South Atlantic Modern Language Association

Hidden Rivalries in Victorian Fiction: Dickens, Realism, and Revaluation by Jerome MeckierReview by: Merritt MoseleySouth Atlantic Review, Vol. 53, No. 4 (Nov., 1988), pp. 139-142Published by: South Atlantic Modern Language AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3200690 .

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South Atlantic Review 139

In the chapters on Dickens, Trollope, and Hardy, Orel wisely con- centrates on aspects of context, such as the role of the audience in shaping the author's sense of purpose, rather than on well-known biographical facts. Orel is particularly good at giving Trollope the tart- maker his due. He recognizes that the now-infamous remark about baking a product to suit the public taste implies a sense of responsibil- ity as well as an eye for the main chance. The assessments of Dickens and Hardy are less original, but they are valuable in conveying the vastly different relationships of two professional writers to their reader- ship.

For all its strengths, the book has little new to say in interpreting familiar works. No reader of Hardy will be surprised by the emphasis on folk life and fate. Our view of Conrad, too, remains largely un- affected. Orel's lack of attention to Conrad's other critics contributes to this problem. His readings of "The Secret Sharer" and Heart of Darkness reflect nothing of the complexities of response that those stories have generated, and Orel's own analysis, while offering some astute observa- tions, is not compelling enough to replace them. One wonders, too, in what sense Conrad qualifies as a Victorian, since these works deal so clearly with themes, issues, and aesthetic values that define the modern period.

Thus, Orel's book opens a fascinating territory, but it by no means completes the exploration-and makes no claims to have done so. Issues of genre and period, and, in some cases, the stories themselves remain to be engaged. None of these books represents the definitive word on its subject matter, but each one of them contributes to a more complex understanding of Victorian literature.

Ellen B. Rosenman, University of Kentucky

I Hidden Rivalries in Victorian Fiction: Dickens, Realism, and Revaluation. By Jerome Meckier. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1987. x + 310 pp. $29.00.

In Hidden Rivalries Jerome Meckier develops a grand unified theory of the major Victorian novelists. Organized around a system of opposi- tions, it divides them into a Dickens group that also includes Wilkie Collins, and another group that is best identified with George Eliot-- although Elizabeth Gaskell and, more peripherally, Anthony Trollope are also included. The dominant mode of the first group is sensational- ism; that of the second group "scientific realism."

Meckier provides other suggestive antitheses in support and ex-

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140 Book Reviews

planation of the Dickens/Eliot dichotomy: revolution vs. evolution; catastrophism vs. gradualism; Coleridge vs. Wordsworth; dystopian vs. utopian. Some of these oppositions are very interesting. Instead of granting Eliot the usual palm for a scientific approach to fiction, Meckier groups her with Darwin, Lyell, and the gradualist position on scientific change - the belief, as Eliot writes, that "the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts" like those of Dorothea Brooke. He presents a "scientific" Dickens who believes that social change is catastrophic, like geological or biological change caused by sudden and cataclysmic events. This analogy has obvious connections with what Meckier calls Dickens's revolutionary model of social change as contrasted with an evolutionary one- slow, gradual, uniformitar- ian- that he ascribes to Eliot and Gaskell.

Unfortunately, the insights deriving from Meckier's unified theory undergird a strenuous argument that is much less reliable. Briefly, the author argues that in the middle of the nineteenth century the major novelists were fighting "the realism wars." Dickens, then accepted as the pre-eminent novelist, was attacked by others who wished to claim for themselves a superior realism. Dickens counterattacked, reasserting his own claim to provide the most compelling picture of the way things were and the most urgent program for social reform. Meckier general- izes that "the goal" for Victorian novelists "was to establish one's own credentials as a realist, hence a reliable social critic, by taking away someone else's- generally Dickens's." The methods involved in pursu- ing this goal are "revaluative parody," revision, correction, or "undoing by outdoing," which always means partly redoing.

There are five major cases. First, Felix Holt is a "deconstructing" of Bleak House. Second, in The Warden, Trollope parodies both Dickens in the person of "Mr. Popular Sentiment" and The Almshouse, a novel ascribed to Dickens. Dickens's Hard Times and Mrs. Gaskell's North and South, which appeared periodically at the same time, parody and rebut each other. Fourth, Wilkie Collins and Dickens went mano a mano in The Woman in White, Great Expectations, The Moonstone, and The Mystery of Edwin Drood, striving for supremacy in melodrama. Finally, George Eliot "revalued" Dickens again in Middlemarch.

These are exciting claims, but how convincing are they? Part of my own incredulity comes from their very grandeur. Beyond these five specific conflicts, Meckier finds, for instance, that in Edwin Drood "Dickens grows so certain of his ability to vanquish his closest rival

[Collins] that he finds time and space to reprimand Trollope and

George Eliot too." Moreover, the realism wars burst beyond the house of fiction; Charles Darwin derived his model of nature from reading

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South Atlantic Review 141

Dickens's Bleak House, a derivation that Meckier simplifies to "Darwin's conception of himself as another Bucket." There are some other prob- lems; in The Warden, Trollope is making fun of The Almshouse, sup- posedly a novel by Dickens that Trollope invented. In Middlemarch there is a scene that, we are told, is Eliot's revaluation of the climactic scene of Edwin Drood that Dickens was going to write if he had not died.

Besides the breathtaking scope of these connections, I am troubled by the evidence for them. For the most part it is old-fashioned in- fluence-hunting: Esther Lyon is a redoing of Esther Summerson; Dickens, Collins, and Eliot have opium users; the burial ground in Bleak House is "outdone" by the morgue in The Woman in White; and Dickens's bad manufacturer in Hard Times is challenged by Mrs. Gaskell's good manufacturer in North and South. What is new in these readings is the author's rhetorical vehemence and his certitude about the writer's intentionality.

We may grant, for instance, significant contrasts between Eliot and Dickens in their notions of realism, but will we accept that "Lydgate's marriage to Rosamond parodically devalues Jasper's obsession with Rosa Bud"? Or, having recognized Trollope's disagreement with Dick- ens in The Warden, will we go along with Meckier's suggestion that "Bold may also embody Trollope's notion of the harm Woodcourt might have done had Dickens presented him in greater detail"?

When his correlations are not evidently true, the author heats up the rhetoric. All the synonyms for "contradict" are heavily used; the novel- ists' intentions, presumed to be unambiguous, are aggressively paraphrased. According to Meckier, George Eliot believes that "De- ficiencies in human nature should not be enlarged melodramatically by confusing them with a deepening interiority of evil, a phenomenon which, she charges, has been largely invented by Dickens and Collins." Furthermore, "Collins asserts that Dickens should have" done some- thing different in Great Expectations by writing The Moonstone. Throughout this book novelists "assert," "claim," "counter," "rebut," "protest," "point out," "insist," and "complain." And they are not overly delicate either.

Thus Dickens's emphasis on the interiority of evil is "a calculated affront" to Trollope and Eliot, George Eliot "assails" Bleak House, and in Edwin Drood, Dickens is going to "settle the score" with G. H. Lewes. In that same novel, "significant reprisals lay in store for Collins." Oddly Thackeray, who was actually on bad terms with Dickens for years and says in his letters that "my books are a protest against his," is a noncombatant in Meckier's realism wars.

The theory behind this book, which apparently owes something to Harold Bloom's ideas about influence, is initially promising. The

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142 Book Reviews

application, though, is flawed by reductionism and the absence of proof. Merritt Moseley, University of North Carolina at Asheville

[IA Voyager Out: The Life of Mary Kingsley. By Katherine Frank. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1986. 333 pp. $18.95.

Of the Victorian women travelers brought to our attention recently by reprints of their narratives, biographical information, and even Broadway plays, the best known and most enigmatic is Mary Kingsley. Daughter of a globe-trotting father (George Kingsley, younger brother of the clergyman and novelist Charles) and invalid mother, Mary Kingsley spent her first thirty years at home as a dutiful Victorian daughter in a family that both depended on her and denied her. She nursed her mother, educated herself (for she received no formal educa- tion) by reading her father's library of exploration narratives, natural science, and anthropology, and assisted her father in his anthropologi- cal studies, which she put into publishable form after his death. When both parents died in 1892, this cloistered woman, whose only "voyage out" had been a one-week holiday in Paris, began to pack her bags for West Africa. In the next eight years, until her death of enteric fever while nursing Boer prisoners of war in South Africa, she made two voyages to West Africa, where she collected fish and studied "fetish," as she called African religion, from Eastern Nigeria to the French Congo, wrote four books and dozens of articles, and became a popular lecturer and an influential voice in British imperial policy.

Kingsley's two travel narratives, Travel in West Afnrica (1897; reprinted by Virago, 1982) and its more politically pointed sequel West African Studies (1899) are interesting not only for their rollicking adventures, their intimate descriptions of the domestic lives of peoples never before visited by Europeans, their sympathetic analyses of African legal and

religious systems, and their vigorous arguments for a British colonial

policy based on trade, but also for their presentation of a paradoxical persona. Mary Kingsley carried Victorian primness to the point of

trekking in long black skirts, high-necked white blouses, and stays, yet allied herself with the roughest class of Europeans in Africa, the hard- drinking, hard-swearing traders. She traveled without tent, cot, bath, or tinned food, climbed storm-swept Mount Cameroon by the arduous southeast face, was the first European to cross the treacherous swamps between the Ogooue and Remboue rivers, and made many valuable contributions to the British Museum's collections; yet she vociferously

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