Catacomb, n., a subterranean place for the burial of the dead, consisting of galleries or passageways with recesses excavated in their sides for tombs.

The Oxford English Dictionary

Silence itself — the things one declines to say, or is forbidden to name, the discretion that is required between different speakers — is less the absolute limit of discourse, the other side from which it is separated by a strict boundary, than an element that functions alongside the things said, with them and in relation to them within over-all strategies.

Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality

We often assume (rightly) that homosexuality must be hidden, that it has to be found.

Neil Bartlett, Who Was That Man?

I. Ruining the Religious Novel

BY TITLING THIS ESSAY “Love Among the Ruins,” I mean at once to be literal, figurative, and allusive in the framing of my topic: literal, in that I will be examining the place of love — specifically, erotic love — within the Roman catacombs or equivalent sites of Christian sanctuary; figurative, in that the representations of love that I will be discussing occur within the context of “literary ruins” — that is, within a relatively obscure nineteenth-century English narrative sub-genre, the Victorian “Early Christian” novel1; and, finally, allusive, in that I deliberately invoke the first poem of Robert Browning’s 1855 collection of dramatic monologues, Men and Women, for more than mere rhetorical effect. In fact, “Love Among the Ruins” condenses a number of the key concerns that I want to address in this essay, for the poem offers an important critique of classical culture not only as a site of pagan aesthetic production and human vainglory, but, relatedly, of homosocial and, perhaps, homoerotic bonds and the sterility presumed to inhere therein — a critique highly visible in Victorian Early Christian fiction. Indeed, I would argue, Browning’s text implicitly participates in the discursive construction of an important, if ultimately unstable, dichotomy that Victorian novels set in the catacombs and written roughly around the same time as “Love Among the Ruins” powerfully reinforce: namely, the traditional opposition between classicism and Christianity, an opposition at least one facet of which is rooted in competing attitudes toward the erotic.

“[I]T IS TIME THE OBSCURITY . . . WAS done away,” writes Charlotte Brontë in 1850. “The little mystery, which formerly yielded some harmless pleasure, has lost its interest. Circumstances have changed” (“Biographical Notice” 134). The “little mystery” she coyly invokes here was not so trivial in the eyes of the literary world. From the moment that Jane Eyre appeared, reviewers speculated wildly about the identity of the authors of Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. “[T]he whole reading-world of London was in a ferment to discover the unknown author,” writes Elizabeth Gaskell (271). When the identities of the three sisters emerged, it was something of a shock to most of the London literati to discover that the writers of these “coarse” and “repulsive” novels were young, sheltered Yorkshire women, daughters of a curate, who had seen little of the world.1 Although the secret had been slowly coming out, bit by bit, it was in 1850 that Charlotte Brontë put the speculations to rest with her “Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell,” written for a new edition of Wuthering Heights.

ONE OF THE BEST selling volumes of Victorian verse, as Donald Gray has shown, was Thomas Babington Macaulay’s The Lays of Ancient Rome first published in 1842 (Complete Writings 19: 167–279). For a generation after its publication, the Lays also generally enjoyed the praise of critics and poets.1 But in 1860, just months after Macaulay had been interred in Poets’ Corner, Matthew Arnold offered up the Lays as a touchstone of the grandly bad. In his lectures On Translating Homer, Arnold said that “a man’s power to detect the ring of false metal in those Lays is a good measure of his fitness to give an opinion about poetical matters at all” (1: 211). Arnold’s put-down was echoed in later works such as Thomas Humphry Ward’s multi-volume anthology The English Poets (1880), which opened with Arnold’s essay “The Study of Poetry.” Ward cited the continuing popularity of the Lays, but he pointed out that “the higher critical authorities have pronounced against them, and are even teaching us to wonder whether they can be called poetry at all. They find in the Lays the same faults which mar the author’s prose — commonplaceness of ideas, cheapness of sentiment and imagery, made to prevail by dint of the writer’s irresistible command of a new rhetorical force; in a word, eloquent Philistinism” (4: 540).

I refer to the health of millions who spend their lives in manufactories. . . I ask if these millions enjoy that vigour of body which is ever a direct good, and without which all other advantages are comparatively worthless? (The Effects of Arts, Trades, and Professions, and of civic states and habits of living, on health andlongevity, C. Turner Thackrah)

[Factory reformers] wrote in the newspapers, and circulated pamphlets - they petitioned Parliament - exhibited diseased and crippled objects in London - and made such an impression on the public mind, that their measures were carried in the House of Commons almost by acclamation, notwithstanding the testimony of facts of a directly contrary nature. (Exposition of the Factory Question)

THIS ARTICLE SEEKS to explore the significance of the injured working-class body in debates about the nature and meaning of industrial capitalism in the first half of the nineteenth century.1 It will argue that a growing awareness that the comforts of middle-class existence depended on processes that maimed working-class lives was profoundly unsettling to the bourgeois conscience as it threatened one of its most important narratives of legitimation. Finally, it will trace the emergence of the “accident” (as both concept and fictional trope) as a response to and resolution of this ideological crisis.

IN CONSIDERING THE SUBJECT of masculinity in Mary Barton (1848), it is perhaps well to remember that Elizabeth Gaskell conceived the novel as being about a man. “‘John Barton’ was the original title of the book,” she wrote to Mrs. W. R. Greg early in 1849. “Round the character of John Barton all the others formed themselves; he was my hero, the person with whom all my sympathies went . . .” (Letters 42: 74). Gaskell’s letter of 5 January 1849 to Miss Lamont reaffirms this: “‘John Barton’ was the original name, as being the central figure to my mind . . . in writing he was [?] my ‘hero’; and it was a London thought coming through the publisher that it must be called Mary B” (Letters 39: 70). While the “London” title of Mary Barton focuses on the romance elements of the plot (and, by extension, on the female gender role), Gaskell’s original title of John Barton focused on working-class protest (and, by extension, on the male gender role). Indeed, there is much to suggest that the novel is as much concerned with masculinity as it is with industrialization and class strife.

ASSESSMENTS OF ELIZABETH GASKELL’S two novels of social purpose typically conclude that North and South, published in 1855, is a more mature work stylistically and ideologically than Mary Barton, published in 1848. North and South is said to integrate the narrative modes of romance and realism more effectively than Mary Barton (Felber 63, Horsman 284), and to provide a more complicated narrative structure (Schor, Scheherezade 122–23), a more complex depiction of social conflicts (Easson 59 and 93) and a more satisfactory resolution of them (Duthie 84, Kestner 170). North and South is also said to deal with “more complex intellectual issues” (Craik 31). And the novel’s heroine, Margaret Hale, has been seen as Gaskell’s most mature creation — a woman who grows in self-awareness as she adapts to an alien environment (Kestner 164–166) and, unlike Mary Barton, becomes an active mediator of class conflicts (Stoneman 120), the central consciousness that brings together “the lessons of social change and romance” (Schor, Scheherezade 127).1 The reconciliation of these conflicts she inspires through her influence over both mill owner and worker has been praised as a more effective and credible narrative resolution to the social problems depicted in the novel than the reconciliation between mill owner and worker in Mary Barton (David 36).

I. Privileged Spies

TOWARD THE END of Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), the most infamous femme fatale of the Victorian novel retires to her dressing room after a long day of committing arson and attempting murder. Shamming a headache, Lady Audley sends her maid from the room. The narrator explains her motive:

EARLY IN Frances Trollope’s 1839 novel The Life and Adventures of Michael Armstrong, the Factory Boy, the title character is introduced into the kitchen of Sir Matthew Dowling’s home. The assembled servants, rigidly organized into their own hierarchy of status and position, react with horror and derision at the very idea of a factory boy joining the household on any terms. The only way in which they can explain such a preposterous idea is to speculate that the boy is Sir Matthew’s illegitimate son; only by inventing a hidden genealogy can they imagine a place for a factory worker in the genteel British home (Figure 2).

[Hardy] is too fond — and the practice has been growing on him through all his later books — of writing like a man “who has been at a great feast of languages and stole the scraps,” or, in plain English, of making experiments in a form of language which he does not seem clearly to understand, and in a style for which he was assuredly not born. (Mowbray Morris)

No reader can fail to notice — and few critics have failed to deplore — the ponderous allusions to literature and art which strew with their initial capitals the pages of Hardy’s early novels. . . . The mark of the autodidact is perhaps to be found not so much in what he knows as in how he regards the world of knowledge. . . . Hardy may have known more than many a man with a university education, but he lacked the kind of intellectual as well as social assurance that such an education might have given him. (Thomas Hardy: His Career as a Novelist, Michael Millgate)

DESPITE A GAP OF ONE HUNDRED YEARS between these two statements, they exhibit little difference with regard to an issue that has drawn critical comment since first publication of Thomas Hardy’s novels: the language of the texts. Morris and Millgate both disapprove of Hardy’s style because of its overt use of quotation, but behind this lies the view that good style depends upon correct language, and that the ability to use language correctly is the preserve of a select few by virtue of their class or education. In the one hundred years and more since Hardy wrote the novels, there are many instances of critics sharing this opinion. And yet, of course, from the early 1970s onwards, new theoretical approaches to language have increasingly dominated critical practice, changing rapidly the premises of literary interpretation. More specifically, the relationship between literature, language, and education has been theorized as an ideological matrix requiring precise historical and political analysis. The late nineteenth century in England, with its dramatic changes in State Education and the cultural crisis leading to fin-de-siècle decadence has proved fertile ground for investigations of these issues, which have indeed cited Hardy’s texts in the process.1 This article invokes that research in its focus upon Jude the Obscure — the novel by Hardy that most explicitly explores the links between education, literature, and language in the context of class.

IT WAS FORMANY YEARS conventional in Hardy studies to treat his rustics — those minor working-class characters who flesh out rural communities, especially in the early novels — in terms that effectively muted their ideological significance: to consider them as literary conventions like the chorus of Greek tragedy or Shakespeare’s clowns, for instance, or at best nostalgic details of local color (for examples, see Wotton 189–91). More recently, some Marxist critics have exposed the biases of such approaches, although at times oversimplifying in other ways the ideological functions of these characters.1 My objective in this essay is to argue for what I see as the more complicated and more dialogic ways in which these minor characters function to focus issues of social mobility that are at the heart of Hardy’s fiction. I am interested in the ways rustic characters function as agents of class rivalry, but more specifically in the ways their characteristic behaviors help to define by contrast the kinds of subjectivity that justify the higher social positions of the more central characters. Hardy’s characteristic combination of this strategy with the more conventional one for advancing bourgeois values in the Victorian novel — by exposing the unworthiness of gentry and aristocrats — can be linked to his insecurities about his own class identity and the repressions involved in maintaining it. He sympathized with the resentments of the lower classes, yet was also invested in positioning them as different from those who, like himself,

IN HIS BOOKMarxism and the City, Ira Katznelson, while lamenting the disappearance of spatial elements within Marxist thought, points to Friedrich Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class in England as an ur-text that is able to provide “positive specification of the mechanisms linking base and superstructure” (56). As a corrective to the narrowly “scientific” strain of Marxism that privileged “structure” over “agency,” Katznelson views Engels’s early text on the industrial city of Manchester as the bearer of a double message: “Writing at the precise branching moment of the emergence of the modern industrial city, [Engels] connected the development of this new urban form to the epochal changes of the industrial revolution; he showed how changes in organization of city space affected social relationships within and between classes; and he tied this social geography to the suffering and coming to consciousness of the new proletariat” (144). In this critical exchange between “base” and “superstructure,” where Marxism becomes a tool for reading the city, and the city a space for revising Marxist method, class consciousness gets redefined as “urban consciousness,”1 thus supplanting the site of praxis from the arena of production to the psycho-social experience of space.

Grandcourt threw himself into a chair and said, with undertoned peremptoriness, “Sit down.” She, already in the expectation of something unpleasant, had thrown off her burnous with nervous unconsciousness, and immediately obeyed . . . “Oblige me in future by not showing whims like a mad woman in a play.” (502; ch. 36; emphasis added)

NOVELISTIC HEROINES, like Gwendolen in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, become trapped in a complex network of social contradictions when they face the threat of marital violence in a world where such violence was thought not to exist — the middle and upper classes. Though increasing attention was paid to violence in the Victorian home as the century progressed, pamphlets, studies, and legislative inquiry significantly ommited sustained or systematic scrutiny of violence in the home that existed beyond the bounds of the working classes. Frances Power Cobbe’s important essay, “Wife Torture in England,” sought to raise public awareness about marital violence and to stimulate interest in protective legislation for the victims. Yet, in spite of Cobbe’s willingness to consider the possibility that some “gentlemen” might be guilty of abuse, she presents the phenomenon of wife abuse as safely distant from the comfortable quarters of the middle and upper classes, asserting that “the dangerous wife-beater belongs almost exclusively to the artisan and labouring classes” (55). In the debates surrounding the passage of the Divorce Act of 1857, Parliament repeatedly made apparent their belief that middle- and upper-class men could not be a danger to their wives by focusing exclusively on marital violence as a working-class issue. Only in “the humbler ranks of life [was] some prompt remedy” necessary; only “poor women” were conceived of as sufferers of violence at the hands of their husbands (Hansard Parliamentary Debates, 3rd ser., 145 [25 May 1857], col. 801–02).

THIS THOUGHTFUL, RAVISHING period film treats us to a work of serious historical scholarship and theoretical speculation on narrative and history, disguised as the old-fashioned plot about the difficulties leading up to a famous theatrical production. Taking as its focus the well-chosen moment in the creative conflict between Gilbert and Sullivan that was eventually resolved in their successful 1885 production of The Mikado, Topsy-Turvy seems throughout its stately first half to be leading us chronologically toward that resolution as if toward its own fulfillment. But meanwhile, in the film’s antic second half, a serious play sets in for the duration, and that traditional momentum is disrupted. By the time of the film’s complex closure — which is both bittersweet and deliberately, astutely, provocatively unsettling — resolution has broken down into multiple divisions once again: between the characteristically divergent responses of Gilbert and Sullivan to their mutual success; between men and women on and off the stage; between theatrical illusion and life behind the scenes. In the fragments from the film’s production of The Mikado — one, in particular, at the very end of the film — we rest for a while in the humor and beauty of its otherworldly charm, but with the uneasy sense of how tenuous, how arduously produced this beauty must be. This play-within-a-film is, among its many other virtues, the best present-day representation of a Gilbert and Sullivan production that I have ever seen.

The following abbreviations appear in this year’s bibliography:

BSNBrowning Society Notes

DAI Dissertation Abstracts International

N&QNotes and Queries

NCLNineteenth Century Literature

RESReview of English Studies

SBHCStudies in Browning and His Circle

VLCVictorian Literature and Culture

VPVictorian Poetry

VRVictorian Review

An asterisk* indicates that we have not seen the item. Cross references with citation numbers between 51 and 70 followed by a colon (e.g., C68:) refer to William S. Peterson’s Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning: An Annotated Bibliography, 1951–1970 (New York: Browning Institute, 1974); higher numbers refer to Robert Browning: A Bibliography 1830–1950, compiled by L. N. Broughton, C. S. Northup, and Robert Pearsall (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1953).