Teaching & Learning Guide for: Victorian Life Writing
Authors: Sanders Valerie 
Published: August 2007

Author's Introduction

The Victorian period was one of the great ages for life‐writing. Though traditionally renowned for its monumental ‘lives and letters’, mainly of great men, this was also a time of self‐conscious anxiety about the genre. Critics and practitioners alike were unsure who should be writing autobiography, and whether its inherent assertiveness ruled out all but public men as appropriate subjects. It was also a period of experimentation in the different genres of life‐writing – whether autobiography, journals, letters, autobiographical novels, and narratives of lives combined with extracts from correspondence and diaries. Victorian life‐writing therefore provides rich and complex insights into the relationship between narrative, identity, and the definition of the self. Recent advances in criticism have highlighted the more radical and non‐canonical aspects of life‐writing. Already a latecomer to the literary‐critical tradition (life‐writing was for a long time the ‘poor relation’ of critical theory), auto/biography stresses the hidden and silent as much as the mainstream and vocal. For that reason, study of Victorian life‐writing appeals to those with an interest in gender issues, postcolonialism, ethnicity, working‐class culture, the history of religion, and family and childhood studies – to name but a few of the fields with which the genre has a natural connection.

Author Recommends

A good place to start is the two canonical texts for Victorian life‐writing: George P. Landow's edited collection, Approaches to Victorian Autobiography (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1979) and Avrom Fleishman's Figures of Autobiography: The Language of Self‐Writing in Victorian and Modern England (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1983). These two re‐ignited interest in Victorian life‐writing and in effect opened the debate about extending the canon, though both focus on the firmly canonical Ruskin and Newman, among others.

By contrast, David Amigoni's recently edited collection of essays, Life‐Writing and Victorian Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate 2006) shows how far the canon has exploded and expanded: it begins with a useful overview of the relationship between lives, life‐writing, and literary genres, while subsequent chapters by different authors focus on a particular individual or family and their cultural interaction with the tensions of life‐writing.

As this volume is fairly male‐dominated, readers with an interest in women's life‐writing might prefer to start with Linda Peterson's chapter, ‘Women Writers and Self‐Writing’ in Women and Literature in Britain 1800–1900, ed. Joanne Shattock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 209–230. This examines the shift from the eighteenth‐century tradition of the chroniques scandaleuses to the professional artist's life, domestic memoir, and spiritual autobiography. Mary Jean Corbett's Representing Femininity: Middle‐Class Subjectivity in Victorian and Edwardian Women's Autobiographies (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1992) begins with material on Wordsworth and Carlyle, but ‘aims to contest the boundaries of genre, gender, and the autobiographical tradition by piecing together a partial history of middle‐class women's subjectivities in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries’ (3).

Corbett is particularly interested in the life‐writing of actresses and suffragettes as well as Martineau and Oliphant, the first two women autobiographers to be welcomed into the canon in the 1980s and 90s.

Laura Marcus's Auto/biographical Discourses, Theory, Criticism, Practice (Manchester and New York, NY: Manchester University Press, 1994) revises and updates the theoretical approaches to the study of life‐writing, stressing both the genre's hybrid qualities, and its inherent instability: in her view, it ‘comes into being as a category to be questioned’ (37). Another of her fruitful suggestions is that autobiography functions as a ‘site of struggle’ (9), an idea that can be applied to aesthetic or ideological issues. Her book is divided between specific textual examples (such as the debate about autobiography in Victorian periodicals), and an overview of developments in critical approaches to life‐writing. Her second chapter includes material on Leslie Stephen, who is also the first subject of Trev Lynn Broughton's Men of Letters, Writing Lives: Masculinity and Literary Auto/biography in the Late Victorian Period (London: Routledge, 1999) – her other being Froude's controversial Life of Carlyle.

With the advent of gender studies and masculinities, there is now a return to male forms of life‐writing, of which Martin A. Danahay's A Community of One: Masculine Autobiography and Autonomy in Nineteenth‐Century Britain (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1993) is a good example. Danahay argues that nineteenth‐century male autobiographers present themselves as ‘autonomous individuals’ free of the constraints of social and familial contexts, thus emphasizing the autonomy of the self at the expense of family and community.

Online Materials

My impression is that Victorian life‐writing is currently better served by books than by online resources. There seem to be few general Web sites other than University module outlines and reading lists; for specific authors, on the other hand, there are too many to list here. So the only site I'd recommend is The Victorian Web: http://.victorianweb.org/genre/autobioov.html

This Web site has a section called ‘Autobiography Overview’, which begins with an essay, ‘Autobiography, Autobiographicality and Self‐Representation’, by George P. Landow. There are sections on other aspects of Victorian autobiography, including ‘Childhood as a Personal Myth’, autobiography in Dickens and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and a list of ‘Suggested Readings’. Each section is quite short, but summarizes the core issues succinctly.

Sample Syllabus

This sample syllabus takes students through the landmarks of Victorian life‐writing, and demonstrates the development of a counter‐culture away from the mainstream ‘classic male life’ (if there ever was such a thing) – culminating in the paired diaries of Arthur Munby (civil servant) and Hannah Cullwick (servant). Numerous other examples could have been chosen, but for those new to the genre, this is a fairly classic syllabus. One week only could be spent on the ‘classic male texts’ if students are more interested in pursuing other areas.

Opening Session

Open debate about the definition of Victorian ‘life‐writing’ and its many varieties; differences between autobiography, autobiographical fiction, diary, letters, biography, collective biography, and memoir; the class could discuss samples of selected types, such as David Copperfield, Father and Son, Ruskin's Praeterita, and Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Brontë. Alternatively, why not just begin with Stave Two of Dickens's A Christmas Carol (1843), in which the First Spirit takes Scrooge back through his childhood and youth? This is a pretty unique type of life‐writing, with Scrooge ‘laughing and crying’ as his childhood and youth are revealed to him in a series of flashbacks (a Victorian version of ‘This is Your Life?’). The dual emotions are important to note at this stage and will prompt subsequent discussions of sentimentality and writing for comic effect later in the course.

Week 2

Critical landmarks: discussion of important stages in the evolution of critical approaches to life‐writing, including classics such as Georges Gusdorf's ‘Conditions and Limits of Autobiography’, in Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. James Olney (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 28–47; Philippe Lejeune's ‘The Autobiographical Pact’, in On Autobiography, ed. Paul John Eakin, trans. Katherine Leary (original essay 1973; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 3–30; and Paul De Man's ‘Autobiography as De‐Facement’, Modern Language Notes 94 (1979): 919–30. This will provide a critical framework for the rest of the course.

Weeks 3–4

Extracts from the ‘male classics’ of Victorian life‐writing: J. S. Mill's Autobiography (1873), Ruskin's Praeterita (1885–89), and Newman's Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864). What do they think is important and what do they miss out? How open or otherwise are they about their family and personal lives? Are these essentially ‘lives of the mind’? How self‐aware are they of autobiographical structures? Are there already signs that the ‘classic male life’ is fissured and unconventional? An option here would be to spend the first week focusing on male childhoods, and the second on career trajectories. Perhaps use Martin Danahay's theory of the ‘autonomous individual’ (see above) to provide a critical framework here: how is the ‘Other’ (parents, Harriet Taylor) treated in these texts?

Weeks 5–6

Victorian women's autobiography: Harriet Martineau's Autobiography (1877) and Margaret Oliphant's Autobiography (1899): in many ways these are completely unalike, Martineau's being ordered around the idea of steady mental growth and public recognition, while Oliphant's is deeply emotional and disordered. Can we therefore generalize about ‘women's autobiography’? What impact did they have on Victorian theories of life‐writing? Students might like to reconsider Jane Eyre as an ‘autobiography’ alongside these and compare scenes of outright rebellion. The way each text handles time and chronology is also fascinating: Martineau's arranged to highlight stages of philosophical development, while Oliphant's switches back and forth in a series of ‘flashbacks’ to her happier youth as her surviving two sons die ‘in the text’, interrupting her story.

Week 7

Black women's autobiography: how does Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands (1857) differ from the Martineau and Oliphant autobiographies? What new issues and genre influences are introduced by a Caribbean/travelogue perspective? Another key text would be Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave‐Girl (1861). How representative and how individual are these texts? Do these authors see themselves as representing their race as well as their class and sex?

Week 8

Working‐class autobiography: Possible texts here could be John Burnett's Useful Toil (Allen Lane, 1974, Penguin reprint); Carolyn Steedman's edition of John Pearman's The Radical Soldier's Tale (Routledge, 1988) and the mini oral biographies in Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor (1861–62) (e.g., the Water‐Cress Seller). There is also a new Broadview edition of Factory Lives (2007) edited by James R. Simmons, with an introduction by Janice Carlisle. This contains four substantial autobiographical texts (three male, one female) from the mid‐nineteenth century, with supportive materials. Samuel Bamford's Passages in the Life of a Radical (1839–42; 1844) and Early Days (1847–48) are further options. Students should also read Regenia Gagnier's Subjectivities: A History of Self‐Representation in Britain 1832–1910 (Oxford University Press, 1991).

Week 9

Biography: Victorian Scandal: focus on two scandals emerging from Victorian life‐writing: Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857) (the Branwell Brontë/Lady Scott adultery scandal), and Froude's allegations of impotence in his Life of Carlyle (1884). See Trev Broughton's ‘Impotence, Biography, and the Froude‐Carlyle Controversy: ‘Revelations on Ticklish Topics’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 7.4 (Apr. 1997): 502–36 (in addition to her Men of Letters cited above). The biographies of the Benson family written about and by each other, especially E. F. Benson's Our Family Affairs 1867–1896 (London: Cassell, 1920) reveal the domestic unhappiness of the family of Gladstone's Archbishop of Canterbury, Edward White Benson, whose children and wife were all to some extent homosexual or lesbian. Another option would be Edmund Gosse's Father and Son (1907) in which the son's critical stance towards his father is uneasy and complex in its mixture of comedy, pity, shame, and resentment.

Week 10

Diaries: Arthur Munby's and Hannah Cullwick's relationship (they were secretly married, but lived as master and servant) and diaries, Munby: Man of Two Worlds: The Life and Diaries of Arthur Munby, ed. Derek Hudson (John Murray, 1972), and The Diaries of Hannah Cullwick: Victorian Maidservant, ed. Liz Stanley (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1984): issues of gender and class identity; the idealization of the working woman; the two diaries compared. Half the class could read one diary and half the other and engage in a debate about the social and sexual fantasies adopted by each diarist. It would also be sensible to leave time for an overview debate about the key issues of Victorian life‐writing which have emerged from this module, future directions for research, and current critical developments.

Focus Questions

To what extent does Victorian autobiography tell an individual success story? Discuss with reference to two or three contrasting examples.

‘All life writing is time writing’ (Jens Brockmeier). Examine the way in which Victorian life‐writers handle the interplay of narrative, memory, and time.

To what extent do you agree with the view that Victorian life‐writing was ‘a form of communication that appeared intimate and confessional, but which was in fact distant and controlled’ (Donna Loftus)?

‘Bamford was an autobiographer who did not write an autobiography’ (Martin Hewitt). If autobiography is unshaped and uninterpreted, what alternative purposes does it have in narrating a life to the reader?

‘Victorian life‐writing is essentially experimental, unstable, and unpredictable.’ How helpful is this comment in helping you to understand the genre?