Copyright 2019 Benjamin D. O'Dell

VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND HISTORICAL TIME: GENRE AND HISTORICITY AFTER WALTER SCOTT

BY

BENJAMIN DANIEL O'DELL

DISSERTATION

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English

in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2019

Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Professor Julia F. Saville, Chair

Professor Lauren M.E. Goodlad, Director of Research, Rutgers University Professor Ted Underwood Professor Gordon Bigelow, Rhodes College

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ABSTRACT

Between the dawn of the nineteenth century and its close, Britain went from a

predominantly rural nation with modest territorial holdings to an urban industrial power with an

expansive imperial presence. This dissertation, "Victorian Literature and Historical Time:

Genre and Historicity after Walter Scott," examines how Victorian writers experimented with

literary form to create narrative temporalities capable of negotiating these changes. Georg

Lukács famously associated literature's historicity with the realist novel’s ability to capture social

movement through typical characters, a narrative form he tied to the historical fiction of Walter

Scott. Yet Lukács believed that a reactionary turn after the failed European revolutions of 1848

coincided with an increasing decline in the novel's capacity to depict such historical dynamism.

Critics including Ian Duncan, Lauren M.E. Goodlad, Ruth Livesey, Harry E. Shaw and Raymond

Williams have since shown the persistence of British literature's historical focus through a

variety of inventive forms. This project explores the modes of temporal experience that different

literary genres convey. Focusing on Charles Dickens’s Sketches by Boz (1833-6; 1839), Arthur

Hugh Clough’s Amours de Voyage (1849; 1858), George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859), and Thomas

Hardy’s Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), it demonstrates how genre-driven temporal experiments

capture a sense of historical movement through creative figurations of narrative time.

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To my wife, Kelly N. O'Dell,

for her encouragement throughout the course of this project.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thank you to all of the people who have provided me with guidance and support during

my graduate studies. This project would not exist in its present form without the feedback that I

received from my tireless advisor, Lauren M.E. Goodlad. Her belief in the project's value and

her persistence in challenging me to refine my ideas helped this project grow in ways that I could

not have anticipated. I would also like to thank Julia F. Saville for her enthusiastic readings of

early drafts and her flexibility in helping the committee address logistical challenges. Thank you

as well to Ted Underwood and Gordon Bigelow, for their timely feedback and support of this

project from its humble origins to the present.

The English Department at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign provided

support for this project through teaching assistantships and several fellowships, including the

Gragg-Barr and Hodgins fellowships. Additional support was provided from Lauren M.E.

Goodlad, who gave me the opportunity to work as a research assistant on The Victorian

Geopolitical Aesthetic: Realism, Sovereignty, and Transnational Experience (2015, Oxford UP),

where I encountered many critical, historical, and theoretical materials that proved important to

my own project. Chris Hedlin, Brandon Jones, Rebecah Pulsifer, and Patricia Sunia provided

valuable personal and professional support during the drafting process. Their graciousness with

their time while pursuing their own studies is truly commendable. I would also like to thank

Patrick Shaw, formerly of the University of Southern Indiana, and Suzanne Flynn, of Gettysburg

College, for encouraging me to return to graduate school during my time as a non-tenure track

faculty member at both institutions. Jordan S. Carroll has been a great friend and colleague since

our time as master's students at Miami University. I would be lost without his insight.

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My parents, Dan and Peggy O'Dell, deserve considerable thanks for their love and

assistance throughout the years. Lyndley O'Dell has been a supportive sister and a wonderful

aunt. My uncle, William Lane, has been a valuable mentor since my adolescence. I thank him

for his curiosity and engagement with the world. Last but not least, my wife, Kelly, has given

me every form of love and support that I could ask for during eight long years of doctoral study.

I am thankful for the life we have built together, especially our daughter, Hannah, who surprises

us with her wonder and joy each and every day.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION: VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND HISTORICAL TIME ... 1 CHAPTER 2: THE PRISM OF HISTORY: SIMULATED MODERNITY IN SKETCHES BY BOZ .......................................................................................................................................... 22 CHAPTER 3: LYRIC MOMENTS AND THE HISTORICITY OF THE VERSE NOVEL: AMOURS DE VOYAGE ............................................................................................................ 49 CHAPTER 4: THE VICTORIAN COUNTER-PASTORAL: ADAM BEDE AS HISTORICAL NOVEL .................................................................................................................................... 80 CHAPTER 5: THE MAYOR OF CASTERBRIDGE'S TRAGIC NATURALISM: SERIALIZING HISTORY'S STREAM .................................................................................. 109 BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................... 139

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Chapter 1:

Introduction: Victorian Literature and Historical Time

The end of the first book in George Eliot's Adam Bede (1859) finds Mr. Irwine, the

Rector of Broxton, failing to seriously question Arthur Donnithorne, the heir to the Donnithorne

estate, on the subject of his intentions towards Hetty Sorrel, the Poyser family's poor niece and

the expected fiancé of Adam Bede. When Arthur raises the question of how Irwine would

evaluate a man who struggles with temptation, the clergyman remains brief in his response

despite sensing that Arthur is talking about himself. Following this missed opportunity, Book

Two opens with an unexpected declaration from the narrator:

"This Rector of Broxton is little better than a pagan!" I hear one of my readers exclaim.

"How much more edifying it would have been if you had made him give Arthur some

truly spiritual advice. You might have put into his mouth the most beautiful things—

quite as good as reading a sermon." (193)

As the chapter proceeds, the narration turns from Irwine's character to an extended dialogue on

the novel’s method, which lingers on the narrator's belief in the superiority of Dutch paintings to

more didactic forms of art and literature. This famous passage from Chapter 17, which positions

the reader as an interlocutor through recurring bouts of anticipated speech, is one of the most

experimental in Adam Bede, linking the novel's story with a theory of novel writing. Yet what is

often overlooked in this much-cited chapter is that the second half returns to the subject of Mr.

Irwine's value to the people of Hayslope through information that the narrator has gathered from

an elderly Adam, decades after the events of the novel's main plot.

Through Adam's unfiltered voice, which dominates the chapter for several pages,

propelling us from the novel's turn-of-the-nineteenth-century setting to this later moment, we

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learn of Hayslope's preference for Irwine’s common courtesy over the sour temper and stinginess

of his successor, Mr. Ryde. Despite Ryde's superior understanding of religious "doctrines,"

Hayslope's "congregation began to fall off" during his tenure as "people began to speak light" of

his harsh demeanor and extravagant lifestyle (198). In Adam's view, Ryde fails because

"religion's something else besides doctrines and notions" (200). Whereas Irwine "said nothing

but what was good, and what you'd be the wiser for remembering," the pedantic approach of

preachers like Ryde empty religion of its meaning so that there is no "real religion" in it at all

(200). The relation between this extended digression and the famous digression on novel-writing

is initially unclear until the narrator intervenes. Returning to a form of narrative commentary,

the narrator contends that she has gained profound insights about the "deep pathos" and "sublime

mysteries" of "human nature . . . by living a great deal among people more or less commonplace

and vulgar" (201). This emphasis on the duration of her experience suggests the real value of

Adam's words. For even as the unexpected detour into Hayslope's history interrupts the reader’s

engagement with the novel's main plot, Adam's leisurely speech encourages readers to alter their

expectations for narrative fiction by replicating the narrator's experience of having lived "a great

deal" among everyday people in miniature.

Read in this light, the long and winding course of Adam's speech aligns narrative pacing

with the reader's own chronological experience in the production of a temporal effect that mirrors

lived reality. Through this effect, Adam's desire to stay "humble before the mysteries o' God's

dealings" highlights a conservative streak which runs throughout Hayslope's culture, tempering

the rate of change over an extended period that stretches well into the nineteenth century (200).1

By presenting Adam's views in this way, the narrative digression of Chapter 17 helps to position

1Although the exact date of Adam's speech is imprecise, the narrator observes that Ryde came to Hayslope

some "twenty-years" after the events of the novel's events, setting it sometime after the 1820s (197).

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Eliot's novel as something more than a deeply affecting story of loss and forgiveness. Through

such moments of temporal complexity, the narration subtly intimates Adam Bede's position as

the historical novel of its time—that is, a novel that tracks the course of social change through

the depiction of ongoing historical processes.

In this regard, Adam Bede is not alone. This dissertation focuses on the importance of

narrative time and temporality in shaping Victorian literature's engagement with history and its

creation of historical awareness in the years after the death of Walter Scott, the preeminent

historical novelist of the nineteenth century. During the Victorian period, British literature

responded to new historical developments including rapid urbanization, the explosion of

periodical publication, an enlarged male electorate, and the expansion of empire in an

increasingly interconnected world-system. From the comedy and melodrama of Charles

Dickens's contemporary Sketches by Boz (1833-6; 1839) to the tragic naturalism of Thomas

Hardy's serialized novel The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), the most innovative works of

literature provided readers with a sense of ongoing history through narrative forms and genre

experiments that diverged from the familiar structure of Scott's historical romances. "Victorian

Literature and Historical Time: Genre and Historicity after Walter Scott" argues that these new

forms developed in the effort to recover the thriving sense of historicity that scholars from Georg

Lukács to Harry E. Shaw have discerned in Scott's Romantic-era fiction.

In what follows, I examine how the narrative works of Arthur Hugh Clough, Dickens,

Eliot, and Hardy responded to the erosion of past agrarian social formations; the emergence of

newer and more alienating urban environments; and the temporal acceleration and

interconnections of these and other modernizing changes.2 As different in content and form as

2 "Modernity" is used here to refer both to a system of production based on industrial capitalism and

urbanization and/or an increased emphasis on the importance of the individual subject. The first view derives from

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are the pastoral fiction, sketchbooks, verse novels, and tragedies explored in this project, they

share a common feature: the generically experimental use of narrative time to strengthen readers'

awareness of the historical processes that had molded the recent past and continued to shape the

lived experience of the present. Assessing the effects of such creative figurations of narrative

time highlights a Victorian literature and culture that had not stopped thinking about the course

of history through the lens of narrative art. In this Introduction, I define my use of history and

historicity, review critical understandings of literature's mediation of historical reality, and

outline the method for the chapters that follow.

***

What do we mean when we talk about "history"? Does it refer to an essential truth about

the past, a story we tell ourselves about that past, or some combination of the two? Is it limited

to the events of the past or can it be conceived to link the past to the present and future? In this

project, I will be thinking of history through narrative forms that hold the potential to illustrate

social movements and processes at work. As Francis Mulhern has observed, despite the

tendency to equate "history" with "change":

Marx and Engels's description of an emergent bourgeois epoch based on "[c]onstant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions," and "everlasting uncertainty and agitation" in The Communist Manifesto (1848) and the effect on the rise of factory towns in Engel's Condition of the Working Classes in England (1844) (Communist 222). Although neither Marx nor Engels use the term modernity in their writing, the conception of a new form of social life tied to the emergence of a new form of economic production has been integral to the development of subsequent theories of change by classical sociologists like Durkheim and Simmel. Since the late nineteenth century, such accounts of modernity have been joined by alternate explanations that seek to link modernity's emergence to the increasing importance of the individual in social, cultural, and political life—a view that permeates through the writing of prominent nineteenth-century British and European thinkers like Maine, Tonnies, and Weber. In both instances, such classical conceptions of modernity seek to mark an abrupt shift from earlier "traditional" forms of social, political, and economic relations. More recently, historians and post-colonial critics such as Arrighi and Chakrabarty had demonstrated certain limitations in each of these nation-centered conceptions, noting a pluralization of "modernities" that exist on a global scale, and which stretch from the sixteenth century to the present. See Vernon 1-17.

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History is also—and decisively, for its greater part—continuity. The historical process is

differential: it is patterned by a plurality of rhythms and tempos, some highly variable,

some very little so, some measured by clocks and calendars, others belonging to the

practical eternity of 'deep time'. Historical structures and events—the substance of what

we invoke as 'contexts'—are thus necessarily complex in character, never belonging to a

single mode (continuity/discontinuity) or temporality. Contexts are brief and narrow (a

generation, a political crisis) but they are also long and wide (a language, a mode of

production, sex-gender privilege), and all of these at once. (22)

As Mulhern suggests, we can catch glimpses of historical process at work but a totalizing

account of the patterned plurality of history’s continuity is beyond the scope of any single

method. Microhistories—which focus on small units of time—record the depth of history

through the interrogations of gaps or lacunae, in the historical record, which open the historian's

analysis to events that exist beyond the immediate boundaries of the event or subject in question.

Meanwhile, longue durée histories—which cover longer spans, such as hundreds or thousands of

years —call attention to the slow movement of glacial processes that may be barely perceptible

within the moment. In both instances, recognizing "history" as a continuity patterned through

plural temporalities alleviates an undue emphasis on specific historical periods and events by

calling attention to their position within a broader and much more varied course of action. It also

opens the way to narrative fictions that experiment with new ways of registering the temporal

plurality of history’s movement.

Victorian thinkers were intimately aware of history's complexities, including the formally

experimental writers in this project. Dickens—like Eliot, Clough, and Hardy—was an avid

reader of Thomas Carlyle's writing on the social changes underway in the nineteenth century,

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which shaped the worldview of his groundbreaking fiction. Dickens drew directly upon

Carlyle's voluminous 1837 history of the French Revolution in writing A Tale of Two Cities

(1859), the second of two Scott-like historical romances he penned in his career.3 Eliot's rigorous

study and intellectual work as a translator of Germany’s "higher criticism," as well as her critical

essays for the Westminster Review from 1855-57, placed her in direct contact with the most

important works of nineteenth-century philosophy of history.4 Across her expansive oeuvre,

which includes an ambitious romance of Florentine republicanism in Romola (1862-3), another

Scott-influenced work, and an epic poem set in fifteenth-century Andalucía in The Spanish

Gypsy (1868), only Daniel Deronda (1876), her final novel, takes place in the England of her

own time. Clough's education at Rugby and Oxford brought him in to contact with literature and

theology, as well as natural science, political economy, and philosophy. In addition to Carlyle,

whom he befriended in the 1840s, Clough's views on history were profoundly influenced by the

historical writings of Thomas Arnold, his former schoolmaster at Rugby.5 Clough's 1853 essay

for the North American Review on "Recent English Poetry" contrasted the contemporary subjects

found in the spasmodic poetry of the working-class poet Alexander Smith with the neo-

classicism of his close friend, Matthew Arnold, carving out a position for his own creative blend

of neo-classical and contemporary styles. Hardy was a voracious reader of contemporary

intellectual thought including the works of Arnold, Comte, Darwin, Macaulay, J.S. Mill, Leslie

Stephen, and Spencer.6 In addition to novels renowned for regional settings imbued with

historical significance, Hardy wrote essays like "The Dorsetshire Labourer" (1883) in which he

3 See Slater 472-3 regarding Dickens's use of Carlyle in drafting A Tale of Two Cities. 4 Eliot's translations of David Strauss's The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined (1835; 1846) and Ludwig

Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity (1841; 1854) appeared under Marian Evans. For more on Eliot's intellectual background, see Fleishman and Haight.

5 Arnold published an unfinished History of Rome (3 vols., 1838-42) and Lectures on Modern History (1842), the latter of which were originally delivered at Oxford during Clough's time there.

6 See Millgate 229 regarding Hardy's reading during this period.

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describes rural workers in the midst of "losing their peculiarities as a class" and "rapidly

disappearing . . . under the constant attrition of lives mildly approximating to those of workers in

a manufacturing town"(262).

To varying degrees, the historical narratives of these writers extend the work of Scott, as

conceived by subsequent critics. Georg Lukács’s The Historical Novel (1937) famously singles

out Scott’s Waverley novels for their intensification of literary historicity—a cultural and

aesthetic engagement with historical movement. Lukács believed that the twenty-five novels

Scott published between 1814 and his death in 1832 convey this sense of historical movement, in

part, through literary characters whose experiences align with the determining forces of their

time. In Scott's fiction, the "middling" experience of "average" (33) heroes provides the

figurative mechanism through which to narrate the clash of world-historical antagonisms. Thus,

Scott's first novel, Waverley (1814) describes the failed efforts of the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745

to restore the House of Stuart to the throne following Charles II's removal during the Glorious

Revolution of 1688. The title character, Edward Waverley, is, as Lukacs describes it, a "country

squire from a family which is pro-Stuart, but which does no more than quietly sympathize in a

particularly ineffective fashion" (37). After Waverley becomes ensnared in the camp of Stuart

supporters during his travels to Scotland as an English officer, he fights bravely, but never to the

point of becoming "fanatically partisan" (37). As a result, his Hanoverian allegiances are

maintained as the novel presents a "pragmatic picture" of the struggle between both sides of the

conflict, immersing early readers in a protracted process that shows how the modern British

nation came into being (37).

Significantly, for Lukács, Scott's "faithfulness" to history does not imply "a chronicle-

like, naturalistic reproduction of language, mode of thought, and feeling of the past" (61).

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Rather, the historicity of the Waverley novels comes from the way in which they use "necessary

anachronism" to portray the past "as the necessary prehistory of the present" (61). Thus,

whereas for Scott's early readers, part of the allure of Scott's work came from his meticulous

description of period dress and furnishings, as well as regional dialect and folklore, the Waverley

novels’ importance as historical fiction has very little to do with these details.7 Instead, Lukács

suggests, the more important feature of the series is to highlight the course of historical

development through the protagonist's symbolic movement between warring camps.

After Scott, Lukács sees Balzac—a "great admirer" of the Waverley novels—taking up

the mantle of Scott's project while transporting it to French society with La Comédie Humaine

(1829-48), an ambitious cycle of ninety-one novels, stories, and essays exploring French history,

from the time of the Revolution in 1789 to the formation of the Second Republic in 1848 (34).

The migration of Scott's influence repeats again with Tolstoy: "the powerful depicter of Russia's

period of transformation from the 1861 Emancipation of the peasants to the 1905 Revolution"

(85). As Lukács notes, Balzac and Tolstoy follow Scott's ambitious course in the production of a

series of fictions that examine the recent past to show how the present came to be—at times

coming up to the contemporary moment (in ways that Scott himself did not). When they delve

deeper into history—say, in Balzac's Catherine de Medici (1841) or in Tolstoy's writing on Peter

the Great—it is to explore "the great, initial turning-points of history which ushered in the

modern development of their country" (85).8

7 See Lukács "Narrate" for a more detailed account of the distinction between narration and description. 8 One important difference between Balzac and Tolstoy comes in Lukács's belief that whereas Balzac

"unconsciously" depicted the French Revolution as "the social foundations" for his project, Tolstoy's sprawling opus War and Peace (1869) self-consciously treats its subject, the Napoleonic Wars, as the "prehistory" for the social transformation that would characterize subsequent work (85).

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While Lukács envisions the historical novel’s surviving beyond these nineteenth-century

examples, he believes that the failed European revolutions of 1848 are a crucial watershed.

Before 1848, the realism at work in Scott’s historical romances and Balzac’s social novels

equally sought to portray "a total context of social life. . . in narrative form" (242). After 1848,

Lukács observes newer fictions narrowing their attention from the holistic to the individual and

particular. Although Tolstoy—a contemporary "of post '48 Western European realism"—was

still able to write historically dynamic fiction because he "live[d] in a country whose bourgeois

Revolution [was] only just developing during his long lifetime," Lukács finds British and

western European fictions rigidifying (85). Whether focused on the lives of rich or poor, the

narrow perspective and abstract detail found in post-1848 novels symptomized a "crisis of

bourgeois realism" and corresponding inability to convey historical motion.

Lukács's suspicion of "bourgeois realism" (and its outgrowths in the form of naturalism

and modernism) have contributed to a broad range of arguments that position certain forms of

literary production as ideologically flawed and/or complicit in the perpetuation of worldviews

that distort social operations, particularly as they relate to capitalism. Yet the extent of the

"crisis" that The Historical Novel describes has long been a subject of debate, including among

scholars of British literature—about which Lukács says very little aside from Scott. One reason

for resistance to the Lukácsian narrative of realism's post-'48 decline is the mismatch with British

history. While revolution and reaction spread through the European continent in 1848, Britain

did not experience a major revolutionary event, in spite of the Irish famine, the violent

suppression of Chartism, and bank failures after the Panic of 1847. In his 1977 essay "Forms of

English Fiction in 1848," Raymond Williams notes two additional problems with the idea of a

seismic shift toward a "characteristic bourgeois realism" in England: "first, that what the

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bourgeoisie was reading was on the whole not bourgeois fiction, in any of its ordinary senses;

second, that the new major novels, from Vanity Fair to Dombey and Son and from Mary Barton

to Wuthering Heights, can be characterized as bourgeois realism only by an extraordinary

flattening" of their distinguishing features (151). As a point of contrast to an "epochal analysis"

derived from Lukács, Williams describes a "complex interlock" of dominant, emergent, and

residual literary categories within the mid-century moment (151).

Moreover, Williams observes that while "much of the narrative mode of the emergent

novel-form" of the nineteenth century is "indicative," providing "an account of what had

happened and what was happening" in ways that Lukács finds increasingly constraining,

prominent novels from British authors at the mid-century such as the Brontës, Dickens, and

others are concerned with "a perspective which is not socially or politically available" (161).

Williams refers to this category as the "subjunctive": that which explores questions of "'what if'

or 'would that' or 'let us suppose that'" (161). Even in novels that are ostensibly more

preoccupied with material and intellectual limitations, such as Felix Holt (1866) and Jude the

Obscure (1894-5), Williams discerns a "subversive" element in the narrative style and structure

which complicates a simple philosophical shift towards the bourgeois realism that Lukács

associates with the Continent (162). Although characters in nineteenth-century British fiction

frequently come up against social limits, they are not the same kind of limits that Lukács

associates with the narrowing of realism's possibilities and the freezing of historical engagement.

Williams's defense of some nineteenth-century British fiction has been followed by a

long line of critics who have sought to describe how the realist literature of this period mediates

social reality. Ian Duncan's dialectical account of the relationship between realism and

romanticism in the British novel from Scott to Dickens suggests "a panoramic and historical

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imitation of the life of the people" and "a criticism of that life” enabled partly through “the

revival of romance" (2). Harry E. Shaw, meanwhile, has challenged theories that connect

realism to accurate depiction, preferring instead to view this mode of narration as a self-

conscious representation that challenges readers "to come to terms with realities," both

"imagined and real" (xi). For Shaw, realist narratives create an impression of social density and

historical difference that combine with "certain mental procedures" to encourage reflection (xii).

Such readings both complement and complicate Lukács's critique of post-'48 realism while

countering a strand of post-structuralist criticism rooted in the work of Roland Barthes and prone

to conceiving the "classic realist text" as an ideological tool.9

More recent scholarship has heightened the recognition of realism's multiplicity,

producing nuanced and discriminating understandings of narrative fiction's role in sparking

historical consciousness. Lauren M.E. Goodlad describes how the globalization of capital and

the concomitant formalization of Britain's empire prompted novelists like Eliot, Wilkie Collins,

and Anthony Trollope to devise formal strategies for illuminating challenges to sovereignty at

multiple scales during a period of relentless transformation for individuals, nations, and the

world at large. For example, Goodlad charts the dialectic between Trollope’s eulogy for a rooted

English identity in the Barsetshire series and his endorsement of "Greater Britain" in his

travelogues of the 1850s and 60s. This "two-part foreign policy" (67) culminates in the

powerfully naturalistic narratives of contemporary capitalist globalization found in later novels

like The Eustace Diamonds (1871-3), The Way We Live Now (1874-5), and The Prime Minister

(1875-6). Ruth Livesey has argued that the antiquated image of the stage coach functions in the

writing of Scott, Dickens, Brontë, and Eliot as a narrative device for articulating the "'just' past":

9 e.g., Shaw Narrating 8.

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a "time and place on the edge of becoming history" which stands "outside the linear flow of

progress" and which reminds the reader "that the recent past is still moving alongside us, shaping

our route" (2). Livesey's analysis of Jane Eyre (1847), for instance, demonstrates how Brontë's

stagecoach works to move isolated places and individuals into communication with the nation in

an idealized form of Tory provincialism that chafes against both an emergent Victorian

modernity and the more recent celebration of Jane as an archetype of liberal individualism.

Accompanying this shift in the realist novel's perception is a heightened recognition of

the role that other forms, such as the periodical sketch and the verse novel, play in generating

narrative accounts of social change. For Amanpal Garcha, the openness and flexibility of the

periodical sketch provided British authors in the 1830s and 40s with a form to develop

"important techniques not only to register modernity's fragmented, hurried temporality but also

to offer an alternative to such changefulness—an alternative the sketches create through

description and essayistic analysis, which produce, aesthetically and ideologically, a sense of

atemporal stability" (4). Tanya Agathocleous has traced connections between, on the one hand,

the visual forms of the sketch and the panorama and, on the other, the periodical sketch and the

realist novel, to illustrate "their interdependence and their significance for writers who sought to

move from local to global scales and from the visual to the visionary" (113). Natasha Moore's

account of mid-Victorian poetry sees the era's explosion of formal experimentation yielding

sophisticated engagements with contemporary change in the verse novels of Elizabeth Barrett

Browning and Clough—a point that resonates with Stefanie Markovits' belief that Victorian

poets used "the mixed form" of the verse novel "to try to resolve tensions between the novelistic

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(present, objective, real) and the poetic (past, subjective, ideal)," particularly in regards to the

temporal experience of duration (7).10

Such work reminds us that, for all its contemporary success and enduring hegemonic

power, the realist novel, though itself a widely varied form, is not uniquely and exclusively

capable of enlivening historical consciousness. Much as Lukács devotes extended passages of

The Historical Novel to epic poetry and historical drama, a detailed account of Victorian

literature's historicity must adopt a broad approach to the forms by which literature cultivates

historical consciousness. Yet while affirming that post-1848 British literature was both far more

sensitive to historical movement than Lukács implied, and more stylistically varied than he

suggested, one might nevertheless still wish to ask what (if anything) happened to the historical

romance after Scott to suggest a decline in its capacity to convey historical movement. In other

words, why not simply examine the Scott-like historical romances of the Victorian period?

While a great many scholars have sought to recoup the historical romance after Scott, I believe

that the answer to this question derives both from changes to that genre as well as changes in the

kinds of historical processes that Victorian-era authors engaged.11

In fact, historical romances remained popular in British literature after Scott's death,

stretching through the fin-de-siècle and beyond. Yet Victorian historical romances often differed

from the Waverley novels in important ways. Whereas Scott’s novels delve deeply into the

textures of the nation-building histories they narrate, Dickens's Barnaby Rudge (1841) and A

Tale of Two Cities are more prone to using events like the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots of 1780

and the French Reign of Terror as thin backdrops for concerns about contemporary violence and

political unrest. Others, like those of Edward Bulwer-Lytton and William Ainsworth looked

10 See Moore 53-67 and 80-93. 11 In addition to Shaw Forms, see Sanders, Hamnett, and Maxwell.

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beyond recent history to a remote past that bears little direct influence upon the present.12 While

nearly every major British novelist wrote a historical romance in the nineteenth century, and

some—such as Eliot's Romola (1862-3) and Elizabeth Gaskell's Sylvia's Lovers (1863)— display

sensitivity to historical structures in ways that arguably justify a Lukácsian reading, those

accomplishments often came with notable stylistic shifts from Scott, so that the idea of

characterizing such work as "romance" almost feels like a misnomer.

Consider, for instance, that unlike the highly mobile protagonists of Scott's fiction,

Romola and Sylvia's Lovers are both primarily interested in the effects of historical environments

on young women. Their protagonists are constrained in ways that differ from the comparative

freedom of Scott's heroes, male or female, and speak to experiences that are far more likely to be

omitted from the historical record. In addition, and as a partial consequence of this focus, Eliot

and Gaskell's historical novels are deeply aware of the challenges that accompany their efforts to

depict the past. Dorothea Barrett observes that while "Eliot is interested in the history she is

studying . . . she is even more interested in the studying of history" (xii). Through the inclusion

of characters like Romola's father Bardo, the scholar, Eliot's depiction of Girolamo Savonarola's

failed efforts at church reform is presented in close proximity to a heightened recognition of the

Florentine Renaissance's own interest in history. Francis O'Gorman finds a similar reflexivity in

Sylvia's Lovers, where Gaskell's depiction of the events surrounding Napoleon's conquest of

Jerusalem in 1799 contain none of the heroism found in Scott's fiction, even as it draws on many

of the historical romance's conventions. When a shamed Philip Hepburn rescues Charlie Kinraid

12 Summarizing these distinctions, Shaw describes three types of "history" in historical fiction after Scott:

"history as pastoral," wherein "history has provided an ideological screen onto which the preoccupations of the present can be projected for clarification and solution, or for distinguished expression;" history as "a source of dramatic energy;" and history as a "subject" or "instrument" through which the novel expresses a view of history." See Shaw Forms 52. See also A.D. Culler's discussion of Carlyle in his exploration of the Victorians' far-reaching tendency to use history as a "mirror" for contemporary concerns.

15

from the battlefield while serving under an assumed name, the narrative does not present the

situation from Philip's perspective. Instead, it blends the narrator's omniscience with the

disoriented, dream-like confusion of the injured Kinraid, who is subsequently unable to track

down the old acquaintance who had previously wronged him. The effect of this stylistic turn

away from the clarity found in Scott's fiction combines with other moments of ambiguity in the

novel to emphasize both the chaos of war and the uncertainty of historical representation.13

Whereas Scott confidently suggests in the post-script to Waverley that "the most romantic parts

of this narrative are precisely those which have a foundation in fact," Gaskell, like Eliot,

carefully acknowledges the complexities of historical representation (363).

Gaskell’s and Eliot's conflicted relationship with romance points towards other

limitations in the use of Scott-like fiction as a Victorian form. When Victorian authors

resuscitate the warring camps model of the Waverley novels in other genres, including

“condition of England” novels such as Benjamin Disraeli's Sybil (1845) or Gaskell's North and

South (1855), the effect is not that of "necessary anachronism" but of an "unnecessary"

obfuscation of social complexity in symbolic conclusions. History, in these works, is no longer

an ongoing process but a problem that has been solved. It follows, then, that in many respects,

the Lukácsian emphasis on representative character types appears to become less important to

British literature's cultivation of historical awareness as the century proceeds. In its place, it

becomes increasingly common for literary works to prompt the reader's recognition of historical

processes through the emphasis they place on an emergent modernity. James Vernon notes that

by the middle of the nineteenth century, decades of rapid and accelerated population growth,

urban concentration, and increased mobilization through innovations in communication and

13 See O'Gorman xxi-xxii.

16

transport had radically altered Briton's conception of social and economic life, leading to the

abstraction and re-embedding of traditional institutions in new systems and practices.14 It is

against these structural transformations that the historical romance begins to lose steam, opening

the door for such formally hybrid alternatives to historical romance as Dickens's Sketches by Boz,

Arthur Hugh Clough's Amours de Voyage (1849; 1858), Eliot's Adam Bede, and Hardy's Mayor

of Casterbridge. Without ever pretending to adhere to a rigidly mimetic fidelity to the world

outside of the text, these variously "realist" works capture social movement in ways that evoke

Scott’s romances even while reinventing them.

"Victorian Literature and Historical Time" thus develops an interpretive method attuned

to temporal plurality and capable of assessing literature's historicity in a range of nineteenth-

century narrative forms. To do so it draws upon John Frow’s historicist theory of genre. As

Frow reminds, rather than treat genre as a means to answer the question, "What kind of thing is a

text?", we should instead view it as a kind of window or lens through which authors create their

own reality and truth ("Reproducibles" 1633). In Frow's terms, a genre is "a set of conventional

and highly organised constraints on the production and interpretation of meaning" (Genre 10).

For Frow, genre matters because it allows us to see that "the realities in and among which we

live are not transparently conveyed to us but are mediated by systems of representation and

interest: by talk, by writing, by acting (in all senses of the word), by images, even by sound"

("Reproducibles" 1633).

Genre achieves this significance through two interrelated concepts: form (the individual

structure of a literary work) and mode (a term which is, in Alistair Fowler's view, "adjectival" for

the way it modifies genres through tonal shifts) (106). Genres present "a social world or partial

14 Vernon 14-15.

17

view of [such a world] that includes configurations of time and space, notions of causality and

human motivation, and ethical and aesthetic values" (Seitel 279). This worlding effect is

achieved, in part, through what Mikhail Bakhtin refers to as genre's chronotopic dimensions (i.e.

"the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in

literature") (84).15 Yet genres are always evolving through parody and migration.16 These

processes of differentiation and assimilation intensify our experience of distinct temporal effects

even as they make it possible for the figurative work of older genres like Scott’s historical

romances to be reinvented and transformed in new genres and under new circumstances. While

all genres possess temporal characteristics as critical concepts (e.g, the stasis particular to

pastoral narratives, the contemporaneity of the sketch, the compressed action of tragedies), each

literary work is a singular entity that need not limit itself to any one set of characteristics,

temporal or otherwise. The complexities of narrative time, in particular, encompass not only the

key categories of "order," "frequency," and "duration" that Gérard Genette developed in his

influential reading of Marcel Proust, but also a range of narrative dynamics related, among other

things, to beginnings, endings, and the position of the narrator's voice in relation to the time of

the narrative's story.17

15 As Bakhtin notes, "The chronotope in literature has an intrinsic generic significance. It can even be said

that it is precisely the chronotope that defines genre and generic distinctions, for in literature the primary category in the chronotope is time. The chronotope as a formally constitutive category determines to a significant degree the image of man in literature as well" (84-5).

16 In response to the question, "Where do genres come from?", Todorov suggests "Quite simply from other genres. A new genre is always the transformation of an earlier one, or of several: by inversion, by displacement, by combination" (15). C. Williams has suggested that "[p]arody is the primary mode of genre formation, for new genres are never entirely new, but emerge from the assimilation and critique of older genres" (12). While such transformations can display varying degrees of resemblance and effect, J. Culler notes that parody is potentially insidious, creating the illusion of critique while advancing dominant meanings and forestalling objections. See J. Culler 152-60. Liu and Moretti, meanwhile, have noted that travel, or movement through space, often leads to generic hybridity in European literature from the eighteenth century onward. See, for example, Liu's discussion of the generic entanglements of Wordsworth's poetry and Moretti's Atlas.

17 Chatman's Story and Richardson's Narrative survey these complexities.

18

My own method of exploring the relationship between genre, narrative time, and history

draws heavily on close reading, which remains a vital (if sometimes hotly debated) feature of

contemporary criticism. Although close reading can be enacted in many ways, my own variation

on the practice involves a balance between a descriptive summary centering on the object of

analysis and an interpretation of the aesthetic or social significance of the object in question.18

To be attentive to literary historicity as Lukacs conceived it, close reading must balance an

aesthetic appreciation for the technical work of narrative unfolding with a historicist recognition

of how narratives manipulate these techniques to articulate a complex relation to time. The

combination of narrative structure, pace, and plot, I suggest, produces distinct temporal effects

that encourage readers to wrestle with what Lukács describes as narrative’s power to evoke "the

way society moves" (Historical 144). Against the presumption of a “realist” novel’s evenly-

paced, linear progression, I emphasize the complex temporal effects produced in, for example,

Eliot’s Adam Bede or in Clough's verse-novel, Amours de Voyage.

The chapters that follow move chronologically from the dawn of the Victorian period in

the 1830s. In Chapter One, I note that when a young Charles Dickens published Sketches by Boz

in 1839, he assembled 56 previously published works in an episodic structure that includes vivid

descriptions of real-life events and places; character sketches devoted to exaggerated social

types; and tales depicting the spectacular and absurd. With no unified narrative to seam the

pieces together, Dickens offers a prismatic vision of a culture transitioning between the familiar

18 In recent years, a "descriptive turn" brought about by interdisciplinary interest in the sociological work of

Latour's Actor-Network Theory has prompted some, such as Marcus, Best, and Love to revisit the idea of description and its relation to interpretation. Yet such efforts have met with a reminder of the important role description has played in the literary materialisms such turns have often positioned themselves against. Schmitt, for instance, observes that the question of whether to "interpret" or "describe" really poses a false choice: the two strategies are interdependent in the production of critical insight. In a similar vein, Brown has proposed thinking of close reading as a kind of "portable dialectic" that moves between the two categories (1188). See Marcus et. al. "Building."

19

past of nostalgic tales and a radically transformed urban present. Chapter One argues that these

generic and temporal shifts blur fact and fiction in their effort to map a labyrinthine world filled

with oddly anachronistic and eccentrically modern characters. Against the perception that

England had become a society of strangers, Dickens's distinct mix of comic, tragic, and

melodramatic genres draws on English folk culture to negotiate the homogenous empty time of

an emergent capitalist modernity.

The next chapter explores the interplay of lyric reflection and epistolary narration in

Clough's genre-defying verse novel, Amours de Voyage. Inspired by Clough’s own travels,

Amours de Voyage takes place in the moments leading up to and following the French Siege of

Rome in 1849, which undermined the fledgling Roman Republic and reinstated papal authority.

The poem presents the story of Claude, an Oxford-educated skeptic, and Mary Trevellyn, the

daughter of an upwardly mobile family, on holiday in Italy. Clough divides the poem into five

cantos flanked by ten lyric stanzas from an unnamed speaker. Between these stanzas, we find a

series of letters from Claude, Mary, and her sister Georgina. While the opening cantos flirt with

a mock epic courtship plot, the outbreak of war sets the poem on a philosophical and political

trajectory that refuses the complacent closure of bourgeois marriage, accepting instead the

melancholy freedom of temporally open-ended uncertainty and wandering. The juxtaposition of

lyric and epistolary styles calls attention to the breakdown of a verifiable world as Clough’s

modern epic stands apart from either Roman cycle or Christian eschatology.

Chapter 3 examines how Eliot's narrative ingenuity in Adam Bede counters the

idealization of the rural past in pastoral writing. Set in the fictional village of Hayslope between

June 18, 1799 and June 1807, Adam Bede relates a multi-plot story of seduction and forgiveness

through a frequently outspoken narrator who addresses a contemporary audience in the 1850s but

20

provides a precise reckoning of the novel's eight-year-long chronology. Whereas pastoral genres

are typically thought to simplify social complexity by using static rural settings to stand for what

is ostensibly eternal in human nature, moments like Dinah Morris's Methodist sermon combine

the word-for-word experience of a historically specific religious performance—what I call "real

time"—with a stylized blend of third-person description and free indirect discourse. Such scenes

distinguish historical time from either a "real" past outside the fictional text, or the passage of

narrative time in its pages: instead constructing historical movement as a shared basis for

consciousness of and reflection on change.

My final chapter turns to serial publication as a structure for mediating and producing

temporal experience. Though Hardy is seldom singled out for his serializations, the weekly

publication of The Mayor of Casterbridge in The Graphic affected his efforts to write a tragedy

in novel form. Subtitled "A Story of a Man of Character," The Mayor of Casterbridge is the

seventh of Hardy's Wessex novels, a cycle of eleven novels set in a fictional county in the

eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A historical novel of sorts, Casterbridge spans the 30-odd

years that lead up to and follow the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, which liberalized the grain

market in Britain. Hardy lamented the serial demand for significant plot turns in each

installment, which detracted from his focus on a tragic arc. I show how the spread of action

across the novel’s original installments cultivates a cyclical temporality that corresponds with

Casterbridge’s geographical and historical location in the English countryside. This structure

leaves a discernible imprint on Hardy's revised edition, dramatizing Hardy's resistance to overly-

deterministic models of historical change.

When Dickens collected his sketches in a single volume, he viewed the project primarily

as a means to meet public demand for his work after the terrific success of The Pickwick Papers

21

(1836-7). Yet as my project shows, nineteenth-century literature's myriad experiments with

genre and temporality are not reducible to the effort to produce a marketable commodity on

schedule. In taking up “the way society moves” as the focus of their narrative art, these works

call attention to a rapidly advancing modernity that they do not call progress. Their novel

evocations of time stand between the historical romances of Scott’s era and the ever-widening

range of historically-sensitive literary experiments found in our post-millennial moment in the

fiction of writers as varied as Amitav Ghosh, Hilary Mantel, David Mitchell, and Zadie Smith.19

19e.g., Ghosh's The Hungry Tide (2004), Ibis Trilogy (2008-15); Mantel's Wolf Hall Trilogy (2009-);

Mitchell's Cloud Atlas (2004); Smith's White Teeth (2000).

22

Chapter 2:

The Prism of History: Simulated Modernity in Sketches by Boz

On the following morning, as Mr. Minns was sitting at his breakfast table, alternately biting his dry toast and casting a look upon the columns of the Times, which he always read from the title to the printer’s name, he heard a loud knock at the street-door; which was shortly afterwards followed by the entrance of his servant, who put into his hands a particularly small card, on which was engraved in immense letters, ‘Mr. Octavius Bagshaw, Amelia Cottage (Mrs. B.’s name was Amelia), Poplar-walk, Stamford-hill.’

‘Bagshaw!’ ejaculated Minns, ‘what the deuce can bring that vulgar fellow here!—say I’m asleep—say I've broken my leg—any thing."

-Charles Dickens, "A Dinner at Poplar Walk" (1833)

Charles Dickens's literary career began like most literary careers: in obscurity. Dickens's first

short story, "A Dinner at Poplar Walk," appeared anonymously in the December 1833 edition of

the Monthly Magazine. Later collected under the title "Mr. Minns and His Cousin," the tale is a

comedy of manners that centers on an unwanted visit.20 Octavius Bagshaw, an amiable but

uncouth grain merchant from Stamford Hill, shows up unannounced at the home of Augustus

Minns, a fastidious government clerk and middle-aged bachelor.21 Bagshaw hopes to foster a

relationship with his cousin that will benefit his son, for whom Minns has agreed to serve as

godfather; and, when he invites Minns to dinner the following week, the latter feels compelled to

attend. Yet on that day, a series of accidents, embarrassments, and inconveniences play out,

culminating with Minns losing his umbrella and missing the last coach to London. After walking

20 By the comedy of manners, I mean to refer to a satirical genre that uses irony, sarcasm, and wit to mock

the artifice of social convention. The tale is a genre of narrative fiction that looks back on exceptional events from the recent past. Their combination in "A Dinner at Poplar Walk" reflects the historicist position that genres are dynamic and porous sets of literary conventions that change over time.

21 Dickens changed Bagshaw's name to Budden for "Mr. Minns and His Cousin" in Sketches by Boz. Yet in both instances, the character's name signifies essential components of his character. Patten, for instance, notes that "[t]he vulgarity of the names Bagshaw and Budden [...] suggests their character: moneybags that do not get filled, hopes for a budding offshoot that are drowned by misfortune and miscalculation" (57). My parenthetical citations for "A Dinner at Poplar Walk" can be found in Dickens Uncollected. Subsequent parenthetical references cite Dickens Sketches.

23

five miles from Stamford Hill to Covent Garden in the rain, Minns resolves to draft his will the

next morning, taking special care to omit reference to Bagshaw and his family.

Delightfully compact, "A Dinner at Poplar Walk" condenses the social reality of London

in the 1830s through a combination of genres and forms including the comedy of manners and

the tale. In so doing, it offers an aesthetic response to a social landscape that is still in the

process of adjusting to the growth of a small but notable middle class, reminding us of the role

that literary conventions play in mediating our apprehension of the world.22 In the story,

Bagshaw, having recently "realized a moderate fortune by exercising 'the trade or calling' of a

corn-chandler," seeks to ensure that his son receive a better education than his own (3). Yet his

efforts to ingratiate himself with his affluent cousin fall short at every turn. From the "loud

knock" at the door of his cousin's home to his fawning toast of Minns before a crowd of

strangers, Bagshaw epitomizes a socially inept buffoon (4). Whether it is the awkward contrast

between his "particularly small" calling card and "the immense letters" it bears, or the way that

Bagshaw slices the ham at Minns' breakfast table "in utter violation of all established rules," his

actions provide a source of endless frustration for Minns (4-5). At the same time, we recognize

that Minns' "love of order" has neither made him happy nor a better person (3). In fact, it is

Minns' preoccupation with social propriety that turns out to be his Achilles heel, ensnaring him

in a dinner party he has no desire to attend. After a miserable evening at Stamford Hill, Minns'

22 As Gunn and Bell note, the longstanding view that the duel revolutions of industrialization and

urbanization prompted the rise of the middle class in British society between 1780 and 1850 is somewhat misleading. Most historians now view industrialization not as a "sharp burst" that occurred in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries but as a longer and more diffuse process (11). Moreover, they recognize that many of the social and cultural associations that are commonly connected with the rise of the middle class predate the arrival of urbanization. While there was an economic component to the development of the middle class, Gunn and Bell suggest that the emergence of middle-class identity is also closely tied to its growth as a political force in a "series of campaigns against the aristocracy, the Church of England, and the unreformed constitution" during the period between 1780 and 1850 (11).

24

decision to sever ties with his cousin yields a satisfying if somewhat ambivalent conclusion, one

in which social boundaries are critiqued and maintained.

"A Dinner at Poplar Walk" offers little hope, then, in the prospect of upward mobility and

personal improvement. It is more interested in mocking social types. In keeping with the

exaggerated vision of social reality found in the comedy of manners and the tale, Dickens places

his characters in a simulated urban landscape made up of simple, recognizable settings such as a

townhouse, a stagecoach, and a cottage. Instead of carefully mapping out the space between

Covent Garden and Stamford Hill, the narration conveys the distance between these points

through the frustration and woe that accompany Minns on his trek north. When Minns secures a

stagecoach, only to find it occupied by a woman and child whom he detests, the story projects

the arduous nature of his journey onto his immediate surroundings, equating the journey's length

with the actions of his insufferable traveling companions. In a similar vein, Minns' return to the

safety and comfort of his home in the final paragraph finds him doubling down on the life of

isolation and stoicism he has set out for himself from the very beginning. To the extent that

change occurs in the story, it is thus not with Dickens's characters but rather the reader, who is

encouraged to adopt the narrator's ironic take on social boundaries.

"A Dinner at Poplar Walk" received little attention upon its initial publication; however,

in the months that followed, Dickens went on to produce an ever-greater variety of work for

newspapers and literary magazines. Set in and around London and the south of England,

primarily in the 1830s, this work provided the foundation for what would become Sketches by

Boz (1833-6; 1839): a collection of short writing that includes vivid descriptions of real-life

events, locations, and practices; character sketches devoted to exaggerated social types; and tales

depicting the spectacular and absurd. By and large, these works shared the distinct narrative

25

style of Dicken's first tale, particularly in regards to the playful juxtaposition of order and chaos

that characterized its view of England's rapidly changing social landscape. This chapter

examines how the process of compiling and editing Sketches by Boz produced a method of

narrative representation that highlights the temporal multiplicity of British society, blurring the

boundaries between past, present, and future. As I will demonstrate, when Dickens published the

first single-volume edition of Sketches by Boz in 1839, he assembled fifty-six short works in an

episodic structure that combines the present-oriented temporality of the sketch with the

retrospective temporality of the tale.23 With no unified narrative to seam the pieces together,

Dickens offers a prismatic vision of a national culture transitioning between a well-worn literary

past and a radically transformed urban present. Read in isolation, street sketches such as

“Hackney-coach Stands” and tales of social mobility like “Mr. Minns and His Cousin” look

much like other fare one might find in newspapers and literary magazines. But by combining

these works in a single volume, Dickens ushers in a new way of negotiating the unpredictable

pace of London life in the 1830s.

Originating in the travelogues, visual art, and essay writing of the late eighteenth- and

early-nineteenth-centuries, the sketchbook is a distinctly ambiguous publishing format which

signifies nothing more than an edited collection of short works of fiction, typically made up of

literary sketches, scenes, and tales. Although there is nothing about the formal properties of the

sketchbook that requires readers to proceed in a linear fashion, Sketches by Boz encourages them

to move through the text in precisely this manner. Over the course of several hundred pages, the

collection follows Boz through his parish on the way to a greater exploration of London before

23 I take the sketch to refer to a brief form of primarily (though not always) descriptive fiction typically

written in the present tense and often published with little revision. For a brief history of the sketchbook and its relation to modernity and other short fiction, see Taylor 239-43 and Garcha 3-24.

26

breaking off into a series of character sketches and tales. Many of the collection's works could

be viewed as a kind of urban micro-history, describing time's effect on people, places, and

things. However, the blurring of the boundary between fact and fiction—both within and

between the collection's individual sections—produces a generic hybrid that is more than the

sum of its parts. This blurring contributes to the development of what I will be referring to in

this chapter as the collection's prismatic effects, wherein subtle shifts in narrative style and

perspective yield a radically different view of the world. As we will see, these effects are a

decentering agent, tempering the advance of an alienating modernity through the production of a

desire for the kind of communal identification that has long been associated with nineteenth-

century literature, and Dickens's fiction in particular.24

My reading of Sketches by Boz thus joins a small but notable group of literary critics

interested in the collection as a formal experiment that highlights questions of realist metonymy

and narrative authority. In Victorian Subjects (1991), J. Hillis Miller observed that the

overarching movement from "scene to character to tale" in the organization of the 1839 edition

mimics a similar movement within the individual works in the collection, underscoring the

unstable foundation on which representations of social reality are produced (131). Around that

same time, Audrey Jaffe's Vanishing Points: Dickens, Narrative, and the Subject of

Omniscience (1991) illustrated Boz's peculiar position as a semi-omniscient figure that parallels

the rise of sophisticated forms of social regulation. More recently, critics have examined

Sketches by Boz from the perspectives of book history, cosmopolitanism, and the collection's

relation to the Victorian novel. Danielle Coriale, for instance, argues that while Dickens's

decisions about how to organize the collection were based on his desire to "create the illusion of

24 See, for instance, Williams's discussion of the "knowable community" in Williams Country 165 and

Buzard's account of "the autoethnographic turn in the mid-Victorian novel" in Buzard 17.

27

immanent design, formal coherence, and narrative progression," the hybrid nature of the

collection produces an impression "that can best be thought of as a montage" (801, 808). Tanya

Agathocleous reads collections of urban sketches like Dickens's alongside nineteenth-century

panoramas as representational forms that turn the city into a metonym for the nation or the

world. And Amanpal Garcha juxtaposes the collection's fragmentary experience of time with the

moments of plotless description found in Dickens's early novel, Nicholas Nickleby (1838-9).25

While such readings inform my interpretation, the following builds more closely upon a

separate observation about Dickens's narrative style that runs from Raymond Williams to Ian

Duncan and the more recent work of Ruth Livesey. In The English Novel from Dickens to

Lawrence (1970), Williams first observed that the popular notion that "the traditional culture of

the English people was broken and disintegrated by the Industrial Revolution" has a tendency to

overlook how individuals responded to "the new conditions of life" (28). In Williams's view,

Dickens, like other English novelists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, repeatedly goes

"back to the decisive origins" of his historical epoch, to "the crises of the Industrial Revolution,

of democratic reform and of the movement from country to town" (14), wherein he "takes and

transforms certain traditional methods [...] into a dramatic method which is uniquely capable of

expressing the experience of living in cities" (32). In The Country and the City (1973), Williams

specifies that Dickens most frequently filters the vast space of London, with its various nooks

and crannies, through a romantic outlook that is more closely related to "the vision of Blake or of

Wordsworth, than to the later, more totalising visions of the period after 1870" (154). As such,

he contends that "[t]he full extent of Dickens's genius" can "only be realised when we see that for

25 In regards to Sketches by Boz, Garcha contends that Dickens's urban sketches are a response to the

"temporal hurriedness" of a modern culture structured on the logic of industrialization, granting privileged characters the agency to respond to the disciplining of time through their mastery of mobility while relegating the poor to a condition of stasis. See Garcha 118.

28

him, in the experience of the city, so much that was important, and even decisive, could not be

simply known or simply communicated, but had [....] to be revealed, to be forced into

consciousness" (165).

In the years since Williams's work, many critics have gone further than this gloss while

retaining Williams's underlying belief in genre's importance as a tool for mediating social reality.

Duncan, for instance, has cited novels like Barnaby Rudge (1841), Dombey and Son (1846-8),

and David Copperfield (1849-50) in support of his argument that the modern British novel is

founded on the movement from the gendered eighteenth-century Gothic romances of Radcliffe

and Walpole to the unique blend of romance and realism found in nineteenth-century authors

such as Scott, Dickens, Eliot, and Hardy.26 Livesey, meanwhile, has recently observed that the

"constant push and pull between past, present, and future" in The Pickwick Papers (1836-7) uses

the image of the stage coach as a "doubled figure that speaks of an appetite for republican

modernity [...] even as it evokes the picaresque eighteenth-century narrative forms of Smollett,

Sterne, and Fielding" (91). As these readings suggest, Dickens's literary style bears traces not

only of Blake and Wordsworth but of a long list of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers.

The use of these conventions is not a mere form of nostalgia, or a mirror image of the past;

rather, it is emblematic of a narrative style all its own.

Reading out from the work of Williams and more recent critics, the following starts from

the premise that despite Dickens's inclusion of recognizable people, places, and things, Sketches

by Boz is not a work of realism.27 Rather, the collection offers a highly stylized and layered

26 See Duncan 5. 27 Influential accounts such as Auerbach's Mimesis (1953) and Watt's Rise of the Novel (1957), describe

realism as a modern mode of representation that defines itself against classical and religious conventions. As Kreilkamp notes, Auerbach's and Watt's conceptions of realism describe "a world of secular (rather than divine or preordained) temporality, individual 'realistic' characters (rather than allegorical types or heroes), and narrative techniques synchronized to a modern world by capitalism and Protestantism's rhythms of everyday life (rather than the heroic or tragic modes of epic drama or poetry)" (38).

29

image of an unmappable, labyrinthine world containing hidden depths. This simulated urban

landscape is populated with relatively flat social types who participate in stories and tales that

bear a closer association to English folk culture than to the homogenous empty time of capitalist

modernity.28 By teasing out the uneasy relationship between the collection's content and its

manner of presentation, I demonstrate how the episodic structure of Sketches by Boz captures

Dickens's recognition of the fragility of England's social body at the start of his literary career.

In so doing, I suggest that the collection offers both an important foundation for and alternative

to the more unifying ends with which Dickens's novels are often associated, gesturing towards

the risks of alienation involved in the growth of a changing social landscape that exceeds the

limits of narrative representation in its action and scale.

I. A Patchwork of Periodical Writing

Like many edited collections, Sketches by Boz has a complicated publishing history.

Dickens was only twenty-one years old when he began work on the collection; however, the

England that he saw around him was vastly different from the country he had known as a child.

Decades of double-digit population growth increased the nation's size from roughly nine million

at the time of Dickens's birth in 1812 to a little more than twelve million at the start of the 1830s

(Wrigley and Schofield 208-09). Urbanization and industrialization led to the growth of factory

towns such as Birmingham, Liverpool, and Manchester, while London saw its population swell

from approximately one million people in 1812 to slightly more than one-and-a-half million

people in the 1830s (Ball and Sunderland 42). For some, these demographic shifts suggested an

intensification of the perception that England had become a society of strangers; however, pace

28 By homogenous empty time, I am referring to Benjamin's term for time organized in the ordered units of

the calendar and clock. See Benjamin 261-4.

30

Benedict Anderson's "imagined communities," an evolving print culture presented a path toward

collective identity.29 Between 1827 and 1832, a series of technological innovations drastically

altered the conditions of textual production and dissemination, making the way for the expansion

and diversification of literature and print journalism, particularly in the form of periodicals.30 By

1829, London's seven morning papers had a combined daily circulation of 28,000; Sunday

papers, meanwhile, had an aggregate sale of 110,000 copies a week—a number whose

importance is even more apparent if one keeps in mind the common practices of reading papers

aloud as well as lending out, trading, and recycling old issues.31 By the time the city's population

surpassed one and a half million people in 1831, print had become an influential medium for

constructing a sense of a shared popular culture.

Sketches by Boz emerged from this environment by chance. Dickens had held a number

of jobs as a law clerk and transcriptionist in Parliament and the Consistory Court of Doctors'

Commons before submitting his first tales anonymously to The Monthly Magazine and Bell's

Weekly Magazine in 1833 and 34. His early tales for Monthly went unpaid; however, the steady

outlet for his writing soon gave birth to his literary identity. Dickens signed the second

installment of his sixth tale, "The Boarding House," as "Boz" for the magazine's August 1834

edition, signaling a conscious shift towards a desire to gain public recognition for his writing.

Around this time, Dickens also began work as a political reporter for The Morning Chronicle,

where his duties soon expanded to include theatrical reviews and a reoccurring series of

sketches, attributed to Boz. Buried in the back pages of the 26 September 1834 edition, "Street

Sketches, No. 1—Omnibuses" was sandwiched between a range of articles: a review of a music

29 See Anderson 33-46. 30 Altick dubs this period "the first great cheap-literature craze" (332). 31 See Altick 323 and 329.

31

festival in Hull, a brief satirical account of an ex-minister of Charles X, and a report from the

Court of Common Council. The sketch described the development of a relatively new

phenomenon—the omnibus—a mode of transportation in which "passengers change as often in

the course of one journey as the figures in a kaleidoscope" (167).

What was most remarkable about the sketch was its method, in which Dickens relates the

humorous and peculiar encounters that Boz observes during a trip from Oxford Street on the

West End to Farringdon in the City of London. "Omnibuses" opens by contrasting the omnibus

(first introduced to London in 1829) with a more established mode of transport: the stagecoach.

Its focus then shifts to a particular bus driver, or "cad," whose disdain for his duties "is

constantly getting him into trouble, and occasionally into the house of correction" (167). The

cad's "great boast," we are told, "is, 'that he can chuck an old gn'lm'n into the buss, shut him in,

and rattle off, afore he knows where it's a-going to'—a feat which he frequently performs, to the

infinite amusement of every one but the old gentleman concerned" (168). The subsequent

description of Boz's trip humorously relates the mind games the cad plays with a particularly

impatient passenger as well as the verbal abuse he wields at other drivers who attempt to pick up

patrons on his route. The chaos of this journey is intensified by its brevity. Almost as soon as

the passengers embark, they arrive at their destination, alighting to set off on their own and

ending this peculiar ritual of modern life.

Dickens's high-powered blend of journalism and creative non-fiction proved a success.

"Omnibuses" captured the joy of people watching in a narrative form that seemed tailor-made for

the world it described. The discrete episodes within the sketch pause and leap forward like a

hulking machine, which, at 1,600-words, could easily be consumed within the pockets of time

created by a burgeoning commuter culture. In addition, the sketch possessed another

32

distinguishing feature: the now-embodied narrative voice of Boz, an eccentric man-on-the-street

who speaks through the editorial "we." Whereas Dickens's work for the Monthly Magazine

embodied the retrospective temporality of the tale, an established genre of narrative fiction that

looks back on "events completed, over and done with," Dickens's street sketch revised and

updated the literary sketches of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century for contemporary

life (Jameson 18). For the most part, sketches had previously been thought of as a rushed and

highly descriptive form of short writing that are often framed in the present tense, so as to

conjure associations with the painter's sketch as a visual art. Yet like the best work of his

predecessors, Dickens's sketch collapsed the boundary between fact and fiction, producing a

distinct blend of narration, description, and editorial commentary.32

Along with "Street Sketches," similar sketch series in Bell's Life in London and the

Evening Chronicle appeared in the coming months—with those in Bell's Life signed "Tibbs"—

accompanied by additional work in The Carlton Chronicle and The Library of Fiction.

Meanwhile, Dickens continued publishing tales, with most appearing in Monthly Magazine

throughout 1834 and 35. Authorized and unauthorized reprints of Dickens's writing also

abounded during this period, with parts of the collection appearing in roughly 140 different

newspapers and periodicals.33 Recognizing the commercial possibilities for this writing, John

Macrone published a two-volume set of Dickens's early work on Sketches by Boz on 8 February

1836, approximately a month before Chapman and Hall began serialization of The Pickwick

Papers (1836-7). Illustrated with George Cruikshank's woodcuts, this early version of Sketches

by Boz contained thirty-two previously published sketches and tales along with three new pieces:

"A Visit to Newgate," "The Black Veil," and "The Great Winglebury Duel."

32 See Garcha 4-6 and Taylor. 33 See Schlicke 5.

33

This version—commonly referred to as the "First Series"—appeared alongside the still-

fledgling installments of Pickwick, which struggled for sales up until Dickens introduced Sam

Weller, the quick-witted hackney coachmen, in the fourth installment of the novel in June

1836.34 Dickens's popularity grew immensely after Weller's appearance, transforming The

Pickwick Papers into a major cultural event and generating the demand for more works from the

inimitable Boz. Macrone and Dickens promptly planned for a "Second Series" of Sketches by

Boz featuring another two volumes. On 17 December 1836, Macrone released the first volume,

which consisted of seventeen previously published works alongside two substantially revised

periodical sketches and a new tale written specifically for the volume, "The Drunkard's Death."

However, shortly thereafter, Macrone sold the rights for the collection to Chapman and Hall,

who had Dickens reorganize the three existing volumes for serialization as a set of Periodical

Numbers (1837-9).35 With the success of Oliver Twist (1837-9) and Nicholas Nickleby,

Chapman and Hall soon published a single volume edition of Sketches by Boz in 1839 at the

conclusion of The Periodical Numbers, following the structure outlined in serialization.

In Dickens at Work (1982), Kathleen Tillotson notes that Dickens "made extensive cuts,

rewrote whole paragraphs, and made innumerable minute changes both of substance and style"

as he prepared the collection for different editions (39). In his earliest work on the "First Series,"

Dickens revised the introductions and conclusions to his newspaper sketches to eliminate the

editorial commentary in those paragraphs. He also cut lengthy passages of description,

sublimated topical references to politics, and subtly altered references to violence, obscene

34 Pickwick's early reception is recounted in Forster 47. 35 See Walder xlii.

34

language, and sexuality.36 The most significant changes came in the organization of The

Periodical Numbers and the 1839 edition. Whereas the "First" and "Second Series" of Sketches

by Boz for Macrone had a chaotic and haphazard method of organization, The Periodical

Numbers and 1839 edition saw Dickens move towards a new and more coherent structure in

which he divided the collection into four sections: "Seven Sketches from Our Parish," "Scenes,"

"Characters," and "Tales." This move completed the process of retroactively installing Boz as a

narrative authority in this far-flung collection of literary pursuits.

In its final form, the 1839 edition embodied what has since become recognized as the

sketchbook's unique resonance in the first half of the nineteenth century. In her writing on the

relationship between short fiction and the novel, Jenny Bourne Taylor contends that "from the

1820s through the middle part of the century, short fictions became the crucial means by which

'folk' cultures and traditions [...] were preserved and reworked by a self-consciously literate

culture" (241-42). For Taylor, collections such as Washington Irving's Sketch-Book of Geoffrey

Crayon, Gent. (1819-20), Walter Scott's Chronicles of the Canongate (1827), and Mary Russell

Mitford's Our Village: Sketches of Rural Character and Scenery (1824-32) "were crucibles for

generic experimentation and play" that "existed in tension with the novel during the period, at

once its offshoot and alternative—taken less seriously than its larger literary sibling, and

paradoxically both freer and more constrained by its smaller compass" (239). Frequently

organized in the manner of a framed collection or nesting set of stories which form an

"embedded chain of tales" (240), these works contributed to the construction of "a national

collective memory" while also harking back "to an older popular culture disseminated by

36 See Tillotson and Butt 44-53. Dickens efforts would culminate in heavily censored version of the

collection for the first Cheap Edition in 1850 that sought to appease the perception of a reading public that had grown more conservative in the years since the collection's publication.

35

broadsheets, ballads, and chapbooks" (242). In Sketches by Boz, these associations begin in the

opening pages with the construction of the parish as a site of meaning and depth.

II. The Parish as Symbolic Space

In his writing on beginnings, Edward Said observes that "[e]very writer knows that the

choice of a beginning for what he will write is crucial not only because it determines much of

what follows but also because a work's beginning is, practically speaking, the main entrance to

what it offers" (3). This is because the codex format, on which the modern book is based,

encourages readers to proceed in a linear manner even when a book does not appear to possess

an internal logic or developmental pattern. To do otherwise requires consciously breaking from

deeply ingrained habits. In Sketches by Boz, the decision to begin in the ambiguous geographic

setting of Boz's parish dramatizes the tension between communal identification and modern

alienation in a highly compressed form, providing a lens through which to interpret the rest of

the collection. Even more than the simulated modernity found in "A Dinner at Poplar Walk" and

"Omnibuses," Boz's parish is a blank slate: a fictional "anyplace" that exists on London's edge.

It does not refer to an actual parish or geographic location so much as the "idea" of a parish,

modeling contemporary institutions and personas in miniature. As the basic unit of local

government and a space that is both a part of but separate from national government, the parish

provides an abstracted setting onto which Dickens can project the forces of change. Through a

series of seven interconnected sketches, the collection's opening section combines the

conventions of established genres like village sketches and tales as it satirizes and critiques the

characters and institutions that make up England's contemporary social landscape.

36

"The Beadle—The Parish Engine—The Schoolmaster" opens "Seven Sketches from Our

Parish" with the memorable declaration: "How much is conveyed in those two short words—

'The Parish!' And with how many tales of distress and misery, of broken fortune and ruined

hopes, too often of unrelieved wretchedness and successful knavery, are they associated!" (17).

In the paragraph that follows, Dickens relates the story of a poor man "with small earnings, and a

large family" who "just manages to live on from hand to mouth" (17). One day, the man

discovers that his taxes have slipped into arrear, prompting the parish vestry to repossess his few

meagre belongings. When the man's wife—already ill—passes away shortly thereafter, the

parish buries her and takes custody of the family's children. Wracked with grief, the man "first

neglects, and afterwards cannot obtain, work," leaving him wholly dependent on public relief

(17). Finally, "when distress and drunkenness have done their work upon him, he is maintained,

a harmless babbling idiot, in the parish asylum" (17). With bitter irony, Boz notes that the parish

is made up of "[e]xcellent institutions and gentle, kind-hearted men" (17). The remainder of the

sketch goes on to satirize three parish authorities: the beadle, the master of the workhouse, and

the schoolmaster. Mr. Simmons, the beadle, anticipates Oliver Twist's Mr. Bumble in his self-

importance, cruelty, and incompetence: bragging to others of his association with the parish

board, "pompously" marshaling children into church, and failing to figure out how to operate the

pump on the parish fire engine in a time of need (17). The master of the workhouse, meanwhile,

is described as "an admirable specimen of a small tyrant: morose, brutish, and ill-tempered;

bullying to his inferiors, cringing to his superiors, and jealous of the influence and authority of

the beadle" (22). "The Pauper Schoolmaster," finally, is a figure of no particular arrogance or

cruel intention (23). Rather, he is an elderly man who has been driven to his position out of

economic necessity after a lifetime of failed speculation.

37

What unites these men is their symbolic association with Dickens's perception of the self-

serving, dehumanizing nature of local government, particularly as it was intensified under the New

Poor Law of 1834, a reform effort that began the process of combining parishes into "unions" for

the administration of relief. While the sketch does not mention the New Poor Law by name, it

first appeared in the 28 February 1835 edition of the Evening Chronicle, approximately six months

after the New Poor Law was given Royal Assent. There it played upon the biases and fears of the

Evening Chronicle's provincial, non-urban readership. Central to debates about the New Poor Law

was the Law's reliance on the Malthusian principle of "less eligibility," in which conditions were

deliberately kept harsh in order to deter all but the most destitute from claiming relief.37 Although

the New Poor Law would never become the totalizing disciplinary apparatus it is sometimes

portrayed as being (and although the old Poor Laws could also be quite cruel), the sketch's assertion

that the parish has not only failed to assist its citizens but also intensified their decline speaks to

the belief that the institutions that are supposed to protect the public have, in practice, become a

threat to its well-being. "Less eligibility" is not, in the sketch's view, a pragmatic way to cultivate

self-sufficiency in a rational society; it is a distinctly modern bureaucratic scourge that prevents

privileged individuals from identifying with those who are less fortunate.

The sketch's biting satire of parish authorities is intensified both through its highly

exaggerated social landscape and its reliance on the present tense. On the first point, the absence

of clearly identifiable geographic spaces in the sketch has a flattening effect on the parish,

providing a backdrop for the display of character. Yet this flattening is not, in and of itself, an

abdication of historicity (as it is sometimes claimed to be by critics who approach the subject

37 See, for instance, Goodlad's recapitulation of these debates in Literature 32-35.

38

from a Lukácsian perspective).38 Rather, it goes hand-in-hand with the sketch's particular use of

the present tense to yield a sense of the "dislocation of history" similar to that which Clare Pettitt

associates with the present tense in works like Dickens's A Christmas Carol (1843), The Chimes

(1844), and Dombey and Son (1846-8).39 For while the present tense is a common feature of the

literary sketch, and is frequently used in "Omnibuses" and other sketches in the volume, the

opening of Sketches by Boz finds Dickens tapping into its powers of estrangement. Transitions

between sections are abrupt and at times held together by little more than the imperative mood, a

kind of performative utterance, expressing the speaker’s desires and preferences—that is, in this

case, what the speaker would prefer the observer to do or believe in a perfect or ideal world.40 In

one instance, Boz implores his readers to "see" the beadle "on Sunday in his state-coat and

cocked –hat" and "[o]bserve" his "generalship" over the parish youth during a church service

(18, 20). Such narrative moves position the reader closer to Boz than the people, places, and

things he describes, underscoring the helplessness of the parish's most vulnerable residents

through its semi-omniscient, god-like perspective.

Stylistic changes in the sketches that follow intensify the section's palpable sense of being

caught up in the midst of historical change. Given the grim impression of modern life offered in

38 I am thinking here of Lukács's critique of Barnaby Rudge and A Tale of Two Cities (1859). See Lukács

244. 39 While contemporary reviewers of Dickens's writing often saw his use of the present tense as the sign of a

move towards the inclusion of blank verse, disrupting the solidity of generic boundaries between poetry and prose, Pettitt argues that it is more accurately understood as part of the search for a form through "which to exercise a temporary withdrawal from linear time in order to contemplate the place of individual experience in a universal 'history' (111). Specifically, Pettitt ties Dickens's use of the present tense in his work of the 1840s to a radical sense of the present as history found in experimental works such as Thomas Carlyle's The History of the French Revolution (1837) and Past and Present (1843), as well as the emergence of the Revolutions of 1848, which "reached from the Atlantic to the Ukraine, from the Baltic to the Mediterranean, catapulting millions of people across the Continent into political life and opening up Europe again to disorder and mobility after an interval of post-Napoleonic peace" (111).

40 In his explanation of the term, Austin states that the "performative utterance" is "used in a variety of cognate ways and constructions, much as the 'imperative' is. The name is derived, of course, from 'perform,' the usual verb with the noun 'action': it indicates that the issuing of the utterance is the performing of an action—it is not normally thought of as just saying something" (6-7).

39

the opening sketch, it is, for instance, somewhat surprising to see that the remainder of "Seven

Sketches from Our Parish" adopts a kinder and gentler tone. As it does so, it gives voice to

Williams's understanding of a "knowable community": a concept that, in Williams's words, "is

part of a traditional method—an underlying stance and approach—that [the writer] offers to

show people and their relationships in essentially knowable and communicable ways" (Country

165). Presented from the perspective of Boz relating public events, provincial rumors, and the

personal histories surrounding a relatively small and tight-knit group of characters, the remainder

of "Seven Sketches from Our Parish" contains multiple vignettes covering topics like

bureaucratic inefficiencies, neighborhood gossip, and private confessions. Although

occasionally tragic and resentful of society's neglect of the poor, they are more often than not

lighthearted, capturing the eccentricities of parish life through memorable figures and events.

The alienating effects of the modern world are thus, in this section, mediated through genre,

which codes alienation as but one part of contemporary English life. Through the jagged and

asymmetrical blending of genres, "Seven Sketches from Our Parish" produces a social

environment that is at once both strange and familiar and that testifies to a desire for a sense of

collective identity in the modern world, however difficult it may be to maintain.

One of the most important ways that the section testifies to this desire is through its

emphasis on the importance of sympathetic identification as a means to break through the social

abstraction of the relationships between individuals. In "Seven Sketches from Our Parish,"

sympathy is not only an individuated emotional state or reaction but also a recognizable set of

generic conventions rooted in tragic and sentimental literature. In "The Broker's Man," Dickens

profiles Mr. Bung, a man previously introduced in "The Election for Beadle." The sketch opens

with Boz characterizing Bung as an individual of "chequered description," who, despite his

40

status as a "careless, good-for-nothing, happy fellow," has watched his life fluctuate "between

poverty in the extreme" to "poverty modified" (43). But its main focus is a first-hand account of

Bung's previous experiences as an assistant to the debt collector, Mr. Fixem in a section titled

"Mr. Bung's Narrative." In his favorite memory, Bung is left to stand guard at the home of a

wealthy debtor until 150 pounds can be raised to pay off a debt. The client, who is hosting a

dinner party that evening, is shocked at what his guests might think and Bung is quickly dressed

as a servant for the event—a situation that produces much humor. Yet Bung notes that such

situations are rare. Far more common is the "dark" side of the picture: debtors whose suffering

produces the greatest sympathy and pity (47).

In his narrative, Bung describes the execution of two poorer clients' debts. In the first

instance, an abjectly poor family owing "half a year's rent," a pittance of "two pound ten" is sent

to the workhouse for failure to pay (47). In the second instance, a family with an equally small

debt—"a year's rent in arrear"—is also at risk of loss of property (49). When Bung enters the

second household with Fixem, the family's respectability surprises him. Inside, they encounter a

woman who has maintained the order of her home despite her husband's illness. When it comes

time to make an inventory of the family's possessions, Bung, moved by the woman's situation,

crosses a beloved miniature that belonged to her father off of his list in the hope that she can

keep it regardless of what may come. Shortly thereafter, he is left in possession of the home for

three long days while the woman attempts to raise the money needed to pay down the bill.

As Bung waits for the woman to pay her debts, he contemplates the helpless position of

the woman's husband and the devoted care his wife provides, noting that:

"She had so long anticipated all his wishes, and acted for him, that he was a lost man

when left to himself. I used to think when I caught sight of her, in the clothes she used to

41

wear, which looked shabby even upon her, and would have been scarcely decent on any

one else, that if I was a gentleman it would wring my very heart to see the woman that

was a smart and merry girly when I courted her, so altered through her love for me." (51)

When the woman returns home successfully, the family is overjoyed and begins "making

preparations for the first comfortable meal they had had since the distress" began; however,

Bung, taking a wider view of the situation, hints that she secured the money through prostitution,

noting "if ever I saw death in a woman's face, I saw it in hers that night" (51). In the final

paragraph, the sketch pulls the reader back from Bung's first-person narration to his conversation

with Boz, confirming Bung's suspicion: in the coming month, "the family grew more

prosperous, and good fortune arrived. But it was too late. Those children are motherless now,

and their father would give up all he has since gained—house, home, goods, money: all that he

has, or ever can have, to restore the wife he has lost" (52).

While no less touching than the story of the anonymous man that opens the collection, the

perception of alienation changes as "Seven Sketches from Our Parish" moves from Boz's semi-

omniscient perspective of the more descriptive sketches to Bung's first-person narration in this

hybrid of sketch and tale. This generic shift goes hand-in-hand with a claim for the importance

of sympathetic identification. Bung—whose name is a direct reference to a cork stopper for a

jug or a cask—is described at the start of the sketch as an individual who, in Boz's words, has a

tendency to "float, cork-like, on the surface, for the world to play at hockey with " (43).

However, here his character comes to display compassion and seriousness, suggesting his

difference from Mr. Simmons, his predecessor as Beadle. Without providing an idealistic or

utopian outcome to the question of inequality, the sketch implies that the abstraction of social

relations in a modern urban landscape has not completely done away with a desire for

42

connection. This comforting thought, while present in the collection's initial periodical

publication, takes on added significance in the sketchbook form, where it is arranged so as to

occupy a position of prominence alongside other parish sketches at the start of the volume.

III. Beyond the Parish Limits

If "Seven Sketches from Our Parish" dramatizes Dickens's perception of the risk that is

presented by the acceleration of modernity in miniature, the remainder of Sketches by Boz

expands upon this theme more broadly, using the episodic structure of the sketchbook to turn

from the abstracted space of the parish to a broader view of England's geography and culture.

"Scenes," the collection's next section, shifts our focus from the parish to London. The twenty-

five sketches in this section contain far more individual works than any other section in the

volume and focus on specific places, events, and institutions in and around the city. Chapters

describing Scotland Yard, Seven Dials, Monmouth Street, Doctors' Commons, the Thames

River, Astley's Amphitheatre, Greenwich Fair, Vauxhall Gardens, Parliament, and Newgate

Prison are joined with more generic subjects like "The Streets," "Gin Shops" and the

aforementioned "Omnibuses." Many of the works in this section describe recent historical

changes. Still more, however, provide a detailed description of the habits and values of London's

residents. As in the preceding section, Dickens describes events that are, by turns, comic, tragic,

and melodramatic, often drifting into satire; however, the absence of a personal connection

between Boz and the people he encounters signals a tonal shift. Whereas Boz positions himself

as an integral member of the parish in the opening section through his access to detailed

43

information pertaining to individual residents, "Scenes" frequently finds him occupying the

position of the flâneur, a detached observer and connoisseur of urban life.41

The section opens with a paired set of highly descriptive sketches, "The Streets—

Morning" and "The Streets—Evening," which set the tone for the remainder of the section by

creating a sense of the dynamic interplay between London's daily rhythms and its broader

changefulness. In the first sketch, Dickens describes the slow transition of night to day,

relegating his narrator to a fixed vantage point from which to examine the world around him.

Concrete, but isolated, images are used to register a sense of the street's atmosphere. These

disparate images are organized through the slow but steady passage of time, which Dickens

records through repeated references to the sun's rise and the movement of minutes and hours.

Time's ceaseless flow—presented through naturally occurring Circadian rhythms and the

movement of clock time—invest the sketch with a form of pure description which is among the

most experimental in the collection. Once the "activity of NOON" leaves the streets "thronged

with a vast concourse of people," punctuating the end of the first sketch, the second sketch jumps

forward in time both in hours and months, shifting from summer to the dead of winter (74). Like

"The Streets—Morning," it tracks the ebb and flow of London's crowds; however, whereas its

predecessor is rooted in a fixed vantage point, the narrative arc of "The Streets—Evening" is

both spatial and temporal. As the evening wears on, the sketch moves from the "larger and better

kinds of streets" and "suburbs," where neighbors converse while purchasing goods from the

door-to-door muffin and beer sellers to the more economically distressed areas "in the vicinity of

the Marsh-gate and Victoria theatre, where "flat fish oyster, and fruit venders linger hopelessly"

41 Benjamin presents the strolling, sauntering figure of the flâneur as emblematic of modernity in "On

Some Motifs in Baudelaire." See Benjamin 170-4. Critics such as Jaffe and Garcha have since asserted a connection between Boz and flâneurism.

44

in search of customers (75-6). The closing paragraphs find our observer moving to a raucous

musical gathering held in the top floor of a public house.

More than any of the other chapters in the collection, Dickens's paired street sketches

embody the genre's emphasis on description. Yet as in "Seven Sketches from Our Parish," which

contains few "pure" sketches, these generic associations break down in subsequent chapters.

"Scotland Yard," for instance, describes the transformation of the St. James district in

Westminster following the construction of the "new" London Bridge in 1831, condensing a

decade-long transition from an older economy centered on labor and established trades to a

newer economy organized around the habits of wealthier patrons. While the broader trends

described in the story have their root in fact, the manner of representation contains the flat and

highly caricatured social types found in sketches like "Omnibuses," channeling our attention

toward the neighborhood's transformation. Prior to the bridge's construction, Boz tells us that

Scotland Yard is populated entirely by workingmen (and presumably, their families). Amongst

the neighborhood's "original settlers" are a tailor, a publican, two eating-house keepers, a fruit

pie maker, and "a race of strong and bulky men" who work as coal heavers, repairing "to the

wharfs . . . every morning, about five or six o'clock, to fill heavy wagons with coal" and cart

them off to distant places in the country (85). In the evening, the men congregate at Scotland

Yard's public house, where they "tell old legends of what the Thames was in ancient times, when

the Patent Shot Manufactory wasn't built, and Waterloo-bridge had never been thought of,"

noting their concern for "where all this would end"—a direct reference to the group's resistance

to industrial and urban development (87).

When the men learn of the Lord Mayor's plan to build a new London bridge, they are

initially shocked. The oldest coal heaver in the group fears that "the moment the piers [of the old

45

London bridge] were removed, all the water in the Thames would run clear off, and leave a dry

gulley in its place" (87). The tailor, meanwhile, nods towards his knife at the table and urges the

men to "wait and see what happened," adding—in a boozy flourish—that he wouldn't be

surprised if someone assassinated the Lord Mayor (88). But despite the group's indignation, the

bridge is completed without incident, leaving Boz to marvel that "We marked the advance of

civilization, and beheld it with a sigh" (88). With the arrival of the new bridge, Scotland Yard

witnesses a dramatic increase in traffic and population. Government officials find the

neighborhood a "near cut" to Parliament, prompting "many other foot passengers" to copy their

route (88). New eating-houses, a new market, and the founding of the Metropolitan Police

Commissioner's Office at 4 Whitehall Place follow suit. For the neighborhood's longstanding

residents, the most significant change comes with the loss of the old public house, which is

"converted into a spacious and lofty 'wine vaults,'" dispersing its old inhabitants and leaving "but

one old man, who seemed to mourn the downfall" of the neighborhood (89).

Emptied of its inhabitants and retailored according to fashion, Boz suggests that Scotland

Yard—a place that was a living embodiment of "old customs" and "ancient simplicity"—has

become a site of progress (89). At the close of the sketch, he wonders if the old neighborhood

will even be recognizable in the future, writing that:

A few years hence, and the antiquary of another generation looking into some mouldy

record of the strife and passions that agitated the world in these times, may glance his eye

over the pages we have just filled: and on all his knowledge of the history of the past, not

all his black-letter lore, or his skill in book-collecting, nor all the dry studies of a long

life, or the dusty volumes that have cost him a fortune, may help him to the where about,

46

either of Scotland-yard, or of any one of the landmarks we have just mentioned in

describing it. (90)

Such an ending is significant not only for the dynamism that is directly represented in the change

between the past, present, and future but also for the more indirect mediation of England's

changing social landscape. In acknowledging the fleeting nature of time, Boz presents a vision

of history that is not altogether different from that definition Walter Benjamin puts forward in his

famous theses, casting history as "the subject of a structure whose site is not homogenous, empty

time, but time filled by the presence of the now" (261). History is—in the sketch—a highly

contingent and fickle discourse about the past that contemporary powers use to construct a sense

of modern collective identity. Anticipating the Benjaminian notion that "[t]here is no document

of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism" (256), Boz sees the old

Scotland Yard resting at the margins of history, ostensibly accessible to "the antiquary of another

generation" but most likely lost to the ravages of time (90). To the extent that this prediction can

be halted, it comes through the sketch itself, which draws on the narrative conventions of the

tale, a form of folklore not altogether different from "the old legends" exchanged between the

men of the public house before Scotland Yard's transformation. "[B]rush[ing] history against the

grain," the sketch preserves the old men of Scotland Yard as a kind of ghost or spirit whose

superstitions and direct face-to-face relations are radically out of step with the changing world

(Benjamin 257). Their existence is thus itself an extension of the kinds of concerns found in

"Seven Sketches from Our Parish," speaking to an important continuity that runs throughout the

collection as a whole. In the face of a social landscape defined by its capacity for change, traces

of long-established literary conventions serve a stabilizing function for calling attention to a

rapidly advancing modernity that the collection does not fully equate with progress.

47

IV. Conclusion

As Sketches by Boz proceeds to its more overtly fictional sections, "Characters" and "Tales,"

Dickens describes holiday celebrations, scenes of violence and abjection, strange occurrences,

failed romance, and social satire. Some chapters, such as "The Boarding House," are once again

set in contemporary London; however, many pull the reader to suburban and rural settings, often

set in the past. "The Tuggs's at Ramsgate," for instance, takes place in the fashionable seaside

town of Ramsgate and opens with the patented fairy-tale line "Once upon a time" (586). So too,

"The Black Veil" describes a suspenseful story of death and shame in a provincial town at the

turn of the century. "The Great Winglebury Duel," meanwhile, relates a humorous case of

mistaken identity that has achieved legendary status in the fictional town of Great Winglebury.

The collection's final chapter, "The Drunkard's Death," caps off this journey with the dark

and cautionary tale of an alcoholic named Warden. First conceived as the final selection for

volume one of the never completed "Second Series," the tale also closes the Periodical Numbers

and the 1839 edition. Its consistent position at the end of various iterations of Sketches by Boz

signal its thematic power in relation to the collection as a whole. Our first exposure to Warden's

story comes with the narrative's depiction of his wife's deathbed in the family's lodging in the

slum of Whitefriars, where he briefly emerges from a nearby tavern to watch her passing before

returning back to the tavern to drink. Thereafter, the tale leaps forward in time: Warden's three

sons escape his abusive grasp, leaving his daughter to care for him. One day, when his daughter

is sick, Warden returns home to find William, his only remaining son, at home, desperately in

need of shelter from the law. Warden reluctantly provides shelter; however, when he leaves the

home in search of food and medicine, he is approached by two men searching for William in a

48

public house. The men fill Warden with alcohol and he quickly gives up the information. After

William is apprehended, Warden's daughter leaves him, initiating his rapid decline into

homelessness and ever-greater drunkenness. Weary from wandering and dazed from

hallucinations, he resolves to commit suicide. But when he tosses himself into the Thames, he is

instantly overcome with a new desire to live. Yet it is too late. Warden drowns and is washed

ashore, where he is found a week later and given a pauper's burial.

In a collection that offers so much in the realm of comedy and satire, the prominence of

tragedy in the opening and closing works is striking. Like the collection's opening sketch, in

which the inability of parish authorities to break with the Malthusian principle of less eligibility

that turns a minor infraction into a life-altering tragedy, "The Drunkard's Death" lingers in the

reader's mind as a moment of structural importance. As Sketches by Boz throws these stories into

relief against a more playful and stylized environment, it encourages readers to come to grips

with the reality of modern alienation while, at the same time, suggesting the possibilities for

something like a knowable community that might offset this feeling. This effect is less the result

of any one work than the peculiar thematic links that emerge from the collection's episodic

narrative structure, the melding of literary genres, and the persistent feeling that Dickens's

characters are somehow out of step with the world around them. These practices place the reader

in a state of constant movement, which, over the duration of the collection, compresses and gives

expression to the dynamic relationship between past and present of a culture in the midst of

seismic transformation. Ultimately, this kaleidoscopic view of London's changefulness both

mediates history and is itself a product of history, calling attention to the narrative possibilities

afforded by a publishing world in a state of flux.

49

Chapter 3:

Lyric Moments and the Historicity of the Verse Novel: Amours de Voyage Just beyond the edge of the failed romance plot of Arthur Hugh Clough's verse novel,

Amours de Voyage (1849; 1858), lies a persistent thematic preoccupation with the accretion of

history. Near the end of the poem's first canto, Claude, an Oxford-educated skeptic, finds

himself reflecting on the twin figures of Castor and Pollux, the colossal pair of horse tamers who

flank the Fontana dei Dioscuri in Rome. The fountain is a blend of salvaged antiquities and

copies of historical sculptures that stand beneath a forty-eight-foot-high obelisk adorned with a

cross. As in the case of many Roman sites, the cross indicates the effort of papal authorities to

mark the spiritual dominance of the Christian God over the Pagan statues below. Yet for Claude,

this peculiar act of cultural appropriation falls short. Writing to his friend Eustace back in

London, Claude addresses the statues in a moment of lyric contemplation:

Ye, too, marvellous Twain, that erect on the Monte Cavallo

Stand by your rearing steeds in the grace of your motionless movement,

Stand with your upstretched arms and tranquil regardant faces,

Stand as instinct with life in the might of immutable manhood,—

O ye mighty and strange, ye ancient divine ones of Hellas,

Are ye Christian too? (I.186-91)

The poetic force of this passage derives in part from its use of anaphoras. While anaphoric

repetition may highlight conviction, its rhythms can also provide a means to generate and

interrogate ambiguity.42 In this instance, Claude's repetition of "Stand" in three successive lines

42 Near the end of In Memoriam (1849; 1850), for instance, Lyric 106 finds Tennyson using the word

"Ring"—often in the form "Ring out"—to open twenty-two of the lyric's thirty-two lines, to call attention to the role of church bells in marking the end of another year in the poem's mourning and another step closer to the catharsis

50

calls attention to the radical alterity of classical myth by effectively bringing the motion of the

poem to a halt. Paralleling the "motionless movement" of the statues themselves, Claude's use of

anaphora arrests the reader's progression while nevertheless moving onward in textual space,

highlighting the slow and ongoing transformation of objects that initially appear static.

From this moment of temporal arrest, the second half of this sixteen-line epistle extends

the radical alterity of Castor and Pollux to other statues that the Catholic Church has

appropriated. Addressing the figures of "Juno and Ceres, Minerva, Apollo, the Muses and

Bacchus" (I.196) that "encircle the walls of the stately Vatican chambers" (I.195), Claude

expands upon his inquiry through a similar arrangement of anaphora and caesura, asking:

Ye unto whom far and near come posting the Christian pilgrims,

Ye that are ranged in the halls of the mystic Christian pontiff,

Are ye also baptized? are ye of the Kingdom of Heaven?

Utter, O some one, the word that shall reconcile Ancient and Modern!

Am I to turn me for this unto thee, great Chapel of Sixtus? (1.197-201)

Whereas the previous use of "Stand" incorporates repetition to arrest the listener in time, here

anaphora calls attention to the display of the statues in relation to their audience and curator—

that is, both the throngs of "Christian pilgrims" who come to study them and the "mystic

Christian pontiff" whose authority they should solidify. The use of not one but two questions in

the caesuric break that follows suggests that this process is incomplete, an idea that is further

extended in the subsequent lines' cry for "the word that shall reconcile Ancient and Modern!" In

the poem's final line, Claude's reference to the Chapel of Sixtus, or Sistine Chapel—one of the

brought of the second coming of "the Christ that is to be" (106.32). Elsewhere, Dickens twenty-one references to London's fog in the opening paragraphs of Bleak House (1852-3) subtly position the fog as both a suffocating atmosphere and a metaphor for obscured relations between characters that the novel's plot will clarify.

51

signature accomplishments of the Italian Renaissance—alludes to the possibility of such a

fusion. Yet by ending the poem in the form of a question, he hints at his own doubt in the Sistine

Chapel's ability to extend that fusion into the present.

In this sense, Claude's writing can be said to display a profoundly historicist suspicion

towards the symbolic logic by which the Catholic Church has sought to integrate Roman history

and culture into its identity. Rather than accept the power that the Church claims over the art and

architecture of ancient Rome through these symbolic "conversions," Claude's lyric meditations

call attention to the very assertion of that power as a product of history that is strangely out of

step with his contemporary moment. As the ensuing letters make clear, Claude writes from the

immediate aftermath of the Revolutions of 1848, which established the short-lived Roman

Republic from February to July 1849 and sent Pope Pius IX behind the walls of the Vatican from

his previous home in the Quirinal Palace, adjacent to the Fontana dei Dioscuri. To look on the

Church's commandeering of classical art and architecture from Claude's position is thus to look

back on a worldview that persists into the present without carrying the meaning it once did. The

dominance exerted through symbols like the cross above Castor and Pollux is revealed to be the

product of a previous moment in time.

Drawing upon the heightened consciousness of time that is produced through such

passages, this chapter considers the temporal effects of Clough's lyric style on the historicity of

Amours de Voyage as a genre-defying verse novel which combines elements of lyric poetry with

other genres including mock-epic, the comedy of manners, and historical romance. Paralleling

Clough's own travels, Amours de Voyage takes place on a transnational stage against the

backdrop of the French Siege of Rome in 1849.43 In the course of the poem, Clough describes

43In April 1849, Clough went to Rome, just as the political situation was coming to a head. Several of

Claude's letters to Eustace in the poem are derived from Clough's actual letters. Phelan, for instance, notes that

52

Claude's experiences as he wrestles with questions of love, duty, faith, and history while falling

in amongst a group of English travelers in Rome. The group includes George Vernon, a college

classmate (though not necessarily a friend); the Trevellyns, an upwardly mobile middle-class

family who are, in Claude's words, "bankers very likely, not wholly / Pure of the taint of the

shop;" and the Ropers, Ms. Roper, who appears to have been the Trevellyn girls' governess and

accompanies her invalid brother (I.125-6). For Claude, who appears restless at the start of the

poem, his powerlessness and indecision in the face of both the French occupation and his

strained friendship with the Trevellyns' daughter, Mary, accelerates a philosophical search for

truth in moments of lyric reflection like those outlined above. Such moments are juxtaposed

between letters and fragments from a range of other voices, yielding abrupt stylistic shifts within

and between passages.

These shifts remind us that, as a genre, the verse novel is perhaps best defined by its

proclivity for experimentation, re-envisioning poetry's connection to the present through a

mixing of poetic and prose conventions. In his Introduction to the poem, Joseph Phelan writes

that "[t]here is no direct precedent in English poetry for Amours de Voyage's eclectic mixture of

styles and genres;" the poem "is a hybrid of ancient and modern, formal and colloquial, poem

and novel," (76). The core of Amours de Voyage consists of fifty-six letters primarily written in

English hexameters across five cantos and interspersed with elegiac stanzas from an unnamed

speaker. Whereas the hexameter is the metrical line of classical epic and the canto the method of

organization used in the Christian epics of medieval Italy, elegiacs had previously been used to

illustrate the epistemological difficulties of writing epic poetry, alternating between hexameter

Claude's letter to Eustace at the start of the fighting in Canto II, Letter V is based on a letter Clough sent to A.P. Stanley on May 24th, 1849. See Phelan's footnotes to Amours 101.

53

and pentameter in works such as Ovid's Amores (16 BCE). In Clough's poem, these shifts

highlight the absence of an objective, epic authority through an awkward and deliberately

inconsistent meter, which is further accentuated through the narratological uncertainty that the

poem creates through its use of the epistolary form.44 In presenting the impressions of Claude,

Mary, and Georgina as both the subject of expression and the object of analysis, Clough

undermines an authoritative voice and forces the reader to treat the poem as a collection of

documents which contains misperceptions that are only visible in hindsight.45

The specific issue that I wish to explore here is how Clough's poem uses the tension

between lyric and narrative modes to carve out a new role for Victorian poetry in the mediation

of history. Although lyric is often thought of as a present-oriented style of poetry that relates the

feelings and experiences of a first-person speaker within a succinct form, I suggest that Amours

de Voyage calls upon the lyric mode's ability to transcend the immediacy of its speaker's position

and accentuate our impression of historical processes in ways that narrative cannot.46 As in the

44 The modern epic is something of a paradox. Whereas classical epics are typically understood as "unified

works structured on classical principles of duration, setting, or moral theme," modern epic contains no such power (Tucker "Epic" 26). Historically literary scholars have often linked epic's decline with the emergence of new empirical disciplines like archaeology, geology, historiography, political economy, and the higher criticism, which drastically changed the way in which writers and individuals conceived of the past. In the nineteenth century, it increasingly seemed that history was not unified but rather open to multiple and often conflicting interpretations. If epic poetry had traditionally been understood as a genre that could function, in Moretti's words, as "a veritable encyclopaedia of a society's own culture: a storehouse of its essence and basic knowledge," by the middle of nineteenth century, the underlying assumptions of that perspective were beginning to be called into question (37). Buckland and Vaninskaya suggest that "if history was contingent, unpredictable, and multiple, it might no longer be 'epic' at all" (165). In addition to Tucker Epic, see Phelan Introduction 77 regarding the association between cantos and the Christian epic poets of medieval Italy. As LaPorte 124-5 notes, Clough's use of elegiac couplets to illustrate the difficulty of writing epic poetry has its origins in Ovid.

45 Thus, Armstrong describes the collection as "a series of documents which the reader edits—and re-edits—as one letter succeeds another" (199). B. Hardy, meanwhile, sees the poem drawing upon a larger trend in which Clough's verse novels incorporate "the non-progressive conversation we find in [his] shorter lyrics. Like the lyrics they accrete contrarieties and qualifications, and do not move towards climax and conclusion" (41). She notes that the lyrical dimensions of Claude's "introspective reverie" provides a means to think "out and round and through his passion until action is postponed, inhibited, and impeded," while the hybridity of the poem's narrative frame provides a "more general sense of the largeness of the world, outside Claude's introspection" (43-4).

46 Culler, for instance, has argued that "[f]iction is about what happened next; lyric is about what happens now" (Theory 226). His emphasis on the "lyric now" takes on a slightly different dimension in the work of

54

case of Claude's reflections on the accretion of history in the Fontana dei Dioscuri, Clough's turn

to lyric frequently underscores the gradual flow of historical processes that are barely perceptible

from within the here-and-now moment of "everyday" life. The juxtaposition of these moments

with the perspectives of other letters from Claude, Mary, and her sister Georgina create a

narrative dialectic wherein the first-hand observations of recent counterrevolutionary events are

thrown into relief against Claude's reflections on a much longer process of cultural and religious

change. Through these forms of literary representation, the poem presents a variegated view of

the relationship between concepts like time and change, demonstrating, for instance, that some

kinds of change are immediately apparent while others require the cultivation of a lyric

perspective.

My interest in the dynamic temporal work of Claude's lyric interludes thus reassesses the

notion of poetry's historicity found in the work of Georg Lukács, for whom lyric lacked the

ability of the novel to channel the "newly-awoken historical feeling" of British and European

literatures after the French Revolution into "a broad, objective, epic form" (32). While Lukács

celebrated the Byronic hero as "a lyrical protest" against "the degrading, all-levelling prose of

rising capitalism," he suggested that its subjective qualities presented an artistic obstacle not

found in the historical romances of Byron's contemporary, Walter Scott (33-4). Yet Lukács did

not consider the Victorian verse novel, a complex and historically neglected genre of poetry

appearing between the 1840s and 70s in England in response to the novel's growing hegemony.47

Brewster, who describes the lyric moment as a "suspension or interlude," which provides "a unique intensification of literary language distinct from everyday experience" (6).

47 Felluga argues that the novel's growing hegemony left Victorian poets with a choice: on the one hand, they could accept the marginalization of poetry as a virtue or, on the other hand, they could adapt to market demand by mimicking "those characteristics that made the novel such a popular success (narrative sequentiality, realistic description, historical referentiality, believable characters, dramatic situations, fully realized dialogism, and, above all, the domestic marriage plot)" ("Verse" 171). Some scholars have tried to explain the distinction between Victorian poetry's embrace of marginalization and its interest in the novel through what has been called "the antithetical poetics" of Clough and his close friend Matthew Arnold. See Deering.

55

Recent assessments of the verse novel by scholars such as Natasha Moore and Stefanie

Markovits have called attention to the genre's unique affordances in (among other things)

highlighting an experience of temporal duration, encompassing broad expanses of space, and

responding to the rhythms and flows of modernity.48 These features are important because, as

Lukács observes in The Historical Novel (1937), literature's historicity does not derive from truth

claims related to the accuracy of the world depicted; rather, it involves the use of literary means

to convey a sense of social movement and connection between periods. In this respect, the

awareness for historical processes that Claude generates through his moments of lyric reflection

can be used to highlight Amours de Voyage's position as a historical novel in the Lukácsian

sense.

To date, discussion of Amours de Voyage and history has centered on the immediate

political context of the French Siege of Rome, the civic republicanism of Claude's letters, and the

poem's conflicted relationship with epic poetry (a feature it shares with other verse novels).

Carol Rumens has suggested that "The political situation is not simply a backdrop to Claude's

emotional and intellectual journey: it helps to drive it." Whereas Claude begins the poem as an

idle traveler who is bored with Rome and the people he finds there, over the course of the

narrative he becomes an insightful observer of the evolving political situation around him,

48 Moore observes that the conception of the world and its processes as knowable and verifiable had been a

mainstay of epic poetry and the novel's proto-realistic genres in the early nineteenth century. But by the 1850s, the underlying assumptions of such genres were beginning to be called into question as the "exponential increase of more or less everything—population, cities, books, ideas, technologies, even of the world itself, thanks to the burgeoning of both empire and tourism" combined with "the erosion of a coherent cultural and religious framework" to produce a distressingly fragmented view of society amongst many novelists, poets, and intellectuals, yielding formal experiments like the verse novel (181). Markovits, meanwhile, has shown how the Victorian verse novel drew upon, and contrasted itself with "the Romantic predilection for organic unity in long narrative poetry" through a self-conscious form of reflexivity that allowed writers to use "the generic indeterminacy of the verse-novel to contest social as well as literary norms, expressing a broad range of cultural concerns that prominently included, but were not limited to, anxieties surrounding gender and marriage" (Victorian 7). Her analysis of verse novels from the Brownings, Clough, Tennyson, and others take up topics such as "the longue durée of marriage" and the symbolic relationship between travel and romantic love.

56

actively summarizing and critiquing the action (and inaction) of individuals and foreign

governments. At the same time, Claude's relation to these events clearly differs from the highly

mobile protagonists of the Waverley novels, which Lukács finds so crucial to Scott's narration of

historical processes. Matthew Reynolds notes that Claude is unable to "marry the girl, fight for

liberty, and make a daring escape with Garibaldi" (146).49 While critics disagree over the

political implications of this point, many have suggested that this shift is indicative of the notion

that the epic heroism still present in Scott's fiction can no longer be achieved in Clough's mid-

century moment.50

But while these political and generic influences on Amours de Voyage are important, they

are not the primary means by which Clough's poem calls attention to historical movement. Far

more important is the poem's depiction of a much longer process of cultural and spiritual

evolution which unites Italy's ancient history with the modern present. While sites like the

Fontana dei Dioscuri do not provide Claude with an easy solution for how to come to terms with

his failed love life and position in solidarity with the Roman Republic on the losing side of

history, they do foster his appreciation for a more fluid understanding of time as unfolding and

contingent. From this expanded worldview, Claude generates the kind of transcendent

standpoint he finds necessary for the negotiation of his mid-Victorian experience. Readers, in

turn, are prompted to take note of historical processes that are not easily represented in a strictly

49 In accounting for this difference from Scott, Reynolds places Amours de Voyage within a broader group

of Victorian poems interested in "creating comparatively general and enduring myths or archetypal narratives which, while having relevance to contemporary affairs, might also throw light on many other, past and future events" (18).

50 In her analysis of the poem, Markovits, for example, downplays Clough's political commitments, contending that he "knew that his was a debased revolutionary age, where real change occurred on the Exchange" ("Arthur" 458). Weiner, meanwhile, has attempted to restore the poem's engagement with republican political thought, suggesting that the political disappointments of Amours de Voyage are representative of "the radical anti-didactism of republican verse during the 1840s and early 1850s" (131). Reading the poem alongside Walter Savage Landor's response to the French and Italian Revolutions of 1848, Weiner sees both poets using their work to negotiate the gap between republican political ideals and contemporary political struggles.

57

narrative form. Thus, while Lukács was reluctant to acknowledge lyric poetry's capacity to

convey a sense of historicity—and famously characterized the Revolutions of 1848 as a

watershed moment that narrowed the prospects for a historically dynamic realism—Amours de

Voyage highlights the historical novel's health in the mid-Victorian era in the form of the verse

novel.

I. "All the incongruous things of past incompatible ages": Blending Lyric and Narrative Modes

The opening lines of Amours de Voyage (1849; 1858) seem designed to disorient.

Following a string of epigraphs that quote Shakespeare's Twelfth Night (1601-2), an anonymous

French novel, a Latin phrase, and Horace's Epodes (29 BCE), an elegiac stanza propels the

reader "Over the great windy waters, and over the clear crested summits" to Rome (I.1). There

the reader encounters the first of many letters from Claude to his friend Eustace, back home in

London. Claude's letter is comparatively recent and it counterbalances his aimlessness with

playful stylistic flourishes. In its opening line of address, Claude gently mocks the conventions

of Victorian letter writing through the use of parallelism to capture the seemingly trivial flow of

correspondence: "DEAR EUSTATIO, I write that you may write me an answer,/ Or at the least

to put us again en rapport with each other" (I.11-12). Subsequent lines contribute to this sense

of poetic style through further parallelism and a frequent use of anaphora, turning the letter into

an exploration of ideas that contains little in the way of narrative events.

Following this opening salvo, Claude expresses his skepticism toward the notion that his

travels will radically alter his worldview, offering what will become a common refrain in the

letters that follow: "Rome disappoints me much" (I.13). The source of this disappointment

appears to be both a result of what Claude finds before him in Rome as well as his frustration

58

with the culture of tourism in which he is implicated. As an illustration of this point, after

Claude notes, with some irony, that St. Peter's Basilica—the grand church within Vatican City—

disappoints him "in especial" (I.3), he is quick to acknowledge that while he believes that

"Greece must be better," this belief may be less rooted in fact than his current emotional state,

adding that "I am feeling so spiteful,/ That I could travel to Athens, to Delphi, and Troy, and

Mount Sinai/ Though but to see with my eyes that these are vanity also" (I.16-18). Although the

point is somewhat obscure, Claude borrows here from Ecclesiastes 1:14: "I have seen all the

works that are done under the sun; and, behold, all is vanity and vexation of spirit." His use of

"vanity" thus refers less to the idea of narcissism and conceitedness and more to the ephemeral

qualities encapsulated in the original Hebrew "hebel," a term which, as scholars have observed,

is more accurately translated today as "breath" or "vapor."51 Like the voice of the Preacher in

Ecclesiastes, who warns of the transitory nature of life, Claude suggests that his intellectual

curiosity has not been alleviated by the curated remains he finds in Rome.

As the poem dips further into a lyric mode of reflection, Claude conveys his frustration

with the layers of Roman artifacts before him through the use of anaphora and caesura like that

later found in his writing on the Fontana dei Dioscuri.

Rome disappoints me much; I hardly as yet understand, but

Rubbishy seems the word that most exactly would suit it.

All the foolish destructions, and all the sillier savings,

All the incongruous things of past incompatible ages,

Seem to be treasured up here to make fools of present and future.

Would to Heaven the old Goths had made a cleaner sweep of it!

51 Phelan 79, fn 18 notes Clough's reference to Ecclesiastes. See Shuster regarding translations of "hebel,"

esp. 229-33.

59

Would to Heaven some new ones would come and destroy these churches! (I.19-25)

In these lines, the repetition of phrases like "All the..." and "Would to Heaven..." are joined with

the sharp contrast of "foolish destructions" and "sillier savings" to create a sense of grandeur and

scale. Significantly, this grandeur comes less through the actual description of the sites and

antiquities in question than from the hyperbolic use of language to express Claude's frustration

with "All the incongruous things of past incompatible ages"—a move which simultaneously

relates both a view of Rome and Claude's reaction to it. As Claude's frustration with the chaotic

layers of history before him suggests, he craves the classical principles of order and unity, which

are (somewhat ironically) in short supply amidst Rome's messy collection of material artifacts.

Consequently, Claude describes Rome as "Rubbishy"—an analogy which refers not merely to the

literal presence of trash (though it may, in fact, have that in mind as well) but rather to a disorder

that is conveyed through the juxtaposition of art and architecture from various periods. As he

extends the analogy to the level of a conceit, his darkly comic wish for the "old Goths" to have

"made a cleaner sweep of it!" during the Sack of Rome eerily anticipates the conflict to come.

Yet in spite of Claude's frustration, the end of his first letter to Eustace finds him briefly

returning to the subject of his own position and acknowledging the joys of being free of

"assujettissement" (I.30)—that is, the constraints of his responsibilities to friends and relations—

before slipping into a more general use of the first-person plural to suggest that, nevertheless,

"we turn like fools to the English" (I.32). As the letter draws to a close, he provides a fleeting

glimpse of his personal life in Rome, noting that "Vernon has been my fate; who is here the same

that you knew him, —/ Making the tour, it seems, with friends of the name of Trevellyn" (I.33-

4). This abrupt conclusion provides us with a working model of the two modes of poetic

representation that will characterize his letters to follow. While Claude's efforts to regain his

60

"rapport" with Eustace will often report details and/or narrate the events of his travels, the

primary function of his letters is the communication of feelings and ideas that transcend his

immediate circumstances. In this sense, they combine the retrospective emphasis on recent

events found in epistolary fiction with the more abstracted time of lyric reflection, which is not

contingent upon any immediate event.

Following another brief letter from Claude to Eustace that builds upon the "tyrannous

sense of . . . oppression" he feels in his travels, the poem turns from Claude's voice to that of

Georgina Trevellyn, who writes to her friend Louisa, who is, like Eustace, back home in England

(I.39). In contrast to the blend of lyricism and epistolary narration found in Claude's letters,

Georgina's letters are far more straightforward, displaying a gossipy tone and a proclivity for

detail which takes pains to mention the "seven-and-seventy boxes" which have accompanied the

family, made up of "Courier, Papa and Mamma, the children, and Mary and Susan" (I.52-3).

This plain style in Georgina's letters contributes to the poem's humorous characterization of her

as a dewy-eyed philistine. Whereas Claude complains of his disappointment, Georgina calls

Rome a "wonderful place," noting that the family is "delighted of course with St. Peter's" (I.54,

56). After turning quickly towards a recounting of the English families they have met on the

trip, Georgina finds herself abruptly called away from her writing and signs off by noting that

her suitor George has brought with him a man named "Mr. Claude," an individual who is "Very

stupid" in her mind but whom "George says so very clever" (I.64-5).

As a narrative device, Georgina provides an important shift in perspective.52 Clough is

interested in—and may, indeed, identify with—Claude's worldview; however, he is equally

52 On this point, B. Hardy has observed that "Amours de Voyage could not be simply a monologue: it needs

enough shift in point of view to establish certain things outside the unreliable sensitive register of Claude's consciousness" (43).

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interested in what happens to Claude's lyrical musings when they are juxtaposed against a social

world which reveals the limits of his intellectual performance. Through Georgina's commentary,

we discover an uneasy tension between Claude's status as a sophisticated cynic and his awkward

position as he moves through the everyday demands of English society abroad. Although

Claude's Oxford education places him above the upwardly mobile Trevellyn family, Georgina's

perspective calls attention to the fact that—whatever anyone else may say about him—she

herself is not particularly impressed (although she will later acknowledge that he may suit Mary,

who shares his intellectual curiosity, and compel George to intervene regarding Claude's

"intentions," unintentionally driving the couple apart). In addition, the turn towards Georgina's

letters foreground an important temporal effect. Whereas Claude drifts between the deep time of

lyricism and the retrospective temporality of epistolary narration, frequently privileging lyric,

Georgina's letters—like those of her sister, to follow—are firmly grounded in the epistolary.

They do not reflect on Rome's deep history so much as they anchor our perception of events in

the immediate past. Thus, while the letters of Georgina and Mary make up just twelve of the

poem's fifty-six letters—and often find the sisters piggy-backing off one another through post-

scripts—they play an important role in shaping our perception of narrative events, allowing the

poem to undertake increasingly wider forays into the past through Claude's perspective without

losing the thread of contemporary events.

Early in the poem, these forays are often quite deep. In the fifth letter of Canto I, for

instance, Claude reflects on the movement from the Protestant Reformation brought about by

Martin Luther's Ninety-Five Theses (1517) and the ensuing Counter-Reformation in a twenty-

eight-line blend of lyric and narrative poetry that calls attention to the continuities between past

and present through the biblical metaphor of the flood, which provides a kind of conceit for the

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letter. Tapping into the Oxford Movement's desire to return to a Pre-Reformation Church, the

poem begins by linking the past to the present with the declaration that "Luther, they say, was

unwise; like a half-taught German, he could not/ See that old follies were passing most tranquilly

out of remembrance" (I.). This declaration quickly takes an ironic turn, however, when Claude

notes that Leo X, son of Lorenzo de' Medici, who served as Pope between 1513 and 1521 and

oversaw the reforms of the Fifth Council of the Lateran (1512-17) while spending extravagant

amounts of money on the arts

. . . was employing all efforts to clear out abuses;

Jupiter, Juno, and Venus, Fine Arts, and Fine Letters, the Poets,

Scholars, and Sculptors, and Painters, were quietly clearing away the

Martyrs, and Virgins, and Saints, or at any rate Thomas Aquinas. (I.89-92)

Leo's lavish lifestyle and prominent position as a patron of the Renaissance stand in harsh

contrast to the scholasticism of Thomas Aquinas and purity of other holy figures, suggesting a

shift in Church life between Aquinas's thirteenth-century moment and the time immediately

preceding the reformation in 1517. Yet from the perspective of Claude's religious skepticism,

this transformation is a potential source of value, notable for the degree to which it momentarily

sidelines Christianity's moralism and repressions through its artistic investment in an ancient

polytheism with its rich aesthetic heritage. Claude mourns the loss of this moment through the

comparison of the effects of the Ninety-Five Theses to the Great Flood of the Old Testament,

complaining that "He [i.e. Luther] must forsooth make a fuss and distend his huge Wittenberg

lungs, and/ Bring back Theology once again in a flood upon Europe" (I.93-4). This comparison

of the effects of the Ninety-Five Theses to a flood is subsequently supported through direct

references to the Great Flood of the Book of Genesis in the lines "Lo you, for forty days from the

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windows of heaven it fell; the/ Waters prevail on the earth yet more for a hundred and fifty"

(I.95-96). Like the flood of Genesis, which is brought about by a vengeful God in response to

the wrongs of a violent and corrupt world, the flood of reform that Luther inspires is an attack on

the corruption brought by the church's sale of indulgences and the wasteful spending of its

figurehead. However, for Claude, the flood remains a destructive force, revivifying a narrow

Christian sensibility that was in the process of waning.

What is particularly interesting about this metaphor is the way in which it aligns with the

poem's rhythm, influencing structure and form at the same time that it establishes a through line

that runs between the Book of Genesis, Reformation, Counter-Reformation, and Claude's mid-

century moment. Throughout the poem, the effects of Luther's actions are captured through the

use of anaphora and em-dashes to highlight the ebb and flow of the flood's waves. Of the waters

that "prevail on earth" in the aftermath of the Ninety-Five Theses, Claude asks

Are they abating at last? the doves that are sent to explore are

Wearily fain to return, at the best with a leaflet of promise,—

Fain to return, as they went, to the wandering wave-tost vessel,—

Fain to re-enter the roof which covers the clean and the unclean,—

Luther, they say, was unwise; he didn't see how things were going;

Luther was foolish,—but, O great God! What call you Ignatius? (I.97-102)

Like the Book of Genesis, in which the end of the flood signals the promise of a new and

restored beginning under God, Claude's metaphor uses the flood's decline to chronicle the end of

Luther's reformist efforts. The doves released from Noah's ark, who return bearing signs of land

and hope, are here a sign of a potential fissure in the restrictive sensibilities of reform. The point

is refracted in the repetition of the letter's opening phrase—"Luther, they say, was unwise"—at

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the midway point of the epistle, launching a subsequent turn towards the role of Ignatius of

Loyola in the Counter Reformation, a movement that Claude finds equally unproductive.

Claude's turn from Luther to Ignatius is intriguing, in part because of Ignatius's esteemed

reputation as a Catholic saint. The wild son of Spanish nobility, Ignatius achieved military

success in his youth before suffering a crippling injury in the Battle of Pamplona in 1521 at the

age of 30. During a long and painful recovery in a church hospital, he underwent a religious

conversion, launching the Jesuit order and achieving recognition for his 1548 work Spiritual

Exercises, in which he promoted the value of a 30-day retreat in search of spiritual

contemplation. Particularly notable in his biography is the fact that, although he was one of the

more prominent figures of the Counter Reformation, Ignatius was subject to some of its worst

impulses, as when he found himself confronted by the Inquisition at several points in his

career.53 In the lines that follow, Claude uses the more attractive figure of Ignatius to call

attention to traces of a corrupting spirit he finds at the heart of the Counter Reformation as well:

O my tolerant soul, be still! but you talk of barbarians,

Alaric, Attila, Genseric;—why, they came, they killed, they

Ravaged, and went on their way; but these vile, tyrannous Spaniards,

These are here still,—how long, O ye heavens, in the country of Dante? (I.103-06)

The "vile, tyrannous Spaniards" referred to in these lines are not directly connected to Ignatius,

but rather the efforts of German mercenaries who led the Sack of Rome in 1527 under the

direction of the Spanish Emperor Charles V and who initiated several centuries of cultural

imperialism. In making this comment, Claude is no doubt aware that the political rumblings

around him in Rome are an offshoot of the revolutions that had overtaken Europe in the

53 Details regarding Ignatius's biography come from Meissner. Regarding Ignatius's encounters with the

Inquisition, see Meissner 128, 146, 153, 214.

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preceding years, beginning in Sicily with the outbursts of liberal revolutionaries against

Ferdinand II, the Spanish King of the Two Sicilies, who earned the nickname "Re Bomba" or

"King Bomb" for his violent suppression of riots in Reggio Calabria and Messina. Yet Claude is

equally suspicious of a gentler form of influence that has borne out across the peninsula in the

preceding centuries.

As the poem turns towards its conclusion, Claude builds a connection between Charles

V's Sack of Rome and the later efforts of Ignatius by suggesting that Ignatius's good deeds are a

form of soft power that derives from such conquest, writing:

These, that fanaticized Europe, which now can forget them, release not

This, their choicest of prey, this Italy; here you see them,—

Here, with emasculate pupils and gimcrack churches of Gesu,

Pseudo-learning and lies, confessional-boxes and postures,—

Here, with metallic beliefs and regimental devotions,—

Here, overcrusting with slime, perverting, defacing, and debasing,

Michael Angelo's Dome, that had hung the Pantheon in heaven,

Raphael's Joys and Graces, and thy clear stars, Galileo! (I.104-14)

Here, those "that fanaticized Europe" like Charles V are directly linked to the "emasculate pupils

and gimcrack churches of Gesu," or Church of the Jesuits, conceived by Ignatius (and for whom

a baroque church was built in Rome in 1551). At the same time, Claude seems conscious of its

slightly hidden, ephemeral nature, which he combats through a long string of pointing words like

"these," "this," and "here" which compel his reader to take notice of connections not otherwise

visible to the casual observer. As the poem concludes, Claude returns to the flood metaphor as

he suggests that the Counter Reformation has destroyed the highest achievements of Renaissance

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culture and thought by "overcrusting" them "with slime" and "perverting, defacing, and

debasing" their legacy. Unlike the promise of a new beginning found in Genesis, the recession

of the flood here reveals a soiled culture beneath, one that has its origins in the actions of the

"unwise" Luther.

One observes that the lyric form is particularly useful in relating this history. Whereas the

overlap between the Reformation and Counter-Reformation as historical movements makes it

difficult to relate a linear account of their relationship to one another in brief, Claude's lyric

moment of reflection provides a metaphor that allows the reader to see the flow of reform and its

response through the lens of the present. While Claude's letter does little to narrate the course of

specific historical events, it conveys a sense of an ongoing historical process that stretches out

over the longue durée, in fusing the present with a profound sense of awareness for its position in

the flow of historical time. In subsequent letters, Claude's fascination with this deep history will

appear in other lyrics, such as when the eighth letter of Canto I examines the Pantheon's

repurposing as a church in 609 AD and in the tenth letter's reflections on the statues found in the

Vatican and the Fontana dei Dioscuri. In Canto I, these reflections break up the contrasting

accounts of Claude, Georgina, and Mary. Yet the growing clarity that Claude brings to his

reflections on the deep history of Rome's past is soon thrown into sharp relief against the

confusion and disorder that accompany the French Siege of Rome and which present events as

history in the making.

II. "So we stand and stare:" The Limits of Epistolary Narration

The intrusion of the French Siege in Canto II thrusts Clough's characters into a world that

is in the process of rapid change. Claude opens Canto II by admitting his ignorance to Eustace:

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"What do the people say, and what does the government do?—you/ Ask, and I know not at all.

Yet […] I, who avoided it all, am fated, it seems, to describe it" (II.13-4). In subsequent letters,

the episodic, first-person dimensions of the epistolary format are repeatedly used to interrupt and

upset the poem's engagement with a coherent, fully formed historical narrative, leaving Claude,

Mary, and Georgina's letters to alternate between retrospective summaries and speculation in

their attempt to keep up with current events. For Georgina and Mary, their status as young

women greatly inhibits their access to and understanding of the political situation in Rome,

forcing them to rely on second-hand account of events from others. Shortly after arriving in

Rome, Georgina—the more prominent voice of the two—misinterprets a popular joke that

Mazzini had sold the Pantheon for Protestant service as fact (I.260-5). Later, in a somewhat

cartoonish account, she tells her friend Louisa that George has just returned having seen

"Garibaldi, dressed up in a long white cloak, on/ Horseback, riding by, with his mounted negro

behind him" (II.218-9). Of Garibaldi's assistant, Andrea Aguyar, a former slave from Uruguay,

Georgina notes:

This is a man, you know, who came from America with him,

Out of the woods, I suppose, and uses a lasso in fighting,

Which is, I don't quite know, but a sort of noose, I imagine;

This he throws on the heads of the enemy's men in a battle,

Pulls them into his reach, and then most cruelly kills them (II.220-4)54

In reflecting on Georgina's relation to the events described in this anecdote, one observes her

self-conscious recognition of her own limited knowledge through the repeated use of phrases like

"you know," "I suppose," "I don't quite know," and "I imagine," which stack upon one another as

54 Whatever their accuracy, it should be noted that contemporary accounts of Aguyar support the stories

that Georgina has heard concerning his skill with the lasso. See Riall 86.

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a reminder of how little she has actually seen. Indeed, at no point in her letters is Georgina able

to move beyond her received (and often misinterpreted) understanding of events to consider the

historical forces driving the French Siege. Although she can lament that the "dreadful Mazzini"

prevents her family from leaving Rome by seizing all of the city's horses for battle, her

conception of the situation's greater political and historical significance is virtually non-existent

(II.230).

By contrast, Claude offers a much more direct—albeit equally flawed—first-person

account of events in the act of unfolding. When fighting breaks out at the start of the French

Siege, we find Claude—having just failed in a mock-epic battle to secure a cafe latte—sipping a

"milkless nero" in a cafe (II.103). Observing an odd tension amongst "civilian and soldier in

strangest costume" as they gulp "in hottest haste, still standing, their coffee," (II.105-06) he

begins "to imagine/ Something is really afloat" (II.109-10). After leaving the cafe and moving

through the normally bustling streets of Via Corso and Condotti, he ascends the Pincian Hill in

the northeast corner of the city where he finds "lots of English,/ Germans, Americans, [and]

French" citizens gathered to observe the battle from their lofty perch (II.113-4). From such a

distance, neither Claude nor his companions are able to make much sense of the events nearby.

Describing the scene in the present tense, Claude writes:

So we stand and stare, and see, to the left of St. Peter's,

Smoke, from the cannon, white,—but that is at intervals only,—

Black, from a burning house, we suppose, by the Cavalleggieri;

And we believe we discern some lines of men descending

Down through the vineyard-slopes, and catch a bayonet gleaming.

Every ten minutes, however,—in this there is no misconception,—

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Comes a great white puff from behind Michel Angelo's dome, and

After a space the report of a real big gun,—not the Frenchman's?—

That must be doing some work. And so we watch and conjecture. (II.116-24)

Although the product of fundamentally different circumstances, Claude's observation of the

fighting shares much of the exaggerated detail found in Georgina's second-hand account of

Garibaldi and Aguyar from George. Far from an all-encompassing panoramic perspective, his

writing is plagued by the same self-conscious recognition of the limits of his observations, which

are conveyed in part through the use of phrases like "we suppose" and "we believe we discern."

The effects of such uncertainty are intensified through Claude's use of what Gerard Genette has

referred to as an "iterative" temporality to describe the frequency of action in the present tense.

For Genette, "in an iterative temporality, the order of succession and the relationships of duration

that make up classical temporality are from the very beginning subverted or, more subtly and

effectively, perverted," illustrating a significant means by which narrative is able to replace the

sequential order of narrative events with a catalog of actions which disrupt the reader's

impression of order and duration ("Order" 34). In this instance, the chronological time that

Claude spends on Pincian Hill (and the specific actions and events he observes) is compressed in

such a way that it emphasizes the limits of epistolary narration. While Claude and his fellow

bystanders catch glimpses of the billowing clouds of smoke and the occasional "bayonet

gleaming," their understanding of events is left to a form of "conjecture," providing readers with

little real insight.

For Claude, more than a triumphant fight, the battle is unsettling and—in fact—a bit

boring. In his account, Claude describes the affair as "tiresome"—a word he uses not once but

twice, eventually admitting that he descended the hill and walked home through the nearly

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deserted streets before the battle's completion (II.127 & 132). Yet such a reaction changes with

his increased physical proximity to events. Later, Claude describes the murder of a Catholic

priest during the "Roman Terror," a brief outbreak of anti-clerical violence that swept through

the city in May 1849. As Claude recounts the events, in which a priest is dragged through the

street and murdered, he is plagued with doubt about what he has witnessed. Although he begins

with the declaration that he has seen a man killed, he quickly disavows the statement, throwing

the veracity of his account into question. As Claude writes: "Yes, I suppose I have; although I

can hardly be certain,/ And in a court of justice could never declare I had seen it./ But a man was

killed, I am told, in a place where I saw/ Something; a man was killed, I am told, and I saw

something" (II.163-6). Much like his experience on the first day of the battle, Claude strives to

represent but ultimately fails to delineate the actions that have occurred. But whereas his view of

the battle from Pincian Hill is woefully distant, here the impression of violence is all too close.

Describing his trip across the St. Angelo Bridge while returning home from a visit to St.

Peter's, Claude notes how, "moving towards the Condotti," he "became conscious" of a mob

collecting nearby (II. 169-70). In a striking shift from the past to the present tense, he recounts

how:

Looking up, I see windows filled with heads; the Piazza,

Into which you remember the Ponte St. Angelo enters,

Since I passed, has thickened with curious groups; and now the

Crowd is coming, has turned, has crossed that last barricade, is

Here at my side. In the middle they drag at something. What is it?

Ha! Bare swords in the air, held up! There seem to be voices

Pleading and hands putting back; official, perhaps; but the swords are

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Many, and bare in the air. In the air? They descend, they are smiting,

Hewing, chopping—At what? In the air once more upstretched! And

Is it blood that's on them? Yes, certainly blood! Of whom, then? (II.76-85).

Stepping away from the Piazza, Claude learns from a bystander that the victim of this violent

outburst was supposedly "A Priest, who was trying to fly to/ The Neapolitan Army" (II.190-1).

Fearing for his own safety, Claude moves to get away from the crowd as quickly as possible,

pausing only briefly to look "through the legs of the people" at "the legs of a body"—his only

visual confirmation of the murder (II.197). As in his account of the events on Pincian Hill,

Claude turns here towards the present tense to narrate specific events related to the French Siege.

Yet unlike the preceding encounter, he does not slip into the more ambiguous space of an

iterative temporality. Instead, he provides a subjective, impressionistic experience of graphic

violence which is conveyed with the full ferocity of the moment, and which is ultimately very

different from the ambiguous duration of the distant cannon fire from the Pincian Hill.

Specifically, Claude's pattern of question (e.g. "What is it?," "In the air?," etc.) and response,

often in the form of exclamations (e.g. "Yes, certainly blood!"), fill the scene with a sense of

urgency that is not found in the preceding instance. Whereas the "puffs" of cannon smoke in the

preceding account appear distant and inconsequential at the outbreak of fighting, the smiting,

hewing, and chopping that Claude finds in the streets is horrifyingly real.

Yet while this rush of action intensifies our understanding of Rome's destabilization, it

does little to prompt the reader towards a sense of its significance within a broader, ongoing

historical process of national formation. Although there are significant events unfolding in and

around Clough's characters, Claude, Mary, and Georgina each struggle to gain a coherent and

useful understanding of those events from their immediate vantage point. While Claude can

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speak with great clarity and precision on the rights of nations and civic duty in moments of lyric

reflection, and take issue with the inaccuracy of the reporting in the foreign papers in scenes of

narrative comment (e.g. II.26-29), his writing in regards to the French Siege does not possess the

same awareness for the movement of history found in his deeper, lyrical reflections on the

centuries-long processes between Rome's ancient past and present. And indeed, it is only

through the cultivation of poetic distance through additional moments of lyric reflection that

Claude is able to come to grips with the personal and political struggles he finds himself on the

edge of engaging.

III. Transcending "our Aqueous Ages" through Lyric

Following his encounter with the fighting in Canto II, much of Claude’s experience in the

second half of the poem is spent in an attempt to distance himself from the Roman Republic.

Meanwhile, the romance plot between Claude and Mary takes an odd turn after George Vernon

addresses what he and the Trevellyns perceive as the insincerity of Claude's "attentions" towards

Mary, sending Claude into social isolation as the family leaves Rome to escape the conflict.

From this position, Claude looks to lyricism again in Canto III, stepping away from the

immediate political context of the French Siege in his second letter to tie his personal

development to the question of humanity's knowledge and position in time. Writing to Eustace

from Rome, Claude first compares his own development to that of a seed, asking whether natural

processes—such as the development of a seed into a plant—would continue if objects in nature

possessed the self-awareness that human beings do:

Tell me, my friend, do you think that the grain would sprout in the furrow,

Did it not truly accept as its summum and ultimum bonum

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That mere common and may-be indifferent soil it is set in?

Would it have force to develope and open its young cotyledons,

Could it compare, and reflect, and examine one thing with another?

Would it endure to accomplish the round of its natural functions,

Were it endowed with a sense of the general scheme of existence? (III. 40-46)

Claude's analogy invokes a post-Enlightenment epistemological shift from faith-based

perspectives to those rooted in history and science. The significance of this analogy is further

developed when he shifts from this abstracted moment of lyric contemplation back to a moment

before the chronological time of the poem's action to recount how, when travelling from

Marseilles to Civita Vecchia by steamer en route to Rome, his ship found itself caught between

violent waters between Capraji and Elba. Unlike the seed, which is supposedly ignorant of its

place in the world, Claude stares off at the sublime power of nature from his perch on the stern of

the ship like the knowing presence of the romantic figure from Caspar David Friedrich's famous

1818 painting, "Wanderer above the Sea of Fog." As Claude recounts:

Looking around on the waste of the rushing incurious billows,

'This is Nature,' I said: 'we are born as it were from her waters,

Over her billows that buffet and beat us, her offspring uncared for,

Casting one single regard of a painful victorious knowledge,

Into her billows that buffet and beat us we sink and are swallowed.' (III.50-54).

Yet from this lyric moment of reflection, Claude suggests that such moments of heightened

consciousness may themselves shortchange the world's complexities. In the final lines, Claude

turns to a later moment, sitting in the Gallery of Statues in the Vatican's Museo Pio-Clementino,

where he reflects on the recumbent figure of Ariadne. Comparing her face to that of "a Triton in

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marble" (III.57) to suggest the duality of this ambiguous state of consciousness, Claude links this

moment of reflection with "the sense in my soul" that he felt staring out into the ocean (III.56).

In the final lines, Claude points again to the idea that nature created humanity as creatures of

knowledge whose only advantage is to know their own inconsequence, suggesting "It is the

simpler thought, and I can believe it the truer" (III.58). At the same time, he also hints at the

possibility of something more, closing the letter with "Let us not talk of growth; we are still in

our Aqueous Ages"—the latter of which is a phrase drawn from the geologist and evolutionary

thinker Robert Chamber's 1844 volume, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (III.59). In

sum, then, the arrangement of these discrete moments and abstract scenarios within Claude's

lyric reflection function as a vehicle for introspection and the exploration of ideas. Claude's

awareness for the long and ongoing processes of historical development found in previous letters

are here reframed so as to suggest that, even with substantial achievements of philosophy and

science in making sense of the natural world in recent generations, there are still realms of

experience that are beyond our comprehension. When confronted with the question of whether

humanity is distinct from other forms of life by virtue of our knowledge, Claude comes to the

radical conclusion that we are not. Like the divided body of Triton, commonly represented as

half-man and half-fish, Claude's vision of humanity does not stand apart from nature so much as

it is inextricably a part of it.

The remainder of Canto III centers on additional letters from Claude to Eustace,

contrasting his heightened recognition of long and ongoing processes of human development

with the political and romantic woes he finds in the present. After bidding "farewell" to politics

and purportedly rejecting any sense of responsibility to the Roman Republic (III.60) and any

interest in love (III.107-150), his subsequent letters extend his use of nature metaphors in

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describing the tension between an expanded consciousness and "our Aqueous Ages." Yet

throughout these passages, Claude remains an unreliable voice, at times obscuring changes in his

consciousness which have occurred outside of the represented reflections found in these

extended moments of lyric and philosophical insight. When, in the tenth letter of Canto III,

Claude opens with the surprising declaration—"Hang this thinking, at last! what good is it? Oh,

and what evil!"—the facade of his cool indifference towards the world finally appears to break

(III. 207). Comparing the torment which accompanies his thoughts to the ceaseless sound of a

ticking "clock in a sick man's chamber" (III. 208) Claude begs to be taken from "this regal

knowledge" (III. 211) of thought and returned to a state of blissful ignorance. Consequently, it is

little surprise that when Mary relates to Ms. Roper her desire for the latter to reach out to Claude

and make him aware of her family's whereabouts, the end of Canto III finds Claude determined

to leave Rome in pursuit of love.

As Claude reconciles himself to hunt down Mary, a series of missed connections ensue in

Cantos IV and V, with Claude zig-zagging back and forth across Italy by train in a desperate

attempt to track the family down, writing short, telegraphic letters to Eustace from Bellagio,

Florence, and Pisa which are presented alongside Mary's own letters from Lucerne and Lucca

Baths. These letters contain none of the intellectual depth and stylistic complexity found in

Claude's lyrical ruminations on the relationship between ancient and modern. Nor do they

contain any of the detailed, first-person response to recent historical events on the ground.

Instead, they express Claude's plans and frustrations as quickly and succinctly as possible,

capturing the urgency of his journey through their stylistic brevity, which includes, among other

things, frequent use of the em-dash as a means to convey the rushed nature of his thought. Thus,

as Claude writes in the second letter of Canto IV from Bellagio:

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Gone from Florence; indeed; and that is truly provoking;—

Gone to Milan, it seems; then I go also to Milan.

Five days now departed; but they can travel but slowly;—

I quicker far; and I know, as it happens, the home they will go to.—

Why, what else should I do? Stay here and look at the pictures,

Statues and churches? Alack, I am sick of the statues and pictures!—

No, to Bologna, Parma, Piacenza, Lodi, and Milan,

Off go we to-night,—and the Venus go to the Devil! (IV.11-18)

One notes here that Claude directly rejects the statues, churches, and pictures that provide objects

of reflections in some of Amours de Voyage's most memorable passages. He is, in this sense,

once again skeptical of Italy's cultural history as an object of importance in and of itself.

Yet he soon recovers his interest in lyric. Near the start of Canto V, Claude—weary from

his attempt to track down Mary and declare his love to her—responds to Eustace's statement

(cancelled from an earlier edition of the manuscript) that "Action will furnish belief" by asking

"will that belief be the true one?" (V.20). After one last trip from Florence to Pisa and back,

Claude abandons his search, recognizing that the time for romance has passed and seems

unlikely to be regained. In the ensuing letters, Claude's writing remains fragmentary as he turns

towards the question of faith as a means to work through his loss; however, there is a shift from

the epistolary mode of narration that previously characterized his account of his travels back

towards lyric. Setting the organic nature of his love for Mary against "the hard naked rock"

(V.67) of religion, Claude briefly finds solace in "Moping along the streets" in Florence until his

ear meets "the sound of an English psalm tune" (V.88-89). Initially, Claude wants to believe that

"there is some great truth" in the song, yet in the next fragment, he dismisses this "religious

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assurance" (V.96) as "factitious," declaring "I refuse, reject, and put it utterly from me;/ I will

look straight out, see things, not try to evade them:/ Fact shall be fact for me; and the Truth the

Truth as ever,/ Flexible, changeable, vague, and multiform, and doubtful—/ Off, and depart to

the void, thou subtle fanatical temper!" (V.98-103). Having suggested that the restorative power

of epic heroism, romantic love, and spiritual enlightenment are each in some way false or

inadequate to the demands of his own life, Claude seeks to chart a new path forward.

In his next letter, Claude learns that "Rome is fallen" and "heroical Venice"—whose own

short-lived republic would eventually meet a similar fate at the hands of the Austrian Empire—is

soon to follow (V.115). Briefly returning to Rome before departing for Naples and Egypt, he

reiterates his frustration with the return of papal authority via the French government. However,

this time, he offers a different conclusion. As Claude writes:

Politics, farewell, however! For what could I do? with inquiring,

Talking, collating the journals, go fever my brain about things o'er

Which I can have no control. No, happen, whatever may happen,

Time, I suppose, will subsist; the earth will revolve on its axis;

People will travel; the stranger will wander as now in the city;

Rome will be here, and the Pope the custode of Vatican marbles.

I have no heart, however, for any marble or fresco;

I have essayed it in vain; 'tis vain as yet to essay it:

But I may haply resume some day my studies in this kind.

Not as the Scripture says, is, I think, the fact. Ere our death-day,

Faith, I think, does pass, and Love; but Knowledge abideth.

Let us seek Knowledge;—the rest must come and go as it happens.

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Knowledge is hard to seek, and harder yet to adhere to.

Knowledge is painful often; and yet when we know, we are happy.

Seek it, and leave mere Faith and Love to come with the chances. (V.191-202)

Here, in these lines, Claude finds power in his own powerlessness. He recognizes that rather

than occupying some kind of literal or figurative "End of History," his own period is subject to

the same battles, changes, and upheavals of any age. For Claude, history is not a zero-sum game

in which the emergence of French support for the Vatican's authority relegates the possibilities

for the Roman Republic and Italian Independence to a distant memory. Instead, Claude has

come to view history as part of a continuum, consisting not only of ground-breaking revolutions

but small and often insignificant changes within a complicated world system. "Time," Claude

notes, "will subsist; the earth will revolve on its axis." To accept and learn from one's small and

insignificant place in the world is, for him, the path towards a sustainable personal philosophy.

In this way, Claude turns the same lyric style that is so productive to his interpretation of Italy's

deep and ongoing history into the foundation for a workable worldview for his contemporary

moment.

Claude's lyrical transcendence at the poem's end marks an apex of what we have seen

throughout Amours de Voyage: lyric is not a diversion from history and time but a mode of

representation that possesses unique affordances which can call the reader's attention to historical

processes that are otherwise obscured from our view. To leverage this potential, Clough

juxtaposes Claude's lyric reflections on historical processes of the longue durée with the rapid

shifts occurring within his own immediate moment. It is lyric that orients Claude's worldview

and encourages him to accept time's fluidity as an essential part of experience. His expanded

consciousness of his place within the course of ongoing historical processes provides a testament

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to the verse novel's potential as a form of historical fiction in the Lukácsian sense. Against the

chaotic and potentially alienating demands of the events in which he finds himself, Claude's

sensitivity to lyric as a mode of expression pulls together disparate strands of experience to come

to terms with a world that is caught in the midst of competing temporal flows.

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Chapter 4:

The Victorian Counter-Pastoral: Adam Bede as Historical Novel

Near the end of George Eliot's Adam Bede (1859), a chapter titled "The Harvest Supper"

describes Adam's failed attempt to track down Dinah Morris before she returns to the distant

town of Snowfield. Though Dinah's absence from the Poysers' home leaves Adam crestfallen,

the scene quickly turns from Adam’s inner world to an extended description of the farmworkers

attending her uncle's feast. The narrator’s methodical description of the men's backgrounds,

habits, debilities, and disagreements seems at first like an odd digression, coming at this critical

juncture, late in the novel. Yet the purpose of this decelerated pace becomes clear when the

narrator pulls back from the detail: "The bucolic character at Hayslope, you perceive, was not of

that entirely genial, merry, broad-grinning sort, apparently observed in most districts visited by

artists. The mild radiance of a smile was a rare sight on a field labourer's face, and there was

seldom any gradation between bovine gravity and a laugh" (565). In a way that recalls the

novel’s well-known commentary on realism in Chapter 17, "In Which the Story Pauses a Little,"

the narrator has interrupted the momentum of diegetic time. Through direct address, readers are

reminded that the world of Adam Bede warrants none of the nostalgia commonly evoked in

sentimental representations of the rural past.

Eliot's repeated use of such digressions might encourage us to view Adam Bede as a kind

of historiographic metafiction, a form of literature that emphasizes its role in the construction of

history.55 As a sort of metafiction, Adam Bede is saturated with references to art and literature—

55 Hutcheon defines historiographic metafiction as a style of postmodern literature which "works to situate

itself within historical discourse without surrendering its autonomy as fiction . . . it is a kind of seriously ironic parody that effects both aims: the intertexts of history and fiction take on parallel (though not equal) status in the parodic reworking of the textual past of both the 'world' and literature" (4). As Alter observes, while metafiction is commonly associated with the ironic pastiche of postmodern literature, its self-reflexivity emerges much earlier in the novel's history.

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from Dutch paintings and epic romances to pastoral genres and silver-fork novels—some of

which it adapts for its own variation on historical realism. But if Adam Bede is far from

adumbrating metafiction in the postmodernist sense of that term, neither is it a classic historical

novel in the mode of Walter Scott. Instead, Eliot's early novel looks back on the turn of the

nineteenth century in a deliberate effort to mediate the contemporaneity of its implied readers in

the 1850s. The careful sequencing and pacing of the narrative exposition render the past as an

object of representation in order to engage readers with that object. Adam Bede's deliberate

pauses, leaps, and elongations of diegetic time thus play an important role in shaping its form as

a work of historical fiction by framing "history" as the accumulation and collectivization of

social experience.

Set in the fictional village of Hayslope between June 18, 1799 and June 1807, Adam Bede

relates a multiplot story of seduction, cruelty, and forgiveness through a frequently outspoken

narrator who addresses a contemporary audience in the 1850s but provides a remarkably precise

reckoning of the novel's eight-year-long chronology. While nearly every chapter includes some

reference to the passage of time, the novel also pauses regularly from the diegetic chronicling of

action to provide description and commentary like that found in "The Harvest Supper."56 Such

passages of description and comment brush the reader’s temporal associations with a nostalgic

past against the grain by complicating the conventions of the pastoral mode. Whereas pastoral

genres are often said to translate "the complex into the simple" by using static rural settings to

56 On this "relentless time marking" see also Zemka, who offers Adam Bede's "suffering" as a way of

thinking about the "temporally transcendent moment of empathy" that Eliot creates for Hetty "outside the timeflow of her narrated life" (123, 141). My reference to the diegetic properties of time, invokes Genette’s distinction between diegesis or narrative engagement and mimesis, or pure imitation (see 30). The contingency of meaning fostered through the interplay of diegesis and mimesis may remind us of anticipates Marcus, Best, and Love's recent call for "better description" in criticism, in part to accommodate such subtle distinctions in narrative style and tone.

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stand for what is ostensibly true and eternal in human nature and society (Empson 53).57 I

contend that Adam Bede creates a Victorian "counter-pastoral" in its place. Instead of a stable

boundary between the novel's latter-day setting and the comparatively modern world of the

1850s, Eliot’s novel fosters a dialectic of past and present through which readers are called on to

confront the ongoing course of history.58 Historical time is thus differentiated from either an

accessible "reality" prior to and outside the fictional text, or the passage of narrative time in its

pages: it is instead offered as a basis for shared consciousness of and reflection on the reality of

change.

Eliot’s interest in history and historical fiction is well-known. Eleni Coundouriotis, for

instance, has described the budding author’s determination to mold a dialectical history.

According to Lauren M. E. Goodlad, Eliot’s worldview "was shaped by the same republic of

letters" that concerns Georg Lukács in The Historical Novel (1937) (178)—works such as Adam

Bede anticipate Lukács's call for "the historical novel of our time" (Lukács 350), aspiring "to

turn the matter of the past into forms fit to augur the future" (Goodlad, Geopolitical 168).59

Harry E. Shaw has suggested that Eliot’s psychological interiorities are counterbalanced by

57 Pastoral literature is typically said to possess a space-time that is both cyclical in its adherence to the

rhythms of the natural world and relatively static in the absence of seismic change (e.g. Mentz 586 and Ettin 141). 58 The dialectics of different temporalities is an integral historical concept for Braudel's longue durée,

which Goodlad has recently explored in the context of the novel ("Worlding" 197). 59 For Lukács, Scott's historical romances translate "great historical trends" into "typically human terms"

(Historical 35): "The historical novel . . . has to demonstrate by artistic means that historical circumstances and characters existed in precisely such and such a way" (Historical 43). Unlike drama, it does not involve the "collision" of the "world-historical individuals" described by Hegel so much as the incorporation of "the small details of everyday life": "It must be historically authentic in root and branch" (Historical 151). The Lukácsian notion of the role that irony plays in the novel's "self-correction of the world's fragility" (Theory 75) helps Coundouriotis show how Eliot's writing anticipates Jameson's notion of the critic's "imperative to totalize" (Coundouriotis 287) by confronting "Eliot's own claims that she is explaining the world to us" (300). For Goodlad, Lukács's importance to our understanding of Eliot stems from his recognition that "the energizing force of realist fiction is not nation-building, per se, but historicity," a concept which requires "intact social structures" (Geopolitical 177). Her reading of Romola (1863), in particular, shows the extent to which that novel "works precisely in the terms suggested by The Historical Novel—that is, as a fiction that depicts the Florentine republic as the forerunner of the mid-nineteenth century's adulterous geopolitical aesthetic" (194).

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historical perception (223) while Rachel Teukolsky compares the ethnographic realism of Adam

Bede to newspaper accounts of the Crimean War in the years preceding its publication. These

readings push against the view of Adam Bede as a bourgeois Bildungsroman that charts Adam's

rise from artisan to entrepreneur.60 Such critiques exemplify a strong suspicion of Eliot’s realist

form that, to some degree, includes the work of Raymond Williams, whose influential chapter in

The Country and the City (1973) argues that Eliot’s English country people are a mix of flat

protagonists and pastoral caricatures—not the "active bearers of personal experience" (168).

My focus on Adam Bede as "counter-pastoral" applies Williams’s crucial term against his

own critique to demonstrate how he misses the Lukácsian consciousness of the past in Eliot's

fiction. The Country and the City shows how generations of British writers developed variations

on the pastoral to express the advent of agricultural enclosure.61 While pastoral genres frequently

mythologize the past, Williams demonstrates how writers have sometimes used the same

conventions to subvert an idealized or nostalgic view of agrarian life (43). Thus, a narrative

poem like George Crabbe's The Village (1783) is "truly a counter-pastoral" in Williams's view

because it registers the often-forgotten material histories of the rural working classes by

opposing seemingly authentic "descriptions of pain to the 'pastoral' descriptions of pleasure"

(92). Crabbe's vision "of simplicity and independence, made bitter and desperate by scenes in

which it is continually denied" is a call for "self-respect and charity: that the rich should learn

these virtues; that the poor should benefit from them" (93). The Village protests the dreamy

60 Eagleton, for example, casts Adam's "Carlylean gospel of work and stiff-necked moralism" as an

'organic' typology—a "petty-bourgeois" pragmatism that "functions as a reliable agent of the ruling class" (114). Sedgwick, meanwhile, suggests that "the basic historical trajectory of Adam Bede is to move the normative vision of the family from the Poysers' relatively integrated farm to the Bedes' highly specified nuclear household" (140).

61 Like Empson, Williams believes that the pastoral mode entails three features: first, a safe retreat from the modern city to Arcadia, or locus amoenus; second, a focus on the lives of rural people; and third, an explicit reference to previous pastoral works. These features enable the pastoral to migrate across genres and styles. See Williams Country, esp. 13-34.

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pastoral imagery of poems like Sidney's Arcadia (1590) and the idealizations of English country

life in the age of enclosure which followed.

But while counter-pastoral narratives illuminate the impoverishment of a rural underclass

well into the nineteenth century, Williams does not describe Eliot's fiction in these terms. In The

English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence (1970), Williams writes that Eliot’s aspirations

compelled her "almost to create a new form;" however, he reads her early works primarily as

failures (80). The Country and The City recognizes Eliot as a complex realist, but criticizes what

Williams perceives as the absence of any serious consideration of rural want and toil. When

Hetty Sorrel abandons her child, Williams suggests she becomes "an object of confession and

conversion" for the middle-class reader's sympathy, thereby confirming his belief that Eliot

"conceives and yet cannot sustain acceptable social solutions" to her characters' problems (173,

176). As in conventional pastoral narrative, Eliot's idealized settings evade class conflict. Her

works consign the "common condition of a knowable community" to the past while offering a

modern bourgeois alternative in "a particular and private sensibility"—the "moral action" of

individuals (180).

Williams’s analysis encourages us to reflect further on that moment of surprising pause in

"The Harvest Supper." He suggests that although such passages go "further" than Crabbe's

Village in depicting rural hardship, they adopt a "more self-conscious" and "uneasily placating"

tone as they address a "particular kind" of bourgeois reader (172). Whereas Crabbe's poem

directly delivers a "real history" of rural England, Williams sees Eliot's prominent narrative voice

struggling "to individuate working people—falling back on a choral mode, a generalising

description, or an endowment with her own awkwardly translated consciousness—so [that] she

finds it difficult to conceive whole actions which spring from the substance of [their] lives and

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which can be worked through in relation to their interests" (Country 172-3). But in making this

case, Williams does not consider Eliot’s emphases on history and historical genres. Although we

would not expect "the historical novel of our time" to resemble Crabbe’s poetry, Eliot's formal

innovations in the depiction of "common coarse people" (Adam 196) do, like The Village, disrupt

the mystifications that pastoral narratives create when they idealize the rural past. Throughout

Adam Bede, and in her writing in the 1850s more generally, Eliot warns that "we should

remember [the] existence" of such "common" people, "else we may happen to leave them quite

out of our religion and philosophy, and frame lofty theories which only fit a world of extremes"

(Adam 196). By focusing on how Adam Bede relates the motives and influences of rural

characters to a mid-Victorian readership, we see how what Williams recognizes as Eliot’s "new

form" is also a new kind of historical fiction for a post-Scott era.

Lukács believed that Scott captured the movement of history through a "broad" picture of

society in which "certain crises in the personal destinies" of literary characters coincide "with the

determining context of historical crisis" (Historical 39, 41). In the absence of typical characters

who, like Scott’s Waverley, embody the fusion of individual and social change, how does Eliot’s

fiction attune modern readers to this ongoing history? In Adam Bede, I suggest, it does so by

weaving together two different kinds of narrative time. The first is what I will refer to as real

time: a temporal effect that adjusts narrative pacing to sync with the reader’s own chronological

experience. The second is what I call stylized time: narrative effects that simulate different

timeframes through literary techniques that rely on readers’ capacity to stand back from the here-

and-now of their own reading situation and engage in a textualized experience of intradiegetic

temporality. Stylized time may decelerate narrative pace, as when Hetty's fleeting meditations

on her appearance in the "old-fashioned looking-glass" of her bedchamber are slowly unpacked

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over several pages in Chapter 15 (163). Or, it may accelerate the story, as when, during Hetty’s

pregnancy, the narrator condenses a long stretch of months between "the beginning of November

and the beginning of February" into a few short paragraphs (393). Stylized time also involves

pauses and temporal shifts in narrative position, including extended description, the detailed

rendering of individual consciousness through free indirect discourse, or a pause in which a

narrator steps forward to offer protracted commentary on (or digression from) storytelling.

As we will see, real time is not opposed to stylized time, nor is it necessarily the basis of a more

authentically real kind of fictional experience. Rather, the ability to modulate stylized time is

what distinguishes novel-writing from drama, a performative medium that offers a much more

limited set of devices for representing multiple temporalities. It is the play of real and stylized

time, I suggest, which enables novels to convey a narrative experience of the subtle (and

sometimes radical) movements of social change in the making—a lived experience that is also an

experience of (and in) history. In Adam Bede, this distinct blend of temporalities announces the

emergence of a new realist mode of narration that is also "counter-pastoral" in the emphasis it

places on Hayslope as a space of ongoing history—one that for all its resistance to change, is

hardly static. By attending to the temporal plurality of Eliot's first novel, we discover how the

same stylistic features that Williams regards as a reactionary wedge between pastoral characters

and modern readers creates a counter-pastoral dialectic of temporalities that encourages an

experience of history as both social and collective.

I. Slow but Not Static

Adam Bede begins memorably with the narrator's declaration that like an "Egyptian

sorcerer," she will use "a single drop of ink for a mirror . . . to reveal to any chance comer far-

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reaching visions of the past" (9). As we pass through this romantic threshold between the time

of the novel's setting and the time of its telling, the opening image of "the roomy workshop of

Mr. Jonathan Burge" conjures an idyllic rural scene through picturesque description of the warm

afternoon sun, the scent of pinewood and elder bushes, and "the strong barytone" of Adam's

voice, "which was heard above the sound of plane and hammer singing" (9). These pastoral

overtones take on greater immediacy as the narration turns to a real-time conversation amongst

the shop's workers. When Adam's brother, Seth, forgets to put panels in the door he is crafting,

Wiry Ben—the character who most thoroughly encapsulates Hayslope’s rough-hewn villagers—

jokes that Seth has been daydreaming about Dinah Morris, the Methodist preacher from

Snowfield's cotton mills, who is slated to give a sermon on the Village Green later that evening.

Adam deflects Ben's mockery, only to find himself subject to the latter's suggestion that he—like

his brother—could wind up "a-turnin' Methody" (13).

If the novel's rural, turn-of-the-century setting suggests a pastoral retreat from modernity,

that effect is temporary. Dinah's Methodist preaching in the next chapter points to a modern

religious practice that arose in conjunction with industrialization and an emergent working-class

consciousness. As Eliot's contemporaries likely knew, Methodism grew alongside structural

changes in Britain’s economy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The enclosure of

common land concentrated property in the hands of landholders and their largest tenants,

enabling the implementation of technological innovations in farming and breeding livestock. As

Williams reminds us, these efficiencies exacted significant human costs: agrarian capitalism

brought about "a continuing contrast between the extraordinary improvement of the land and the

social consequences" of change (Country 82). The elimination of common property rights

proletarianized Britain’s rural population, spurring urban migration and enabling the rise of

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factory towns. By the end of the eighteenth century, Methodism had brought as many as twenty

percent of the poor and working classes into its ambit in manufacturing and mining districts, as

well as rural areas with weak aristocratic and parson control.62

Though Methodism's appeal was its emphasis on salvation as an act of free will,

historians such as E.P. Thompson have tended to frame it as a religious "opiate" diverting

attention from collective politics.63 Williams’s reading of Adam Bede might lead us to expect

that Eliot's novel idealizes the power of individual conversion. Yet in fact, the novel's elongated

"real-time" scene of preaching complicates the notion of individual agency by dramatizing

Hayslope's cultural resistance to change. Rather than focus on Dinah’s character—as the novel

might do if she were the heroine of a Bildungsroman—the chapter invites readers to witness a

complicated social grouping through an elaborate set piece. Although the chapter itself is a

blend of real and stylized time, the narration presents significant sections of Dinah's sermon

word-for-word, encompassing almost the entire second half of the chapter and pulling the

narrative into extended scenes of real-time effect. Through the careful assessment of such

temporal variety, we see how the depiction of Dinah's sermon immerses readers in a complex,

conscious-raising experience alongside Eliot’s characters.

At the start of Chapter 2, Adam Bede dips into what Seymour Chatman calls "stretch"

time, a kind of stylized time in which the telling of a story takes longer than the events it

describes (72). The effect of this deceleration is comparable to the use of slow motion in film

and, at times, the unfolding of the story could even be said to pause. The chapter begins with the

62 On Methodism, see Hempton Politics 12-15 and Empire; on the changing relationship between industry,

agriculture, and empire in general, see also Thompson, Mokyr 171-97 and Allen 57-79. 63 Thompson emphasizes the disciplinary compulsion of Methodist rhetoric in the period following John

Wesley's death in 1791, when Methodism came to serve "as the religion of the industrial bourgeoisie . . . and of wide sections of the proletariat"(355)

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arrival of an unnamed traveler, who will turn out to be Colonel Townley (the magistrate who,

much later, allows Dinah to visit Hetty in prison). As Townley approaches Hayslope on

horseback, the narrator adopts a perspective close to his position near "the entrance of the

village" to speculate on his "ignorance" of "the heraldic bearings of that ancient family," which

mark "the weatherbeaten sign" of the Donnithorne Arms, Hayslope's principal inn (18). From

this initial focalization of Townley, the narrator shifts attention to Mr. Casson, the Donnithornes'

former butler and the present landlord, who "had been for some time standing at the door with

his hands in his pockets, balancing himself on his heels and toes, and looking towards a piece of

unenclosed ground . . . which he knew to be the destination of certain grave-looking men and

women whom he had observed passing at intervals" (18).

Through his implied contrast with Townley, who is a kind of stand-in for the reader,

Casson may appear to exemplify the condescension toward rural characters charged by Williams.

With painstaking detail, the narrator breaks Casson's physical form down into its most basic

geometric shapes; first, likening his figure to "two spheres" which bear "about the same relation

to each other as the earth and the moon," and, then, complicating the comparison by noting that

Mr. Casson's head was not at all a melancholy-looking satellite, nor was it a 'spotty globe,' as

Milton had irreverently called the moon; on the contrary, no head and face could look more sleek

and healthy, and its expression, which was chiefly confined to a pair of round and ruddy cheeks,

the slight knot and interruptions forming the nose and eyes being scarcely worth mention, was

one of jolly contentment, only tempered by that sense of personal dignity which usually made

itself felt in his attitude and bearing. (18-9)

The narrator’s extended simile, comparing the relationship between Casson's head and

torso to that of the earth and the moon, invites readers to ponder an ironic reference to Paradise

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Lost (1667). Through the mock-epic style that this figurative device invokes, the novel contrasts

the supposedly transcendent themes of epic to the realist novel's depiction of everyday change on

a local scale. Milton's celestial image of the earth and the moon, a striking detail in the epic

description of Satan's movement from Chaos, is wholly incongruous with Casson, an exile of a

fundamentally less spectacular kind. Neither a member of the gentry (whom he served as a

butler), nor of the working classes of Hayslope (who are now his customers), Casson is a middle-

class tradesman. His position as landlord affords him respect from the "men and women" that

pass before him, but also separates him socially. In this instance, Casson's dilemma is "[h]ow to

reconcile his dignity with the satisfaction of his curiosity" regarding the events on the Green, a

problem that he solves, in mock-epic fashion, "by taking his hands out of his pockets, and

thrusting them into the armholes of his waistcoat, by throwing his head on one side, and

providing himself with an air of contemptuous indifference to whatever might fall under his

notice" (19). Shuffling about the Donnithorne Arm's porch with the feigned superiority of a

snob, his pantomime of the rich and well-bred suggests both his strong investment in Hayslope's

stratified social relations, as well as the narration's satire of a certain bourgeois pretension to be

better than the common people.

The irony of this posture is accentuated when a hurrying Townley gets sucked into

conversation with Casson and discovers that, contrary to the landlord's self-congratulatory belief

that he has mastered upper-class speech patterns, Casson possesses something like the very rural

working-class dialect he seeks to surpass. Yet this conversation between the self-conscious ex-

butler and the genteel traveler is not (as Williams’s analysis of Eliot might lead us to believe)

entirely at the former's expense. As the narrative slows down for an interlude of description and

dialogue that waxes ethnographic, Townley, it turns out, makes a few mistakes of his own.

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When he tells Casson that "I should have thought there would hardly be such a thing as a

Methodist to be found about here. You're all farmers, aren't you? The Methodists can seldom

lay much hold on them," he appears to suggest that Hayslope is either filled with independent

farmers who are fundamentally different from the workers of the growing factory towns, or that

Hayslope's agricultural laborers have such a deferential view of society that they would be

unresponsive to Methodism's political valence (20). But as we learn from Casson, although the

villagers are generally suspicious of Dinah's mission, Hayslope contains "a pretty lot o'

workmen": hired farmhands, carpenters, miners, and artisans; moreover, men like Seth Bede and

the wheelwright Will Maskery have already joined her ranks (20). The opening exchange

between the two men thus plays real-time dialogue against slow description to suggest, in

counter-pastoral fashion, that no outsider can afford to ignore the insights of local knowledge,

even when voiced by an absurd social upstart. Likewise, building on the historicizing detail of

Dinah's sermon, the narrative confirms the notion that no (implied) middle-class reader should

assume that Hayslope is the idealized rural retreat of a typical pastoral narrative.

After Townley leaves the Donnithorne Arms to proceed towards the Green, the narrator

returns to slow description. Over the course of several pages, Hayslope's seemingly pastoral

farms, woods, and hills are juxtaposed with a meticulous catalog of "the living groups close at

hand" through an omniscient narrative perspective that switches between ethnographic detail and

the focalization of several villagers' perspectives (23). To mark the villagers’ distance from

Methodist radicalism, the narrator notes that the crowd "would not have disclaimed the

imputation of having come out to hear the 'preacher-woman', —they had only come out to see

'what war a-goin' on, like'" (23). The women huddle near the Green, where they can "examine

more closely the Quaker-like costume and odd deportment of the female Methodists" (24); the

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men, meanwhile, are "chiefly gathered in the neighbourhood of the blacksmith's shop," close

enough to observe but far enough to suggest only passing interest (23). Within these lines, the

narration also decelerates to pinpoint the perspectives of certain highly individuated characters

including Chad Cranage, Joshua Rann, and Sandy Jim. By devoting several pages to the

villagers' conversations, descriptions, and thoughts, the narrator further complicates the reader's

identification with Townley's middle-class perspective and offers, instead, a glimpse of

collective community to take the place of a Scott-like typical character.

This collectivity develops through the narration's sustained access to the villagers' minds

by way of reported thoughts and free indirect discourse (FID), which foreground the importance

of the villagers' interiority and, by extension, their capacity to change in response to the sermon

that is about to begin. Whereas characters' reported thoughts attest to their potential for

individual change, FID—which combines the voice of the character together with that of the

narrator—presents a more collective experience. As Rae Greiner argues, FID "weds the

individual and public mind" (12): it "produces not so much the fused identity of narrator and

character, character and reader, but the partial, merely approximate cohabitations of

individualized persons and impersonal, virtual voice" (41). Williams does not consider the social

and collective bent that FID elicits through its brief and approximate (but nonetheless potent)

shifts in perspective. At the same time, FID helps to explain how the narration of Dinah's

preaching positions the novel's rural characters as a group that cannot be reduced to pastoral

stereotypes or objects of historical curiosity. The stylized rendering of their social attitudes in

and toward this public event marks a collective experience of change that envisions a nascent

sense of communal working-class consciousness.

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When Dinah mounts her makeshift pulpit beneath the maple tree, Chapter 2 moves from

a slow descriptive register to a brisker real-time sequence. Running roughly twenty pages in

most editions, the actual chronology of Dinah’s sermon covers a little more than an hour in clock

time. There is, thus, a near-direct equivalence between the pacing of time’s passage for Eliot’s

characters and readers. But although the synchronized pace of Dinah's speech is striking, the

scene is not wholly comprised of her dialogue. Instead, the real-time flow of Dinah's words,

which we might liken to the textual record of a speech, is punctuated by interludes of stylized

time devoted to the audience's response, enhancing the effect of this dramatized public event.

As Dinah reflects on Jesus's claim that he came to earth not for the "righteous'" but for

the "lost" and the "sinners," she poses a rhetorical question: "The lost!... Sinners!... Ah! dear

friends, does that mean you and me?" (32). In response, Townley, who still functions as a proxy

for the reader, finds himself "chained to the spot against his will by the sweet charm of Dinah's

mellow treble tones, which had a variety of modulation like that of a fine instrument touched

with the unconscious skill of musical instinct" (32). The narrator’s continuing FID evokes

Townley's belief that "[t]he simple things she said seemed like novelties, as a melody strikes us

with a new feeling when we hear it sung by the pure voice of a boyish chorister; the quiet depth

of conviction with which she spoke seemed in itself an evidence for the truth of her message"

(32). The narrator then relates his perception of the "grave attention" of the villagers, who, like

him, are "thoroughly arrested" (32). Returning to Dinah's earlier question—"Will God take care

of us when we die?" (30, 32)—he recalls "a tone of plaintive appeal" that induces tears in "some

of the hardest eyes" (32). In a striking moment of identification with the villagers, Townley

admits that Dinah "could fix the attention of her rougher hearers;" however, he still wonders if

"she could have that power of rousing their more violent emotions, which must surely be a

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necessary seal of her vocation" (32). As the narration gestures back to the words that initiated

this pause through the repetition of the words "Lost!—Sinners!", it artfully uses stylized time to

pull readers back to the diegetic present (32).

The narration next turns to Dinah, describing a transformation as her mind becomes

"filled by agitating thoughts that showed themselves in her features. Her pale face became paler;

the circles under her eyes deepened . . . and the mild loving eyes took an expression of appalled

pity . . . as she tried to bring home to the people their guilt, their wilful darkness, their state of

disobedience to God" (32-3). Recognizing that "her yearning desire to reclaim the lost sheep"

cannot "be satisfied by addressing her hearers as a body," Dinah confronts her audience one by

one (33). Returning to Townley as focalizer, the narrator shows Dinah resuming her speech, but

the temporality is no longer real-time reportage. Addressing the reader, the narrator describes

"many a responsive sigh and groan" from Dinah’s fellow Methodists, suggesting that "the village

mind does not easily take fire, and a little smouldering vague anxiety, that might easily die out

again, was the utmost effect Dinah's preaching had wrought in them at present" (33). If this

pronouncement implies that, for all Dinah’s charisma, the collective subject of village society

changes slowly, the point is not that Dinah's sermon is a failure. With the exception of the

children and the hearing-impaired Feyther Taft, none of the villagers retires from the Green,

enabling the narrator to describe the collective impact of Dinah's message.

Although Dinah’s words make Wiry Ben uncomfortable, he cannot "help liking to look at

her and listen to her, though he dreaded every moment that she would fix her eyes on him, and

address him in particular" (33). Sandy Jim, meanwhile, finds himself rubbing tears away from

his eyes "with a confused intention of being a better fellow, going less to the Holly Bush down

by the Stone-pits, and cleaning himself more regularly of a Sunday"—an oath that (in a kind of

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FID) conveys his own voice as much as the narrator’s (33). The most exceptional response,

however, comes from the impressionable Bessy Cranage, who "gradually" becomes "conscious

of what Dinah is saying" during an extended passage of introspection that slides between FID

and reported thoughts (34). With hints of comic condescension, the narrator observes that Bessy

begins Dinah's sermon "lost in a puzzling speculation as to what pleasure and satisfaction there

could be in life to a young woman who wore a cap like Dinah's" (34). Yet Dinah’s "severe

appeals" eventually make Bessy feel shame for her "religious deficiencies": "God, whom she

had always thought of as very far off," suddenly feels "very near to her" (34). Eliot’s diverse

stylized time thus draws on multiple narrative techniques to incorporate a succession of

individual interiorities that complicate the abstraction of "the village mind" and temper comic

irony with the possibility of collective change in action.

Of course, these reactions hinge on Dinah's immediate appeals. When Dinah turns

towards Bessy, touched "with pity" for her "bonny youth and evident vanity," she implores

Bessy to repent in the only one of Dinah’s individual appeals to appear in real-time:

"Poor child! poor child! He is beseeching you, and you don't listen to him. You think of

ear-rings and fine gowns and caps, and you never think of the Saviour who died to save

your precious soul . . . Ah! tear off those follies! cast them from you, as if they were

stinging adders. They are stinging you—they are poisoning your soul—they are

dragging you down into a bottomless pit, where you will sink for ever, and for ever, and

for ever, further away from light and God." (35-6)

These words produce a palpable reaction from Bessy, who rips off her earrings in a fit of tears.

But if this vivid response suggests a possible convert, the reader cannot be sure (and, in fact,

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Bessy’s behavior reverts in Dinah's absence). As the chapter concludes and Townley continues

on his journey, the effectiveness of Dinah's labor remains in doubt.

Why, then, does Adam Bede devote so much narrative space to a scene that, if hardly

nostalgic or idealized, provides so little in terms of narrative momentum? To answer this

question, we might return to Eliot's Lukács-like consciousness in her fashioning of a historical

counter-pastoral. As Lukács writes, "[w]hat matters . . . in the historical novel is not the retelling

of great historical events, but the poetic awakening of people who figured in those events. What

matters is that we should experience the social and human motives which led men to think, feel

and act just as they did in historical reality" (Historical 42). Such motives are, for Lukács, best

portrayed in "outwardly insignificant events" because they focus on "smaller" relationships,

which can be presented in a "straightforward way" (Historical 42). As this line of reasoning

suggests, Dinah’s anti-climactic sermon (a seemingly "insignificant" event focused on the

"smaller" relationships of the world) illustrates "poetic awakening" in the making: the

emergence of a consciousness that resonates with possibilities for collective feeling and action.

The slow burn of social change, marked in Eliot's pointed use of reported thought and FID to

account for the villager's response "at present," indicates a social transformation that is underway

in Hayslope as well as more decidedly urban locales (33). Thus, in contrast to Williams's belief

that Eliot's "new form" fails, the play of real and stylized time in the depiction of Dinah's

preaching offers a dialectic of temporalities for a timely innovation in historical novel-writing.

Against the proposition of a bourgeois novel trafficking in pastoral clichés, we see a novel whose

middle-class stand-in for the reader, Townley, both observes and participates in a changing rural

scene alongside Hayslope's villagers.

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II. "A Twinge of Consciousness"

Thus far, we have seen how the temporal complexity found in Eliot's narration of a public

event like Dinah's preaching opens up new formal pathways for stimulating consciousness of

collective historical change. As the novel proceeds, Adam Bede periodically slows down for

additional scenes of collectivity in the making. Among the most important is Book Three's

depiction of the elaborate celebration of Arthur’s birthday, midway through the novel. The start

of Book Three leaps forward roughly a month in chronological time to follow Hetty's perspective

as she joins the Poysers on the journey from Hall farm to the Donnithorne Chase. From there,

the novel's pace decelerates to narrate a public event that occupies about ten hours in a stretch of

narrative that runs five chapters, or roughly fifty pages in most editions. While the celebration

seeks to reinforce the hagiography of the country house and its social order through the illusion

of an idealized form of cross-class relations, the event itself is carefully orchestrated to maintain

class divisions. Midway through Book Three, these tensions take on added significance in a

public scene that highlights rural inequality and the obstacles that prevent its removal.

In Chapter 24, Arthur emerges from his sequestered position in the Donnithorne mansion

to participate in a series of speeches and toasts following the celebration's dinner. Having

privately vowed to end his flirtation with Hetty, Arthur's thoughts are presented alongside a

series of public addresses, which combine the real-time, word-for-word experience of oration

with stylized moments of narrative comment, reported thoughts, and FID, granting the reader

access to the perspectives of other attendees. Williams would no doubt dismiss this cacophony

of voices as further evidence of Eliot's inability to individuate rural characters. Yet the chapter's

blend of real-time speech and stylized narration contrasts what is said and felt by those in

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attendance, positioning the crowd less as Williams's "choral mode" of idle commentators than as

a complex social group caught up in a revealing moment of cross-class encounter.

The Donnithornes' tenants initially occupy a secondary position that places them in ironic

contrast to Arthur within the scene. Eliot opens Chapter 24 with Dinah and Hetty's uncle, Mr.

Poyser, whom his peers have hastily selected to welcome the young Squire. Although normally

jolly and upbeat, Poyser appears ill-at-ease with the role that has been thrust upon him as one of

the estate's principal tenants. The narration relates his nervousness in a moment of stylized

description, dilating time to note in the opening paragraph that for the "five minutes" before

Arthur's arrival, Poyser "had been in a state of abstraction, with his eyes fixed on the dark picture

opposite, and his hands busy with the loose cash and other articles in his breeches-pockets"

(288). This reaction is sharply contrasted with the outward confidence of Arthur, whom the

attendees stand to greet upon his arrival in a show of respect. Turning towards Arthur's thoughts,

the narration briefly shifts into FID to elaborate on his satisfaction with the moment, noting that

"[h]e liked to feel his own importance, and besides that, he cared a great deal for the goodwill of

these people: he was fond of thinking that they had a hearty, special regard for him" (288).

After a welcome from the young Squire, our attention is directed back to Poyser "who, with his

hands still busy in his pockets, [begins his toast] with the deliberateness of a slow-striking

clock," commencing the first of several rhythmic turns between sustained passages of real and

stylized time (288).

Poyser's nervous, wandering speech is included in full; however, it is chiefly important

for the stylized depiction of the response it yields from Arthur. From the "glorious shouting,"

"rapping," "jingling," and "clattering," that follow his words, we are reminded that Arthur is not

as confident as he initially appears (289). As the narration shifts back in diegetic time to record

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"a twinge of consciousness" in his character, it launches into an extended moment of FID to

chronicle Arthur's inner turmoil:

Did he not deserve what was said of him on the whole? If there was something in his

conduct that Poyser wouldn't have liked if he had known it, why, no man's conduct will

bear too close an inspection; and Poyser was not likely to know it, and after all, what had

he done? Gone a little too far, perhaps, in flirtation, but another man in his place would

have acted much worse; and no harm could come—no harm should come, for the next

time he was alone with Hetty, he would explain to her that she must not think seriously of

him or of what had passed. (289)

The rush of consciousness that accompanies Arthur's pattern of question and response appears

within this moment of FID as a sign of an ongoing individual transformation. Early in the novel,

Arthur is strongly associated with a pastoral perspective that chafes against the burgeoning

collectivity found in Dinah's sermon. During a meeting with the Irwines, he dismisses the

Lyrical Ballads (1798; 1800)—a collection of poetry famous for challenging pastoral

convention—as "twaddling stuff" (72). Later, when Arthur kisses Hetty in the Fir-tree Grove for

the first time, the narrator describes his feelings with a literary analogy to the pastoral imagery of

ancient Greece, suggesting that "[h]e may be a shepherd in Arcadia for aught he knows, he may

be the first youth kissing the first maiden, he may be Eros himself, sipping the lips of Psyche"

(150). Here, in Book Three, Arthur's pastoral worldview begins to slip. But the transformation

is—at this point—incomplete, captured more fully in our own looming anticipation of the events

to come.

As such, the narrator quickly breaks from this stylized moment of FID to observe that

"[i]t was necessary to Arthur, you perceive, to be satisfied with himself: uncomfortable thoughts

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must be got rid of by good intentions for the future, which can be formed so rapidly, that he had

time to be uncomfortable and to become easy again before Mr. Poyser's slow speech was

finished" (289). Pulling the reader back to the diegetic present, Arthur's nagging self-doubt is

momentarily cast aside in an attempt to preserve the illusion of harmony and order. But when

the narration shifts back to a real-time effect to depict the young Squire's own address to the

crowd, we discover that Hayslope's villagers are not passive observers to the scene. Anticipating

his future position as head of the estate, Arthur speaks gracefully of a paternalistic desire to treat

the role "not merely as one of power and pleasure" for himself, but as a "means of benefitting"

his tenants through the adoption of policies to improve the land and the keeping of livestock

(290). Then, noting that his pleasure in having his own health celebrated "would not be perfect"

if the crowd "did not drink the health" of his grandfather, he proposes a toast to the elder Squire

Donnithorne (290).

It is this request which produces a notable reaction from the crowd. Although the

narration provides few details about Arthur's grandfather, the information it does present paints

him in a negative light as a greedy and unresponsive landlord who has allowed the homes on his

estate to fall into disrepair. As the narrator turns away from the real-time effect of Arthur's toast,

we discover the real sentiment of the room. Shifting between omniscient narration and reported

speech, the narrator observes that "[p]erhaps there was no one present except Mr. Irwine who

thoroughly understood and approved Arthur's graceful mode of proposing his grandfather's

health. The farmers thought the young Squire knew well enough that they hated the old Squire,

and Mrs. Poyser said that 'he'd better not ha' stirred a kettle o' sour broth'" (290). From this, the

narrator remarks, somewhat ironically, that "[t]he bucolic mind does not readily apprehend the

refinements of good taste" before reminding us that "the toast could not be rejected" and noting

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the crowd's reluctant assent (291). Yet even with this assent, in incursion of stylized time

provides a subtle but profound reflection on the strained class relations that run throughout the

scene, highlighting thoughts that cannot—or, in the case of Mrs. Poyser, should not—be

expressed directly (as we might expect of a choral mode). The tenants' murmurs of discontent

transform what would otherwise be a symbolic moment of consensus into a rejection of the

pastoral harmony the celebration seeks to honor.

Yet less we fetishize the tenants' capacity for subversion, Eliot is quick to highlight the

prominence of jealousy and self-interestedness within their ranks in the absence of a unifying

figure like Dinah. When, a short while later, Adam is announced as the new manager of the

woods, the narration returns to stylized comment to subtly note that "[i]f Jonathan Burge and a

few others felt less comfortable on the occasion, they tried their best to look contented," thereby

hinting at the pangs of jealousy felt amongst those who previously considered themselves

Adam’s superiors (293). Then, after Adam makes a short speech in which he stresses the

importance of his own work ethic, the narrator turns from the real-time effect of his speech back

to a moment of stylized descriptive detail to present the conflicting sentiments of the crowd

through a free indirect style that blends narrative omniscience with regional turns of phrase.

While "some of the women whispered that he didn't show himself thankful enough, and seemed

to speak as proud as could be," the narrator suggests that "most of the men were of the opinion

that nobody could speak more straightfor'ard, and that Adam was a fine a chap as need to be"

(293). These observations are soon joined with additional "wonderings as to what the old Squire

meant to do for a bailiff, and whether he was going to have a steward" (294). As the speeches

conclude and our focus returns to the novel's principal characters, the embers of change,

previously concentrated in Dinah's sermon, dissipate into a stream of conflicting thoughts and

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motives that highlight division. Without Dinah, the villagers burgeoning collectivity has

dissolved into a directionless morass which, while not static, is momentarily inert.

III. A "Sense of Enlarged Being"

This leads us to an important question: if scenes like Dinah's preaching and Arthur's

birthday celebration demonstrate how Williams's critique of Eliot neglects the complex status

that Adam Bede's characters hold within the novel's dialectic of past and present, which

characters develop a social consciousness in the novel and how does that consciousness augment

the novel's vision of historical connection? Admittedly, in the second half of the novel, the

answer is not immediately clear. Books Four and Five see the love triangle between Adam,

Arthur, and Hetty come to a head when, over a span of months, Hetty wrestles with personal

crisis when she becomes pregnant with Arthur's child and reluctantly agrees to marry Adam,

dashing her hope for a life of comfort and glamor. In the climax of this subplot, Hetty’s failed

attempt to track down Arthur during a training exercise with his ceremonial militia sends her into

labor, prompting her to abandon her child in the wilderness. Her subsequent trial, conviction,

and the dramatic commutation of her sentence by Arthur’s unexpected arrival at the executioner's

gallows on horseback find the narrative working through the artistic problem of how to cultivate

sympathy for those who have committed heinous acts.

For Williams, the problem is not Eliot's interest in sympathy per se; rather, it is the notion

that Hetty's removal from our field of vision following her transport effectively strips her of her

ability to capture an authentic form of historical experience. In this way, the novel's previous

interest in her failed effort to transcend the circumstances of her existence is ultimately

abandoned in favor of what Williams describes as a bourgeois marriage plot designed to

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celebrate "the dignity of self-respecting labour and religious enthusiasm" in Adam and Dinah's

union (Country 173). The depiction of Adam and Dinah's marriage, however, is far more

discriminating than is suggested by Williams's characterization. Rather than reinforce bourgeois

ideology through an emphasis on the private family unit as the apex of individual experience, the

narration of Adam and Dinah's courtship closely aligns with the formation of an emergent

collective consciousness in and beyond the novel's historical frame. The slow, methodical

negotiation of Dinah's religious life, coupled with prolonged periods of waiting and Adam's

heightened appreciation of others, turn this key moment in the development of the novel's plot

into a reflection on the possibilities for collective feeling at the dawn of the nineteenth century.

Halfway through Book Six, in Chapter 52, Adam seeks out Dinah at the Poyser home on

a Sunday afternoon, where she is alone while the family is at church. When Adam confesses his

love, Dinah expresses her reluctance to marry based on her deep commitment to her faith in an

extended scene of real-time dialogue that heightens our impression of this decisive moment.

Dinah admits that her "heart is drawn strongly" towards Adam and that she "could find my

happiness in being near you, and ministering to you continually;" however, she fears that she

may "forget to rejoice and weep with others" (554). As she tells Adam:

"It seems to me as if you were stretching out your arms to me, and beckoning me to come

and take my ease, and live for my own delight, and Jesus, the Man of Sorrows, was

standing looking towards me, and pointing to the sinful, the suffering, and afflicted. I

have seen that again and again when I have been sitting in stillness and darkness, and a

great terror has come upon me lest I should become hard, and a lover of self, and no more

bear willingly the Redeemer's cross." (555)

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Adam expresses his support for Dinah's labor, noting that "I won't ask you to go to church with

me of a Sunday; you shall go where you like among the people, and teach 'em; for though I like

church best, I don't put my soul above yours, as if my words was better for you to follow than

your own conscience" (556). Dinah, meanwhile, leaves open the possibility that their love may

enlarge her faith before suggesting that she must ultimately wait for the "clearer guidance" of

Divine Will (556).

Following news of Dinah's abrupt return to Snowfield in the next chapter, "The Harvest

Supper," Chapter 54 finds Adam resolving to undertake a journey there weeks later in search of

an answer from Dinah. Over the course of several paragraphs, the narration compresses the

duration of Adam's long journey, highlighting his love for Dinah in a stylized presentation of

narrative comment and reported thoughts which afford a broader social meaning to the scene.

Riding beyond "the grey stone walls" of Oakbourne, Adam moves through the same "broken

country" and past the same "meagre trees" that Hetty traversed as she made her desperate

journey towards Arthur, in which she would eventually give birth to and abandon their child

(576). As Adam confronts this "painful past," the narrator speculates on thoughts that Adam

himself is unlikely to admit in an extended stretch of stylized comment and description that uses

the compression of chronological time to clarify his experience (576). Adam, we are told, "could

never thank God for another's misery . . . he would have shaken his head at such a sentiment, and

said, 'Evil's evil, and sorrow's sorrow, and you can't alter its nature by wrapping it up in other

words. Other folks were not created for my sake, that I should think all square when things turn

out well for me'" (576-7). Still, the narrator suggests that "it is not ignoble to feel the fuller life

which a sad experience has brought us is worth our own personal share of pain . . . The growth of

higher feeling within us is like the growth of faculty, bringing with it a sense of added strength"

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(576-7). Indeed, the narrator posits that "[s]omething like this sense of enlarged being was in

Adam's mind this Sunday morning as he rode along in vivid recollection of the past . . . Tender

and deep as his love for Hetty had been . . . his love for Dinah was better and more precious to

him; for it was the outgrowth of that fuller life which had come to him from his acquaintance

with deep sorrow" (577).

Still within this moment of stylized time, the narration turns towards Adam's actual

thoughts as he admits to himself that his stubborn sense of superiority has led to "a poor sort o'

life" that devalues others and which he vows to change (577). His newfound commitment to

collectivity is joined with news of Dinah's renewed commitment to her faith in the chapter's

closing paragraphs. Upon Adam's arrival at Snowfield, he discovers that Dinah has set off to

preach in a small cottage at "Sloman's End, a hamlet about three miles off" (578). When they

meet in a dramatic embrace on the outskirts of that community, the narrative briefly shifts

towards a real-time effect when Dinah tells Adam "it is the Divine Will" for them to come

together in marriage: "My soul is so knit to yours that it is but a divided life I live without you.

And this moment, now you are with me, and I feel that our hearts are filled with the same love, I

have a fulness of strength to bear and do our heavenly Father's Will, that I had lost before" (580).

Read alongside Adam's experience, these words solidify the notion that their love provides a

kind of symbiotic power which, in the case of Adam, produces a heightened consciousness of

others and, in the case of Dinah, a renewed commitment to her social and spiritual mission.

The social need for Dinah's renewed commitment to her mission is reemphasized in the

novel's conclusion as the novel returns to a collective scene, leaping forward a "little more than a

month after that meeting on the hill" to witness Dinah and Adam’s wedding in "an event much

thought of in the village"(581). In her opening description, the narrator observes that "there was

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hardly an inhabitant of Hayslope specially mentioned in this history and still resident in the

parish" who was not present:

The churchyard walk was quite lined with familiar faces, many of them faces that had

first looked at Dinah when she preached on the Green; and no wonder they showed this

eager interest on her marriage morning, for nothing like Dinah and the history which had

brought her and Adam Bede together had been known at Hayslope within the memory of

man. (581)

Amid the narrator’s catalog of attendees, the narration returns to Bessy Cranage, the

impressionable young woman from Dinah’s preaching, who is once again adorned "in her neatest

cap and frock" and crying, "though she did not exactly know why" (581). The narrator's satire of

Bessy's fickle emotions and vanity is then extended to other memorable figures when, her

cousin, Wiry Ben "judiciously" reminds her that "Dinah was not going away, and if Bessy was in

low spirits, the best thing for her to do was to follow Dinah’s example, and marry an honest

fellow who was ready to have her"(581). That Dinah's "example" could be reduced to her

decision to wed suggests that the most important lessons of Dinah’s work remain half-learned

amongst many of the people of Hayslope. Yet notwithstanding these challenges, the novel's

description of Dinah within the scene highlights the persistence of her faith. Although not in the

black garments commonly associated with the Methodist preacher, her wedding dress, "made all

of grey" is "in the usual Quaker form" so that "the lily face looked out with sweet gravity . . .

neither smiling nor blushing, but with lips trembling a little under the weight of solemn feelings"

(582). As Dinah enters her union with Adam, she thus retains the aspect and sentiment of her

religious faith.

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Yet in a notable departure from the novel's beginning, Adam Bede's conclusion

acknowledges the limitations of Methodism as a political tool. Following the final chapter, the

novel makes a stylized leap forward roughly six years to a time to a moment "near the end of

June, in 1807" in the Epilogue (587). As the narrator zooms in on Dinah, she is joined by two

children—Addy and Lisbeth—and the children's uncle, Seth, in anticipation of Adam's arrival

from a visit with Arthur, recently returned from the Napoleonic Wars. After Adam greets his

family, the conversation quickly reveals how changes adopted by the Methodist clergy in 1803

have forced women from the pulpit, leading Dinah to continue her mission by talking with

people in their homes. While the sting of this detail is expressed through Seth’s disdain, it is

clear that Eliot does not view Methodism—filled, as it is, with the belief in "miracles,"

"instantaneous conversions," and "revelations by dreams and visions" that she describes much

earlier in the novel—as an unequivocal solution to England's social problems (43). Instead, it is

Dinah's dynamic approach to her work in spite of the gendered bias of Methodism in the years

after the death of its founder, John Wesley, that signals the most valuable takeaway.

Anticipating Thompson's influential critique of Methodist ideology in the middle of the twentieth

century, Eliot shows the movement losing its radical potential at the dawn of the nineteenth. To

inspire the people of Hayslope and beyond towards a collective identity is thus, in the view of the

novel, an ongoing process that transcends any one tactic or movement. In this way, rather than

resurrect the romantic threshold between the time of the novel's setting and the time of the

novel's telling by suggesting that Hayslope's social problems have been solved, Adam Bede uses

this stylized leap forward in the Epilogue to offer a sense of a history still in the process of

unfolding and which persists into the implied present of the novel's narration.64

64 The belief that England's social and spiritual change is ongoing and incomplete is depicted elsewhere in

several scenes. In the second half of Chapter 17, for instance, the narration leaps forward to a comparatively recent

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Through the preceding examples, we have seen how Eliot anticipates the Lukácsian view

that literature's historical authenticity requires more than simply writing about historical events

or including vivid historical detail; it is the result of writers who use narrative means to show

readers "the way society moves" (Historical 144). In labeling Adam Bede counter-pastoral, I

have demonstrated how Eliot's novel muddies the waters of rural nostalgia for a Victorian

readership to whom the transition between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries lingers as a

space of ongoing cultural memory. As I have suggested, Williams's belief in Eliot's

condescension towards her rural characters neglects the ways in which Adam Bede's cultivation

of a collective vision place it far closer to his own desire for a literature that elicits "the real

history" of the English countryside (Country 1). By focusing on the novel's complex blend of

real and stylized temporal effects, we gain a better understanding of how Adam Bede's blended

temporalities yield a new type of historical fiction for Eliot's mid-century moment. Whereas

Scott's fiction frequently brings characters from different social groups together in dramatic

moments of encounter that parallel decisive moments in national political life, Adam Bede

reminds us that such encounters need not be national in focus or transformative in the moment to

present a historically dynamic vision. Through complimentary shifts between real and stylized

time, Eliot's first novel pulls its readers beyond the external, performative dimensions of public

scenes to highlight the complex relationship between narrative and historical time in the years

after Scott's fiction. Its characterization of the slow creep of change in Hayslope's rural society

solidifies Eliot's position as one of the Victorian period's most important practitioners of the

counter-pastoral and historical fiction.

moment to note the elderly Adam Bede's preference for Mr. Irwine’s common courtesy over the sour temper and stinginess of his successor, Mr. Ryde, in a scene that suggest that the years following the novel's main action have yet to produce a seismic transformation in Hayslope's social order.

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Chapter 5:

The Mayor of Casterbridge's Tragic Naturalism: Serializing History's Stream

Frustration abounds in The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886). A historical novel of sorts,

Casterbridge spans the 30-odd years that lead up to the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, which

liberalized the grain market in Britain. Midway through the novel, Hardy's ill-fated grain

merchant, Michael Henchard, suspects that his former employee, Donald Farfrae, has developed

an attraction for his love interest, Lucetta Templeman. Henchard, already jealous of Farfrae's

rise in society, vows to sabotage his rival's business by deliberately undercutting his prices. Yet

in order to inflict maximum damage, Henchard must purchase grain based on anticipated weather

patterns. Experience leads Henchard to predict a "disastrous garnering" for the upcoming

season; however, his superstitious tendencies prompt him to seek out the advice of "Wide-oh"

Fall, the local weather-prophet (142). When Wide-oh's forecast supports Henchard's prediction,

Henchard buys an abundance of grain at the current rate. In the weeks that follow, the weather

defies expectation, foiling his plan. The severity of Henchard's mistake is intensified when it is

revealed a few pages later that he unwisely leveraged his credit, forcing him to turn over "much

real property as well as vast stores of produce" to the Casterbridge Bank (145). While Henchard

survives his encounter with the creditors, the scene portends a downward spiral in his luck. In

subsequent chapters, the story of how Henchard sold his wife and daughter to a wandering sailor

comes to light. Shortly thereafter, Henchard's employee commits a "blunder of

misrepresentation" during the sale of grain, further damaging Henchard's reputation and plunging

him into a life of disgrace (167).

Beyond its role in the story of Henchard's decline, Wide-oh's appearance is significant for

the associations it conjures with the uneasy relationship between chance and determinism. In

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seeking out Wide-oh Fall, Henchard desires "what so many have wished—that he could know

for certain what was at present only strong probability" (142). Yet as Henchard discovers,

categories like "certainty" and "probability" cannot be easily transformed. The narrator

underscores the error of Henchard's faith in Wide-oh through the use of tragic irony, a formal

device through which the narration reveals the mistake of a character's actions to the reader

before the repercussions of those actions are felt in the story's plot. The start of the scene lays

the groundwork for this irony through the atmospheric shift that accompanies the description of

Henchard's journey to Wide-oh's cottage. The narrowing of the comparatively modern turn-pike

road to an overgrown footpath marks a turn from Casterbridge's isolated but historically distinct

setting to an archetypal place more fitting English folklore than a novel situated in the first half

of the nineteenth century. Upon Henchard's arrival at Wide-oh's cottage, the weather prophet

invites him in for dinner, noting that he has anticipated his visit. But while the scene seduces

Henchard, Hardy places the reader in a position to know better. After Henchard pays Wide-oh a

crown for his services, the narrator interrupts the weather-prophet's forecast by mentioning that

"five farmers had already been [to Wide-oh's home] on the same errand from different parts of

the country" (143-4). The revelation of this detail to the reader, and not to Henchard, allows

Hardy's protagonist to mistake the weather-prophet's performance of witchcraft for actual

supernatural ability. As a result, he fails to see that the closest thing one has to certainty in the

realm of business is an aggressive form of risk management.

Henchard's experience speaks to a historically-specific preoccupation with the nature of

certainty in a post-Enlightenment world. In the nineteenth century, the celebration of rational

thinking contributed to a proliferation of theories related to the anticipation of change. Whether

they derived from political economy, sociology, natural science, or something else, such theories

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were premised on the belief that the more individuals understood about the world, the more they

would be able to anticipate the way events would unfold. In literature, one of the most

significant corollaries for this way of thinking was "naturalism," a series of movements in which

a realistic depiction of the world involves swapping out the perceived agency of literary

characters for various forms of biological and socioeconomic determinism. Yet the theory of

change that Hardy outlines in his fiction is not (as in the case of the typical naturalist) tied to

rational and deterministic thinking.65 Instead, Hardy's view derives from a much more chaotic

and creative perspective, underscoring Victorian literature's potential to elicit varied responses to

emergent trends in nineteenth-century intellectual culture.

One finds evidence of Hardy's resistance to determinism in a journal entry from May

1885. Written just after he completed the manuscript of The Mayor of Casterbridge, the entry is

primarily concerned with Hardy's disdain for the "average men" he has met at various social

parties in London, who have come to take on roles as influential members of the national

government. In describing the effect such men have on the course of history, Hardy departs from

Darwin's use of "the tree" as a metaphor for explaining the theory of evolution in On the Origin

of Species (1859). Whereas Darwin's tree metaphor comes from a desire to articulate the

principle of natural selection, or survival of the fittest, through an adaptation of the diagrams that

had been used to map genealogical relationships for centuries, Hardy offers a model that is much

more contingent and diffuse. As he observes:

65 Eagleton reminds us, although there is "a streak" of naturalism in the novels of Hardy, "who from time to

time likes to widen the narrative focus so as to gaze on human existence with the unperturbable eyes of the gods [...] this is less a scientific doctrine than an imaginative hypothesis" (English 196). This stands in contrast with Beer's association of Hardy with Darwin-inspired evolutionary narrative and Moses's interpretation of Hardy as a "neo-Hegelian" thinker, outlined below (63).

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History is rather a stream than a tree. There is nothing organic in its shape, nothing

systematic in its development. It flows like a thunderstorm-rill by a road side; now a

straw turns it this way, now a tiny barrier of sand that. The offhand decision of some

commonplace mind high in office at a critical moment influences the course of events for

a hundred years. (Life 179)

Like the emergent fin-de-siècle branch of mathematics that gave birth to chaos theory (best

known today for "the butterfly effect"), Hardy sees significant, unexpected events rising out of

the seemingly inconsequential experiences of the past. The flow of history, like the flow of the

stream, washes over the world in unexpected ways. The importance of individual action stems

not from biological fitness but rather an individual's position in space and time.

This stream of history was very much on Hardy's mind in his fiction of the 1880s,

contributing to the content and form of The Mayor of Casterbridge. First run in a twenty-week

serialization for the Graphic magazine, Casterbridge is the seventh of Hardy's Wessex novels, a

cycle of eleven novels set in a fictional county in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Though Hardy's serializations are primarily noted for their bowdlerization of controversial

subject matter, the weekly publication of Casterbridge affected Hardy's efforts to write a tragedy

in novel form.66 Hardy lamented the serial demand for significant plot turns in each installment,

which detracted from his focus on a tragic arc.67 At the same time, serialization provided a

means for Hardy to dramatize his theory of history as a stream. As we will see, the spread of

action across the novel's original installments introduces a broad, cyclical temporality that

corresponds with Casterbridge’s geographical and historical location in the English countryside.

66 See Beach regarding serialization's role in bowdlerizing Hardy's fiction. 67 Karl observes that Hardy "was afraid that the demands of weekly publication, with the need to force an

incident into each installment, would strain the credulity of the reader of the novel as a whole" (417).

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This narrative structure leaves a discernible imprint on Hardy's revised edition. Not only one of

Hardy's most notable interrogations of literary character, the finished work balances the tragic

dimensions of its protagonist's life in history.

While Casterbridge's serialization has received little attention, the notion that Henchard

is a tragic figure who portends a shift in agrarian capitalism is well-established amongst critics.

Michael Valdez Moses argues that Casterbridge's archaeology of Roman, Tudor, and

Elizabethan artifacts plays a crucial role in Hardy's effort to recast Attic tragedy in the form of

the novel: Moses contends that by depicting "the advent of modernity in Casterbridge against its

'classical background,'" Hardy heightens "the dramatic sense of historical rupture and political

change that ultimately overtakes this community" (33). Meanwhile, Pamela Dalziel observes

that our perceptions of Henchard’s "downward trajectory" are "at once reflective of and

complicated by Hardy’s narrative, which combines structural linearity and circularity while

interrogating conventional notions of individual and social progress" (xv). Although the general

movement of the narrative is towards decline, “rather than present the course of Henchard’s life

in straightforwardly linear terms, […] the narrative charts the numerous rises and falls of his

career, from journeyman hay-trusser to corn-factor and mayor, then from bankrupt and hired

hand to small seed-shop proprietor, and finally back to journeyman hay-trusser” (xv). As a

result, she suggests that the novel resists a steady progress in any one direction in favor of a

structural model she compares to “the turning wheel of fortune” (xv).

Such readings call to mind the theories of history and tragedy associated, first, with

Hegel's Phenomenology of the Spirit (1807) and later cited in Georg Lukács's work on The

Historical Novel (1937).68 Moreover, they remind us that literature's engagement with history

68 For Lukács, "i]t is certainly no accident that the great periods of tragedy coincide with the great, world-

historical change in human society," as tragedy's emphasis on "the collision of social forces at their most extreme

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and creation of a sense of historical authenticity varies from space-to-space and time-to-time.

For Lukács—the critic who has proven most influential to our contemporary understandings of

literature and history—the second half of the nineteenth-century witnessed a decline in realism's

capacity to convey historical dynamism in England and parts of Europe as a politically inert

"bourgeois" realism came to prominence alongside emergent forms of naturalist and proto-

modernist literature. He believed that such movements flattened and distorted the reader's view

of social "totality," providing, at best, undialectical critiques of society that failed to grapple with

the author's own class position and, at worst, naïve apologies for a problematic social order.

Subsequent critics, however, have frequently sought to expand our understanding of literature's

historicity. Some, such as Jed Esty, Simon Joyce, and Emily Steinlight, have even demonstrated

the importance of naturalist and modernist experiments in grappling with an increasingly

complex social order in ways that complement Lukács's work.69

Indeed, in the case of naturalism, specifically, it is worth noting that while Lukács is

often presented as a fierce critic of the movement, his analysis of the movement's most

influential figure, Émile Zola, is always subtle and discriminating. In his 1940 essay "The Zola

and acute point" render it useful to the depiction of social transformation through the downfall of individual characters (97). Still, Lukács is reluctant to accept that the narrow focus of most tragic plots on a select group of individuals can stand in for the depiction of a changing social reality with the same degree of success as the novel or the epic before it. While tragedies succeed, in his view, when they "present the objective, outer world" and "the inner life of man only insofar as his feelings and thoughts manifest themselves in deeds and actions" that relate to that world, Lukács finds the novels of Scott, Balzac, Tolstoy, and continental realists of the twentieth century far more conducive to demonstrating how the present political climate came into being (90).

69 In her reading of Jude the Obscure (1894-5), Steinlight argues that while "the fate of Hardy's protagonists" may initially seem to reflect what Lukács refers to as "naturalism's morbid consciousness," Hardy's narrative stresses "a persistent strain of chance" that complicates "the familiar Lukácsian indictment of naturalism as the literary form of bourgeois ideology: a genre whose only subject is the private individual severed from social totality (and thus from politics)" (225). Esty, meanwhile, has challenged Lukács's disdain for modernism, asserting that modernist literature is a globally inflected "critical realism" that takes up "the contradictory task of representing world-historical development as both an imperative and an impossibility" (371). Joyce notes that Lukács view of movements like naturalism and modernism is far more discriminating than many critical accounts suggest, looking to Lukács's 1940 essay "The Zola Centenary" as evidence of a transformation in the author's position in the late nineteenth century. See Joyce 17-8.

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Centenary," for instance, Lukács contends that Zola's "undialectic conception of the organic

unity of nature and society" place "the elimination of antagonisms" and the desire for "harmony"

as "the essence of social being," thereby rendering it incapable of providing a clear image of

social development in spite of the author's otherwise "sincere and courageous critique of society"

(Studies 86-7). For Lukács, Zola's challenge came from his search for a method by which the

modern writer, "reduced to a mere spectator and chronicler of public life . . . could again

realistically master reality" (89-90). He believed that Zola's documentary tendencies led to a

kind of "grey average" (92) which failed to lift his subject matter to a "higher plane" (94) as

effectively as the more romantic style of writers like Balzac and Stendhal before him. The

problem, for Lukács, is thus less a matter of naturalism in and of itself than in the particular form

it adopts in Zola's work. Yet Hardy, who frequently distanced himself from French naturalism,

does not easily fit Lukács's critique. The highly imaginative, tragic elements of his writing—

which Lukács might characterize as a form of "romanticism" akin to that of Balzac or Stendhal—

differ from the naturalist's scientific, documentarian impulse. Hardy's naturalism—to the extent

that we describe it as such—is less about a systematic analysis of the world than a sustained

reflection on the difficulty of pinning down the world's ever-increasing social complexity.

My account of The Mayor of Casterbridge argues that Hardy's serialized blend of

naturalist and tragic conventions reinvigorates the historical novel for his late-Victorian readers

through its dramatization of history's stream. As Hardy was intimately aware, agrarian

capitalism had undergone significant changes in the decades preceding the 1880s. The repeal of

the Corn Laws, which gradually opened the grain market to foreign product, played a crucial role

in lowering the price of grain and transforming agriculture's position in English society.70

70 Hardy alludes to this reality in the opening lines of his Preface to the 1895 edition, when he observes that

"Readers of the following story who have not yet arrived at middle age are asked to bear in mind that, in the days

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Raymond Williams notes that "[a] point was reached, late in the century, when the development

of industrial production and consequent changes of national economic policy led to a pattern in

which manufactured goods were exported against imports of cheap foreign food" (Country 187).

Although never a simple, totalizing process, these shifts led to "a redirection of agricultural

production" that hit the grain market especially hard, eventually working their way through "the

classical problems of rural England—ownership of the land, the means of production, the

possession and function of capital for investment, and the persistent problems of wages, housing

and educating" (Country 188). As the value of agricultural commodities fell, labor and wealth

left the English countryside to such a degree that the rural society of the first half of the

nineteenth century felt very different at the century's end.

That Hardy would look to the cycle as a model for dramatizing a moment just before the

acceleration of these changes is not surprising. In the most basic sense, a cycle is a series of

repeating events that complicate the notion that social and human development can be

understood in simple, linear terms. Rather than treat events as unique and new, cyclical theories

of change require attending to repetition. Yet such repetitions are never perfect facsimiles.

Subtle changes born from experience yield small variations that are compounded over time,

charting a course of unexpected consequences not unlike the flow of history's stream. In

Casterbridge, cyclical temporality appears both as a theory of change and a set of narrative

devices. Whereas tragic plots are typically said to gain from the compression of space and time

because such compression brings characters into contact with one another, heightening narrative

recalled by the tale, the home Corn Trade, on which so much of the action turns, had an importance that can hardly be realized by those accustomed to the sixpenny loaf of the present date, and to the present indifference of the public to harvest weather" (1).

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tension, Hardy's novel disperses cause and effect.71 In some instances, such as the abrupt leap

between the novel's first and second installment for the Graphic (which I explore in Section

One), the narration uses descriptive contrast and parallel action to blend a tragic elevation of the

novel's characters with a careful attention to the natural and social processes at work in the

eighteen years following the sale of Henchard's wife and daughter. Elsewhere, in the protracted

account of the commercial battle between Farfrae and Henchard (the subject of Section Two),

the narration stages an even more radical departure from typical tragic "collisions" in the

depiction of the cycles of accumulation and loss that transpire over the span of months, and

which are neatly divided between individual installments.

By examining the various ways in which Hardy uses the serial form to dramatize history's

stream, we find that although Hardy himself expressed anxiety about serialization's effect on his

novel's unity, it plays a vital role in The Mayor of Casterbridge's negotiation of recent historical

change. Instead of perpetuating what he takes to be a reductive model for thinking about

narrative and historical causality, Hardy taps into the creative potential of serialization to

produce a dynamic historical novel for his late-Victorian moment.

I. "Time, the Magician:" Clarity and Confusion as Temporal Effects

The Mayor of Casterbridge famously begins with a false start. The novel opens on an

"evening of late summer, before the nineteenth century had reached one-third of its span" (2).

Accompanied by his wife, Susan, and their infant daughter, Elizabeth-Jane, Michael Henchard

ambles along the long and weary path towards the village of Weydon-Priors in "perfect silence"

71 Bushnell helpfully contends that despite longstanding efforts to reduce tragedy's temporality to present-

oriented "collisions," the genre is perhaps best understood by its temporal variety in bestowing characters, readers, and audiences with an "anxiety of existing in the present, trembling between the awful certainty of the past and the unknown future" ("Temporality" 784).

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(3). After encountering a passing farmworker, the family is directed to a nearby fair, where they

purchase several bowls of furmity, an "antiquated slop" made up of "grain, flour, milk, raisins,

currants, and what not" (6). When the proprietor of the tent—a "haggish creature of about

fifty"—entices Henchard to lace his bowls with rum, he becomes increasingly belligerent,

eventually auctioning his wife and child to a passing sailor for five guineas before collapsing in a

drunken stupor (5). Upon waking in the next chapter, Henchard searches for his family and

pledges an oath of sobriety for twenty-one years—one for each year of his life—as penance for

his actions before settling in the distant town of Casterbridge and bringing the novel's first

installment to a close.

Then, in the second installment, the narrative leaps forward roughly eighteen years to the

diegetic present at an indescript moment in the 1840s.72 Once again, the location is the highroad

near Weydon-Priors. This time, however, it is Susan and her second daughter—also named

"Elizabeth-Jane," but who will eventually be revealed as the daughter of her marriage with the

sailor, Richard Newson—who walk towards the fair in search of Henchard, dressed in the black

clothes of mourning. Recalling the novel's opening paragraphs, Chapter 3 begins with the

narrator's observation that the road "was again carpeted with dust. The trees had put on as of

yore their aspect of dingy green, and where the Henchard family of three had once walked along,

two persons not unconnected with that family walked now" (15, italics mine). From these

details, the narrator adds that "[t]he scene in its broad aspect had so much of its previous

character [...] that it might for that matter have been the afternoon following the previously

recorded episode" (15, italics mine).

72 Beyond the narration's brief reference to a time before the repeal of the Corn Laws, reprinted in fn70, the

most concrete detail it offers regarding the novel's historical setting comes from the memorial card that Susan carries, which reads "In affectionate memory of Richard Newson, mariner, who was unfortunately lost at sea, in the month of November 184—, aged forty-one years" (16).

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Beginnings tell us a lot about a work of fiction. Through the dramatic leap in diegetic

time between Casterbridge's first and second installments, Hardy draws upon the natural break

of the serial's publishing cycle to create a kind of caesura that accentuates our impression of

time's passing through structural repetition and descriptive contrast. This caesura reminds us that

while serialization placed clear limitations on the kind of story that Hardy could tell, it also

presented unique opportunities for artistic innovation in the development of a new kind of

historical tragedy. Like a bridging shot in film—which uses symbolic images such as the flow of

newspaper headlines to alleviate narrative discontinuities—the opening paragraphs of the second

installment cast the highroad into the village of Weydon-Priors as a symbolic reference point to

bridge a substantial gap in time. Through its descriptive contrast with the novel's opening, the

narration conjures associations with the Freudian uncanny—that strange, but familiar sensation

that generates anxiety and dread in the beholder.

For Julian Wolfreys, this "constant pulsation of doubling, reiteration and return" is an

invitation to deconstruction, calling attention to Casterbridge's conflicted relationship with the

past as a gothic tragedy poised between realism and modernism (139).73 Yet such moments look

different when we examine them with a cyclical model of narrative and historical development in

mind. While Wolfreys correctly suggests that uncanny moments encourage the reader to

question the nature of the world, they are not always an end in and of themselves. As Wayne C.

Booth has observed, one of confusion's roles in literary narrative is "to break down the reader's

convictions about truth itself, so that he may be ready to receive the truth when it is offered to

him" in the form of literary experience (285). And indeed, in Casterbridge, the creation of

73 To Wolfreys, Casterbridge is a "haunted" novel—one that, as a form of gothic literature, vulgarizes

"tragedy's high portentousness" (117). He sees Henchard's decision to expel "the family in the name of economics" transforming his character into an "unhomely" figure who is "doomed to fail repeatedly in the reconstitution of family and home" (132).

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confusion through uncanny moments like the opening of Chapter 3 frequently prompt the reader

to come to grips with the complexities of history and time, often through the creation of distinct

stylistic shifts. By examining the relationship between clarity and confusion in Hardy's novel,

we see how the narration's tragic elevation of its characters and subject matter is frequently

contrasted with a naturalist description of social and scientific "laws." These competing styles

bind Hardy's depiction of characters' experiences with a sense of ongoing natural and historical

processes, dramatizing the flow of history's stream.

In the novel's opening chapters, the combination of tragic and naturalist elements places

readers alongside characters as they come to grips with a changing world they only partially

understand. What Wolfreys describes as the "ghostly trace" left by Susan and Elizabeth-Jane's

return, quickly gives way to a naturalist mode of representation which emphasizes the every-day

process of maturation and physical decline (114). Against the illusion of a seemingly static

highroad to Weydon-Priors, the narrator acknowledges that change could "be observed in [the]

details," where "it was obvious that a long procession of years had passed by" (15). In the case

of Susan: "her face had lost much of its rotundity; her skin had undergone a textural change; and

though her hair had not lost colour it was considerably thinner than heretofore" (15). From this

brief but striking catalog, which conjures naturalism's fascination with the depiction of physical

and social decline, the woman whom the narrator initially describes in Chapter 1 as "pretty, and

even handsome" despite bearing a "hard, half-apathetic expression" is shown here to have

become worn down under her life's strain (3-4). Thus, although the narration refrains from

providing additional information about Susan's experience either before or after her sale (and so

maintains an air of mystery about her character, as one might expect of tragedy), it embeds her in

a changing world through its use of naturalist description in its depiction of the aging process.

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The narration follows Susan's description with an equally concise account of her

"companion . . . a well-formed young woman of about eighteen, completely possessed of that

ephemeral precious essence youth, which is itself beauty, irrespective of complexion or contour"

(15-16). With the declaration of Elizabeth-Jane's "ephemeral precious essence," which begins a

process of idealizing her character as a tragic heroine, the narration briefly encourages readers to

mistake Elizabeth-Jane for the infant who appears in Chapter 1 before delving deeper into a

naturalist mode of representation to relate the cycles of human development.74 Contrasting the

appearance of mother and daughter, the narrator suggests that

While life's middle summer had set its hardening mark on the mother's face, her former

spring-like specialties were transferred so dexterously by Time to the second figure, her

child, that the absence of certain facts within her mother's knowledge from the girl's mind

would have seemed for the moment, to one reflecting on those facts, to be a curious

imperfection in Nature's powers of continuity. (16)

Through this descriptive summary, which reifies time and nature as seemingly rigid forces, the

narration describes a symbiotic relationship in which the "hardening mark" that has set in on

Susan's face is likened to the turn of the seasons, coinciding with the transference of her former

"spring-like specialties" to her daughter. Indeed, the only break in this process comes in the

absence "of certain facts" from Elizabeth-Jane's mind, which the narration will soon reveal to be

connected with her mother's history and relation to Henchard.

This unique blend of tragic and naturalist convention persists beyond Susan and

Elizabeth-Jane's opening descriptions as they pass the outskirts of Weydon-Priors and ascend

74 In Poetics, for instance, Aristotle contends that the best tragedies will imitate "people better than we are"

(25).

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towards the fair. Still within a mostly naturalist mode of representation, Hardy's narrator turns

his gaze from Susan and her daughter to the fair to convey a sense of its decline. As he notes:

Certain mechanical improvements might have been noticed in the roundabouts and

highfliers, machines for testing rustic strength and weight, and in the erections devoted to

shooting for nuts. But the real business of the fair had considerably dwindled. The new

periodical great markets of neighbouring towns were beginning to interfere seriously with

the trade carried on here for centuries. The pens for sheep, the tie-ropes for horses, were

about half as long as they had been. The stalls of tailors, hosiers, coopers, linen-drapers,

and other such trades had almost disappeared, and the vehicles were far less numerous.

(16)

In a brief paragraph, which reflects on the fair's transformation from a trading center to a place of

entertainment, Hardy gestures towards a general arc of decline. But he does so with an important

shift from naturalism. Were Casterbridge a naturalist novel in the ilk of Zola, one would expect

the close proximity of nature and society to provide a testament of Zola's belief that "[t]he social

cycle is identical with the life cycle" (qtd. in Lukács Studies 86). Yet Hardy's novel resists these

associations. Whereas the cycle of maturation that "dexterously" transfers Susan's features to her

daughter proceeds in a fluid course, the process of social development is a complex affair that

defies causal explanation. The emergence of the "new periodical markets of neighbouring

towns"—a comparatively modern institution in which business is conducted "from day to day

throughout the business days of the year"—has not signaled the fair's complete disappearance

(Plumb 2). Instead, its persistence in its degraded form points towards a rippling effect of

change that close aligns with Hardy's conception of history's stream.

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The effects of these changes are further illustrated in the reappearance of Mrs.

Goodenough, the witch-like furmity woman from the opening scene. In Chapter 1, Mrs.

Goodenough is presented as a relatively flat and symbolic character whose stooping posture,

coarse demeanor, and potion-like gruel conjures associations with the witch-like figures of many

tragedies, who embody and facilitate human vice. Yet those associations give way here to a

much more banal character who is, at least in part, herself the victim of the changing times.

Upon Susan and Elizabeth-Jane's arrival, the narrator relates a brief exchange in which Susan

reveals to her daughter that she has brought her to the fair to seek out information regarding

Henchard, whom she vaguely characterizes as "a connection by marriage" (17). Elizabeth-Jane

initially dismisses her mother's aspirations as foolish, noting that "[p]eople at fairs change like

the leaves of trees; and I daresay you are the only one here to-day who was here all those years

ago" (17). But the sight of Mrs. Goodenough proves Elizabeth-Jane wrong, turning the narration

towards the human cost of the fair's decline.

Hardy's narrator reintroduces Mrs. Goodenough with a tragic style, following Elizabeth-

Jane's eyes as her mother gestures towards "a tripod of sticks stuck into the earth, from which

hung a three-legged crock, kept hot by a smouldering wood fire beneath" (17). From this image,

which calls to mind a witches' cauldron, narrator notes that: "[o]ver the pot stooped an old

woman, haggard, wrinkled, and almost in rags. She stirred the contents of the pot with a large

spoon, and occasionally croaked in a broken voice, 'Good furmity sold here!'" (17). Yet unlike

the archetype of the witch, who frequently appears in tragedies to provide the promise of control

over the world, Mrs. Goodenough lacks that power. As the narration becomes ever-more

naturalist, it slips into a moment of narrative comment to note that:

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It was indeed the former mistress of the furmity tent—once thriving, cleanly, white-

aproned, and chinking with money—now tentless, dirty, owning no tables or benches,

and having scarce any customers except two small whitey-brown boys, who came up and

asked for "A ha'p'orth, please—good measure," which she served in a couple of chipped

yellow basins of commonest clay. (17)

In these lines, the narration adopts a detached point of view to chronicle Mrs. Goodenough's

social and commercial decline. The rapid succession of details contrasting her former

circumstances with the present throw the trajectory of her life into a sharp relief, marking yet

another instance of natural and social decay. Yet Mrs. Goodenough, who will return defiantly to

Henchard's world in Casterbridge's courtroom much later in the novel, is no generic social type.

Her eccentric persona and grotesque features interrupt the flow of the narration, further

expanding our view the fair's change.

Against the protests of Elizabeth-Jane, who is put off by the old woman's lack of

respectability, Susan approaches the stand and purchases a "basin of thin poor slop that stood for

the rich concoction of the former time" (17). When Mrs. Goodenough offers Susan a shot of rum

for the mixture, Susan inquires as to the proprietor's history, suggesting "You've seen better

days?" (18). The question, in turn, launches Mrs. Goodenough into an extended response that

momentarily pulls us away from Hardy's narrative voice as she recounts her history in a string of

hyperbole and overstatement:

"Ah, ma'am—well ye may say it! . . . I've stood in this fairground, maid, wife, and

widow, these nine-and-thirty year, and in that time have known what it was to do

business with the richest stomachs in the land! Ma'am, you'd hardly believe that I was

once the owner of a great pavilion-tent that was the attraction of the fair. Nobody could

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come, nobody could go, without having a dish of Mrs. Goodenough's furmity. I knew the

clergy's taste, the dandy gent's taste; I knew the town's taste, the country's taste. I even

knowed the taste of the coarse shameless females. But Lord's my life—the world's no

memory; straightforward dealings don't bring profit—'tis the sly and the underhand that

get on in these times!" (18)

The grandiosity of Mrs. Goodenough's performance, which bends and twists its meaning through

the use of rhetorical devices like anaphora (e.g. "I knew…") and chiasmus (e.g. "nobody

could…") mark her as a figure who is anything but average. While unreliable, her character is a

distillation of the fair's ever-declining population of entrepreneurs. Whether Mrs. Goodenough

ever engaged in "straightforward dealings," as she claims here, her declining fortunes indicate a

changing marketplace of which she herself only partially understands. While she is correct in

her assertion that honest trade does not bring profit, the reason is not because it is "the sly and

underhand that get on in these times!" (for, as her own experience shows, her long-practiced

"trick" of lacing her client's furmity with smuggled rum has been insufficient to ensure her good

standing) (18). Instead, what Mrs. Goodenough cannot see—but which Hardy's narrator and, by

extension, his readers are intimately aware of—is that the position of Weydon-Priors at a

considerable remove from England's economic activity has had a profound effect on the region's

fortunes. Much later in the novel, the narrator will observe that although "[t]he railway had

stretched out an arm towards Casterbridge at this time," it "had not reached it by several miles as

yet," suggesting Wessex's insulation from the railroad boom overtaking England in the 1840s

(203). Yet already, Hardy makes it clear that Wessex stands at the far end of a slow and uneven

process of change rippling out across the countryside.

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For her part, Susan is wholly disinterested in Mrs. Goodenough's backstory and quickly

turns the conversation towards Henchard to discover that he returned to the furmity tent the

following year to leave news for his wife and child that he had gone to settle in Casterbridge,

should they ever return. The news of Henchard's whereabouts quickly bring Chapter 3 to a close

as Susan and Elizabeth-Jane set out for an extended journey. Yet this opening scene is not mere

exposition: it plays a profound role in highlighting history's stream. If one of confusion's roles

in literature is, as Booth argues, to prepare the reader for the presentation of a new form of truth

in the presentation of literary experience, then the temporal effects that are created through

Casterbridge's use of contrasting naturalist and tragic styles illustrates how such confusion can

be leveraged to the flow of natural and historical development. While the sense of time and

causality that Hardy's narrator provides is frequently erratic and confused, these effects are not

an end to themselves. Rather, such confusion is carefully embedded within isolated moments as

a means of illustrating the complexities of time and history. Against the development of a

seemingly comprehensive worldview, Hardy offers a narrative landscape in which the blend of

naturalist and tragic modes of representation combine in the serial form to highlight the slow and

uneven course of modernity as it ripples across the English countryside. The confusion that is

cultivated as a temporal effect in the moves within and between these styles of representation

thus serves a practical function in linking the experience of characters and readers in their

wonder at the flow of history's stream.

II. Living in (and Representing) History's Stream

Thus far, we have seen how the opening chapters embed the novel in a changing world

through a blend of tragic and naturalist styles that highlight time's contingency and movement

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within a relatively condensed sequence of events, which we might liken to tragic compression.

In the coming chapters, the Scottish traveler Donald Farfrae joins Henchard, to assist in the

management of his grain business. Meanwhile, Henchard reunites with Susan and Elizabeth-

Jane after hatching an elaborate plot to avoid relitigating the scandal of their marriage in public.

Through these opening chapters, the novel maintains a relatively compressed sequence of events

rooted in tragic time. Thereafter, however, the narration frequently turns away from the narrow

temporal scope of these early chapters towards a broad and episodic temporality that covers

longer stretches of time. Although installments remain relatively uniform in length, containing

roughly six thousand words spread across two or three chapters, many present self-contained plot

arcs that transpire over the course of days, weeks, and even months. In so doing, the novel

reminds us of the many ways in which serialization affects how readers experience history. As

Linda K. Hughes and Michael Lund have observed, the serial form possesses an inherently linear

structure that encourages readers to think of their own position in terms of historical stages or

"installments." Hughes and Lund note that even when serialized historical novels "demonstrate

the complications of living in and understanding history" such works "affirm in their very

publication format the process of moving along a line from the past through the present and into

the future," through the gradual development of events in real time (108).

This sense of living with characters in real-time—an inescapable feature of

Casterbridge's original serialization for the Graphic—does not fade away in the novel's

completed version. Rather, the episodic action that forms those original installments, or cycles,

becomes the foundation for a narrative temporality that illustrates the effect of history's stream

on Henchard's social and economic standing within the novel's broader tragic arc. Shortly after

entering Henchard's employment, Farfrae takes issue with Henchard's harsh treatment of a petty

128

day laborer. Thereafter Henchard, increasingly jealous of his employee, plans an elaborate

celebration to compete with a party held by Farfrae across town. When severe rains disturb

Henchard's plans, sending attendees to the cover of Farfrae's tents, Henchard abruptly fires his

former employee and requests that Farfrae refrain from courting his daughter any further.

Thereafter, the middle of the novel's plot shifts towards Henchard's prolonged efforts to best his

former employee in his personal and professional affairs. During these installments, Farfrae's

initial plan to avoid direct competition with his former employer fails as the realities of the

market gradually pull them closer to one another. By exploring the long arc of their competition

as it summarized with and connected between installments, we see how Henchard's downfall—a

blend of tragic and naturalist convention—combines within the novel's serial form to capture the

flow of history's stream over an extended duration of time.

News of Farfrae independent business dealings first appear near the end of Chapter 17 in

Casterbridge's seventh installment when the narration observes that the Scotsman "had opened

the gates of commerce on his own account, and with every intention of keeping clear of his

former friend and employer's customers" (87). Turning towards a distant form of summary to

capture this extended stretch of time, the narrator notes that "[s]o determined was he to do

nothing which would seem like trade-antagonism to the Mayor that he refused his first

customer—a larger farmer of good repute—because Henchard and this man had dealt together

within the preceding three months" (87). Yet in the paragraphs that follow, Farfrae's good

intentions become difficult to uphold. Dipping further into summary, the narrator suggests that

"[i]n spite of his praiseworthy course the Scotchman's trade increased" so "that whatever he

touched he prospered in" (88). Thereafter, the narrator retains this distant mode of representation

to relate how "[a] time came when, avoid collision with his former fried as he might, Farfrae was

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compelled, in sheer self-defence, to close with Henchard in mortal commercial combat" over the

course of a few brief paragraphs, using symbolic encounters and classical allusion to perpetuate a

feeling of struggle within a relatively condensed narrative space (88).

As Henchard and Farfrae's "war of prices" begins to takes shape, the narrator

momentarily pulls back from this summary to relate the degree to which the outcome of this

battle hinges not only on commercial success but public perception (88). In the next paragraph,

the narrator observes that when Henchard discovers Farfrae's name amongst the stalls of the

other "larger formers, corn-merchants, millers, auctioneers" (88) at Casterbridge's weekly

market, he finds himself "stung into bitterness; like Bellerophon"—the tortured Greek hero—

wandering "away from the crowd, cankered in soul" (89). In terms of duration, the scene is itself

incredibly brief, taking up three sentences just before final paragraph brings the installment to a

close. Yet interestingly, Hardy describes this less in terms of Henchard's discovery of Farfrae's

newfound standing than in terms of the routine encounters between the pair at the market each

week. We feel the gravity of Henchard's battle with Farfrae, in other words, because it is so

prolonged, stretching out over multiple installments and an extended period of diegetic time.

In the installments that follow, Henchard attempts to sort out the cause of his woe and

come to grips with the trajectory of his life. When his first wife Susan passes away, just after his

commercial combat with Farfrae begins, Henchard becomes increasingly frustrated with

Elizabeth-Jane and the news that the latter is poised to become his replacement as Mayor when

his two-year term comes to an end. With characteristic narrative distance, the narrator turns

again towards summary to relate Henchard's efforts to sort through his position in the flow of

history's stream, noting that "[e]ver since the evening of his wife's arrival with her daughter there

had been something in the air which had changed his luck. That dinner at the King's Arms with

130

his friends had been Henchard's Austerlitz: he had had his successes since, but his course had

not been upward" (103-4). In a hasty effort to change course, Henchard once again encouraging

Farfrae's courtship of his daughter as Elizabeth-Jane leaves his home for a new position as

housekeeper and companion to the woman at High-Place Hall, who will soon be revealed as

Henchard's former lover, Lucetta Templeman.

Yet driving Elizabeth-Jane away does not solve Henchard's problems: indeed, it only

compounds them. As Lucetta learns of Henchard's cruel behavior to his family, and of the lies

that he has told, his hopes of marrying his former mistress are dashed when Farfrae begins to

take an interest in her person, as opposed to Elizabeth-Jane (as Henchard had hoped). In

addition, Henchard's commercial life continues to waver as Farfrae becomes more entrenched in

the operations of Casterbridge's agricultural community. Subsequent installments record this

movement through representative anecdotes like those above, such as when the town ogles a

"new-fashioned agricultural implement called a horse-drill," recommended to a farmer in

Casterbridge by Farfrae as a means for farmers to modernize their work, and in Henchard's ill-

fated attempt to predict the weather through the aforementioned advice of Wide-Oh Fall (128).

Yet at no point are Henchard's woes explained through a single, decisive event.

One notes, for instance, that Henchard's encounter with Wide-Oh comes midway through

Chapter 26, the first of two chapters in Casterbridge's twelfth installment for the Graphic,

joining the rest of the installment in dramatizing nearly a year of chronological time. Based on

this information, we might expect the widening of the chapters' temporal frame to make

Henchard's plight less affecting. Yet Hardy's use of summary transforms narrative distance into

a stylistic choice that accentuates the severity of Henchard's woes. When prices plummet after

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Henchard invests heavily in that year's grain crop, Hardy compares Henchard's "gamble" to that

of a "card room," writing that:

Henchard had backed bad weather, and apparently lost. He had mistaken the turn of the

flood for the turn of the ebb. His dealings had been so extensive that settlement could not

long be postponed, and to settle he was obliged to sell off corn that he had bought only a

few weeks before at figures higher by many shillings a quarter. (144)

In these lines, the brevity of Hardy's narration is out of proportion with the scale of Henchard's

loss and, consequently, intensifies our experience of it. As Henchard searches for someone to

blame, readers are prompted to acknowledge that—contrary to his own belief—there is no single

cause of his woe. The tragedy of Henchard's experience thus derives not from a single cause or

collision but from the protracted, drawn-out cycles of accumulation and loss that gradually wear

him down.

After Mrs. Goodenough, the furmity woman, reappears in Chapter 28 to tell the story of

how Henchard sold his wife and child at Weydon-Priors during her trial in Casterbridge's court,

Henchard's luck in business takes a turn for the worse. The remainder of the novel subsequently

centers on his suffering as he searches for purpose and meaning in a world where he has lost

everything. During this section, Henchard rejects most aid and reluctantly begins working for

Farfrae. He also starts drinking when his twenty-one-year vow of sobriety comes to end, a move

which leads to a string of erratic behavior. At one point, Elizabeth-Jane, passing by Farfrae's

grain store, observes Henchard appearing to contemplate shoving Farfrae off the ledge on the top

floor. Soon after, he lures Farfrae back to the scene and challenges him to a duel where

Henchard—with one hand tied behind his back—overpowers Farfrae, but he cannot bring

himself to kill his rival and retreats in shame. Later, when Farfrae is lured out of town during the

132

skimmington ride that publicly mocks Lucetta for her prior relationship with Henchard, it is

Henchard that travels in search of Farfrae so that he may be with her during her miscarriage and

death.

It is around this point that Henchard's ambivalent relationship with Farfrae takes a

backseat to his renewed affections for Elizabeth-Jane, whom he has once again grown to love as

a daughter in spite of his knowledge that he is not her birth father. Following Farfrae's

engagement to Lucetta, Henchard falls sick and Elizabeth-Jane returns to his side to care for him,

staying on to aid him as he slowly builds himself up to a small level of respectability as a small

seed shop proprietor. But Henchard's domestic bliss is interrupted with the return of Richard

Newson, long presumed lost at sea. When Elizabeth-Jane comes close to discovering that

Henchard failed to tell her of Newson's return, Henchard is thrown into ever-greater shame,

resolving to leave Casterbridge behind to wander as a journey-man haytrusser once more. As in

so much of Henchard's life, this crisis provides a lens through which to bear witness to the flow

of history's stream.

Upon his departure from Casterbridge, Henchard's first stop is the vacant fairgrounds of

Weydon-Priors, where he recalls the events of that night twenty-five years ago. As Henchard

describes to scene to himself, the narration abruptly pulls the reader aside to observe that the area

that Henchard gestures towards "was not really where the tent had stood" but rather where "it

seemed" to have stood to him (243). Henchard is left standing in the wrong direction, but we

should note that the narrator's commentary stems less from a desire to ridicule him than to

acknowledge the sprawling gap between Henchard's desire to position himself as a tragic figure

and the realization of others that he is, in fact, a man to be pitied. Henchard is, of course, to

some extent aware of this gap himself. As the scene continues, the narrator observes Henchard's

133

"bitterness" in "looking back upon [his] ambitious course" and discovering that "his attempts to

replace ambition by love had been as fully foiled as his ambition itself" (243). As he approaches

the end of his life, Henchard has found no link between action and consequence. His fidelity or

deviation from moral principles has had little effect on his wellbeing. Indeed, the most beautiful

aspect of his life—his stepdaughter—has been born of his mistakes. The "odd sequence" of

Henchard's life and his inability make amends for his past wrongs have led Henchard to believe

that his best course of action is to withdrawal from the world altogether. Yet because of his

sincere affection for Elizabeth-Jane, Henchard cannot let go of Casterbridge completely.

As the chapter proceeds, the narration turns towards descriptive summary as it recounts

Henchard's development of a new life for himself, collapsing days and weeks that follow into a

description of routine wandering wherein Henchard's initial intention to leave Wessex gives way

to a circular path around Casterbridge that keeps him close to Elizabeth-Jane. As Henchard

settles into a position in his former occupation of haytrusser, the narrator pauses to observe that

he thus found himself standing "in the precise standing which he had occupied a quarter of a

century before" (244). This structural repetition then, in turn, prompts a larger reflection on the

flow of history' stream. Reflecting on a broader set of social principles, the narration suggests

that:

Externally there was nothing to hinder his making another start on the upward slope, and

by his new lights achieving higher things than his soul in its half-formed state had been

able to accomplish. But the ingenious machinery contrived by the Gods for reducing

human possibilities of amelioration to a minimum—which arranges that wisdom to do

shall come pari passu with the departure of zest for doing—stood in the way of all that.

134

He had no wish to make an arena a second time of a world that had become a mere

painted scene to him. (244)

From within this narrative vantage point, which steps back from the immediate moment of

Henchard's life, the narration enters into a realm that push tragic and naturalist convention in a

new direction. Henchard's fortunes have declined, as we would expect of naturalist fiction;

however, that decline is not the result of immediate material constraints or limits that have been

placed on his character. Instead, his decline has been brought about the weight of events that

have accumulated over time. The narration captures this process here, as it does throughout the

novel, in a distant form of summary which momentarily departs from the diegetic time of the

novel's action to create a perspective from which to reflect on his character's position in time.

The tragic effect of these actions ultimately comes from our recognition of Henchard's

insignificance within the flow of history. In the final chapters of the novel, Henchard takes up

work in a community situated on a major turnpike road at fifty miles distance from the old

Roman town. When he learns of Elizabeth-Jane's marriage to Farfrae, he defies the terms of his

self-imposed exile, and travels there, having purchased a humble goldfinch as a wedding present.

But when it comes time to attend the reception, Henchard gets cold feet. After hiding the

goldfinch in the bushes, he enters his old home by the back-parlor, where he has a brief and

emotional encounter with Elizabeth-Jane before hastily departing, promising to never bother her

again. Weeks later, the goldfinch is discovered dead in the bushes and, when the connection is

made to Henchard, Elizabeth-Jane and Farfrae seek him out. When they arrive at the isolated

cottage of Abel Whittle, Henchard's former employee, they discover that he has just passed,

leaving behind brief will compiled on a "crumpled scrap of paper" (254). Written in Henchard's

hand, it asks:

135

'That Elizabeth-Jane Farfrae not be told of my death, or made to grieve on account of me.

'& that I be not bury'd in consecrated ground.

'& that no sexton be asked to toll the bell.

'& that nobody is wished to see my dead body.

'& that no murners walk behind me at my funeral

'& that no flours be planted on my grave.

'& that no man remember me.

'To this I put my name.

'MICHAEL HENCHARD.' (254)

This will is a final attempt at self-fashioning, written for an audience of one. Ashamed of his

actions towards his stepdaughter, Henchard rejects religious rites and memorialization in an

effort to continue his life of obscurity.75 Elizabeth-Jane and Farfrae respect these requests to the

best of their ability, though as the narrator observes, this comes "less from a sense of the

sacredness of last words, as such, than from [Elizabeth-Jane's] independent knowledge that the

man who wrote them meant what he said" (255). For Elizabeth-Jane, the directives outlined in

Henchard's will are "a piece of the same stuff that his whole life was made of, and hence were

not to be tampered with to give herself a mournful pleasure, or her husband credit for large

heartedness" (225). While Henchard seeks to position himself as a man of character on par with

the promise of the novel's title, for Elizabeth-Jane, he is a character whose wishes are respected

but who is ultimately pitied.

It is in this entirely underwhelming response to Henchard's life that The Mayor of

Casterbridge differentiates itself from the tragic falls of a long list of literary predecessors.

75 Although somewhat paradoxically, the document also provides a venue for the performance of suffering

which keeps Henchard's memory alive long after his death.

136

Despite the overtones of Attic tragedy that run throughout Hardy's novel, Henchard does not

conform to the Aristotelian notion of a tragic hero as an individual who is "better than we are,"

reminding us that tragedy does not possess a single unified meaning or set of principles

(Aristotle 25). Moreover, although the novel toys with Novalis's notion that "Character is Fate"

through a reference that appears midway through the novel, it suggests that the true tragedy of

Henchard's life is ultimately its dependence upon chance and contingency (88). It is chance that

the furmity woman remembers Henchard, both when Susan arrives at her stand twenty years

later, and when she appears in Casterbridge's court a short while after that. It is chance that

Farfrae passes outside the King's Arms at precisely the moment when his services can be of use

to Henchard. And it is chance Newson is reluctant to give up his search for his family, even after

Henchard sends him away. While such events do not deprive Henchard of his agency, they

testify to his inability to fully author the story of his own life. By contrasting Henchard's desire

to position himself as a tragic hero with Elizabeth-Jane's pity, the narration suggests that

Henchard's actions are ultimately subsumed by the flow of forces that are beyond his control.

The relationship of this reliance on chance to the novel's depiction of history's stream

comes in the recognition of the ongoing and often indirect flow of events. The narration

reiterates this message more directly in its closing paragraphs, as we shift from Henchard's death

to the comparative fortune of Elizabeth-Jane. In many ways, Elizabeth-Jane has been set up with

the character traits of a heroine in the vein of Jane Eyre, Esther Summerson, and Dorothea

Brooke. She is compassionate, industrious, and committed to self-improvement and the

improvement other others. Yet despite her exceptional moral conduct and commitment to self-

improvement, the novel calls into question the idea of her position as a literary protagonist. As

the narrator writes:

137

Her position was, indeed, to a marked degree one that, in the common phrase, afforded

much to be thankful for. That she was not demonstratively thankful was no fault of hers.

Her experience had been of a kind to teach her, rightly or wrongly, that the doubtful

honour of a brief transit through a sorry world hardly called for effusiveness, even when

the path was suddenly irradiated at some half-way point by daybeams rich as hers. But

her strong sense that neither she nor any human being deserved less than was given, did

not blind her to the fact that there were others receiving less who had deserved much

more. And in being forced to class herself among the fortunate she did not cease to

wonder at the persistence of the unforeseen, when the one to whom such broken

tranquility had been accorded in the adult stage was she whose youth had seemed to teach

that happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain. (256)

Like Henchard's will, Elizabeth-Jane's parting thoughts chafe against our generic expectations.

While she is happily married to Farfrae, Casterbridge's current mayor and leading businessman,

her wonder at "the persistence of the unforeseen" resists the idea that her situation can be readily

explained as a symbolic reward for good behavior or the byproduct of social Darwinism, in

which she has risen in life through natural selection. Her wellbeing, the narration asserts, has

come in a world in which many deserving individuals are not so fortunate and, as she stares into

the future, there is a lingering sense that her status is not set in stone.

The preceding has sought to describe how The Mayor of Casterbridge's resistance to

teleology in the presentation of a changing historical landscape offers one model of a path

beyond causal determinism while working within the formal parameters of the novel. In

characterizing Casterbridge as a genre-defying serialized tragedy that illustrates the stream of

history, my goal has been to call attention to the stylistic features by which the novel registers

138

historical change on its own terms. In making this argument, I have placed pressure on certain

assumptions about Hardy's supposed position as a proponent of more deterministic theories of

change. While the preceding is not intended to negate the presence of such readings, it does seek

to call attention to the undue emphasis that they place on the idea of the historical conjuncture or

"event": those moments in national and world history on which everything seems to turn.

139

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