competition (from A. W. N. Pugin, Contrasts, Leicester University Press, 1992 © Leicester University Press, a Continuum imprint).


shifty actors who changed costume effortlessly and made public appearances “tricked out in the guises of all centuries and all nations” (2). Still these “professors” of “the carnival of architecture,” he quips, would not be “satisfied with perpetrating one character,” and so would “appear in two or three costumes in the same evening” (2). Architects, however, were not the only contributors to this culture of artificiality. In Pugin’s treatises, they share the blame with an aristocracy who, instead of fulfilling their natural role as the caretakers of national heritage, promoted its destruction. The attention they paid to their social responsibilities decreased in direct proportion as their architectural extravagance increased. Rather than conserve the distinguished seats of their estates and other “honest” edifices, the aristocracy chose to erect “mere show places” that were so extravagant they “impoverished some generations of heirs.”48 They showed fiscal—and artistic—irresponsibility within their own families and circles of acquaintance and within the larger public sphere. Whereas the medieval gentry had dispensed hospitality and benevolence from estates (at which they were constantly in residence), they now only opened their doors to those “few fashionables who condescend to pass away a few days occasionally in a country house” (61). Indeed, describing the modern country house as “a mere mask” and as “an ill-conceived lie,” Pugin denounced the aristocratic practice of having homes built to resemble abbeys (“toys” for the wealthy) or castles (deserted places visited only by rooks that nested in the fake turrets) (59). These hideous and lonely edifices were evidence of the breakdown of the familial social and political structure that had been established in the Middle Ages. They signaled the end of a time when, “under the oaken rafters of their capacious halls, the lords of the manor used to assemble all their friends and tenants” into one companionable group (61). This is, in Pugin’s eyes, an inclusive, convivial, open, and honorable community in which each individual, no matter how lowly or poor, could find security and fellowship. Pugin indulgently reconstructs a utopic scene of the past, wherein even the humbler guests partook of their share of bounty dealt to them by the hand of the almoner beneath the groined entrance of the gate-house. Catholic England was merry England, at least for the humbler classes, and the architecture was in keeping with the faith and manners of the times,—at once strong and hospitable. (61)

Pugin’s describes the old estate mansions as inherently honest edifices. Erected by community craftspeople, they are made of scrupulously dependable and naturally beautiful materials, and designed in accordance with their purpose as a social and economic center of the community.


The middle classes, too, adopted and espoused the artificial. They were keen to ape the taste of the modern gentry and so attempted to display affluence (whether real or feigned) at all times (and to do so as cheaply and easily as possible). Middle-class taste prioritized image over truth. Reflecting this priority, they had wholeheartedly embraced the architectural trend to “trick things out,” that is, to erect grand false fronts to hide what were otherwise very modest and characterless buildings.49 This artful and dishonest trend had become so prevalent and Pugin’s criticism of it so voracious that the issue became satirized in a humorous ditty, which made its way from private circulation into the press: Some raise a front up to the street, Like ould Westminster Abbey, And then they think the Lord to cheat, And build the back part shabby. For stuccoed bricks, and sich like tricks, At present all the rage is They took no one in! those fine ould m[e]n! In the pious Middle Ages! ! !50

Though lighthearted, this passage highlights how modern architecture seduced ignorant, grasping consumers. For Pugin, the taste for false fronts clearly demonstrated how innately chimerical was the commercial age: the marketplace falsely promised the grandest of lifestyles for one low price. In the rush to display the latest fashion, individuals sacrificed taste and integrity to false economy. “On the pleas of economy and convenience”— but actually for the sake of an image—they willingly accepted “the vilest sash-window and street-door residences.”51 As a nation, he writes, we have cast off in too many instances strength and real convenience, for empty display and cheap magnificence; and a modern house, with its cracking plaster and compo, peeling paper, rubbed off graining, marble veneers, dirty paint, and faded finery, is an erection that could not have arisen in any less fictitious age than the present. (99, italics mine)

Pugin’s conspicuous use of the word “fictitious” here underscores his sense that modern architecture told untruths. Upon the surfaces of modern buildings, nineteenth-century citizens gleaned fabricated narratives that obscured, instead of revealed, historical, religious, and cultural truths. Understandably, Pugin’s wholesale rejection of contemporary tastes opened him up to the charge of intolerance, naiveté, and impracticality. His ideals, some claimed, were out of touch with social reality, while his own designs were inappropriate for a progressive century.52 Pugin anticipated and/or


answered these types of criticisms. In his harangues against sham style and inferior construction, he was careful to declare that his aim was not “to arrest the course of inventions,” but rather “to confine these inventions to their legitimate uses” and to ensure that practical improvements were “engrafted on old principles.”53 The old principles embodied honesty, or in the words of the Notes and Queries satirist above, medieval buildings like Westminster “took no one in.” They were inherently honest structures because they proclaimed their principles, revealed their purpose (whether grand or pedestrian), and proudly displayed their structural “guts” to the world. There was, Pugin declared, “nothing artificial about them,—no deception,— nothing built up to make a show.”54 Medieval craftspeople had not felt pressured, for instance, to add even numbers of doors and windows to make for a symmetrical building, neither did they “think it necessary to build up a high wall to hide a roof, nor disguise a chimney into a flower pot” (18). Exhibiting their “ribs” or buttresses to the world, the medieval edifice did not fear to show itself to the public, but instead “invite[d] inspection within and without.”55 In this way, whether consciously or subconsciously, medieval designers— and Pugin himself—subscribed to a building principle that twentieth-century architectural theorists would describe as the “ ‘narrative’ display of . . . structural form.”56 The idea is that a building is allowed to interact honestly, seemingly without pretension, with the people who inhabit it. For Pugin, this principle is based on a belief that aesthetic beauty is derived from the integrity of construction in much the same way that the integrity of the medieval community had been founded on a sense of openness and forthrightness. In the Middle Ages, honesty in design corresponded to, or translated into, the dignity of daily life. Accordingly, the “concealment” that had become “the rule of modern British architecture” was indicative of the hypocrisy that had infiltrated public and private life, and was slowly eroding both.57 National Identity and the Making (and Unmaking) of Historic Heroes One of Pugin’s favorite targets was the practice of modern commemoration. Nineteenth-century memorials only promoted the atmosphere of mistrust that had pervaded modern society. Blinded by their own apathy and ignorance, individuals who erected public memorials to the heroes of the past were often deceived by, and thus continually perpetuated, false readings of history. Thus, the project of national regeneration must involve a more “accurate” reading of history—one that would explain why modern Britons had become so acquiescent in the destruction of their own communities,


even to the point of commemorating the events that led to their demise. For instance, Pugin argues with some vehemence, according to his reading of history, the nation’s cultural and social decline commenced with the heretical reign of Henry VIII; and still, the modern nation insisted on memorializing his regime. A case in point was the formation of an Oxford committee in 1838 to erect a Martyrs’ Memorial to pay homage to Thomas Cranmer, Henry’s Archbishop of Canterbury. Upon learning of the committee’s inception, Pugin fired off an article urging subscribers to consider “the disgraceful origin” of their monument and the real “pedigree” of such “pretended martyrs.”58 Why, he asks, would nineteenth-century citizens wish to commemorate such corruption? Did they not realize that the violent and debased Cranmer had himself been clandestinely married during his tenure as Archbishop, at the same time that he facilitated the king’s divorces, persecutions, and executions? In his article, Pugin urges subscribers to recognize Cranmer as one of many hypocritical, self-serving figures who had established the Church of England “by racks, noisome prisons, ripping up alive, clipping ears, boring tongues, fines, confiscations, harassing by pursuivants, tearing children from their parents, and tortures innumerable.”59 This type of monumentalization demonstrated precisely, for Pugin, the mechanisms by which church and state had coalesced their power. Across historical periods, monuments chronicled and legitimized state-sanctioned violence. The Martyrs’ Memorial was an example of how cleverly and insidiously public symbolic gestures served to sanction this hegemonic reading of history, to endorse a corrupt establishment, and to legitimate the state’s violence against its citizens. This was how, he wrote, the “church of England, with all its pretended apostolicity, authority, and purity” created a whitewashed front behind which lurked a history of “tyrannies, and usurpations, and extortions, and falsehoods.”60 The supporters of the Oxford Martyrs’ Memorial were essentially immortalizing the history of their own oppression: Never has a nation been so deluded and hoodwinked as the English for the last two centuries; every source of historical information has been poisoned and perverted; and they have been successfully turned from examining . . . cruelties. . . . The real source of misery is that the whole fabric of . . . [the] establishment exists on misrepresentation, and you dread all that approximates to truth, or exhibits facts in their true light. (99–100)

History falsely claims to chronicle the nation’s emergence from popish darkness into the light of rationality and Protestantism, but this supposedly authoritative reading of history not only crushed historical truth beneath its weight, but also made the task of appending it almost impossible.


Though a difficult task, attempts must be made, Pugin insists, to more accurately define the term “Reformation.”61 It should be described as an era that saw a nation’s faith forcibly suppressed, its churches plundered, and the common lands of its communities pillaged. Moreover, he argues, people should understand that these events did not stem from religious conviction or “doctrinal differences” (as established historical accounts claimed).62 Rather, the Reformation rose “entirely from temporal causes” not the least of which was a desire for power.63 The establishment of Protestantism as the national religion had allowed a corrupt king to appropriate Catholic church lands, which could then be apportioned out to the “favourites of the day” in order to appease them and to gain their complicity.64 This was, Pugin argued, the most flagrant sin against God, but it was also a heinous crime against the people: Henry had betrayed his patriarchal duties and had swindled his own subjects of their birthright. “To sever those holy ties” that connected individuals to their pasts was an act, for Pugin, “worse than parricide.”65 From this point in history, Britons would suffer for the sins of such a counterfeit political father. The Reformation, then, should be understood as a familial rupture. Henry had spawned a new “Establishment,” formed out of “the many who, converted by political intriguers, avaricious and ambitious men, abandoned the faith of their fathers.”66 He had inaugurated a circle of corruption not only at the highest levels of government but also had introduced schism and intolerance into the very bowels of the national family. He had also bequeathed tyranny and rapaciousness to generations of Britons for whom the spirit of community had given way to a desire for personal profit. From the time of the Reformation onwards, Pugin argues, “men of power and affluence” were guided by “high interest” while the “humbler class” were left to suffer and to fight for scraps among themselves.67 Even Henry, Pugin claims, had “lived to perceive” that his oppression could not “preserve any thing like [the] unity of creed” that had previously existed.68 Once “the great spell” of shared custom and creed “which had so long kept men together” was broken, “they were as little disposed to be restrained by rules prescribed by him [Henry], as he had been by those of the ancient faith from which he had departed” (26). As a surrogate religion, Protestantism could not reforge such grievously damaged familial and communal bonds. Subtle Arrangements: Spatiality, Utility, and the Will to Order The natural heirs to the Reformation were, Pugin argued, modern-day apathetic Britons who continued to find new ways to degrade what remained of their shared cultural legacy. In accord with the growing mood of social disaffection, architects were producing designs increasingly


grounded in utilitarian principles. The aim of utilitarianism—to produce a more productive, ordered and rational world—appealed to a society no longer mediated by bonds of duty and obligation. Yet, according to Pugin, this emphasis on public utility intensified the sense of social disenfranchisement among individuals who felt increasingly little connection to God or family, community, or nation. Utilitarianism sought to remove the human element from current social configurations and to eradicate the vestiges of interdependence and personal kinship that yet remained. As the grip of capitalism intensified, the distribution of goods and services was increasingly determined by utility, rather than by need, obligation, benevolence, or compassion. Everything from church pews to modern factories, asylums, and, as Pugin demonstrates, access to public waterworks, was becoming arbitrated by utility and by economic interest. In the plate Public Conduits, the massive lock that bars public access to the conduit at St. Annes Soho signals the civic abandonment of the lower orders and the culmination of a long history—since the Reformation at least—of the withdrawal of social responsibility (see figure 1.3). The signs of disaffection are manifest everywhere in the image: garbage litters this lifeless and uninspiring public space; a young child is shooed from the water source by a threatening policeman with a truncheon; a dandy shows only indifference as he reclines lazily in the doorway of the stationhouse. And rising out of this dismal scene, is the cold, unvarying façade of a police station that bears no embellishment on its even surfaces except a desultorily pasted-up notice of “marriages burials and christenings.” There is none of the communal celebration described in True Principles that, in the medieval village, marked religious festivals and familial milestones.69 Both this scene and the contrasting representation of the medieval West Cheap Conduit, reveals the connection between the conditions of daily life and the configuration of public space. In the medieval community, the material demands of the living body merge with the divine: the divisions are blurred between religious worship and daily labor and between care for the body and care for the soul. The aesthetic grandeur of the West Cheap Conduit, decorated with national symbology and religious iconography, attests to this material–spiritual integration and to the community’s shared identity. Moreover, the suggestion here is that the life of the medieval citizen actually becomes imbued with the integrative qualities and coeval features of the communal space. Just as the divine and the earthly harmonize in architectural terms, in similar manner, authority figures and plebeians live within a structure of interdependency and pastoral care. The medieval/modern polarity is especially marked in what are undoubtedly the two most often reproduced plates in Contrasts. These plates (figures 1.4 and 1.5) especially target modern utilitarian design and suggest that it is not only an aesthetically abhorrent architectural school,

26

Figure 1.3 Pugin’s Public Conduits (from A. W. N. Pugin, Contrasts, Leicester University Press, 1992 © Leicester University Press, a Continuum imprint).

27

Figure 1.4 Pugin’s Contrasting Towns 1840/1440 (from A. W. N. Pugin, Contrasts, Leicester University Press, 1992 © Leicester University Press, a Continuum imprint).

28

Figure 1.5 Pugin’s Contrasting Residences for the Poor (from A. W. N. Pugin, Contrasts, Leicester University Press, 1992 © Leicester University Press, a Continuum imprint).


but also that its principles are deeply damaging to the social psyche. Remarkable for their overt social commentary, critics often see these atypical illustrations as incompatible with Pugin’s larger project. In the words of Patrick R. M. Conner, these famous anomalies have “misled” readers to “attribute to Pugin a ‘social theory’ of architecture.”70 Yet, this would seem to miss the point; indeed, it is the very unfamiliarity of these plates, the way they sit rather uneasily within an architectural treatise-cum-religious polemic, which makes them so significant. Their shocking images are aimed at nineteenth-century sensibilities: disturbing the expectations of cultivated readers who would ordinarily come to the text expecting sumptuous engravings of medieval masterpieces, they instead present a powerful indictment of modern priorities. For this reason, and because they express in explicit terms an anti-utilitarian ideology that runs throughout Pugin’s verbal and visual texts, these plates deserve revisiting. Figure 1.4, the imaginatively recreated Gothic Catholic town and the contrasting modern version of the same town, demonstrates how and why a physically and socially inclusive community degrades into urban disorder. In the fifteenth-century townscape, abbeys, chapels, cathedrals, and guildhalls punctuate the skyline with the “great height and vertical lines” of their towers and spires.71 The verticality of Gothic design links the human with the divine; it is the conduit through which some portion of heavenly grace might be transferred from heaven to earth, bestowing individuals with some portion of goodness and dignity. But by 1840, this community has come to testify to a new set of priorities. The nineteenth-century townscape declares an irreverent disregard for traditional values, for custom, community, nation and God; instead, profit holds sway over all other concerns. The cathedral spires, for instance, are replaced with the spires of industry. Smokestacks do not thrust skyward in order to receive divine guidance, however, but to spew thick dark clouds as if in an attempt to cleave the connection between earth and heaven. Increasingly isolated from the divine, humans are bound to a landscape blighted by the spread of urban manufacture. Ugly, smokebelching iron works squat on the ruins of what was once the Abbey— a building that, previously, would have been an instantly recognizable landmark. Instead, the modern buildings wear indistinct faces. The new boxy, unadorned chapels, each representing a different denomination, are almost indistinguishable from the town’s commercial and industrial buildings. As Pugin states elsewhere, modern buildings, whether churches, universities, or asylums, form “one uniform mass, unbroken either in outline or in face.”72 This configuration of public space signals, for Pugin, the paradoxical nature of modernity: a deep social factionalism lurks beneath a homogeneous front. The existence of a Baptist chapel, a Unitarian Chapel, a New Church,


a Westleyan Centenary, a New Christian Society, a Quakers Meeting House, and a Socialist Hall of Science are not, according to Pugin, signs of social progress. Rather, this increased heterogeneity provides evidence of a community divided: the modern community might package itself as liberal and tolerant but, in reality, it promoted segregation and schism. Such religious diversification and political factionalization indicated that the self had become prioritized to the detriment of community. Behind undifferentiated doors, Pugin suggests, there existed restless, self-seeking, consuming individuals for whom contentment (at least in this society) was impossible to obtain. Employing the same strategy, but focusing even more minutely on the human cost of modern urbanity, the plate Contrasted Residences for the Poor demonstrates modern methods of dealing with society’s most vulnerable inhabitants—the poor and those deemed criminal or insane (figure 1.5). The representation of the variety of material distinctions between the “antient” and the modern poor house suggest, in precise terms, the collapse of what had remained of the medieval system of guardianship and the decline of benevolence. The doctrine of personal independence, rather than social interdependence, had effectively released society’s traditional patriarchs from their social responsibilities. In this image, lunatics and factory workers are isolated from the wider community in soulless plain-fronted buildings while the inhabitants of the Modern Poor House (figure 1.5) and the New Jail of 1840 (figure 1.4) are housed in buildings unquestionably modeled after Jeremy Bentham’s (in)famous utilitarian architectural design, the Panopticon. In his letters on the Panopticon; or The Inspection-House, Bentham details the design’s most identifiable features—the high central tower and the surrounding fan of peripheral cells.73 Bentham’s self-described “simple idea” was that each cell, although walled off from the others, was transparent to the opaque, impenetrable central tower. Believing they were always under the eye of the unseen authorities that were housed in the tower (even when it was actually empty), inmates would feel compelled to discipline themselves.74 This spatial design, with its play of transparency and opaqueness, negates the possibility of disruptive collectivization among inmates who were visually segregated and therefore unable to communicate with one another.75 In his analysis of this method of social discipline, Michel Foucault insightfully equates these cells to “so many small theatres, in which each actor is alone, perfectly individualized and constantly visible.” Moreover, as these plates show, inmates have no opportunity to disrupt the ordered functioning of the larger community: they are completely isolated from “the outside” in a building that gives no clue to its function (the concept here being “out of sight, out of mind”). The symmetrical


uniformity of the jails and lunatic asylums ensures that nonproductive and disruptive individuals are hidden away from the eyes of a public who might act as their advocate, or alternatively, become tainted by them. Not just the internal spatiality, then, but also the external appearance of these buildings signals the politics of visibility at work in this society. Pugin’s panoptic Modern Poor House (figure 1.5) and New Jail (figure 1.4) are architectural manifestations of the growing tendency to physically and psychically differentiate, and to remove from the “normal” community, those branded undesirable, abnormal, or unproductive. Simply stated, the highly adaptable, efficient, and uncomplicated Panopticon answers to the modern demand for order. Its symmetry parallels its supposedly egalitarian methods: its aim is to mete out an impartial justice to all, regardless of individual circumstance. Boasting of its fairness and its extensive social benefits, Bentham promises that under the “power” of the Panopticon, “morals [will be] reformed . . . industry invigorated . . . public burthens lightened . . . [and] Economy seated, as it were upon a rock.”76 Utilitarian design promised to create an environment conducive to productivity in places where order did not always reign, such as in “penitentiary houses, prisons, houses of industry, work houses, poor-houses, manufactories, madhouses, lazarettos, hospitals and schools” or any other “establishment, in which persons of any description are . . . kept under inspection.”77 It is this prioritizing of industry, economy, and surveillance—untempered by responsibility and benevolence—that Pugin indicts and seeks to counter. His plates demonstrate how efficaciously the set of social priorities expressed by Bentham legitimized the practices of factory owners who justified their brutal exploitation of working men, women, and children as keeping otherwise idle hands busily occupied and trouble-free. The emphasis on productivity, economy, and “the greater good” excused civic authorities from having to deal with the growing stench, disease, pollution, and the aesthetic ugliness of industrial urban centers. The arrangement of figure 1.5, Contrasted Residences for the Poor, clearly indicts utilitarian design for its willingness to sacrifice humanity in the name of rationality. The series of thumbnail illustrations that border the two larger images reveal how a lack of compassion is easily disguised as scientific rationalism. In the name of progress, the poor are victimized by economic rapaciousness even after death: while their living bodies are only valued as machines of labor, their dead bodies—worth even less—are reduced, in economic terms, to the lowest use-value. Pugin’s description of the poor as only “material for dissection” underscores the degree to which he equated the deflation of human life with rationalism and with capitalist enterprise. This modern value system also supports the disciplinary practices of sadomasochistic taskmasters who, in seclusion and under the dictates of


order and utility, apply a particularly uncivilized hand to the burdensome poor. For Patrick Conner, the image of “whip-carrying Masters” seems particularly disengaged from the text, so although “social and stylistic conditions are persuasively coupled” in this picture, as real social criticism, its scope is very limited.78 He argues that within the text of Contrasts, we read nothing of the maltreated lower classes of the nineteenth century, not of the brutality of their policemen, nor of the kindly social arrangements of the fifteenth century. Pugin’s bêtes noires were on the whole men he considered hostile to Catholicism or to Gothic.79

Yet, those bêtes noires—Henry VIII, Cranmer, Wyatt, neoclassicists, and architectural speculators—are also indicted for the crimes against humanity depicted in the thumbnail images. They share responsibility for the destruction of the type of communities that Pugin presents in the contrasting image of figure 1.5, where “the antient poor house” is essentially all public spaces: the church, the common gardens, and the other religious buildings that comprise the hub of the community. In this society, the medieval master does not so much discipline his wards as conceive of them as substantive members of a communal family. This is, of course, a sentimental, nostalgic picture of the medieval community. Unquestionably, Pugin subscribed to what Phoebe Stanton characterized as a “Utopia of the spirit, the Church and the arts.”80 His chief concern was not so much to give an accurate recreation of the past or an unbiased representation of the present, but to convey the spirit of times past and to expose the ailing spirit of times present. His contrasting images are, in this way, ideological landscapes. He may not have formulated any kind of a comprehensive social program, but these plates remind readers of the sheer possibility of human effort when it is infused with a spirit of cooperation, social responsibility, civility, and religious devotion. Thus although Pugin’s arguments may often seem to embody the spirit of reactionary nineteenth-century conservatism, we may conclude that he belongs to another lineage of political thought. Certainly he promotes a distinctly conservative politics: his perfect world is undoubtedly a traditional, paternalistic, culturally insular, and inherently hierarchical one. Through a duty-bound social hierarchy, each individual fulfills a necessary role within a shared framework of responsibilities—much like a family. But this is also a politics that goes further: it promotes social responsibility, questions the modern consumerist ethic, and challenges the modern proclivity to locate morality in utilitarianism. Further still, Pugin’s project aims to counteract modern social alienation by reconfiguring the spaces within which people live. Ultimately, then, it could be said that Pugin’s treatises remind his readers that, in the words of


contemporary social theorist Henri Lefebvre, the injunction to “ ‘Change Life! Change Society!’ ” are mere words that “mean nothing without an appropriate space.”81 Notes I’d like to thank June Sturrock for her constructive comments on an early draft of this essay and Robert Lamb for his responses to a later one. 1. A. W. N. Pugin, The Collected Letters of A. W. N. Pugin, vol. 2, ed. Margaret Belcher (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 379. 2. Pugin’s treatises and correspondence are littered with criticism of various sects and denominations. In just one example, he writes to register his disapproval of the practice of placing benches in churches, and comments contentiously that even “the Anglicans[,] schismaticks as they are, hereticks as they are have never dared to substitute a bench for a font. [S]uch an idea has only been put in force by the puritans & Calvinists” (Letters 1:310). The catalogue of examples I have given here are culled from A. W. N. Pugin, The Collected Letters of A. W. N. Pugin, vol. 1, ed. Margaret Belcher (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 169, 316, 261, 276, 336, 171, 310, and 41 and A. W. N. Pugin, Collected Letters, vol. 2, 92. 3. Pugin, Collected Letters, 41. The biblical reference is from the Gospel of St. Mark 3:25 (see Belcher’s footnote). 4. Benjamin Ferrey, Recollections of A. W. N. Pugin and his Father, Augustus Pugin; With Notices of their Works (1862) (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1972), 142. 5. See Collected Letters, vol. 1, 254. Pugin writes: “I have suceeded [sic] at Last in keeping my text uncastrated in the contrasts. Dolman wished to omit all about Westm[inster] Abbey & the queen.” 6. A. W. N. Pugin, Contrasts: or, A Parallel between the Noble Edifices of the Middle Ages, and Corresponding Buildings of the Present Day; Shewing the Present Decay of Taste, 2nd ed. (1841) (Leicester and New York: Humanities Press, 1969), 42–43. 7. Pugin, Contrasts, 42. 8. Pugin, Contrasts, 10. I am following Pugin’s example in using the term “English,” as opposed to “British.” Pugin’s career took him to Ireland and Scotland, but his habit was to speak of a distinctly English identity and architecture in his treatises. 9. Pugin, Collected Letters, vol. 1, 41–43. 10. Sir John Soane (1753–1837), Professor of Architecture at the Royal Academy, proponent of international neoclassicism, and known for his idiosyncratic blending of Gothic and classical detailing (such as, e.g., the Bank Stock Office). Royal favourite James Wyatt (1746–1813) was famously referred to as “Wyatt the destructive” by Pugin in his The True Principles, of Pointed or Christian Architecture (1841), intro. Timothy Brittain (Reading: Spire books, 2003), 53. His designs include the Byzantine-influenced Pantheon Building in Oxford Street, London, and the ornate Gothic-styled Fonthill Abbey. It was his restorative “improvements” of the ancient Salisbury Cathedral and Westminster Abbey, however, that earned him the nickname “the Destroyer” among the general public.

34 / corinna m. wagner 11. Pugin, Collected Letters, vol. 1, 42. 12. A. W. N. Pugin, An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England (1843) (London: John Weale, 1969), 50. 13. “Pugin’s Christian Architecture,” Artizan 4 (April 30, 1843): 90–91; “Our Library Table,” Athenœm (January 14, 1837): 32. To gain a sense of the heated debate that Pugin inspired and for a survey of the language of these articles see Margaret Belcher’s invaluable A. W. N. Pugin: An Annotated Critical Bibliography (London: Mansell, 1987). 14. “Gothic Architecture,” Oxford University, City, and County Herald 37 (April 23, 1842): [2]; in Belcher, Annotated, 203; [Leeds, W. H.] “A Batch of Architects,” Fraser’s Magazine 15 (March 1837): 324–339, 329; An Architect, “Reply to Contrasts, by A. Welby Pugin” (London: J. Masters, 1837), 5; “A Cursory Glance at the Present State of Architecture in England, Chiefly with Respect to the Metropolis,” Civil Engineer and Architect’s Journal 1 (October 1837): 9–10, 9. 15. [W. H. Leeds], “A Batch of Architects,” Fraser’s Magazine 15 (March 1837): 324–339, 329. 16. “Welby Pugin and His Critics,” Civil Engineer and Architect’s Journal 1 ( January 1838): 60–63; “Gothic Architecture,” Oxford University, City, and Country Herald 37 (April 23, 1842): [2]; in Belcher, Annotated, 203. On the sense of Pugin as a designing popish or Jesuitical figure, see esp. the pamphlet authored by “An Architect” entitled Reply to “Contrasts,” by A. Welby Pugin (London: J. Masters, 1837), particularly p. 6 and Leeds, “A Batch of Architects,” 324–339. 17. “Fine Arts. Architecture,” Atlas 16 (July 17, 1841): 464; also in Belcher, Annotated, 192. 18. Ferrey, Recollections, 112. 19. On Pugin’s religiosity: David Watkin, Morality and Architecture: The Development of a Theme in Architectural History and Theory from the Gothic Revival to the Modern Movement (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 3. See also Richard DavenportHines’s comment that Pugin was a nineteenth-century crusader who “sought salvation in gothic design” in his Gothic: Four Hundred Years of Excess, Horror, Evil and Ruin (London: 4th Estate, 1998), 223–224. On Pugin as a romantic: Roderick O’Donnell, “Pugin as a Church Architect,” in Pugin: A Gothic Passion, ed. Paul Atterbury and Clive Wainwright (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994), 63–89, 64; A. L. Drummond, “Augustus Welby Pugin: Art and Vocation,” Church Quarterly Review 153 ( July 1952): 335–349, 342. See also Megan Aldrich, “Gothic Sensibility: The Early Years of the Gothic Revival,” in A. W. N. Pugin: Master of Gothic Revival, ed. Paul Atterbury (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1995), 13–29, esp. 13–14. 20. Clive Wainwright, “ ‘Not a Style but a Principle’ Pugin & His Influence,” in Pugin: A Gothic Passion, 1–21, 6. 21. Pugin, An Apology, 51. 22. Pugin, Contrasts, 5. 23. A. W. N. Pugin, The Present State of Ecclesiastical Architecture in England (1843) (Frome, Somerset: Butler and Tanner, 1969), 42. 24. Pugin, An Apology, 43; see also 4. 25. As Kenneth Clarke puts it, until Pugin began writing his architectural treatises, style was not understood as “something which springs inevitably from a way of


26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

life,” in Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), 137. Williams, Culture and Society, 137. William Morris, “The Prospects of Architecture in Civilization” (1881) in William Morris on Art and Socialism, ed. Norman Kelvin (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1999), 58. Pugin, Present State, 15–16; Apology, 5. Pugin, Apology, 5. Pugin, Principles, 57. Shrewsbury’s comment underlines how revivalist minds conceived of architectural taste as a force that shaped the political persuasions of public figures. Roderick O’Donnell points out that Shrewsbury is most likely referring to the “Young England” group of “romantic” Tories associated with the novelist and eventual Prime Minister Isaac Disraeli. (See Roderick O’Donnell, “Pugin as a Church Architect,” in Pugin: A Gothic Passion, 63–89, 73–74.) This group, which included George Smythe and Lord John Manners, is described by Robert Blake (Disraeli’s biographer) as “the Oxford movement translated by Cambridge from religion into politics” (171). Importantly, Blake indicates that the politics of this group of young Tories was associated with a clearly recognizable aesthetic. In fact, he describes the confrontation between advocates of Regency and Gothic design as a “battle of the styles, conducted on strict Conservative versus Liberal party lines” (171). This group shared with Pugin an abhorrence of the heartlessness of an intensely consumerist era and a distrust of Enlightenment rationalism and liberal utilitarianism. Like Pugin’s project, the Young England movement sought to “resuscitate[ ] a no less mythical benevolent feudal system to set against the radical, centralizing Benthamism which seemed to be carrying all before it in the 1830s and 1840s” (172). Like Gothic Revivalism and Tractarianism, this movement was also motivated by a growing sense of the defeat of the aristocracy at the hands of a liberal, consumerist, utilitarian, and newly ascendant middle class (171). See Robert Blake, Disraeli (London: Methuen & Co., 1978). Pugin, Present State, 15. Pugin, Contrasts, 10. See Pugin, Contrasts, chapter II “On the Revived Pagan Principle,” 8–20. See Pugin, Principles, 45–49. Pugin, Principles, 45–50. Pugin, Present State, 11. Pugin, Apology, 49. Chris Brooks, The Gothic Revival (London: Phaidon, 1999), 240. Pugin, Contrasts, 6. Pugin, Present State, 22. Pugin, Collected Letters, vol. 1, 116. Pugin, Contrasts, 40. Pugin, Apology, 1, 3. This quote originally appeared in the first edition of Contrasts, but is also quoted by H. R. Hitchcock in the “Introduction” to the second edition of Contrasts, 16. Pugin, Present State, 86.

36 / corinna m. wagner 47. 48. 49. 50.

51. 52.

53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

59.

60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73.

Pugin, Apology, 1. A. W. N. Pugin, True Principles, 61. Pugin, Apology, 1. Ferrey claims that this Song on Pugin’s Contrasts, written by “Mr. M’Cann,” an Irishman first made the rounds of architectural circles, before being published in “Notes and Queries” and then in the “Builder” (see Ferrey, Recollections, 115–116). Pugin, Present State, 98. One critic argued that Pugin might have insisted that the Gothic edifice was a “living and energizing body,” but in reality he treated architecture as “a curious object of antiquarian investigation.” Quoted from “The Present State of Ecclesiological Science in England” (1847), in George L. Hersey, High Victorian Gothic: A Study in Associationism (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Press, 1972), 75. Pugin, Apology, 40; Present State, 99. Pugin, Present State, 18. In Ferrey, Recollections, 106; transcribed by Ferrey from an anonymous “Letter to the Times,” see 105–109. Timothy Brittain-Catlin, “Introduction,” Present State, i–iv, iii. In Ferrey, Recollections, 106; transcribed by Ferrey from an anonymous “Letter to the Times,” see 105–109. In January 1839, Pugin composed a pamphlet on this topic entitled A Letter on the Proposed Memorial to Cranmer, Ridley & Latymer, addressed to the Subscribers (London: Booker & Dolman, 1839). This pamphlet is helpfully transcribed by Belcher, with copious notes, as “To ‘The Subscribers to and Promoters of ’ the Martyrs’ Memorial in Oxford,” in Pugin, Collected Letters, vol. 1, 89–105, 99. Pugin, Collected Letters, vol. 1, 99. See also Pugin’s pamphlet An Earnest Address, on the Establishment of the Hierarchy (London: Charles Dolman, 1851) and his Reply to Observations which Appeared in “Fraser’s Magazine,” for March 1837, on a Work Entitled Contrasts (London: printed for the author, 1837). In this last pamphlet, he writes of the injustice of being taught, as all Britons were, to associate Catholicism with “racks, faggots and fires, idolatry, sin-purchase, etc, with all the usual tissue of falsehoods so industriously propagated throughout the land” (4). Pugin, Collected Letters, vol. 1, 101. Pugin, Collected Letters, vol. 1, 101; Contrasts, 21. Pugin, An Earnest Address, 5. Pugin, Collected Letters, vol. 1, 101. Pugin, Contrasts, 28. Pugin, Apology, 50. Pugin, Present State, 43. Pugin, Collected Letters, vol. 1, 72. Pugin, Contrasts, 26. See Pugin, True Principles, 61. Patrick R. M. Conner, “Pugin and Ruskin,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 41 (1978): 344–350, 349. Pugin, Contrasts, 3. Pugin, True Principles, 54. Jeremy Bentham, “Panopticon; or The Inspection-House” (1787) The Panopticon Writings, ed. Miran Bozovic (London: Verso, 1995), 29–95.

pugin’s architecture, society, and medievalism / 37 74. Bentham, Panopticon, 39; See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1995), 205. 75. Bentham, Panopticon, 33. 76. Bentham, Panopticon, 39. 77. Bentham, Panopticon, quoted from the title page. 78. Conner, “Pugin and Ruskin,” 349. 79. Conner, “Pugin and Ruskin,” 349. Also see Phoebe Stanton, Pugin (London: Thames and Hudson, 1971). 80. Phoebe Stanton, Pugin, 92. 81. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 59.


Chapter Two “Knight, Bard, Gallant”: The Troubadour as a Critique of Romanticism in Browning’s SORDELLO Britta Martens

The medieval period occupies an essential yet paradoxical place in Robert Browning’s poetic imagination. On the one hand, he felt ever drawn to the Renaissance as an age of crucial progress in science, learning, and the arts, finding in its artists in particular a convenient mouthpiece for articulating his poetics. On the other, he chose to make the pivotal work of his career, Sordello (1840), the story not of a Renaissance artist but rather that of a medieval Italian troubadour. The narrative of Sordello’s life parallels Browning’s own artistic development from the derivative Romanticism of his early works to the impersonal poetics of his maturity. This transition is also enacted in the poem’s form, as its narrator (who is ostensibly Browning himself ) progresses from self-conscious Romantic digressions to a more dramatic presentation of the story. Sordello constitutes not just the most self-reflexive and self-revealing of Browning’s poems; its central concern of developing a post-Romantic poetics is so representative of the challenge confronting all Victorian poets that it can justifiably be called the “key poem of the Victorian age.”1 Given the poem’s engagement with Romantic poetics and Browning’s frequent association of his poetry with Renaissance art, why did he set Sordello in a thirteenth century with which he would appear, from his other writings, to have had little affinity? The medieval period had been rediscovered, and to a certain extent reinvented, by the Romantics who had used it to promote their own values and had consequently shaped the nineteenthcentury concept of the period. Setting the poem in the Middle Ages thus

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allowed Browning to acknowledge his Romantic roots, while at the same time elaborating a critique of Romanticism. This critique is developed in two related ways: first, in his adaptation of the Romantic version of a medieval genre, the narrative verse romance, which displays an attitude toward the Middle Ages that distinguishes Browning from the nostalgic medievalism of more popular (post-)Romantic texts; and second, in his representation of Sordello, who turns out to be partly a medieval troubadour, partly a Romantic poet, and partly a precursor of the Renaissance. Before turning to Sordello, it is necessary to clarify how Browning conceptualized the difference between the Renaissance and the Middle Ages. His aesthetics were based in part on a religiously motivated principle of eternal striving, and his “Old Pictures in Florence” (1855) echoes Ruskin’s promotion of the imperfection and aspirational aesthetics of medieval Gothic architecture. Nevertheless, like the Pre-Raphaelites, Browning discovered these features primarily in the Italian painters at the threshold between medieval and Renaissance art. It is not surprising that he felt an affinity with the early Renaissance, which developed the concepts of perspective and the individual that are central to his preferred genre, the dramatic monologue, while he associated medieval art with aesthetic stasis. Thus, the unknown Florentine painter who speaks in “Pictor Ignotus” (1855) represents a dead end in art, because he continues, as late as in the sixteenth century, the medieval tradition of religious frescoes: My heart sinks, as monotonous I paint These endless cloisters and eternal aisles With the same series, Virgin, Babe and Saint, With the same cold calm beautiful regard,— (58–61)2

In contrast, the eponymous speaker of “Fra Lippo Lippi” (1855), an early fifteenth-century monk and painter, rebels against medieval stylized painting. Disobeying his Prior’s injunction that he “Paint the soul, never mind the legs and arms!” (193), Lippo represents human bodies “Just as they are, careless what comes of it” (294). His realistic style, capturing the individuality of the characters he portrays, bears an obvious resemblance to Browning’s own innovatively realistic depiction of men and women in his mature poetry. Browning also identifies implicitly with a Renaissance author: Shakespeare.3 In his main prose statement on poetics, known as the “Essay on Shelley” (1852), Shakespeare is the prime representative of the impersonal “objective poet” who, in contrast to the self-expressive “subjective poet” in the Romantic mold, does not reveal his personality in his work. This would be the posture adopted by Browning in the dramatic monologue, where the

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poet effaces himself behind the voice of his speaker. It is only after having dramatized in Sordello his renunciation of Romantic self-expression that Browning would consistently use the dramatic monologue and avoid any further self-display in his poetry.4 Importantly for our discussion here, Sordello subverts not only the selfexpressive Romantic mode but also the medieval romance as adapted in the Romantic period. The poem’s opening line, “Who will, may hear Sordello’s story told,” recalls similar openings of medieval romances.5 This in combination with the poem’s six-book structure builds up the expectation that the poem will follow the convention of the Romantic descendants of this genre, the historical verse romances in six cantos that Walter Scott had made popular in the first two decades of the nineteenth century before he transferred his medieval subjects to the even more popular form of the novel. Sordello has indeed all the stock ingredients of a historical romance à la Scott: war, the love of the page Sordello for the beautiful aristocratic Palma, which she requites, a wicked stepmother figure who keeps the secret of Sordello’s birth, and Sordello’s discovery that he is the son not of an archer but of the ruler of Ferrara, Taurello Salinguerra. Browning’s oblique references to Sordello as a “more popular” work than his previous output in the preface to Paracelsus (1835) and in a letter of the same year suggest that, in the early stages of its six-year long gestation, Sordello had perhaps really been intended as a conventional historical romance.6 In 1837, a Mrs. Busk published her chivalric romance Sordello.7 Browning’s reaction to this highly conventional work is not recorded, though it seems certain that he knew of it and probable that he would have read it.8 In any case, the difference between the two Sordellos illustrates Browning’s much more innovative approach to the subject. Unlike Mrs. Busk’s poem, Browning’s has no happy ending. With its convoluted narrative structure and syntax, presented in pentameter rather than the conventional tetrameter, the poem is the very opposite of the straightforward, action-packed narrative of external events that the public loved and got from Mrs. Busk. A look at Browning’s first 100 lines shows how he teases his readers’ expectations. The narrator’s first digression, an extended simile in which he compares himself to Don Quixote, Cervantes’ parody of a naive lover of medieval romances, takes up lines 4–9. This is followed by the anticipatory exclamation “Appears / Verona . . .” (I, 10–11), but it is only after two further digressions and repetitions of this phrase (I, 59–60 and 76–77) that the narrator finally turns his attention to the story’s first scene. The two poets’ respective use of facts on the historical Sordello is also revealing. As the two main collators of available sources on Sordello’s life stress, these accounts are, like all biographies of troubadours, highly unreliable and inconsistent with each other.9 Indeed, many of them read more

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like the fictional romances that the troubadours themselves composed. Only a few facts about Sordello seem certain. Born in Goito, in the territory of Mantua, at the end of the twelfth century, Sordello was a troubadour and warrior. He abducted Cunizza, the wife of Count Saint Boniface, who probably seduced him, and he lived for a time in Provence. Major points of disagreement are whether he was of low or noble birth and whether he died a violent death. Mrs. Busk bases her poem on a combination of rather fantastical sources to arrive at the following plot:10 Sordello fights a duel, falls in love with the unmarried Cunizza, serenades her, is found out by her brothers and sent to war, while Cunizza is married off to Boniface. Tensions develop between the evil Boniface and Cunizza’s brothers, who order Sordello to abduct Cunizza and henceforth tolerate his serenading (and more) of their sister. Browning makes creative use of his sources to arrive at a far more complex story and character. After a description of the young Sordello’s intellectual development in Goito and his triumph at an undocumented Court of Love (a troubadour singing contest) comes the declaration of love. This is initiated by the woman as in most sources, but purged of adulterous passion as in Mrs. Busk’s work, since Browning’s Palma (substituted for Cunizza) is only engaged to Boniface.11 The second half of the poem, starting with Sordello’s decision to abandon poetry, is freely invented. The plot now becomes more clearly determined by Sordello’s function as Browning’s alter ego. In a long digression at the center of the poem, the narrator undergoes a conversion experience: he encounters a female beggar whom he invests with the allegorical role of “suffering humanity.”12 He now realizes that he must abandon the self-centered worldview, which was apparent in his earlier digressions, and devote himself to humanity. The aesthetic consequence of this decision in Browning’s work after Sordello is that the subject of his poetry will no longer be the poet himself, as in the self-expressive Romantic tradition, but other people, as in the dramatic monologue. Sordello’s development mirrors Browning’s conversion from Romantic egotism to an ideal of philanthropic humanitarianism. He also decides to serve humanity and discovers his model in the principles of the Roman republic. This support of republicanism, which reflects Browning’s Radical politics at the time, challenges the political conservatism that underlies Scott’s and Mrs. Busk’s romances, which are not critical of feudal society.13 Sordello’s republicanism is suggested only by his few surviving satires on the vices of princes and by an allusion in Dante’s Purgatorio, where Dante praises Sordello’s love of his native land.14 Caught in the historical struggle for control over Lombardy between the Ghibellins (the local supporters of the German Emperor) and the Guelfs (the supporters of the Pope), Sordello resolves to side with the Guelfs, whom he believes to represent the common


People’s interest. At this point, Browning exploits the conflicting opinions on Sordello’s birth for a major plot device: the revelation that he is not a lowly page but the son of a Ghibellin chief, Taurello, whom no source mentions in relation to Sordello. Sordello tries in vain to convert Taurello to the Guelf cause. When Taurello in turn offers him the leadership of the Ghibellin faction, Sordello dies under the strain of having to choose between the temptation of antirepublican power and his humanitarian commitment. This sequence of events indicates the importance in the poem’s second half of Browning’s political message and the undermining of the conservative politics of the Romantic romance. The implicit criticism of a populist strand in Romanticism that fostered an uncritical nostalgia for the Middle Ages is not surprising coming from a young poet who had so far tried to emulate a more elitist, introspective Romanticism. It is more remarkable that Browning also uses his medieval sources to mount a critique of the self-expressive Romantic tradition, which had been the point of departure of his early poetry. This critique is articulated mainly through the presentation of Sordello as a poet in the first two books. Because Sordello is the vehicle for Browning’s search for ways to overcome Romantic egotism, he primarily constructs his hero as a Romantic but draws on characteristics of the troubadour either to emphasize Sordello’s Romanticism or to suggest solutions to his egotism.15 At the same time, the troubadour’s confrontation with his public allows Browning to reiterate his assessment of popular narrative poetry. It is particularly in his early life in the isolated castle of Goito that Sordello appears as a Romantic poet rather than a medieval character. An orphan left much to himself, the child spends his time in the countryside around the castle. The shaping of the boy’s character through his intercourse with nature owes much to Wordsworth’s poetry, although Sordello’s development, which is divided into three stages, seems to be modeled on the preface to Alastor (1816) in which Shelley describes his poem as an allegory of the punishment of an egotistical poet.16 At first, Sordello naively believes that the external natural world is only an extension of his own identity and is ridiculed for this by the narrator, who comments: “As if the poppy felt with him!” (I, 705). After this stage of extreme solipsism, during which the hero is not even aware that anything outside his own self exists, he realizes that his human consciousness is separate and different from nature and turns to imagining human stock characters. Out of these characters he eventually constructs two ideal figures analogous to the protagonist of Alastor who searches for one ideal image. In the preface to Alastor, Shelley states that the poet’s passion for the ideal image that he cannot find and that eventually kills him is the furies’ revenge for the “poet’s self-centred seclusion” and lack of “human

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sympathy.”17 By contrast, in Sordello, this ideal becomes a positive element, as Browning now transforms his Romantic hero into a troubadour who follows the tradition of courtly love. Love, whose object is by definition outside the self, is the potential means of escape from the sterile self-love of egotism. The ideal in Alastor is also a female figure, but one that is too idealized to exist in reality, whereas Sordello has no problem in investing a mere mortal with the characteristics of the idealized, unattainable lady. She is Palma, who also lives at Goito, but with whom the page Sordello has no contact. Browning provides his hero with an ideal lady by substituting the innocent Palma, who is about to be forced into apolitical marriage, for the adulteress Cunizza, whose sexual promiscuity does not fulfill the standards of courtly love. The courtly trope of chaste love from afar for an idealized woman was clearly an aspect of medievalism that fascinated Browning, who would later fall in love with Elizabeth Barrett before having met her. His short poem “Rudel to the Lady of Tripoli” (1842) portrays an extreme case of this love. It is based on the legendary story of the troubadour Jaufre Rudel who falls in love with the Countess of Tripoli because he has heard praise of her beauty and her hospitality for crusaders. He travels to the Holy Land but is struck with illness. When he finally meets his lady, he can only declare his love before dying in her arms. In Sordello, the protagonist has none of Rudel’s absolute devotion to his lady. After Palma has confessed her love for him, his interest shifts to the suffering of the common People. From then on, he pursues his new ideal of serving the People. The narrator’s comment “Never ask / Of Palma more!” (V, 973–974) indicates how secondary the love interest has become. However, Sordello’s altruistic devotion to the cause of the People, his love for the many rather than just one person, is a further step away from the egotism that has defined his youth and thus a step toward overcoming the Romantic heritage. Egotism is indeed Sordello’s ruling passion before his conversion to humanitarianism, and it shines through in the ideal self-image that he creates for himself: that of Apollo. His proud identification with the Greek god of poetry implies a criticism of Romantic poets who believed that their creativity equaled God’s—a stance that Browning repeatedly denounced as dangerous hubris.18 But in the Romantic text that probably inspired Browning’s use of Apollo, Keats’s Hyperion (1820), the god is a more ambiguous figure. He sympathizes with humans, and the fragment breaks off at the moment when he paradoxically becomes divine through a transfiguration that seems like human death. Keats, thus, draws attention to the central Romantic conflict between the poet’s aspiration toward divine creativity and his humanity.19 In Sordello, this conflict is mirrored by Sordello’s internal antagonism between “the Poet” in him, who glories in his imaginative powers, and “the Man,” who is eager for public acknowledgment (II, 655–689).


Sordello is initially unaware of this conflict. In his eyes, Apollo represents an ideal combination of artistic genius and physical prowess. He is the result of Sordello’s imaginative fusion of the characters of the powerful, heroic Emperor Friedrich and the famous troubadour Eglamor, who through his poetic power informs the people of Friedrich’s feats. When Browning wrote Sordello, being both a poet and a man of political action had become quite impossible. In the 1810s and 1820s, the younger Romantics had aspired to this ideal, although with very limited practical effect.20 Shelley had spent some time in Dublin campaigning for Catholic emancipation and the Repeal of the Union, and Byron had actively supported the Greek struggle for independence. But by the 1830s, the poet had, in pursuance of the egotistical strand in Romantic poetry, withdrawn into his ivory tower, as in Tennyson’s exercises in solipsism, “The Palace of Art” and “The Lady of Shalott” (both 1832), in which contact with the real world brings death to the artist figure. By contrast, in the Middle Ages, the poet who was also a man of action was still an actuality. Troubadours were frequently noblemen and warriors. The English king and crusader Richard Cœur-de-Lion, for instance, was a fine poet, and most sources present the historical Sordello as an accomplished knight. The fact that Browning’s Sordello never appears as a man of arms highlights his failure. Moreover, in the second half of the poem, he is juxtaposed with his father Taurello, the exemplary man of action. In a key scene, Sordello turns into a caricature of the idealistic, impractical intellectual. Although he delivers his elaborate harangue with the quite unrealistic aim of convincing Taurello to support the Guelfs, the pragmatic Taurello dispassionately notes his son’s prematurely faded hair (V, 348–351), an indicator of how far removed he is from the physical fitness that is necessary to be a military leader. The narrative ends with Sordello’s inability to act, depicting him, in David Kwinn’s words, as a hesitant “artist-Hamlet figure.”21 The conflict between his desire to indulge his still prevailing egotism by accepting the leadership of the Ghibellins and his new desire to support the People is so violent that he dies without any apparent medical reason. The hero’s anticlimactic death here disappoints readers raised on Scott’s romances, which always end with the hero’s marriage to his lady. By killing off his hero, Browning signals that even a combination of altruism and egotism is not the way forward if egotism still dominates and prevents humanitarian action. Only the complete erasure of the poet’s interest in himself, as in the dramatic monologue, offers an aesthetic solution to this moral problem. At the end of the poem, the narrator puts ironic emphasis on the discrepancy between the failed aspiration of his character to become a god and the god-like,

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exemplary, all-round hero into whom Sordello is turned by one of his sources, a local myth that makes him a member of the influential Visconti family and, more importantly, a valiant knight who saves his city:22 The Chroniclers of Mantua tired their pen Relating how a Prince Visconti [i.e. Sordello] saved Mantua and elsewhere notably behaved— Who thus by fortune’s ordering events Passed with posterity to all intents For just the God he never could become: As Knight, Bard, Gallant, men were never dumb In praise of him: while what he should have been, Could be, and was not—the one step too mean For him to take, we suffer at this day Because of; (VI, 818–828)

In the last two lines, Sordello’s failure to become a man of action is blamed for the suffering of the Italian people, who would have to wait until 1861 to attain national unity and freedom from occupying powers. What Sordello has left to the people of Italy is his poetry, represented by the narrator’s vision of a boy on a Tuscan hillside who sings one of Sordello’s songs. Yet, even his poetry has faded: “All that’s left / Of the Goito lay” are “Some unintelligible words to beat / The lark, God’s poet” (VI, 865–866 and 861–862). Sordello’s words have become meaningless—perhaps because he wrote in Provençal and not Italian. Only his lyricism and artistic ambition to rival “God’s poet” have survived. Does this mean that Sordello has failed not only as a man of action but also as a poet? And what kind of poet is he? In the whole of Sordello, we are given only a four-line snatch of the song with which he wins the Court of Love in Mantua that brings him fame and moves Palma to make him her minstrel (II, 152–155). These lines praise the beauty of a woman called Elyz. Browning had found her name in three poems in an anthology of Courts of Love, in one of which Sordello participated and where she represents the ideal courtly lady.23 Browning’s Sordello, therefore, seems to follow the convention of the troubadour love lyric. However, the contestants at Courts of Love did not choose their own subject but either performed songs on the same subject or disputed a question; Sordello’s rehearsal of a love theme can, therefore, not be ascribed to choice. What actually captures his imagination in the song to which he responds— the last scheduled contribution to the contest by Eglamor—is not Elyz but the fact that the song is also about Apollo. When hearing Eglamor’s song, Sordello could supply each foolish gap and chasm The minstrel left in his enthusiasm, Mistaking its true version—was the tale Not of Apollo? (II, 73–76)


Sordello can outdo Eglamor because he believes himself to be Apollo. This means that his song is essentially self-expression, as in the Romantic lyric. In his inspired performance, he also appears more like a Romantic than a medieval poet: And, lo, the people’s frank applause half done, Sordello was beside him [Eglamor], had begun . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . the true lay with the true end, Taking the other’s names and time and place For his. On flew the song, a giddy race, After the flying story; word made leap Out word; rhyme—rhyme; the lay could barely keep Pace with the action visibly rushing past: Both ended. (II, 79–88)

As a result of the contest format, the contributions to Courts of Love were frequently improvised, but Sordello’s furor poeticus here is reminiscent of Romantic poet figures like the one in Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” and a long way from the witty rhetorical exercises of the Courts of Love. It seems that in this contest—contrary to the historical Courts of Love— not the lady Palma but the whole audience acts as judge. When he is awarded the prize, the egotist Sordello assumes this is because the audience admires his divine imaginative powers through which their inferior minds can share his fancies. He concludes: “I needs must be a God to such” (II, 160). So happy is he with this interpretation of his victory that he retreats to Goito to rest on his laurels, nursing his sense of superiority over others. Browning’s portrayal of Sordello’s withdrawal from society as misguided and arrogant echoes similar censures of the Romantics by contemporaries.24 The inappropriateness of the poet’s isolation from society is highlighted by the fact that Sordello has just been invested with the public “office” of minstrel to Palma, which requires his presence at the court in Mantua. Browning sees the poet as a public figure with a responsibility toward society. However, the poet’s relationship with his audience turns out to be problematic, as Sordello realizes when he returns to Mantua flattered by a call for more of his poetry. Once more the fact that his hero is a troubadour allows Browning to bring into sharper relief a problem that he encountered in the nineteenth century: the poet’s dependence on the readers’ taste in an increasingly commercialized literary marketplace. Troubadour poetry is particularly audience oriented. It was transmitted orally and often by the poet himself, so that he saw his audience face-to-face. The quality of his work was frequently measured against competitors in Courts of Love, where the winner was awarded a prize as a material token of his skill and esteem.

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By making the whole audience the judge at his Court of Love, Browning transforms the prize into a proof of popularity. It becomes clear, though, that what the Mantuans like about Sordello’s song is not his portrayal of Apollo but his exciting narrative, “action visibly rushing past” (II, 87). On his return to Mantua, Sordello delights his audience with similarly accessible and popular poetry. His listeners enjoy the personifications of abstract qualities that are his characters, as he chooses “Such a Strength, such a Weakness, added then / A touch or two, and turned them into Men” (II, 525–526). Yet driven by the ambition to create more complex characters, to “present us with ourselves, at least, / Not proportions of ourselves, mere loves and hates / Made flesh” (II, 566–568), he decides to fashion a new poetic language that has the scope to express such complexities. In letting his hero create a literary language “from the new speech round him” (II, 576), that is, Italian, Browning draws again on conjectures about the historical Sordello. By the early thirteenth century, other Romance languages like French and Spanish had already become dominant literary mediums, but in Italy the vernacular was only just beginning to replace Latin as the literary lingua franca. A vernacular literature was only fully established in the fourteenth century, when Dante, and a little later Boccaccio and Petrarch, wrote major works in Italian dialects and thereby marked the beginning of the Italian literary Renaissance. There is no evidence that Sordello wrote in Italian, as all of his surviving poems are in Provençal. However, there are suggestions in Browning’s main source, the Biographie universelle, that he had already experimented with vernacular poetry although Dante states in his treatise on the new literary language, De vulgari eloquentia, that Sordello had to forsake his Mantuan dialect because, even supplemented by borrowings from adjacent dialects, it was too poor.25 As already seen with reference to the suggestions of Sordello’s republican sympathies in Purgatorio, of which so much is made in Sordello, Browning is here again trying to portray Sordello as a thirteenth-century version of Dante. The extent to which he identifies the two poets can be seen in an apostrophe to Dante in book I, in which the narrator expresses his anxiety that he may falter in his attempt to “disentwine / That undercurrent soft and argentine [of Sordello’s poetry] / From its fierce mate” [Dante] (I, 361–363). Dante’s work has eclipsed that of Sordello, who is only remembered as one of Dante’s characters. Both here and in the passage described above, Browning promotes Sordello, whose surviving poems are clearly medieval, to a precursor of the early Renaissance, the period in which he saw an analogy for his own new poetics. Browning’s personal identification with Sordello, and hence indirectly with the great innovator of Italian poetry, Dante, is most obvious in the characterization of the poetry which Sordello composes in his new poetic


idiom. Unlike his earlier work, it is dramatic instead of self-expressive: “. . . he took / An action with its actors, quite forsook / Himself to live in each” (II, 581–583). This foreshadows a stage in Browning’s theory of the historical development of poetry that Sordello, as Browning’s mouthpiece, spells out in Book V (560–631). Here poetry is presented as a progression from the epic to the dramatic and finally to the highest poetic genre, “synthesist” poetry, which is both dramatic and psychological. In later editions of the poem, Browning proclaims himself the exponent of this genre, as the narrator’s voice interrupts Sordello’s definition of the synthesist poet with the exclamation: “. . . why, he writes Sordello!”26 Sordello’s poetry is, thus, made to aspire to the same ideal as that of Browning, who had been writing dramas and experimenting with dramatic monologues since the mid-1830s and who clearly saw Sordello as breaking new ground both for his own poetics and for those of his age. When Sordello’s new poetry meets with the same incomprehension as Browning’s early work, the troubadour attempts a compromise. In order to appeal to the audience’s taste for “mere romance” (II, 785), he composes a poem about Simon de Montfort’s crusade against the Cathari sect, which later editions describe as a ballad, another accessible narrative genre. Since neither the historical Sordello nor Browning would have had sympathy with the repressive politics of the Inquisition, this is clearly an effort to pander to popular taste. However, Sordello is applauded for the wrong reasons: he found that every time He gained applause by any ballad-rhyme, His auditory recognized no jot As he intended (II, 621–624, 1863–1888 editions)

His chivalric hero fascinates his listeners, but to Sordello’s dismay, they show no appreciation for the imaginative powers of the poet, whom they see as “a mere singer, ugly, stunted, weak” (II, 629). Hungry for acclaim, Sordello continues to follow “the dull conventions of his day” (II, 710), but the tension between the demands of the audience and his continuing desire to reveal his self and his complex ideas in his poetry impede his creativity. He flees from the public back to Goito and eventually abandons poetry for his new ideal, a life of action. Sordello’s abortive career as a troubadour thus brings into focus the two leftovers from the Romantic era, which in Browning’s view hamper the development of poetry in a new direction: first, the audience’s aesthetically as well as politically conservative taste for undemanding romance narratives, which makes them unable to appreciate a poem on any level other than that of external action; and second, the poet’s desire to express his ego and impose his ideas on the world. At the same time, the medieval ideal of

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the troubadour as “Knight, Bard, Gallant” also points toward what Browning considers the solution to the impasse into which Romantic poetry has maneuvered itself: the poet needs to combine art with action, and the action he takes has to be as selfless and idealistic as the troubadour’s love for his lady. In political terms, this means republicanism, and in aesthetic terms an innovative, dramatic poetry. Both concepts anticipate the spirit of the historical period following the Middle Ages, the Renaissance. Sordello realizes that he should embrace these two concepts, but he cannot fully make this transition. Browning does not become a political activist either, but having outlined his new definition of the role of the poet in Sordello, he does, in his subsequent poetry, succeed in replacing the poet’s self with other characters. His unconventional medieval poem is thus the catalyst that allows him to make a major contribution to a renaissance of poetry in the Victorian period. Notes 1. See Lionel Stevenson, “The Key Poem of the Victorian Age,” in Essays in American and English Literature Presented to Bruce McElderry, Jr, ed. Max F. Schulz et al. (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1967), 260–289. 2. All line references to Browning’s poetry excluding Sordello and The Ring and the Book are to John Pettigrew and Thomas J. Collins, ed., Robert Browning. The Poems, 2 vols. (London: Penguin, 1996). 3. See “At the ‘Mermaid’ ” and Aristophanes’ Apology (London: Penguin, 1996) (5140–5146). 4. Browning’s first two dramatic monologues, “Porphyria’s Lover” and “Johannes Agricola in Meditation,” were first published in 1836. His first collection of dramatic monologues, Dramatic Lyrics (London: Penguin, 1996) appeared in 1842. 5. For examples of medieval romance openings, see John Woolford and Daniel Karlin, ed., The Poems of Browning, vol. 1 (London: Longman, 1991), 395. All line references to Sordello are to the poem’s first edition as reprinted in Woolford and Karlin’s meticulously annotated edition. 6. Letter of April 16, 1835 in Philip Kelley and Ronald Hudson, ed., The Brownings’ Correspondence, vol. 3 (Winfield, Kansas: Wedgestone Press, 1985), 134. 7. Mrs. William Busk, Plays and Poems, vol. 2 (London: Th. Hookham, 1837). 8. Woolford and Karlin identify an echo of Busk’s Sordello in Browning’s lines II, 269–270 (Poems, 479). 9. Biographie universelle ancienne et moderne, vol. 43 (Paris: Migaud, 1825), 131–135. A translation of the whole entry is cited in Ian Jack and Margaret Smith, ed., The Poetical Works of Robert Browning, vol. 2 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 165–171. Girolamo Tiraboschi, Storia della poesia italiana, vol. 1 (London: T. Becket, 1803), 65. 10. Busk seems to have relied on sources compiled by Tiraboschi (Storia, 52–53). 11. The historical Palma is a half-sister of the historical Cunizza. See Woolford and Karlin, Poems, 380. 12. See the running titles to Book III in the 1863–1868 editions.

critique of romanticism in browning’s SORDELLO / 51 13. As John Grube points out, Mrs. Busk makes her political position clear in a review article in Blackwood’s Magazine of October 1832 (“Sordello, Browning’s Christian Epic,” English Studies in Canada 4 [1978]: 413–429, here 429). Busk attacks the republicanism of the historian J. C. L. Simonde de Sismondi, on whose Histoire des républiques italiennes au moyen-âge Browning relied for his historical background, and compares the emerging city republics in medieval Italy to the triumph of the “mob” in the 1832 Reform Bill. And though most would agree that Scott’s politics were conservative, many would not agree that he was not critical of feudal society. See Kevin L. Morris, The Image of the Middle Ages in Romantic and Victorian Literature (London: Croom Helm, 1984). 14. Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri. Il Purgatorio, trans. John Sinclair (New York: Oxford University Press, 1939), VI, 60–81. Dante meets Sordello among the penitents of the last hour. Dante’s guide Virgil and Sordello embrace when they recognize each other as fellow Mantuans. Sordello’s function as Dante’s guide through the Valley of the Princes seems to be inspired by Sordello’s most famous poem, “Planh sur la mort de Blacatz,” a satire on cowardly princes. For an edition of all poems attributed to Sordello, see James J. Wilhelm, ed., and trans., The Poetry of Sordello (New York: Garland, 1987). 15. For a reading of Sordello as Browning’s exorcism of his Romantic egotism that does not take account of the poem’s medieval setting, see Michael G. Yetman, “Exorcising Shelley Out of Browning: Sordello and the Problem of Poetic Identity,” Victorian Poetry 13 (1975): 79–98. 16. For textual parallels, see Woolford and Karlin, Poems, 437. 17. Percy Bysshe Shelley, Poems and Prose (London: Everyman, 1995), 16. 18. See e.g., Richard D. Altick, ed., The Ring and the Book (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971) (I, 707–772) and Aristophanes’ Apology, 5178–5272. 19. John Woolford, “Browning Rethinks Romanticism,” Essays in Criticism 43 no. 3 (1993): 211–227, here 213–214. For a different reading of the role of Apollo in Sordello, see Alan P. Johnson, “Sordello: Apollo, Bacchus, and The Pattern of Italian History,” Victorian Poetry 7 (1969): 321–338. 20. Shelley had spent some time in Dublin campaigning for Catholic emancipation and the Repeal of the Union, and Byron had actively supported the Greek struggle for independence. 21. “Browning’s “ ‘Sordello’: The Problem of the Poet,” South Atlantic Bulletin 39 no. 2 (1974): 3–9, here 3. 22. Aliprando and Platina as summarized in the Biographie universelle ( Jack and Smith, Poetical Works, 167–68. 23. Fabre d’Olivet, trans., Le trobadour. Poésies occitaniques du XIIIe siècle, vol. 2 (Paris: Heinrichs & Renouard, 1804). 24. See e.g., Matthew Arnold’s reproach that Wordsworth’s “eyes avert their ken / From half of human fate” in his “Stanzas in Memory of the Author of ‘Obermann’ ” (53–54). 25. De vulgari eloquentia (I, XV) quoted in translation by Woolford and Karlin, Poems, 365. 26. This insertion between lines V, 599, and 600 of the original edition first appeared in the poem’s second edition of 1863. In the 1888 edition, which is the textual basis for Collins and Pettigrew’s Poems, this is line V, 620.


Chapter Three Charlotte Yonge’s Victorian Normans in T H E L I T T L E D U K E Sarah R. Wakefield

Reflecting on the paucity of women writers in the Victorian medievalist craze, Florence Boos writes, “It may also be revealing that no Victorian woman novelist of greater stature than Charlotte Yonge was prepared to grant the dignity of idealization to ‘medieval’ fiction.”1 Male nineteenth-century writers certainly glorified the Middle Ages. As early as 1819, Sir Walter Scott popularized (and romanticized) the Middle Ages in Ivanhoe, and Tennyson’s reflections on Malory and Arthurian lore, Idylls of the King, influenced generations of poets. In contrast to these looming literati, Charlotte Mary Yonge indeed is a minor writer, best known today, if at all, for The Heir of Redclyffe (1853). Novels aside, Yonge also wrote over two-dozen historical children’s books for an Anglo-Catholic audience. Although some might argue that these works are a continuation of the didactic, evangelical publications of the Religious Tract Society (founded 1799), they are firmly Victorian in their emphasis on entertaining as well as educating little readers. The new acceptance of lighter subjects can be seen in the popularity of fantasy works such as Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies (1863) and Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865). The most renowned authors of the day, including Charles Dickens and William Thackeray, penned children’s literature, frequently in the popular magazines. Yonge started her own Anglo-Catholic periodical, The Monthly Packet, in 1851, and by 1880, middle-class boys and girls could choose among multiple serials, including Aunt Judy’s Magazine, The Boy’s Own Paper, and The Girl’s Own Paper. In itself, magazine writing for a young audience did not confer great literary stature, and modern studies frequently gloss over Yonge’s career as children’s author.2 Yet, her output for younger audiences was prolific and

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the Middle Ages a favorite topic. In her first historical children’s tale, The Little Duke, published serially in 1854, next as a novel in 1854, and then in eighteen reprints between 1864 and 1901, Charlotte Yonge fictionalizes life in the ninth century.3 The English public adored the work, and many rank it at the top of Yonge’s canon.4 Despite—or, as I will argue, because of—the tale’s basis in medieval chronicles, it has at heart a familiar Victorian plot featuring a plucky orphan, beloved by servants and buffeted by the world. Yonge idealizes the Little Duke as the model English boy for any age: brave, kind to animals, ready to amend his faults, and above all, Christian to the core. Although the author could be charged with historical blindness, Charlotte Yonge should not be underestimated.5 A devoted High Anglican, she understood the Oxford Movement’s interest in medieval forms of worship and recovering “authentic” traces of such religion in the Church of England. Her very Victorian Normans can be read as an attempt to show an unbroken line, in manners and faith, from the tenth century to the nineteenth; England, its people, and its Church could and should be just as they were long ago in the days of Richard, the Little Duke. Critics generally agree that Yonge’s primary aim with The Little Duke was to bring the past to young readers in a pleasing package. She wrote a variety of histories, including a series of Aunt Charlotte’s Stories in the 1870s, her Cameos of English History, and school textbooks in the 1880s. In her own childhood, Yonge read Shakespeare’s plays and Scott’s Waverley novels. From these sources, we might argue, she gleaned her method of historical writing: lively, colorful, but frequently inventive and inattentive to exact details. Sir Walter Scott’s lasting legacy to nineteenth-century imitators is that when records are sparse or unclear, one simply invents.6 Yonge herself came to acknowledge shortcomings in her literary models in the preface to her 1868 The Chaplet of Pearls, a sixteenth-century French historical romance: Scott, however, willfully carved history to suit the purposes of his story; and in these days we have come to feel that a story must earn a certain amount of credibility by being in keeping with established facts, even if striking events have to be sacrificed, and that the order of time must be preserved. In Shakespeare’s days, or even in Scott’s, it might have been possible to bring Henry III and his mignons to due punishment within the limits of a tale beginning with the Massacre of St. Bartholomew; but in 1868 the broad outlines of tragedy must be given up to keep within the bounds of historical verity.7

The writer, therefore, took her work as a history teacher sincerely. In general, children’s books and stories before 1860 tended to be instructive, and Yonge’s work is no exception.8 Primary goals included inculcating proper values like domesticity in girls, courage in boys, and obedience in both

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sexes, largely because authors of nursery literature sought respect. If their subject matter were sober and uplifting, then they themselves might be taken more seriously. Charlotte Yonge knew that her target readers—middle-class girls, poor children in need of tutelage, boys who liked adventure in their literature, and young male teachers—might appreciate “striking events and heroic characters” in their lessons.9 She wanted them not only to read but also to nurture the same love for history that she felt as a child. In the final footnote to The Little Duke, Yonge writes, “Few names in history shine with so consistent a lustre as that of Richard . . . This little sketch has only brought forward the perils of his childhood, but his early manhood was likewise full of adventures, in which he always proved himself brave, honorable, pious, and forbearing. But for these our readers must search for themselves into early French history.”10 She meant her “little” novels to function as tantalizing appetizers to explore the original chronicles. Charlotte Yonge repeats this sentiment in the preface to The Lances of Lynwood (1855), again labeling her own work a sketch and urging the readers to seek out the “bewitching” and “delectable” source of her narrative about Edward III of England.11 For The Little Duke, Charlotte Yonge turns her attention to the rather neglected Norman heritage of Great Britain. Interest in the Middle Ages grew along with Romanticism, given the movement’s interest in the past, the supernatural, the aesthetic, and the adventures of knights and ladies seen in the poetry of Coleridge, Byron, and Shelley. More didactic investigations into medievalism resulted in new histories for children, like Charles Dickens’s A Child’s History of England (1852–1854) and Edward Augustus Freeman’s Old English History for Children (1869). Both give prominent place to the Anglo-Saxons and largely ignore the Normans before 1066, a bias familiar to the Victorian medievalists who fiercely debated the Conquest and its impact on England. Although some scholars contended the blending of Norman and Saxon cultures created one powerful Britain, many argued for the “Norman yoke” theory, which holds that William invaded and corrupted a happy, civilized, Anglo-Saxon paradise.12 This prejudice even goes back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when writers like David Hume and Thomas Jefferson praised the Saxons’s democratic government and lamented its fall after the Battle of Hastings.13 Political liberality was not the only cause for preference, however, for as R. Allen Brown notes, England’s Saxon forebears were considered staunch Protestants.14 The Normans, with their close ties to the French, were suspiciously Catholic. Charlotte Yonge, who was unlike most of these writers a lifelong English Catholic, found their faith appealing. In accordance with anti-Norman and anti-Rome sentiments, antiquarians and authors other than Yonge held forth every culture but Normandy as the


formative influence on modern Britain.15 In The History of Normandy and England (1851–1864), Sir Francis Palgrave admires the Roman heritage of England, whereas John Mitchell Kemble opines in The Saxons in England (1849), as his title suggests, that English power derives from Saxon ancestry. Although Yonge adored Sir Walter Scott, the Normans come off badly in Ivanhoe, in which they are characterized as thieving, twelfth-century pretenders to Richard I’s English throne, and Edward Bulwer-Lytton followed suit with his description of Norman cultural destroyers in Harold, the Last of the Saxon Kings (1848). While labeled enemies for the events of 1066, the Normans simultaneously became Victorian figures of romance. Thomas Percy’s Northern Antiquities (1770) spurred interest in the Norse sagas, and Wace’s Roman du Rou, translated into English by Edgar Taylor in 1837, became popular.16 Wace took his story from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae (1136), considered the English history for centuries. More significant to a discussion of Charlotte Yonge, Geoffrey gave the postconquest Normans a noble ancestry going back to Troy, thereby explaining and validating the culture’s military glory.17 Chivalry also appealed to the nineteenthcentury audience. Thomas Macaulay, author of one of the most influential Victorian histories, notes early in his four-volume History of England from the Accession of James the Second (1848, 1855): The polite luxury of the Norman presented a striking contrast to the coarse voracity and drunkenness of his Saxon and Danish neighbours. He loved to display his magnificence, not in huge piles of food and hogsheads of strong drink, but in large and stately edifices, rich armour, gallant horses, choice falcons, well ordered tournaments, banquets delicate rather than abundant, and wines remarkable rather for their exquisite flavour than for their intoxicating power. That chivalrous spirit, which has exercised so powerful an influence on the politics, morals, and manners of all the European nations, was found in the highest exaltation among the Norman nobles.18

Charlotte Yonge, who was unafraid of embracing the aristocracy, was drawn, as were several of her contemporaries, to a vision of a refined, imperial power. The author found seemingly easy parallels between these ancient Catholics and the ideal England she envisioned in the present. In The Little Duke, Yonge plays up the chivalry of the Normans, circumventing the hotbed of Conquest debate by choosing as her setting A.D. 943, shortly after the Norse established their first settlements on the River Seine.19 According to most historical accounts, her hero, Richard I, Duke of Normandy, became the subject of intense political machinations when his father died; Franks, Danes, and Normans made and broke alliances, kidnapped one another, and ultimately the preteen Richard claimed his lands. Working from this spare framework, Charlotte Yonge elaborates and invents


detailed exploits for Richard. Significantly, instead of characterizing the Normans as French pirates, she, like Macaulay, highlights their nobility, and she lingers deliberately on their devoutness. Medieval chroniclers promulgated the little duke’s faith. Richard I the Fearless was the grandson of Rollo, the first Viking leader to convert openly to Christianity, and the son of William, who mixed the Norse and Frankish cultures and went so far as to keep a Danish mistress, Sprota (mother to Richard), and a Christian, French wife. He even considered leaving behind his domains for life at a monastery. Richard continued these efforts to blend in with neighboring cultures, adopting the French feudal system for his lands. Both father and son gave money to religious causes; William restored the monastery at Jumièges, and Richard financed the rebuilding of several churches destroyed by his own Northmen ancestors, notably Mont-Saint-Michel, St. Wandrille, and St. Ouen.20 By emphasizing the godliness of her subjects, Yonge mirrors the fawning praise of medieval accounts like the Chronicle of Henry Huntingdon and Dudo’s Gesta Normannorum, revised as Gesta Normannorum Ducum by William of Jumièges, Orderic Vitalis, and finally Robert of Torigni.21 Leaving aside for the moment the matter of the Gesta’s credibility, if we compare chronicle accounts of Duke Richard’s childhood adventures with The Little Duke, we discover that Yonge adapts the story, adding and redacting details, assigning actions to different characters, and introducing new persons altogether. Overall in her medieval setting, we see patterns familiar from popular 1840s and 1850s texts.22 Yonge’s The Little Duke features many stock characters of the Victorian novel: a tender-hearted, Christian, orphan child who suffers a period of illness; an older, female servant who regales the protagonist with folktales; a cruel mother figure; the preferred, rude son, who boasts of his high social rank, bullies other children, and tortures animals; and a waif-like, exceptionally good child who befriends the hero/ine. Richard the Fearless in the medieval Gesta is a paragon. He always obeys his elders, remembers all pieces of wisdom he hears, and never does anything foolish or childish. Yonge changes all of this, giving the young Duke plenty of faults and a loving father to correct them. In his brief appearance, William, like a model Victorian literary parent, expresses affection for his son, taking time to cuddle and inquire after Richard’s scholarly progress: The Duke had time to attend to his little boy, and Richard sat upon his knee and talked, told about all his pleasures, how his arrow had hit the deer to-day, how Sir Eric let him ride out to the chase on his little pony, how Osmond would take him to bathe in the cool bright river, and how he had watched the raven’s nest in the top of the old tower. Duke William listened, and smiled, and seemed as well pleased to hear as the boy was to tell.23


In addition to showcasing the affectionate bond between the two, the passage also allows Yonge the opportunity to describe, albeit briefly, the exciting pastimes of a medieval boy hero. The Gesta Normannorum Ducum mentions William’s delight at the birth of his son and his care in baptizing Richard properly, but never such a scene of small, domestic matters. Later Yonge inserts a lesson on the importance of reading. Rather than being self-disciplined as lauded by the chronicle, Richard in Yonge’s version is a reluctant pupil, complaining, “I don’t like those crabbed letters on the old yellow parchment.”24 William, professing embarrassment over his own illiteracy, stresses that nobles must learn to read if only to enjoy scriptures. Although medieval history assures us that the Duke ordered his son schooled in the Norse tongue, no mention is made of reading and writing. On the contrary, literacy was a growing concern in England in the midnineteenth century. Estimates place male illiteracy around thirty-five percent and female illiteracy at forty-five percent in 1850, and children like the Little Duke often surpassed their parents’ levels of knowledge.25 Yonge, who taught in parish schools most of her life, assures her readers that although heroes like Richard may not enjoy study, it is necessary. As Richard’s dislike of his lessons demonstrates, he is not perfect by any means. Yonge enjoyed this brand of protagonist, and in many ways the Little Duke is a miniature Guy de Moreville from The Heir of Redclyffe, full of lofty ideas and strong emotions that he must learn to master in accordance with the will of God. Yonge defines this will through the Oxford Movement, which envisioned a return to the early medieval church of St. Augustine, a restoration of liturgical ritual, and a degree of mysticism. She wrote to spread the Movement’s Tractarian message. Moreover, The Little Duke was created firmly in the midst of Charlotte Yonge’s most fervent religious writing and shortly after the January 1851 founding of The Monthly Packet.26 In the first preface to her serial, she writes that it is for young ladies, “to make them more steadfast and dutiful daughters of our own beloved Catholic Church of England.”27 In Duke Richard the Fearless, Yonge found all the raw material needed to achieve her goals of historical instruction, adventure, and religious uplifting.28 Her Oxford Movement mentor, John Keble, admonished her to avoid doctrine in her writing and to keep moralizing to a subtle minimum, but this early tale, though not as heavily didactic as the work of fellow AngloCatholics Elizabeth Missing Sewell and Felicia Skene, definitely is steeped in Tractarian thought.29 The word “Christian” appears frequently, and details in the story signal the Anglo-Catholicism of the hero. Richard’s foster mother, Fru Astrida, reminds him “to say his prayers constantly, never leaving out one, as the beads of his rosary reminded him of their order.”30 When Richard arrives at the Church of Our Lady to sprinkle holy water on


his father’s body, the beauty of the Mass strikes him: he saw not only the two tall thick candles that always burnt on each side of the Altar, but in the Chancel stood a double row ranged in a square, shedding a pure, quiet brilliancy throughout the building, and chiefly on the silver and gold ornaments of the Altar. Outside these lights knelt a row of priests in dark garments, their heads bowed over their clasped hands, and their chanted psalms sounding sweet, and full of soothing music. (38–39)

In the next chapter, Yonge describes the richness of the Holy Communion performed at the boy’s ducal coronation, down to the “the full, loud, clear chant of Te Deum Laudamus” (46). Everything in the scene—the candles, the clergy vestments, and the music—reflects alterations that High Church Anglicans introduced into religious service.31 The emphasis on setting also fits with the philosophy of the Oxford Movement, for as Michael Bright observes, “the transmission of theology depends now not as much on the sermon . . . not as much on the word as on the symbolism of the church building, the priest’s vestments, the liturgy, and the Sacraments, especially the Eucharist.”32 The eager author might well be projecting her own preferred worship back onto the Normans, but, as stated previously, Charlotte Yonge was taught that the Oxford Movement represented a return to the medieval church. If she believed her lessons, she could conclude, in a myopic way, that Richard’s experience must have been the same as her own. At the same time, the author infuses her own religious mission into parts of the history where devoutness is not mentioned. In Yonge’s greatest amendment to the history, Richard and William have a debate about revenge. The child says he hates the English, for they killed the valiant Norse warrior Ragnar, and if he had been that king’s son, he would have waged a bloody war. William admonishes, “Listen to me, my son, Christian as is this nation of ours, this duty of forgiveness is too often neglected, but let it not be so with you. Bear in mind, whenever you see the Cross marked on our banner, or carved in stone on the Churches, that it speaks of forgiveness to us; but of that pardon we shall never taste if we forgive not our enemies. Do you mark me, boy?”33 Richard, albeit reluctantly, swears to his father that he will let love rather than hatred steer him, a moral arguably in line with most Christian doctrine. It is Tractarian in its insistence on the submission of personal will and opinion to God. In typical little-boy fashion, the Little Duke then forgets all about his promise when he hears a vivid description of how his own father was killed. Recalling his foster mother’s tales of war and wanting to be like a hero from the Sagas, Richard declares William’s murderers will suffer, a sentiment that meets with loud approval from the Norman nobles. Pleased by their pleasure, he continues speaking for vengeance. Richard, like many children, wants to


live the adventures in his favorite (here, pagan) stories. The following day, Richard and the barons are chastised at length by the Abbot of Jumièges and exhorted to recall Christ’s forgiveness of his murderers. Richard’s vow, his subsequent forgetfulness about the solemn promise, and the resulting sermon serve important religious purposes for Charlotte Yonge. The author’s Tractarian philosophy demands absolute submission of children to a parent’s wishes, as well as to God’s rules. High Church Anglicans also invested priests with renewed respect, placing them above any secular government, so it is only fitting that the cleric here explains to everyone the sinful danger of their military fervor. Some flaws are unacceptable to Yonge, so she erases an instance of deceit mentioned in the medieval chronicles. While a captive of French King Louis, Richard’s tutor Osmond tells him “to pretend to be so ill that everyone would despair of his life,” and the child readily obeys.34 Yonge omits the pretense, substituting the more romantic idea of a mysterious illness: “Just at this time he became very unwell; it might have been only the effect of the life of unwonted confinement which he had lately led that was beginning to tell on his health; but, after being heavy and uncomfortable for a day or two, without knowing what was the matter with him, he was one night attacked with high fever.”35 There are even dark hints of poisoning, but all dishonesty is on the part of the French court. Alone and vulnerable, Richard appeals to readers in large part due to his orphan status. Osmond, other Norman nobles, and even King Louis call the Duke a poor, fatherless thing deserving compassion.36 Orphans richly populated mid-Victorian fiction by authors like Dickens, the Brontës, Thackeray, Gaskell, and Collins. Some of the most popular Victorian orphan literature included a sailor protagonist who is brought, like Richard, to an unknown country. On the voyage and in the new territory, “the heroism of the orphan is to be found in his endurance and retention of an inherent innocence despite the deprivation and ill-treatment suffered.”37 Although the orphan child could represent a threat to English stability—consider literary ne’er-do-wells like Becky Sharp or Heathcliff—he or she also could uphold national values. In the case of these seafaring adventures, the boy hero acts as an imperial agent, bringing domestic order to “savage” peoples. In Duke Richard, Yonge thus anticipates the Empire’s boy heroes like Amyas in Westward Ho!, a sixteenth-century protagonist “who is tongue-tied and thoughtless, but strong, brave, and simple in his faith in God, England and himself, and in his right to rule not only his social inferiors at home, but all the world abroad.”38 Given the historical setting of The Little Duke, imperialism may not spring to mind readily, but Richard encounters populations in need of civilization. When he visits Louis’s French court, the queen and Prince Lothaire scoff at Richard and his Northman sensibilities,


but Yonge’s telling of events bears out that the French, not her hero, are unrefined. She transforms three minor characters from the chronicles, Queen Gerberge, and her two sons, Lothaire and Carloman, into pivotal players in Richard’s religious development. For their inspiration, she seems to have drawn directly from popular fiction of the time, making Gerberge and Lothaire villains remarkably like the Reeds in Jane Eyre. The younger French prince, Carloman, is a wistful invalid, and in his saintly deathbed scene, he rivals Helen Burns or Paul Dombey for pathos. The French Queen, of course ugly and sour-tempered, dislikes Richard from the start. Like Charlotte Brontë’s Mrs. Reed (or even Emily Brontë’s Mrs. Earnshaw), the French royal must accept a child brought home by her husband, and although she promises to raise the orphan as her own, she bitterly resents the visitor. Yonge paints the Queen as distasteful, a woman whom Osmond suspects as the cause of Richard’s sudden illness and an inadequate mother who overindulges her eldest son, Lothaire. Her attitude toward Richard is described as follows: “Gerberge, who had from the first dreaded his superior strength and his roughness with her puny boys, and who had been by no means won by his manners at their first meeting, was especially distant and severe with him, hardly ever speaking to him except with some rebuke, which, it must be confessed, Richard often deserved.”39 For example, the Little Duke rides out to bathe in a nearby river, and the infuriated Queen fetches him back. She declares he was forbidden to leave the castle grounds and threatens to put out the eyes of Richard’s squire, Osmond. Interestingly, a similar incident appears in the medieval Gesta with two major differences: an angry Louis, not his wife, suggests punishment for the Duke himself. “The king abused him with bitter insults; he called him the son of a whore who had seduced another woman’s husband, and threatened that unless he would give up his pretensions, he would brand the back of his knees and deprive him of all his honour,” reads the chronicle.40 Why might Yonge augment Gerberge’s role to such a negative extent? In the above passage, the author could have kept Louis the villain while expurgating the details of Richard’s bastardy, but instead she inserts a tirade from the Queen. Even some later readers felt the story was too harsh on Gerberge. In her own history The Story of the Normans (1886), Sarah Orne Jewett comments that The Little Duke “makes Queen Gerberga appear very hard and cruel . . . We must remember, though, that these times were very hard, and one cannot help respecting the poor queen, who was very brave after all.”41 Brave or not, she wins no sympathy in Yonge’s retelling. Readers see only Gerberge’s cold heart. The queen’s lack is all the more apparent because she has a foil in Fru Astrida, Richard’s Scandinavian nanny (Yonge’s own invention). This lady adores the boy, works her distaff, superintends the household, exhorts


everyone to pray, and bustles around surprisingly like a model, middle-class, Victorian lady. According to careful readings of Old Norse sagas, pre-Christian mothers in this culture did not develop tender ties with their offspring, partly due to the large number of illegitimate births. If the purported father claimed the child was not his, the baby was left to die; if the father accepted paternity, more often than not the infant, especially if male, was raised by another family. Foster mothers, rather than biological ones, tended to have the stronger bond with children.42 Thus, Astrida’s affection for her charge, makes historical sense and also fits with nineteenth-century literary trends in England. Charles Dickens and Emily Brontë, for instance, granted their orphans surrogate mothers like Betsy Trotwood for David Copperfield or Nelly Dean for Cathy Earnshaw. Thrust into a fostering role, however, Gerberge does not warm to Richard. That this villain is a woman and a mother makes her even more terrible to the Victorian reader, who would expect the queen, like Fru Astrida, to run a happy household and direct the religious education of all inhabitants. Motherhood in Yonge’s day was a scientific affair; advice manuals assured British ladies that any sickness or behavioral issue in their children would be their sole fault.43 In keeping with this belief, the Queen has caused both of her sons to be incapable of surviving in their medieval world. Furthermore, her failure to accomplish popular Victorian feminine duties indicates the pervasive moral corruption of the Frankish court, or, as Yonge calls it repeatedly, “the feeble and degenerate race of Charlemagne.”44 The heir to the throne of Laon certainly embodies degeneracy. Descriptions of Lothaire mirror those of naughty Victorian lads: spoiled, rude, demanding, and cruel to others. Again the characters of the Brontës come to mind, like John Reed of Jane Eyre and Tom Bloomfield from Agnes Grey. Indeed, like the latter, Lothaire reveals a shockingly unchristian nature in his treatment of animals: When his horse kicked, and ended by throwing him, he stood by, and caused it to be beaten till the poor creature’s back streamed with blood; when his dog bit his hand in trying to seize the meat with which he was teazing it, he insisted on having it killed, and it was worse still when a falcon pecked one of his fingers. It really hurt him a good deal, and, in a furious rage, he caused two nails to be heated red hot in the fire, intending to have them thrust into the poor bird’s eyes. (127)

The tender Little Duke physically intervenes, saving the hawk but getting burned on the cheek with a hot iron. Lothaire promptly tattles to his mother, who seizes the opportunity to rail against Richard. Again Gerberge is the clear monster, for when Louis hears the full story, he chastises not the Duke but Lothaire for wanting to destroy a valuable bird.


Given the nasty dispositions of his new foster family, Richard has opportunity to practice knightly behavior and most importantly, Christian mercy. Lothaire not only tests Richard’s self-control, but he also models what a boy of rank might become if he is too coddled (“imperious” is the author’s favorite word to describe unappealing temperament). Having observed the effects of dictates and tantrums, the hero resolves to behave more kindly to his subjects if he ever returns home. No longer a resentful, impulsive child, “Richard, who, six months ago could not brook a slight disappointment or opposition, had, in his present life of restraint, danger, and vexation, learnt to curb the first outbreak of temper, and to bear patiently instead of breaking out into passion and threats” (147). To highlight his new virtues, the hero squares off against Lothaire on several occasions. In a mirror of the falcon episode, Richard intervenes in the beating of a Norman visitor; this time instead of a burned face, he receives a lash meant for the pilgrim. Yonge shows her readers that they too must defend the helpless and poor and, perhaps, even suffer if they seek true goodness. The highest degree of suffering falls not to Richard, however, but to the younger Frankish prince, Carloman. Easily frightened and sickly, Carloman becomes a missionary project, for he “could only repeat the Lord’s Prayer in Latin—he had not the least notion of its meaning—in which Richard had been carefully instructed by Father Lucas” (205–206). With this small comment, Yonge indicates the true reason Louis’s court is so uncivilized compared with the Norman duchy: neglect by priests to spread Christianity. Richard’s kingdom is devout down to the smallest peasant. When his people fear that Louis means their ruler harm, “three days’ fast was observed throughout the dukedom, and in every church, from the Cathedral of Bayeux to the smallest and rudest village shrine, crowds of worshippers were kneeling, imploring, many of them with tears, that God would look on them in His mercy, restore to them their Prince, and deliver the child out of the hands of his enemies” (154). At Laon, neither church service nor prayer takes place. Although it is too late to save Gerberge from her hatred and even Lothaire is nearly a lost cause, Carloman eagerly drinks in everything Richard tells him about catechism. These lessons occur at Rouen, not in the Frankish domains, another sign of Norman religious superiority. Carloman, the sensitive soul who would not mind becoming a priest, never was strong (due to his mother’s complete neglect, Victorian readers could conclude) and gradually wastes away. His death is taken from an aside in the medieval Gesta; the Normans exchanged Louis for his second son and two bishops as prisoners of war, and the child perished in captivity. Yonge fleshes out the incident, bringing Lothaire along for good measure and giving Carloman a drawn-out demise during which he can reflect on his soul and the beauties of faith. He knows he will die, but, like Helen Burns, he is


calm. Consider the following two passages from The Little Duke and Jane Eyre, which show striking similarities in conversations between the dying children and their closest companions. In the first, Carloman tries to soothe Richard: “No; I have been lying still, musing; Richard, I shall never be better.” “Oh, do not say so! You will, indeed you will, when spring comes.” “I feel as if I should die,” said the little boy; “I think I shall. But do not grieve, Richard. I do not feel much afraid. You said it was happier there than here, and I know it now . . . I do not want to live. This is a fighting, hard world, full of cruel people; and it is peace there. You are strong and brave, and will make them better; but I am weak and fearful—I could only sigh and grieve.” (212)

The sentiments expressed by the French prince, that he cannot cope in society and that he is happy to go to heaven, seem lifted with slight alteration from the final words exchanged between Helen Burns and Jane Eyre: “Are you going somewhere, Helen? Are you going home?” “Yes; to my long home—my last home.” “No, no, Helen!” I stopped, distressed. . . . “I am very happy, Jane; and when you hear that I am dead, you must be sure and not grieve: there is nothing to grieve about. We all must die one day . . . By dying young, I shall escape great sufferings. I had not qualities or talents to make my way very well in the world: I should have been continually at fault.”45

Both Carloman and Helen speak of the glory awaiting them, and the former, in good Anglo-Catholic fashion, credits the local priest, Father Lucas, for teaching him about sin and salvation. In a very short time, the French prince has turned into a saintly boy. Through him, Yonge demonstrates how easy it is to embrace religion and how important faith is, since death may come for the young. The pathos of a charged deathbed scene had moved readers at least since Richardson and Clarissa, and it becomes all the more touching when involving an innocent Christian boy or girl. Today readers may be mystified by the nineteenth-century fascination with the dying child character, a phenomenon due perhaps to declines in infant mortality or increased general interest in childhood.46 Even by the 1880s the vogue changed, with English audiences strongly favoring more rational, masculine heroes over feminized, sentimental ones.47 Thus Carloman, rather than a medieval type, is a product of a Victorian cultural moment and the author’s determination to produce pious literature. Given Charlotte Yonge’s interest in the Oxford Movement, The Little Duke fittingly ends not with battle glory, but with a series of apologies. Anglo-Catholics believed that such displays of faith were more important


than quiet reflection, and for this book, forgiveness becomes the blatant moral. In the medieval Gesta, the story plays out when Louis’s ally, Hugh the Great, turns on him and pledges forces to Richard to help hold Rouen. After Norman forces seize the Frankish king, he gives up his pursuit of the Duke’s lands. Yonge transforms Richard’s time as prisoner from a political maneuver to an individual process of spiritual maturation. The end point is not Norman victory over the Franks, but rather the Little Duke’s mastery over himself. Having learned humility by watching Lothaire’s abuse of the French court, Richard first begs forgiveness of his foster family, saying, “I was often no good Lord to you; I was passionate, and proud, and overbearing; but God has punished me for it, when I was far away among my enemies, and sick and lonely. I am very sorry for it, and I hope you will pardon me.”48 Tractarians firmly believed that evil followed evil, which explains why the Duke must suffer for his slights against friends. Once Richard atones, it is time for everyone else to ask his pardon. When Richard persuades the Danish king to free the grief-stricken Lothaire, Louis admits that he has behaved badly and can learn from the magnanimity of Little Duke himself. Starting with Oliver Twist in 1837, the idea of children as spiritual agents became very popular with the Victorians—consider Tiny Tim or Little Lord Fauntleroy as other examples.49 Even Lothaire reinforces our sense of Richard’s good influence by declaring, “If I lived with you, I might be good like you.”50 Of course, the narrator observes that father and son fall back into wickedness before their early deaths. By contrast, Richard, the ideal Anglo-Catholic individual who accepts the responsibility to do good with the life given him by God, keeps to his path and lives long and happy. We also might note that Gerberge, as conclusive proof of her wickedness, never admits wrongdoing in her treatment of the orphan, although she seems to go unpunished. With the rehabilitation of male characters paramount, the final scene pictures the grown Duke, forgiving his father’s murderer, offering to reconcile the broken old man with King Hugh, and welcoming Arnulf to take sanctuary in the chapel. In the words of Catherine Wells-Cole, he shines as “a credible ideal of Christian manliness.”51 But is this Richard I of Normandy credibly medieval, since he and his companions model so many Victorian, Tractarian traits? Just as most histories reflect the historian’s era to some extent, Norman history-making has a tradition of anachronism. The retelling and coloring of fact began in the early eleventh century with Dudo of St. Quentin’s Gesta Normannorum and continued over the next two centuries with the efforts of William of Jumièges, Orderic Vitalis, and Robert of Torigni. At the risk of oversimplifying, all chroniclers had the same goal: to establish the Norman line as refined and as respectable by depicting it as unfailingly Christian.


From the footnotes to The Little Duke, we can surmise that Charlotte Yonge, with her translator’s command of French, might have worked from The Histoire des ducs de Normandie et des rois d’Angleterre, edited by F. Michel in 1840.52 The original late-twelfth-century Histoire (ca.1170), which author Benoît de Sainte-More took over from Wace, is not the most trustworthy for historical purposes, primarily because it is a rhymed romance and uses the clearly biased sources mentioned above. Shortly before he died (usually placed in A.D. 996), Richard I himself requested his cleric Dudo to write a history of his grandfather, Rollo.53 Dudo gathered his material from Richard’s bastard son Rodulf and his widowed second wife, Gunnor, and in his Latin prose and poetry, he purposefully frames William and Richard as holy men by using the gesta form, previously reserved for religious figures such as saints and popes.54 Continuing the transformation of the warlike Northmen into Christian leaders, William of Jumièges reworked and revised Dudo’s Gesta after 1066 and the Norman victory at Hastings (ca.1070). He “removed all sections which in his opinion were pure entertainment and not instructive (in a Christian moralistic sense) at all” (106). From there, at the beginning of twelfth century, the Gesta Normannorum Ducum passed to Orderic Vitalis, who added substantial sections. Finally, in the last half of the twelfth century, Robert of Torigni took his pass at the history, restoring many parts excised by William. Each monk, commissioned by ruling Anglo-Norman nobles to update the history, painstakingly legitimated the Norman conquests as God’s will and the Norman people as God’s elect. The chronicle contains as much myth and invention as history, according to most modern scholars. Cassandra Potts observes, “Tenth-century Frankish writers complained that the Normans reverted to their pagan practices ‘like dogs to their own vomit,’ despite their reported conversion to Christianity.”55 The Franks may well have denounced their Norman rivals as heathens in order to appear the superior culture, admittedly, but Victorian historians remained skeptical about the Gesta’s credibility. Edward Augustus Freeman scoffed at the chronicles and declared them “ridiculous outpourings of his [Dudo’s] lying vanity,”56 and in his Short History of the English People, J. R. Green explains how the Normans abandoned Christianity during the early years of Richard’s rule.57 By contrast, Charlotte Yonge writes of Richard and his people as exemplary and the Franks as deficient in religion. In a neat parallel, just as she believed the Oxford Movement restored the Church to its pre-Reformation purity, Yonge’s writing methods hearken back to the thread of medieval, Norman historiography, complete with cultural agenda. She wanted to recuperate the maligned conquerors of England as model citizens, especially in regards to their never-labeled but certainly Catholic piety.


Where does this leave The Little Duke? With her obvious morals and reinforcement of social structures, Yonge’s work may seem to share more with the evangelical tradition of Mary Sherwood, Sarah Ellis, and Isabella Beeton than with later, subversive works by Jean Ingelow and Christina Rossetti. Actually the latter, a conflicted Anglo-Catholic, admired Yonge and her female characters. Writers who continued Charlotte Yonge’s project of wholesome entertainment into the 1870s include Maria Louisa Molesworth, a prolific novelist for children and adults, and Juliana Horatia Ewing, a regular contributor to her mother’s serial Aunt Judy’s Magazine.58 Even Ewing’s fairy tales such as “Amelia and the Dwarves” (1870) echo The Little Duke by detailing the transformation of a naughty child into an exemplar. As a work of nineteenth-century medievalism, Charlotte Yonge’s book is not atypical in its strongly Victorian shading of history. The author’s contemporary Arthurian revivalists sought a noble past but often projected their own culture onto the myth, for example.59 For the same maneuver, critics commonly dismiss Yonge as anachronistic with one biographer going so far as to write, “Not merely did she project her own Victorian and Church of England philosophy of life into mediaeval Germany or Renaissance France, but she had no idea that any other philosophy had ever existed.”60 Such a statement is unduly harsh. It seems more probable that this writer read the old chronicles and then purposely reshaped them to fit her didactic aims. The emphasis on faith mirrors Yonge’s personal concerns, certainly, but at the time religious influence marked a rare arena that British women could command.61 The modern scholar of Victorian literature may be tempted to skip over Charlotte Yonge. Her work offers several enticing pairings, however, with authors mentioned earlier, including Scott, Dickens, the Brontës, and several lesser-known children’s writers. Also, she published well over 150 texts, including histories, novels, and schoolbooks, plus a score of translations and coauthored collections. Much of this literature is available on the World Wide Web, ready for those who seek further study of her canon. Her lasting influence on the thousands of British and American children from the 1840s onward who delighted in her stories and novels like The Little Duke,62 makes her work of particular interest. Charlotte Yonge embroiders her Anglo-Catholic fable for Victorian children using the thread of medieval, Norman historiography. By offering not only a taste of history but also a subtle fantasy of power, Charlotte Yonge’s The Little Duke represents a potent formula for Victorian children’s literature. Notes 1. Florence S. Boos, “Alternative Victorian Futures,” in History and Community: Essays in Victorian Medievalism, ed. Florence Boos (New York: Garland Publishers, 1992), 12.

68 / sarah r. wakefield 2. For example, June Sturrock, “Heaven and Home”: Charlotte M. Yonge’s Domestic Fiction and the Victorian Debate over Women (Victoria, BC: English Literary Studies, University of Victoria, 1995) focuses on Yonge’s domestic novels (The Daisy Chain, The Clever Woman of the Family, and The Three Brides). Joseph Ellis Baker openly states in his introduction to a section on Yonge in The Novel and the Oxford Movement (New York: Russell and Russell Inc., 1965), 103, “We shall try not to include purely juvenile fiction.” 3. Catherine Wells-Cole, “Angry Yonge Men: Anger and Masculinity in the Novels of Charlotte M. Yonge,” in Masculinity and Spirituality in Victorian Culture, ed. Andrew Bradstock et al. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 78. 4. Georgina Battiscombe, Charlotte Mary Yonge: The Story of an Uneventful Life (London: Constable and Co. Ltd., 1943), 85. 5. This precisely is the argument of Maria Poggi Johnson in “The King, the Priest and the Armorer: A Victorian Historical Fantasy of the Via Media,” Clio 28, no. 4 (1999): 399–413. Writing on The Armourer’s ’Prentices, she contends Yonge’s medieval history tales for children seem simple enough, but serious religious intentions underpin much of her writing. 6. Harold Orel, The Historical Novel from Scott to Sabatini: Changing Attitudes toward a Literary Genre, 1814–1920 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1995), 13. 7. Charlotte Yonge, The Chaplet of Pearls, Project Gutenberg, June 23, 2002, ⬍http://www.ibiblio.org/gutenberg/etext04/chplt10h.htm⬎ (accessed May 24, 2003). 8. Nina Auerbach and U. C. Knoepflmacher, ed., Forbidden Journeys: Fairy Tales and Fantasies by Victorian Women Writers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 2. 9. Alethea Hayter, Charlotte Yonge (Plymouth, U.K.: Northcote House in association with the British Council, 1996), 43. 10. The Little Duke, or Richard the Fearless (London and Toronto: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1910), 231. 11. Charlotte Yonge, The Lances of Lynwood (London: John W. Parker, 1855) describes the fourteenth-century exploits of the Lynwood brothers in the court of Edward III, and the first paragraph of Yonge’s preface reads in full as follows: “For an explanation of the allusions in the present Tale, scarcely any Notes are necessary, save a reference to the bewitching Chronicle of Froissart; and we cannot but hope that our sketch may serve as an inducement to some young readers to make acquaintance with the delectable old Canon for themselves, undeterred by the size of his tomes.” 12. Chris Waters, “Marxism, Medievalism, and Popular Culture,” in History and Community: Essays in Victorian Medievalism, ed. Florence Boos (New York: Garland Publishers, 1992), 145. 13. Asa Briggs, Saxons, Normans and Victorians (Bexhill-on-Sea and London: Historical Association, 1966), 6. 14. R. Allen Brown, The Normans and the Norman Conquest, 2nd ed. (Dover, NH: Boydell Press, 1985), 1. 15. Anti-Catholic sentiments were on the rise starting in 1850, according Rosemary Clark-Beattie in “Fables of Rebellion: Anti-Catholicism and the Structure of Villette,” ELH 53, no. 4 (Winter 1986): 821–847. Allegiance to the Pope over one’s queen was viewed with increasing suspicion.

victorian normans in THE LITTLE DUKE / 69 16. D. J. A. Matthew, “The English Cultivation of Norman History,” England and Normandy in the Middle Ages, ed. David Bates and Anne Curry (London and Rio Grande, Ohio: Hambledon Press, 1994), 13–14. 17. Francis Ingledew, “The Book of Troy and the Genealogical Construction of History: The Case of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae,” Speculum 69, no. 3 (July 1994): 687. 18. Thomas Macaulay, History of England from the Accession of James the Second, 6th ed., vol. I (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1850), 11–12. 19. According R. Allen Brown (15), Vikings were granted land in 911, 924, and 933, with this last parcel given to William Longsword, father to Yonge’s hero. 20. Brown, Normans and the Norman Conquest, 21. 21. Because I am interested in the chain of revision in Norman historiography, for this essay I have used Elisabeth van Houts’s compiled The Gesta Normannorum Ducum of William of Jumièges, Orderic Vitalis, and Robert of Torigni (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992–1995). It indicates additions made by each of its authors subsequent to Dudo of St. Quentin. 22. The Victorian flavor of the Gesta account of Richard’s life has been suggested by Eleanor Searle, noted Norman historian, in Predatory Kinship and the Creation of Norman Power, 840–1066 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 66. She points to the ending, with newlyweds awaiting their fine, large family, as characteristic of nineteenth-century novels. 23. Yonge, The Little Duke, 12–15. In this edition, the illustrated plates take up two page numbers—in this case, pages 13 and 14. 24. Yonge, The Little Duke, 15. 25. The percentages come from figures 1.2 and 1.3 in David Vincent’s The Rise of Mass Literacy: Reading and Writing in Modern Europe (Cambridge: Polity, 2000), as does the comment about children’s literacy versus their parents (14). The numbers accord with The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–1900 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), 60, and Richard Altick’s 1841 literacy rates of 67% male and 51% female, based on the ability to sign one’s name on a marriage license. Although not a perfect measure of literacy (perhaps some individuals could read but not write), the statistics point to a continuing need for education. 26. Biographer Barbara Dennis gives 1856 as a turning point, when Yonge backed down from her High Church moralizing in Charlotte Yonge (1823–1901): Novelist of the Oxford Movement: A Literature of Victorian Culture and Society (Lewiston: E. Mellen Press, 1992), 64. 27. Quoted in Margaret Mare and Alicia C. Percival, Victorian Best-Seller: The World of Charlotte M. Yonge (London: Harrap, 1949), 40. 28. Some might wonder why Charlotte Yonge did not rework Arthurian lore, especially since the Sangreal quest might have fit her religious intentions. See David Staines, “King Arthur in Victorian Fiction,” in The Worlds of Victorian Fiction, ed. Jerome Buckley (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), 274. From him we learn that The Monthly Packet ran two King Arthur features, one a sixarticle series on Galahad (1852–1853) and the other an extensive twenty-one article (1859–1864) by Ellen J. Millingston on the Grail quest. Yonge mentions Arthur in The History of Tom Thumb, and she refers to hero Guy as Galahad in The Heir of Redclyffe. Otherwise she does seem to have avoided the more


29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

fantastic Camelot legend, with its pagan and incestuous overtones, and kept to the path of “purer” history. The King Arthur myth enjoyed popularity in children’s literature later in the Victorian period, with Sidney Lanier’s The Boy’s King Arthur (1880) and Margaret Vere Farrington’s Tales of King Arthur (1888). The information about Keble comes from Robert Lee Wolff, Gains and Losses: Novels of Faith and Doubt in Victorian England (New York and London: Garland, 1977), 119. Yonge, The Little Duke, 105 Wolff, Gains and Losses, 113. Michael H. Bright, “English Literary Romanticism and the Oxford Movement,” Journal of the History of Ideas 40, no. 3 (1979): 386. Yonge, The Little Duke, 8–12. van Houts, Gesta, 105. Yonge, The Little Duke, 155. Richard is called “fatherless” on two occasions, an “orphan” seven times, and “poor child” nine times. Seven of those nine instances occur in dialogues delivered from Norman characters. Laura Peters, Orphan Texts: Victorian Orphans, Culture and Empire (Manchester, NY: Manchester University Press, 2000), 64–65. J. S. Bratton, The Impact of Victorian Children’s Fiction (London: Croom Helm, 1981), 113–114. Yonge, The Little Duke, 126. van Houts, Gesta, 103. Sarah Orne Jewett, The Story of the Normans (New York and London: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1889), 126. All information about Old Norse mothering comes from Jenny Jochens, “Old Norse Motherhood,” in Medieval Mothering, ed. John Carmi Parsons and Bonnie Wheeler (New York: Garland Publishing, 1996), 204–208. Natalie J. McKnight, Suffering Mothers in Mid-Victorian Novels (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 1–5. Yonge, The Little Duke, 138. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, ed., Q. D. Leavis (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1985), 112–113. Laurence Lerner, Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1997), 160. Kimberley Reynolds, Girls Only?: Gender and Popular Children’s Fiction in Britain, 1880–1910 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), 36. Yonge, The Little Duke, 176. Jackie Wullschläger, Inventing Wonderland: The Lives and Fantasies of Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, J. M. Barrie, Kenneth Grahame and A. A. Milne (London: Methuen, 1995), 18–19. Yonge, The Little Duke, 225. Wells-Cole, in Masculinity and Spirituality, 79. Another critic suggests Yonge took her material from Palgrave’s History of Normandy and England. See Clare A. Simmons, Reversing the Conquest: History and Myth in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 110. The relevant first volume of the four-volume tome was published in 1851, so it is probable that Yonge knew of this historian’s version of events.

victorian normans in THE LITTLE DUKE / 71 53. Dudo’s history, sometimes called De moribus et actis primorum Normanniae ducum, was published for a broader reading public in 1619 by André Duchesne. The second edition came out in 1865. In addition to van Houts’s book, today’s readers can consult Eric Christensen’s 1998 edition of Dudo’s original text (including his many interspersed poems), History of the Normans / Dudo of St. Quentin (Woodbridge & Rochester: Boydell Press, 1998). 54. Elisabeth van Houts, “Historical Writing,” in A Companion to the Anglo-Norman World, ed. Christopher Harper-Bill and Elisabeth van Houts (Woodbridge and Rochester: Boydell Press, 2003), 104. 55. Cassandra Potts, “Normandy, 911–1144,” in A Companion to the Anglo-Norman World, ed. Christopher Harper-Bell and Elisabeth van Houts (Woodbridge and Rochester: Boydell Press, 2003), 24. 56. Edward Augustus Freeman, The History of the Norman Conquest of England, trans. Abridged J. W. Burrow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 125. 57. John Richard Green, A Short History of the English People, rev. ed. (London: Macmillan, 1952), 72. 58. Peter Hunt, An Introduction to Children’s Literature (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 74. 59. Debra Mancoff, The Return of King Arthur: The Legend through Victorian Eyes (New York: H.N. Abrams, 1995), 8. 60. Battiscombe, Charlotte Mary Yonge, 131. 61. Julia Briggs, “Women Writers and Writing for Children: From Sarah Fielding to E. Nesbit,” in Children and Their Books: A Celebration of the Work of Iona and Peter Opie, ed. Gillian Avery and Julia Briggs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 237. 62. See Catherine Wells-Cole, “Angry Yonge Men: Anger and Masculinity in the Novels of Charlotte M. Yonge,” in Masculinity and Spirituality in Victorian Culture, ed. Andrew Bradstock et al. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 78.


Chapter Four “And the golden halls were dumb”: Norse Fatalism and Mourning in Matthew Arnold’s BALDER DEAD Kim Zarins

For many Victorian readers, the medieval period was a spiritually rich age of faith, an aesthetic setting for knights and ladies, and an era with a paternal social order in which landowners sat at table with the men who tilled their land.1 Medieval Norse literature offered Victorian readers an experience more fraught with violence that exemplified a masculine yet uncorrupt culture of warriors. William Morris’s Sigurd the Volsung celebrates a dragon slayer’s valor,2 and Thomas Carlyle includes Odin as his first hero in his On Heroes, Hero Worship, and the Heroic in History; such Victorian medievalists idealized Norse society’s manly integrity and vitality as a model for the more industrial, less innocent present. In Arnold’s Balder Dead (1855), the medieval past is not a model but a mirror of the present, a way for his Victorian audience to see and know themselves. For him, Balder’s death is a profound moment in a mythology otherwise bustling with empty heroic exploits. Arnold rejects his contemporaries’ idealization of Norse violence and Valhalla as a paradise for the bold of heart. Instead, he shows Heaven to be gaudy and joyless, Odin cold and despairing, the gods and heroes trapped in a life of daily death. As empty songs of strife, Valhalla’s poetry refreshes the soul as little as Valhalla’s banquets nourish the body. Balder, by contrast, is a poet and figure of light living in a darkened age. In Arnold’s adaptation, Balder’s new life in Hell is not tragic, for he finds comparative peace there with opportunities for contemplation and friendship and a role as poet and prophet of a new age of peace in which a true Heaven of light and love emerges from Valhalla’s ruins.3

74 / kim zarins

Blood, Guts, and Skull Cups: Arnold’s Rejection of Valhalla’s Norse Hero Arnold based only this one poem on Norse mythology, but he would have known of a small but active poetic subculture that drew inspiration from Norse myths, interest culminating with Richard Wagner’s cycle Ring of the Nibelung in 1869–1876. Antiquarianism had been in the air since James Macpherson’s enormously famous Ossian poems of 1760,4 which were quickly followed by Thomas Percy’s Five Runic Pieces (1763), Thomas Gray’s two Norse odes of 1768, and Paul-Henri Mallet’s Northern Antiquities, containing the main translation of Snorri’s Edda for Victorian readers and Arnold’s source for Balder Dead.5 For Victorian readers who saw their own society as lacking in the passion and vitality thought to abound in the “infancy” of civilization, Norse poetry appealed for its sublime, pagan elements.6 George Dasent’s 1842 translation of Snorri’s Edda edits out some naughty bits,7 and Percy’s and Mallet’s translation removes the Christian-influenced prologue,8 but translators and writers never bowdlerized or abridged texts on account of gory bloodshed, which was a token of a primitive yet vital culture. In Percy’s translation of the Dying Ode of Regner Lodbrog, for example, Regner vaunts his fearlessness while dying in a snake pit. Regner recounts all the enemies slaughtered, all the conquests savored, until he says his last words, “I die laughing.”9 Rather than lament his pain, he exults that he will go to Valhalla, where Vikings quaff wine from the skulls of dead foes [“Soon, in the splendid hall of Odin, we shall drink Beer out of the sculls of our enemies” (126)]. This grotesque image, actually a mistaken translation and in that respect not much different from our modern notion of the Viking in the horned helmet, is an early icon of the Viking as a heroic, bloodthirsty fighter.10 Regner became the paradigmatic Norse hero who boldly laughs at pain, dying joyfully because he will feast and fight in Valhalla until the great final conflict between good and evil, gods and giants. Percy’s translation, although not of Ossianic fame, shaped the Victorian perception that Norse mythology centered on the warrior’s code of bravery and battle, as in William Morris’s Sigurd the Volsung (1876), whose heroes face death and bad odds fearlessly and aspire to go to Valhalla.11 Morris’s Signy tells her brother Sigmund that the gods will honor him with a place in Valhalla: “By the side of the sons of Odin shalt thou fashion a tale to be told / In the hall of the happy Baldur” (I.723–724).12 There is no medieval basis for Balder being a god of Valhalla (Odin is the god of slain warriors), but so pervasive is the Victorian perception of Valhalla, that Balder is associated with the warrior paradise.13 Arnold’s poem is set in a conventional Valhalla, with skull mugs and doughty warriors, but these heroic trappings do not symbolize purity and

fatalism and mourning in arnold’s BALDER DEAD / 75

vitality. Indeed, his Regner and Balder are not stereotypical warriors. If anything, Arnold uses them to undermine the culture of violence and show Valhalla’s spiritual emptiness. Instead of laughing at battle, Arnold’s Regner tenderly recalls the joys he shared with his two wives and sees his life in Valhalla as one of monotonous violence broken only by Balder’s poetry of peace and joy. Arnold thus rejects the Victorian belief, prominent in Morris, that feats of arms indicate a man’s intensity of heart.14 The poem begins with a vision of Balder’s fresh corpse and immediately opens up to the violence of the culture that killed him: So on the floor lay Balder dead; and round Lay thickly strewn swords, axes, darts, and spears. (I.1–2)15

An enchanted sprig of mistletoe ignorantly thrown by Hoder caused Balder’s death, but before Arnold tells us this, he shows us the corpse surrounded by meaningless heaps of conventional weapons cast in sport, with no connotation of heroic valor or honor. In an episode from Snorri’s Edda not included in Arnold’s poem, Balder’s mother had secured oaths of peace from all projectiles that might harm him, since Balder had had prophetic dreams of his death, but in casting weapons at their magically protected brother, the gods—like stereotypical Vikings who laugh at fear and turn it into sport—enact Balder’s death. Balder dies because of a game, “til skemtun Baldrs ok ásanna” (for the pleasure of Balder and the gods), but as John Lindow points out, The reputation of this literature for violence notwithstanding, skemtun is for the most part associated with verbal entertainment—reciting poetry, recounting sagas—and there is a special poignancy that in the house of Odin, god of verbal skills, his one legitimate son [Balder] and the rest of his followers amuse themselves with a dumb mime of manslaughter.16

Play, verbal or violent, gives way to stunned silence as the gods crowd around the body and weep. In the gods’ grief, violence and rowdy gourmandizing lose their appeal: the meats on the banquet table and “gold-rimmed skulls” filled with wine are untasted (I.14). Odin exhorts the gods to stop weeping and get on with “daily life” (I.36), which means more feasting and more fighting, but the gods and heroes obey only reluctantly: returning to their golden seats, they force-feed themselves on “New messes of the boar Serimner’s flesh” (I.67). Serimner is the mythical boar whose butchered body rejuvenates itself daily, like the flesh of the heroes in Valhalla who consume it, so that the “loathéd feast” (I.203) is repugnant not only for its gourmandizing but also for its

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dissolute, wasteful cycle of slaughter and renewal: And all day long they [the Heroes] there are hacked and hewn, ’Mid dust, and groans, and limbs lopped off, and blood; But all at night return to Odin’s hall, Woundless and fresh; such lot is theirs in Heaven. (II.15–18)

The Norse world was supposed to be a rugged one in which valiant action kept chaos at bay, but Arnold shows its internal decay, as Valhalla’s men routinely hack at themselves. The gods too are bound to this endless cycle of destruction and freakish regeneration, for they will need these heroes at the final battle, and until then they “feast their eyes with looking on the fray” every morning (II.31). The ocular “feast” is just as repellent as Serimner’s flesh; the hacked limbs of boar and heroes resemble each other, and the gods avoid the practice yard and banqueting tables (II.14). Odin, however, insists on returning to the feasts of flesh and arms. He sends the gods back to dinner, and later he postpones considering Hela’s conditions for Balder’s release while he continues with the funeral and another sickening, “loathéd feast” that lasts all night (III.214). The gods are permitted to stop gorging only when “morning over all the world was spread” (III.213). As in other Germanic poems, daylight marks the greatest time of grief, when yesterday’s horrors become plain to the eye. The pun on “morning” and “mourning” suggests that dawn brings only deeper gloom; later, mourning will spread over the world as the gods make all things weep for Balder’s release, to no avail. And if morning is rendered gloomy in Arnold’s hands, so is Heaven’s light in general. Clyde De L. Ryals emphasizes the contrast between light and dark imagery in Heaven and Hell,17 but Heaven is not as flooded with light as the gods would like to think it is. Hermod describes his race as those who “live in light and joy” (II.199) and “see the light” (II.255); Hod comments that he has lost the light in coming to Hell (III.401); Balder will one day return to the light (III.511). But we do not see much genuine light in Heaven: instead, it is a place full of gold. Arnold’s emphasis on gold is a critique of Victorian materialism, in which wealth substitutes for true happiness. Frustrated with such examples of self-satisfied opulence as the Great Exhibition of 1851,18 his poem shows Norse gods acting out a similar pageant empty of substance. His criticism resembles John Ruskin’s attribution of the Victorian hunger for wealth to the modern malaise in his “On the Nature of Gothic” (1853): “It is not that men are ill fed, but that they have no pleasure in the work by which they make their bread and therefore look to wealth as the only means of pleasure.”19


Carlyle also perceives wealth’s emptiness; his Past and Present (1843) opens with a section on Midas, a myth of “a horrid enchantment” turned real in Victorian society’s obsession for wealth that enriches no one: “In the midst of plethoric plenty, the people perish; with gold walls, and full barns, no man feels himself safe or satisfied . . . [but feels] Fatal paralysis, spreading inwards, from the extremities, in St. Ives workhouses, in Stockport cellars, through all limbs, as if toward the heart itself.”20 For Arnold, the contrast between light and gold signifies his own era’s empty luxuries, poor replacements for true joy. The golden roof (I.12), golden dining chairs (I.64), and golden-rimmed skulls (I.14) of Valhalla’s feasting chamber smack of Midas’s hall in Past and Present. Just as the feast does not nourish, the gold is a poor substitute for light and joy. Of the gods, only Balder, “so bright, so loved a god” (I.22; I.126; III.64), emits rays of real light (I.284–285; III.517). Like pretty people in a Victorian fairy tale, the rest of the gods live in golden halls (II.306; Hod’s home III.404), tremble like princes and princesses in golden beds (I.262), and wake to a golden rooster’s crowing (III.496). Gold seems to reassure them that their kingdom is strong and safe. Odin lives in a completely golden, massive hall called Gladheim (“Glad-home,” as if the name and the gold both insist on its joy) and wears a “dazzling corslet” and helm of gold (III.58). Lovesick Freya’s tears are golden (III.90, 110, 114), but unlike the source text, Arnold’s Freya refers to her golden tears self-consciously, as if she weighs their value while she weeps. These examples show a kingdom that values its golden halls too highly, contrary to Ruskin’s assertion in The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) that “the greatest glory of a building is not in its stones, nor in its gold. Its glory is in its Age, and in that deep sense of voicefulness . . .” that connects the ages and brings identity.21 Gilded Heaven, by contrast, is spiritually dark. Balder, who is a true source of light, modestly rejects Hermod’s high praise of his stature in Hell: “gild me not my death!” (II.264). Ironically, this is literally what the gods do when, perhaps emulating Freya’s stylized, golden grief, they heap gold on Balder’s pyre (III.169) and Odin adds his golden ring (III.173).22 In Norse mythology, the invaluable ring Draupnir signifies a bond between Odin and his beloved son: Odin gives his son’s corpse the ring, which Balder gives back to Odin when Hermod visits him in Hell. In having Odin toss a nameless gold ring that is never returned or acknowledged, Arnold renders the ring just another piece of gold. Smothering Balder’s body, the gods heap gold on the corpse much as they heaped weapons in their fatal play, in which gold not only brings no enrichment, as Carlyle and Ruskin assert, but also buries the thing of true value. Clinging to this substitute for real light, the gods live in a place of empty splendor.

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Some gods learn that their gilded world is beautiful only at first glance. Returning after his long dark journey, Hermod, like a weary traveler, . . . sees, beneath, Clouds of white rolling vapours fill the vale, But o’er them, on the farther slope, descries Vineyards, and crofts, and pastures, bright with sun— So Hermod, o’er the fog between, saw Heaven. And Sleipner snorted, for he smelt the air Of Heaven; and mightily, as winged, he flew. And Hermod saw the towers of Asgard rise; And he drew near, and heard no living voice In Asgard; and the golden halls were dumb. Then Hermod knew what labour held the Gods; And through the empty streets he rode . . . (II.297–308)

The sunlit beauty just beyond the fog pricks Hermod with sharp desire, while his less visually-inclined horse responds to Heaven’s invigorating smell. Both long for Heaven’s warmth and beauty after the cold underworld, but they find that the light of Heaven has faded into a golden, tomblike emptiness not much better than the fog. The deserted streets show a world as lifeless as the vacant houses and empty lands of Virgil’s underworld: “Ibant obscuri sola sub nocte per umbram / perque domos Ditis vacuas et inania regna” [“Dimly through the shadows and dark solitudes they wended, / Through the domiciles of Dis, the bodiless regions”].23 Here, Virgil’s Hell resembles the Norse Heaven more than the Norse underworld, which shows shadowy movement, not empty streets. Virgil’s famous leaf simile (VI.310–312), for example, shows the souls crowding the shores of Styx in their eagerness to cross, as Arnold’s ghosts eagerly crowd the living Hermod (II.163). Heaven, by contrast, is utterly still and empty, without that desperate but tenderly companionable crowding. Heaven is lonelier. Arnold accentuates this isolation by placing Heaven in a location not unlike that of “Dover Beach.” In the Edda, Heaven is far from the sea;24 Arnold’s Heaven is set against its waters, a constant reminder of an immeasurable darkness at the door, far more powerful and engulfing than the little light that Heaven actually has. The “Sea of Faith” (21) of “Dover Beach” sets up the medieval period as an age of belief and harmony that the modern age no longer shares, a contrast that makes Arnold seem to share some of his contemporaries’ view that the Middle Ages enjoyed a more certain sense of the sacred.25 The “bright” sea (23) of “Dover Beach,” which becomes dark and threatening only in the modern age, was always dark and forbidding in Balder Dead. Writing these poems at the same period, Arnold in “Dover Beach” wistfully looks to the Middle Ages, but in Balder Dead he casts aside


any idealization of the past. Arnold’s sea in Balder Dead never indicates belief or hope but instead is a bleak counterpart to his own age. Heaven’s gloomy setting complements Arnold’s expanded role for Hoder, whose daily life is darkness. In Snorri’s Edda, Hoder is merely known for being blind, killing Balder, being killed the next day from an avenging god, and surviving in the new age after Ragnarok. Arnold fleshes out his role and shows his anguish after his unwitting act of murder. As Hoder gropes toward Frea’s house, Arnold describes Heaven’s dark margins and the sound of them: the “roaring sea” (I.77), “black o’erhanging cliffs” (I.79), and “screaming seafowl” (I.80). We hear things as Hoder does and later experience blindness when Hoder and Hermod pass each other in the night. Hermod does not see his brother, so Hoder reaches out and touches him as softly as the scent of honeysuckle surprises a wanderer (I.230). The simile appeals to senses of scent and touch not only because of Hoder’s blindness, but also because Hermod cannot see in Heaven’s “darkened lanes” (I.233). Hoder has learned to navigate his way without sight, but the other gods depend upon torches during the night in Heaven (I.204, III.167). The most important torch, of course, is Balder’s funeral ship, which the sea swallows up while the gods stand mutely on the shore: “through the dark they watched the burning ship” until, in a shower of sparks, the red water extinguished the flames “and all was dark” (III.197, 206). “Feebler haters”: The Descent of Odin In rejecting both the “daily fray” and Heaven’s gilding, Arnold indicates Heaven’s spiritual emptiness. In this respect, he is at odds with the nineteenth century’s idealization of the Norse for their simple vitality and freedom from the modern malaise. Living at the margins of the world under hard and warlike conditions, the Norse were seen as masculine yet also childlike in their uncorrupt innocence. Carlyle’s “The Hero as Divinity. Odin. Paganism: Scandinavian Mythology” (1841) looks nostalgically to the Norse as a society in its infancy: “a childlike greatness was in the primitive nations,” Carlyle insists, marveling at the combination of “a young child’s thoughts, in the hearts of these strong men!”26 Sophisticated classical and modern societies lacked their “childlike way of recognizing the divineness of Nature.”27 Norsemen may have drunk from skull cups and engaged in ruthless bloodshed, but their vices were those of a simple people. Mallet equates the Norse poets with the “barbarians who set fire to Rome” (1770, II, 268), and despite some regret at this destructiveness, Norse enthusiasts in England thought degenerate empires like Rome had had it coming to them, though any modern society could serve as an evil counterpart to the North’s purity.28 Samuel Laing (1780–1868), a leader of the “berserker-school” who

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translated Snorri’s Heimskringla in 1844, looked to the North as an antidote from Latinate, Catholic culture.29 Carlyle’s enemy empire was modern society itself, with its cold science that labels and tames Nature rather than worships her in wonder. The Norse lacked the sophistication of the Greeks; their simple response to nature rendered their religion comparatively crude, but to Carlyle their “infant minds” had something more valuable, for they were “deep, rude, earnest,” yielding a mythology with a vibrant mishmash of solemnity and broad humor.30 Carlyle’s appreciation for this range causes him to scoff at Romantics like Gray who elide Norse humor in favor of gore and sublime horror.31 But he too thought the Norse passionate, imaginative, and pure—everything that industrial, scientific Victorian culture was not. Arnold also has an empire to critique, though unlike Laing and Carlyle, he values the classical too much to set it up as a straw man to a Norseman’s axe. In fact, he uses a classical lens with which to view Norse myths. Borrowing from Homer and Virgil gives Arnold’s gods a calm melancholy and anguish. Rather than fixate on the Norse as the ideal Other of a purer past, he writes of them from inside their camp, portraying them as the mirror image of Victorian culture, twisted with melancholy and engaged in a similarly lifeless daily life. Arnold especially emphasizes this stunted lifestyle in his drastic revision of Odin, the king of the gods, who was admired by English readers since Thomas Gray’s Descent of Odin (1768), a translation of the Norse poem Baldrs draumar (Balder’s Dreams), in which Odin, learning that Balder’s dreams foretell his death, takes his mythical steed Sleipnir to the underworld to ask a seeress questions about Balder. The journey is daring but fruitless: Odin cannot protect Balder from his fate any more than he can avert his own death at Ragnarok. The anguished tale of a god forced to sacrifice his son echoes the Christian story in a fatalistic, modern key. Victorian readers continued identifying Odin as the wise father of the gods and Norse civilization. Carlyle valued Odin as a deified historical figure, a visionary who invented Runes and Poetry.32 Arnold certainly knew Carlyle’s essay and Gray’s poem, but his Odin is neither a wise rune-winner nor a daring hero. Arnold challenges Odin’s supremacy, transforming him from the revered figure of tradition into a weak leader. Not even alluding to Odin’s ride to the underworld in Baldrs draumar, Arnold creates a more detached Odin living in semiretirement. Rather than stay by his son’s body with his fellow gods, he retreats to Lidskialf, his appointed seat, to survey the world: So spake the King of Gods, and straightway rose, And mounted his horse Sleipner, whom he rode; And from the hall of Heaven he rode away

fatalism and mourning in arnold’s BALDER DEAD / 81 To Lidskialf, and sate upon his throne, The mount, from whence his eye surveys the world. And far from Heaven he turned his shining orbs To look on Midgard, and the earth, and men. And on the conjuring Lapps he bent his gaze Whom antlered reindeer pull over the snow; And on the Finns, the gentlest of mankind, Fair men, who live in holes under the ground . . . (I.46–56)

Ian Hamilton cites these lines as an example of Balder Dead’s “passable pastiche of epic grandeur . . . always on the edge of falling flat . . . Arnold’s heroic posture is at best a grim-jawed, pumped-up thing.”33 This criticism assumes that Arnold meant the poem’s epic tone as a genuine attempt to make the gods grand, and of course if that is the case, he fails.34 But this is not Arnold’s heroic posture; it is Odin’s. The god is determined not to mourn, but to move mechanically forward. Lidskialf is supposed to be a place of vision, but Odin flees there to escape what he has seen (“Nor did he look once more to Ida’s plain, / Nor tow’rd Valhalla, and the sorrowing Gods,” I.57–58), while maintaining a posture of duty and dignity. Distracting his gaze with the kingdom of the Lapps and other northern lands, Odin misuses Lidskialf ’s power. With merely the appearance of vast visionary power, Odin’s outward gaze blinds himself to the crisis at home.35 From his first lines in the poem, Odin shows his two-fold agenda: to stop the gods and heroes from grieving and to get them back to fighting and feasting. He refuses to let the gods mourn because mourning interferes with “daily life” (I.36; III.56), a phrase that conveys the bloodshed, gold, and gore of a sublime tale with a quotidian tone that renders it the opposite of sublime. From that perspective, the feast is tasteless, the fighting in Valhalla’s court dull unheroic labor. It is a lifestyle of drudgery not unlike what Ruskin condemns in his The stones of Venice: “It is verily this degradation of the operative into a machine, which, more than any other evil of the times, is leading the mass of the nations everywhere into vain, incoherent, destructive struggling for a freedom of which they cannot explain the nature to themselves.”36 Like Ruskin’s glass bead makers, Valhalla’s warriors are tools rather than men, with a precise but uncreative schedule to follow mindlessly: men hack, gods observe, and all feast over and over again. The medieval patriarchal social order, with its organic and humane connection between lord and worker—so praised by Carlyle and Ruskin—does not exist in Arnold’s Heaven-run workshop of war. Balder’s death marks a key moment in Heaven’s history, for under the circumstances the normally pliant tools tire of their routine, but Odin is suspicious, even frightened, of their grief: “there well may be too much of wail” (III.157). He reins in the gods and renders himself a frigid father

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willing to hasten his son’s funeral just to have it over. Before the ship-burning, he says he wants Balder “Out of our sight” (III.55) so that all may return to daily life. He echoes Achilles’s lines before Patroclus’s funeral in Iliad XXIII: “let us consent to the feasting I loathe . . . the sooner to burn Patroclus from our sight—and the men turn back to battles they must wage.”37 At the funeral, Achilles tells Agamemnon to dismiss the men and have them eat, for “Even of sorrow men can have their fill.” Putting Achilles’s words in Odin’s mouth, Arnold enhances the parallel with the same roaring sea in the background, the consciousness of a battle still to be fought, and the evening feasts, but there are important differences. Achilles lets himself groan, cry, and express sorrow and rage, hacking the bodies of twelve Trojans to honor Patroclus. There is no such abandon at Balder’s restrained funeral. The corpse is not heaped with cut hair or wrapped with the fat of sacrificial beasts, nor is the pyre loaded with dead enemies—the Norse gods give only gold. Snorri’s version has people from all races in attendance swelling the shores; in Arnold’s version, a handful of gods and heroes huddle before the sea, nearly as swallowed up by darkness as Balder’s guttering candle of a ship. Arnold diverges from both the Snorri of medieval and Victorian readers and the Iliad to show a lonelier funeral and more isolated Odin, whose iron resolve makes him hard to read. His four-line speech is the first, shortest, and least personal tribute at the funeral: Farewell, O Balder, bright and loved, my son! In that great day, the twighlight of the Gods, When Muspel’s children shall beleaguer Heaven, Then we shall miss thy counsel and thy arm. (III.67–70)

Odin is thinking more about Ragnarok than Balder. In the Edda, the gods “were all plunged in the deepest mourning, and especially Odin”; he knew what this loss meant for Ragnarok, but he mourns his son (Mallet, Northern Antiquities, 1809, II, Edda, 103). Arnold’s Odin, however, focuses on Balder less as a person than as a pawn in the game of fate. In the Norse sources there are no funeral speeches, so Arnold invents freely. The other gods, more openly grieved, make longer speeches with more personal statements about Balder’s peacefulness and ability to comfort and inspire. A couple of eddic poems mention a moment at the funeral in which Odin whispers words in Balder’s dead ear.38 Though the words are not given, Odin’s whisper indicates intimacy with his son, a personal, mournful touch that Arnold does not permit. Odin’s lines seem cold—what kind of a father is he? Rustum, all grim determination before the duel, falls to pieces at Sohrab’s death, but Odin


vacuum-seals his emotions with lines that insist on finishing mourning for Balder and getting on with life. James Najarian offers an insightful interpretation of Sohrab and Rustum by reading their duel as the conflict between, not merely Arnold and his father, but Arnold’s frivolous past and his sterner present.39 Like Sohrab, Balder is a pretty young man with a severe father, although the dynamics in Balder Dead are more complex. Odin is no Rustum—Thor is the resident warrior. And, at least traditionally, Balder is no poet. He is supremely beautiful and “eloquent,” but Brage (or Bragi) “presided over eloquence and poetry,” and Odin is its supreme god and inventor, the god who hung himself on Yggdrasil to win the runes and stole the mead of poetry to give it to the gods (Mallet, Northern Antiquities, 1809, I, 83; II, 43). To medieval and Victorian readers alike, Odin’s traditional power rests in his wisdom, runes, and gift of poetry. Arnold takes Odin’s poetry away from him and makes Balder the poet, forcing a standoff like that of Sohrab and Rustum: Balder is a “coiner of sweet words” too passionate and pure to survive, with the result that his father, like Rustum, will “never end this life of blood” (Sohrab and Rustum, 458, 826). Arnold strips Odin of his poetic mantle, leaving only that life of blood, which Arnold reinforces with the elemental symbolism of the gods. If Balder is the sun, and Thor the thunder, Odin is twice called the “whirlwind” of roiling energy and discontent (I.264; III.248).40 No longer the traditional “Father of Verses,” Arnold’s Odin is nothing but the “Father of Battles”—a god of the dead (Mallet, 1809, II, Edda, 45). Odin’s identity as psycho-pomp is recorded as early as Tacitus, who associates Wodan with the Roman psychopomp Mercury.41 Much of his magic is power over the dead, raising seeresses from their graves to prophesy; souls of consecrated warriors slain in battle are “Odin’s right” (Mallet, Northern Antiquities, 1809, I, 73), just as Arnold’s Hela holds Balder “by right” (I.181; II.193; III.288). Rather than show a conflict between the god of life and the god of death, Arnold sets up Odin and Hela as competing gods of death. This connection between the two gods of death is strengthened by Odin’s lust for revenge, which he declares early on to mask his own consuming indecision: By me shall vengeance on the murderer Lok, The foe, the accuser, whom, though Gods, we hate, Be strictly cared for, in the appointed day. (I.37–39)

Though Arnold’s poem closes before “the appointed day” arrives, we know he will have “cared for” Loki: prophetic Hela tells Hermod that he will. She insists that, although the gods tortured and will torture her family, she is not like the gods—that is, not inclined to torture her enemies: “We do

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not as some feebler haters do— / Seek to afflict our foes with petty pangs” (II.228–229). Her tone of moral superiority is surprising. We are prepared to be prejudiced against Odin’s enemy, but she is not like the Hela of the Edda, who is Death personified and a monster: half her body blue, half flesh, she has a “dreadful terrifying look,” and with “despotic power” she rules a house of allegorical horrors—her palace is called Anguish, her table Famine, her bed Leanness (Mallet, Northern Antiquities, 1809, I, 102; II, Edda, 61–62). Arnold gets rid of these monstrous trappings and dignifies her as a “queen” or “solemn queen” (I.178, 319; II.179, 197, 201, 280, 283; III.40, 278), a Norse Proserpina thrown to Hell against her will. She does not take her anger out on Balder but instead shows him all honor. In such a way, she is a counter figure to Odin, bound in Hell but not bound at heart like him. Desiring valiant action of some sort, Odin in Part III turns his anger against Hela and proposes a full-scale war: Bethink ye, Gods, is there no other way?— Speak, were not this a way, the way for Gods? If I, if Odin, clad in radiant arms, Mounted on Sleipner, with the warrior Thor Drawn in his car beside me, and my sons, All the strong brood of Heaven, to swell my train, Should make irruption into Hela’s realm, And set the fields of gloom ablaze with light, And bring in triumph Balder back to Heaven? (III.236–244)

His words fall on martial ears: “He spake, and his fierce sons applauded loud” (III.245). Yet it is all hypothetical, and he knows it. His wife interrupts his military fantasy and declares that she “will not applaud,” reminding Odin that since he has already confined Hela and given her a role in the Norse cosmogony, there is no further vengeance (III.281). Ryals calls Frea “a nagging wife” for her refusal to cheer Odin on to war with Hela, but this scene shows Odin breaking apart with wild plans, willing to shatter his past pacts and storm Hell by surprise, while Frea brings him back to reality.42 Using Hela and Frea to question Odin’s leadership, Arnold breaks from the glamorization of Odin by Carlyle, who similarly lauds Abbott Samson in Past and Present while editing out the more ambiguous, problematic comments in his source texts.43 Arnold accentuates those problems and shows Odin’s weaker side, but he makes Frea strong. The Edda says that Frea “knows man’s destiny but tells nothing” (Mallet, Northern Antiquities, 1809, II, Edda, 45), and Arnold takes his source seriously. Arnold gives Frea prophetesses to attend her (I.88–91), and she knows what will happen before Odin does, so that Odin’s grand


proclamation to Hermod is redundant and hollow for readers who already heard Frea’s prophesy the day before of Hermod’s journey. Frea’s veil and folded hands mark her as distant and enigmatic like her husband, but Frea is also active and approachable. One of the few images of light in Heaven that is not mere torchlight or gold comes from Fensalir’s lighted windows facing the sea (I.86), signifying that her home is a place of vision and she herself a light in the darkness. Odin needs her help, even if she must give it while working behind his back, as she does in her dealings with Hoder and when she and Balder conspire to give Nanna, Balder’s wife, a painless death, snipping her “thread of life,” as Juno had Iris do to Dido, rather than suffering her to burn alive on Balder’s funeral pyre (I.303). In Snorri’s Edda, Nanna is not burned alive on the pyre; rather she is so heartbroken at Balder’s funeral that she dies and is laid out next to him. But Arnold would have read Mallet (1809, I, 288–289) and decides to make the ritual-obsessed gods plot to kill one of their order. Balder plans Nanna’s escape, as he, appearing as a classical ghost, tells her: . . . and thee They think to burn, and all my choicest wealth, With me, for thus ordains the common rite. But it shall not be so; but mild, but swift, But painless shall a stroke from Frea come, To cut thy thread of life, and free thy soul, And they shall burn thy corpse with mine, not thee. (I.298–304)

Balder does not visit his father but instead visits Nanna and communicates with Frea, suggesting that Odin is outside the circle of activity in the poem. Hoder is usually branded as the outcast god, but in Arnold’s poem Odin is an outcast, too. He insists on “daily life,” but his own life never seems to cross paths with anyone else’s. Balder in Hell: Poetry, Prophecy, and Building the Kingdom of Heaven Arnold redefines Heaven and Odin by measuring them against Hell and Balder. Arnold shows Balder increasingly accept his place in Hell until he is empowered to give the most important prophecy in the poem, one originally spoken by a seeress in the eddic poem Völuspá (The Seeress’s Prophecy), foretelling the new kingdom of Heaven. In the Edda and in Baldrs draumar, Balder has a vague sense of prophecy; he has imprecise dreams of his death, which cause Frigg (or Frea) to secure oaths from all weapons and projectiles not to harm him. But this passive hero did nothing

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to protect himself other than tell the gods, at least in the Edda we have today. Mallet’s 1770 and 1809 versions, however, describe one way Balder fought against his fate: “Balder hath his palaces in Breidablik, and there I know are columns, upon which are engraven verses, capable of recalling the dead to life.”44 Arnold’s Balder engraves his columns with these enchantments, like a desperate man who looks for the cure of the disease he is dying from. Feebly trying to wall out his future, Balder does not want to die. After his death, he is restless in spirit; his shade tells Nanna that Hell is dreary (I.314), and he bitterly repeats to Hermod Achilles’s lines to Odysseus in the underworld (Odyssey xi.482–491), Hermod the nimble, gild me not my death! Better to live a serf, a captured man, Who scatters rushes in a master’s hall, Than be a crowned king here, and rule the dead . . . (II.264–267)

But these words apply to Heaven, too, and later he does not want to go back: For I am long since weary of your storm Of carnage, and find, Hermod, in your life Something too much of war and broils, which make Life one perpetual fight, a bath of blood. Mine eyes are dizzy with the arrowy hail; Mine ears are stunned with blows, and sick for calm. Inactive therefore let me lie, in gloom . . . (III.503–509)

Balder has realized that Hell, though a land of shadows, is the only place that provides a respite from the bipolar shift between Heaven’s empty streets and the frenetic “tilt-yard” games and force-feeding (II.30). There is no need to mourn for Balder, for the people of Hell have “crowned” him with “acceptance” and “Love” him (III.461–465). Hell is a peaceful place to rest, think, and enjoy one another’s company through “converse undisturbed” (III.346). As Balder learns, only in the kingdom of death can he find the path to a new way of life and be himself as he never could be in Heaven. It is here that he gains his clear vision of future days beyond Heaven’s darkest hour. For most Victorian medievalists, such as Morris, Ragnarok is like Armageddon: a day of judgment and apocalyptic battle in which good once and for all triumphs over evil and brings on a new golden age.45 To Arnold, though, Heaven is not pure and good but in need of cleansing, too. Heaven must die before it can be renewed, and only some gods will be reborn in the new world as if they, and not just their enemies, are the ones judged. Arnold glorifies Balder as the prophet of this age, and in a climactic visionary passage, Balder tells Hermod that after the gods and giants have destroyed


one another, a “small remnant” of gods will rebuild a new and better kingdom of Heaven, which exists even now “beyond the blue” (III.518, 525). A true golden age will dawn, with self-springing fruits, a green earth, and an ocean that is “bright” rather than, as before, an Arnoldian scene of darkness (III.528). The inhabitants too will be renewed and men . . . shall live in peace, as now in war. But we in Heaven shall find again with joy The ruined palaces of Odin, seats Familiar, halls where we have supped of old; Re-enter them with wonder, never fill Our eyes with gazing, and rebuild with tears. And we shall tread once more the well-known plain Of Ida, and among the grass shall find The golden dice wherewith we played of yore; And that will bring to mind the former life And pastime of the Gods, the wise discourse Of Odin, the delights of other days . . . (III.531–535)

This vision is found in Völuspá, but Arnold’s lines perhaps owe something to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Tegner’s Drapa” (1847), also a poem on the Balder myth celebrating a new Heaven and Earth that will be places of peace rather than blood. But Balder’s vision in Arnold is more rounded with the weight of the past, the knowledge of homes lost, gods dead. The old places become more precious in ruins than they were in their pride. Odin built the world with a murdered body; Balder and his companions will build the new world with tears and reflection. Balder’s stay in Hell seems to have given him a seeress’s vision. In his past, he dreams vague dreams of his death; now he vividly sees the green earth, “ruined palaces,” and “golden dice” in the grass. His clarity of vision brings hope to him, and he shares that hope freely with others. This new Heaven is a place worth waiting for. That its conceptual birthplace is in Hell is Arnold’s stroke of genius. The dramatic shift between the Balder of Parts II and III is possible because Arnold gives Hermod two trips to the underworld rather than just one, as in the Edda. The second time, Balder is not alone. Nanna walks arm in arm with him, and Hoder is their close friend. Arnold creates that friendship; in the Edda there is no indication that Balder and Hoder become peers until the new Heaven after Ragnarok. Indeed, Balder, Hoder, and Hermod have little to do in Norse mythology except, respectively, be killed, accidentally kill, and ride unsuccessfully to fetch Balder back. It is Arnold’s contribution to bring these gods to life by bringing them together in Hell. Balder forgives Hoder, the “fellow-sport of Lok” (III.412), showing a companionableness missing in Heaven—there are no friendships in Heaven, no

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touching (except that graze with honeysuckle that so unnerved Hermod), no intimacy beyond hacking each other up and getting roaring drunk afterward. Hell is a place where tenderness is possible, where Hoder can touch and be touched without embarrassment. When Nanna “gave their brother blind / Her hand, in turn, for guidance” she is motivated by love, not merely direction for his steps since Hoder already gets around on his own (III.550–551). Hoder dies to escape Heaven’s hate, never hoping to find love and understanding in Hell. The image of Balder, Nanna, and Hoder walking away hand in hand must have been an enviously peaceful sight to Hermod, who . . . stood beside his drooping horse, Mute, gazing after them in tears; and fain, Fain had he followed their receding steps, Though they to death were bound, and he to Heaven, Then; but a power he could not break withheld. And as a stork which idle boys have trapped, And tied him in a yard, at autumn sees Flocks of his kind pass flying o’er his head To warmer lands, and coasts that keep the sun; He strains to join their flight, and from his shed Follows them with a long complaining cry— So Hermod gazed, and yearned to join his kin. At last he sighed, and set forth back to Heaven. (III.554–566)

Hermod and Sleipnir have felt desire before, but this moment is sharper. Before they sought a beautiful place masked in fog, but detected its emptiness on arrival. Hell’s appeal is more personal. The place is gloom, but on arrival, they feel love and contentment. Even the horse sags with reluctance to leave. It is a homecoming they are allowed only to taste before banishment to Heaven, just as Arnold’s readers taste its joy before the poem ends. Balder’s gift is the gift of home. He becomes the prophet of the new Heaven, but it is a power he carried as a poet and peacemaker during his time among the gods and heroes. Again, this is Arnold’s invention. In the Edda, Balder is beautiful but not a poet or a peacemaker—his son Forseti is credited with the greatest ability to resolve conflicts (Mallet 1809, II, 60). Arnold’s Balder, however, calms the quarrels of Valhalla’s warlike bunch through his gentle words (III.85–86) and does much the same in Hell (III.465–467). His listeners hear a poetry from him that makes them forget strife and think of home, and some become disciples, like Hoder and Hermod, who feel most at home in his presence. Hermod even returns to Hell a second time, not because Frea foretells or Odin commands it, but because he wants to see Balder again. Lindow writes that in the Edda Hermod “leaves the story rather as he entered it,” but Arnold’s character is


not the mere “emissary” who drops out of the story after reporting Hela’s requirement for universal weeping.46 He wants to see the whole story through and will return to Heaven a new believer. Balder’s greatest disciple while he was in Heaven was Regner Lodbrog, whom I discussed earlier as the Viking spokesman and poster-child during the late eighteenth century who quaffs mead from skull-cups, fights fiftyone battles, and utters a joyous death song. Arnold knows his reputation, for Regner is “of the hero-troop the chief ” (III.125), and the gods honor him, the only human among the speakers of Balder’s funeral. With his poetics of love and light, Arnold’s Balder converts Regner into an entirely different man, one who rejects the literary tradition he fueled. His funeral speech is one of the most personal and beautiful moments in the poem: Balder, there yet are many Scalds in Heaven Still left, and that chief Scald, thy brother Brage, Whom we may bid to sing, though thou art gone. And all these gladly, while we drink, we hear, After the feast is done, in Odin’s hall; But they harp ever on one string, and wake Remembrance in our soul of wars alone, Such as on earth we valiantly have waged, And blood, and ringing blows, and violent death. But when thou sangest, Balder, thou didst strike Another note, and, like a bird in spring, Thy voice of joyance minded us, and youth, And wife, and children, and our ancient home. Yes, and I, too, remembered then no more My dungeon, where the serpents stung me dead, Nor Ella’s victory on the English coast— But I heard Thora laugh in Gothland Isle, And saw my shepherdess, Aslauga, tend Her flock along the white Norwegian beach. Tears started to mine eyes with yearning joy. Therefore with grateful heart I mourn thee dead. (III.132–152)

Regner, famous for his death ode, now makes that old poem ring false. For the poetry of Odin’s court is a postured poetry, in which subject matter is uniform and sentiments are scripted, a tradition that encourages men to vaunt their victories and nurse their grievances perpetually. Only Balder broke the mold; his doing so created in Regner a new poetry of peace and love. For this Arnold drew on Mallet’s account of Regner—how, after Thora died, he met his second wife, Aslauga, and fell in love with her, and married her (1809, I, 272–275). To war-torn Regner, who has known many lifetimes of death and battle, these memories seem from another world, though

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it is his “ancient home,” the world he was truly born for, rather than Heaven. Regner’s “yearning joy” is similar to Hermod’s feeling when he “yearned to join his kin.” Both are grievous emotions, yet Regner and Hermod would not trade them for Heaven’s most golden joys. Regner’s tears are among the tears that will help build the new kingdom of Heaven (III.536), and his comrade heroes who groan at Regner’s heartfelt speech do the same. Grief, which Odin has tried so hard to suppress as subversive, is the only true path to wholeness, and Hela’s demand for universal mourning is not itself evil but a twisted use of the truth. Arnold’s poem shows that things are not as they seem: Heaven is dark and empty, Odin detached and cold, the gods and heroes enslaved. It is a bleak world, but hope lies in an unexpected place, the realm of the dead. Going against the main current of Victorian medievalism, Arnold attacks the idealization of medieval times as a perfect past to hold up to a flawed present. Arnold’s gods suffer the crises attributed to Victorian times, and the slavery that Ruskin and Carlyle saw in their own era is mirrored back in Arnold’s depiction of Norse heroes in perpetual slaughter and renewal. For Arnold, medieval violence does not show vitality, and he gives it a Victorian flavor by making it a part of the humdrum “daily life” of Heaven. Arnold’s Heaven is a false paradise, but there is consolation, for Balder’s vision of the future is not false. For Victorian medievalists, the tragedy of the Balder myth is Balder’s death, but that is not so for Arnold. Balder’s death grieves the gods but reveals to them the problems in their culture, makes them aware of another way of life, and enables Balder himself to lead them to that life. Though the medieval setting shows the flaws of Victorian culture, Balder himself is a poet and guide for all ages. Notes This essay began as a collaborative project with Esther Hu of Cornell University. I thank her for our discussions on Balder Dead. I would also like to thank Dorothy Mermin of Cornell University for her invaluable assistance. 1. Alice Chandler, “Order and Disorder in the Medieval Revival,” Browning Institute Studies, 8 (1980): 1; A Dream of Order: The Medieval Ideal in Nineteenth-Century English Literature (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970). 2. See Richard Frith’s “The Worship of Courage”: William Morris’s Sigurd the Volsung and Victorian Medievalism (chapter 7, this volume). 3. Many readers of this poem have criticized it as a failure or considered the subject matter obscure, or both. Some of Arnold’s contemporaries called it “Balder Dash”; see Nicholas Murray, A Life of Matthew Arnold (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1996), 147. Warren D. Anderson thinks Arnold works “at crosspurposes with himself,” the goals set out in his 1853 preface clashing against his “inward vision”; Matthew Arnold and the Classical Tradition (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1965), 61. Dwight Culler finds that Balder Dead does


4.

5.

6. 7.

“not even have the saving grace of Sohrab and Rustum”; Imaginative Reason (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), 215. On the poem’s poor reception and obscure subject matter, see Clyde De L. Ryals, “Arnold’s Balder Dead,” Victorian Poetry 4 (1966): 67–68; Lionel Trilling, Matthew Arnold (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1939), 77–78; and Philip Raisor, “Matthew Arnold’s ‘Balder Dead’: An Exercise in Objectivity,” Studies in English Literature, 13, no. 4 (Fall 1973), 653–669; and Laurence W. Mazzeno, Matthew Arnold: The Critical Legacy (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 1999), 3. Ian Hamilton considers the Norse source tale “absurdly tall, and seems all the taller in Arnold’s unamused retelling”; A Gift Imprisoned: The Poetic Life of Matthew Arnold (London: Bloomsbury, 1998), 181. Positive responses are few: William Buckler praises Arnold’s “perceptual genius” in seeing Norse mythology through a Homeric lens; On the Poetry of Matthew Arnold (New York: New York University Press, 1982), 155. Murray comments that the poem “is in fact remarkably successful,” 147. Victorians with an interest in medievalism perhaps disregarded the poem because it did not affirm popular Victorian values or uphold medieval times as a golden age, much as Morris’ subversive “Defense of Guenevere” lacked popularity for its praise of Guenevere and criticism of Arthur’s court; Antony H. Harrison, “Medievalism and the Ideologies of Victorian Poetry,” Studies in Medievalism, 4 (1992): 223. Macpherson’s “translations” from this alleged fourth-century Scottish bard were questioned by Percy and others as soon as they were published, so Matthew Arnold knew them as a form of modern medievalism. Even so, Arnold appreciated the poetry for its “Titanism,” its fierce, melancholy power. The book moved “like a flood of lava” through the last century, and in spite of its forged elements, “there will still be left in the book a residue with the very soul of Celtic genius in it, and which has the proud distinction of having brought this soul of the Celtic genius into contact with the genius of the nations of modern Europe, and enriched all our poetry by it.” Mathew Arnold, On the Study of Celtic Literature, vol. 5, The Works of Matthew Arnold (London: Macmillan and Co., 1903), 126–127. Arnold’s defense of Ossianic poetry hints at some of his feelings for Norse poetry and its similar style, its heightening mode of expression that creates “spiritual excitement” (118), and his approval of modern poets remaking the medieval and tapping into its power. For an account of the three different editions of Northern Antiquities (1770, 1809, and 1847), translated by Percy, and the evidence behind Arnold’s familiarity with either of the first two editions but not the third at the time of composing Balder Dead, see Mary W. Schneider, “The Source of Matthew Arnold’s ‘Balder Dead’,” Notes and Queries 14 (Oxford, 1967), 56–61. She corrects C. B. Tinker and H. F. Lowry’s assertion that Arnold used the 1847 edition; The Poetry of Matthew Arnold (London: Oxford University Press, 1950), 90. Margaret Clunies Ross’s The Norse Muse in Britain, 1750–1820 (Trieste: Edizioni Parnaso, 1998), 26–27. See also Heather O’Donoghue, Old NorseIcelandic Literature: A Short Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004). When Loki must make Skadi laugh, he attaches a string to a goat’s beard and “the other end to his own body” (i.e., his testicles), “and afterward one pulled this way and the other that and both shrieked out loud.” Dasent, The Prose or Younger Edda, Commonly Ascribed to Snorri Sturluson (Stockholm: Norstedt and Sons, 1842), 90, vii.

92 / kim zarins 8. Writing in the thirteenth century, Snorri was at pains to preserve pagan myths in a way that did not offend his Christian readers (Iceland converted in A.D. 1000), yet more modern readers saw Snorri’s efforts as untrue to the myths: since the euhemeristic parts are “useless and ridiculous . . . I have not translated this absurd piece . . .” (Paul-Henri Mallet, Northern Antiquities, or a Description of the Manner, Customs, Religion and Laws of the Ancient Danes, Including Those of our Saxon Ancestors, 2 vols. [trans. Thomas Percy] from L’Introduction a l’Histoire de Dannemarc, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh, printed by C. Stewart, 1809), II, xxiii–xxiv. See also 1st edition (printed by T. Carnan and Co., London, 1770); new edition, 1 vol., ed. I. A. Blackwell (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1847). Blackwell supports Mallet’s and Percy’s decision to omit the “absurd” Prologue (378, 397). 9. See Clunies Ross, The Old Norse Poetic Translations of Thomas Percy: A New Edition and Commentary (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2001), 130. 10. Blackwell’s edition of Mallet points out the translation error in Regner’s lament in Percy, Mallet, and Robert Southey and attributes it to faulty Latin source texts. See Mallet 1770, I, 121; 1809, I, 102; 1847, 105. 11. An example of valor is when Morris’s Sigmund kills a she-wolf with his bare teeth “as a wolf of the forest” does (I.662), although in the source legend in Volsunga saga, he coaxes the wolf to taste the honey in his mouth and so bites off her tongue and kills her. Morris’s change reflects a preference for heroic action and an aversion to conquering through trickery. 12. William Morris, Sigurd the Volsung (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1994), 22–23. 13. See also Richard Polwhele, who shows Regner’s eyeballs swimming as vipers tear his limbs, yet Regner rejoices because he knows he will sit on the “festal bench” of “Balder’s hall” (40–41); “Part of the Epicedium of Regner Lodbrog,” in Poems, Chiefly By Gentlemen of Devonshire and Cornwall, II (Bath: R. Cruttwell, 1792). 14. His rejection of glamorized violence resembles Browning’s response to medieval feats of arms; Beverly Taylor, “Browning and Victorian Medievalism,” in Browning Institute Studies 8 (1980): 66. 15. Kenneth Allott, ed., Balder Dead in The Poems of Matthew Arnold (London: Longmans, 1965). 16. John Lindow, Murder and Vengeance Among the Gods: Baldr in Scandinavian Mythology (Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1997), 51. 17. Clyde De L. Ryals, “Arnold’s Balder Dead,” Victorian Poetry 4 (1966): 74. 18. Lionel Trilling, Mathew Arnold (New York: Norton, 1939): 79. 19. John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice (New York: Hurst & Co., 1851), 2 vols., 164. 20. Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present (New York: James B. Millar & Co., 1885), 6. 21. For a discussion of Ruskin’s passage, see Chandler, “Order and Disorder,” 8. 22. The myth resembles another tale (Volsunga saga, ch. 14) in which Loki kills a dwarf in otter-shape, and in repayment to the dwarf family the gods stuff and cover the corpse with cursed gold, including a magic ring tossed by Odin. Arnold was possibly drawing from this myth to cheapen and taint the display of gold at Balder’s funeral. 23. Virgil, Aeneid, VI.268–269, ed. R. Deryck Williams (Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1998); trans. C. Day Lewis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). 24. “The earth is round, and about it is placed the deep sea; the shores of which were given for a dwelling to the Giants. But higher up, in a place equally distant


25. 26.

27. 28.

29. 30. 31. 32.

33. 34.

35.

36. 37. 38.

39.

on all sides from the sea, the Gods built upon the earth a fortress against the Giants . . .” (Mallet, Northern Antiquities, 1770, II, 23–24; 1809, II, 17). Harrison discusses “Dover Beach” as an overlooked medievalist poem; 228–229. Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero Worship, and the Heroic in History (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966), 7, 27. See also Mallet, whose Norsemen “subsist in full vigor and maturity, even during the infancy of reason” (Northern Antiquities, 1770, II, 268). Carlyle, On Heroes, 29. See also Robert Southey, “The Race of Odin,” in The Poetical Works (Paris: A. & W. Galignani, 1829), 711. Peter Mortensen discusses the political allegory of modern revolutionary wars in Southey’s poem, “The Descent of Odin: Wordsworth, Scott, and Southey Among the Norsemen,” in Romanticism (Edinburgh) 6, no. 2 (2000): 211–233. See Andrew Wawn, “Samuel Laing, Heimskringla and the Victorian ‘Berserker School’, ” in Anglo-Scandinavian Cross-Currents, ed. Inga-Stina Ewbank (Norwich, UK: Norvik Press, 1999), 44–45. See Carlyle, On Heroes, 19. Carlyle, On Heroes, 19. See Anne Varty, “Carlyle and Odin,” in Anglo-Scandinavian Cross-Currents, ed. Inga-Stina Ewbank (Norwich, United Kingdom: Norvik Press, 1999), 62–63. Carlyle’s source is Mallet, whose 1809 commentary on Odin treats him as a historical ruler of the North who “made great changes in the government, manners and religion” and “had divine honors paid him” (Northern Antiquities, 1809, 1, 50). See Ian Hamilton, A Gift Imprisoned, 181–182. Also see Anderson: “[Norse literature’s] ethos is boisterous, energetic, crudely powerful, and he [Arnold] has been accused of failing utterly to do it justice; yet he made a clear attempt to do so” (Mathew Arnold, 59). This implies that Arnold tried to make his gods behave grandly but missed the mark because of his poetic “temperament.” Arnold invents this scene, but it would not be the first time in Norse mythology Lidskialf was used to see what one wishes to see. When the fertility God Frey gazes from the spot, he sees a beautiful giantess, and smitten with desire for her, gives his sword to his servant as the price for having her brought to him. This unthinking action, explains Snorri, is why Frey will be ill-armed at the time of Ragnarok and meet his death there. Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, 2 vols., 162 in vol. 2. Homer, Iliad, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin, 1991), book 23. Odin whispers to Balder in Vafrudnismal, 54 and the Gestumblinda gatur. For a critical discussion, see Lindow, Murder and Vengeance, 45–46. Arnold may have seen a translation, such as A. S. Cottle’s Song of Vafthrudnis from Icelandic Poetry or The Edda of Saemund (Bristol: N. Biggs, 1797). A number of scholars have profitably read aspects of Arnold’s relationship to his father with his poetry, especially Sohrab and Rustum. See James Najarian, “ ‘Curled minion, dancer, coiner of sweet words’: Keats, Dandyism, and Sexual Indeterminacy in Sohrab and Rustum,” Victorian Poetry 35, no. 1 (Spring 1997): 23–42. Park Honan remarks that Balder Dead arose from Arnold knowing “he

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40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

cannot live his father’s life,” much as Arnold’s Balder cannot be like Odin and the other gods: Matthew Arnold: A Life (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1981), 286. Honan describes how Sohrab “fights to discover—and protect— a psychic self ” (281), yet this is what Odin does, rather than passive Balder. Odin’s insistence on “daily life” is a determination to keep fighting for a rigid stability, whereas Balder accepts his fate and the redefinition it brings. The name “Whirlwind” suggests Arnold used an earlier edition of Mallet (1770 and 1809), which includes a few kennings and epithets including Freya’s golden tears and combat as a “bath of blood” (1770, II, 190–191; 1809, II, 142). Tacitus, The Agricola and the Germania, trans. H. Mattingly (New York: Penguin, 1970), ch. 9, 108. Mallet confirms the connection between Odin and Mercury and explains that Odin’s Day (Wednesday) in Latin was Dies Mercurii, hence Mercredi (1809, I, 77). H. R. Ellis Davidson describes Odin as psychopomp, god of the dead, and the inspiration for battle and poetry, Gods and Myths of Northern Europe (New York: Penguin, 1990), 140–147. Clyde De L. Ryals, “Arnold’s Balder Dead,” 72. Linda Georgianna, “Carlyle and Jocelin of Brakelond: A Chronicle Rechronicled,” Browning Institute Studies, 8 (1980): 103–125. See Mallet, Northern Antiquities, 49. Alice Chandler, A Dream of Order, 218. John Lindow, Murder and Vengeance Among the Gods, 126.

Chapter Five Lessons from the Medieval Convent: Adelaide Procter’s “A Legend of Provence” Christine A. Colón

In 1855, the poet Adelaide Procter joined Barbara Bodichon, Bessie Rayner Parkes, and other women to gather signatures and lobby Parliament to support the Married Women’s Property Act. Even though this petition eventually failed, the process of collecting the signatures proved to have long-term benefits, for, as Bessie Rayner Parkes acknowledges in “A Review of the Last Six Years,” “people interested in the question were brought into communication in all parts of the kingdom, and . . . the germs of an effective movement were scattered far and wide.”1 The core group of these women became known as the Langham Place Circle, which has been called “the first organized feminist group” in Britain.2 Together, these women (who would also come to include Jessie Boucherette and Emily Faithfull) founded the English Woman’s Journal and the Society for Promoting the Employment of Women (SPEW). Procter eagerly embraced the activism of the Langham Place Circle. Not only was she a member from its inception, but she also became an important force behind SPEW. According to Jessie Boucherette, “In almost every committee there is a leading person, an animating spirit, some one, in fact, who does more than a fair share of work and does it well, and thus gains influence over the rest; this was the part taken by Miss Procter.”3 As secretary of SPEW, Procter would have become very familiar with the desperate plight of many middle-class women in her society, for the number of women seeking employment quickly overwhelmed their resources. Parkes records that the women working in the office, “may certainly lay claim to have heard more of women’s wants during the last year than any other people in the kingdom.”4 Through her involvement with the

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Langham Place Circle, Procter gained extensive knowledge of the “Woman Question,” and the knowledge compelled Procter to continue to fight for women’s rights both through her activism and through her poetry. Procter’s activism, however, was motivated not simply by her connection to the Langham Place Circle but also by her strong Catholic faith. Procter had made the radical decision to convert to Catholicism in 1851 during a time of intense anti-Catholicism that followed the so-called Papal Aggression of 1850,5 and throughout the rest of her life, she was deeply interested in the plight of her fellow Catholics within Protestant England. Procter’s concern was not simply for the Catholics of her own class who had faced persecution but also for those of the lower class who were suffering from much more serious problems. As a result of the famine in Ireland, London was full of Irish-Catholic immigrants who desperately needed help just to survive. Procter addresses this problem directly in her final collection of poetry, A Chaplet of Verses, which was published to raise funds for the Providence Row Night Refuge for homeless women and children. In the introduction to this volume, Procter reminds her readers that “the very poorest and most destitute are in many cases Catholics,”6 and she asks them to help alleviate the problem with their donations. Although her work with the Langham Place Circle allowed her to see the difficulties suffered by middle-class women, her work for Catholic charities enabled her to see the even more extreme plight suffered by lower-class women within Victorian society. Procter’s conversion to Catholicism and her membership in the Langham Place Circle compelled her to acknowledge the inequities of Victorian society that many tried to ignore, and throughout much of her poetry, Procter combines the discourse of practical feminism with the tenets of Catholicism to create a coherent philosophy of active compassion, which she believes will reform Victorian society. Interestingly, in one of her clearest representations of this philosophy, “A Legend of Provence,” she turns to the medieval convent as a model of the values she believes can transform her society. For Procter, the medieval convent recalls a time when all of society was infused with Catholicism and when individuals were held together with communal values that compelled them to care for others who were not part of their immediate family. In this poem, the convent provides not only a place of empowerment for women but also a return to the truly radical possibilities of redemption through the Catholic Church, and it, therefore, becomes a perfect symbol of the change Procter believes is necessary. By examining several of her shorter poems to see how Procter conceives of the problems facing her society and then turning to “A Legend of Provence” to explore the type of activism she is advocating, we can begin to see not only the importance that medieval Catholicism held for Procter but also the hope she had that it could be used to transform Victorian society.

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Much of Procter’s poetry explores the problems that she sees in the world around her, and she focuses on two key dangers that mirror her involvement with the Langham Place Circle and with Catholic charities: the inequities between men and women in romantic relationships and the plight of the homeless. One truth of Victorian society, which Procter saw repeatedly in her work with the Langham Place Circle, was that middle-class women had very few alternatives to marriage. The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw the growth of domestic ideology in which women were given the “important” task of reforming the public sphere through their personal influence on their husbands and children.7 By the mid-nineteenth century, when Procter was writing, this ideology had reached its height, and with the publication of Coventry Patmore’s poem from 1854 to 1863, these women also received their title: “Angel in the House.” Although some have argued that this ideology could potentially give women more power in society than they had achieved in the past,8 women could only achieve this power by remaining under the protection of the home and maintaining their moral superiority. As the 1851 Census indicated, however, not all women would have the opportunity to be married, for there were simply not enough men. The “angel in the house” might be a powerful moral force, but for middleclass women compelled to leave the private sphere in order to make a living, she became an encumbrance.9 This lack of opportunity for many middle-class women put them in a very vulnerable position not only in society but also in romantic relationships, for most middle-class women were desperate to find a husband so that they would not be compelled to face the dangerous inequities of the Victorian workforce. Ironically, the idea of romantic love rather than economic considerations as a basis for marriage began to grow around this same time.10 Like domestic ideology, itself, this idea of romantic love that began to circulate around the courtship ritual could seemingly provide women with a great deal of power, allowing them to choose a husband based on love. This hope in romantic love, however, was countered by an economic reality that revealed just how illusory this power was for women. Men had a larger number of partners to choose from and were able to support themselves even if they chose to remain single, so they, ultimately, had the power in romantic relationships. In addition, despite being the supposed solution to all their problems, marriage did not necessarily make women any more secure. As the failure of the Married Women’s Property Act reiterated, once married, women had to relinquish themselves and their money to their husbands. This focus on romantic love and domestic ideology seemingly provided women with power, but it actually obscured their precarious position in society. Throughout her poetry, Procter highlights this risk by presenting romantic relationships as negotiations for power


where women must be extremely careful to protect themselves instead of simply surrendering either to romantic ideals or desperation, and she sets the stage for her solution in which the medieval convent (a place of community, sanctuary, and empowerment) becomes the model for a type of society in which women are valued for who they are outside the domestic sphere thereby allowing them the freedom to remain single. In her poem “Too Late,” Procter reveals the dangers of a woman giving her heart to a man who is not worthy of it, for the woman in this poem is both deserted by her lover and disowned by her family. In a world that values women primarily for their roles as wives and mothers within the domestic sphere, she has become an outcast for giving her heart and perhaps her virginity to a man who abandons her and leaves her vulnerable to society’s scorn and her own despair. Without any other options, she discovers that “restless, helpless, hopeless, / Was her bitter part.”11 As she is dying, her family finally brings her home, but her story still remains tragic. The woman, who has spent many years desperately waiting to hear from the man who left her, dies just before his letter reaches her. Victorian society denied most women the opportunity to support themselves and told them that they should marry, yet as Procter reveals, finding happiness in romantic love is very uncertain and women must be very careful. This need for caution is expressed most clearly in her poem “A Warning” in which an older woman warns a young lady, “Do not venture all, child, / In one frail, weak heart” (116). Love here is not a romantic state in which women may lose themselves. Instead, it is a power struggle in which women must be careful not to relinquish any of the limited power they have. The speaker of this poem counsels, “Measure all you give, still / Counting what you take; / Love for love, so placing / Each an equal stake,” and even then, she warns that in order to be safe, the young lady must “Trust no prayer or promise; / Words are grains of sand: / To keep your heart unbroken, / Hold it in your hand” (116, 117). This practical view of love acknowledges the realities of Victorian society, but even the speaker realizes that it is a difficult one to accept. She reveals that she, herself, did not learn the lesson in time, and she knows that her words are probably in vain. But still she strives to avert the dangers that she has experienced. Procter, as well, uses her poetry to attempt to warn her readers. With these poems, Procter compels her readers to recognize the inequities of her society and presents the realities that the myth of romantic love helps to obscure. Procter, however, is not simply concerned with the predicament of middle-class women. She is also troubled by the plight of the lower class, particularly those who have become homeless, and interestingly, she proposes that one of the sources of this problem is the same as that which endangers middle-class women: domestic ideology. Proponents of domestic


ideology hoped that the supposed moral influence of the private sphere would ultimately transform the public sphere by restraining the excessive selfishness of capitalism. Sarah Stickney Ellis, for instance, proposes that through his wife’s influence, a husband would learn to check his “inborn selfishness” and “worldly pride” in his interactions in “the mart, the exchange, or the public assembly” thereby limiting the dangers of the free enterprise system.12 Procter, however, reveals that this division between public and private may actually enhance certain social problems rather than alleviate them, for it often provides justification for an economic structure that places the poor in danger. In a society divided securely between the complacent domestic sphere and the greedy marketplace, the poor are easily forgotten. Just as with her poems on romantic relationships, in these poems Procter continues to set the stage for her ultimate solution found in the values of the medieval convent in which human interaction is not founded on the tenets of capitalism but rather on a vision of community, which embraces individuals outside the family unit as part of the family of Christ.13 In her poem “Homeless,” Procter’s critique of capitalism and domestic ideology is quite clear. The poem begins at “cold, dark midnight” when the speaker hears the “patter of tiny feet.”14 She asks, “Is it one of your dogs, fair lady, / Who whines in the bleak cold street?” (247). The answer that the speaker receives to this question reveals the smug security of a domestic sphere that cares more for its pets than for poverty-stricken children: My dogs sleep warm in their baskets, Safe from the darkness and snow; All the beasts in our Christian England, Find pity wherever they go— (Those are only the homeless children Who are wandering to and fro). (247)

The woman who replies seems appalled that the speaker could even imagine that she would leave her dogs out in the storm, but she easily dismisses the homeless children as an afterthought. Theoretically, the domestic ideology of the Victorian era proposed that the morality of the domestic sphere would protect society from the excesses of the public sphere, but here the compassion that should flow from the domestic sphere is given to the dogs rather than the children. If this is the “moral domesticity” that is expected to protect individuals from an amoral public sphere, society is definitely in trouble. Not only does this “moral domesticity” create a situation in which homeless children must wander the streets, but it also fails to restrain the greed of the economic sphere, which is just as oblivious to the needs of the poor. As the speaker continues through the streets, she sees an object


propped up against a wall and wonders, “Can that be a pack which a Pedler [sic] / Has left and forgotten there?” (247). She soon realizes her mistake, for “goods in our thrifty England / Are not left to lie and grow rotten, / For each man knows the market value / Of silk or woollen or cotton” (247). But how much is human life worth? Obviously, in this society it is not worth as much as any of these goods, for this homeless person is left “lying out unsheltered” (247). The speaker concludes, “in counting the riches of England / I think our Poor are forgotten” (247). The problems of Victorian society, however, extend even further, for in “The Homeless Poor” Procter illustrates that even the Church, the last refuge of the poor, has become oblivious to their plight.15 As the angel of prayers travels through London on Christmas Eve searching for prayers to bring to God, he encounters a church where “Hushed in reverent awe, a faithful throng / Have this night adored the Holy Presence, / Worshipping with incense, prayer, and song.”16 The angel of prayers is pleased with this congregation until the angel of deeds reveals that “not far from where [he] plucked this garland / Is a squalid place in ghastly gloom / [. . .] / There the rats and vermin herd together. . . . / There God’s poor ones sometimes come to sleep” (229). The charity that should flow from this “faithful throng” is missing, for these “devout” Christians retreat to their church and ignore the homeless who are forced to shelter in the “ghastly gloom.” Earlier, the angel of deeds had asked the angel of prayers, “Will [God] prize mere words of love and honor / While His Homeless Poor are left to die?” (228), emphasizing the gap between the professions of the faithful that allow them to feel “holy” and the actions that reveal their true sinfulness. With this image of the Church, Procter reveals how dangerous this hypocrisy can be, for many of the homeless are threatened not only with physical death in the “slow darkness” of the “dismal river” as they give in to their hopelessness, but also with spiritual death as they die never knowing the hope of spiritual salvation. Procter’s condemnation of the injustices of her society, which was very pointed when discussing the plight of middle-class women, becomes even more intense as she reveals the even more desperate plight of the destitute and condemns the domestic sphere, the economic sphere, and the Church for their unconcern. Procter, however, does not simply present these problems in her poetry and then leave her readers in despair. She also begins to search for an answer, and for Procter, the answer begins with the Catholic Church, not the hypocritical Victorian Church that she criticizes in “The Homeless Poor” but the medieval Catholic Church from which England separated itself. For Procter, the English Reformation did immense damage to the spiritual life of the nation. By shifting the established religion from Catholicism to Anglicanism and relegating Catholics to the margins of society, the


Reformation hindered the work of what Procter considers to be the true church and also restructured society in a way that allowed for the onset of the capitalism and domestic ideology that Procter believes to be so damaging. For Procter, the medieval church comes to represent a set of values that she believes are necessary to transform Victorian society. Admittedly, Procter’s view of the medieval church and of the convent is a romantic one rather than a realistic one. She never addresses the problems of the medieval church, representing it instead as the ideal model that England abandoned. For her, the image of what has been lost is more important than the reality of what was. Perhaps this is one reason why she presents her view of the convent as a legend. What she seeks is the legendary beauty of the medieval church rather than the reality of it, but she does hope that the values she associates with the medieval church will eventually be embraced by Victorian society with wonderful results. Most practically, Procter sees the medieval convent as providing a place for women outside the domestic sphere, a place where they may be valued even if they are not wives and mothers, but even beyond that, the medieval convent also provides a model of community both within the convent and between the convent and the surrounding neighborhood that not only allows for but compels compassionate connections beyond the immediate family. Procter chooses to set her poem in France where, as Mary Skinner relates in her study of Benedictine nuns in France, monasteries (particularly the Cluniac communities) were “[m]odeled on the family,” creating ties not by blood but rather by shared devotion and purpose, and these communities “[were] supposed to live in unity and love, reaching out to inspire others and draw them in, while maintaining a precarious independence of outside interference.”17 Their separation from the rest of society allowed them to create new ties and see family relationships in a much wider sense as they embraced the different members within their communities. The sense of community, however, was not simply reserved for those cloistered within the convent walls, for medieval convents also played an important role in the larger community. As Skinner relates, “Religious houses helped keep the peace, provided lodging for travelers, and protected the poor. They governed many people and administered the economy of extensive lands. . . . Women’s monasteries provided education for girls, offered second careers for widows and wives, and an alternative to marriage for young girls. They were centers of liturgical revival and religious renewal for entire provinces.”18 Although there were certainly many differences between the French and the English convents as there were from convent to convent within both countries, Procter uses her image of the French convent to illustrate the possibilities of community that no longer existed in the same way in England after the Reformation. With the destruction of the monasteries


and the relegation of Catholicism to the outskirts of English society, the Reformation radically changed this communal structure of society, leaving a gap that, in Procter’s mind, was not being filled by the Victorian Church, the domestic sphere, or the economic sphere. Procter, however, finds worth not simply in the communal values that she associates with the medieval Catholic Church. She also longs for a return to a belief in the mystical and miraculous. For Procter, Catholicism is, at heart, a mystical religion in which the amazing power of God and the Virgin Mary can miraculously transform individuals. Interestingly, in the mid-nineteenth century as theologians in England were debating the value of Higher Criticism and the need to reevaluate the Bible according to more scientific principles, Marian visitations to the faithful in France were increasing with the Virgin Mary being seen in Paris in 1830, in La Salette in 1846, and in Lourdes in 1858. Not everyone was willing to concede defeat in their championing of the miraculous, and Procter’s poetry demonstrates the value she places on the supernatural works of God. Throughout her poetry, she emphasizes the amazing powers of Mary that were being rejected by many in the modern Anglican Church in their search for the logical and rational,19 and, as we will see in “A Legend of Provence” she uses the figure of Mary to represent the incredible transformation that anyone can receive through Catholicism. For Procter, belief in the supernatural power of God is a necessary foundation for social transformation, and the nineteenthcentury Anglican Church was being drawn further and further away from this belief. For Procter, then, the medieval Catholic Church represents all that she sees missing in her society. She longs for a world in which Catholicism is not relegated to the periphery but is instead an integral part of everyone’s life and in which a more communal society takes the focus away from the domestic sphere, allowing women to have important roles outside of the home and compelling individuals to care for everyone within their communities. And she also longs for a world that accepts the miraculous works of God through the Virgin Mary and allows for individuals to be completely transformed by His grace. Her poem, “The Jubilee of 1850,” is perhaps her strongest statement of her desires, for here Procter argues that the Catholic Church is the only pure form of Christianity and urges England to return to the true faith it once embraced. She reminds her readers that England was once “the Isle of Saints” and “Our Lady’s Dower” and asks that the faithful “[p]ray that her vast Cathedrals, / Deserted, empty, bare, / May once more echo accents / Of Love, and Faith, and Prayer.”20 Procter fears that God may have forsaken England upon the Reformation, crying “Look on her ruined Altars; / He dwelleth there no more” (210), and she prays for a return of the medieval church that represents the vital Christianity for


which she longs. Ultimately, Procter still has faith that Catholicism will once again become influential in England and will be able to transform society if individuals embrace these spiritual and communal values, and in her poem “A Legend of Provence,” she expresses her ideas very clearly. Here, Procter uses the medieval convent as an example of the type of redemption that is available to all individuals in Victorian society if they will only return to their medieval Catholic roots and accept the religious truths of Catholicism, but even more specifically, she proposes that by returning to this true Christianity, Victorian society will be able to address the inequities that place both the middle-class woman and the homeless in danger. Procter’s “A Legend of Provence” was originally published in 1859 under the title “The Ghost in the Picture Room” in the Christmas number of Charles Dickens’s All the Year Round. In this number, titled “The Haunted House,” Dickens creates a frame story in which a group of friends visiting a supposedly haunted house are given the task of reporting any strange occurrences that they observe. Dickens creates a fictional version of each of his authors and christens Procter as “Belinda Bates,” a young woman he describes as “ ‘go[ing] in’ . . . for Woman’s mission, Woman’s rights, Woman’s wrongs, and everything that is Woman’s with a capital W. . . .”21 In the narrative, Dickens gently mocks Procter for her feminist concerns and at the conclusion of the tale marries Belinda off to “Alfred Starling” who he believes will temper her poetic temperament. Starling has previously been described as “a young fellow who pretends to be ‘fast’ . . . but who is much too good and sensible for that nonsense, and who would have distinguished himself before now, if his father had not unfortunately left him a small independence of two hundred a year, on the strength of which his only occupation in life has been to spend six.”22 By pairing her with Starling, Dickens provides Belinda with the appropriate Victorian conclusion, for while young women might dabble in social concerns, ultimately their goal was to be married—even if they were submitting themselves to the control of young spendthrifts who, although supposedly “good and sensible,” had yet to manifest those qualities. Ironically, despite Dickens’s implicit support of the status quo as far as women’s roles are concerned, Procter’s contribution to the volume presents perhaps her clearest vision of the need to transform Victorian society so that women of all classes are no longer victimized. Belinda’s “ghost” story is inspired by a portrait of a nun that is hanging in her room. As she gazes at the portrait in the flickering firelight, she travels in her imagination to the south of France “[w]here first the old chivalric lays were sung; / Where earliest smiled that gracious child of France / Angel and knight and fairy, called Romance.”23 With this introduction to her poem, Procter prepares her readers for a lush, romantic tale of medieval France, but


she begins not with the traditional knight and lady but with a medieval convent, which becomes the central image of the poem. As Procter describes the convent, she emphasizes its important role both in ordering medieval society and in empowering the women who choose to become nuns. The convent is clearly the center of the community, for “that bell, which still rings out to-day, / Bid all the country rise, or eat, or pray” (106). Medieval life in this town is structured around the convent’s bell, for all within hearing live according to the rhythms of the convent. The influence of the convent, however, extends even further into the community. These nuns are not shadowy figures cloistered behind the walls of an impenetrable convent. Instead, the Abbess and the nuns are active in the outside community and help it to function properly.24 The Abbess settles “cottage strife or village brawl” and comforts “[y]oung hearts that came, weighed down by love or wrong.”25 The pilgrims and beggars that pass by are granted food and shelter, and the nuns use the “deepest mysteries of the healing art” to care for those in the surrounding areas (106). We soon discover that Angela, the main character in this poem, is an orphan who had “[n]o home, no love, no kindred” until she was adopted by the nuns (107). These women play an integral role in their community, and Procter accentuates this vital role by concluding her opening image with a couplet that summarizes their actions: “strife, love, sorrow, good and evil fate, / Found help and blessing at the convent gate” (106). With these images, Procter emphasizes the valuable role that the convent plays, for it empowers single women and allows them to minister directly to their community. Procter also emphasizes the joy that these women find within their vocation. These nuns are not bitter, careworn women who begrudge the help that they give. They embrace their lives and express their joy with the creativity of song, floral decorations, and embroidery. The poem is full of the creative devotions they offer up to God. Their vesper hymns fill the air. They decorate Mary’s altar throughout the year with the “battalion on battalion” of flowers that thrive around the convent, and at Easter “the chapel sh[ines]” with “Banners, Vestments, gold, and colors bright” (107, 108). Their joyful devotion to God reveals both the force that empowers their social action and the joy that they receive from enacting it. Through their devotion to God, these women have been granted the opportunity to choose a vocation other than marriage, and they and the community are thriving as a result.26 For readers steeped in the ideals of Victorian domesticity, this image of the convent may have been difficult to accept. As Susan P. Casteras reveals in “Virgin Vows: The Early Victorian Artists’ Portrayal of Nuns and Novices,” art in the Victorian age often represented the convent not as a means of empowerment for women but rather as a place where beautiful, young


virgins were denied their “true” vocations as wives and mothers.27 In addition, as Frank H. Wallis points out, the convent became an important symbol for nineteenth-century, anti-Catholic rhetoric.28 He quotes from the Select Committee on Public Petitions (1852) in which a group of Protestant women condemn convents, claiming that the Catholics work upon the excitable feelings of the young, the inexperienced, and enthusiastic, decoying them from the bosom of their families, tearing asunder the ties of nature, stripping them of their property, keeping them under unwholesome restraint, separating them from the duties to which nature has called them, both public and private; immuring them for life within walls, bolts, and guards, without the possibility of appeal, redress, or liberty, should they desire it; under the irresponsible power of priests, who have in so many instances abused that power to the most unworthy ends. (191–192)

In nineteenth-century England, the convent carried with it all of these negative connotations. With Sister Angela’s story, Procter addresses this issue directly and asks her readers to evaluate the opening image of the convent and determine its true value in light of Angela’s experiences. As the “Convent Child” reared by the nuns, Angela has embraced her life: Of all the nuns, no heart was half so light, No eyelids veiling glances half as bright, No step that glided with such noiseless feet, No face that looked so tender or so sweet, No voice that rose in choir so pure, so clear, No heart to all the others half so dear, So surely touched by others’ pain or woe, (Guessing the grief her life could not know,) No soul in childlike faith so undefiled.29

Angela seems to be the perfect nun. When she is placed in charge of a wounded foreign knight, however, she begins to doubt her vocation. She is suddenly exposed to stories of a world she has never known, and she eventually leaves the convent in the company of the knight with whom she has fallen in love. Here, Angela’s story seems to contradict the opening image of the convent as a thriving and fulfilling community of women. By leaving the convent, Angela seems to be searching for fulfillment that she cannot find within the cloister. Is the convent, then, truly a place of empowerment for women as the opening image proposes, or is it rather, as most Victorian art and literature suggests, a prison that denies them the experiences of the outside world? Angela’s flight would initially seem to imply that she has finally discovered the “true” domestic vocation that the convent had tried to deny her.


Procter, however, is not simply replicating the conventional convent tale. Although Angela’s flight does imply that there is something lacking, the fault lies not within the convent but in Angela’s circumstances that have denied her the ability to choose her life. The other nuns have had the opportunity to choose their vocations based on their experiences in the outside world. Angela has not had this same opportunity because, as an orphan, she has grown up in the convent and known no other options. With this character, then, Procter highlights the importance of choice and experience as a basis for vocation, but ultimately, she still reaffirms this vocation as a positive choice, particularly in response to the dangerous inequities of the outside world that Angela will soon encounter. In her recounting of the tale, Procter reveals that Angela’s lack of experience is what makes her so vulnerable. Because Angela has known no other world, she is easily intrigued by the knight’s stories of “the glories of his past; / Tourney, and joust, and pageant bright and fair” (109). She is tempted by this “the glorious world of joy” and finds all “[t]ransfigured in the golden mist of love” (109). Since Angela does not yet have the knowledge from which to evaluate his claims and protect herself, she becomes caught up in the emotions of romantic love. She believes his stories and his professions of love, and as she escapes with him to the outside world, she expects a future of complete happiness and fulfillment. Angela has been happy in her convent life, but when the knight tempts her with his love and the wonders of the outside world, she cannot resist. She desires to experience this world, and Procter reveals that Angela cannot make a true choice of her vocation until she knows what she is choosing. As Procter continues the story, she emphasizes the inequities of the outside world that make the convent a positive choice for many women. Once Angela leaves the convent, she is immediately confronted with the realities that the knight did not reveal: the fickleness of men’s devotion and the difficulties of a single woman providing for herself. The “glorious world” that Angela expected quickly becomes “cold” and “bleak.” Rather than reveling in a life of blissful, romantic love with the knight, she “saw, each day and hour, more worthless grown / The heart for which she cast away her own / And her soul learnt, through bitterest inward strife, / The slight, frail love for which she wrecked her life” (110). As Procter has revealed previously in her poetry, romantic love can be very dangerous for women, and with the character of Angela, Procter illustrates how extreme those dangers may be. Procter does not detail the specifics of the disintegration of the relationship, but soon Angela is alone, trying to survive in a world where she has very few options. Although this world might excuse the sexual indiscretions of a young knight, it certainly does not forgive such indiscretions in a young lady. The knight disappears back to his previous


life, but Angela is forced to face the scorn society has for rejected women. Although Procter never states it directly, we may assume that Angela eventually resorts to prostitution in order to survive, for as time passes, “she [grows] reckless more and more, / Until the humblest peasant closed his door” (110). The glorious future with the knight is gone. Instead, Angela must learn how to live in a world that lacks compassion for any woman who has not lived a blameless life. Procter reminds her readers how cruel society can be, asking, “would even the tenderest heart / Now stoop to take so poor an outcast’s part?” (110). Not only has Angela’s life been destroyed by the myth of romantic love, but now she is also a homeless outcast whom her society ignores. With the character of Angela, Procter combines the two concerns we have seen previously in her poetry and illustrates how easily a woman may fall into despair in a world that grants her so few opportunities. She uses this story, however, not simply to contrast the terrible repercussions of social inequities in society with the joyful empowerment women may find within the convent, but also to demonstrate how the spiritual and communal values of the medieval convent may be used both to aid those who have suffered and to begin to transform society, itself, so that women will no longer have to face these inequities. Angela’s experiences in the outside world have left her “[w]eary and worn—her comrades, chill remorse / And black despair” (110), and she finally realizes what she gave up by leaving the convent. She longs to return and knows that even though she is no longer the Angela they once knew, the nuns will care for her no matter what her condition is. And she is correct. When she crawls to the convent gate and cries, “Take me in, / . . . Sister Monica, from sin, / And sorrow, and despair, that will not cease; / O take me in, and let me die in peace!,” Sister Monica gives her “soothing words” and goes to get the key to the gate (111). Unlike the “humblest peasant” who closed his door to her or the “fair dames” who “[s]huddered, and drew their rustling robes aside” when she passed (110), the nuns will provide food, healing, and comfort. Through this image, Procter reaffirms the value of the convent, for it stands in contrast to the rest of society as a place that provides both empowerment for single women as they actively support their community and hope for the outcasts of society who have been abandoned by everyone else. Procter was certainly not alone in turning to the idea of the convent as empowering for women. Following in the tradition of eighteenth-century writers such as Mary Astell and Sarah Scott, many in nineteenth-century England had begun to wonder if single women could effectively come together in Anglican sisterhoods, and these sisterhoods began to be established as early as 1845.30 Anna Jameson, a friend and mentor to Procter as well as several of the other women in the Langham Place Circle, was a vocal


supporter of these sisterhoods. In Sisters of Charity, she states, “We require in our country the recognition—the public recognition,—by law as well as by opinion, of the woman’s privilege to share in the communion of labour at her own free choice, and the foundation of institutions which shall train her to do her work well.”31 As Jameson searches for a tradition of women’s work to embrace, she acknowledges that the only formal institution that has allowed single women to pursue their vocation outside the family is the Catholic Church. Jameson (perhaps thinking of Procter and her sisters who had converted a few years before this text was written) wonders, “Why is it that we see so many women carefully educated going over to the Roman Catholic Church? For no other reason but for the power it gives them to throw their energies into a sphere of definite utility under the control of a high religious responsibility” (101). Although Jameson sees the value and appeal of this tradition, she, as a Protestant, is uncomfortable with the idea of the Catholic convent “as a purely religious establishment, subservient to a hierarchy” (17). She proposes a Protestant version of the Sisters of Charity in which women will be trained for different occupations but will not be under the authority of the Pope. By providing a way for young, single, Protestant women to engage in meaningful work, Jameson, like Procter, hopes to improve her society by expanding opportunities for the many single women within Victorian Britain and allowing them to share “the communion of labour” that is needed in order for society to develop. Jameson (like many other Victorian reformers) does not, however, focus on the spiritual life of these women. Although Jameson links her ideas both to the historic Catholic convent and to Protestant Christianity, she is clearly more concerned with vocational training than religious training, envisioning “a place where women could obtain a sort of professional education.”32 Procter has a very different perspective. As we have seen, in “A Legend of Provence,” Procter does emphasize the empowerment that a convent could give to single women, but her belief in the power of Catholicism stretches much further than that. She is not interested in a “sisterhood” that simply focuses on professional vocations but rejects its Catholic foundation. For her, Catholicism is much more than simply a way to “throw [her] energies into a sphere of definite utility.” Medieval Catholicism with its central role in society, its communal values, and its acceptance of the miraculous is integral to Procter’s vision of transformation, and Procter uses the convent as a symbol not only of female empowerment but also of the remarkable redemption offered to everyone through Catholicism. When Angela returns to the convent, she is saved not simply by the ministry of the nuns who come to her aid but rather by a miracle in which she is utterly transformed by the work of the Virgin Mary. As Sister Monica leaves Angela at the gate in order to retrieve the key, Angela is confronted


with a vision. She sees “[a] face that came from long, long years ago: / Herself; yet not as when she fled away, / The young and blooming novice, fair and gay, / But a grave woman, gentle and serene.”33 As she gazes at the face, she realizes that this vision is “what she might have been” if she had not left the convent. Upon this recognition, the vision changes, and Angela suddenly realizes that this “figure with a circle round its head, / A ring of glory; and a face, so meek, / So soft, so tender” is the Virgin Mary (112). As Angela calls out for aid, Mary reveals the miracle that will transform Angela’s life, for Mary has taken Angela’s place all these years. No one knows that she has been gone, and she may step back into her old life without suffering any repercussions for her actions outside the convent. Instantly, the “poor beggar” is gone and is replaced by the gentle, serene Sister Angela. Through her recounting of this miracle, Procter reveals the incredible redemption available to everyone through Catholicism. Angela is not simply forgiven and given hope that once in heaven she will be able to escape the sin and shame that continue to mark her on earth. Both the sin and the shame are erased completely. Procter emphasizes this fact, for in her words to Angela, Mary reminds her of the incredibly powerful deliverance offered by God: Kind hearts are here; yet would the tenderest one Have limits to its mercy: God has none. And man’s forgiveness may be true and sweet But yet he stoops to give it. More complete Is Love that lays forgiveness at thy feet, And pleads with thee to raise it. Only Heaven Means crowned, not vanquished, when it says, “Forgiven!” (112)

The nuns in the convent are kind and helpful, but even they cannot offer the complete redemption that God can: redemption that returns the sinner to what she might have been if she had not fallen. While Jameson may see religious devotion as incidental to the empowerment of women and may even fear the influence of Catholicism on Protestant England, Procter embraces Catholicism, proposing that only through God’s redemption can all women truly be free. This belief allows her to create a truly radical portrait of a “fallen” woman. In Victorian England, prostitutes had little opportunity to rejoin society. In her discussion of the Anglican sisterhoods, Martha Vicinus reveals that even when penitent prostitutes went to one of the Houses of Mercy run by the sisters, “[t]hey were never ‘forgiven,’ nor expected to forget their sin; they could not go back into society as if they had never fallen.”34 In addition, “[n]either could they become full members of the religious community”; instead, those who chose to become nuns were confined to special Magdalen orders (79).


The picture that Vicinus paints is bleak, for both society and the sisterhoods continue to condemn even repentant prostitutes, and this is the image that echoes throughout much of Victorian literature. While acknowledging society’s view, Procter presents a very different picture, reminding her readers that God’s complete forgiveness is available to all, and Susan Mumm’s research suggests that Procter was not completely alone in her thinking. Even though most of Victorian society continued to condemn “fallen” women, Mumm paints a more positive picture than Vicinus, revealing that some sisterhoods did not, for “Sisterhoods renounced the belief that sexual immorality was a unique offense against the moral order, one that resulted in irredeemable degeneration of the character.”35 From a twenty-first-century perspective, the rules within these penitentiaries may seem harsh and repressive, but the underlying philosophy has radical implications. These implications are seen most clearly in the lives of those reformed prostitutes who became nuns, for as Mumm relates “when a former prostitute or thief became a sister this not only implied that all taint of impurity had been removed by repentance, but placed these women in a higher spiritual and social class than they had been before their fall from virtue—a radical transformation socially as well as morally” (539). In her poem, Procter embraces the radical implications of this philosophy, taking it even further than the sisterhoods would have. Angela does not enter a penitentiary where she gradually learns to reform. Her reformation is immediate, dependent solely upon God’s grace. Angela once again becomes the “Bride of Christ,” and her shameful life as a prostitute is erased entirely. For Procter, then, the convent is not simply a symbol of female vocation, but it is also a symbol of the perfect forgiveness offered by God to everyone through the Virgin Mary. And this forgiveness empowers women in a different way, for no matter what the sin has been or the social class of the sinner, all women may be equally redeemed by God and can start anew. Procter, however, does not end the story here, for she believes that this redemption will only be completely effective when society embraces the actions of the Virgin Mary as a model of the type of forgiveness that should be enacted by everyone. Rather than concluding the poem with Angela’s redemption, Procter turns to the readers, reminding them of the important “lesson of God’s pardon shown, / Never enough believed, or asked, or known.”36 She has shown how radical this idea is through her story of Angela, but she asks her readers to take its ramifications even further as they apply it to their own lives and, by implication, to the lives of the people around them. Procter desires her readers to go beyond simply seeing this truth of God in the legend, so she asks, “Have we not all, amid life’s petty strife, / Some pure ideal of a noble life / That once seemed possible?” (113). With these words, she equates her readers with the “fallen” woman of the


poem, reminding them that all have sinned. By placing everyone on an equal plane, Procter begins to break down the division between her middleclass readers steeped in moral domesticity and the lower-class “fallen” women that they look down upon. All have sinned yet all may still receive complete redemption through God, for “still our place is kept, and it will wait, / Ready for us to fill it, soon or late: / No star is ever lost we once have seen, / We always may be what we might have been” (113). With these words, Procter emphasizes how radical God’s transforming power is and implies that since God is always willing to restore individuals, no one has the right to judge anyone else. Instead, all should be accepted as the redeemed sinners everyone is. In “A Legend of Provence,” Procter uses the context of the medieval convent to remind her readers of the compassionate God who not only forgives them and cares for their needs but also expects them to show this same compassion to others, and she hopes that this compassion will be a starting point from which to transform the dangerous inequities that continue to exist within Victorian society. Procter does not expect every woman to join a convent as a means of finding empowerment. She, herself, did not choose that option. She does, however, hope that her readers will begin not only to comprehend the dangers that exist for women of all classes and begin to have compassion for them but also to discover what they can do to address these inequities, perhaps by allowing single women more opportunities to support themselves and by helping those who have become destitute. Procter concludes her final volume of poetry with the poem “Homeless,” which, as we have already seen, presents a clear condemnation of domestic ideology and the industrial capitalism that it supports for ignoring the poor who so desperately need help. But Procter goes even further in this poem to reveal the individual responsibility of all of her middle-class readers. In the final stanza of the poem, she tells her readers, “But the Poor are only His image, / His presence, His word, His will;— / And so Lazarus lies at our doorstep / And Dives neglects him still” (247). By referring to the story of Lazarus and Dives, Procter warns her readers of the terrible consequences of ignoring the plight of those in need. In this story, which occurs in Luke 16.19–16.31, Dives, a rich man, eats “sumptuously” while Lazarus hopes for the crumbs that fall from the table. When both die, Lazarus is received into Abraham’s bosom, but Dives is sent to hell. Seeing Lazarus, Dives begs for him to give him some water but Abraham replies, “Son, remember that thou in thy lifetime receivedst thy good things, and likewise Lazarus evil things; but now he is comforted, and thou are tormented.”37 With this example, Procter reveals that by ignoring the plight of those who are suffering, individuals may be putting their eternal souls in jeopardy. Although society might create an atmosphere in which some people may be easily ignored,


individuals still have a responsibility before God to notice them and help alleviate their suffering. In her discussion of shifting definitions of mysticism, Grace M. Jantzen points to the nineteenth century as a time when “[b]oth mysticism and women . . . became constructed as private and personal, having nothing to do with politics.”38 Adelaide Procter fights against this trend. For her, Catholicism and the mystical connection to God through the Virgin Mary is certainly not confined to the domestic sphere or even to the convent but is rather the beginning of social and political change that may help alleviate problems caused by a reliance on the domestic sphere. Although much of nineteenth-century social work was outside the scope of what was actually accomplished within the medieval convent and Procter’s ideas of transforming society were certainly beyond what even the most radical medieval convent could have conceived,39 Procter focuses on the similarities of values rather than on the differences of actions, arguing that the values she associates with the medieval convent may be applied more widely by everyone within society in order to bring about larger social transformations. For Procter, the convent is a place of sanctuary and empowerment for women, but, more importantly, it becomes a model for the type of action that needs to be taken in Victorian society: action that is based on love, forgiveness, spiritual equality, and a sense of community that extends beyond the nuclear family. Procter believes that these “new” values will help to counter the greed of capitalism and the insularity of domestic ideology that place so many individuals in danger. Her poem “Now” illustrates the urgency of the task, for she encourages her readers to Rise! For the day is passing, And you lie dreaming on; The others have buckled their armor, And forth to the fight are gone: A place in the ranks awaits you, Each man has some part to play;40 The Past and the Future are nothing, In the face of the stern Today.41

Procter asks her readers to join the battle against oppression by leaving the security of their homes, embracing the values once embodied by the medieval convent, and fighting for those who have little or no voice. In her own life, Procter worked tirelessly not only with the Langham Place Circle to improve the plight of middle-class women but also with the Providence Row Night Refuge to help lower-class women as well. In the introduction to her final book of poetry, A Chaplet of Verses, she encourages her readers to become involved and inspires them with another example of


these medieval values of community and spiritual equality at work in Victorian society. After compelling her readers to recognize that “many of our miserable fellow-creatures [are] pacing the streets through the long weary nights, without a roof to shelter them, without food to eat, with their poor rags soaked in rain, and only the bitter winds of Heaven for companions,” Procter draws their attention to the Sisters of Mercy who “unhesitatingly accepted a task, worthy indeed of the holy name they bear” (195, 196). Like the medieval nuns in “A Legend of Provence,” the Sisters of Mercy provide food, lodging, and spiritual direction to the women and children who seek their shelter. These active, single women become the model for the rest of society who are then challenged to enact these same values of community in their own lives, thereby broadening the influence from the cloister to the rest of Victorian society. With her portrait of these nuns, Procter illustrates that the values of the medieval convent may be used productively within their society, and with the support of her readers they may be expanded not simply to provide vocations for women and comfort for the homeless but, more importantly, to illustrate God’s love to everyone, offering them the chance to transform their lives. By helping this work of transformation take place, Procter proposes that society may be gradually changed into a place where everyone is given the chance to succeed. Notes 1. Bessie Rayner Parkes [Belloc], “A Review of the Last Six Years,” in Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon and the Langham Place Group, ed. Candida Ann Lacey (New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986), 217. 2. Sheila Herstein, A Mid-Victorian Feminist, Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 78. 3. Jessie Boucherette, “Adelaide Anne Procter,” The English Woman’s Journal 13 (1864): 19. 4. Bessie Rayner Parkes [Belloc], “A Year’s Experience in Woman’s Work,” in Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, 182. 5. For over 200 years, the Catholic Church in England had been petitioning the Pope to restore a local hierarchy of bishops to govern the church. Finally, in September 1850, Pope Pius IX agreed to this request. Ironically, the Pope’s resolution, which gave the English Catholic Church more autonomy, was seen as an example of the Pope’s influence over English citizens. Not only did the English press condemn the act as an example of the Pope’s attempts to control England, but also the popular sentiment against the resolution escalated until on Guy Fawkes’ Night it exploded into violence against Catholics. See Gerald Parsons, “Victorian Roman Catholicism: Emancipation, Expansion, and Achievement,” in Traditions, vol. 1 of Religion in Victorian Britain (New York: Manchester University Press, 1988), 147–148 for a discussion of the event. The furor had died down by August of 1851, but as Parkes points out in her discussion of Procter’s conversion, “to publicly confess obedience to the Catholic Church


6. 7.

8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13.

14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

demanded strength of no usual sort.” See Bessie Rayner Parkes [Belloc], In a Walled Garden (London: Ward and Downey, 1895), 176. Adelaide Anne Procter, The Complete Works of Adelaide Anne Procter (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1902), 195. For discussions that explore the development of domestic ideology, see Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (London: Hutchinson, 1987); Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 1988); Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1990); and Elizabeth Langland, Nobody’s Angels: Middle-Class Women and Domestic Ideology in Victorian Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995). See Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). See Anna Jameson, Sisters of Charity, Catholic and Protestant Abroad and at Home, 2nd ed. (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1855), 9–10. See Penny Kane, Victorian Families in Fact and Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1995); Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 41; and Lawrence Stone, Family, Sex, and Marriage in England 1500–1800 (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 390–405. Procter, Complete Works, 120. Sarah Stickney Ellis, The Women of England, Their Social Duties and Domestic Habits (London: Fisher, Son & Co., 1839), 51. Like Thomas Carlyle, Procter sees the dangers of capitalism, and she, too, turns to medieval society for a better model. Procter, however, places her hope not in feudalism and the connections between a lord and his serf (as Carlyle does) but in the communal values of the medieval convent. Procter, Complete Works, 246. In this poem Procter does not explicitly state the denomination of the church she is describing. Although she does mention incense, which implies a High Anglican church or a Catholic Church, she seems to be making a more general statement about the lack of compassion in the Victorian Church as a whole. Procter, Complete Works, 228. Mary Skinner, “Benedictine Life for Women in Central France, 850–1100: A Feminist Revival,” in Distant Echoes, vol. 1 of Medieval Religious Women (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1984), 103. Skinner, “Benedictine Life,” 103. See Procter’s poems “The Annunciation,” “The Names of Our Lady,” “Ora pro Me,” and “The Shrines of Mary.” Procter, Complete Works, 210. Charles Dickens, “The Haunted House,” All the Year Round 2 (1859): 7. Dickens, “The Haunted House,” 7. Procter, Complete Works, 105. Through reforms in the eleventh through thirteenth centuries, convents gradually lost their independence as they were controlled more directly by male supervisors. Rather than concentrating on the tensions that could arise as nuns tried to accomplish their goals under the strict control of male leadership, Procter represents a world in which male authority is absent and seems to focus


25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40. 41.

on a particular time when abbesses and nuns had the freedom to use their talents to the fullest. See Bonnie S. Anderson and Judith P. Zinsser, A History of Their Own: Women in Europe from Prehistory to the Present, vol. 1 (New York: Harper, 1988) for a discussion of the developments affecting medieval convent life. Procter, Complete Works, 106. Although Procter was probably aware of the many young women who became nuns because of pressure from their families, she focuses on those who choose their vocation. As we will soon see in the discussion of Sister Angela, choice is important to Procter, for the cloister can only be empowering for women if they recognize their alternatives and choose to be there. Susan P. Casteras, “Virgin Vows: The Early Victorian Artists’ Portrayal of Nuns and Novices,” Victorian Studies 24 (1981): 168. Frank H. Wallis, Popular Anti-Catholicism in Mid-Victorian Britain (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 1993), 183. Procter, Complete Works, 106–107. See Martha Vicinus, Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women, 1850–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985) and Susan Mumm, Stolen Daughters, Virgin Mothers: Anglican Sisterhoods in Victorian Britain (London: Leicester University Press, 1999) for more information on the Anglican sisterhoods. Jameson, Sisters of Charity, 11. Jameson, Sisters of Charity, 116. Although some Anglican sisterhoods, primarily those founded by the supporters of the high church, were quite similar to Catholic convents with their own vows and cloisters, others founded by low-church Anglicans rejected the idea of lifelong vows and gave women the freedom to leave. Jameson’s vision seems closer to the low-church “sisterhoods” in which women learned vocations and worked more directly with the community. Procter, Complete Works, 111. Vicinus, Independent Women, 78. Susan Mumm, “Not worse than other girls: The Convent-Based Rehabilitation of Fallen Women in Victorian Britain,” Journal of Social History 29 (1996): 527. Procter, Complete Works, 113. Luke 16.25 King James Version. Grace M. Jantzen, “Feminists, Philosphers, and Mystics,” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 9, no. 4 (1994): 190. Procter, herself, implicitly recognizes the limits of the medieval convent, for in “A Legend of Provence,” the love from the convent flows only so far. It embraces all who come for help, but it has not yet transformed the wider society of which it is a part. The wider society continues to treat women like Angela as outcasts. Here, as in other poems, Procter uses “man” to refer to humanity in general. Procter, Complete Works, 25.


Chapter Six “The Worship of Courage”: William Morris’s S I G U R D T H E V O L S U N G and Victorian Medievalism Richard Frith

“It is the central work of my father’s life,” wrote William Morris’s daughter and editor May in 1911, referring to his epic poem The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs (1876). “It is the work that, first and last—putting aside the eagerness of the moment which sometimes gives all precedence to the work in hand—he held most highly and wished to be remembered by.”1 Today William Morris is remembered for many things, but Sigurd is rarely one of the foremost of them. The poem’s very title is apt to engender amused smiles, even among Victorianists: the Story of Who the What? Such reactions reflect, first of all, a scholarly indifference to Victorian interest in the Old North. Yet, as Andrew Wawn’s groundbreaking study The Vikings and the Victorians (2000) has demonstrated, this interest was surprisingly widespread, and constitutes an important element of the manysided phenomenon that is the Medieval Revival.2 English people’s fascination with medieval Scandinavia spawned novels, plays, poems, and scholarly works, and became a remarkably popular movement, with antiquarian societies all over the country facilitating and encouraging the study of the Viking past. Their preoccupation was founded to a significant extent on contemporary racial theory, and the idea, frequently reiterated in nineteenth-century works on the subject, that the Saxon and Nordic peoples belonged to the same Germanic family, that the Odin of the Norsemen was essentially identical with the Woden of the English, and that the modern Englishman therefore had a kind of hereditary claim on the literature and mythology of the Old North. Sigurd is the most important literary result of this Norse medievalism, and stands in relation to it essentially as does Tennyson’s Idylls

118 / richard frith

of the King to Arthurian medievalism, or Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice to the Italian. On this basis alone the poem demands careful consideration. However, as “the central work of [Morris’s] life,” and the one that he himself considered to be his greatest achievement, the poem is also a crucial text for the insight that it affords into the relationship between the different, sometimes apparently contradictory, aspects of Morris’s fascination with the Middle Ages, which in turn reflect important, broader tendencies within Victorian medievalism. When Morris is discussed in the context of the literary Medieval Revival, it is usually Morris the lecturer and Socialist agitator, author of A Dream of John Ball (1886–1887) and News from Nowhere (1890). The key to Morris’s vision in these later works is his conviction of the medieval artisan’s pleasure in his daily labor, a pleasure that gave everything he produced the status of art. This view of the Middle Ages is essentially a Ruskinian one, with roots reaching back to the famous chapter of The Stones of Venice titled “The Nature of Gothic,” which Morris regarded as “one of the very few necessary and inevitable utterances of the century.”3 Morris, like Ruskin, is concerned with the social basis of art and with its social usefulness. In spite of his Socialist allegiances and revolutionary aspirations, therefore, Morris can be situated relatively easily in a basically conservative medievalist tradition, originating in the novels of Scott and including such figures as Cobbett, Southey, and Carlyle, as well as Ruskin. (With the exception of Southey, all of these writers were important influences on Morris.) The defining feature of this tradition is a tendency to idealize the Middle Ages as “a period of faith, order, joy, munificence, and creativity.”4 Morris’s praise of the medieval period is more qualified than most of his predecessors’, but is clearly indebted to them. Morris’s poetry, by contrast, appears to belong to a very different mode of medievalism, one usually referred to as “Pre-Raphaelite” or “Aesthetic” (the two labels were frequently used interchangeably in the later nineteenth century). This kind of medievalism tends to emphasize the subversively erotic elements in medieval literature and art. Its most important exponents, apart from Morris, were Rossetti and Swinburne in poetry, and Rossetti and Burne-Jones in painting. Morris’s earliest volume of poetry, The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems (1858), was the first book of “Pre-Raphaelite” verse to be published, and remains one of the clearest expressions of the group’s medieval vision. In the title poem, for example, Morris gives a vivid and sympathetic portrayal of King Arthur’s adulterous queen as she defends her love for Launcelot both to the knights of the Round Table and (by implication) to the Victorian reading public. (It will thus be clear that poetry referred to as “Aesthetic” is often far from lacking in ideological commitment.)5 The Earthly Paradise (1868–1870), Morris’s

morris’s SIGURD and victorian medievalism / 119

huge collection of verse tales from medieval and classical sources, also emphasizes anti-ascetic elements of the medieval inheritance and shares a broad ideological basis with two other major documents of Aesthetic medievalism published at around the same time: Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads (1866) and Rossetti’s Poems (1870). When Robert Buchanan identified a “Fleshly School of Poetry” in 1871, he spared Morris the abuse meted out to Rossetti and Swinburne, but clearly numbered him among the “School’s” members.6 These, then, are the two faces of Morris’s medievalism with which the literary scholar must deal. It is not possible to explain the discrepancy in simple terms of Morris’s development from “Romantic to Revolutionary,” in E. P. Thompson’s famous phrase: on the one hand, Morris read and was captivated by Ruskin as an undergraduate at Oxford, and his admiration of medieval craftsmanship is evident in his many activities for the Firm of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Co. (later Morris and Co.), which occupied him throughout virtually the whole span of his career; on the other hand, he never gave up loving stories for their own sake, as is testified abundantly by the voluminous prose romances of his last years. It is in attempting to relate these two facets of Morris’s love of the Middle Ages that the centrality of Sigurd the Volsung becomes apparent. Morris’s Norse epic occupied him during a pivotal period of his life. He was first introduced to its principal source, the thirteenth-century Icelandic Völsunga saga, in 1869. This was during what was probably his most intense period of depression, caused in part by the failure of his marriage and his wife’s sexual involvement with Rossetti, but also by obscure fears of mortality and futility. The finished poem was finally published in 1876, the year that saw Morris’s entry into public affairs as treasurer of the Eastern Question Association. The period in which he had the project in mind (if not in hand: it was apparently not begun on paper until October 1875 [CW, 12: xxiii]) was therefore one of recovery of hope and purpose, a process to which Iceland and the medieval literature of the North contributed in no small measure. Morris began to learn Icelandic in 1868 under the tutelage of the Icelandic scholar Eiríkur Magnússon. He had been an admirer of medieval Scandinavian literature in translation since his undergraduate days: his early prose romances contributed to The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine (1856) testify to his enjoyment of Benjamin Thorpe’s two collections of Nordic material, Northern Mythology (1851–1852) and Yule-Tide Stories (1853).7 Sometime in the mid-1860s, he took up the matter of the Old North again and began to read whatever he could find in English. Magnússon later recalled (CW, 7: xv–xvi) being impressed by Morris’s knowledge of the available English works on the subject, including Percy’s Northern Antiquities

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(1770, a translation of Paul-Henri Mallet’s Introduction à l’Histoire de Dannemarc of 1755), Thorpe’s translation of the Elder Edda (1866), and George Dasent’s versions of Njáls saga (The Story of Burnt Njal, 1861) and Gísla saga súrssonar (The Story of Gisli the Outlaw, 1866). In fact, the amount of Northern literature available in English was quite considerable: Morris might also have read George Stephens’s translation of Fri12ófs saga (1839) or Samuel Laing’s of the Heimskringla (1844). Thanks largely to Andrew Wawn’s recent work, we can now see that Morris’s foray into the Old North was less pioneering than it might previously have appeared. Nevertheless, when Morris discovered the sagas in their original language, they seem to have come upon him with the force of a revelation. The first work which Morris and Magnússon tackled together was the short Gunnlaugs saga, their translation of which, The Story of Gunnlaug the Worm-Tongue, appeared in the Fortnightly Review in January 1869; then followed Grettis saga (published as The Story of Grettir the Strong in June 1869), and the Laxdæla saga. This last translation was unfinished, but provided the basis for “The Lovers of Gudrun,” published in the third part of The Earthly Paradise in November 1869 and often regarded as the most successful tale of the entire work. By the time this was published, however, Morris was being bowled over by the Völsunga saga. Writing to Charles Eliot Norton on December 21, 1869, he describes it as “to the full meaning of the word inspired”; while in another letter written on the same day to Swinburne, he avers that it “quite throws all the other stories into the shade.”8 His and Magnússon’s translation was published in 1870 as The Story of the Volsungs and Niblungs with a preface announcing it as “the Great Story of the North” (CW, 7:286). These translations, together with The Earthly Paradise, make the period 1868–1870 one of almost astonishing literary productivity for Morris. What initially struck Morris most forcibly about the Völsunga saga seems to have been its combination of a tragic love story with the qualities of reticence and stoicism, which govern both the characters and the narrative. In his letter to Norton, Morris immediately seizes on the scene in which these two elements combine to greatest effect, namely, the final meeting of Sigurd and Brynhild, in which Brynhild rejects Sigurd’s offer to abandon Gudrun and marry her:9 The scene of the last interview between Sigurd and the despairing and terrible Brynhild touches me more than any thing I have ever met with in literature[;] there is nothing wanting in it, nothing forgotten, nothing repeated, nothing overstrained; all tenderness is shown without the use of a tender word, all misery and despair without a word of raving, complete beauty without an ornament, and all this in 2 pages of moderate print.10


The themes of blighted love and the need for stoicism were not new ones for Morris: they had been preoccupying him increasingly throughout the years of The Earthly Paradise. What was different about the sagas was that they enacted that stoicism (something Morris’s poetry had hitherto largely failed to do) without sacrificing human feeling. But at this stage, it was the love interest that principally interested him. This focus is shown clearly by the “Prologue in Verse” that Morris wrote for the translation, in which he calls on his fellow Englishmen to listen “unto the best tale pity ever wrought,” a story “of utter love defeated utterly, / Of Grief too strong to give Love time to die!” (CW, 7:290). These lines belong very much to the emotional register of The Earthly Paradise; in its initial stages, then, the quality of Morris’s enthusiasm for the Völsunga saga was essentially consistent with the tone of his poetry of the time. By the mid-1870s, however, the focus of Morris’s admiration had shifted significantly. From this time on, and consistently until the end of his life, his recorded comments on Icelandic literature center on the Norse heroic code, the essence of which lay for Morris in striving to perform deeds that will live forever in story and then accepting death unflinchingly. Morris’s enthusiasm for “the religion of the Northmen” can be judged from the concluding sentences of a summary of Northern mythology that he wrote, according to his first biographer, at about the time of Sigurd: Think of the joy we have in praising great men, and how we turn their stories over and over, and fashion their lives for our joy: and this also we ourselves may give to the world. This seems to me pretty much the religion of the Northmen. I think one would be a happy man if one could hold it, in spite of the wild dreams and dreadful imaginings that hung about it here and there.11

As Morris wrote to Georgiana Burne-Jones in January 1877, “What a glorious outcome of the worship of Courage these stories are.”12 To a certain extent, Morris’s changed understanding of the sagas must simply reflect a deeper familiarity with them, a response to what a recent critic has called their “underlying ethical principle” of heroism.13 However, there were also other, extra-literary factors at work. In 1871, Morris made the first of two visits to Iceland. As several critics have pointed out, this journey seems to have been for him a declaration of independence from Rossetti and a shaking-off of Pre-Raphaelitism (although it was not, as Wawn again makes clear, quite such a singular venture as we might be inclined to think).14 On this expedition, Morris began to discover a new courage with which to face life. This was partly a matter of the resources he needed to find in order to meet the physical challenges of pony-trekking

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through the Icelandic terrain, fording rivers, and crossing lava fields of jagged rock. However, it was also a result of the transformation that Morris’s travels wrought on his understanding of the sagas. Seeing for himself the land in which the writers and (in the case of the Íslendinga sögur or “sagas of Icelanders”) protagonists of the old stories had lived impressed him deeply with the heroism that seemed necessary to survive under such conditions and helped to purge him of his tendency to romanticize the sagas; visiting the lair of the outlaw Grettir, Morris found that hero, whom he had previously embraced as “another friend to me, life’s void to fill,” “transfigured . . . into an awful and monstrous being, like one of the early giants of the world” (CW, 7:xxxvi; 8:149). The awestruck sense of the otherness of Iceland and its early inhabitants suggested here was to affect Morris profoundly. It was this new understanding of land and people that ultimately transformed his view of the sagas. He now found them, as he wrote in later years, “a good corrective to the maundering side of mediaevalism”;15 and when he came to write his epic poem of the Icelanders’ greatest tale, it was this new kind of medievalism, “the worship of Courage,” that he was concerned to impart to his English readers. By “the maundering side of mediaevalism,” Morris presumably meant courtly literature and modern poetry inspired by it, including that of Rossetti and Swinburne. Yet Sigurd shares significant elements with Pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic medievalism, most importantly its concern with medieval sexuality. The tragic love of Sigurd and Brynhild that engaged Morris most deeply occupies the central, focal section of the poem. Throughout, he strives to do justice to the dignity of the saga characters and to present their passion as supremely noble, free, and indeed equal. This is perhaps most evident in his treatment of their first meeting on Hindfell, the shield-burg surrounded by a ring of fire where Odin has placed the valkyrie following her attempt to save a doomed warrior from death. By this stage in his career, Sigurd has already established his preeminence by slaying the serpent Fafnir and winning the gold; he has been hailed by Gripir as the “hope of the Kings first fashioned” and the “blossom of the morn” (CW, 12:99). Morris takes care to make his Brynhild a similarly impressive figure. He does this first by emphasizing the majesty of the shield-burg; he also, like Wagner, retains the saga’s detail of Sigurd taking the mailed, sleeping figure for a man. Although she leaves her warlike bearing behind her with the dwarf-wrought hauberk from which he must cut her free, the love of Brynhild and Sigurd is stamped indelibly by the strange, other-worldly manner of their meeting and by Brynhild’s past life as Odin’s “VictoryWafter” (CW, 12:125). Her feminine beauty is moreover as awesome as her previous martial aspect, and the love between her and Sigurd is completely natural and spontaneous. As soon as Sigurd beholds “the smooth unfurrowed


cheeks, and the wise lips breathing light,” he “loveth her sore, and he longeth her spirit to move” (CW, 12:123); but not until the hauberk has been cut away does the valkyrie awake. When she finally stirs, suddenly “the sun rose upward and lightened all the earth,” and Brynhild breaks forth into a passionate invocation of nature and the gods: “All hail, O Day and thy Sons, and thy kin of the coloured things! Hail, following Night, and thy Daughter that leadeth thy wavering wings! Look down with unangry eyes on us today alive, And give us the hearts victorious, and the gain for which we strive! All hail, ye Lords of God-home, and ye Queens of the House of Gold! Hail, thou dear Earth that bearest, and thou Wealth of field and fold! Give us, your noble children, the glory of wisdom and speech, And the hearts and the hands of healing, and the mouths and hands that teach!” Then they turned and were knit together; and oft and o’er again They craved, and kissed rejoicing, and their hearts were full and fain. (CW, 12:124)

Brynhild returns Sigurd’s love freely and independently; her speech, like the simultaneous sunrise, shows their mutual passion to be in total harmony with the natural order of the universe while the final couplet cited above indicates the (implicitly right and natural) result of their passion, an embrace that is almost certainly intended to be understood as coital. Morris is even more explicit about this physicality in his treatment of Sigurd and Brynhild’s second meeting at Lymdale. On this, their final encounter before Sigurd’s fateful journey to the Niblung burg, Morris dwells touchingly on the solicitousness and tenderness of the lovers’ conversation, before describing how forth she stepped from the high-seat, and forth from the threshold he came, Till both their bodies mingling seemed one glory and the same, And far o’er all fulfilment did the souls within them long, As at breast and at lips of the faithful the early love strained strong. (CW, 12:147)

By contrast with the relative explicitness of Morris’s descriptions, the saga writer simply refers to Sigurd and Brynhild as plighting troth on each of their two encounters, though he does later have Brynhild direct her fosterfather Heimir to take care of Aslaug, her daughter by Sigurd. (No such child is mentioned by Morris.) It is in these scenes that Sigurd’s relatedness to Morris’s earlier poetry, and to that of Rossetti and Swinburne, is most apparent. Like them, Morris not only implies that sexual love unrestricted by religious dogma is natural and desirable, but also that major medieval

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works share this subversive idea. Thus, whereas the saga-writer introduces the physical love of Sigurd and Brynhild in an offhand, casual way, Morris sees that physicality as important, even central, to the nobility of the saga’s conception of the lovers and amplifies it accordingly. His approach is in this respect similar to that of Swinburne in the latter’s treatment of another important medieval legend, Tristram of Lyonesse (1882). In this poem, Swinburne describes the lovemaking of his hero and heroine in quite graphic terms, as part of his attempt to reassert the pagan, anti-ascetic (and specifically anti-Christian) bias that he found in the Tristram story. Thus, in his sexual–ideological response to medieval texts, Morris continues to align himself with literary aestheticism. However, set alongside these familiar Morrisian concerns are important new ones. Most obvious among these is the poem’s constant emphasis on the Norse heroic code, on courage and stoicism, and on “striv[ing] to win fair fame.”16 All of Sigurd ’s positive figures, and many of its more ambiguous ones, are governed in their actions by this code. The often wearying emotionality of The Earthly Paradise is almost entirely eliminated. King Volsung goes to meet his death in the hall of Siggeir in spite of the warnings of his daughter Signy because his “word is given, it is gone like the springtide ships” (CW, 12:11). Sigmund, the only one of Volsung’s sons to survive the slaughter, lives alone is Siggeir’s forest for many years awaiting his chance for revenge; he rejects the son whom Signy sends him to foster when the boy refuses to take corn from a meal-sack in which there is an adder (although he is not, as in the saga, instructed by Signy to kill the “cowardly” youth). When Sigmund’s revenge is accomplished, Signy goes back into Siggeir’s blazing hall to die with the husband who has murdered her family. In the second book, Sigurd, having only just reached manhood, rides out without hesitation to slay the serpent and then rides through the ring of fire to wake Brynhild. Later, after Sigurd has been killed and the Niblungs have assumed the mantle of heroism in the poem, Gunnar and Hogni go knowingly to meet their doom in Atli’s hall just as did Volsung. Hogni laughs as Atli’s men cut out his heart, and, finally, Gunnar plays his harp and sings as he waits for death in Atli’s snake pit. This unremitting Norse heroicism has a significant effect on the kind of reading experience Sigurd offers. In a recent and insightful reading, Herbert F. Tucker has described the poem as “the least forthcoming of the many nineteenth-century epics, the most remote in its presentation and least accommodated to contemporary interests.”17 Tucker’s comments are corroborated by some contemporary reviews, such as that of Henry Hewlett in Fraser’s. According to Hewlett, a poem, which, like Sigurd, “reflects, with hard, uncompromising realism, an obsolete code of ethics, and a barbarous condition of society, finds itself irreconcilably at discord with the key of


nineteenth-century feeling.”18 From one perspective, such verdicts may seem somewhat surprising. Morris was hardly the only Victorian to be preoccupied with ideas of heroism or even with Norse ideas of heroism. Almost all of the many nineteenth-century novels to draw on the Old North, from Scott’s The Pirate (1822) to H. Rider Haggard’s Eric Brighteyes (1891), emphasize Norse hardihood. More pointedly, Thomas Carlyle devoted the first of his lectures On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (1840) to “The Hero as Divinity,” focusing on the figure of Odin. Carlyle’s interpretation of Norse paganism as a “Consecration of Valour” is in some respects strikingly similar to Morris’s.19 Furthermore, it is by no means the case that Morris did nothing to enhance the appeal of the story for a Victorian audience. To give a greater measure of unity to his poem, he omitted the beginning of the saga, which deals with the shadowy ancestors of the Volsungs, and its end, which relates the final extinction of the Niblung line; and he excised episodes that would disrupt the direction of the narrative, such as the digressive account of the conflict between Sigmund’s son Helgi and King Hodbrod. He made extensive use of Max Müller’s solar myth theory in order to stress the timelessness of the Volsung story. He developed the saga’s hints concerning character and motive with his impressive, and very modern, grasp of human psychology—“modern amplification and sentiment” as he later called it20—and even modified the character of Sigurd to some extent, making him more altruistic and less revenge-driven than his saga counterpart. Relatedly, he actually softened the Norse heroic code as he saw it, removing some of the more barbaric incidents such as that of Signy sewing gloves onto the hands of her sons in order to test their endurance. But Sigurd remains remote because the conception of courage that is at the center of its “code of ethics” is indeed, as Hewlett argued, “obsolete,” and nonetheless so for Morris’s ultimately cosmetic surgery: in the world of the poem, greatness subsists in the observance of a rigid, almost stylized heroic code with which a nineteenth-century audience could not reasonably be expected to identify. Thus, although Morris takes pains to explain the heroic ethos to the reader, with frequent references to the necessity of doing deeds to win everlasting fame, these attempts at mediation generally fail to engender empathy. To take one particularly striking example, Hogni greets the news of his impending death with the remark: “Take heed now! deeds are doing for the fashioners of tales” (CW, 12:292). Unlike Carlyle, whose aims and methods are openly didactic, Morris is not really concerned with helping his readers make Norse ideas of heroism relevant to their own lives as he himself had succeeded in doing. His idea seems to have been that the story, suitably “amplified” for a modern audience, should speak for itself. Morris’s treatment of the Norse gods represents a similarly ambivalent attempt at mediation. In 1876, the Æsir were by no means a closed book to

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the British public: interest in Northern mythology was, as I have indicated, quite widespread, and Wagner’s use of it in the Ring cycle had begun to be discussed in the journals. But neither were they a fully assimilated part of the national consciousness, as centuries of familiarity had made the classical gods. Morris realized this and attempted to weave in explanations of the gods and of Norse cosmology (particularly the concept of Ragnarök, the impending death of the gods) at opportune moments in the story. Yet Morris’s divinities remain resolutely alien. The main reason for this is that Morris, unlike Wagner, does not significantly develop the characters of the gods or cause them to act in a way that is readily comprehensible. Neither does he really attempt to give them metaphysical significance as Wagner does, although he does develop the Ragnarök motif to suggest the idea of a heroic age under threat. To interfere with the gods would have involved compromising the story, to which, as Tucker points out, Morris subjugates all other considerations.21 Thus Morris’s Odin appears periodically throughout the first half of the narrative, but there seems to be no reason or plan governing his actions. He usually helps the Volsungs, thrusting the sword into the Branstock tree so that Sigmund can win it and advising Sigurd on how best to tackle Fafnir; but he also intervenes in Sigmund’s final battle to shatter the sword and thereby ensure the hero’s defeat and death. Nor does Morris supply a reason for Odin’s disappearance from the story following the slaying of the serpent. The result is that the gods achieve no real significance in the poem other than a purely narrative one. Then there is the prosody itself. Sigurd ’s divided hexameter line is a brilliant invention of Morris’s. Derived primarily from the meter of the Middle High German Nibelungenlied (one of the secondary sources of the poem), its use of alliteration and mixture of iambs and anapests also suggest some of the qualities of Anglo-Saxon and Eddic verse; but the result is completely Morris’s own and proves surprisingly capable of modulation to deal with the varied materials of the story. It also serves, however, to emphasize the antiquity and strangeness of the poem’s subject matter. Nowhere is this better demonstrated than in the wonderful opening lines in which the primitive, organic splendor of King Volsung’s hall seems almost an image of the similar qualities that Morris wishes to emphasize in the old story: There was a dwelling of kings ere the world was waxen old; Dukes were the door-wards there, & the roofs were thatched with gold; Earls were the wrights that wrought it, and silver nailed its doors; Earls’ wives were the weaving-women, queens’ daughters strewed its floors, And the masters of its song-craft were the mightiest men that cast The sails of the storm of battle adown the bickering blast. (CW, 12:1)


It is terrific verse, but the effect of the long, swinging couplets and of Morris’s Germanic diction can be forbidding. It may even appear less accessible than the saga itself, which opens in a prosy but engaging manner: “Here begins the tale, and tells of a man who was named Sigi” (CW, 7:291). The epic is also more than three times longer than the saga on which it is based. It is clear, then, that although Morris did much to mediate the Volsung story for a nineteenth-century audience, he could have done much more had he not felt that in doing so he would compromise the Old Northern qualities for which he valued it and which he desired to communicate to the British public (who were, of course, the cousins of the Nordic race). So whereas Wagner in the Ring cycle, or indeed Tennyson in his Idylls of the King (1842–1885), was interested primarily in creating a new myth for his own times out of old materials, Morris was concerned above all to retain the integrity of the legend, while making its wider significance as intelligible as this aim would allow for his contemporaries. He wanted simultaneously to universalize the tale and to retain its cultural specificity.22 Morris’s interest in that cultural specificity leads him to emphasize the close connection between the Norse heroic code and the Norse cosmos. Several times within the poem, heroes sing of the gods’ work of creation. The climactic instance of this is Gunnar’s song in Atli’s snake pit, which constitutes a final summary of “the religion of the Northmen.” Gunnar first recounts the Norse creation myth: he sings of “the World of Aforetime, unshapen, void of lands” (CW, 12:297), then of the creation of the sun, moon, and stars, of dwarves and of men. He describes the cyclical nature of human life: they wrought, and rejoiced in their bodies, and saw their sons and were glad: And they changed their lives and departed, and came back as the leaves of the trees Come back and increase in the summer:—and I, I, I am of these. (CW, 12:298)

Gunnar emphatically places himself (“I, I, I am of these”) among the race of men who live, work deeds, and die. Here “these” seems to refer to the whole of the human race. But our understanding is modified when Gunnar goes on finally to sing of Valhall, his anticipated home beyond death, where Odin gathers warriors for the final battle of Ragnarök: for I see the spring of the day Round the doors of the golden Valhall, and I see the mighty arise, And I hearken the voice of Odin, and his mouth on Gunnar cries, And he nameth the son of Giuki, and cries on deeds long done, And the fathers of my fathers, and the sons of yore agone. (CW, 12:299)

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This final section of the song reminds us that heroism like Gunnar’s is inseparable from Norse cosmology and pagan religion; that it is a strictly historical phenomenon, the “glorious outcome” of a certain set of cultural circumstances. These beliefs may unite Gunnar with “the fathers of [his] fathers,” but any modern reader with less temperamental empathy for the Old North than Morris possessed is likely to remain forever alienated from them. Ever since Morris first discovered the Völsunga saga, he had associated its greatness with that of the society that produced it. In the 1869 letter to Norton already cited, he follows his enthusiastic praise of the saga by remarking: “touching too though hardly wonderful to think of the probable author; some 12 century Icelander, living the hardest and rudest of lives, seeing few people and pretty much the same day after day, with his old religion taken from him and his new one hardly gained.”23 Although the roots of the story lie far to the east of Scandinavia, Morris always identified it with the Norse people, and more specifically with the Icelandic people, who were the producers of the definitive version.24 There is evidence within the poem to suggest that, in retelling the story, he sought to strengthen the identification of the tale with its medieval Icelandic tellers. J. M. S. Tompkins has pointed out that Morris “snapp[ed] the twisted and eroded links which still hold the Volsungasaga to the history and topography of the North.”25 In the saga, we encounter Goths, Danes, Saxons, and Franks; the kingdom of the Niblungs is south of the Rhine. Morris excises all of these tribal references except for “Goth,” which becomes a much more general term, encompassing all of the characters except Atli and his Eastlanders. The effect of this is to make Sigurd ’s settings seem much more Northern than those of the saga. This suggestion is strengthened by the fact that Morris’s natural descriptions often appear to draw on his memories of Iceland. The description of the rocky desert though which Sigurd rides to encounter Fafnir on the Glittering Heath is the clearest example of this; but the entire poem is saturated in the sublime otherness of the Icelandic landscape. For Morris, the sagas were “folk art”:26 stories that had been handed down orally for centuries before being committed to writing and that were, therefore, the property of the folk and a reflection of its virtues. (By contrast, modern scholarship tends to view the best sagas, and the Eddic poems, as highly conscious literary works.) In a letter of 1894, he describes the Volsung story as a “curious entanglement of the ages,” a series of accretions in which successive centuries have added their own contributions to the tale to produce “something of wonderful imagination and clearnesss [sic] of outline, without disturbance of the huge and vague figures of the earlier times.”27 Though Morris does not make it, the comparison with a Gothic cathedral is clearly begged. Like those monuments, the Volsung


story was for Morris a manifestation of the medieval workman’s pleasure in his labor, and, thus, a symbol of the nobility of one particular medieval people, its great virtues of fortitude and courage and its love of freedom. This greatness is an important part of what Morris wanted to communicate to his readers through the retelling of that people’s greatest tale. His purpose, thus, resembles that of Ruskin in “The Nature of Gothic,” for, like Ruskin, Morris wishes to celebrate and mediate the glorious artistic product of a savage yet noble society. Morris’s epic version of the “Great Story of the North” retains some of the tool-marks of the people who first fashioned it. In this sense, Sigurd clearly foreshadows Morris’s Socialist-period insistence on the social basis of art, and even anticipates his work for the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings. The poem furthermore suggests that Morris regarded the love of Sigurd and Brynhild, which was for him the crux of the story, as being closely connected with the Norse heroic code and thus with medieval Iceland. The qualities that characterize their relationship in Sigurd, of freedom, dignity, and naturalness, are ones that Morris ascribed to medieval Norse, and particularly Icelandic, society. In addition, he worked hard at preserving the reticence and stoicism of the saga characters, these also being, of course, defining values of the Norse warrior. Morris’s treatment of the final meeting of the estranged lovers, which was revised extensively before he was happy with it (see CW, 12:xxiv–xxix), has a reserve and a terse power unapproached elsewhere in his work. When Sigurd confesses to Brynhild that “no tongue may tell of the sorrow that I had for thy wedded love,” Brynhild’s reply simply reiterates the inexorability of fate: “All was and today it is not—And the Oath to Gunnar is sworn, / Shall I live the days twice over, and the life thou hast made forlorn?” (CW, 12:223); and to his final, desperate offer to abandon Gudrun and marry Brynhild she replies with the shortest, bleakest line of the poem: “I will not wed thee, Sigurd, nor any man alive” (CW, 12:224). Thus, “The worship of Courage” encompasses love as well as war. As though to underline this, Morris concludes the eulogy of the two lovers that follows their funeral with one more allusion to the mythology of the North: They are gone—the lovely, the mighty, the hope of the ancient Earth: It shall labour and bear the burden as before that day of their birth: It shall groan in its blind abiding for the day that Sigurd hath sped, And the hour that Brynhild hath hastened, and the dawn that waketh the dead: It shall yearn, and be oft-times holpen, and forget their deeds no more, Till the new sun beams on Baldur, and the happy sealess shore. (CW, 12:244)

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We are reminded finally that Sigurd and Brynhild were products of the old Norse religion and its cult of heroism, and that their “deeds” must be understood as speeding the day of Ragnarök. Which of Brynhild’s deeds are here being referred to—her actions as a valkyrie or as a mortal woman— remains uncertain; but the context of the passage, following the culmination of the lovers’ tragedy, suggests the latter. The capacity to imagine sexual love in such exalted terms is for Morris an important part of the greatness of the Old North. In Sigurd, then, Morris is using sexuality as part of an essentially historicist argument: that medieval Iceland was an admirable society, and that its greatness was manifested primarily in the great stories that it produced and the “worship of Courage” that they embodied. In this sense, as I suggested earlier, the poem brings together two distinct strands of medievalism, the “Pre-Raphaelite” and the “Ruskinian,” in Morris’s work. Sigurd thus casts an interesting light on the relationship between the movement known as “Pre-Raphaelitism” or “Aestheticism” and the broader Medieval Revival, and I wish to highlight this briefly in closing. It has often been seen as a paradox that Morris, the disciple of Ruskin and virtual founder of the Arts and Crafts Movement, should have been regarded by many of his contemporaries as being in the vanguard of Aestheticism. Such views tend to be based on the suggestion, now increasingly discredited among scholars of Aestheticism but present in the most influential accounts of the literary Medieval Revival, that Pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic writers were not really serious about the Middle Ages, and that their uses of the medieval period were, if not exactly superficial, then at least “aesthetic” rather than historicist.28 Sigurd shows this to have been far from the case and argues strongly that “Aesthetic” medievalism, with its emphasis on eroticism in a medieval context, could be the vehicle for a vision of the Middle Ages, which fully deserves to be called historicist. This is true not only of Sigurd, however, but also of many of Morris’s other poems (particularly those from the Defence of Guenevere volume), and of those of Swinburne and, to a lesser extent, of Rossetti. What is particularly fascinating about Sigurd is that it shows how closely this Aesthetic medieval vision could be made to cohere with the seemingly opposed, conservative medievalism of the Carlyle–Ruskin tradition; for, once the social basis of art is accepted, any work of art that embodies a fully desirable conception of sexuality must imply a healthy, admirable, “natural” society. Sigurd the Volsung, poised on the cusp of Morris’s political involvements, allows us to see this because in it the themes of his earlier, “Aesthetic” poetry are held uniquely in balance with those of his later, more sociopolitically oriented works. Sigurd is thus in a real sense the central work of Morris’s life, and also (since Morris’s concerns so often reflect those of the Medieval Revival itself ), a truly important document of Victorian medievalism.


Notes 1. William Morris, The Collected Works of William Morris, ed. May Morris, 24 vols. (London: Longmans, 1910–1915), 12:xxiii. Hereafter cited in the text in the form, CW, 12:xxiii. 2. I draw on Wawn’s work for details of “Old Northernism” throughout my essay. 3. William Morris, William Morris: Artist, Writer, Socialist, ed. May Morris, 2 vols. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1936), 1:292. 4. Alice Chandler, A Dream of Order, The Medieval Ideal in Nineteenth-Century English Literature (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970), 1. 5. For a guide to the uses of these labels, and their attendant perplexities, see Ruth Z. Temple, “Truth in Labelling: Pre-Raphaelitism, Aestheticism, Decadence Fin de Siècle,” English Literature in Transition 17 (1974): 203–214. 6. See Buchanan, “The Fleshly School of Poetry: Mr. D. G. Rosetti,” Contemporary Review 18 (1871): 334–337, 347. 7. “Lindenborg Pool” and “Gertha’s Lovers” are the two stories of Morris’s that show Thorpe’s influence most clearly. 8. William Morris, The Collected Letters of William Morris, ed. Norman Kelvin, 5 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984–1996) 1:99, 100. 9. In referring to the saga characters (as opposed to those of Sigurd ), I have used the anglicized names employed by Morris and Magnússon in their translation; these are in most cases the same as the forms used in Sigurd. All citations of the saga refer to Morris and Magnússon’s version. 10. Morris, Collected Letters, 1:99. 11. Cited in J. W. Mackail, The Life of William Morris, 2 vols. (London; New York: Longmans, Green, 1899), 1:334. 12. Morris, Collected Letters, 1:344. 13. Stephen A. Mitchell, Heroic Sagas and Ballads (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1991), 114. 14. See Andrew Wawn, The Vikings and the Victorians (Cambridge: Brewer, 2000), 283–311. 15. Morris, Collected Letters, 2:229. 16. William Morris, The Unpublished Lectures of William Morris, ed. Eugene D. Lemire (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1969), 190. 17. Herbert F. Tucker, “All for the Tale: The Epic Macropoetics of Morris’s Sigurd of Volsung,” Victorian Poetry 34 (1996): 386. 18. Peter Faulkner, ed., William Morris: The Critical Heritage (London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), 262. 19. Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero Worship, and Heroic in History (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966), 41. 20. Morris, Collected Letters, 4:206. 21. Tucker, “All for the Tale,” 375. The question of whether Morris was deliberately writing against the Ring, as Jane Suzanna Ennis has argued, is a murky one, owing to the difficulty of determining the degree of Morris’s awareness of Wagner’s text. In 1873 he is known to have received a copy of Alfred W. Forman’s translation of the libretto of Die Walküre, but, as he told Forman’s brother Henry Buxton Forman in November of that year, “I have not had time to read it yet: nor to say the truth am I much interested in anything Wagner

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22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

does, as his theories on musical matters seem to me . . . perfectly abhominable [sic].” He then goes on to deplore the idea of “a sandy-haired German tenor tweedledeeing over the unspeakable woes of Sigurd” (Collected Letters, 1:205). It is possible that Morris’s strong emphasis on the Norse heroic code is to some extent a response to Wagner’s undercutting of it in his characterization of Siegfried. Jane Suzanna Ennis, “A Comparison of Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungun and William Morris’s Sigurd the Volsung.” Phd diss., University of Leeds, 1993. It is worth noting that this kind of sensitivity to the textures of medieval works is a frequent characteristic of Aesthetic medievalism. Swinburne, for example, insisted that his aim in writing Tristram of Lyonesse was “simply to present that story, not diluted and debased as it had been in our own time by other hands, but undefaced by improvement and undeformed by transformation, as it was known to the age of Dante.” (Algernon Swinburne, “Dedicatory Epistle,” in Swinburne Replies, ed. Clyde Kenneth Hyder (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press), 99. Morris, Collected Letters, 1:99. In his lecture on “The Early Literature of the North—Iceland” Morris suggests, incorrectly, that the Nibelungenlied is derived from the Eddic poems (see Unpublished Lectures, 192). J. M. S. Tompkins, William Morris: An Approach to the Poetry (London: Woolf, 1988), 237–238. Fiona MacCarthy, William Morris: A Life for Our Time (London: Faber, 1994), 290. Morris, Collected Letters, 4:206. See Chandler, A Dream of Order, 232–233; Raymond Chapman, The Sense of the Past in Victorian Literature (London and Sydney: Croom Helm, 1986), 72–73; Kevin L. Morris, The Image of the Middle Ages in Romantic Victorian Literature (London: Croom Helm, 1984), 168.

Ch ap t e r S e ve n The Gallows Nightingale: Swinburne’s Translations of Villon Nick Freeman

Prince of sweet songs, made out of tears and fire, A harlot was thy nurse, a God thy sire . . . Villon, our sad bad glad mad brother’s name. Algernon Swinburne, “A Ballad of François Villon, Prince of all Ballad-Makers” (1878) The only true motive for putting poetry into a fresh language must be to endow a fresh nation, as far as possible, with one more possession of beauty. D. G. Rossetti, Collected-Poetry and Prose, xxiv (2003)

Introduction: Victorian Medievalism? Popular conceptions of the Victorian view of the Middle Ages often revolve around idealized chivalric treatments of Arthurian myth by Tennyson, an all-purpose sentimentalized “prettiness” loosely, and unfairly, associated with the Pre-Raphaelites, and the “dream worlds” painted by J. W. Waterhouse and other artists who followed the lead of Edward Burne-Jones.1 There certainly is Victorian literature, art, and even fashion that support this view, but it is important to recognize that there is no single dominant strand of “Victorian medievalism,” for interest in the Middle Ages took many forms. Artists and writers were often unconcerned with the niceties of history, especially if those “niceties” were violent, sordid, or otherwise unsuited to the tastes of the Victorian middle class. However, this did not mean that sentimentality and idealism always prevailed or that those terms were themselves fixed and constant. Victorian art was reluctant to consider events such as the Hundred Years War (1337–1453), itself a term invented during the late nineteenth

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century, the Black Death (1348 onward), and the Peasants’ Revolt (1381),2 but it did not regard the medieval period purely as fodder for escapists and romantics, despite acknowledging its appeal for them. Many today judge the Victorian view of the Middle Ages by the architecture of the Gothic Revival or the swooning beauties on art gallery walls, but another strand of Victorian medievalism dramatized a very different world. One of its most important figures was the poet Algernon Swinburne. Swinburne’s Middle Ages Swinburne’s engagement with the Middle Ages was deeply rooted in French culture, especially the poetry of the romance and troubadour traditions. Both “vehemently critical of the epoch” and “nostalgic toward it,”3 Swinburne had a wide knowledge of its literature and history, researching them as a student at Oxford University where he had won the Taylorian Scholarship in 1858.4 He was familiar with both the traditions of courtly love, exemplified in works such as Rosamund (1860), Chastelard (1865), and Tristram of Lyonesse (1882), and the earthier writing of François Villon and François Rabelais. At the same time, his friendships with D. G. Rossetti, Burne-Jones, and William Morris introduced him to other varieties of medieval experience, from Rossetti’s reverence for Dante, to Burne-Jones’ passion for Arthurian myth, to Morris’s idealizing of old England. Swinburne drew on differing “medievalisms” throughout his life, including the Arthurian lushness of Tristram, the bleaker and technically less flamboyant environment of poems such as “After Death” and “The Leper” in Poems and Ballads (1866), and the “border ballads” that pastiche the folk traditions of his native Northumbria. The work of Villon brought together several of these styles, offering stylistic sophistication, jaundiced romanticism much in keeping with Swinburne’s own cynicism, and a stimulating collision of elevated and demotic language. His translations from Villon, published in the second series of Poems and Ballads (1878), revel in reclaiming the Middle Ages that some versions of Pre-Raphaelitism preferred to forget, blurring the boundaries between courtliness and the apparently more “authentic” world of medieval Paris by using elegant stanza forms to reveal its scabrous underbelly. Little is known of Villon’s life. He was born in Paris in 1431, but even his original name is in doubt. It appears variously as François Montcorbier and François des Loges, but he soon adopted the surname of Guillaume de Villon, his guardian and benefactor. He studied at the University of Paris from the late 1440s, taking his baccalauréat in 1449 and his licence and maîre ès arts three years later: Swinburne described him as taking a degree in “klepto-dipso-porno-poetics.”5 From then on, he was continually in trouble

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with the Parisian authorities. In 1455, he was pardoned for his role in a fight that saw the death of a priest. He was then involved in a serious robbery from the College of Navarre in 1456 and fled Paris when a confederate confessed to the crime. He lived the life of a vagabond, being arrested and imprisoned for a variety of offences, chiefly brawling and robbery, and winning the enmity of the Bishop of Orleans, who apparently imprisoned him in his palace dungeons. Released in 1461, Villon’s criminal activities continued unabated. After another affray in 1463, in which a papal notary was wounded, Villon was sentenced to be hanged, writing his Ballade des pendus, later translated by Swinburne as “Epitaph in Form of a Ballad,” in which he imagined his appeal to God as he dangled from the gibbet. Once again, however, the sentence was commuted, and he was banished from Paris for ten years. His banishment is “the last real fact we have about [him],” notes Peter Dale.6 In view of his dissolute and chaotic existence, it is surprising that Villon managed to write as much as he did. Even then, he left only ca.3,000 lines of poetry. The overwhelming majority of this is found in two works. The Lais (“legacy”) or Petit Testament, dates from shortly after the College of Navarre affair and takes the form of a will. Villon, claiming to be leaving Paris as a consequence of a failed relationship, bequeaths sundry satirical gifts to his friends and enemies—he leaves his ex-love his broken heart, but other “gifts” include a stolen duck, hair clippings, and cobwebbed windows. The second major work is the generally more serious Testament or Grand Testament. Here Villon reflects on his mistakes and disappointments, as well as his fears of poverty, imprisonment, and old age. Interspersed among such concerns are a number of previously composed short lyrics, one of which, the Ballade des Dames du temps jadis, with its memorable refrain, “Mais où sont les neiges d’antan,” has become Villon’s most well-known work.7 As this summary suggests, Villon was a world away from the image of the Pre-Raphaelite medieval world described by Derek Stanford as “one of fantasy rather than history.”8 Though educated and socially privileged, Villon seems to have sought out all manner of low company—to judge from the Testament, he mixed with pimps, prostitutes, thieves, and murderers. His poetry has the robustness of fabliau, yet he also produced works of great elegiac sensitivity. Villon was a mass of contradictions. It was these that made him so appealing, not only to Swinburne and Rossetti, but also to the British poets of the fin de siècle to whom “he seemed a [Paul] Verlaine of the fifteenth century” complete with moods that “alternated between piety and moral defiance.”9 Joyce Reid notes that “[b]y its mingled bitterness, melancholy, and humor, its sincerity and deep feeling, the Testament contrasts strikingly with the insipid lyrics of [Villon’s] predecessors,” as well as being very different from the poetry of the moralizing rhétoriqueurs who succeeded him.10

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The nineteenth-century revival of interest in Villon was partly a legacy of Romanticism’s fascination with the Gothic. It had already produced several translations and essays, notably one by Théophile Gautier, one of Swinburne’s favorite writers, in Les Grotesques (1844), before Swinburne and Rossetti began to rediscover his poetry in the late 1850s.11 Swinburne had been interested in medieval French literature since his schooldays, and his first collection, Poems and Ballads, demonstrates his abiding fascination with French poetry. Poems such as “In the Orchard” utilize obscure or archaic styles such as the Provençal Burden.12 Others, such as “A Ballad of Burdens,” and the “miracle play,” The Masque of Queen Bersabe, display more familiar influences, with the “Ballad” using the complex rhyme scheme of its medieval forebears. The collection also shows Swinburne using medieval French prose to fabricate an authenticating legend for “The Leper,” and, in an especially audacious stunt, introducing “Laus Veneris” [“Praise of Venus”] with a lengthy citation from the Livre des grandes merveilles d’amour [“Book of the great wonders of love”]. This he mischievously attributed to a sixteenth-century priest. He clearly had the skills and knowledge to tackle Villon and indeed had started to translate Villon’s works in the early 1860s.13 He had also begun an essay on Villon in 1863, describing the poet as a “gallows-nightingale” in whose work “the extended arm of his native gibbet casts the significant shadow of its fond beckoning hand” (184). Such rhetorical effusion characterized his sole public speech, the discussion of Anglo-French literary relations given at a Royal Literary Fund dinner on May 2, 1866. Here he discussed Villon and also Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (ca.1380s), exploring the “heathenish love of Provençal fighters and singers” and “the bitter absorption of life” that distinguished Chaucer’s poem.14 Together with Rossetti, he planned to translate Villon’s complete works, and although this initiative came to nothing, Rossetti did produce three lyrics including the famous “Ballad of Dead Ladies” that seems almost a gloss on his doomed relationship with Elizabeth Siddal. However, although Rossetti’s choices explored the acceptable melancholia of the ubi sunt tradition, Swinburne’s were more provocative, and were not included in Poems and Ballads or its successor, Songs Before Sunrise (1871).15 Poems and Ballads contained more than enough outrageous material without contributions from Villon, whose influence was rarely foregrounded. However, Swinburne’s reading of him lingered in the pessimism of “A Ballad of Burdens,” and the wearied nostalgia of “Félise,” which uses “Mais où sont les neiges d’antan” as its epigraph. Seized by the cause of Italian nationalism and increasingly estranged from Rossetti following the latter’s failed suicide attempt in 1872, Swinburne did not return to Villon for several years. By 1876, however, his


enthusiasm was fiercer than ever, with letters to friends such as the academic John Nichol and the poet Stéphane Mallarmé proclaiming a “Mediaeval Trinity” of Dante, Chaucer, and Villon. He had, he told Nichol, “long since come to the conclusion that though third in date,” the French poet “is beyond all question second in rank of these three; as indisputably greater than Chaucer as lesser than Dante in the natural gift of poetic genius.”16 In a burst of creative energy, Swinburne translated five ballads in three days, relishing the complex technical challenge of “preserving the order and number of rhymes” in his verse (136). The ballade, with its eight or ten syllable lines rhyming ABABBCBC, provoked Swinburne’s virtuosity and, because there were often “only three or four variations in the whole poem,” tested his ingenuity as a rhymer (136). The poems also allowed him to continue to outrage English propriety, though as he ruefully told Norman MacColl, his favorite translations, “The Complaint of the Fair Armouress” and “Villon and Fat Madge” were “too characteristic of the third among his three honorable professions of Poet, Pickpurse, and Pimp, to be published, the one (I fear) in full, and the other (I regret to state) at all” (270).17 The result was a censored version of the first and a posthumous publication for the second. In all, Swinburne’s “Villonneries,” as he called them, amounted to approximately a dozen translations, ten of which appeared in the second series of Poems and Ballads in 1878. They were prefaced by the celebratory “A Ballad of François Villon, Prince of all Ballad-Makers,” a poem which not only stressed Swinburne’s imaginative and ideological kinship with the Frenchman, but which also linked Villon and Sappho, whom Swinburne considered the greatest of lyric poets. As Jerome McGann points out, Swinburne often alluded to Sappho through the figure of the nightingale, and in this poem, he audaciously triangulated classical Greece, medieval Paris, and the contemporary Victorian world.18 Swinburne’s translations showed him reining in his habitual prolixity, and perhaps influenced by his contemporaneous reading of Robert Browning and John Donne, displayed a rougher edge than his earlier work. Their publication was well received, helped by a review by his close friend Theodore Watts in the Athenaeum ( July 6, 1878), which praised them as “marvelous, both for vitality and for closeness.”19 By now, Villon’s work was becoming more widely known, with a major essay on it by Robert Louis Stevenson appearing in the Cornhill Magazine in 1877, and a translation of the complete poems by John Payne published in 1878, shortly after the second Poems and Ballads. A revival of interest in medieval poetic forms such as the villanelle, the ballade, and the rondeau during the late nineteenth century prompted further interest in Villon’s work. In a letter to the Pall Mall Gazette in January 1886, Swinburne ranked Villon twelfth in a list of

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his fifty most important writers.20 With poets such as Arthur Symons and W. E. Henley adding to the chorus of approval during the 1890s, the stage was set for the next generation of proselytizers, led by Ezra Pound. Villon’s place in the modern canon was seemingly assured.21 Why Villon? A brief history of Villon’s reputation in English from the 1860s onwards shows the growth of his popularity among certain radical writers, but it reveals few of the reasons behind it: Medieval France is hardly the obvious starting point for a poet seeking new modes of expression in Victorian Britain. One explanation is that Villon’s outlaw lifestyle appealed to those, like Swinburne, who delighted in affronting bourgeois morality. His life and crimes could hardly be discussed in polite society, and this gave him the allure of a well-kept secret shared only by those of “advanced” views. This “other” Villon was all the more appealing because some of his work had entered the public domain. Translations such as Rossetti’s were beautiful enough to evade moral censure, for pondering on love and death reshaped in sumptuous and even fashionable “aesthetic” language could produce a beguiling cocktail of past and present. There is however, a more important reason for the resurgence of Villon: his relevance in Victorian Britain. Swinburne’s tribute to him stressed the links between himself and “our sad bad mad glad brother,” eliding the Victorian and medieval worlds. Swinburne underlined Villon’s originality and contemporary relevance in arguing that he was the “the first modern and the last medieval poet.”22 It was this “modernity,” implicit in Villon’s recognition of the tragicomic irreconcilable opposition of individual desires and the social institutions that police them that made him so relevant for late Victorian readers. The idea was explored in poems such as the “Epitaph in Form of a Ballad,” in which Villon imagines himself and his comrades “slain by law” (l.13) in a world that cannot accommodate their desires. A number of Victorian writers and cultural critics had sensed that their world was starting to move too quickly for comfort, hence Matthew Arnold’s identification of “This strange disease of modern life / With its sick hurry, its divided aims” in “The Scholar Gipsy” (1853). In translating Villon, however, Swinburne saw that the “sick hurry” had begun far earlier than what Arnold implied: The rain has washed and laundered us all five, And the sun dried and blackened; yea, perdie, Ravens and pies with beaks that rend and rive Have dug our eyes out, and plucked off for fee Our beards and eyebrows; never are we free,

swinburne’s translations of villon / 139 Not once, to rest; but here and there still sped, Drive at its wild will by the wind’s charge led, More pecked of birds than fruits on garden wall; (ll.21–28)23

Leaving aside Villon’s representation of his crimes, the poem has a stark intensity that spoke powerfully to a Britain grappling with the imposition of capital punishment.24 The last public execution in Britain, that of the Fenian Michael Barrett, had occurred in May 1868 in the face of considerable opposition from Swinburne and many others. For a translator of Villon, the event threw into relief the similarities between the supposedly “barbaric” medieval world and the complacently “civilized” modern one.25 “Epitaph” has little interest in the nature of crime, remarking only that “all alive / Have not wit always to walk righteously” (ll.13–14), itself an attitude gaining support among criminal reformers during the 1860s and 1870s. The seemingly unanswered prayer for forgiveness that concludes each stanza again stresses the poem’s relevance for readers of 1878, chiming in with increasing skepticism toward a providential universe. The ballad is therefore a striking summary of recognizably modern legal and existential anxieties, which, despite occasional archaism in its diction, is both elegiac and unsettling. The medieval world to which Swinburne gained access via Villon allowed him to challenge conventional proprieties without risking the open conflict with them generated by the first Poems and Ballads. In much of his finest poetry, Swinburne plays a complex game with the legitimizing authority of history, exploiting while at the same time colluding with contemporary hypocrisy in placing transgressive narratives at distant removes from the present. The hothouse eroticism of “Laus Veneris” would have been unthinkable in a Victorian setting, but it could be explored if contained within the legendary Venusberg, just as painters such as Lawrence Alma-Tadema and Edward Poynter managed to exhibit titillating nudes under the guise of goddesses, nymphs, or heroines of classical antiquity. Similarly, the outrageous procession of queens representing “perverse or extravagant forms of sexuality”26 in The Masque of Queen Bersabe relies on a potent combination of classical tradition and the Old Testament. Villon’s poetry was another way to introduce controversial subjects to the public realm. The published translations that do this most strikingly are “The Ballad of the Women of Paris” [“Quoy qu’on tient langagieres”] and “The Complaint of the Fair Armouress.” The first sees Villon praising the women of his native city above all others, supposedly for their facility in the French language, “Il n’est bon bec que de Paris,” “there is no tongue like Parisienne.”27 However, in the context of the Testament, the women are likely to be

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prostitutes, and this surely alters the meaning of the poem. It may seem a nostalgic salute to Parisian slang, but it also offers veiled allusions to the women’s skill in kissing and perhaps by extension (oral) sex. Swinburne did not print the French originals beside his renderings, and so was able to rely, to some extent, on his audience’s ignorance. Much hinges on his translation of the refrain as “There’s no good girl’s lip out of Paris” (l.10), a line offering several meanings. The least controversial suggests that Parisian girls possess “the gift of the gab,” speaking French with such idiomatic flair that the language itself is ennobled by their use of it. However, the line also means that beyond Paris, where Villon would be exiled, “There’s no good girl’s lip,” and sexual fulfillment, whether through kisses or other means, is as unlikely as linguistic dexterity.28 In the type of polysemic indecency Swinburne so relished, the line achieves another meaning when read aloud—“There’s no good girls slip out of Paris.” The city corrupts and confines its women, but they have little desire to leave since they are innately lascivious, and should they do so, they are of course, not “good girls.” For a Victorian audience used to seeing Paris as a city of vice, the poem both confirms expectations and, for some male readers, stimulates fresh ones. A celebration of the skills of Parisian prostitutes could not have been published openly in 1878, but by translating a historic text, Swinburne is able to smuggle disreputable content into English homes under the guise of high art, just as his friend Lord Houghton smuggled pornography from Paris in diplomatic bags. Had critics challenged his translation, he would doubtless have used the same defense employed in his Notes on Poems and Reviews (1866) that the poem was either a moral, rather than immoral statement, or else had upset readers because of their own corrupt interpretation of an innocent text. “What certain reviewers have imagined it to imply, I am incompetent to explain, and unwilling to imagine. I am evidently not virtuous enough to understand them,” he wrote in response to the furor surrounding his first collection.29 A second treatment of prostitution, “The Complaint of the Fair Armouress,” is controversial for another reason. Swinburne had seen the uproar caused by Rossetti’s “Jenny” (1870) and the more serious discussion of the prostitute’s social position generated by Augusta Webster’s “A Castaway” in the same year. However, although both these poems examined the sordid realities of contemporary London and the moral hypocrisy that they engendered, the translation from Villon took a very different tack. Villon’s poem objectifies the physical deterioration of a once beautiful prostitute without any concern for the morality of her profession. Her decrepitude is the wages of time, not sin, and the poem both elegizes her lost beauty and stares in fascinated horror at the decay that all humans suffer. This is at once ancient in recalling the momento mori tradition and modern


in that the woman’s fate is strongly reminiscent of the horror and alarm generated by the female body in much “decadent” French writing from Baudelaire onwards and of its treatment in contemporary Naturalist fiction. Émile Zola’s Nana would appear within two years of Swinburne’s poem in 1880. “The Fair Armouress,” whom Villon had known in her extreme old age, derived her nickname from a Parisian campaign to rid the streets of prostitutes, a purge that had merely forced them underground, with girls doubling as shopkeepers. This produced a certain hypocrisy among Parisians who doubtless knew the true profession of the belle heaulmière and her kind, and Villon plays on this by implying her calling without stating it. Such hypocrisy is echoed in the profusion of euphemisms, “unfortunates,” “women of the town,” even “soiled doves,” found in the Victorian press.30 In Swinburne’s version, the old whore is described as “That sweet who was the armourer’s maid” (l.2), but even the seemingly straightforward conceals provocative associations. Not only does “armourer” pun on “amour” and suggest—through its proximity to the French word for love, the artificial nature of the affections the woman offers—but it also alludes to “armour” as a slang term, beloved by James Boswell for instance, for male contraceptives, an entirely appropriate, though utterly unmentionable, association. Barbara Sargent-Baur notes that “Peculiar to Villon is the degree of difficulty caused by his indulgence in jargon and private jokes.”31 Readers of Swinburne would be entitled to make similar observations. The poem’s extended catalogue of the symptoms of age, specifically sexual decline, would again have been impossible in contemporary English literature, especially in the way that Villon refused to poeticize the disgust their sufferer feels—her “lank thighs” are “no thighs but skin,” “specked with spots like sausage meat” (ll.69–70). This depiction of the woman’s plight could be regarded as prurient and exploitative, but it could also be a legitimate attempt by both writers to extend the range of poetic subject matter available to them, as well as a reaction against courtliness and aureate diction. Unfortunately, as Swinburne had feared, the poem could not be printed in its entirety. His publisher, Andrew Chatto, censored the seventh stanza: The shapely slender shoulders small, Long arms, hands wrought in glorious wise, Round little breasts, the hips withal High, full of flesh, not scant of size, Fit for all amorous masteries; *** ***** ***** *** *** ****** **** *** ******* ***** ** ***** ***** ****** ** * ***** ****** ** **** *****? (ll.49–56)

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These asterisks, and the question mark that concludes the verse, both imply and erase the missing words, in a sense magnifying their presence by drawing attention to what they do not say. One wonders how many readers pored over these omissions in an attempt to puzzle out the mutilated lines, restored by Thomas Wise in 1919: The large loins and the flower that was Planted above my strong round thighs In a small garden of soft grass?32

Yet, before the censorship of Swinburne’s poem is seen as another example of the compromising of artistic freedom bemoaned by sundry late Victorian writers and even touched on by Watts in his review, one might consider the translation of Villon’s line “Ce larges rains; ce sardinet.” Swinburne gives this as “The large loins and the flower that was,” but it is hard to say whether this is a poetic flourish, an example of rhyme compulsion, or an act of self-censorship in a poem Swinburne knew he would not be able to publish in full. Peter Dale’s version of Villon keeps the garden image as faithful to the “petit jardinet” but is much bolder earlier in the stanza: “the broad loins and pursing cunt.”33 Perhaps, for all his Bohemian enthusiasms, Swinburne’s position as a gentleman of aristocratic descent held him back from a literal rendering of courtly flower symbols. It may be though that he simply relished such obvious use of them and saw no need for more explicit language. Conclusion: Subverting the Victorians Throughout his career, though particularly in the period from Atalanta in Calydon (1865) to the second series of Poems and Ballads, Swinburne used the literature and culture of the past to shock, startle, and subvert the Victorian bourgeoisie. The tender elegy “Itylus,” for instance, a staple of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, derives from a bloodthirsty Greek myth, and he put historical events to similar uses. Poems and Ballads’ “Les Noyades” offers a flagrantly erotic depiction of public executions during the French Revolution. The “Villonneries” enlist the poetry of the past, rather than myth or history, in providing an eyewitness account of the brutalities of their milieu. Translating Villon also allowed Swinburne to step outside English poetic tradition, with the result that his engagement with the Middle Ages was overshadowed neither by Chaucer nor by the recreations of medieval history found in Shakespeare’s Henriad and elsewhere. By 1878, Swinburne was no longer the enfant terrible he had been in the 1860s. Then, as Donald Thomas notes of Poems and Ballads, “there were


passages detailing a girl’s breasts and nipples in a manner calculated to bring a family reading to an abrupt halt”34 but a decade later, his audience was wise to such techniques. The Villon translations did encourage Swinburne to flirt with transgressive subjects, but their subversive element was far more sophisticated than previously. Instead of disturbing his audience with details, Swinburne narrowed the historical distance between Villon and themselves, implying resonant parallels between the Middle Ages and the present. The “Ballad Against the Enemies of France,” for instance, initially a product of the Hundred Years’ War, could now be read in the light of the recent Franco-Prussian conflict. The “Epitaph in the Form of a Ballad” raised the issue of public execution and the friction between the individual and the state. The prostitution poems, meanwhile, had obvious relevance at a time when prostitution was receiving widespread attention as a social evil and when campaigns against the Contagious Diseases Act were gathering force. In short, while some of his contemporaries escaped into a whimsical or sentimental version of the Middle Ages, Swinburne offered a more troubling engagement with the period that suggested medieval Paris and Victorian cities shared significant, even worrying, features. Both were overcrowded, hypocritical in religious observance, filled with whores, and often brutally policed. Swinburne appreciated and identified with Villon’s persona, savored his earthy humor, and delighted in his technical skill. His admiration was long lasting: as late as January 1904, he was likening him to Marlowe and Robert Burns.35 Yet, although J. A. George maintains, “Villon allowed Swinburne to escape both the stylistic and ethical concerns of nineteenth century verse,”36 the break was not a clean one. The supposed “escape from stylistic concerns” itself led to a new fashion for French-influenced verse forms, which, although it included striking work by Swinburne, often produced triviality in those who followed him.37 The subject matter that Villon allowed was startling, but even here Swinburne’s translations of the prostitution poems could be seen in the context of wider debates about the relationship between art and (sexual) morality that he had in many ways initiated with Poems and Ballads. These would flare up again during the trials of Oscar Wilde in 1895. Swinburne’s translations from Villon reveal a very different face of Victorian medievalism from that shown by Idylls of the King (1859–1891) or a painting such as Frank Dicksee’s Chivalry (ca.1885).38 They deal with “the commons of France,”39 a sector of society often ignored in Victorian artistic formulations of the Middle Ages, and are vivid and alive in ways in which the marmoreal stillness of a Burne-Jones picture could never be. Although the poems inevitably place medieval Paris at a linguistic distance, they do not place it under glass. They focus not on chivalry and romance but on elderly

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whores, hangings, military and national turmoil (“Ballad Against the Enemies of France”), the transience of fame (“Ballad of the Lords of Old Time,” a companion piece to Ballade des Dames du temps jadis), and the complexities of subjectivity (“The Dispute of the Heart and Body of François Villon”). Cynical pragmatism and sly humor are the dominant moods of “A Double Ballad of Good Counsel” (“Good luck has he that deals with none!” 1.8), whereas the “Fragment on Death” permits no pieties when “Nose bend, veins stretch, and breath surrender” (1.10). Taken together, the translations represent not only a challenge to stereotypical conceptions of the Victorian engagement with the medieval world but also remain a notable technical and imaginative achievement in their own right. By translating Villon, Swinburne began to redraw the Victorian poetic map. Their work would have far-reaching consequences for twentieth-century literature. Notes 1. Following William E. Freedman in his Pre-Raphaelitism: A Bibliocritical Study (1965), one should see the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the Pre-Raphaelite Movement, and Pre-Raphaelitism as “sequential terms descriptive of a continuous, if not unified aesthetic force” (quoted in Derek Stanford, ed., Pre-Raphaelite Writing: An Anthology [London: Dent, 1973], xiv). The first of these refers to the original “PRB” formed by John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt, and D. G. Rossetti, together with James Collinson (a minor painter who regularly fell asleep in PRB meetings), the sculptor Thomas Woolner, and the art critics W. M. Rossetti and F. G. Stephens. When this grouping broke up, some of its ideals were retained by Holman Hunt and by artists who had not belonged to the original Brotherhood such as Ford Madox Brown. The term “Pre-Raphaelitism” became increasingly associated with Rossetti’s later pictures, the “languorous depictions of femmes fatales” that had little connection with the painstaking detail advocated by the original PRB (Ian Chilvers, Harold Osborne, and Dennis Farr, eds., “Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood,” in The Oxford Dictionary of Art [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988], 400). Rossetti, Burne-Jones, and Morris were popularly, if wrongly seen, as pursuing unified aims. “Thus in the popular imagination the term ‘Pre-Raphaelite’ conjures up pictures of medieval romance, and ironically a movement that began as a rebellion against artificiality and sentimentality is now identified with a kind of escapism,” note the editors of the Oxford Dictionary of Art (400). The popularity of “pseudo-medievalism” began in the 1860s, and artists were still producing such work in the 1920s and 1930s. There is an excellent selection of it in John Christian, ed., The Last Romantics (1989). The notion that Rossetti and others are “escapist” has been reinforced by many “coffee table” art books since interest in “Pre-Raphaelitism” reawakened during the 1960s. 2. Despite the efforts of William Morris in his political fantasy A Dream of John Ball (1888). 3. Antony H. Harrison, Swinburne’s Medievalism: A Study in Victorian Love Poetry (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), 10. 4. The library of the Taylorian Institute was especially renowned for its collection of French literature.

swinburne’s translations of villon / 145 5. Algernon Swinburne, New Writings by Swinburne, ed. Cecil Y. Lang (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1964), 186. 6. François Villon, Selected Poems, trans. Peter Dale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), 10. 7. As Michael Freeman has noted, Rossetti’s popular translation of the refrain, “But where are the snows of yester-year?,” is rather smoother and more “poetic” than the rest of the ballad. There is a sinister edge to much of the poem, notably in the second verse’s reference to “the Queen / Who willed that Buridan should steer / Sewed in a sack’s mouth down the Seine,” D. G. Rossetti, Collected Poetry and Prose, ed. Jerome McGann (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 119. That is rarely acknowledged by those who quote “the snows of yester-year” (Michael Freeman, François Villon in His Works: The Villain’s Tale [Amsterdam: Rodoipi, 2000], 156–160). 8. Derek Stanford, ed., Pre-Raphaelite Writing: An Anthology (London: Dent, 1973), xvii. 9. Ian Fletcher, ed., British Poetry and Prose 1870–1905 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 416. 10. Joyce Reid, ed., The Concise Oxford Dictionary of French Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976). 11. Freeman François Villon in his Works, 14. 12. “In the Orchard” uses the Provençal “alba” or “dawn-song,” “a genre without a fixed meter or form in which a lover laments the imminent separation from the other lover at the break of day.” (Algernon Swinburne, Poems and Ballads & Atalanta in Calydon, ed., Kenneth Haynes [London: Penguin, 2000], 340.) The result is oddly akin to a rhymed version of Tennyson’s “Tears, idle tears” (The Princess, 1847). 13. Swinburne, New Writings, 183–187. 14. Edmund, Gosse, The Life of Algernon Charles Swinburne (London: Macmillan, 1917), 148. 15. Ubi sunt (“where are they?”) are the opening words of a number of Medieval Latin poems. “[T]hey are now used to classify a particular kind of poem that dwells on and laments the transitory nature of life and beauty,” writes J. A. Cuddon, who includes Ballade des Dames du temps jadis as an example ( J. A. Cuddon, “Ubi Sunt,” in The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory [London: Penguin, 1999], 952). 16. Algernon Swinburne, The Swinburne Letters, vol. III., ed. Cecil Y. Lang (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960), 164. 17. Swinburne had translated “The Ballad of Villon and Fat Madge,” with its memorable refrain “Inside this brothel where we drive our trade” in the early 1860s, doubtless drawn to its exuberant style and outrageous content. The poem depicts the relationship between Villon and “gros Margot,” a prostitute with whom he lives. Its descriptions of sex and sexual commerce, together with its physically disgusting detail of farting and physical abuse, made it a favorite of Swinburne’s, but one that was not published in his lifetime. Because its publication was posthumous, it is not discussed here, and readers are referred instead to Cecil Lang’s consideration of it (Swinburne, New Writings, 183–184). 18. Jerome J. McGann, Swinburne: An Experiment in Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 89–91.

146 / nick freeman 19. Clyde K. Hyder, ed., Swinburne: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), 179–180. 20. His top twelve were (1) Shakespeare, (2) Aeschylus, (3) Selections from the Bible, (4) Homer, (5) Sophocles, (6) Aristophanes, (7) Pindar, (8) Lucretius, (9) Catullus, (10) Dante, (11) Chaucer, (12) Villon (Swinburne, Swinburne Letters, 132). 21. Henley translated Villon into contemporary slang in his extraordinary rendering of the “Ballade de Bonne Doctrine” as “Villon’s Straight Tip to All Cross Coves” (Fletcher, British Poetry, 179). 22. Harrison, Swinburne’s Medievalism, 12. 23. “Pies” are magpies, a species of crow. 24. Philip Priestley, Victorian Prison Lives (London: Methuen, 1985), 240–251. 25. As did other horrors of the period—Governor Eyre’s brutal suppression of the Jamaican revolt (1865), the atrocities of the Franco-Prussian war (1870–1871), and the dispute between Turkey and Bulgaria (1877), for instance. 26. Richard Jenkyns, Dignity and Decadence: Victorian Art and the Classical Inheritance (London: Harper Collins, 1991), 264. 27. François Villon, Selected Poems, trans. Peter Dale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), 160. 28. Perhaps Swinburne’s use of “lip” in this context was inspired by Emilia’s comment on Lodovico in Shakespeare’s Othello, “I know a lady in Venice would have walk’d bare-foot to Palestine for a touch of his nether lip” (IV.iii.39–40). 29. Swinburne, Poems and Ballads, 405. 30. “Many circumlocutions have undoubtedly been invented to describe . . . the highly tinted Venuses who form so favorite a study of the connoisseurs of the Haymarket,” noted the Saturday Review in 1862 (Sheila Fisher, “Taken Men and Token Women,” in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Seeking the Woman in Late Medieval and Renaissance Writings: Essays in Feminist Contextual Criticism, ed. Sheila Fisher and Janet E. Halley (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989), 74–75. 31. François Villon, Complete Poems, trans. Barbara N. Sargent-Baur (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 13. 32. Algernon Swinburne, Selected Poems, ed. L. M. Findley (Manchester: Carcanet, 1982), 169. 33. Villon, Selected Poems, 81. Robert Lowell’s uninspired effort in Imitations (1961) opts for “vagina.” 34. Donald Thomas, Swinburne: The Poet in his World (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1979), 120. 35. Swinburne, The Swinburne Letters, 174. 36. J. A. George, “Poetry in Translation,” in A Companion to Victorian Poetry, ed. Richard Cronin, Alison Chapman, and Antony H. Harrison (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. 272. 37. Notably Andrew Lang, who rewrote Swinburne’s “A Ballad of Burdens” as the “Ballade of Cricket” (“The burden of hard hitting: slog away!”) in his tellingly titled Rhymes à la mode (1885), which also contains the “Ballade of Aesthetic Adjectives.” The poems are reproduced in Valentine Cunningham, The Victorians: An Anthology of Poetry & Poetics (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 851–852. 38. Swinburne typically referred to Tennyson’s poem as “Idylls of the Prince Consort,” and the “Morte d’Arthur” as the “Morte d’Albert.” 39. Swinburne, Swinburne Letters, 164.

Chapter Eight Counter-Medievalism: Or, Protestants Rewrite the Middle Ages Miriam Elizabeth Burstein

Possessed with mediæval notions, they trace all the faults and follies of our modern social and political life to the decline of Church influence, and their daily labour is to revive it in all its old supremacy. In dogma they are Sacramentarians; in devotional sentiment, Mystics; in habits and tendencies, Mediævalists; in sympathy and aim, strong Romanists. J. H. Rigg, “The Catholic Revival” (1867)

The Methodist J. H. Rigg,1 a staunch opponent of Roman Catholicism, here lights into Anglo-Catholics—those who sought to revive the Church of England’s pre-Reformation character. For Rigg, medievalism is not just an aesthetic or even political orientation toward the past; it is, rather, irrevocably bound up with a specifically Roman Catholic moment in English history. Such medievalism involves a leave-taking of the senses—the AngloCatholics are, after all, “possessed,” not least because they insist on tracing all modern foibles to a single ancient cause. More dangerously, that leavetaking includes a most un-English (so Rigg might say) worship of authority. Thus, absorbed by visions of a unified, centralized church, Anglo-Catholics work to reconstruct it in the present. They are spiritual Luddites, resisting the modernizing force of the Reformation. To be a medievalist is not to engage with history, but to revive its dead corpse in the present; not to value progress, but to desire regression toward an earlier state; and above all, not to embrace Protestant reason but instead Roman Catholic authority. In this reading, medievalism is not, properly speaking, a “historical” attitude at all. What I call “counter-medievalism,” then, forward the as-yet unfinished project of Reformation. And it does so by reading the Middle Ages as a series

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of tragically incomplete attempts at asserting Protestant principles. When Ellen Ranyard, in her enormously popular children’s history The Book and Its Story (1853), tells her readers that sixth-century Scottish Christians were learning “Protestant doctrines,” she blatantly distorts the historical record for her youthful readership—but the distortion reflects ongoing evangelical attempts to disentangle “pure” Christian doctrines from their supposed corruption under the papacy.2 Counter-medievalism returns to the Middle Ages to prove that no “revival” or “reversion” is necessary, for the true heritage of medieval Christianity comes to fruition in the Reformation. It stands against contemporary medievalist utopias—perhaps most familiar to modern scholars in the work of Thomas Carlyle, William Cobbett, A. W. N. Pugin, and John Ruskin—that imagined medieval Catholic culture as a haven of organic unity, paternalism, and social justice.3 In rejecting the medievalist utopia, whether conservative or radical, counter-medievalism draws attention instead to the “true” Church that haunts Catholicism’s margins, whether it be the so-called saving remnant within the Church or the heresies (Lollards, Albigensians, etc) that lurk at its theological, economic, and geographical margins. Yet this project is not in and of itself new, but rather a new incarnation of a historical endeavor that had preoccupied English writers since the Reformation. In the wake of increasing legislative tolerance for Roman Catholics, writers of all stripes turned to history in order to justify, once again, Britain’s independence from the papacy. I focus on two topics that provoked heated debate among Victorian novelists, theologians, and historians: the position of the Anglo-Saxon Church, especially in relationship to the Augustinian mission of the sixth century, and the role of Wycliffe and the Lollards in setting the stage for the English Reformation.4 I am most interested in this debate in its “low” fictional form rather than its “high” theological and historical mode, for the novels suggest how quite complicated historiographical issues could be appropriated, revised, and disseminated to a sometimes juvenile public. Novels such as Emily Sarah Holt’s Imogen (1876), Emma Leslie’s Conrad (1880), or the anonymous The Rivals (1859) employed authenticating devices like prefaces and afterwords, footnotes, and pointedly interventionist narrators to emphasize that they drew on the “best” authorities or even, as in Holt’s case, primary sources. Despite the literal cheapness of these fictions, they covered themselves in the historian’s glory, either by claiming to popularize scholarly research or (more rarely) by arguing for original interpretations of the primary evidence. If, as so many polemicists warned, Victorian Protestants were in danger of forgetting their heritage, then the novelists would supply a new store of memories to keep the faith alive. Mostly, the purpose of these narratives is not to convert so much as it is to confirm, and to that end they construct a fictionalized narrative of British history that ends with the desired Protestant outcome. At the same time,

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the historiography in question rests on what John Brewer has nicely termed “the cognitive map of anti-Catholicism,” namely, “distortion, deletion, distance and denial.”5 The novels derived from it, thus, seek to render obvious what Protestant historians argued. Moreover, inasmuch as such historical fiction is normally didactic and, indeed, evangelical, it aims not simply to enlighten readers about the “right” interpretation of medieval Christianity, but, more importantly, to control interpretation and shape future action. That is, these novels try to inscribe their readers into an ongoing narrative of Christian life, a living history that ultimately transcends vast cultural differences by unifying its participants in the love of Christ. As we shall see, both evangelicals like Holt and High Church novelists like the anonymous author of The Rivals (1859) often embody religious upheaval in gender identity—specifically, in a “new” Christian masculinity emphasizing tenderness, spirituality, spiritual sensitivity, and kindness to women. This is most emphatically not the muscular Christianity associated with Charles Kingsley, which, although certainly involved sincere and profound feeling, also insisted on physical and even erotic virtuosity—both almost entirely absent from the works under discussion.6 Moreover, whereas most recent theoretical accounts of Victorian masculinity emphasizes the male body and its disciplines, novelists like A. D. Crake and Elizabeth Rundle Charles insist that manhood is purely a state of soul; there is little emphasis on what James Eli Adams dubs the “ascetic regimen” of Victorian masculinity.7 If anything, in many of these novels, such a “regimen” takes on a purely historical cast, as an artifact of misguided Roman Catholic or pagan policies. I begin by sketching the historical context of these fictions, particularly the continuity between sixteenth- and seventeenth-century polemics and Victorian theories of the medieval church. The next section examines how novelists running the theological gamut from evangelical to High Church negotiated the problem of the Anglo-Saxon Church’s relationship to Rome. At the same time as they try to reconcile Anglican apostolicity with St. Augustine of Canterbury’s mission in the sixth century, these novelists imagine the birth of English civilization in the person of the new Christian man, defined by his righteousness instead of his violence. Finally, the third section shows how Victorian narratives of Lollardy tried to rewrite the Reformation in a purely English key, while celebrating the rebirth of “true” holiness through the reader’s personal encounter with the vernacular Scriptures. In Search of a Native British Christianity Nearly all of the novels to be considered here are part and parcel of an attempt to rule Catholicism out of history—particularly in an age when


Catholic appeals for legislative tolerance were proving increasingly fruitful. It is worth noting that nearly all of the novels I treat were published in the last three decades of the nineteenth century, long after anti-Catholicism had ceased to be a fruitful party platform.8 Despite the groundswell of antiCatholic agitation spurred by the Catholic Emancipation Act (1829), the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy (1850), and the spread of Ritualism or Anglo-Catholicism within the Church of England, Victorian evangelicals of the 1870s and after often felt confronted by Protestant apathy or, indeed, charges of intolerance. They thus react against Roman Catholicism’s public success, on the one hand, and their need to disclaim the pro-Protestant cause’s reputed “bigotry,” on the other. As the late Victorian evangelical Emma Leslie put it, ventriloquizing a nun, “There are vile falsehoods told about us, so that some English think of us, and speak of us, as though we worshipped a strange God—another God than theirs; but it is not so, and you know it; but your aunt, she cannot know it, and she may say, ‘These nuns are bad, and cruel, and want to force my children to forget their own God, and worship some strange idol.’ ”9 Leslie’s nun here voices the Protestant caricature of Catholic requests for toleration. When Roman Catholics appealed for tolerance against “bigotry,” in other words, they were really traducing Protestant expressions of religious truth. “Good” Protestants would firmly withstand any such false appeals. But although these novelists responded to a specifically Victorian religious context, their historiography—or at least what passed for the same— drew heavily on themes first established in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.10 History was key because Anglican theologians needed to demonstrate the Church of England’s apostolic descent. To oversimplify drastically, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century theologians and antiquarians argued that Augustine’s mission to England in 596 did not “introduce” Christianity to England. Instead, Augustine introduced Roman practices to the Anglo-Saxons while the British tried to maintain their native Christianity, purportedly introduced by Joseph of Arimathea, the most popular choice of John Foxe and his followers, and/or the legendary King Lucius, as suggested by Bede.11 After Augustine, the papacy made steady inroads on native independence until, as John Milton put it, the providential rise of “the divine and admirable spirit of Wicklef,” whose insights were sadly but only temporarily suppressed by the “obstinate perversnes of our Prelats.”12 Meanwhile, the displaced Druidic tradition could conveniently stand in as a parallel for priestly abuses.13 The use value of this position for Reformation polemic is obvious: if the Church of England did not originate from a papal mission, then whatever Augustine introduced corrupted the native tradition’s purity.


Victorian Protestants, including those who rejected the Joseph and Lucius theories, still argued that Augustine’s mission was less important than native British evangelism. Moreover, they usually maintained the opposition between the proto-Protestant native British and the easily corrupted Anglo-Saxons. Thus, Henry Soames gloated that nearly all the northern counties of England have “the full gratification of pointing to the ancient church of Britain as its nursing mother in Christ’s holy faith.”14 Although Soames was willing to grant that Augustine was of some use, especially since Roman Catholicism was not yet wholly corrupt, nevertheless, ecclesiastical history demonstrated that the papacy’s work in medieval Britain consisted of one long power-grab—a position that the famed Catholic historian John Lingard treated with understandable contempt.15 Soames reserved his praise instead for those whose theology demonstrated the ongoing influence of native, proto-Protestant beliefs. The antiquarian George Smith was even less charitable, complaining that Augustine’s “policy” was characterized by “a serious amount of ignorance respecting the real gospel truth, and of the privileges which it was intended to communicate to the souls of mankind.” Although Smith conceded that under the Saxons, British Christianity was in a bad way, he nevertheless reserved his admiration for the Britons who “resist[ed] the inroads of Romish authority, and maintain[ed] their independence.”16 Similarly, writing on the eve of Catholic Emancipation, the Independent Minister Robert Vaughan distinguished between the Scottish evangelists and the “spirit of subjection to a foreign interference so observable in the history of the Anglo-Saxon Church”—although that was mild in comparison to the hysterical American clergyman John Dowling, who denounced the Anglo-Saxon conversions as “exchanging with the same ease as they would exchange one garment for another, the ancient Paganism of their Saxon ancestors, for the Christianized Paganism of Rome.”17 In this interpretation, Augustine’s mission was hardly Christian, let alone benevolent, and any conversions he effected were to something other than authentic belief. Even traditional High Church theologians, including those wary of Foxe’s ecclesiology, joined many of their evangelical and Dissenting brethren in representing Roman Catholicism as a foreign incursion into Britain’s extant line of apostolic succession.18 In other words, even those who shied away from apostolic succession or, in some cases, proto-Protestantism, dovetailed on the existence of a native British Christianity, one that made the Reformation a “revolution” in the old sense—that is, a return to a previous state rather than an innovation. The Victorians proved just as intrigued by the late fourteenth-century theologian John de Wycliffe and his followers, the Lollards. John Foxe said


of Wycliffe that he “by God’s providence, sprang and rose up, through whom the Lord would first waken and raise up again the world, which was overmuch drowned and whelmed in the deep streams of human tradition”—a sentiment echoed in the quotation from Milton given above.19 Following Foxe, evangelicals regarded Wycliffe and the Lollards as the heralds of not simply English Protestantism, but of the Reformation in toto. In Foxe’s ecclesiology, heretics like the Lollards stood side-by-side with the elect within the institutional churches—a tactic that, as Anthony Milton points out, had to be discarded by the Church of England’s Laudian faction, since it undermined the notion of apostolic descent.20 Nevertheless, Wycliffe enjoyed considerable praise from the sixteenth century onward, although outside the Protestant fold, commentary was not always positive; David Hume observed dryly that Wycliffe “seems not to have been actuated by the spirit of martyrdom,” while later an even less enthusiastic John Lingard painted Wycliffe as a thwarted place-seeker whose opinions were variously characterized by “violent hostility,” “bitter and envenomed invectives,” and “quibbles and evasions.”21 It was against opinions such as these that nineteenth-century pro-Wycliffites took up their pens. Wycliffe’s Victorian renaissance began with Robert Vaughan’s The Life and Opinions of John de Wycliffe (1828; 2nd ed., 1831), based on extensive manuscript research and intended as a corrective to the eighteenth-century life by John Lewis. In the context of the ongoing debates over Catholic Emancipation, Vaughan’s claims for Wycliffe’s significance were highly topical. Vaughan’s Life grounded Wycliffe in the context of medieval theology and culture, arguing that over the course of his lifetime, Wycliffe moved away from his youthful Catholicism and toward a position close to that of post-Reformation Protestantism, emphasizing such tenets as the right to private judgment and sola scriptura. Like Foxe and Milton, Vaughan proudly declared that when it came to comparing Wycliffe and Luther, “the claim to originality and enterprise, must be certainly awarded to the Englishman”—a claim that would later be echoed in the work of even German theologians and historians like Rudolf Buddensieg and Johann Loserth.22 In England, the scholarship advanced further with Forshall and Madden’s edition of the Wycliffe Bible in 1850, but German Protestants, especially G. V. Lechler, rapidly established themselves at the forefront of Wycliffite studies.23 As modern scholars have established, some of the adulation was based on false attributions. It is not clear how much, if any, actual work Wycliffe did on the Bible translation that bears his name, and one text popular with Victorians, Wycliffes Wycket, may not be his at all.24 Nevertheless, many Victorians could point proudly to Wycliffe in order to argue that “when tracing the history or influence of Divine Truth throughout Europe, the


habit of ascending no higher than Germany is past, or passing away”;25 in rehabilitating Wycliffe’s reputation, British Protestants felt that they could ground true Reformation principles on native soil, instead of regarding them as a foreign import. The lesson to be learned from Wycliffe’s example was a pointed one, according to the Congregationalist John Stoughton: Wycliffe “promoted the policy of liberal English statesmen of the fourteenth century, who aimed at maintaining, as far as possible, the independence of their country.”26 Wycliffe’s politics as well as his theology could be amenable to Victorian readers, who approved of his proto-Protestant patriotism. Needless to say, there were still demurrals, both from those like Francis Massingberd, whose churchmanship was too high to approve of all of Wycliffe’s teachings on church authority and property, and from those who argued that Wycliffe’s reforms did not really anticipate modern Protestantism.27 Nevertheless, evangelicals seized on Wycliffe as proof that essential Protestant doctrines such as sola scriptura and justification by faith alone were inculcated in England long before they were heard of abroad. Imagining the Anglo-Saxon Conversion When appropriating the debates set out above, most historical novelists translated them into the form of the conversion novel—that is, a novel about the self ’s discovery of error, consequent despondency, and, finally, the discovery of salvation through faith in Christ. Although most recent critical work on this subject has focused on Jewish conversion fiction, the patterns remain the same whether Hindus or Unitarians are at issue.28 To modern readers, the sheer repetitiveness of this patterning across novels set in wildly different time periods soon comes to seem tedious, not to mention predictable—yet that predictability is precisely the point. These novels lay out a universal plot, one that repeats itself across time and space; its universality means that the reader, too, can transform him- or herself along the convert’s model. At the same time, this plot’s apparent suitability for all historical moments yokes past and present together. Converts occupy a privileged historical realm that transcends the mere accidents of mundane existence. A case in point is the missionary Charlotte Maria Tucker’s [“A.L.O.E.”] Daybreak in Britain (1880), which imagines how Christianity might have reached the British around the second century A.D.29 Tucker ignores the various speculations about the apostles and substitutes instead, Alpheus, a convert who, like Paul, had previously persecuted Christians. The short tale revolves around Alpheus’s capture by the Britons and his subsequent relationship with the orphaned Imogen, whom he manages to convert. As Royal W. Rhodes points out, the chapter divisions are mostly catechetical in nature; one might add that the book thus situates the reader in the position


of the pagan child, eagerly receptive to the evangelist’s teachings.30 As with many evangelical tales, the novel displaces the work of conversion from priestly authority figures onto private evangelists; as a converted Jew, Alpheus is a marginal figure in relationship to the Druids, to his own original community, and indeed to the Romans. Similarly, Imogen is not only an orphan, but also the only female character in the entire story. Tucker’s decision to yoke evangelist and female convert is not accidental: Imogen’s instinctive “pity” for Alpheus, arising naturally and irresistibly from her “gentle heart,” is the natural type of Christian mercy itself (Daybreak, 12). By contrast, the Druid priests do not pray to “a God of mercy and love” (9), and the British chieftain, Vortimer, is a “bold, proud, cruel man” (11) who dies killing the Roman soldier responsible for his own fatal wound (75). Worse still, the Druids have a low opinion of women. The priest Urien sneers that women have “no soul for the mysteries of religion” (24) and has “struck” Imogen at least once (34). The paganism of Tucker’s early Britain is, thus, inseparable from the wrong sort of masculinity, one hyper-patriarchal, violent, and antifeminine.31 Christianity, by contrast, ultimately transcends violence through the power of mercy, but from a this-worldly perspective, mercy is “feminine”—and, therefore, seemingly extrinsic to a militaristic British culture. Alpheus’s ultimate success as a missionary unites the British through bonds of sentiment instead of violence; we last see them “mourning as for a father” (124) as they bring him to his grave. Tucker tells us in a note that her book was originally written for proselytizing in the East (21), and—demonstrating the fine flexibility of the stereotype—her priests can do quadruple duty as analogies for Hindus, Roman Catholics, AngloCatholics, or Jews.32 In her evangelical model, the locus of faith is not the power-hungry clerisy but the humble believer, who receives the Gospel truths as they were meant. Civilization itself emerges from such faith, which domesticates wayward masculine energies and promotes loving bonds instead of militaristic violence. For Tucker, true Christianity partly means liberation from an autocratic clergy; the evangelical emphasis on the priesthood of all believers and the right to private judgment displaces religious authority from the priest to the Word. Given that context, it should be clear why the Augustinian mission proved such a problem for evangelicals. High Church Anglicans, however, saw the matter differently. In The Rivals: A Tale of the Anglo-Saxon Church (1859) and the Rev. A. D. Crake’s The Doomed City; Or, the Last Days of Durocina (1886), Augustine’s coming providentially rescues an island whose British Christians have been nearly destroyed by the inroads of heathen Anglo-Saxons. Although both novels strongly affirm the existence of a native Christian tradition, in The Rivals it has withered into marginality, kept alive only in the circle around Ethelbert’s wife Bertha, and in


The Doomed City, “the Church and its whole organization had vanished” by the time of Augustine’s arrival.33 Crake’s novel describes the collapse of Christianity under pagan assault and its renaissance under Augustine’s influence. In his interpretation, British Christianity falls to the AngloSaxons because of Welsh moral turpitude; having become “butchers of your own souls” (35), the morally effeminated Welsh must learn to regard the coming of the Anglo-Saxons as God’s providential punishment for their sins. At the same time, the Saxons contain within themselves the seeds of the nation’s renewal, for despite their unbelievable cruelty, they also maintain a “stern chastity” (15) and a sense of honor that, as in Daybreak in Britain, is the type of Christian virtue. In the novel’s romance plot, the pagan warrior Hermann loves the young Christian Rowena, whose brother Basil has trained for the priesthood but is forced into the uncomfortable role of soldier. After many trials and tribulations suffered at the hands of her distasteful cousin Cadwallader—who, along with his father Cador, embodies the worst of Welsh degeneracy—Rowena manages to yoke heart and duty by agreeing to marry Hermann in order to save what is left of her town. If the name “Rowena” had not already provided a hint, most readers would recognize in this joining of Celt and Saxon an echo of Sir Walter Scott’s romances of national union. Basil, who leaves Britain only to return in Augustine’s train, finally comes to represent a new mode of Christian masculinity to Hermann; “Basil,” we are told, “had taught him to know that Christianity was not incompatible with manhood” (Doomed, 289). Significantly, this is the priest supplanting the warrior as a masculine ideal. Although Crake, thus, echoes Tucker in linking Christianity, nationality, and manhood, he nevertheless reveals his High Church allegiances by elevating the priesthood and the significance of the Sacraments (Doomed, 89), carefully arguing at the same time that British Christianity was Gallican rather than Roman in nature (33) and that, ultimately, Celtic Christianity was responsible for reconverting much of England (302 n.). Anglicanism thus depends on Augustine’s contribution, but it also purifies it by yoking it to native Christian traditions. Written nearly three decades earlier, The Rivals offers a more flamboyant Anglo-Catholicism. Unlike The Doomed City, in which the paganism is mostly classical, The Rivals shares Daybreak in Britain’s opposition of Druid and Christian.34 The main characters belong to the court of Ethelbert, husband of the Christian Bertha. Two Saxon pagans, Kenulf and Alcred, compete for the hand of the beautiful young maiden Ermenhilda. Alas, Alcred turns out to be lacking the more solid virtues and repeatedly conspires to put Kenulf out of the way—among other things, by having him attacked in a forest and, eventually, enslaved by the Danes. Kenulf, by contrast, possesses a “pure and simple heart”—once again, secular righteousness


foreshadows true Christian righteousness (Rivals, 24). The daughter of Kenulf ’s captor further prepares the benighted Saxon for Christianity by teaching him the possibility of self-forgetful service for others, which proves to be the type of Christian resignation (39–40). As in the other novels, when Christianity returns to England, it is in order to triumph “with the spiritual sword; and chants for war-cries; and sweet peace and love, instead of death and desolation” (Rivals, 41–42). Yet The Rivals carefully represents the new English Church as grounded in the practice of toleration; the Church’s “charter of liberty” (57) derives from Ethelbert’s willingness to allow the missionaries to preach without him necessarily assenting to their doctrines. The novel’s message thus diverges slightly from the others: the Druids are persecuting figures, but far from being wholly supplanted by Christian mercy, they reappear again and again in the “persecuting and slaying” practiced by “Roman, Anglican, Puritan, and Independent . . . in turn” (58). This tract glorifies antiquity, then, the better to refresh contemporary Anglican memories about the nature of true Christian belief, which is in this case identical with a quintessentially “English” devotion to the subject’s spiritual liberties. Moreover, it does so by suggesting that to mention priests and liberty in the same breath is hardly oxymoronic. Ermenhilda is tutored in Christianity by a British bishop and the novel emphasizes the high sacramental nature of Baptism and the Eucharist (60). There are, in other words, right and wrong kinds of priestly vocation, some “English,” some not. For an evangelical Calvinist like Emily Sarah Holt, such representations of both priests and Augustine were anathema. Holt firmly asserted that “[f ]rom the earliest period when—if we adopt the first and indigenous tradition of the English Church—the Apostle John planted the original Christian community in this country, the Church of England has been her never-varying title,” and her forty-plus novels all reinforce the eternal binary opposition of the true Church of Christ (e.g., proto-Protestant or Protestant) and anti-Christ (e.g., the Roman Catholic Church and AngloCatholics).35 Like many Calvinists, Holt argues that in a fallen world, the saints face persecution for their goodness, and this position characterizes her Imogen: A Story of the Mission of Augustine (1876).36 Starting from the position that British Christianity did not originate from the Roman Church, Holt (like Dowling) argues that Augustine achieved merely a “nominal Christianisation” of the Saxons (19).37 Instead of effecting widespread conversion, Holt argues, Augustine’s presence in England really marks a very different beginning: the destruction of British liberties under Roman rule (Imogen, 23). Like The Rivals, Holt links Christianity to native liberty; unlike The Rivals, Holt displaces Bertha from her central place in the narrative of Saxon Christianization. Instead, Holt opposes British female liberty


to Saxon female subjection and identifies the latter with the propagation of Catholic authoritarianism. Bertha is willing to relinquish her right to private judgment (Imogen, 129), and Holt notes disapprovingly, has no objection to Augustine’s “ritualistic” apparatus (139). In other words, Bertha’s willingness to accept her inferiority in both the sacred and the profane realms prefigures the Saxons’ eventual capitulation to Augustine’s sway, whereas the British Imogen’s insistence that Christians search the Scriptures for themselves equally prefigures the British rejection of his claims. Like the other novelists we have seen, however, Holt figures Christianity’s effects most intensely through its work on masculinity. Hrolf the Dane, a pagan, resists all efforts to proselytize him and particularly resents being told “that he was a sinner” (38). As we eventually discover, Hrolf ’s simmering rage derives from the rape and murder of his beloved daughter by Saxons (209). Hrolf ’s narrative functions in the novel as an alternative to the Catholic confessional; he confesses his passionate hatred not to a priest but to Imogen and receives not absolution but pity (211). Moreover, Imogen finally manages to evangelize him successfully, not by discussing his sin but, rather, by offering “the whole narrative of His work and suffering, up to the cross on the hill of Calvary” (212). Here is the alternative to the Augustinian mission. Instead of ritualistic observance, Imogen shows Hrolf an alternative life-plot: a story of suffering that renders it both exemplary and meaningful. Christianity resides in ongoing action, the believer’s transformation of life into the imitatio Christi. In Hrolf ’s case, this means that he chooses to die in the place of his greatest enemy’s son, Edric. When Edric fears to die a “dog’s death” as a captive, the enlightened Hrolf reminds him that Christ’s death was “a death of disgrace in the eyes of men” (229). Once again, Christianity supplants the warrior’s worldly honor with the believer’s embrace of suffering. True manliness means rejecting the desire for supremacy in favor of the highest calling of all—“Christ’s servant” (337). As Holt dryly acknowledges at the end of her novel, the British did not hold out against Rome forever. Her point was meant to resonate among concerned readers who found their fellow Christians increasingly inclined to either (wrongheaded) tolerance or simple apathy.38 It was no wonder that both she and fellow evangelical Emma Leslie represented the Norman Conquest as a good thing, one of God’s providential chastisements designed to rescue England from itself. “But may it not be,” asks Leslie’s Gytha, “that God would fain do us some good—make our country greater, better— teach us things we would not learn in any other way than through force?”39 Christianity’s “triumph” in Britain proves its undoing. Under the regime of the Roman Catholic Church, Britain degrades instead of improving; it is the Norman invasion that will recall Britain to itself, and eventually set the stage for the proto-Protestants and Protestants who will, one day, return


British Christianity to its antique purity. As Henry Soames exulted in his Bampton Lectures, “[t]he Reformers did little more than expel from her [the Church of England’s] bosom the gradual accumulation of medieval novelties, and abolish various observances dependent upon ecclesiastical tradition, and convicted by long experience of inutility and danger.”40 Lollard Narratives As celebrations of the Wycliffite tradition go, Thomas Gaspey’s The Lollards (1822) is probably not what evangelicals like Holt had in mind.41 An awkwardly plotted and awkwardly written farrago of historical facts, Gothic horror, and romance, The Lollards’ willingness to engage in homoerotic titillation when one of its female protagonists dresses as a page no doubt sent shudders down the spine of any evangelical who picked it up. Nevertheless, the novel’s interest in the rise of print culture does foreshadow later (if perhaps no more sophisticated attempts) at rendering the significance of Wycliffe’s Bible. For if the Anglo-Saxon tales imagined a marginal religion slowly moving to the center, reinventing the nature of virtue in the process, then Lollard tales imagined a marginalized truth battering against the walls of a now-institutionalized and corrupt Christianity—a call to arms against the progress of Anglo-Catholic attitudes within the Established Church. And authors crystallized access to that truth by representing the translation, dissemination, and consumption of the Biblical text itself. Bible reading takes on new importance as not just the means of salvation, but also the means of discovering a new inwardness—an inwardness that, as in the Anglo-Saxon tales, newly identifies feeling with “manliness” and religious awareness with “femininity.” Victorians seized on Wycliffe because his translation of the Bible (whether or not he is the actual translator) seemed to promote, as Vaughan put it, “the right of private judgment” and “the duty of a devout attention to whatever may promote their [the laity’s] faith in the grace of the Saviour, and obedience to his will.”42 In Lollard tales, as so often in evangelical fiction, “words spoken by the blessed Lord himself ” are “so deep, so pure, so simple, so divine—children might understand them”: the Scriptures are calibrated to the understandings of even the youngest and most innocent.43 In a very real sense, the Scriptures are supposed to speak directly and plainly to the mind of any honest inquirer. By translating the Scriptures, Wycliffe renders their essential transparency visible to the laity’s eyes, and hence brings down upon himself the persecutions of the Roman Catholic Church. Wycliffe’s crime, in other words, is that he demonstrates that there is no “privilege” involved in reading and interpreting Scriptural texts. He is spiritually but not politically democratic—a necessary qualification for those


who needed to distance him from John Ball, Wat Tyler, and the antitaxation Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. Neither Ball’s leveling doctrines nor revolutionary mobs found much favor in the post-1848 literary world.44 All of the Lollard novels adopt the position put forward by the leading Wycliffe scholar of the later nineteenth century, G. V. Lechler: Wycliffe’s goal was to make Scripture “the common property of all.”45 That is, Wycliffe is to be understood as a radical advocate of private judgment and the ease of Scriptural interpretation. These novels transform Roman Catholicism into the equivalent of Druidism—not a difficult task, given that many believed that the Church had simply absorbed pagan ritual into itself—and figure it as absolutely opposed to the dissemination of Scripture in the vernacular, on the grounds of power rather than holiness. Whereas the Scriptures represent divine truth, the Church represents the allure of human desires; the former chastises in order to heal, but the latter pleases in order to imprison. This approach endorses Paul’s observation that “while knowledge puffs up, love is what builds up” (1 Cor. 8.1): the humblest believer proves more capable of Biblical interpretation than the most learned scholar. Access to Biblical truths becomes easier from the margins than from the center. A case in point is Emma Leslie’s Conrad (1881), whose eponymous character goes from peevish young cripple to scholar.46 As a child, Conrad has a difficult time appreciating that God’s definition of good is not the same as man’s; he is unwilling to admit that when it comes to human suffering, “God keepeth the help in his own hands that we may seek him only for it, and because we might wear out the patience of the saints by our impatient cries, and they should give us what we cry for, though it should do us harm.”47 In this conventional evangelical explanation of pain, God is simultaneously parent and doctor: pain reminds the sufferer of his sinful human nature, and the sole “medicine” for this pain lies in total faith in God. Because the Roman Catholic Church urges prayer to the saints or to Mary, however, the sinner finds himself disbarred from the proper medication for his physical and spiritual pains.48 Leslie shows particular distaste for what one character calls the “accommodating” nature of Roman Catholic doctrine,49 which relativizes Christian practice to the worldly desires of the sinner (the wealthy sinner in particular) rather than preaching absolute Scriptural truth to all men. Conrad’s own problem lies in his unwillingness to relinquish his desire for academic advancement; he yearns to be learned, but as a youth he sets out about it on the negative path, seeking “for things to find fault with” (115). Despite his enthusiasm for Wycliffite doctrines, however, only “[h]is reason and his intellect had been convinced” (241)—that is, he finds himself very close to the position of Charlotte Brontë’s St. John Rivers, that philosophical “follower of the sect of Jesus.”50 Much to his astonishment, an “honest old mason” he has known from his childhood manifests far greater


strength than he.51 Leslie’s point is an evangelical truism: if the meek shall inherit the earth, then it ought not to be surprising that the meek shall have an easier time understanding the Gospels. When shaped into historical narrative, however, this truism goes further. Insofar as the Roman Catholic Church emphasizes Aristotelian logic, controversial debate, and so forth, it institutes a deliberately anti-Christian regime—for all such intellectual acquirements lead the practitioner to self-contemplation rather than selfabnegation. “I have thought I deserved more than God hath given me,” moans Conrad, “and so how can I go to him confessing I am unworthy when I feel almost as though God were my debtor for doing what I have to help Master Huss here in Bohemia” (249). All of Conrad’s training, even when turned to the Wycliffite good, nevertheless, does not teach him to understand his own total depravity, his essential weakness and worthlessness: that Christ’s grace is given but never deserved is a lesson he cannot bear to learn until the very end precisely because it threatens to level all distinctions between the learned elite and the unlearned populace. Such leveling requires that the Scriptures have an immediate effect on the honest inquirer. Elizabeth Rundle Charles’s “A Story of the Lollards” meditates on precisely this point: to what extent can acquaintance with the Scriptures awaken human beings to their personal call to labor for God?52 Charles, a diary novelist, subdivides her story into two journals, one belonging to Cuthbert, a friar, and the other to his sister, Cicely. Cuthbert begins and ends in prison, first as an accused follower of Joachim of Fiore and last as a Lollard; his sister, meanwhile, grows up in a household divided between her father’s partly political and partly emotional enthusiasm for Wycliffe and her mother’s attempts to remain orthodox. Cuthbert’s apparently circular journey from prison to prison actually maps out a spiral of enlightenment; if he begins by moaning that “[t]he gloom of this prison is nothing compared with the horror of great darkness in my soul,” he concludes “[o]nce more in prison, but no more in darkness,—never more in darkness.”53 His original and metaphorical imprisonment partly derives from what, in Protestant eyes, was a peculiarly Catholic misreading of Matthew 10:37: he flees to the convent from personal feeling, thereby undercutting rather than strengthening his faith.54 Cuthbert thus finds himself facing the abyss of skepticism as he literally and figuratively travels to Rome, until he hears Joachim’s “Everlasting Gospel.” Yet this, too, fails him, for he has no assurance of its divine inspiration.55 It is only when his cousin Richard reads to him from a manuscript copy of Wycliffe’s Bible that he discovers true peace. “I could scarcely account for it,” he says, in a passage worth quoting at length: I lay still quietly weeping as of old when my mother told me some touching sacred history. Doubtless I was weak with my hurt, and with prison fare, and

counter-medievalism / 161 with long anguish of mind. But it was long since tears had risen to my eyes. And this was no tale of woe, no story of wrong and agony to harrow the heart, no appeal such as the Friars’ Preachers make on Passion Week or on Martyrs’ Festivals,—appealing with quivering voices, clasped hands, and streaming eyes, to the blood-stained crucifix, the pierced side, the nailed hands and feet, until the people sobbed, and wailed, and beat their breasts, as I had seen them often in Italy. Richard’s voice was calm and steady, the story was cheerful and quiet, the words of comfort very simple and very few. Yet I could do nothing but cover my face for shame at these childish tears and weep, so deep did the soft, slow-falling words pierce into my inmost heart. (388)

This passage harks back strongly to the Anglo-Saxon tales, since it relates the discovery of religion as feeling. Notably, Cuthbert’s response to the Wycliffe translation echoes his sister’s response to hearing Wycliffe himself: “I hid my face, and wept quite gently, lest I should miss one of the precious words, until he once more prayed for a blessing on the sufferer and on me, and left” (378). Again, gender differences blend in authentic spiritual experience (although Cuthbert, unlike his sister, is partly ashamed of his response). Roman Catholic experience is not just corporeal but founded on visible signs of pain; it is literally sensational. Cuthbert identifies Italian religious experience with a kind of group hysteria, derived from repeated appeals that ultimately rest on images. By contrast, the “natural” response to Scripture and Scriptural doctrine is of the “inmost heart” and comes accompanied by a desire to privatize the experience by hiding the face. The whole experience, moreover, lies wholly in language; instead of appealing to Christ’s pierced side, Richard relays words that themselves “pierce.” In a sense, this repetition of “pierce” identifies the true conversion experience with Christ’s own sufferings on the cross: Cuthbert does not contemplate Christ’s sufferings but (in a very small way) experiences an echo of those sufferings. Fictional representations of Wycliffe himself, such as those in Emily Sarah Holt’s The Lord Mayor (1884) and W. Oak Rhind’s Hubert Ellerdale (1881), dwell indeed on Wycliffe as almost Protestant, one for whom sola scriptura is the sole route to authentic religious experience (even if he was a bit shaky on other Protestant “essentials”). In particular, these novelists praise Wycliffe for the near-transparency of his vernacular sermons, which bring their audience to an immediate sense of Christ’s presence. Speaking of Wycliffe and the poor priests, Holt remarks that “[t]hey had the virgin honey; why should they present it in vessels of painted porcelain, so that men would stop to admire the jar and would not taste the contents?”56 Rhetoric obstructs the act of “tasting,” of absorbing Scriptural truth into the soul. This truth, as Holt explains, is for Wycliffe “an absolute, imperial, everlasting certainty” (266). Whereas, Holt argues, Catholics and Ritualists


take “The Church” as their rule of law (268), Wycliffe elevates God’s revelation above all human tradition, and thus sets the rule of moral action on a transcendent plane; indeed, Holt makes Wycliffe explicitly reject his earlier Marian theology (271), on the grounds that it contradicts Scripture. In fact, Holt expressly associates Wycliffe’s proto-Protestantism with his relatively positive attitude to women (77), on the ground that Marian attitudes actually subvert Scripture. Holt takes woman’s work as the ultimate proof of God’s spiritual egalitarianism: He is “as ready to give wisdom to a woman puzzling over a household problem, or to comfort a little child fretting over a lost toy, as to assist a prime minister in the policy needful to guide an empire, or to speak peace to a monarch deprived of his kingdom” (334). This, in other words, is a gospel of total personal access to God, in which there is no hierarchy of “important” sufferings but, rather, a multiplicity of crosses, all suited to their individual bearers. If all have the right of private judgment, then all can commune equally with their God. For Rhind, Wycliffe himself manifests the link between Scriptural reading and tender feeling: he is “stern” when rebuked by the friars but “full of sweetness and tenderness when he talks to us about the Gospel; and so gentle does he become under the influence of the sublime words of Christ, I have seen his eyes moisten when he has touched upon some more than usually loving promise of the Saviour.”57 True Christian feeling legitimates manly sentiment, especially in response to what one character calls the “pathos” of the Bible, which would make the “heart . . . melt with love for God.”58 Reading the Scriptures disables the emotional defenses, laying the inquirer open to God; in a sense, one’s self dissolves, one becomes another person (reborn) through Scriptural “influence.” Later, the title character’s beloved, Edith, confesses that at one point, “[m]y heart was cold and bitter, and truth to tell, I hardly believed in any religion at all”; she acknowledges her change by “bur[ying] her face in her hands, overcome by her feelings” (84). Again, belief is inseparable from feeling, and that feeling breaks down the barriers of the self. At the same time, this self-dissolution becomes the avenue to true strength. Even as Wycliffe remains weak from a stroke, he still gives “himself little rest” and, more importantly, “spent much of his time in translating the Bible—it being the dearest wish of his heart to give England an English Bible before he died” (71). Rhind’s decision to emphasize Wycliffe’s illness is important, since it strips Wycliffe’s writing of any purely careerist motive. Moreover, one notes the subtle political echoes: Wycliffe’s desire is salvific but also nationalist, a wish for England. Wycliffe’s Christianity is not incompatible with devotion to his country—an important point when one of the key charges against Roman Catholicism was that it undermined civic loyalty. Rhind, somewhat more willing to entertain the notion that Wycliffite doctrines might have encouraged the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381,


nevertheless argues that the revolt at its heart was prompted by the desire for “freedom” (113). Even if such sentiments ran too dangerously rampant, nevertheless they were deeply English at their core. The obvious difficulty with identifying Wycliffe and the Lollards as the starting point of the Reformation was, as the Rev. Arthur Brown admitted, “they were utterly exterminated, and their very name had become a thing of the past, before the final assault began that drove from its strongholds in England the usurping power of Rome.”59 Yet, it was precisely their apparent defeat that made them such powerful figures in the end. For if the Roman Catholics thought they had destroyed Wycliffe’s legacy, the Reformation proved not just Catholic fallibility but, more importantly, the impossibility of wholly suppressing divine truth. The persecution of the Lollards signaled not medievalism’s triumph but its defeat by the once-forbidden Book, the reading of which makes “life, and death, and things present, all [seem] to be nothing, and Christ alone [seem] to be everything.”60 A New Discourse The novels I have discussed here offer an alternative to utopian readings of the Catholic Middle Ages, in which the dominant tradition symbolizes not a lost organic community but, instead, one manifestation of “the world’s” attempt to stamp out true godliness whenever it can. Written in response to a perceived tide of pro-Catholic sentiment, such novels sought to make the Victorians remember a past they might otherwise be doomed to repeat. At a time when Protestants felt that Roman Catholics were instituting a counterReformation of sorts, tales of both Augustine of Canterbury and the Lollards attempted to reconsolidate the “Britishness” in British Christianity: the former qualified or negated Britain’s spiritual relationship to Rome, whereas the latter asserted that Protestantism was not only native but also, in a sense, natural. In adapting sixteenth- and seventeenth-century historical thought to late Victorian needs, religious historians and novelists successfully created a new discourse that turned the medieval past into a sometimes threatening, sometimes hopeful analogy for the present—a tactic that continues to pay dividends even today, as a number of Victorian anti-Catholic texts have achieved a kind of canonical status among fundamentalists.61 For these Protestants, no matter how high or low their churchmanship, “medievalism” stood in stark opposition to the Word. Their attempt to read modern Protestantism back into the Middle Ages was not, for them, just a willful anachronism, but an assertion of a key truth: the essentials of authentic Christianity were transhistorical, indeed transcendent. It was not that medieval dissenters from orthodoxy were “Protestant” (although some certainly went so far as to argue that they were), but that “Protestant” was simply another


way of speaking the word “Christian.” Protestantism might be modern, but its modernity was just a new instantiation of Christianity’s antiquity. Counter-medievalism thus turned the world upside down, transforming mainstream Catholic orthodoxy into a dangerous detour from the “strait gate” through which the heretics entered the gates of Heaven. Notes 1. [J. H. Rigg], “The Catholic Revival,” London Quarterly Review 10 (1867): 33. Cf. “Ultramontanism,” London Quarterly Review 9 (1853): 219. For Rigg’s often conflicted attitude to Roman Catholicism’s influence, see John T. Smith, Methodism and Education 1849–1902: J. H. Rigg, Romanism, and Wesleyan Schools (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). 2. L. N. R. [Ellen Ranyard], The Book and Its Story: A Narrative for the Young. On Occasion of the Jubilee of the British and Foreign Bible Society, intro. T. Phillips (1853; Philadelphia: Parry and McMillan, 1856), 116. On Ranyard’s work for the British and Foreign Bible Society, see Leslie Howsam, Cheap Bibles: Nineteenth-Century Publishing and the British and Foreign Bible Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 170–178. 3. For the medievalist tradition in British social criticism, see Alice Chandler, A Dream of Order: The Medieval Ideal in Nineteenth-Century English Literature (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970); Rosemary Jann, “Democratic Myths in Victorian Medievalism,” Browning Institute Studies 8 (1980): 129–149; R. J. Smith, “Cobbett, Catholic History, and the Middle Ages,” Studies in Medievalism 4 (1992): 113–142. 4. It is worth bearing in mind that no matter how obscure they may seem to modern secular readers, both historical moments were “common currency” in Victorian popular culture, regularly discussed in religious magazines and tracts as well as in the elite periodicals. 5. John D. Brewer with Gareth I. Higgins, Anti-Catholicism in Northern Ireland, 1600–1998: The Mote and the Beam (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1998), 176. 6. For a good overview of the complexities of “muscular Christianity,” see David Rosen, “The Volcano and the Cathedral: Muscular Christianity and the Origins of Primal Manliness,” in Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age, ed. Donald E. Hall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 17–44. By decentering Kingsley and his often idiosyncratic attitudes to sexuality and asceticism, I dissent from Kevin L. Morris’s view of anti-medievalist attitudes in The Image of the Middle Ages in Romantic and Victorian Literature (London: Croom Helm, 1984), 68–102. However, Morris examines a number of important issues tangential to my own argument, particularly rationalist anti-Catholicism and polemics against monasticism. 7. James Eli Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Masculinity (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995), 111. See also Herbert Sussman, Victorian Masculinities: Manhood and Masculine Poets in Early Victorian Literature and Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Christopher Lane, The Burdens of Intimacy: Psychoanalysis and Victorian Masculinity (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1999).

counter-medievalism / 165 8. Recent treatments of Victorian anti-Catholic attitudes tend to stop between 1860 and 1870; see, e.g., D. G. Paz, Popular Anti-Catholicism in Mid-Victorian England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992); Frank H. Wallis, Popular Anti-Catholicism in Mid-Victorian Britain (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1993); John Wolffe, The Protestant Crusade in Great Britain 1829–1860 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). 9. Emma Leslie, Caught in the Toils: A Story of a Convent School, 2nd ed. (1880; London: Sunday School Union, n.d.), 58–59. Emma Leslie: prolific evangelical novelist, primarily for the Religious Tract Society; fl. 1870–1900. 10. For what follows, I am indebted to S. J. Barnett, “Where Was Your Church Before Luther? Claims for the Antiquity of Protestantism Examined,” Church History 68 (1999): 14–41; Colin Kidd, British Identities Before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World, 1600–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 99–122; Hugh MacDougall, Racial Myth in English History: Trojans, Teutons, and Anglo-Saxons (Montreal, Canada: Harvest House; Hanover, New Hampshire: University Press of New Hampshire, 1982), 31–40; Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 270–310. 11. Bede, The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, vol. 1, ed. Judith McClure and Roger Collins (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 14, 4. 12. John Milton, Areopagitica: A Speech of Mr. John Milton for the Liberty of Unlicenc’d Printing, to the Parliament of England, in The Works of John Milton, vol. 4 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931), 340. 13. On the use-value of the Druidic priesthood for modern polemic, see Samuel Smiles, The Image of Antiquity: Ancient Britain and the Romantic Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 92. 14. Henry Soames, The Anglo-Saxon Church: Its History, Revenues, and General Character (London: John W. Parker, 1835), 59. 15. John Lingard, The History and Antiquities of the Anglo-Saxon Church; Containing an Account of its Origin, Government, Doctrines, Worship, Revenues, and Clerical and Monastic Institutions, rev. ed., 2 vols., vol. 1 (London: C. Dolman, 1845), 22 n. 1. 16. George Smith, The Religion of Ancient Britain: A Succinct Account of the Several Religious Systems which have Obtained in this Island from the Earliest Times to the Norman Conquest. Including an Investigation into the Early Progress of Error in the Christian Church, the Introduction of the Gospel into Britain, and the State of Religion in England till Popery had Gained the Ascendancy (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1844), 363–364, 368. 17. Robert Vaughan, The Life and Opinions of John de Wycliffe, D.D., 2nd ed., 2 vols., vol. 1 (1831; New York: AMS Press, 1973), 164; John Dowling, The History of Romanism: From the Earliest Corruptions of Christianity to the Present Time., 16th ed. (New York: Edward Walker, 1848), 228. Dowling’s work was well-known in British anti-Catholic circles. 18. Peter Nockles, The Oxford Movement in Context: Anglican High Churchmanship, 1760–1857 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 166–167. On High Church anxieties about but appropriations of Foxe, see Peter Nockles, “A Disputed Legacy: Anglican Historiographies of the


19.

20. 21.

22.

23.

24.

25. 26. 27. 28.

Reformation from the Era of the Caroline Divines to that of the Oxford Movement,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library of Manchester 83 (2001): 136–137. John Foxe, The Acts and Monuments of John Foxe, ed. George Townsend, 8 vols., vol. 2 (New York: AMS Press, 1965), 796. Although I am well aware that this is a very poor edition indeed, it is nevertheless the one with which most of my novelists were familiar. Milton, Catholic and Protestant, 300–310. For an example of Anglican anxiety on this point, see Charles Webb Le Bas, The Life of Wiclif (London: J. G. & F. Rivington, 1832), 31–33. David Hume, The History of England from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution of 1688, 6 vols., vol. 2 (1778; Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1983), 322; John Lingard, The History of England, from the First Invasion by the Romans to the Accession of William and Mary in 1688, 6th ed., rev., 10 vols., vol. 3 (London: Charles Dolman, 1855), 133, 134, 150. Vaughan grumbles of Hume and Lingard that “[i]t is to the men who have most corrupted Christianity, and to those who treat it as a lie, that the rumours opposed to the reputation of the christian [sic] reformers have always been most acceptable”; Life, vol. 2, 377, n. 30. Vaughan, Life, vol. 2, 340; Rudolf Buddensieg, John Wiclif: Patriot & Reformer, Life and Writings (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1884), 10–11; Johann Loserth, Wiclif and Hus, trans. M. J. Evans (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1884). Loserth’s thesis is that much of Hus’s work is identical to or otherwise derives from Wycliffe’s. In an otherwise unintentionally comical review essay, indicating a somewhat bruised ego, Vaughan praises the superiority of German scholarship on Wycliffe; see “Wycliffe—His Biographers and Critics,” British Quarterly Review 10 (1858): 399. On the problems with Wycliffe as Bible translator, see Anne Hudson, The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 238–247; and on the problems with Wycliffe as author of the Wycket (or Wicket), Margaret Aston, “John Wycliffe’s Reformation Reputation,” in Lollards and Reformers: Images and Literacy in Late Medieval Religion (London: Hambledon Press, 1984), 257–258. In 1895, Francis Aidan Cardinal Gasquet suggested that what Forshall and Madden had reprinted was really an orthodox Catholic translation; see “The Pre-Reformation Bible (I),” in The Old English Bible and Other Essays, new ed. (London: George Bell and Sons, 1908), 87–134. It is perhaps symptomatic of late Victorian doubts that C. E. Sayle simply avoids the subject altogether in Wiclif: An Historical Drama (Oxford: James Thornton, 1887). Christopher Anderson, The Annals of the English Bible, 2 vols., vol. 1 (London: William Pickering, 1845), xxxvii. John Stoughton, Our English Bible: Its Translations and Translators ([London]: The Religious Tract Society, n.d.), 41. Francis Charles Massingberd, The English Reformation, 3rd ed., rev. and enl. (London: John W. Parker and Son, 1857), e.g., 136–137, 156–157; “Wycliffe and His Relation to the Reformation,” British Quarterly Review 4 (1879): 334–368. The best study is Michael Ragussis, Figures of Conversion: “The Jewish Question” and English National Identity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995).

counter-medievalism / 167 29. A.L.O.E. [Charlotte Maria Tucker], Daybreak in Britain (London: Religious Tract Society, [1880]). Hereafter cited parenthetically in the main text as “Daybreak.” Page numbers of subsequent citations given in text. Charlotte Maria Tucker (1821–1893): novelist and tract writer; missionary in India from 1875–1893. 30. Royal W. Rhodes, The Lion and the Cross: Early Christianity in Victorian Novels (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1995), 263. 31. Cf. Mrs. J. B. Webb, who argues that Roman paganism breaks down natural gender roles by promoting violent female sports: Pomponia; Or, the Gospel in Caesar’s Household (1867; London: Religious Tract Society, n.d.), 193–196. 32. Rhodes, Lion and the Cross, argues that Anglo-Catholicism is Tucker’s target (264), but the stereotype actually covers any number of religions with a dedicated priesthood or priest-caste. 33. A. D. Crake, The Doomed City; Or, the Last Days of Durocina. A Tale of the Anglo-Saxon Conquest of Britain, and the Mission of Augustine (Oxford and London: A. R. Mowbray & Co., [1886]), 32. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the main text as “Doomed.” Page numbers of subsequent citations given in text. Augustine David Crake (1836–1890): Vicar of Cholsey, Wallingford; author of numerous “Early Church” historical novels. 34. The Rivals: A Tale of the Anglo-Saxon Church (London: John Henry and James Parker, [1859]). Hereafter cited parenthetically in the main text as “Rivals.” Page numbers of subsequent citations given in text. 35. Emily Sarah Holt, The Harvest of Yesterday: A Tale of the Sixteenth Century, new ed. (1893; London: John F. Shaw, n.d.), 172. Emily Sarah Holt (1836–1893): of Stubbylee Hall; sister of James Maden Holt, M.P. 36. Emily Sarah Holt, Imogen: A Story of the Mission of Augustine (London: John F. Shaw & Co., [1876]). Hereafter cited parenthetically in the main text as “Imogen.” Page numbers of subsequent citations given in text. 37. Rhodes, Lion and the Cross, suggests that Holt may be responding to H. E. Manning’s rise to Cardinal the previous year (271–272). 38. On the decline of anti-Ritualist activism, see James Whisenant, “Anti-Ritualism and the Moderation of Evangelical Opinion in England in the Mid-1870s,” Anglican and Episcopal History 70 (2001): 451–477. 39. Emma Leslie, Gytha’s Message: A Tale of Saxon England (1885; London: Blackie and Son Limited, n.d.), 203–204; cf. Emily Sarah Holt, Behind the Veil: A Tale of the Days of William the Conqueror, new ed. (1890; London: John F. Shaw & Co., n.d.), 18. As Kevin L. Morris reminds us, the far more theologically liberal Charles Kingsley took a much harsher view of the Conquest; see Image of the Middle Ages, 86–87. 40. Henry Soames, An Inquiry into the Doctrines of the Anglo-Saxon Church, In Eight Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford (Oxford: Samuel Collingwood for C. J. G. and F. Rivington, 1830), 473. 41. [Thomas Gaspey], The Lollards: A Tale, Founded on the Persecutions which Marked the Early Part of the Fifteenth Century, 2 vols. (New York: James & John Harper, 1822). Originally published in Britain the same year. 42. Vaughan, Life, vol. 2, 49–50. 43. [Elizabeth Rundle Charles], “A Story of the Lollards,” in The Early Dawn; Or, Sketches of Christian Life in England in the Olden Time, intro. Henry B. Smith


44.

45. 46. 47. 48.

49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

(New York: M. W. Dodd, 1864), 390. Originally published in England the same year as Sketches of Life in England in the Olden Time. Elizabeth Rundle Charles (1828–1896): Anglican novelist, theologian, and hymnodist. For a documentary overview, see R. B. Dobson, The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 (London: Macmillan and Co., 1970). Henry Hallam got as close as any nineteenth-century Protestant did to suggesting that Wycliffe might be at least remotely responsible; see View of the State of Europe in the Middle Ages, 2 vols., vol. 2 (1818; New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1880), 379. Emily Sarah Holt, who dryly noted that “Wycliffe was himself one of the parish priests doomed to extermination, and that all his principal friends and supporters would likewise have been put to death,” represents received opinion. John de Wycliffe and What He Did for England (London: John F. Shaw, n.d.), 106–107. [G. V.] Lechler, John Wycliffe and His English Precursors, trans. with add. notes by [Peter] Lorimer, new ed., rev. (London: Religious Tract Society, n.d.), 202. Emma Leslie, Conrad: A Tale of Wiclif and Bohemia (1880; New York: Phillips and Hunt; Cincinnati: Walden & Stowe, 1881). Earlier published by the Religious Tract Society as Before the Dawn: A Tale of Wycliffe and Bohemia. Leslie, Conrad, 92. For an interesting discussion of later nineteenth-century attempts to rebel against this interpretation of suffering, see Lucy Bending, The Representation of Bodily Pain in Late Nineteenth-Century English Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Leslie, Conrad, 97. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, ed. Richard J. Dunn, 3rd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2001), 320. Leslie, Conrad, 241. See endnote 43. Charles, “Story,” 343, 384. Charles, “Story,” 356. On the importance of Matthew 10:37 in evangelical anti-Catholic polemic, see my “Protestants against the Jewish and Catholic Family, c. 1829 to c. 1860,” Victorian Literature and Culture 31 (2003): 333–334. Charles, “Story,” 351–352. Emily Sarah Holt, The Lord Mayor: A Tale of London in 1384 (1884; New York: Robert Carter & Brothers, n.d.), 27. W. Oak Rhind, Hubert Ellerdale: A Tale of the Days of Wycliffe (1881; London: S. W. Partridge, n.d.), W. Oak Rhind: author otherwise unknown. Rhind, Hubert, 19. Arthur Brown, The Knight of Dilham: A Story of the Lollards (London: S. W. Partridge and Co., [1875]). Emily Sarah Holt, Mistress Margery: A Tale of the Lollards (1868; London: John F. Shaw, n.d.), 26. For an important compendium of online anti-Catholic sites, many of them drawing on nineteenth-century texts, see David Cruz-Uribe, Anti-Catholicism on the Net ⬍http://shakti.trincoll.edu/~dcruzuri/anti-catholic/anti-catholic. html⬎ ( June 1, 2004).

Chapter Nine Where Medieval Romance Meets Victorian Reality: The “Woman Question” in William Morris’s THE WOOD BEYOND THE WORLD Lori Campbell

Man as a social animal tends to the acquirement of power over nature, and to the beneficent use of that power, which again implies a condition of society in which everyone is able to satisfy his needs in return for the due exercise of his capacities for the benefit of the race. William Morris, “A Theory of Life” (1894)

One of the most important figures in terms of the Victorian preoccupation with the Middle Ages, William Morris (1834–1896) directed his business ventures as well as his political and artistic endeavors toward re-creating what he and many others viewed as a more humane, graceful approach to living. Regarded as the father of the Utopian fiction that became a staple of Victorian fantasy, Morris was a Renaissance man whose undertakings in design, literature, and politics make him an indispensable figure for helping us to comprehend the period as a whole. Despite the large body of work Morris left upon his death in 1896, however, his opinions on gender equality remain clouded by avoidance and contradiction.1 Morris’s prose romance The Wood Beyond the World (1894) constitutes a crucial text for unraveling how his Socialism fits with his attitude toward the male–female dynamic. Wood relates the journey of a merchant’s son that begins in a “real” world mirroring Morris’s capitalist milieu; however, the story’s diction and setting are obviously medieval. Blaming his own youthful wanderlust on his wife’s supposed infidelity, Walter leaves behind one stormy relationship only to engage with two magical women whose motives and actions appear

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even more difficult to fathom. This, combined with the fact that both women in the faerie realm ultimately fall in direct result of their interactions with Walter, makes Wood a powerful example of the paradoxes inherent in Morris’s vision of equality. In “Interpreting Victorian Medievalism,” Charles Dellheim provides a useful definition coinciding with critical consensus and with Morris’s approach in the prose romances. Dellheim identifies Victorian medievalism as “a social language composed of myths, legends, rituals, and symbols that was appropriated by Victorians both to criticize and to affirm their own times.”2 Citing Morris as among the “middle-class social critics [who] found much to admire in the Middle Ages,”3 Dellheim acknowledges how “[t]he meaning medievalists attached to specific myths and symbols were often as different as the ideological implications they drew from them” (46–47). In other words, Morris and others construct a way of communicating, which concerns itself with a literary reenactment of the past meant first and foremost to repair the present. Assessing Wood alongside two other notable prose romances, The Story of the Glittering Plain (1890) and The Water of the Wondrous Isles (1896), and with the Utopian News from Nowhere (1890), confirms how Morris uses fantasy to work out in his own mind opinions about power for and between man and woman. The romances show male/female power in varying degrees, but in Nowhereian society gender roles remain restrictive. Unlike A Dream of John Ball (1888), in which the time traveler lands in a peasant uprising in Morris’s Middle Ages, News from Nowhere transports a Victorian to a future the author envisions and believes may yet come to pass. The contrasts between Wood and these other representative fantasies reveal contradictions implying shifts in his thinking over time. These inconsistencies more importantly evidence that, while embracing romance and folktale, Morris develops a unique brand of medievalism irretrievably preoccupied with the challenges he witnesses in late Victorian society, especially regarding gender. Pinpointing the complexities of Morris’s Victorian medievalism in regard to gender also requires juxtaposing Wood with an authentic medieval romance displaying parallel themes and interactions between men and women. Certain superficial similarities align Walter with the medieval knight character type: Walter and Gawain journey away from familiar surroundings into the unknown, accepting hospitality from strangers (including women in both cases), and displaying traditional chivalric courtesy although sometimes falling short of the ideal. More importantly, though, as Sheila Fisher notes, Gawain is “put to severe inconvenience in the name of a contest, not between men, but between women.”4 Morris’s “knight” meaningfully mirrors Gawain in this respect, since Walter’s journey through

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the Wood starts and ends with a power struggle between the two women who vie for his allegiance. Still, while Morris constructs Walter as a hero in the medieval tradition, the character’s experience remains inextricably bound by the author’s perception of the male–female dynamic in his own time and place. The “Woman Question” and William Morris Before assessing Morris’s approach to gender in Wood, a brief discussion of the author’s relationship to the feminist movement of his day is needed. In recent years, critics have emphasized a less black-and-white view of woman’s place in Victorian society than typically articulated by those writing in the Civil Rights-era of the 1960s and 1970s. Although Donald Hall’s 1996 study Fixing Patriarchy focuses on the middle years of the nineteenth century, his point that the “dialogue on the ‘woman question’ is not reducible to a simple paradigm of feminist demands and antifeminist rejection of demands” easily covers conditions for the remainder of the period. Hall finds “men were both threatened and fascinated by women,” and sees the real issue as “a fractured sense of self ” in the Victorian male.5 Florence Boos points out how some Victorian writers, including key Morris influences, Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, “may have noticed with tacit approval the degree to which [Medieval] . . . sources marginalized and romanticized the lives and social roles of women . . . [since] portrayals of knighthood and chivalric paternalism tended rather obviously to ratify and encourage a patriarchal model of the ideal Victorian family.”6 In “The Problematic Self of William Morris,” Frederick Kirchoff offers a view similar to Hall’s, arguing the difficulty “of putting Morris together . . . [since] he remains a collection of parts too various to organize as a coherent idea of a coherent human being.”7 Morris advocates in “A Theory of Life,” quoted in my epigraph, as well as in many of his other essays, a world where man has the potential to use his talents for the common good.8 Obviously using “man” to denote “human” and thus cover both male and female was standard in Morris’s day; although, he does at times specifically refer in his essays to “ladies” as a distinct group. An ardent socialist, Morris endorses in his nonfiction an equality that, if applied to gender, suggests a progressive view opposing the “angel of the house” status typically prescribed for middle- and upper-class Victorian ladies. Nevertheless, as Boos notes in one of her studies of Morris’s “socialist-feminism,” he refrains from making definitive statements on equality for women beyond “his preoccupation with male sexual responsibility toward female partners” and recognition of woman as a sexual being in her own right.9 For a man of Morris’s day, though, recognition of such a possibility would have been seen

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at the time as progressive, suggesting his notion of equality may have indeed extended to include both sexes. Still, one must not overlook the fact that, as Boos puts it, “there are depressingly few direct references to women” in Morris’s nonfiction until late in his career.10 The reticence is, perhaps, due to the fact that although rarely shy about voicing opinions, Morris would have been aware that men obviously composed the majority of his audience for his socialist papers. Certainly the Victorian age itself was fraught with questions and contradictions, especially in regard to gender roles, being a time when “British law required men to pay obeisance to a queen regnant while it figured women in general as subordinate to male subjects.”11 To “organize” Morris’s socialism into a “coherent idea” in such a context requires exploration of the ways in which his fiction overlaps or goes further than his nonfiction to confront the issue of gender power imbalance. Arguably Morris’s depiction of empowered femininity occurs most prominently in the romances, which emerged near the end of his life out of his interest in Icelandic legends and medieval tales. Some of his contemporary reviewers pinpointed his fantasy work as the core of his criticism of Victorian society. Norman Talbot confirms this in his introduction to one of the romances The Water of the Wondrous Isles, saying Morris’s characterization of the “female hero . . . [made him] an enemy of his age in its patriarchal as well as its economic, aesthetic, and ethical assumptions.”12 Not unexpectedly, Morris’s fiction sometimes evokes as many or more questions than his nonfiction. Yet in the tensions caused by these questions, one can begin to trace the author’s—and indeed his society’s—efforts to come to terms with the myriad emotions evoked by feminist challenges to masculine dominance. In this response and its subsequent implications lie the true scope and import of Morris’s medievalist approach to the “Woman Question” in the prose romances, especially in The Wood Beyond the World. The Power Morris makes Walter’s journey the main focus in Wood. After his ship is (conveniently) blown off course by a storm, Walter and his men reach an island where he meets the Carle, an older double for Walter who tells of his own experience in the land beyond the cliff wall.13 Against the Carle’s advice, Walter takes an opportunity to penetrate the shard in the wall. He wanders alone, then encounters the Dwarf, followed by the Maid, and later the Mistress. All three had appeared to him previously in dreamlike visions, beginning with his first sight of the vessel that would take him on his journey away from home and from his domestic problems (6–7). Although he interacts first with the Dwarf, widely viewed by critics as a personification


of Walter’s lustfulness, throughout the tale his progress unmistakably occurs under the direction of the two women of the Wood, the Maid and Mistress. Understanding Morris’s treatment of gender in the story necessarily begins with a look at the power with which he endows both women. Morris establishes the Maid’s dominance when Walter first meets her. In response to the hero’s inclination to comfort her when she shudders at his mention of her “Enemy” the Dwarf, the Maid waves Walter away but quickly regains her composure. She then demonstrates her superiority by saying “[F]riend, whereas thou speakest of delivering me, it is more like that I shall deliver thee” (70). The line proves to be prophetic and echoes soon after this scene when the narrator describes how Walter knows “it was her [the Maid] only that he looked to for his deliverance from this [the Mistress’] house of guile and lies” (103). The Maid’s power over Walter most strikingly emerges after he has been a houseguest/prisoner at the Mistress’s house for some time. Here he meets the Maid in the forest after she engages in an unwelcome tryst with the King’s son, most recently the Mistress’s partner. Giving Walter a series of orders, the Maid concludes, “When we are free, and thou knowest all that I have done, I pray thee deem me not evil and wicked . . . whereas thou wottest well that I am not in like plight with other women” (125). Although Walter’s superior, the Maid nevertheless admits that her ability to make him bow to her will is not a power possessed by “normal” or “real world” females. Since the Maid tells Walter just previous to this scene that she has “some little craft . . . to change the aspect of folk so utterly that they seem other than they verily are” (124), the reader already accepts her as extraordinary. More importantly, her statement here defines both her uniqueness as a powerful female and Walter’s submissiveness to her. The Maid’s early control over Walter is perhaps even more intriguing since she wears an iron ring around her ankle, indicating thralldom to the Mistress. Walter’s first meeting with this ruler of the Wood happens as she sits beside her consort, the King’s Son, in the Golden House. Here gender is clearly at issue when she tells Walter, “I have not bidden thee hither; but here mayst thou abide a while if thou wilt; nevertheless, take heed that here is no King’s Court” (79–80). The implication is that in this “queen’s” court a man should be especially careful about his conduct. Also, even though the Mistress indicates Walter is free, both he and the reader understand this claim to be false. The Maid explained in her first encounter with Walter that his compulsion to enter the Wood was the result of the Mistress’ magic: “[T]hou art her latest catch. . . . [T]he Mistress will have thee for her only, and hath lured thee hither for nought else” (71). Walter’s journey begins as a way to avoid the emotional strain and responsibility of confronting his wife about his suspicion of infidelity.

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Instead he leaves his father to see to his wife’s family, who take it amiss when Walter takes his leave. His father’s death in a feud between the two families provides the event that propels Walter’s turn toward home, interrupted by the storm and his talk with the Carle. Thus even without once speaking in the story, Walter’s wife plays a powerful role in his experience; yet he appears to be incapable of finding the courage to face her. In the Wood, the untrustworthy Mistress provides a more formidable double for the “real” world wife, similarly instigating Walter’s actions. Since the ruler of the Wood appears in the flesh and interacts with Walter on her own rather than on his terms, she equals a real force in the story. Manifesting from their first meeting and even before this in the visions we find out later are her doing, the Mistress’s control over Walter makes him appear as even less the master of his fate in the Wood than he was in his own world, thus confirming his immaturity and establishing the female role in propelling him toward manhood. Interestingly Morris’s first and arguably least feminist prose romance The Story of the Glittering Plain, published four years before Wood, strikingly contrasts the later work’s portrayal of male–female power. Like Wood, Glittering Plain includes a maiden in the hero’s maturation quest but in a decidedly less progressive way, illustrating one of the contradictions that makes Morris’s approach to gender so slippery. For example, although the Maid and Mistress constitute authoritative, palpable presences for Walter in Wood, Glittering Plain meaningfully downplays the female role in the hero’s quest. As the title that serves as her name suggests, The Hostage carries weight in the story only as far as her absence compels Hallblithe to leave home in search of her. In this way, The Hostage equals the “lack,” or the “initial situation in a tale” that compels the hero to leave home, as defined by Vladmir Propp in The Morphology of the Folktale.14 Villainy most often instigates the journey as it does with The Hostage’s abduction in Plain; however, Propp says the “lack” can occur “within or without” the hero, and the “object which is lacking does not determine the tale’s structure—it’s the ‘lack’ itself that’s important, not the object” (36). From the beginning then, The Hostage is identified for her absence. Given Propp’s qualifications, her role may be viewed as insignificant compared to those of Walter’s Wood women in terms of Hallblithe’s maturation. The Hostage merely provides the catalyst for him to leave home; then virtually disappears until the reunion. As noted earlier, Walter’s mortal wife serves a similar purpose to that of The Hostage as the reason for his decision to leave home. Unlike The Hostage, Walter’s wife never appears physically in the text, but his belief in her infidelity and his response to it, leaving his father to handle the woman’s incensed relatives, create the “lack” in this story. Clearly, Walter has yet to


attain the strength and insight to deal with his domestic situation. Still, one must remember that in Glittering Plain, Hallblithe goes through it alone with only minor aid from a few helpers, all of whom are male. On the other hand, in Wood, Morris compensates for the absence of Walter’s wife by replacing her with not one but two female aides. If he wants to succeed— indeed if he wants to survive the Wood—Walter has no choice but to negotiate with these magical women. Walter spends most of his time doing what he is told by the Maid and Mistress, but Hallblithe makes mistakes and relies upon his own devices. Because Hallblithe pursues his quest for the maiden on his own terms, navigating each challenge and making choices ultimately resulting in the restoration of the maiden, his heroism is more clearly defined and his maturation better earned in traditional chivalric and folkloric terms. He passes the tests of his quest and as a result corrects the “lack.” He receives his “reward” in a reunion with The Hostage, normally equated with the joining of the male and female halves of the self, a sign of male maturation in folktale terms. Morris’s use of dialogue in Glittering Plain reinforces the difference in his portrayal of gender between the earlier romance and Wood. Once The Hostage does appear in Glittering Plain, her very being is questioned and her character depicted in limited terms. In contrast to the Maid, who spends the majority of Wood giving Walter instructions and repeatedly telling him to “refrain thee” so she can speak, The Hostage is silent until the reunion. Hallblithe’s experiences up until that point prompt him to ask, “Art thou woman and my speech-friend?” The Hostage affirms this, then inquires, “Art thou verily Hallblithe?”15 This exchange reveals how he questions her gender and her relationship to him whereas she only questions his identity. The emphasis on The Hostage’s sex and role as the hero’s lover suggest the secondary place of the female in Victorian society. For a woman in Morris’s world, having a place at all remained inextricably bound by male ownership and biology. This idea also appears, of course, in literature of the Middle Ages. Although the King Arthur legend abounds with powerful females, as Michelle Sweeney acknowledges, “[f ]or a woman in the romance world there are only two tried and true avenues to power: God and men.”16 As in Morris’s time, these medieval women who challenged male authority often found themselves bound by social constraint, identified as “witches” living on society’s fringes, or judged and left with no choice but the nunnery, in Guenevere’s case. Morris’s blending of medieval and Victorian standards clearly shows in his use of naming in the recognition scene described above. Sheila Fisher addresses the issue of naming in her study of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, asserting, “The Lady is simply the Lady because she comes to represent essentialized womanhood; as such, she is so private that she needs

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no public token by which to identify herself.”17 Interestingly, the Mistress in Wood is also alternately called “the Lady.” Using personal names sparingly to suggest universality is, of course, standard in the folktale and in medieval romance. In Morris’s reinventions, though, heroes are usually named: Walter (Wood ); Hallblithe (Plain); Ralph (The Well at the World’s End ), and so on. The major exception remains News from Nowhere’s Guest, whose status as a visitor from the Victorian to the medieval era is central to the plot. In Wood, the Maid and Mistress carry on the female namelessness. Again unlike The Hostage, though, the Wood women are important characters distinct from Walter. Indeed they share a rivalry that is already long established by the time Walter arrives in their territory, as the Maid explains when she tells how, for as long as she can remember, she has “lived in this land and been the thrall of the Lady.”18 The two women have a kind of psychic bond, which the Maid illustrates when she tells Walter after they escape, “I banned thy kissing and caressing of me till today because I knew that my Mistress would surely know if a man, if thou, hadst so much as touched a finger of mine in love” (181). Coming after Glittering Plain, Wood represents the hero’s journey as directed by the female element rather than defining her as a shadowy catalyst for masculine development. The chronology begs a thought about the direction in which Morris’s thinking was heading at the time. I do not mean to suggest Morris purposely sets up Glittering Plain as an alternative or a correction of the gender dynamic in Wood. Rather the difference in the portrayals suggests the fluidity of Morris’s thinking on the issue that he continues to grapple with it in his ongoing quest to envision a “better” society. Such a view finds confirmation in the fact that, in his earlier nonfiction, Morris “uses the word ‘man’ and its derivatives more often than any other major Victorian essayist”; yet the writings composed later in his life exhibit more frequent and direct allusions to women.19 Further, another of Morris’s prose romances, The Water of the Wondrous Isles (1896), comes after Wood—in fact, near the end of Morris’s career and his life—and is one of the rare examples of his fiction that does call its women by name. In fact, Wondrous Isles centers on a heroine and is almost saturated with feminine presence. Combined, these factors support the idea that Morris’s vision of male–female equality evolves, or at the very least becomes bound by his contemplation of past and present, with the romance as his chosen vehicle for expression. Morris’s treatment of male–female power in Wood occurs most clearly through his reversals of stereotypical positions each would hold both in medieval romance and Victorian reality. Perhaps the best example occurs in the scene in which the Maid tells Walter she hopes he will forgive her for what she might be forced to do in an effort to gain their freedom: “I have heard tell that when the knight goeth to the war, and hath overcome his foes


by the shearing of swords and guileful tricks and hath come back home to his own folk, they praise him and bless him.”20 By casting herself as this “him,” the male knight entering combat, the Maid elevates her status and lowers Walter’s. She becomes the valiant warrior, while he remains the submissive lover. By virtue of her aggressive and even deceitful efforts, which she likens to the strategies a man might legitimately use in battle, she will “save” them both. John R. Wilson rightly links the gender reversal to Morris’s choice of form and setting. He reasons, “If physical courage and leadership are norms in this romantic medieval world, Walter must clearly be seen as subordinate to the Maiden.”21 The above passage from Wood supports this view by incorporating the knight’s quest in the name of a lady’s honor but with the Maid rather than the hero in the knight’s position. Of course, here Morris is to a point following the dictates of courtly love, which teaches “young men to desire, but not to act upon that desire . . . [and thus] privileges the knight who can best submit himself to the desires of others.”22 Thus in kneeling to “kiss the place where [the Maid’s] feet had been”23 in this scene, Walter upholds medieval custom. Viewed this way, the Maid’s elevation marks a function of that custom, but given Morris’s politics, the portrayal requires a deeper look. Rather than emphasizing stereotypically feminine “magic,” the Maid indicates her power by choosing an analogy to the masculine idea of war, one Morris repeats later in Walter’s test for kingship. Again Morris’s Victorianism complicates matters. Enlarged, the Maid’s placing of herself in the knight’s role echoes her earlier description of being “not in like plight with other women” (125). Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890), a fantasy sans the explicit use of magic in the romances, helps to illustrate the point, especially since the novel constructs a Utopian society with medieval customs and costumes. Similar to the Wood, Nowherian society is populated by women free to “do what they can do best, and what they like best.”24 This picture supports Boos’s assertion that Morris “remained strikingly distinctive among end-of-century socialists in the straightforwardness and sincerity of his insistence that no legal or social coercion should constrain a woman’s choices.”25 Despite the extent of her “freedom,” though, the Nowherian female still exercises it in a milieu in which a “clever woman” sees housekeeping as “a great pleasure” as well as an important, primary vocation.26 Maintaining a household obviously constitutes a hefty responsibility as well as a noble profession, but a Victorian woman would rarely have the modern ability to choose such an occupation. Sally Ledger acknowledges that News has some “feminist credentials,” but reminds us that “[w]hilst the division of labor along class lines has been abolished, the same is not true along gender lines.”27 In other words, Nowherian society emancipates women from their Victorian legal ties to men; but their freedom is illusory. Morris’s

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Utopian England maintains the Victorian status quo by promoting the female’s ability to choose the positions of wife and mother that had previously been prescribed to her. In contrast to Nowhere, which approximates futuristic London, Wood presents a faerie realm “beyond the world” where the Mistress wields the political power and where both she and the Maid show cunningness and strength. One must keep in mind, though, that Morris repeatedly defines the Wood as a land of “trickery and guile,” a description voiced alternately by the Maid and Walter. Further, Langton-on-Holm, where Walter’s father is a “great merchant,” seems more like the capitalistic Britain of the nineteenth century than the feudalistic Middle Ages. This is the rational world outside the faerie Wood, just as Victorian society occupies the space outside Morris’s text. Richard Matthews sees the Wood as “a parallel world . . . of correspondences in a medieval sense but one where potential and possibility are unleashed.”28 In this way, the reversal of traditional gender roles between the Maid and Walter confirms faerie’s altered logic and, more importantly, shows how Morris uses the medieval romance to illustrate the disorder he finds around him. Morris upholds medieval romantic convention more closely in The Water of the Wondrous Isles. In this later work, Birdalone provides information and the Sending Boat so the knights from the Castle of the Quest can find their lost loves.29 In fact the Questers’ mission becomes an issue in the story long after Birdalone figures out how to operate the boat and conducts the first part of her own quest. Like Wood’s Maid and Mistress, Birdalone diverges from the “damsel in distress” role occupied most prominently in Morris’s romances by Glittering Plain’s The Hostage. However, in contrast even to Wood, which begins and ends with Walter’s concerns, nearly one hundred pages pass in Wondrous Isles before a male character enters.30 Additionally, Wood’s Maid and Mistress both possess great magic, whereas Birdalone appears as a sorceress-in-training, learning through her interactions with her “Wood-mother” Habundia and by spying on the witch who raised her. She must rely on intellect and courage to resolve the tests of her own quest, whereas the Maid and Mistress use magic and are virtually created in order to aid the male hero. Given such considerations, Birdalone appears as more hero than heroine, leaving home on a quest and meeting daunting challenges along the way. Like Walter, she receives the most useful and important help from wise women: the three sisters and (unknowingly) the witch. In keeping with folkloric and medieval romantic conventions of the “damsel,” Birdalone also enjoys male support from the priest, the Champions of the Quest, Sir Thomas, and later Gerard and his sons. Unlike Walter, though, whose female helpers undermine his masculinity, Birdalone does not look weak for


the aid she receives. She still shows courage and ingenuity, and, for most of her adventures, operates alone, as her name emphasizes. In this way, Birdalone is more like Glittering Plain’s Hallblithe who, interestingly, also travels by boat for much of his journey. These connections between Morris’s romances support the argument that his view of male–female power dynamics develops as a line of inquiry, with each story revealing new turns in his thinking. Conceived later, Birdalone’s character proves to be much more adventurous than Wood ’s male hero. She even seeks out adventure by going into the Black Valley against her hosts’ instructions. In contrast, from his entry into the faerie realm until he kills the lion during a hunting expedition with the Mistress, Walter remains curiously passive, not unlike the hero of an authentic romance, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. More importantly, in both Gawain and Wood, the heroes face female “testers.” In fact, the woman becomes a feature of the quest, another “test” on the hero’s path toward achieving a higher self. Although this makes her an object to some extent, it also places her in an authority position. She retains the knowledge of and control over the exercise while, in keeping with the very definition of the quest, he must surmount the challenge for himself. In both Gawain and Wood, the female’s power remains problematic and requires deeper investigation. Of course the fact that Morgan LeFay is the one responsible for Gawain’s quest in the first place further reinforces the existence of female power in the medieval tale, but as Fisher points out, Morgan is not even mentioned until after Gawain fulfills his promise to the Green Knight. By the end of the poem, the Lady and Morgan are converted from the generators of exchange into tokens that men can use in their own literary and political exchanges. Reading Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in light of Morgan’s agency, then, alerts us not only to the nature and function of the power assigned to female characters, but also to the process by which that power is denied so that women can be converted into the tokens of men.31 Similarly, in Wood, by the end of the story, both Maid and Mistress relinquish power so Walter can become a king in faerie. One especially key difference between Gawain and Walter also relates to Morris’s approach to the romance in Wood. As with Glittering Plain’s Hallblithe, Gawain acts with only minor, shadowy aid whereas Walter has substantial help from the Maid, and to some extent, the Mistress. In fact, Walter almost never acts on his own logic and inclination from the time he ignores the Carle and passes through the cliff wall. Morris repeatedly highlights Walter’s subordinate status to the women perhaps most clearly by letting the reader into the hero’s thoughts after he receives orders from the Maid regarding their escape. Morris writes, “But Walter went slowly on his way, thinking within himself that now at the present moment there was

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nought for it but to refrain him from doing, and to let others do; yet deemed he that it was little manly to be as the pawn upon the board pushed about by the will of others.”32 Here Walter not only admits his “pawn” status but also notes that, although his behavior may be “unmanly,” he has no choice in the matter. One of the most explicit scenes in terms of showing how the Maid’s control enables Walter’s growth, this passage exemplifies his position. Virtually powerless, he exists at the mercy of the women who rule this alternate world. Once again, compared to Wondrous Isles’ Birdalone or even to Glittering Plain’s Hallblithe, who shows courage in rejecting “the Land” to pursue his stolen love, Walter presents a decidedly unheroic figure. One might accept his inaction as a function of his recognition, whether conscious or no, that the time has not yet arrived for him to assert himself. Such a reading, though, does not match the narrator’s description of Walter’s thoughts above. Being “pushed about by the will of others,” suggests a child’s, and in nineteenth-century terms, a woman’s place in society. In expressing a sense of being “unmanly” in letting “others do” for him, Walter shows the immaturity that initiates his quest. Applying this idea to Gawain, who also privately acknowledges his position as pawn to the Knight’s Lady, one can see Walter remains much less in control of his decision-making, at least in his journey’s early stages. Although Gawain plays along with the gifting game into which he enters at the Knight’s insistence, he does so without sacrificing his knightly courtesy and virtue, right up until the end when his life hangs in the balance. In this way, he displays masculine courage in medieval romantic terms, whereas Walter, as a facsimile of the knight conjured by Morris’s Victorian imagination, only approximates such a persona as the prize in a tug-of-war between the Maid and Mistress. Thus Walter personifies the Victorian male’s confusion, again in keeping with Hall’s notion of the “fractured sense of self.” Also, although the Green Knight’s Lady questions Gawain’s reputation and courtesy, she does not challenge his manhood as the Mistress does with Walter. The clearest example of this occurs during the lion episodes, initiated by the hunting trip upon which he goes as the Mistress’s Squire. Once in the forest, she bids Walter to stay behind. She becomes the hunter, recalling the reversal when the Maid cast herself as a knight. Here again, Morris makes Walter the passive damsel; but the outcome of this scene is more important for characterizing the hero’s display of stereotypically feminine weakness. After Walter bolts to the rescue and kills the lion, the Mistress reminds him to choose his reward, causing “his heart [to be] clouded with manlike desire of her” although he thinks he should rightly request the Maid’s freedom rather than sex with the Mistress. Noticing his discomfort, she accuses Walter of being afraid of her (116–117), suggesting an “unmanly”


weakness that mirrors his own earlier thought and contradicts the “manlike desire” her presence inspires. Indeed Morris’s use here of “manlike” (my italics), although a replication of medieval speech, also suggests Walter is more “like” a man than he is masculine, which the Mistress confirms in accusing him of fearfulness. Sensing rejection, she says, “It is growing in my mind that thou deemest the gift of me unworthy! Thou, an alien, an outcast; one endowed with the little wisdom of the World without the Wood” (129)! Her comment illustrates Walter’s subjectivity as a stranger in a strange land ruled by women. Interestingly, the Mistress’s charge that Walter is “endowed with the little wisdom of the World without the Wood” (my italics), carries dual meaning. Morris implies not only that the real world is substandard to faerie, but also that Walter is ignorant of life in any realm. The tension between Walter’s subjectivity and his female helpers’ dominance easily reads as a statement on the divergence between the Wood women and those of Morris’s day. Through the Mistress (and less so, the Maid), Morris depicts a single woman directing her own course. Rather than being an “angel” in someone else’s “house,” the Mistress runs her own establishment. Viewed this way, she represents the kind of life the 1890s suffragette aspired to in displaying an implicitly “masculine” stance to forward her cause. Ledger defines the “New Woman” as “very much a fin-de-siècle phenomenon,”33 calling her “a challenge to the apparently homogenous culture of Victorianism which could not find a consistent language by which she could be categorized and dealt with. All that was certain was that she was dangerous, a threat to the status quo” (11). Lucy Bland adds, “She was generally thought of as a middle-or upper-class young woman, concerned to reject many of the conventions of femininity and to live and work on free and equal terms with the opposite sex.”34 Morris composed the prose romances at a time when the “New Woman” was having “her heyday.”35 Given his social and political concerns, Wood’s Mistress clearly reads as a fictional embodiment of such a real-world female. The Mistress politically and personally dominates her male subjects, the King’s Son, the Dwarf, and most importantly, Walter.36 As pathways for Walter’s maturation quest, the Maid and Mistress resist the “pawn” status held by The Hostage in Glittering Plain. It is the Wood women’s presence that defines them both as powerful agents for moving the hero forward. Interestingly, through its absence, the lion also marks an important symbol for measuring the extent of Walter’s subjectivity in the climax of the hunting episodes. He follows the Mistress’s order and, venturing to the spot where the lion’s body should have lain, finds the beast has disappeared.37 The lion’s body is extremely significant, representing Walter’s only definitive act since entering the Wood. Without this concrete evidence, the beast’s slaying seems never to have occurred, and indeed it has not; since we

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find out later from the Maid that the conjuring of “the lion that never was” (183) constituted a device by the Mistress to instigate a sexual liaison with Walter, his only act of bravery leaves him looking weak and foolish. The narrator confirms this, describing how Walter “was all abashed and again laughed in scorn of himself, and said, ‘forsooth I deemed I had done manly; but now forsooth I shot nought, and nought there was before the sword of my father’s son’ ” (140). Walter’s internal reference to himself as his “father’s son” also links him to his patriarchal world beyond the Wood as well as to Victorian Britain. Therefore, Walter has yet to exhibit any noteworthy strength, either in terms of character or physical prowess. Once again the work uses gender reversal to show Walter as helpless and “feminine” especially compared to the women who so easily lead and deceive him. The Problem Given the evidence supporting the dominance of the Maid and Mistress in Wood, one can accept that Morris’s socialism does allow for some equality of the sexes. Only by raising the Wood women so far above Walter can the author fully express the divergence between faerie and his own reality. Further, the contrasts with Glittering Plain published before and Wondrous Isles after Wood show clear shifts in Morris’s thinking. If this is the case, however, then why does he go to such lengths to tear down what he has so carefully constructed in Wood by ensuring Walter’s subsequent maturation comes at the expense of both Maid and Mistress? Tracing the hero’s maturation path in the latter chapters reveals the problems in the story’s approach to gender and helps give insight into Morris’s Victorian medievalism. After a period in which Walter serves both women, he begins to mature as a result of his experiences in the Wood. A decided shift occurs when the Maid tricks the Mistress into suspecting a tryst between Walter and the Maid. While this scene unfolds outside the text, both Walter and the reader learn the details in flashback when the Maid finally tells him the whole story. Explaining how she used magic to make the King’s Son look like Walter, the Maid says, “[A]s there I lay I cast over him thy shape, so that none might have known, but that thou wert lying by my side” (184). Here she describes her literal conjuring of Walter’s facsimile, but the Maid’s words also read symbolically. Her magic, which up until this point has helped to mold Walter into a man by directing his actions, now transforms his character. Instead of the ineffectual youth afraid of the Wood ’s powerful ruler, with the help of the Maid, Walter becomes the man capable of inspiring such passionate jealousy that the Mistress is moved to slay his image and then herself (184–186). Although Walter’s figure in this scene is an illusion, like many of the tricks enacted upon him by both Maid and Mistress, the effect


represents a divine act of Creation whereby the young man’s chief female helper literally shapes him into a man. Despite this great step forward, however, Walter’s journey remains incomplete; he has only made a move toward maturity that will be realized later in his kingship of Stark-wall. Morris’s repeated juxtaposition of the Maid’s power against Walter’s submission furnishes a means by which to gauge his growth. For example, before settling into a new life together, the couple stops in Bear-Country, an area of faerie outside the Wood. The Maid confirms her Creator role by replacing the Mistress, the Children of the Bear’s former leader. As Matthews notes, the Maid offers the Bear-folk a message of “resurrection and renewal”38 by telling them, “Now then is the day of your gladness come; for the old body is dead, and I am the new body of your God.”39 More importantly, the Maid places Walter in her shadow. Prior to her speech to the Bear-folk she cautions him to “Abide a while” so as not to undermine her status as “God” by appearing “over lover-like” (206). Her parting words to the Bear-folk also confirm Walter’s inferiority: “leave me to go my ways; and my man [Walter] with the iron sword shall follow me” (218–219). Walter’s response to all of this illustrates the male view of threatening female power. For the first time in the story, Walter expresses doubt about the Maid’s intentions: “Is it so, that she will bewrayme and live without me” (205)? With her help, he overcomes this impulse but that he indulges it at all dramatizes what Leonore Davidoff calls “the danger lurking below the surface” in the Victorian household.40 Morris underscores the Maid’s superiority in the above scene by having Walter walk behind her. The “iron,” of course, recalls the ankle ring the Maid once wore to mark her thralldom to the Mistress. Davidoff ’s study “Mastered for Life: Servant and Wife in Victorian and Edwardian England” describes how the “disruptive forces” acting upon the nineteenth-century master–servant relationship created a vulnerability for the husband or “master.”41 Just as seeing the Maid, who was formerly a thrall, as a “God” causes Walter to doubt her love for him, the Victorian man of the household felt the pressure of the “new woman’s” influence just outside his door. In both cases, the female appears as a subversive force; though in the latter case, an often-unknowing one. In the Wood, however, the Maid controls Walter until almost the end. Consequently, Matthews’s argument that “The heroism of the book is shared by the couple” is not substantiated by the text. Further, his view that “the main thrust [of the tale] is toward liberation of the repressed feminine principle”42 overlooks the fact that the Maid’s independence comes about through her own agency: she conjures Walter’s likeness, which leads to the destruction of her oppressor, the Mistress. From that point onward, Walter’s status elevates but does not reach that of the Maid until hers begins to

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decrease. So, although Walter does eventually exhibit a heroic self, at no time do the Maid and Walter share equal footing. More accurately, the Maid moves from thralldom to the Mistress, then to freedom, and finally to another kind of oppression in the end. Coinciding with the initial stages of Walter’s transformation, the Mistress’ death offers the clearest illustration of a problem in Morris’s treatment of Wood ’s female characters. The narrator explains that, after slaying the fake Walter, the Mistress “raised a great wailing cry . . . and caught up the knife from the bed and thrust it into her breast, and fell down a dead heap over the bed and on to the man whom she had slain.”43 As this action unfolds, the real Walter waits outside for the Maid to meet him. Immediately following the Mistress’s death, of which he remains unaware at this point, Walter leaves with the Maid, signifying a first step toward maturity: he chooses her pure love over the Mistress’s guileful beauty. Walter begins a new journey with the Maid just after the lady in charge of the Wood kills herself. The proximity of these two events connects the Mistress’s destruction/loss of power with Walter’s newly gained freedom. He can only leave the Golden House after its owner, the Wood’s ruler, relinquishes her power; before this time Walter is compelled to “refrain him from doing, and to let others do” (142). Since this relinquishing happens via the Maid’s magic, one may view Walter’s maturation as thus far incomplete, especially given that he leaves the Golden House led by the Maid, as the narrator describes: “[S]he caught him by the hand and said breathlessly: ‘ask me no questions but come!’ He dallied not, but went as she led” (155). Immediately following the couple’s flight, Walter effects “his first independent action” by killing the Dwarf.44 As the first male Walter encounters in the Wood, the Dwarf reappears at various points, at which times Morris emphasizes his hideous aspect. While possessing some magic and serving as “rulers of metal and mines,”45 in folkloric terms dwarfs are traditionally “threatening . . . primitively sexual” creatures (128). For Walter, who is ineffectual up until this point, the Dwarf slaying symbolizes his growth in the clearest possible way. Coming on the heels of the Mistress’s destruction, the killing shows bravery, a trait Walter keeps hidden throughout most of his stay in the Wood. Once again, though, the Dwarf slaying remains bound by Walter’s relationship with the Maid since it is in her defense that he acts and at her command that he beheads the creature.46 Earlier, Morris contested Walter’s slaying of the lion, so his killing of the Dwarf corrects the hero’s previous failure. Whereas the lion’s carcass disappeared, making Walter “unmanly,” the Dwarf remains, allowing Walter to smite off “the hideous head of the fiend with his own weapon” before he buries the body (165). Because the Maid is also referred to as the “Enemy” by both Mistress and Dwarf, her link to the creature confirms Walter’s maturation as bound by


female direction. Although Walter repeatedly feels revulsion at seeing the Dwarf, it never actually harms him; in fact, the Dwarf provides Walter with bread when they first meet in the Wood. More importantly, the conjured lion appears only once, whereas the presumably “real” Dwarf crosses Walter’s path numerous times, yet he makes no move against “the Evil thing” until after fleeing with the Maid upon the Mistress’s death. Walter’s final aggressive action against the Dwarf suggests that the hero’s emerging masculinity is made possible only by the annihilation of the most powerful female of the Wood. As Walter moves closer to maturity, the Maid begins to appear more like the Victorian “angel of the house” than the “new woman.” The clearest example occurs in her speech to Walter just after she regenerates the flowers she wears to convince the Bear-people she is their new queen. She says, “[D]id I not tell thee that I am wise in hidden lore? But in my wisdom shall be no longer any scathe to any man. And again, this my wisdom, as I told thee erst, shall end on the day whereon I am made all happy. And it is thou that shall wield it all, my Master” (195). Here the Maid means she will relinquish her magical powers “on the day” when she becomes Walter’s bride, so he can “wield it all” as “master” of the household. In fact, this is what does occur, as the narrator describes: “All wizardry left her since the day of her wedding; yet of wit and wisdom she had enough left, and to spare; for she needed no going about, and no guile, anymore than hard commands to have her will done” (257). In other words, now that the Maid has her man, she no longer needs the “wizardry” or guile she previously used to vanquish her competition (the Mistress) or to help her husband to the crown and herself to a place beside him. She only requires enough “wit and wisdom” to govern the domestic space. Here Morris challenges his own earlier portrayal of nontraditional female power by forcing the Maid to give up her magic and making such appear as the natural order of things, casting her as the “servant,” to use Davidoff ’s term.47 The explanation for such an ending again involves the intrusion of the “real” world on faerie. By passing through the cleft in the wall, Walter infuses the “other” realm with his patriarchal values so that the only way for him to achieve maturity is through the subordination or destruction of his female helpers. As Davidoff notes, “in an industrializing society, particularly a capitalist society at the high tide of liberal economic doctrine, there was no place for those whose social identity was defined primarily in terms of personal relationships, neither servants nor wives. They had no roles to play in the great drama of market forces. In theory, they did not exist or at most were residual categories.”48 The Mistress rules faerie until her demise; the Maid governs via her magic and power over Walter. He can only become a man, an accomplishment Morris expresses according to folkloric and

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medieval romantic tradition, through kingship, by dethroning the women who practically place him there. Since, as Matthews indicates, Wood marks “the first time a hero does not return to his tribe or people at the end of a Morris novel,” the story suggests that Walter, with the Maid as his guide, will “establish a new order within a larger human family where the insights of the hero and heroine can be promulgated.”49 Certainly this seems valid given Walter and the Maid make their kingdom in faerie instead of in the “world beyond the wood”; however, Matthews characterizes the couple’s relationship as much more equal than the text allows. Morris further enacts the status quo by seeing that Walter’s final test to gain maturity is administered by men. Finally arriving in Stark-wall, Walter and his love are separated. He is bathed and led to a kind of throne where he is asked to choose between “robes of peace . . . unmeet for any save a great king . . . [or] war-weed . . . bestained with weather, and the pelting of the spear-storm.” Choosing the war garb, Walter is hailed as “the King of battle.”50 He sends for the Maid, who kneels before him, saying, “O my lord, now I see that thou hast beguiled me, and that thou wert all along a king-born man. . . . I will beseech thee not to cast me out utterly but suffer me to be thy servant and handmaid for a while” (246). As the Maid indicates, Walter’s kingship completes his maturation journey with a total reversal in his relationship with her. Referring to Morris’s socialism, Silver finds that the romances present “relationships [that] are interclass and free of economic considerations,” citing the union of the “great merchant’s son and . . . a thrall of unknown parentage” as evidence.51 Although I generally agree, the idea must be qualified. In the scope of the text, Walter’s higher social status based on his parentage has meaning only in the world outside the Wood. Once he passes through the cleft in the wall, every aspect of his being becomes challenged in the “land of mere lies.” Morris’s emphasis on Walter’s immaturity, ineffectuality, and passivity, particularly in contrast with the opposite traits in his female helpers, repeatedly places him lower in Wood’s hierarchy. Further, the Maid explains more than once that she has knowledge of “wizard’ry,” a trait she shares with the Mistress and another advantage placing the women above Walter. Silver overlooks that, despite the Maid’s thralldom, she remains in control of Walter’s destiny, directing his every move until his coronation. Whereas she previously wielded control over Walter, when he achieves kingship the Maid’s power is so completely diminished that she asks if he might take pity on her by keeping her on as a “servant” or “handmaid.” Even further intensifying the role reversal, Morris’s narrator describes how, in response to her humble speech, Walter “stoop[s] down to [the Maid] and raise[s] her up,” introducing her to the people as his “beloved and spouse”


before saying she is also “Queen and Lady.”52 Essentially then, the Maid trades in her iron ring of thralldom to the Mistress for a golden wedding band. Obviously marriage need not imply loss of identity or agency for a female, but for the nineteenth-century “new woman” and for those who would oppose her, the institution of marriage contains within it certain traditional assumptions about power. In Wood, the new king does not forsake the woman who precipitated his success, but the words Morris puts into Walter’s mouth do show that her previous sway over him is erased so that she can become “beloved and spouse.” Only as a consequence of being such to a king does she merit the secondary titles of “Queen and Lady.” In folktale and medieval romance, a marriage ending typically represents a union between two halves, the male and female components of the self. Resulting from the tests the hero (or heroine in rare cases) overcomes, the marriage defines his (or her) maturity. Such an ending also invariably marked the Victorian novel, which according to Amanda Hodgson, Morris “professed to despise” for being “too focused on the character’s psychological problems.” She goes on to say that Morris “shows impressive skill in his handling of the externalizing power of romance, using the events of the story to reveal psychological truths. This analysis is placed at the service of an assertion of the need for, and possibility of, integration—between man and nature, past and present, man’s own warring propensities and desires.”53 Such integration can occur in the more obvious form of a social contract— that is, a marriage—or more symbolically as a fusion of the masculine and feminine components of a self. Before his entry into the Wood, Walter exists as an undeveloped masculine self, interested in proving himself by seeking adventure and viewing woman as an object of desire rather than as a human being. Instead of confronting his wife about her infidelity, he runs away from his feelings of loss and humiliation to “see other lands.”54 Through his interactions with both the Maid and Mistress in the Wood, Walter comes to terms with his earthly passion and, by putting it in its place, is able to access a deeper, more emotional side. Ultimately, it is the development of this ability through his connection with both Maid and Mistress that enables him to find a balance and achieve the true maturity that will make him a good “king” or man. By accepting the ultimate power position in the end, Walter embodies real world patriarchy. Taking Walter’s kingship as an uncomplicated endorsement of such a system, however, does not fit with what we know of Morris’s politics from his essays and especially from his fiction. Walter’s journey is fraught with problems and therefore serves as a warning to Victorian society in which conforming to rigid behavioral codes based on sex often demands great sacrifice. The frustration and loss is particularly intense for the women who, like the Maid, must feign inferiority to survive.

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Others, like the Mistress, are viewed as “masculine” and “destroyed” by the social pressure to conform. Significantly, Walter achieves kingship and lives out his days with the Maid in faerie not in his own world. Ending the story thus, Morris implies that despite being king, the hero remains immature— or perhaps more accurately—unevolved. Walter’s kingship leaves one powerful woman dead and another at his mercy. The story argues that a system founded on a lack of equality for all, regardless of sex, offers no hope for any real social or political progress for Britain’s future. The Wood Beyond the World provides keen insight, both into the subtleties of Morris’s egalitarian vision and into the ways in which his medievalism works as a vehicle for him—and subsequent generations of readers—to consider the past and present. Notes 1. Morris’s marriage to Jane Burden included his seeming toleration for her affair with his friend Dante Gabriel Rossetti. This aspect of Morris’s personal life falls outside the scope of this essay, but for more information about the author’s marriage, see especially E. P. Thompson, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1955). 2. Charles Dellheim. “Interpreting Victorian Medievalism,” in History and Community: Essays in Victorian Medievalism, ed. Florence S. Boos (New York: Garland, 1992), 39. 3. Dellheim. “Interpreting Victorian Medievalism,” 45. 4. Sheila Fisher. “Taken Men and Token Women in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” in Seeking the Woman in Late Medieval and Renaissance Writings: Essays in Feminist Contextual Criticism, ed. Sheila Fisher and Janet E. Halley (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989), 96. 5. Donald Hall, Fixing Patriarchy: Feminism and Mid-Victorian Male Novelists (Washington Square, NY: New York University Press, 1996), 3–6. 6. Florence Boos, History and Community: Essays in Victorian Medievalism (New York: Garland, 1992), 9–10. 7. Frederick Kirchoff, William Morris: The Construction of Male Self, 1856–1872 (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1990), 4. 8. William Morris. “A Theory of Life,” in News From Nowhere and Selected Writings and Designs, ed. Asa Briggs (New York: Penguin, 1986), 151. 9. Florence Boos, “An (Almost) Egalitarian Sage: William Morris and Nineteenth Century Socialist-Feminism,” in Victorian Sages and Cultural Discourse, ed. Thais E. Morgan (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 187. Also, such ideas formed a significant platform for the women’s movement at the time, as Lucy Bland indicates in her study of English Feminism and Sexual Morality, 1885–1914, saying, “Feminists wished for the eradication of women’s experience of sexual objectification, sexual violence, and lack of bodily autonomy, to be replaced instead by a new sexual morality in which men lived by the same ethical precepts as women” [0]. 10. Boos, “Egalitarian,” 189.

morris’s THE WOOD BEYOND THE WORLD / 189 11. Gail Turley Houston, Royalties: The Queen and Victorian Writers (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1999), 10. 12. William Morris, intro. Norman Talbot, The Water of the Wondrous Isles, (Bristol, England: Thoemmes Press, 1994), ix. 13. William Morris, The Wood Beyond the World (New York: Dover, 1972), 33–36. 14. Vladmir Propp, The Morphology of the Folktale (Austin, TX: University of Austin Press, 1998), 35. 15. William Morris, The Story of the Glittering Plain (Bristol, England: Thoemmes Press, 1996), 325–326. 16. Michelle Sweeny, Magic in Medieval Romance from Chretien de Troyes to Geoffrey Chaucer (Portland, OR: Four Courts Press, 2000), 158. 17. Fisher, “Taken Men and Token Women,” 79. 18. Morris, Wood, 173. 19. Boos, “Egalitarian,” 189–190. 20. Morris, Wood, 125–126. 21. John R. Wilson. “The Eve and the Madonna in Morris’s The Wood Beyond the World,” Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies 4, no. 1 (1983): 53. 22. Sweeny, Magic, 15. 23. Morris, Wood, 126. 24. William Morris, “News From Nowhere,” in Stories in Prose, ed. G. D. H. Cole (New York: Random House, 1934), 56. 25. Boos, “Egalitarian,” 203. 26. Morris, Nowhere, 56. 27. Sally Ledger, The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the fin de siécle (New York: Manchester University Press, 1997), 51. 28. Richard Matthews, Fantasy: The Liberation of Imagination (New York: Twayne, 1997), 52. 29. William Morris, The Water of the Wondrous Isles (Bristol, England: Thoemmes Press, 1994), 127–136. 30. Talbot, Water, xii. 31. Fisher, “Taken Man and Token Women,” 72. 32. Morris, Wood, 142. 33. Ledger, New Woman, 1. 34. Bland, English Feminism, 144. 35. Ledger, New Woman, 2. 36. One cannot overlook the fact that a Queen ruled when Morris was writing, especially since the animal Walter supposedly slays in the forest is a lion, an emblem of the British Empire. Still Victoria’s husband played a crucial role in her governance and she was often called “ ‘the Great White Mother,’ ‘the Grandmother of Europe,’ and ‘the Mother of the Peoples.’ ” Even so in many ways Victoria (and Albert) personified the confusion of the age in regard to male–female power, as Gail Turley Houston explains: “Tutored in the dominant gender ideology that made all domestic ‘queens’ of the household submissive to male rule, Victorian women were faced, in their queen, with a deviant model of femininity. Viewed as explicitly informing the subjectivity of every Victorian female, Victoria’s womanhood was both endangered and endangering because she was queen” (33). Morris creates the Mistress in Wood as a different sort of queen; he does not mirror the woman presiding over his own nation. Rather,

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37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

through the Mistress and her relationship with Walter, Morris dramatizes the issue of female power itself, enlivening the contradictions and fears he witnesses in the politics of his own world. Morris, Wood, 138–139. Richard Matthews, Worlds Beyond the World: The Fantastic Vision of William Morris (San Bernadino, CA: Borgo, 1978), 46. Morris, Wood, 212. Leonore Davidoff, Worlds Between: Historical Perspectives in Gender and Class (New York: Routledge, 1995), 30. Davidoff, Worlds Between, 30. Matthews, Worlds, 46. Morris, Wood, 186. Amanda Hodgson, The Romances of William Morris (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 178. Carole Silver, Strange and Secret Peoples: Fairies and Victorian Consciousness (New York: Oxford, 1999), 120. Morris, Wood, 158–164. In “The Eve and the Madonna,” Wilson argues that Walter’s “success depends on exterior power” provided by the Maid and the Mistress, but overlooks that Walter’s gains come at the expense of both of his female helpers. Wilson finds that Walter emerges as “a non-hero” in Medieval romantic terms, whereas the Maid fulfills the more traditional role of champion (54). Although accurate to a point, this argument overlooks that Walter becomes a king in faerie after Maid and Mistress are separately overthrown. Therefore, although Morris plays with the conventional idea of the Medieval hero by transferring these characteristics to a female (primarily the Maid), he adheres to the traditional “marriage” conclusion one finds in the folk tale as well as in the novels of his own time that he actually found distasteful. Here the man (Walter) assumes control and the Maid enthusiastically accepts the subordinate role as his wife. As a key function of this sequence, the Mistress ceases to exist entirely. Davidoff, Worlds Between, 34. Matthews, Worlds, 44–45. Morris, Wood, 239–240. Silver, “Socialism Internalized,” 125. Morris, Wood, 246. Hodgson, Romances of William Morris, 179. Morris, Wood, 3.

Chapter Ten The Performance of Victorian Medievalism Barbara Bell

The medieval performance structure that lay at the heart of the nineteenth-century embrace of medievalism was the tournament, and perhaps the key factor in the ease with which Victorians played at and played with the medieval tournament was the essentially performative and doubled nature of the original event. Louise Fradenburg’s account in City, Marriage, Tournament: Arts of Rule in Late Medieval Scotland1 of the way in which monarchs used the performance space of the tournament field variously for public entertainment, personal recreation, military training, political maneuvering, diplomatic dialogue, and settling serious disputes makes clear that role play and the taking on of symbolic and idealized personae were key elements in the construction of tournaments.2 Nineteenth-century authors, particularly Sir Walter Scott, understood and utilized this aspect of tournaments in shaping their narratives, and it was recognized and embraced by nineteenth-century participants in recreations. Another notable feature of the Victorian performance of the medieval was the apparent ease with which participants moved from a serious engagement with the ideals and imagery of the source materials to playful mockery of that same contemporary engagement; whereas the visual imagery can appear stable, closer inspection reveals selective manipulation of the originals to suit the contemporary context. There was also a degree of overlap between the three groups involved in these performances. The professional entertainers, the military, and the amateurs would overlap sometimes in their personnel and frequently in their choice of materials, which gives a sense of the widespread enthusiasm for the drive to redefine a cultural heritage that gathered pace as the century progressed. Even so there

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was frequently more attention paid to the spectacle itself than to the strict authenticity of the event.3 Scott’s Ivanhoe (1819), and The Betrothed and The Talisman (1825), called the Tales of the Crusaders, formed the core of the professional theatrical performances of the medieval period; however, well before the first wave of stage adaptations of Ivanhoe, British theaters enjoyed successful performances of “troubadour” plays. One of the best known was Richard Coeur de Lion by Sedaine (1784). It was adapted for the British stage by General Burgoyne who added to the French original what would become a commonplace of nineteenth-century medieval performance—the female page.4 Victorian medieval stage performances reveled in their recreations of jousts and tournaments; indeed some productions would be built solely around these spectacles, but this too was not a wholly new occurrence. A. H. Saxon writing about the history of hippodrama5 in Enter Foot and Horse6 notes a very successful revival of Garrick’s play, Cymon at Drury Lane in 1791–1792 that featured a pageant and tournament in which two knights fought on horseback; however, this was a fashion that spread across the audience spectrum and at the popular end of the market, in June 1800, the Royal Amphitheatre, Westminster Bridge brought out a “new Serio-Comic Pedestrian and Equestrian Pantomime, called the Magic Flute or Harlequin Champion.”7 It is worth noting that these works were, notwithstanding the several plays about King Richard the Lionheart, largely fantastical and/or romantic. By the time that Ivanhoe, which combined stirring adventure and romance with an exploration of the politics of a nation in turmoil, was published in December 1819, the Scott novels had already established themselves as goldmines for theatrical speculation of all sorts.8 However, their single largest impact was on the divide between the Patent Houses, called Theater/s Royal, which had the legal right to serious (legitimate) drama, and the Minor houses, mostly serving working-class areas, which were not licensed to do plays. Scott’s invaluable dialogue was in the novels and thus in the public domain, so that for the first time all sections of society could legally hear the same words spoken by the same serious characters in their theaters, which helped to spread Victorian medievalism across class lines.9 The first flush of enthusiasm for all Scott dramatizations came with their initial publication, when they received repeated productions in most theaters.10 By March 1820, the London theaters had at least five different adaptations running. As was usual with the Scott dramas, the Minor theaters had been first with pieces taken from the new publishing sensation. T. J. Dibdin’s piece titled Ivanhoe; or, The Jew’s Daughter appeared at the Surrey Theatre on January 20, 1820, barely a month after the novel, followed by versions at the Coburg on January 24 (Moncrieff ) and Adelphi on January 27 (Anonymous). During this phase, a close adherence to the

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original was key in gaining audience approval. Scott’s friend, the actor and playwright Daniel Terry, assured him he would be sticking as closely to Ivanhoe as possible, since “deviation from the story experience shows to be bad—the public expect as rigid adherence as possible to it.”11 The pieces by T. J. Dibdin and Moncrieff followed the plan of the novel fairly closely. However, the Patent theaters seem to have determined to be bolder with their plotting if they could not be first to produce. The Times of March 3, 1820 contained reviews of new adaptations that premiered at Drury Lane and Covent Garden on the same night. Figure 10.1 contains a portrait of Charles Kemble as Ivanhoe who, in Beazley’s confusingly titled Ivanhoe; or, The Knight Templar, for Covent Garden turns out to be King Richard. Even more radical in its departure from the novel was G. Soane’s The Hebrew for Drury Lane, written in blank verse, which focused on the story of Isaac and Rebecca, creating an overt and reciprocated romantic relationship between Rebecca and Ivanhoe. Kean was given an expanded role as Isaac that allowed him full rein for his acting, but the Times reviewer considered it strayed too far from Scott’s original character, having Ivanhoe propose marriage to Rebecca, which the writer felt was plainly absurd.12 The reviews of all the London pieces commented on their level of adherence to the plots of the original novel, and the more modest ambitions of the Minor theaters won out, both in initial approval and subsequent longevity in terms of revival and publication. The playbill, figure 10.2, is for a performance of Ivanhoe, or the Knights of the Temple at the Edinburgh Theatre Royal on December 13, 1823. This adaptation for a Patent House, attributed to W. H. Murray,13 followed the pattern established in the early successful Ivanhoe plays in focusing on three dramatic spectacles, namely, The Grand Tournament, the Attack and Destruction of Torquilstone Castle, and the Court-yard at Templestowe where Ivanhoe defeats Bois-Guilbert in trial by combat. The rivalry between Patent house and Minor theater to work with the Crusader tales could be seen even more clearly in Edinburgh in the case of The Talisman. When Scott came to publish The Talisman, the Edinburgh Theatre Royal, which had never before presumed on its close relationship with the novelist to obtain advance knowledge of a work, clearly made the approach because Murray’s adaptation premiered on June 22, 1825, less than a day after the novel appeared.14 Partly anchored by Scott’s own dialogue and partly influenced by external factors, these adaptations of Ivanhoe and the Crusader Tales had an appeal that was, despite Sir Kenneth’s Scottish roots, national in a way that Rob Roy or even Kenilworth were not. Ivanhoe mirrors the case of Rebecca with the case of England, both in peril from those who would twist the law and justice to suit their own ends. For Rebecca, the peril comes from the

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Figure 10.1 Mr. West as Sir Kenneth of Scotland in The Siege of Jerusalem and Mr. C. Kemble as Ivanhoe (from the collection of Dr. Barbara Bell).

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Figure 10.2 Ivanhoe Playbill, Edinburgh Theatre Royal, December 13, 1823 (from the collection of Dr. Barbara Bell).

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Templars, whose narrow, prejudiced, understanding of humanity cannot see a path other than their own, while England is threatened by the contending and fundamentally selfish concerns of Richard, the absentee king, Prince John and his power-hungry allies, and finally Cedric and his stubborn attachment to the hopeless dream of a return to Saxon rule. James Chandler’s seminal study England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (1998)15 points out that Ivanhoe, published in 1819 as Scott’s first novel set outside of Scotland, was written in the aftermath of the Peterloo Massacre when the country was in a ferment and prolonged social upheaval that was felt to be an imminent possibility, prompting numerous “Condition-of-England” commentaries. In Scott’s creation of framing-device characters, Chandler sees Scott actively engaging with his role as historical novelist in a way that ultimately had a profound effect on the wider sphere of cultural historicism and on how society as a whole approached history (136). A slightly different, but complementary, slant on the nineteenth-century project of creating a national identity is provided by Stephanie Barczewski in her study Myth and National Identity in Nineteenth-Century Britain: The Legends of King Arthur and Robin Hood.16 Barczewski explores nineteenthand twentieth-century interpretations of the legends, pointing out that twentieth-century interpretations consciously moved away from “racialist notions that had been constructed in the nineteenth century” in a “return to the position adopted by Sir Walter Scott in Ivanhoe, in which the Normans and Saxons had ultimately set aside their mutual enmity in the interest of national unity” (234–235). Both Chandler and Barczewski identify, as key to Scott’s portrayal of successful nation-building, this picture of England at a pivotal moment in her history; contending forces could have torn her apart, but Saxons and Normans are ultimately brought together in a just cause. Many of the surviving play texts give prominence in the final scene to dialogue that glosses the gradual thawing of relations between Saxon and Norman, which Scott describes as happening over many years. W. T. Moncrieff ’s version ended with the King articulating his desire for this merging of interests: Richard: The rebels are dispersed, and Richard mounts again the throne of England amidst the general love of his subjects. Henceforth let factions cease. Norman and Saxon blended in one common interest, the study of my future life shall be the happiness of all;—the tie which binds me to my people, the watchword to intimidate their foes—OUR NATIVE LAND.17

The ending of T. J. Dibdin’s widely performed adaptation had a slightly different slant in that although he focuses on the fates of Isaac and Rebecca,


he also expands the “realm” to Britain, giving to Ivanhoe a version of a speech which in the novel Scott assigns to King Richard. Bois-Guilbert is dead and the Templars face expulsion from England. (Scott, Ch. XLIV) “I will resist thy doom,” said the Grand Master. “Proud Templar,” said the King, “thou canst not: look up, and behold the royal standard of England floats over thy towers instead of thy Temple banner! Be wise, Beaumanoir, and make no bootless opposition. Thy hand is in the lion’s mouth.”18 (Dibdin, pub. 1820: Ivanhoe; or, The Jew’s Daughter) Ivanhoe: Proud priest, my king disdains an answer to thee. His royal standard floats above thy temple mummery, nor all thy threats can pull that daring ensign, from where a British hand with justice plants it—Beware, thou’rt in the lion’s grasp. Richard: Templars, go where ye list but rule not here. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Isaac: And dare such humble subjects as my dear Rebecca and myself intrude—with heartfelt gratitude to you, and you, and all, we’d say—our minds, our hearts and means shall ever be devoted to our country and the good king we have so long revered.19

Once the rightful (British) order of things has been restored, Ivanhoe, the Saxon knight, speaks for the nation, and all sections of society—even the persecuted Jews—can feel secure. Rebecca’s trial is probably the single most consistently staged scene in the novel.20 The adaptors do conflate and reorder Scott’s original structure, but Scott’s celebrated “silken glove/mailed gage” exchange appears almost intact and gives the actress playing Rebecca one of the high moments of drama that served to make Rebecca the favorite role for leading actresses over the more conventional Rowena: (Scott, Ch. XXXVII) “And who, Rebecca,” replied the Grand Master, “will lay lance in rest for a sorceress? Who will be the champion of a Jewess?” “God will raise me up a champion,” said Rebecca. “It cannot be that in merry England, the hospitable, the generous, the free, where so many are ready to peril their lives for honour, there will not be found one to fight for justice. But it is enough that I challenge the trial by combat: there lies my gage.”21 (Scott, Ch. XXXVIII) “Give me her glove,” said Beaumanoir. “This is indeed,” he continued, as he looked at the flimsy texture and slender fingers, “a slight and frail gage for a purpose so deadly! Seest thou, Rebecca, as this thin and light glove of thine is to one of our heavy steel gauntlets, so is thy cause to that of the Temple, for it is our order which thou hast defied.”

198 / barbara bell “Cast my innocence into the scale,” answered Rebecca, “and the glove of silk shall outweight [sic] thy glove of iron.” (426) (Dibdin, Act 3, Sc. 4) Grand Master: And who will lay lance in rest for a sorceress—who will be champion for an infidel? Rebecca: Heaven will raise me up a champion; it cannot be said, that in Merry England, the hospitable, the generous, the free, where so many lose their lives for honour, there shall not be found one to fight for justice: there lies my gage. (Throws down her glove.) Grand Master: Give me the glove, a slight and frail gage for so dread a purpose—see’st thou, maid, as this small glove of thine is to one our heavier gauntlets, so is thy cause to that of the holy order thou defiest. Rebecca: Cast Innocence into the scale, and the glove of silk outweighs the glove of iron.22

Just as Chandler and Barczewski see Scott commenting on the world around him, so the theaters, steering a path between the Stage Censor and the popular sensibilities of their audiences, adjusted the original materials to suit.23 For example, the final combat between Ivanhoe and Bois-Guilbert in the novel was dramatically unsatisfactory, with Bois-Guilbert dropping dead, a victim of “his own contending passions,” and a number of the dramatizations preferred to have Ivanhoe defeat the Templar in open combat; however, there may have been another popular sentiment at work beyond an impetus to tidy up the dramatic structure: a desire for audiences to see justice done.24 It is certainly true that the dramatizations at the popular end of the market were the most likely to follow the preferences of their patrons by making the fight between Ivanhoe and Bois-Guilbert more energetic than the single pass described in the novel. A particularly action-packed finale was seen at Astley’s in April 1859. Not many of the texts produced at Astley’s were printed, but this three-act drama by Fox Cooper gives a good idea of the way in which materials were tailored to the particular strengths of a company and the tastes of its audience. Ivanhoe was played by Miss Agnes Cameron, and the playwright has Bois-Guilbert rousing the assembled Knights Templar to a general scrimmage with Robin Hood’s men: (Fox Cooper, pub. 1883: Ivanhoe) Bois G: Dog of a Saxon, take the death thou hast drawn upon thy head! Ivanhoe: On, then, and heaven defend the right! Herald: Sound! (Music. Trumpet sounds and success varies, and all the spectators are agitated apparently by their hopes and fears. Ivanhoe at length disarms Sir Brian de Bois Guilbert, strikes him down centre, places his foot upon his breast, and his sword at his throat.)

performance of victorian medievalism / 199 Grand M: Bois G:

Forbear! Ivanhoe is conqueror! Rebecca is free! Never! I will contest it yet! On Templars! The fiends have juggled with us. Onwards, for our Holy Temple! Robin Hood: Ha! Breaking faith! Then my merry men, on for Richard! (Music.—Hurrahs and general combat between the Knight Templars and the outlaws, in which the Black Knight is mixed up; after a desperate conflick, the Black Knight on horseback, rushes up to the pile with Gurth, and they release Rebecca.—Tableau.) Black K: Nay, nay! On your allegiance I charge you hold! Ivanhoe is conqueror in the fight. The maiden is his prize. He’s won her freedom. He who rebels ’gainst this, my righteous judgement, his head shall answer for it. (Discovering himself.) This Richard of England awards for doom! (Music) (Richard, c., Royal Guards, R. and L. The Standard of England is unfurled, Grand Master throws down his baton. They all kneel, Rebecca falls at the feet of Ivanhoe, Isaac on the other side. Ivanhoe raises them, they rush into each other’s arms, and the curtain falls amidst general shouts.) (III, iii)25

Once the novelty had worn off, the adaptations would settle into the overall theatrical repertoire. The “medieval” adaptations contained a couple of starring roles, notably for actresses playing Rebecca, but they demanded a deal of investment in cast and costume, so that they tended to become occasional works rather than part of the regular repertoire. Despite the expense involved in producing the “medieval” Scott adaptations, they appeared at a sufficient range of popular venues to be available to swathes of the theater-going public, and many popular theaters received visits from canine guest artists whose repertoire included The Knights of the Cross; or, the Dog and the Standard 26 taken from The Talisman. In addition, the equestrian theatrical companies, run by such as William Cooke and the great Andrew Ducrow, traveled the country with adaptations both of Scott’s tales and of other medieval spectacles. The widespread popularity of the Scott dramatizations engendered merchandise and souvenirs, ranging from portraits of the “dog” stars of Talisman adaptations, given away free to patrons, to music from the plays arranged for amateur performance. The portraits (figure 10.1) of Kemble as Ivanhoe and Mr. West as Sir Kenneth of Scotland (Astley’s The Siege of Jerusalem, 1835) were just two of the many theatrical portraits that went hand-in-hand with the publication of the Juvenile Drama. Dibdin’s adaptation of Ivanhoe was published in toy theater format by five different publishers, along with the sheets of characters and scenes, for the enjoyment of children and adults at home. The sometimes contested legal status of the circus ring and the backgrounds of the artists, frequently, as in the case of John Astley, ex-cavalrymen,

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made them particularly sensitive to shifting popular and national feeling, encouraging this particular section of the entertainment industry to tap into current events for commercial advantage and cultural legitimation. Saxon describes how the equestrian actor William Cooke, in 1855, at a time when Britain was allied to its traditional rival France, against Russia in the Crimea, produced England and France in the Days of Chivalry; or, The Brothers in Arms by a French performer, Stocqueler, in which “the theme of international friendship was borne out by a splendid tournament scene representing the meeting of Francois I and Henry VIII on the Field of the Cloth of Gold.”27 But if the professionals looked to contemporary events for legitimacy, at times it seemed as though the amateur performers were determinedly ignoring the world around them. The recreation of medieval images in tableaux vivants28 was a favourite pastime in upper-class and artistic circles throughout the period. W. H. Fox Talbot’s29 half-sister, wrote to him in 1830 of how she had been enlisted by Lady Dudley Stuart to play Rowena in a tableau vivant from Ivanhoe.30 The juxtaposition of these hobbies against the turmoil of the period can appear callously escapist. The remainder of Horatia’s letter concerns preparations by family and friends to defend their properties against the mobs of the Swing Riots. The Scottish painter David Wilkie’s participation in managing a particularly splendid set of tableaux at Hatfield House in 1833 earned him the censure of The Spectator, which considered that in the present turbulent times the painter of “Distraining for Rent” and “The Village Politicians” would have been better employed “painting the Rape of the Costermongers, instead of regulating how far or how short Rebecca Lyndhurst’s head should turn upon her ruffian ravisher.”31 Rather than the characters portrayed stepping out of the original illustration into life, the participants seemed to retreat into the picture frame and immobility. If the Hatfield tableaux created a furor, it paled beside the hullabaloo surrounding the Eglinton Tournament, the Earl of Eglinton’s 1839 re-creation of a medieval tournament that cost enormous sums, convulsed society for months beforehand and was remembered chiefly for having been rained out on the first two days. Studies by Ian Anstruther32 and R. B. Martin33 give detailed accounts of the various participants, the rehearsals in London, and the fabulous costumes.34 During the rehearsals, witnessed by crowds of several thousand, the number of knights steadily diminished from an initial thirty-five as the real difficulty of the enterprise became clear. All were fine horsemen, but even those with military experience had not begun to train in full armor from childhood. The Renaissance legislation outlawing jousting was still in place in 1839, and when Sheriff Bell of Ayr heard of accidents at the London rehearsals, he wrote to the Earl to point out that he would regard


any injuries or deaths sustained in the lists as coming under the old laws and would act accordingly. This prompted Eglinton to reply with an assurance that the lances used would be light enough to ensure that no serious injury would occur.35 In the final event, thirteen knights and ten knight visitors rode in the Tournament, including Prince Louis Napoleon, the Vicompte de Persigny, and Count Esterhazy. Approximately sixty thousand36 spectators converged on Eglinton’s Ayrshire estate. The Eglinton rainstorms became legendary and provided a deal of sour satisfaction for those who had disapproved of the project. However nothing could dampen the enthusiasm of the participants themselves, and when the tent erected for the Banquet leaked, the combatants staged a mock tourney with mops and brooms. The third day’s sport took place in glorious sunshine, and the various reports of that performance highlight the differing hopes with which spectators had headed north. Many of the general populace, while they enjoyed the spectacle, found the actual jousting tame in comparison with the dramatic accounts in novels such as Ivanhoe. Eglinton’s letter to Sheriff Bell had been published in the press, and some onlookers complained that the lances splintered too easily. For many, the most thrilling moment of the day came in the final melee when the Lords Waterford and Alford lost their tempers, lashing out at each other in earnest, such that the Knight Marshall was forced to ride between them.37 When the main event had ended, the Earl’s houseguests kept up the sport for a few weeks. The Times of November 8, 1839 contained a report of the “Passage of Arms at Irvine” when the remnants of the Eglinton party traveled to repeat the spectacle for that town. The article is written rather as a report of a sporting event, the writer noting with satisfaction that “[t]he lances were manufactured in Irvine, and were of a much stronger nature than those use at the late tournament.”38 Several professional actors had taken part in the Tournament.39 The following year, the New Theatre Royal, Dunlop Street in Glasgow, gave its verdict on the event with a burlesque titled the Mock Tournament: or, The Age of Chivalry, with “Embellishments, Arms . . . by MR DUTCH METAL . . . from Designs by Vincent Crummles, Esq., late Manager of the _____ Theatre.” From the synopsis given on the playbill,40 this piece, which emphasized that its knights were mounted on “real Basket Horses,” poked fun at the whole area of medieval “anachronasmatic” performances. The Dunlop Street Theatre swamped its playbill with “authorities” for the Mock Tournament; the list of composers runs from A(rne) to Z(erbini), making plain the contradictory nature of the “medieval” performance context, but this awareness was widespread. Many commentators on the Eglinton Tournament made clear that it was possible to be enthused by the ideals and entranced by the spectacle and at the same time be fully alive to

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the incongruity of traveling to view a recreation of a medieval chivalric spectacle behind a railway engine named Marmion. The anonymous author of Tournaments; or, the Days of Chivalry considered it as a useful leaven to a working world from which fancy had been banished: We are apt to become long-headed, dull-thinking individuals, in this drudging sphere, and to reject every innovation unless we can immediately perceive its utility. We have been called “a nation of shopkeepers,” and if so a very useful body we are; but a little of the ornamental and even the fictitious, will tend vastly to our improvement.41

Henry Curling, a half-pay officer with the 52nd Regiment, wrote an account of the tournament, which was published in the United Service Journal.42 Curling, felt himself drawn irresistibly to the event, in which the spectacle did not disappoint him: I have been wont to live in a world of my own imaginings and amongst the former beings of another age;—and thus daffing this work-a’day world aside, to bid it pass “sequester’d and alone,”—unconcerned by hurry of mercantile business and mechanical invention, my ears unpolluted by the infernal din of steam-carriages, steam-ships, stage-coaches, and the shouts of the mob, and my mouth and lungs uninvaded by smoke and stench of factory and mining artificers of modern towns and over-build cities.43 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . but when you looked upon the scene as now enacted and remembered with difficulty that you lived in the dull mechanical money-getting, commonplace year of eighteen hundred and thirty-nine, in place of some four hundred year agone [sic] “in the dark backward and abysm of time,” you felt that, as nothing but a dream of the past ever came up to what you then was [sic] mixed up in, so was it proportionately unlikely you could ever again behold so perfectly delightful a spectacle. (52)

It is perhaps difficult for us, so used to photographic and filmic records of momentous events, to imagine how fleeting the scene must have appeared before Curling. The editor of the United Service Journal, while he was happy to publish Curling’s account, did not share his unalloyed enthusiasm for times past. What he did thoroughly approve of were the “noble motives” of the Earl: Although we do not go the length of those who would retrograde to the pursuits and pageantry of the feudal ages, albeit duly alive to the captivations of their traditional romance, we are far from insensible to the noble motive of Lord Eglintoun [sic], in his late munificent attempt to revive manly pastimes amongst his countrymen, and at once to diffuse entertainment and circulate money amongst the not over-rich population of the romantic site of

performance of victorian medievalism / 203 his hereditary possessions. The execution of these laudable objects has not escaped ridicule in certain quarters—simply, it would appear, because the sports and the actors in them were of a character the reverse of vulgar: here is a reason the more for exercising our chivalry in redressing an injury. It is to us a source of gratification that this Periodical was mainly instrumental in putting down the national disgrace of prize-fighting, with its train of knavish and demoralising practices—we have equal satisfaction in supporting an antithesis to so base a prostitution of British manhood by recording in our pages the Passage of Arms at Eglintoun.—Editor U. S. J.44

The editor’s contrast of these sports with prize fighting emphasizes the positive light in which the period saw attempts to regulate and codify violence. The exact rules of engagement under which the Eglinton tournament ran were derived from historical sources and, although they might have spoiled the fun of the thrill-seekers, were designed to place the emphasis on skill over power in much the same way that in 1867 the Marquis of Queensberry sought to raise the “noble art” of boxing from its raw state that depended on basic stamina, power, and physique by creating a competitive structure that would encourage “science” in its execution. James Eli Adams’s erudite Dandies and Desert Saints; Styles of Victorian Manhood 45 probes the established Victorian middle-class male icons, in particular the gentleman, the priest, and the soldier to discover the complex interweaving of ideologies that encompassed the ascetic, with its emphasis on self-discipline and denial and all the variants of muscular Christianity. In Ivanhoe with its dubious secret societies, whether of sanctimonious Templars or scheming Normans, and examples of almost all the different types and conditions of men that could be imagined, Scott set forth the contending forces out of which a strong and just society must be forged. In events such as the Eglinton Tournament, created as a showcase for contemporary chivalry and manly skills, many of the contending ideals that Adams discusses came together. The Eglinton Tournament was used widely as an opportunity to comment on contemporary manners, notably by Peter Buchan, a self-taught Scottish antiquarian. Most of the British knights who competed at the Tournament were, like the Earl, Scots, but this aspect of the event has been somewhat overlooked by commentators since. Buchan, however, was fully aware of the historical precedents and, as well as writing a brief account for the Glasgow Herald, wrote a longer commentary on the tournament as a dialogue on the nature of chivalry between King James V (1512–1542) and his great playwright, tournament, and pageant organizer, Sir David Lyndsay.46 The essentially performative nature of the tournament field was exemplified in this “makar,” or poet, whose work spanned the worlds of palace and people, artifice and reality. Buchan’s Lyndsay is keen to make clear the essential difference

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between the outward appearance of chivalric behavior and a code of conduct underpinned by humility and the restraint of power. Buchan’s concrete descriptions of the Eglinton Tournament are interesting in this respect for the way in which he describes the nature of the event as creating an arena in which social conventions could safely be set aside. This was particularly the case with the involvement of women in the Tournament: It is somewhat unusual to see ladies enacting a part in a public drama, and the more so when they are titled and high born; but the esprit de corps which the Tournament engendered has banished all feelings of squeamishness . . . And equally interesting were the archeresses, who, a pied, mingled in the procession, clad in tunics and turbans of forest green, with bows in hand, and the quiver and arrows slung across the back.47

The “archeresses,” Buchan described as threading through the crowd, were the Ballochmyle Archeresses, a group of young ladies who got together to form their own company and join in the procession. This reinforces Barczewski’s study of the Victorian myth of Robin Hood that notes the way that, although Maid Marion was promoted as an active Saxon maiden and an appropriate role model for a young girl, archery as a sport was considered to be a “suitable” form of exercise for a lady, combining a graceful stance with a charming costume and the minimum of visible exertion. Although the viewing stands contained women playing symbolic roles within the tournament narrative, none appeared in the lists at Eglinton but, as in the case of archery, riding at the ring required no particular physical strength beyond steady hand-eye coordination and the ability to manage a horse accurately. Figure 10.3 from The Graphic of February 9, 1889 demonstrates that ladies in British India enjoyed the sport. Theatrical presentations of the medieval were designed to dazzle the eye and impress much as the historical originals had been, and the subtle difference between rational and improving recreation and “empty” amusement was exploited by the entertainment industry in its display of historical and folk customs. One London attraction in particular trod the fine line between recreation and amusement with some skill. Cremorne Gardens for many years managed to portray itself by day as a safe, respectable place to take one’s family, and by night as an arena of moral ambiguity and modest excess. Lynda Nead’s study Victorian Babylon48 devotes one section to analyzing the workings of Cremorne as it played a pivotal role in the complex cultural exchange between the entertainment industry and the populace. As Nead points out “[t]he gardens had to retain a degree of respectability, without appearing dull and staid; and they had to convey an element of risk and excitement without becoming infamous” (117). Within this context, the “medieval” tournament staged at Cremorne in 1863 fulfilled all the criteria

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Figure 10.3 Raj Ladies Tilting (from Illustrated London News Picture Library).

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of providing instructive and improving recreation that still contained an element of danger but stayed firmly within the safety of approved historical reenactment. Figure 10.4 depicts a scene from the tournament published by the The Illustrated London News of July 18, 1863. The accompanying article contained a lengthy review of the event. Significantly, it began by contrasting Cremorne by day with the older Vauxhall Gardens, which “destroyed all your illusions” when seen in daylight: There is about Cremorne Gardens, the successor to old Vauxhall, a general appearance of rural beauty and horticultural symmetry decidedly favourable to their being viewed by daylight. Moreover, from four or five o-clock in the afternoon till long after dusk Paterfamilias, and Materfamilias, and all their little olive-branches may, with perfect propriety resort to its umbrageous avenues, or wander through its sparkling parterres.49

The reviewer plays with the clichéd language of historical and narrative sources, calling the Ashburnham Ground attached to Cremorne “an offshoot, or messuage, or succursal or appanage to it.” However, although he later references dramatizations of Ivanhoe by reporting the party of jesters as belaboring one another “with bladders in the most approved Wamba-like manner,” his initial point of reference is to “the renowned tilting-match lately held in the Imperial riding-school at Vienna.”50 The ILN reviewer warns that a “tournament by daylight would seem but a perilous experiment,” it being “difficult to divest a pageant which has become an anachronism from the . . . tawdry splendour of a theatrical spectacle.” He inevitably then reminds readers of the Eglinton deluge and congratulates the proprietors on weather so fine the roof of the Ashburnham Pavilion might have been removed. The opening procession of over three hundred “heralds, seneschals, men-at-arms, arbalisters, timbaliers, squires, yeomen, pages” was felt to be particularly successful because “[a]bove all, the procession assumed an air of reality, and was devoid of any marked theatrical aspect.”51 He does go on to qualify this “realism”: “The pages, indeed, were of the softer sex, and were, perhaps, no strangers to the choreographic stage; but they bore themselves bravely, and looked as much like boys as ever they possibly could.” This, of course, means that no one was fooled for a moment, and gentlemen could gaze in respectable comfort at the hose-clad limbs of these recruits from the chorus line. The tournament featured “trials of skill” between knights representing England, France, Russia, Prussia, Holland, Denmark, and Poland. There was tilting at the ring and at the quintain, javelin casting, and finally “[t]here was a grand melee, or general combat of preux chevaliers on each side of the lists, ending in one of the combatants being, for form’s sake, unhorsed, and his triumphant antagonist receiving the prize from the Queen of Beauty” (63, col. 13).

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Figure 10.4 Cremorne.

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The article, with that one phrase “for form’s sake,” reveals the ambiguity at the heart of critical receptions for this type of event. On the one hand, the writer applauds the spectacle for its realism, while on the other he urges the proprietor, E. T. Smith, to manipulate the event in order to construct a satisfactory narrative that would provide the level of excitement and variety to hold spectators’ attention beyond the initial visual impact. The problem was the same one identified by commentators on the Eglinton tournament. Devoid of the rationale for action provided either by the multiple aims of the original medieval event or by the narrative action such as the Scott dramatizations, the spectacle struggled to provide a satisfying variety of incident from which its audience could construct their own narrative. Even the closest equivalents, the military tournaments that had serious military training at their heart, learned to hold the qualifying rounds elsewhere, saving the finals of competitions, and thus the most exciting spectacles, for the major event in London. As the nineteenth century began, it must have seemed as though some of the ancient chivalric skills were being brought back into service to defend the nation. Impressed by the conduct of Bonaparte’s Polish Lancers, Whitehall decided to convert most of the army’s light cavalry regiments into regiments of lancers. This move demanded changes to training regimes for men and horses. Recruits to the new lancer regiments “rode at the ring,” in the old phrase, learning to handle the lightweight Polish lance and horse in the tiltyard in ways that would have been familiar to medieval squires in training. At the same time, the introduction of the short-service system required officers and men to practice and hone skills away from active service, so that the adoption of some of those exercises as both demonstration and competitive sports was seen as a real contribution to military readiness. Recent research into Victorian and Edwardian adoption of “ancient” fighting techniques for both military and recreational use has unearthed a range of resurrected practices.52 Particularly interesting is an article from Outing magazine, March 1891, by Charles Turner titled “How Old England Trains Her Red Coats.”53 Turner begins by eulogizing the mounted sentries in horse guards, pointing out that despite the “shrewish tongue of envy” sometimes calling them “Knights of the Carpet” they are the most highly trained soldiers in Europe on whose shoulders rests the responsibility of providing law and order for British Empire subjects across the globe, against “infuriated bigotry,” “unprincipled tyrants,” the “piratical,” and the “fanatical.” In many respects, this article is conventional in its support for the Imperial project; however, the military rationale Turner outlines for the style and choices made in training Empire soldiers provides an interesting sidelight on medievalism in the military.


Turner is contemptuous of the fighting styles of the “so-called civilised countries of Europe” that sacrifice men in waves of cannon-fodder. He contrasts these methods with the close quarter style of fighting using “primitive weapons of the world, the sword and the lance,” which require the British soldier to be “as fierce and dependent as much on personal skill and endurance, as did [sic] the knights of old who met the ancestors of today’s enemies in the Crusades” (2). Turner describes the various processes undertaken to turn the recruit into a finished fighting man and applauds the way in which the problem of keeping men in a state of combat readiness has been solved for good and aye. The military tournaments which culminate in the metropolis every year, to delight ever increasing thousands upon thousands of civilians and soldiers, who flock to them from every corner of the United Kingdom, are the factors solving it. (2)

Turner is also very clear that a strong element of attraction for the audience comes from those events constituting exciting spectacles and his account, like that of the Cremorne Tournament, reveals the exchange of techniques with the theatrical presentation of similar materials: It looks indeed it is quite real, and the spirit of it is so much as that when the bayonet pierces, or seems to pierce, the cavalryman . . . one almost expects the see the blood follow its withdrawal . . . Nor does the fight end here, for even when the horse is ruled out, disabled [by a referee] . . . and the cavalryman is reduced to his sword, he still fights, like the Corsican brothers, [Dion Boucicault’s celebrated play The Corsican Brothers] until every form of arm is exhausted. (5)

Yet at the same time, the military could also burlesque the conventions of the chivalric code. In 1828, the Officers of the Malta Garrison and the Mediterranean Squadron conducted a mock tournament in Valetta’s Palace Square, creating elaborate puns on their names for their adopted persona; for example, Lt. Col. George Brown of the Rifle Brigade, who wore green uniforms, became “Giorgio Bruneleschi dei Verdi.”54 Figure 10.5 shows three vignettes drawn from a production of an Ivanhoe burlesque by the Guards Burlesque Company at the other end of the century in 1889.55 In one, the leading ladies are pictured conversing earnestly in the stalls at rehearsal as Rebecca, played by the professional actress Kate Vaughan, gives Rowena, in the person of Lt. Compton Roberts, some advice, while another picture shows “The Clog Dance” performed by Drummer A. Phillips and Private W. Stewart. By this point in the century, both the serious and the burlesque approaches to the medieval materials had shifted somewhat and acknowledged

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Figure 10.5 Guards Ivanhoe Burlesque (from Illustrated London News Library).

their distance from the original sources. The vignette of Kate Vaughan as Rebecca, dancing in her Eastern garb, shows clearly the overt exoticism with which the Edwardian stage identified the Jewess, by now far removed from Scott’s portrait of a dignified and courageous young woman. The final popular manifestation and ultimate democratization of the experience of the performance of the medieval came with the development of the fairground carousel, called in England a “tilt.” There are several


accounts of the origins of the word “carousel,” but small roundabouts, with a few crude horse-shaped hanging seats were among the first training aids used to introduce noble youths to the joust. The combination of skills required to sit on a horse and to use a lance at the same time required good hand–eye coordination which could be developed by trying to spear a small ring held by a servant as you spun past, before the added complication of controlling a live mount was introduced. During the Renaissance, “carousel” came to refer to a ceremonial musical ride, traveling in procession around an arena, usually gorgeously caparisoned, involving a King and his court in a flamboyant display of horsemanship. With the late nineteenth-century development of the steam-driven central truck that could power much heavier and more elaborate roundabouts, the fairgrounds of Europe and America, adapted the sport of “tilting at the ring” to combine a dizzying ride on a carved horse with a game of skill in which the prize for spearing one of the brass rings was usually another free ride. These carousels traveled anticlockwise, to leave the right hand free toward the outside to hold the miniature lance. Once again this was an area where the British en masse seem to have ultimately preferred the ceremonial and performative aspects of the event to trying to imitate its martial origins. In Britain, carousels turned clockwise, with their “romance” side, the side most elaborately decorated, reversed. This meant that riding at the ring was impossible, but on the other hand it meant that the horse could be mounted from the correct, “near,” side. Mark Girouard’s important 1981 study The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentlemen56 points out the connections between tournament design and the development of the cricket match with its tented pavilions and team liveries; however, the whole architecture and imagery of the classic steam galloper set is also drawn from the medieval tournament, with the overall shape and tented roof of the carousel echoing tournament pavilions. The decoration of the horses too was often chivalric, some horses apparently covered in carved armor, while others wore tournament trim, complete with heraldic imagery on the trappings. The outside horse on the front row, larger and more gorgeously decorated than the others was called the “King” horse.57 Between Scott’s tales and poems and the carousels of the late Victorian fairground, the nineteenth-century performance of the medieval evolved in a series of borrowings, adaptations, and lateral diversions, which reached out to all levels of Victorian society. It was frequently driven by an economic imperative and often influenced by events outside the performance setting. This meant that whereas it might reasonably have been expected that such enthusiasm as these “medieval” performance generated among the general public would have filtered down from their elite origins, in fact the reverse was often true.

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One shrewd commentator on the Victorian theater noted that “[a]s is usual in all tastes theatrical, the feeling has come upward from the masses and has not travelled downwards from the cultured . . .”58 It was the adaptations written for the Minor theaters that succeeded initially and that lasted. These adaptations were shaped to the tastes of an audience who wanted the “real” experience of the original stories, seasoned to their tastes in terms of spectacle and sentiment, with due space to the characters such as Gurth and Wamba who opened Ivanhoe and who, more than simply comic characters, spoke for the common man caught up in the struggles of the powerful. In the same way, during a period when British soldiers drawn from every town and village were spread across the globe, it was the training of a portion of these soldiers in sword and lance that brought immediacy and contemporary value to “ancient” skills. Above all, the performances made physical an idea of the past that was being reshaped for the present, and it commented on that present in ways that enabled performers and spectators alike to understand that they shared in the shaping of history. Notes 1. Louise O. Fradenburg, City, Marriage, Tournament: Arts of Rule in Late Medieval Scotland (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992). 2. They held a place within the performative lives of the nobility and military somewhat akin to the Robin Hood/Lords of Misrule carnival days enjoyed by the people. It was in many respects this license to shrug off the responsibilities of position and faction to take on the mantle of an idealized chivalric figure, that, alongside the physical thrill of the sport, proved so seductive to Europe’s rulers and nobility that jousting was eventually outlawed as proving much too costly in princely blood and consequent political upheaval. 3. An example of spectacle winning over authenticity could be seen in the rash of maypoles that sprang up in Victorian villages as the Continental style of ribbondecked maypole, first seen in theaters in displays of ribbon-dancing, gained favor over the traditional English flower-decked maypole. 4. A long line of Victorian heroines followed their lovers on Crusade disguised as pages; see e.g., Catherine Swanwick’s play The Talisman [1882] and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poem The Romaunt of the Page [1838]. Burgoyne’s heroine Matilda, disguised as a blind minstrel, is an active figure, risking capture to find and rescue King Richard. The performance of the medieval during the subsequent decades provided varied opportunities for women to take on active roles in ways that contrast with the numerous pictorial works featuring knights and fair maidens painted by virtually every nineteenth-century artist with an interest in the medieval. 5. Hippodrama were plays in which horses played character roles, such as Black Bess in Dick Turpin, as opposed to Equestrian dramas that featured characters on horseback. 6. A. H. Saxon, Enter Foot and Horse (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 1986), 6.

performance of victorian medievalism / 213 7. Review in The Times, June 24, 1800, 3, issue 4829, col. D. . . . the introduction of a grand Tournament on the stage; also the splendid procession of Equestrian Knights mounted on real chargers, performed before the Emperor Charlemagne, in his chariot of Chivalry, drawn by real war horses, was quite nouvelle and superb, and does great credit to the Circus; the beauty of the armour, the caparisons of the steeds, the mettle of the animals themselves, and the ardour and grace of the combatants surpassed every thing that fancy had ever painted 8. Although Scott’s long poems, notably The Lady of the Lake had engendered dramatizations as early as 1810, the first really successful adaptation of a novel was Daniel Terry’s 1816 adaptation of Guy Mannering. The countrywide popularity of adaptations of Rob Roy, alerted astute managements to the wisdom of seizing on each new novel in the Waverley Series, as it appeared, to turn it into whatever type of play, musical play, drama, operatic drama, opera, burletta, melodrama, burlesque, or pantomime might be required for their particular situation. 9. When the Theatres Act of 1843 abolished the Patent some credited Scott with bringing about its demise through his gift to the Minors of a semi-legitimate repertoire with which they could legally compete with the Theatres Royal. 10. Most of the Scott originals, even his Life of Napoleon, were tried on the stage. 11. A letter from Terry to Scott dated November 5, 1819, footnoted in The Letters of Sir Walter Scott, ed. H. J. C. Grierson, London 1932–1937, vol. V, 361. Terry had failed with an adaptation of Heart of Mid-lothian that did not follow the plot of the novel. 12. The Times, March 3, 1820, 3, issue 10870, col. G. Proving the rule that opera allows more latitude with source material, M. R. Lacy’s The Maid of Judah; or, Knights Templars with music selected from Rossini, opened at Covent Garden in March 1829 and was regularly revived. This version of the story omitted the character of Rowena entirely. 13. K8 in Richard Ford, Dramatisations of Scott’s Novels: A Catalogue (Oxford: Oxford Bibliographical Society, 1979). 14. Later in the century serious new adaptations of the novels could also be freer in their use of Scott. See the review in The Times, September 26, 1871, 4, issue 27178, col. B in which the reviewer of Andrew Halliday’s Rebecca at Drury Lane in 1871 considered that “a more imposing series of living tableaux was never beheld in any theatre” and bestowed particular praise on the way in which the piece was structured. By simply referring to the tournament at Ashby, Halliday could use the effect for the final climactic fight between Ivanhoe and Bois-Guilbert. “Glittering is the armour, real are the horses, and brilliant is the assemblage of spectators,” whereas, “Two knightly ‘passages’ in the course of a single piece would have involved a repetition of the same visible effect.” 15. James Chandler, England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 16. S. Barczewski, Myth and National Identity in Nineteenth-Century Britain: The Legends of King Arthur and Robin Hood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

214 / barbara bell 17. W. T. Moncrieff [pseud. William Thomas Thomas] Ivanhoe; or, The Jewess (Printed for J. Lowndes by F. Marshall, London, 1820). Listed as K2 Ivanhoe; or, The Jew of York in Richard Ford’s catalogue. “Scene the last,” 80. 18. Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe (Harmondsworth; New York: Penguin. Penguin Classics, 1986), 508. 19. T. J. Dibdin, Ivanhoe; or, The Jew’s Daughter (London: Roach and Co., 1820) Listed as K1 in Ford’s catalogue. Act 3, sc. 6, 71. 20. Chandler considers, particularly significant in a consideration of Scott’s writing of his historical novels to be his use of casuistry, in the sense of laying out the contending ethical dilemmas surrounding a particular situation, which culminates in his creation of “the case of Rebecca the Jewess.” 21. Scott, Ivanhoe, 423–424. 22. Dibdin, Act 3, sc. 4, 54. 23. The necessity to have all plays passed by the Stage Censor accounts for the substitution of “Heaven” for “God” in Rebecca’s speech. 24. Many saw this as justice reflected in the novel in a form that had surprisingly recently been denied in a notorious rape/murder case. See Gary Dyer’s 1997 essay “Ivanhoe, Chivalry and the Murder of Mary Ashford,” which is very specific in its analysis of Rebecca’s plight, linking Scott’s construction of it to a murder that had scandalized the country in which the accused man had claimed trial by combat and the case had collapsed. 25. F. Fox Cooper, Ivanhoe (London: Dick’s British Drama 1883 no. 385). K18 in Ford’s catalogue. 26. See V3 in Ford’s catalogue. Ford believes this may be a variant of S. Beazley’s The Knights of the Cross; or, The Hermit’s Prophecy. The canine version was seen in most popular theaters that featured dogs as guest artists. 27. Saxon, Enter Foot, 63. 28. Tableaux vivants were “living” pictures in which participants dressed as the characters in celebrated pictures or scenes from history and literature and tried to recreate the still images before an audience. The works of Sir Walter Scott provided opportunities for many such recreations taken from the descriptions in the original novels or often from stage adaptations, since the Scott novels were originally published without illustrations. 29. Fox Talbot was a pioneer of photography. Early Scottish photographers Hill and Adamson also experimented with creating “medieval” images and Julia Margaret Cameron created a notable series from Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. 30. Letter from Henrietta Horatia Gaisford to W. H. Fox Talbot, dated December 2, 1830. (Doc. No. 02094). Transcribed by the FoxTalbot Letters project at Glasgow University—online at ⬍www.foxtalbot.arts.gla.ac.uk/letters⬎. 31. Spectator, VI, January 19, 1833, 61–62. 32. Ian Anstruther, The Knight and the Umbrella (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1963). 33. R. B. Martin, “Plum’d like Estriches,” Enter Rumour: Four Early Victorian Scandals (London: Faber and Faber, 1962), 83–136. 34. One argument put forward by scholars is that the Tournament with its elaborate ceremonial was in some way a rebuttal of those who had organized Victoria’s coronation, which had been largely stripped of pageantry.

performance of victorian medievalism / 215 35. One of Eglinton’s ancestors had accidentally killed Henry II in 1559 in similar circumstances so his caution was understandable. 36. Anstruther believes a contemporary estimate of one hundred thousand spectators could be correct. 37. The Eglinton Tournament was immortalized in sentimental prints, satirical cartoons, and a tidal wave of sheet music and souvenirs, notably “Eglinton” jugs featuring knights jousting or in procession. 38. The Times, November 8, 1839, 6, issue 17194, col. D. 39. The Jester was played, reluctantly, by Robert McIan, an actor and later a noted painter of idealized Highland figures in their various tartans. 40. Scottish Theatre Archive, Glasgow University. Playbill no. E/498. 41. Anon, Tournaments; or, the Days of Chivalry (London: W. Strange 1839), ix. 42. It was published by the London publishers Sampson Low in 1839 and then in the February 1840 issue of the Journal. 43. H. Curling, Some Account of The Field of the Cloth of Gold of Eglintoun. [sic] (London: Sampson Low, 1839), 2. 44. Editor comments on H. Curling, “A Ramble to the Eglinton Tournament,” The United Service Journal (February 1840): 35. 45. J. E. Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Manhood (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 1995). 46. Peter Buchan, The Eglinton Tournament, and Gentleman Unmasked: A Conversation Between the Shades of King James V of Scotland and Sir David Lindsay of the Mount, Lyon King-at-Arms in the Elysian Fields (London: Simpkin Marshall, 1840) Lyndsay’s Satyre of the Threi Estaits (1540) is an extraordinary dramatic work of a scope far outreaching better-known morality plays. It was written for James V, performed both at court and in public and examined the relationships between the three estates of the church, the nobility and the merchants, with the common man in the person of John the Common-Weill. 47. P. Buchan, taking from the report in the Glasgow Herald in A Full Report of the Grand Tournament at Eglinton Castle (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Printing and Publishing Co., 1839), 11. 48. Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2000). 49. The Illustrated London News, July 18, 1863, 63, col. B. 50. It is worth remembering that a nineteenth-century attachment to the recreation of medieval tournaments was not confined to Britain or to the entertainment industry, and Continental Europe periodically saw officially sanctioned tournaments that celebrated treaties or royal marriages. [0] 51. See The Illustrated London News, July 18, 1863, 63, col. B. 52. Tony Wolf, “ ‘A Grand Assault-at-Arms’: Tournaments and Combative Exhibitions in Victorian England,” Journal of Many Arts (August 2001) at ⬍www.ejmas.com/jmanly/articles/2001/jmanlyart-wolf2-0901.htm⬎ and “The Manly Art of Quarter-Staff: Origins of a Victorian Combat Sport” at ⬍www.alliancemartialarts.com/quarterstaff.htm⬎. 53. C. Turner, “How Old England Trains Her Red Coats” Outing Magazine, no. 6 (March 1891): 412–418. Reprinted in Journal of Manly Arts, April 2003 at ⬍http://ejmas.com/jmanly/articles/2003/jmanlyart-cturner-0403.htm⬎.

216 / barbara bell 54. William Reid’s article on the Eglinton Tournament that mentions this tournament omits to mention that according to the same hand-annotated bill that revealed Lt. Col. Brown’s adopted character, the tournament’s reigning Queen of Beauty was played by “The Hon. Capt. Grey, R.N.” Reid, W. “ ‘Such sights as youthful poets dream’: the Earl of Eglinton’s tournament and society,” Livrustkammaren: Journal of the Royal Armoury 19 (1991/1992): 104–128. 55. The Graphic, no. 1, 002 vol. XXXIX Saturday February 9, 1889. Front page. Artist “JH.” 56. M. Girouard, The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 1981). 57. At the last the general populace might have lost sight of the origins of the splendid spectacles that were the steam gallopers in full flow, but the fairground community remembered and in 1928, the American National Association of Amusement Parks passed a resolution in praise of a noted carousel maker who had recently died: The knights of old rode their magnificently caparisoned horses only in defense of themselves and their honor and to what they thought is [sic] their lasting way of fame. Our member produced a finer caparisoned horse than the world had known up to his time, and best of all, it was produced to give joy to the millions, and any man who made his fellow man happy, cannot be said to have lived his life in vain. Quoted in F. Fried, A Pictorial History of the Carousel (New York: A.S. Barnes and Co., 1978). The maker was William H. Dentzel. 58. Anon. Article in The Chiel, vol. 10, September 8, 1887, 14, col. A.

Ch ap t e r El ev e n What is a Man?: The Refuting of the Chivalric Ideal at t h e Turn of t h e Ce n t ur y Sandra Martina Schwab

By the last decades of the nineteenth century, Victorian society was in a crisis. Darwin’s writings had challenged all the old beliefs about God’s creation and man’s place within it. The losses in the imperial wars had led people to question the basic Victorian concept of progress, whereas democratic reforms had begun to erode the old power structures within society, and new laws concerning marital property and divorce had changed the balance of power within marriage.1 Thus, masculinity itself had become unstable and was thrown into a crisis of its own (8). What help then could a nostalgic yearning for bygone ages offer when dealing with modern times? Consequently, from the 1890s onward the medieval ideal for male behavior came under increasing attack, and this is especially true for the image of the knight in shining armor. To fully understand the deconstruction of the chivalric ideal, however, it is important to first take a look at the ideal itself.2 The renewed interest in the Middle Ages since the second half of the eighteenth century led to numerous studies on medieval life; fashionable people had their houses built in the neo-Gothic style or had fake ruins erected in their gardens; and the Gothic novel found an avid readership.3 Yet, this new interest in the Middle Ages also brought forth an interest in chivalry, the code of conduct for the knights of old4—or at least what was thought to have been the code of conduct for the knights of old.5 This influenced the changing ideal of masculinity. Although the typical gentleman at the beginning of the nineteenth century favored a slightly feminized fashion6 and was quite ready to burst into tears at the slightest provocation,

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such effusions of emotion were frowned upon at the end of the century.7 By then, [a]ll gentlemen knew that they must be brave, show no sign of panic or cowardice, be courteous and protective to women and children, be loyal to their comrades and meet death without flinching. They knew it because they had learnt the code of the gentleman in a multitude of different ways, through advice, through example, through what they had been taught at school or by their parents, and through endless stories of chivalry, daring, knights, gentlemen and gallantry which they had read or been told by way of history books, ballads, poems, plays, pictures and novels.8

Two types of stories were of particular importance to this trend: stories about King Arthur, for example, Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Idylls of the King (1859–1888), which inspired numerous Pre-Raphaelite paintings, and stories about England’s patron saint St. George.9 In Britain, the most popular version of these was Richard Johnson’s The Seven Champions of Christendom (first published in 1596) in which St. George slays a ghastly dragon in order to save the beautiful Egyptian princess Sabra and thus wins her love and her hand in marriage. Over the centuries, numerous editions and new versions of Johnson’s tale appeared in print and were still published in the nineteenth century. Of all of St. George’s adventures, the fight with the dragon, the ultimate hero test,10 attracted the most attention, and medieval knights fighting against dragons to save a damsel in distress became a popular subject for Victorian painters. In an age when female emancipation challenged the traditional gender roles, the dragon-slayer story offered the opportunity to glorify these roles,11 for “[t]he legend of St. George presents in an essential form the male body unimpaired, victorious, heroized and desired by the female.”12 Likewise, the weak, helpless woman, whose rescue depends on the male hero, corresponds to the Victorian ideal of the delicate female.13 While the man is strong and energetic, the woman is weak and helpless. Her role is passive; his is active. Kestner points out that a particularily large number of St. George paintings appeared in Royal Academy exhibitions during the 1890s, that is, during the already mentioned crisis of masculinity. In these paintings, women’s weakness is often underscored by contrasting female nudity with the armored male body.14 Yet the story of St. George was not only employed for its reactionary element in regard to gender roles, but the saint also became the symbol for the “knight” fighting for the empire (95). This notion finds expression in Shapcott Wensley’s libretto for Edward Elgar’s choral work The Banner of St. George (1896–1897), composed for the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee.

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The Epilogue paints an imperialistic–nationalistic image of the banner of St. George, floating high over the battlefields of time and telling of Britannia’s victories. In accordance with the nineteenth-century romanticized view of the Middle Ages, Wensley creates a link to a hazy, mystical time of heroic deeds: It comes from the misty ages, The banner of England’s might, The blood-red cross of the brave St. George, That burns on a field of white! It speaks of the deathless heroes, On fame’s bright page inscrolled, And bids great England ne’er forget The glorious deeds of old!15

Yet Wensley assigns not only a strategic superiority to England, but also a moral one, as the banner shall only be used in a “righteous” battle and shall bring “hope to the hearts oppressed.”16 In the last stanza of the epilogue, it becomes clear that Wensley regards England and the whole of the British Empire as a shining example in the imitation of St. George: Great race, whose empire of splendour, Has dazzled a wondering world! May the flag that floats o’er thy wide domains Be long to all winds unfurled! Three crosses in concord blended, The banner of Britain’s might! But the central gem of the ensign fair, Is the cross of the dauntless knight!17

The chivalric ideal of masculinity, which was fully developed in the Victorian Age, continued to be influential even in the early twentieth century. Thus, “knightly” behavior and nationalism all came together in Robert Baden-Powell’s boy scout movement. He made explicit use of the two greatest British heroes and role models: King Arthur and St. George and assigned the saint a prominent place within his teachings: “He is the patron saint of . . . Scouts all over Europe.”18 In Scouting for Boys, which was first published in1908 the year of Queen Victoria’s death,19 the boy scout is seen as a knight, following the rules of chivalry,20 which, according to Baden-Powell and in total disregard of history, were started by King Arthur himself.21 The perceived parallels between scouts and knights become especially clear in the passages on “chivalry” and in “Camp-Fire Yarn No. 20: Chivalry to Others.” Although the related illustration depicts a scout as a dragon slaying St. George on his valiant horse, the text itself starts with a romanticized


version of the Middle Ages, which is reminiscent of Tennyson’s poems and Pre-Raphaelite paintings: “In days of old, when knights were bold,” it must have been a fine sight to see one of these steel-clad horsemen come riding through the dark green woods in his shining armour, with shield and lance and waving plumes, bestriding his gallant war-horse, strong to bear its load, and full of fire to charge upon an enemy. . . . In peace time, when there was no fighting to be done, the knight would daily ride about looking for a chance of doing a good turn to any wanting help, especially a woman or child who might be in distress.22

Thus, Baden-Powell gives clearly defined roles: the strong, heroic man is always ready to save damsels in distresses because women are as helpless as small children, indicated by the alignment of the two. Like the knight of old, the scout should, therefore, be always “on the look-out to help women and children. A good opportunity is when they want to cross a street, or to find the way. If you see them, go and help them at once . . .” (148), for apparently women cannot even deal with the most simple daily challenges. In addition, Baden-Powell combines these gender roles, in particular his ideas of masculinity, with national pride: “Britons, above all other people, insist on fair play” (149). A boy scout, following the knights’ code of honor, will therefore contribute to Britain’s greatness: “. . . you are all Britons in the first place, and you’ve got to continue to make Britain a power for good in the world. You have to stand shoulder to shoulder to do it” (172). This last sentence again subtly echoes the chivalric rhetoric and evokes images of noble knights standing side-by-side to ward off evil. And while, at the end of the book, Baden-Powell emphasizes the importance of cultivating friendships with people all around the world (178), it is certainly no coincidence that he starts Scouting for Boys by naming the “frontiersmen of the world,” pioneers, trappers, missionaries, and explorers, as role models for the scouts (1). Apart from knowing about how to survive in the wilderness, “[t]hey are accustomed to take their lives in their hands, and to fling them down without hesitation if they can help their country by doing so” (1). With such instruction, it can come as little surprise that the boy scouts were among the thousands of young men who flocked to the recruiting offices in 191423 and died miserable deaths in the mud of continental Europe a few months later. In the moral preparation for war, the chivalric rhetoric and iconography played an important role, as both Kestner and Girourard show.24 Ultimately, against the realities of World War I, so much removed from idealized fights between gallant knights, the chivalric ideals stood no chance.25 This rejection of the medieval code, despite the popularity of ideas like the Scout movement, had already been established in the 1890s with the crisis of masculinity.26


From the very beginning, not everybody shared the fascination with the Middle Ages. As early as 1813, Byron spoke of chivalry as a failure.27 Moreover, although literature, fine art, and music glorified war and idealized a romanticized image of medieval masculinity, the discrepancy between fictional description and reality increased during the Victorian age. The growing cities as well as the new road and train networks transformed the countryside, and after the rise of the middle classes during the eighteenth century, society now underwent another change due to the pressure of the working classes.28 The importance of capital assets increased at the same time as the importance of landed property decreased, which, for the aristocracy, resulted in a gradual loss of power.29 Thus, at the end of the nineteenth century, Great Britain had moved far from “the days of old when knights were bold,” and, as a consequence, not all parts of society approved of the ideal of the chivalrous man. This disapproval found expression in such stories as Brysson Cunningham’s “Modern Knight Errantry,” which was published in 1895 in the The Strand Magazine. The title already points to the gulf between the romanticized image of the Middle Ages on the one hand and reality on the other, for it reads like an oxymoron: modern times and heroic knights just do not go together. This is the painful lesson that the protagonists, three young people of high society,30 have to learn. The lovely Miss Ethel Fontaine, courted by two ardent suitors, refers to just these “knights of old” and to the concept of courtly love when she bemoans modern man’s lack of ready action: The knights of old used to find some way of proving their devotion. . . . I can’t see why each age should not have its own form of chivalry, at any rate, in the shape of deeds and not words. If a man . . . were to come to me and say that he was ready to die for me, I should want some confirmation of his statement before I believed him. If he really meant what he said, he would have no difficulty in finding an opportunity of proving it.31

Ethel dismisses the protests of her sensible friend, who points out the incompatibility of modern times and such knightly proofs of love and whose choice of words reveals the ridiculousness of such an idea: . . . you forget that we are living under different circumstances now. A man can’t nowadays go roaming round on a warhorse, amputating his neighbours, and wrecking their houses in order to gratify the whim of his ladye-love [sic]. We are too prosaic. He would get taken up and punished. (425)

The choice of words in the second sentence in particular unmasks the absurdity of Ethel’s idea. Apart from the alliterating “roaming round,” the glorious battle of the knight is reduced to “amputating neighbours,” and the task assigned to him by the woman is referred to as a mere whim.


Nevertheless, Ethel’s two suitors, after overhearing this conversation, also bemoan the fading of the good old times: “They each regretted that the days of knighthood were passed; that no joust or tournament could afford them the opportunity of covering themselves with gore and glory in honour of Miss Fontaine” (425). Yet the reader must necessarily find it hard to unite the fashionable gentlemen with such a dusty, bloody, and dirty activity like a tournament. The glorious daydreaming, however, continues: “Ted’s fervid imagination pictured himself, as the hero of a hundred combats, kneeling at her [Ethel’s] feet to receive the laurel crown of victory. Jack entertained the conviction no less that he would have vanquished whole armies in such a cause” (425). These exaggerated daydreams finally result in the two gentlemen organizing situations—a docile carriage horse that suddenly bolts or an assault on a lonely lane—which enable them to act as Miss Fontaine’s heroic saviors (426, 427). Although she is always most grateful to the hero in question, to the reader, who knows that the heroic deeds are in truth clever stagings, the “heroes” necessarily appear ridiculous, childish, and even irresponsible. Although the romantic ideal has the knight overcoming the opponent on the tournament ground—without any danger to the admired lady,—these gentlemen, in their keenness to outdo each other, expose Ethel to real danger. A boating accident, which both of them organize independently of each other (428–429), ends with the two opponents in the water fighting about who may bring the maiden to the shore instead of actually rescuing Miss Fontaine. While she is brought to the shore by an old boatsman, Ted and Jack continue bashing each other’s noses in the water, and instead of gallant knights, they resemble “a couple of great fish in mortal combat” (430). The combination of the words “fish” and “mortal combat” creates an ironic tension, which mocks the men’s misguided attempts at chivalry. In the end, the two of them have to be fished out of the river—a welcome entertainment for the whole picnic party, and their “heroism” is wholly exposed to ridicule (430). By its action and ironic style, Cunningham’s story shows that modern man cannot be reconciled to the ideal of the heroic knight. Such a conviction also manifests itself in F. Anstey’s story “The Adventure of the Snowing Globe” (1906).32 Although Cunningham uses mainly irony to ridicule the chivalric ideal, Anstey parodies a story pattern, namely, that of the dragon slayer, who willingly and happily draws his sword and fights against the dragon to save the virgin maiden from being devoured. This type of story was well known from chapbooks such as The Seven Champions of Christendom as well as fairy tales and folk tales. In Anstey’s story the protagonist, a modern man, gets the chance to prove himself worthy of the chivalric ideal by mastering the hero test of old. However, from the very beginning, he is doomed to fail, for he obviously does not fit even in pseudo-medieval surroundings.


The story starts with the first person narrator, a solicitor, being sucked into the world of a snowing globe while doing his Christmas shopping. Even though he finds himself standing in front of a still functioning medieval castle and the gatekeeper talks to him in antiquated, pseudo-medieval English, it takes some time until the narrator fully understands his situation. When the princess appears and pleads with him to rescue her from her terrible distress—her evil and tyrannical uncle keeps her a prisoner in the castle in order to marry her off to his son,—the narrator still believes he is to give her only legal support, when in truth, he is to kill the uncle’s dragon. A large part of the humor in the story derives from the fact that in the conversations between the narrator and the other characters, a contrast is built between the real, modern world on the one hand, and the fantastic, medieval world of the snowing globe on the other hand. The gulf between the two worlds becomes apparent in the characters’ talking at cross purposes, which necessarily must seem funny to the reader—the only one with a full grasp of the situation. Thus, the first person narrator thinks that the gatekeeper wishes to preserve him from a cold when he warns him, “ ‘I pray you stand no longer parleying without, which, since I perceive you are but ill-protected at the present . . . may be fraught with unnecessary danger.’ ”33 In fact, the gatekeeper, of course, does not worry that the narrator has not opened his umbrella and, thus, may catch a cold, but that the foreign knight wanders about without proper armor and therefore might come to harm at life and limb. The connection with the nineteenth-century romanticized image of the Middle Ages becomes especially clear in the description of the princess: She was quite young . . . she was richly but fantastically dressed in some shimmering kind of robe, and her long hair was let down and flowing loose about her shoulders, which (although I am bound to say that the effect, in her case, was not unbecoming) always has, to my mind at least, a certain air of untidiness in a grown-up person, and almost made me doubt for a moment whether she was quite in her right senses. (125)

According to this, the princess seems to have stepped directly out of a Pre-Raphaelite painting, a living reminiscence of the female figures of Waterhouse or Burne-Jones. How old-fashioned such an ideal appears to be to the author, is revealed by the last sentence: “. . . and almost made me doubt for a moment whether she was quite in her right senses.” When meeting the medieval ideal in real life, modern man obviously finds it too strange to fit his concept of normality. Furthermore, when faced with a perfectly normal task for a knight in shining armor, modern man fails miserably. Catching sight of the stranger, the princess is beside herself with joy that, as it befits her fairy-tale world,


a gallant hero has come at last to rescue her (125). Her choice of words makes it clear what kind of rescue and deliverance she has in mind: “. . . I care not who else is on my side, so long as you will be my champion” (126, my emphasis), that is, the noble knight who takes the field or kills dragons for his lady-bright. The narrator, however, totally misunderstands the situation and plans to make the fairy tale into a lawcase: I think our best course would be to apply for a habeas corpus. You will then be brought up to the Courts of Justice, and the judge could make any order he thought advisable. In all probability he would remove your uncle from his position and have you made a ward of court. (126–127)

As might be expected, the princess does not think this sufficient—after all, her uncle is a magician!—which the narrator dismisses as a general female inability to understand the difficult interrelations of jurisdiction: “There is always a difficulty in getting ladies to understand even the simplest details of legal procedure, and my Princess was no exception to the rule. She did not seem in the least to realise the power which every court possesses of enforcing its own decrees” (127). He obviously applies to her a common nineteenth-century view of women, that of being less rational and intelligent than men. Yet in this case, it is he who does not comprehend the situation and does not realize the immense power that the wizard-uncle possesses. Even when the princess mentions the dragon problem, he arrogantly dismisses her well-founded worries as childish belief in fairy tales: I could not help smiling; it was so surprising to find a Princess of her age who still retained a belief in fairy-tales. “I think, ma’am,” I said, “that at this time of day a dragon is not an obstacle which we need take into serious consideration. You have evidently not been informed that such a monster has long since ceased to exist. In other words, it is undoubtedly extinct.” (128)

Of course, modern man does not believe in the reality of fairy tales; thanks to the museums of natural history he knows that “dragons,” that is dinosaurs,34 are extinct and, thus, no longer part of reality. Yet since dragons are part of the reality of the world in the snowing globe, the princess naturally misunderstands his words: “ ‘And you have slain it!’ she cried. . . .”35 Only when he sees the dragon with his own eyes does the narrator, similar to doubting Thomas, believe in its existence. Yet as a modern man, he is not up to the task before him. Instead of acting according to the fairy-tale/medieval ideal, that is, slaying the dragon, he suggests to sue the uncle (129). Despite all proofs that the world of the snowing globe follows different rules than his own reality, he still tries to act according to this reality and, thus, to


extract himself from a difficult situation. Dealing with dragons is simply not part of his job description, therefore “it was perfectly preposterous on her part to expect such services as these [i.e., to kill the dragon] from one who was merely acting as her legal adviser” (130). Rather than being willing to help the damsel in distress, as the chivalric ideal dictates, modern man is shaking in his boots and worries more about his own well-being.36 This fact he tries to hide behind his pompous mode of expression, at which he dismally fails. Even the traditional prize—marrying the princess—is not enough of an inducement in Anstey’s story. On the contrary, the narrator considers even this to be too adventurous (130–131). Finally, instead of facing the task at hand like a “real” man according to the chivalric ideal, the narrator tries to slip out of the castle. Only when it dawns on him that the dragon will devour him if he puts so much as a foot outside the castle does the narrator consent to fight with the monster (132–133). But the “fight” with the dragon does not live up to the example of either folk literature or nineteenth-century stories of daring, knights, and gallantry. Instead of holding a proper fight of man against beast, the narrator kills the dragon with the help of a piece of bread buttered with insecticide (133–134). Rather than matching his strength against the beast’s, as becomes a proper hero, he cowardly poisons it as one would poison a rat. That his manner of slaying the dragon does not quite correspond to the traditional model, the narrator knows fully well: “I cannot say that I was much elated. I am not sure that I did not even feel a pang of self-reproach. I had slain the dragon, it was true, but by a method which I could not think would have commended itself to St. George as entirely sportsmanlike. . . .” (135). The reference to St. George, the icon of (British) masculinity, and the use of the adjective sportsmanlike, which in the late nineteenth century many people regarded as a typical British characteristic,37 thus also imply a rather un-British behavior on the narrator’s side. He has failed both the hero test of old and the nineteenth-century ideal of chivalry. Immediately the dragon slayer reverts back to a solicitor, namely, a solicitor who cowardly worries about his own well-being.38 As soon as he behaves out of the dragon-slayer character, he returns from the dragon-slayer story, that is the world of the snowing globe, to his own reality (136). Thus, Cunningham and Anstey demonstrate in their respective stories how unsuited modern man is to deal with the tasks of the romanticized Middle Ages: while Cunningham’s “heroes” fail the test of courtly love, Anstey’s narrator fails the ultimate hero test of all, namely, killing the dragon in a fight man against beast. Therefore, both authors show that the image of man as knight in shining armor is no longer valid. Yet the parody becomes even more biting when the whole story is set in a secondary world. For here it is not a man who only plays the dragon slayer who fails, but


traditional dragon slayers such as St. George himself who are no longer fit to fulfill their tasks. In face of problems like the worsening of living conditions due to the industrialization, the impoverishment in the cities,39 and the ongoing wars throughout the empire, the second half of the nineteenth century saw a rising doubt in some parts of society whether the way into the future was really as happy as the idealists liked to declare. Although there were artists like Shapcott Wensley and the painters of the Royal Academy focusing on the glory of chivalry, poems like A. E. Housman’s “1887” or Rudyard Kipling’s “The Widow at Windsor” destroyed the glorious image of the soldier and thereby the image of the Empire. War and fighting were no longer regarded as something praiseworthy but as barbarous. This new attitude toward war and fighting becomes also apparent in revisionist fantasy, in which from the end of the nineteenth century onwards, the notion of a glorious hero is deconstructed. Thus, Kenneth Grahame’s story “The Reluctant Dragon” (from Dream Days, 1898) is a moral tale for children, but an appeal for more tolerance and for getting rid of old prejudices. For the dragon that one day decides to settle down on a hill in the Downs is not a man-eating monster but “a peaceable sort o’ beast,”40 which likes lounging about in the sun, writing sonnets, or chatting with the neighbors. He refuses “chasing knights” and “devouring damsels” in favor of regular meals (15) and generally detests violence, particularly if it is directed toward himself: “Now don’t you hit me . . . or bung stones, or squirt water, or anything. I won’t have it, I tell you” (12)! With this, Grahame trivializes and “tames” the monster dragon, while criticizing the need to fight such a being. Yet despite his obvious harmlessness, the villagers are convinced that, in accordance with (fairy tale) tradition, he is a threat to humankind and needs to be destroyed: The dreadful beast must be exterminated, the country-side must be freed from this pest, this terror, this destroying scourge. The fact that not even a hen-roost was the worse for the dragon’s arrival wasn’t allowed to have anything to do with it. He was a dragon, and he couldn’t deny it, and if he didn’t choose to behave as such that was his own lookout. (21)

In order to get rid of the dragon, the villagers hire a true hero, the epitome of British masculinity: St. George. Although the description of his person and armor is reminiscent of Tennyson’s medieval heroes, Grahame proceeds to play down St. George in a similiar fashion as the dragon. The hero’s entrance into the village already contains elements that disturb the glorious image: “. . . amidst welcoming shouts, shrill cries of women, uplifting of babies and waving of handkerchiefs, St. George paced slowly up the street” (23). Grahame creates an off-key effect by aligning seemingly


incorporeal actions (“uplifting of babies,” “waving of handkerchiefs”) with an unpleasant (shrill) sound, suggesting that not everything is what it seems to be. The saint, however, lacks this insight. He is unable to see through the villagers’ tall tales (28, 30–31) and only perceives the world as how it ought to be and not as what it is really like. In order to accept the changes in the world, he needs the mediation of a small boy. The old generation apparently cannot break out of old traditions without the help of the new generation. Yet the world has not just changed, it has also become more complex. That St. George still thinks according to old patterns becomes obvious when he talks about the dragon. He has the traditional dragon image, as it is known from folk literature, in mind: “. . . may not this wily beast have misled you as to his real character, in order that your good report of him may serve as a cloak for his evil deeds? Nay, may there not be, at this very moment, some hapless Princess immured within yonder gloomy cavern?” (32). What St. George envisions here is a dragon from a fairy tale, a dragon like the one he fought in Richard Johnson’s Seven Champions: cunning, cruel, evil, and devouring virgin maidens, especially princesses. But he finally has to realize that “[t]his is an evil world, and . . . that all the wickedness in it is not entirely bottled up inside the dragons” (32); in other words, this is not a fairy tale world with black or white cardboard characters. This “real” world is more complex than the world of folk tradition, and the seemingly helpless, tearful villagers are, in fact, liars fond of fights and betting. Apart from needing the boy’s help to realize all that, St. George also passes on the responsibility to find a solution for their predicament to the small boy. The ideal of the glorious hero is even further diminished, for here St. George behaves in notable contrast to the heroes of folk literature who master all dangers themselves or overcome them with the help of the supernatural—but never with the help of a child. And, as St. George is one of the emblematic figures of Victorian medievalism, Grahame’s St. George does not live up to the nineteenth-century ideal of chivalry either. In order to meet the demands of tradition and to satisfy the villagers’ bloodthirst, the saint and the monster agree upon a feint fight. This fight with the dragon becomes a public spectacle, where each party wants to make the best possible impression upon the audience: St. George enters the stage as the ideal knightly hero,41 whereas the dragon tries to embody the perfect terror-inspiring monster (45–47). Thus, the fight is mere cheap showmanship and furthers the deconstruction of the image of the heroic dragon slayer. After the dragon has been overcome—with St. George striking the traditional dragon slayer pose as it is known from paintings42—and St. George has held a speech about the telling of false stories, everybody is happy and nobody had to die. Instead, due to the saint’s insistence, the dragon is admitted into the village community. Even though the dragon fight restores


the order—as in traditional tales but without the death of the dragon—it, nevertheless, serves to break with the traditional beliefs of the dragon fight. The description of St. George’s attitude toward fighting makes this particularly clear. In his speech, he not only condemns the villagers’ sensation-seeking, but he also points out that, for the parties involved, a fight is neither very nice nor very heroic: . . . he informed his audience that he had removed their direful scourge, at a great deal of trouble and inconvenience to himself, and now they weren’t to go about grumbling and fancying they’d got grievances, because they hadn’t. And they shouldn’t be so fond of fights, because next time they might have to do the fighting themselves, which would not be the same thing at all.43

Thus the St. George of this story differs from the traditional St. George, who is always ready and willing to draw his sword and to fight. In contrast to the Seven Champions, for example, St. George’s work is not glorified but regarded as an unpleasant necessity: “St. George was happy because there had been a fight and he hadn’t had to kill anybody; for he didn’t really like killing, though he generally had to do it” (55). Yet in this, he also strays from the common nineteenth-century ideology of masculinity. In Grahame’s story the saint is clearly not a model of warlike behavior, but rather a spokesman for peace and tolerance. Out of the nineteenth-century fascination for the Middle Ages and chivalry developed a certain code of conduct for men and a new ideal of masculinity. The knight stood for daring and gallantry, for stoic calmness even in the worst situations, for being brave and protective toward women and children, for self-assurance, and ready action. In the image of St. George, war was glorified, and fighting a “righteous” battle was regarded as the ultimate gallant deed. Yet, not everybody approved of these ideals or thought that modern man could live up to them. Cunningham’s and Anstey’s stories clearly show their authors’ doubt as to whether modern man would be able to handle the role of a gallant knight. In “Modern Knight Errantry” the “chivalry” of the male protagonists is exposed as vain and flimsy, a show of irresponsibility and foolishness. In a similiar fashion, Ethel’s yearning for the knights of old is regarded as a romantic daydream that cannot withstand the test of reality. Anstey’s hero turns out to be unable to live up to the ideals of chivalry and Britishness alike: he is a coward, most unsportsman-like, considers leaving the princess to her fate, lies by omission, and is only skilled in sly poisoning instead of glorious battle. Clearly, he is no hero of old. The criticism becomes more poignant when the story is wholly set in a fantastic world as in Grahame’s “The Reluctant Dragon.” Even though St. George is described in terms of a real hero, his initial inability to see through the lies of the villagers, his readiness to let the boy find solutions to


their problems and take up all responsibility for the preparations all mark him as a very untraditional hero. His unwillingness to fight and his last speech to the villagers reveal the moral core of the story: it is better to find a peaceful solution instead of fighting. Grahame turns the nineteenth-century St. George, the icon of masculinity as well as of the soldier fighting for the empire, into an advocate for peace. Yet Grahame’s appeal remained largely unheard. When the Great War broke out and Kitchener made his first call for volunteers, boys and young men, all conditioned on the stories of heroic deeds and gallantry, flocked to the recruiting offices in hundreds and thousands,44 all believing in a “righteous” war (282), in “a war of glory, honour and cavalry charges” (283). In hundreds and thousands they died in the mud of continental Europe, disillusioned, for war proved to be nothing like a medieval passage at arms. And so, World War I did not just end the Victorian era or the influence of Victorian ideas and norms. Even though knights, soldiers, and gallantry still abounded in literature, especially in popular literature, chivalry as a dominant code of conduct received its final deathblow on the battlefields of Europe (290). Notes 1. Joseph A. Kestner, Masculinities in Victorian Painting (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1995), 7–8. 2. For a more detailed analysis of the chivalric ideal see Joseph A. Kestner, “The Return of St. George 1850–1915,” King Arthur’s Modern Return, ed. Debra N. Mancoff. (New York: Garland, 1998), 83–98, and Philip Mason, The English Gentleman: The Rise and Fall of an Ideal (London: André Deutsch, 1982), but especially Mark Girouard, The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981). 3. Girouard, Return to Camelot, 20–21. See also Richard Davenport-Hines, Gothic: Four Hundred Years of Excess, Horror, Evil and Ruin (New York: North Point, 1998). He includes pictures and photographs of Gothic-designed gardens and castles from Alexander Pope to Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill that inspired him to write The Castle of Otranto. 4. Girouard, Return to Camelot, 21. 5. The nineteenth-century ideal of chivalry was far removed from the reality of a medieval knight; indeed, the same could be said even for the medieval ideal of chivalry, as Girouard points out (16). Yet both ideals, the old and the new one, sketch the same type of man: “The ideal knight was brave, loyal, true to his word, courteous, generous and merciful” (16). In fact much of this code was based on Kenneth Digby’s The Broad Stone of Honour that went into five editions between 1822 and 1883. For more on Digby, see Girourard’s chapter on Digby’s book in The Return to Camelot, 56–66, and “Medievalism in Action: Young England and Disraeli,” in Alice Chandler’s A Dream of Order: The Medieval Ideal in 19th-century English Literature (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1970), 152–183.

230 / sandra martina schwab 6. See Sue Birtwistle and Susie Conklin, Stolz und Vorurteil: Die Welt der Jane Austen, trans. Sabine Lorenz and Felix Seewöster (Köln: vgs, 1997), 52. 7. See Lloyd Sanders, The Holland House Circle, 1908 (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1969), 103. 8. Girouard, Return to Camelot, 7. 9. See also Kestner, Victorian Masculinities 93–94; Kestner, “Return of St. George,” 84–85. 10. In fairy tale, myth and legend, the dragon always presents the utmost challenge for any hero. See Lutz Röhrich, “Drache, Drachenkampf, Drachentöter,” Enzyklopädie des Märchens, ed. Rolf Wilhelm Brednich, vol. 3 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1981), 788. For more on St. George and his dragon battle see Samantha Riches, St. George: Hero, Martyr, and Myth (Thrupp, England: Sutton, 2000). 11. Donald E. Hall, “Muscular Christianity: Reading and Writing the Male Social Body,” in Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age, ed. Donald E. Hall, Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, no. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 10. 12. Kestner, “Return of St. George,” 89. 13. See Sandra M. Gilbert, “Literature of the Nineteenth Century,” in The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Traditions in English, ed. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1996), 289–290. 14. Kestner, “Return of St. George,” 91–92. 15. Shapcott Wensley, The Banner of St. George: A Ballad for Chorus and Orchestra, music by Edward Elgar. Novello’s Original Octavo Edition (London: Novello, n. d.), n. pag. 16. Wensley, Banner of St. George, n. pag. 17. Wensley, Banner of St. George, n. pag. 18. Robert Baden-Powell, Scouting for Boys: Boys’ Edition, 1932, abridged ed. (London: Arthur Pearsons, 1954), 145. 19. The following quotes are taken from the abridged edition as documented above. 20. Baden-Powell, Scouting for Boys, 10, 145. 21. Girouard, Return to Camelot, 255. 22. Baden-Powell, Scouting for Boys, 144. 23. Girouard, Return to Camelot, 281, 283. 24. Kestner, Victorian Masculinities, 92–93; and Girouard, Return of Camelot, 276–92. 25. See Girouard, Return to Camelot, 290. 26. It is important to distinguish this from the Victorians who never believed in medievalism in any form or who disagreed with the popular notion of the chivalry and the Middle Ages. 27. Girouard, Return to Camelot, 33. 28. See V. T. J. Arkell, Britain Transformed: The Development of British Society Since the Mid-Eighteenth Century (Harmondsworth: Penguin Education, 1973), 83 and 115–118; and “The Victorian Age,” The Norton Anthology of English Literature, ed. M. H. Abrams., 6th ed., vol. 2 (New York: Norton, 1993), 898. 29. Arkell, “The Victorian Age,” 891. 30. Although their social status is never explicitly mentioned, it becomes clear that the protagonists belong to the upper class. For on the one hand, the young


31. 32.

33. 34.

35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

gentlemen do not have jobs, and on the other hand, their speech is peppered with fashionable French expressions, e.g., “Those are the sacrifices de nos jours.” Brysson Cunningham, “Modern Knight Errantry,” The Strand Magazine: An Illustrated Monthly, ed. George Newnes, vol. 10 (London: George Newnes, 1985), 425. Cunningham, Modern Knight Errantry, 425. Contrary to Manlove’s assumption, the author’s name is not a “pseudonymous near-pun” (The Fantasy Literature of England [London: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999], 123), but the result of a misprint: “The name F. Anstey was actually the pseudonym of Thomas Anstey Guthrie (1856–1934) and came about as a result of a printer’s error. The poor man misread the signature ‘T. Anstey,’ but with typical good humour the author passed off the mistake and instead decided to use the name on all his later work” (Peter Haining, ed., The Wizards of Odd: Comic Tales of Fantasy, 1996 [London: Orbit, 1997], 122). F. Anstey, “The Adventure of the Snowing Globe,” 1906, in The Wizards of Odd: Comic Tales of Fantasy, ed. Peter Haining, 1996 (London: Orbit, 1997), 124. That the narrator makes the connection between dragons and dinosaurs becomes apparent in his description of the dragon: “. . . the dimensions of the beast could not have been much, if at all, less than those of the ‘Diplodocus Carnegii,’ a model of which is exhibited at the Natural History Museum . . .” (Anstey 133–134). Around the time when Anstey wrote this story, the British Museum of Natural History bought a model of the Diplodocus Carnegii, short “Dippy,” which had been found in the United States. The original was the first dinosaur to move into the newly erected dinosaur building of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh in 1907. Dippy was named after the steel magnat Andrew Carnegie, who had founded the excavation (“Dippy’s Scrapbook,” Carnegie Museum of Natural History ⬍http://www.carnegiemuseums.org/cmnh/exhibits/dippy/⬎ [September 11, 2002], n. pag.). Anstey, “Adventure of the Snowing Globe,” 128. See Anstey, “Adventure of the Snowing Globe,” 130. See Roger Horrocks, Male Myths and Icons: Masculinity in Popular Culture (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1995), 149. Anstey, “Adventure of the Snowing Globe,” 136. See Arkell, Britain Transformed, 96–98, 105; and Paul Turner, English Literature 1832–1890 Excluding the Novel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 11. Kenneth Grahame, The Reluctant Dragon, 1898, illustr. E. H. Shepard, 1938 (London: Mammoth-Egmont, 2000), 9. See Grahame, Reluctant Dragon, 43–44. “. . . and the Boy made out that the dragon was down, pinned to the earth by the spear, while St. George had dismounted, and stood astride of him” (Grahame, Reluctant Dragon, 52). Grahame, Reluctant Dragon, 54. Girouard, Return to Camelot, 283.


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Index

Aesthetic medievalism 11, 12, 13, 118, 119, 122, 130, 132n22 Ascetisim 119, 124, 149, 164n6, 203 Alighieri, Dante 48, 51n14, 134, 137 Anachronism 15, 65, 67, 163, 206 Angel in the House 97, 171, 181, 185 Anglican sisterhoods 107–108, 109–110, 115n32 Anglo-Catholic(ism) 53, 58, 64–65, 67, 68n15, 147, 155–156 Anglo-Norman (see also Normans) 66, 71n54 Anglo-Saxon see Saxon Anti-Catholicism 64n15, 96, 105, 149–150, 163, 164n6, 165n8, 165n17, 168n54, 168n61 Arnold, Matthew 3, 5, 51n24, 73–94, 138 Arthurian legend (see also Sir Gawain and the Green Knight) 1, 4, 69n28, 118, 133, 134, 175, 218, 219 St. Augustine 58, 148, 150–151, 154, 155, 156–157, 163 Bentham, Jeremy 30, 36n73 Boy Scout movement 219–220 Brontës 60, 67 Brontë, Anne 62 (Agnes Grey) Brontë, Charlotte 61, 62, 63–64, 159 (all Jane Eyre)

Brontë, Emily 61 (Wuthering Heights), 62 Browning, Robert 3, 39–51, 137 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward 56 Burne-Jones, Edward 118, 133, 134, 144, 223 Busk, Mrs. 41–42 Byron, (George Gordon) Lord 45, 55 Capital Punishment/execution 139, 142–143 Capitalism 14, 25, 99, 101, 111, 112, 114n13 Carlyle, Thomas 2, 4, 12, 73, 77, 79, 80, 84, 114n13, 118, 125, 130, 148, 171 Carousels 210–211, 216n57 Catholicism 11, 12, 56, 58–59, 66, 96, 100, 102–103, 108–110, 112, 113n5, 147, 148, 149–150, 151, 157, 158, 159, 161, 163 Charles, Elizabeth Rundle 149, 160–161 Chaucer, Geoffrey 136, 137, 142 Children’s literature 53–71, 148, 221, 226–228 Children’s theater 199 Chivalry 6, 44, 49, 56, 133, 144, 170, 171, 175, 202, 203, 204, 208, 209, 217–231

250 / index Classicism 10–12, 15, 17, 32, 33n10, 80, 137, 139 Cobbett, William 118, 147 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 47, 53 Commercialism 11, 13, 14, 21, 29, 47, 200 Community values 15, 20, 22, 24, 25, 29–32, 63, 65, 73, 81, 96, 98, 99, 102, 104, 107–108, 112, 113, 154, 163 Contagious Diseases Act 143 Convents 95–115, 160, 175 Conversion novels 148, 153 Cremorne Gardens 204, 206–208, 209 Crusades 44, 45, 192, 193, 209, 212n4 Dibdin, T.J. 192, 193, 196–197 Dickens, Charles 53, 55, 60, 61, 95, 67, 103 Digby, Kenneth 2, 229n5 Dragons/Serpents 3, 73, 122, 124, 126, 217–231 Druids 150, 154–156, 159, 165n13 Dwarves 92n22, 122, 172–173, 181, 184–185 Eglinton Tournament 3, 200–204, 206, 208, 215n35, 215n36, 215n37, 216n54 Epic 49, 81, 117, 119, 122, 124 Eroticism 118–119, 130, 139–142, 149, 158 Evangelism 53, 67, 147–168 Family 25, 32, 62–63, 65, 96–99, 101, 108, 112, 143, 171, 204 Feminism (see also gender roles and women’s roles) 95–96, 103, 169, 171–172, 177, 188n9 Feudalist/feudalism 2, 3, 35n31, 42, 51, 57, 114n13, 178, 202

Folklore and mythology 128–129, 174, 175, 176, 184, 185, 187 Freeman, Edward Augustus 55, 66 Games (see also sport) 4, 75, 82, 86, 180, 211 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 170–171, 179, 180 Gender roles 169, 170–171, 172–182, 187, 218, 224 St. George 10, 218–219, 225, 226–228, 229 Gesta Nomannorum 57, 58, 65, 66, 69n21 Gothic revival 9, 10, 12, 40, 128, 134, 136, 217 Gray, Thomas 74, 80 Heretics 9, 11, 23, 33n2, 148, 152, 164 Hero/heroism 73, 74, 75, 76, 80, 81, 82, 85, 88, 89, 90, 121, 122, 124–125, 127–130, 176, 178, 179, 180, 184, 186, 187, 218, 221, 224, 225, 226, 227 High church 149, 151, 154, 155 Hindu(ism) 18, 153, 154 Holt, Emily Sarah 148, 156–157, 158, 161–152 Hume, David 55, 152 Iceland 1, 92n8, 119, 121–122, 128–130, 172 Imperialism 60, 208, 218–219, 226 Jefferson, Thomas 55 Jewett, Sarah Orne 66 Jews/Judaism 153, 154, 166n28, 197, 210 Knights/knighthood 3, 45, 46, 55, 73, 104, 105, 106, 170, 171, 177, 200, 201, 203, 209, 219–231

index / 251 Langham Place Circle 95, 96, 97, 107, 112 Leslie, Emma 148, 150, 157, 159–160 Lollards 151–152, 158–159, 160–163 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth 87 Magic 75, 83, 92n22, 169, 173, 175, 177–178, 182, 184, 224 Marriage 97, 101, 104, 187, 190n47, 215n50, 217 Masculinity 73, 75, 79, 149, 154, 155, 156, 157, 171, 177, 180–181, 186, 202–203, 217–231 Medieval Chronicles 54, 60 Medieval church 4, 58, 59, 101–102, 149 Medieval romance 41, 50n5, 160–190 Middle class 21, 96–98, 100, 103, 133, 170 Military 154, 191, 200, 202, 208–210, 212 Minor Houses (theater) 192 Moncrief, William Thomas 192, 193, 196 Morris, William 1, 4, 6, 12, 13–14, 73, 74, 86, 91n3, 92n11, 117–132, 134, 169–190 Muscular Christianity 149, 164n6, 164n7, 203 Nationalism/patriotism 14–17, 25, 153, 162, 193, 196–197, 219, 220 New Woman 181, 183, 185, 187 Normans 55–57, 63, 65, 66, 67, 196 Norse 56, 57, 58, 59, 62, 73–94, 117–132 Nostalgia 2, 17, 32, 40, 43, 79, 134, 136, 140, 217 Oxford Movement 64, 66

54, 58–59, 60,

Patent Houses (theater) 192–196 Peasant Uprisings 3, 134, 159, 162, 158n44, 170 The poor/poverty 20, 24, 30–32, 96, 98–100, 103, 111 Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood 6, 40, 118, 121, 122, 130, 133, 134, 135, 144n1, 218, 220, 223 Prison/imprisonment 31, 63, 65, 105, 135, 160, 173, 223 Procter, Adelaide 6, 95–115 Prostitution 107, 109–110, 140–142, 143, 145n1 Protestant(ism) 11, 15, 23, 24, 55, 96, 105, 108, 109, 147–168 Pugin, A.W.N. 5, 9–36, 148 Racial theory 117, 127, 196 Realism 40, 124, 206, 208 Reformation 24, 66, 100–101, 102, 147–148, 149, 150, 163 Religious Tract Society 53, 165n9, 166n26 Rhind, W. Oak 161–162 Romanticism 3, 12, 39, 39–51, 53, 55, 80, 119, 122, 134, 136, 171, 219, 221, 223, 225 Rossetti, Christina 67 Rossetti, Dante 2, 118, 119, 121, 123, 130, 133, 134, 135, 136, 138, 140, 171 Ruskin, John 2, 4, 13, 40, 76, 77, 81, 118, 119, 129, 130, 148, 171 Saxons 55–56, 117, 126, 128, 148, 149, 150, 151, 153, 154, 158, 161, 196–197 Scott, Sir Walter 1, 4, 7n3, 41, 45, 53, 54, 56, 67, 118, 125, 191, 192–200, 203, 206, 208, 209–210, 211, 212, 213n8 Sexuality 122, 123–124, 130, 140–142, 143, 144, 145n17, 171, 173, 180–181, 182, 184

252 / index Shakespeare 40, 54, 142, 146n20, 146n28 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 40, 43–44, 45, 51n20, 55 Snorri’s Edda 74, 75, 79, 82, 84, 85, 92n8 Soames, Henry 151, 158 Social Class 1, 18, 20, 21, 24, 32, 35n31, 54–55, 62, 95–98, 100, 103, 110–112, 133, 170–171, 177, 181, 186, 192, 200, 203, 221, 230n30 Socialist/Socialism 9, 30, 118, 129, 169, 171, 172, 177, 182 Society for Promoting the Employment of Women (SPEW) 95–96 Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings 129 Sport (see also games) 2, 75, 167n31, 191–216, 225, 228 Swinburne, Algernon 1, 3, 5, 118, 119, 120, 122, 123, 130, 132n22, 133–146 Templars 196–199, 203 Tennyson, Alfred 45, 53, 117–118, 127, 133, 145n12, 214n29, 218, 220, 226

Terry, Daniel 2, 193, 213n8 Thackeray, William Makepeace 3, 53, 60 Tournaments 191–216 Tucker, Charlotte Maria [A.L.O.E.] 153–154 Ubi Sunt Tradition 136, 145n15 Utilitarianism 24–25, 29, 30–31, 32, 35n31 Victoria, Queen 214n34, 219

189n36,

Wagner, Richard 74, 126, 127, 131n21 War 41, 42, 59, 63, 66, 79, 81, 84, 86–89, 93n28, 129, 133, 143, 146n25, 176, 177, 186, 213, 217, 220, 221, 226, 228, 229 Women/female roles 95, 97–98, 204, 206, 212n4 Wordsworth, William 43, 51n24 Wycliffe, John 151–153, 158–159, 160–163 Yonge, Charlotte

5, 53–71

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