Teaching & Learning Guide for: ‘The Victorian’
Authors: Davis Philip 
Published: June 2007

Author Recommends:

The best book on the Victorians I have read since completing the OELH volume is one I wish I had read whilst writing it – Jan‐Melissa Schramm, Testimony and Advocacy in Victorian Law, Literature, and Theology (Cambridge University Press, 2000). It gives a powerful account of the singular risk of testimony, in seeking either to apprehend the unproven real or to bestow personal reality upon otherwise notional ideas. In relation to risk itself, Elaine Freedgood’s Victorian Writing about Risk (Cambridge University Press, 2000) is about the interaction between safety and danger in the period: I am interested in the creation of that Victorian holding‐ground which is safe enough not to be merely tame or conventional but carefully experimental upon life. I do now think that I should have said more about the development of free indirect discourse in the nineteenth‐century novel – the inward articulation of the silent private mind. On this Garrett Stewart’s Reading Voices (University of California Press, 1990) remains important in relation to the nervous rhythms of unspoken and explorative mentality. In general, I see the period as explorative of the holding‐ground between the theological and the secular: in this respect, I would urge further attention to the theoretical position of pragmatism in the work of William James, starting with his Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) in the Penguin Classics edition of 1985.

Brigid Lowe’s Victorian Fiction and the Insights of Sympathy has recently been published by Anthem Press (February 2007). In sundry ways it is a book I have been waiting for – against that hermeneutics of suspicion where critics with a modern political agenda tell Victorian authors what they should have said or did almost say without knowing it. This book finally kills off that tiresome agenda if people will listen to the argument it offers. Dr Lowe’s defence of sympathy as a form of intuitive recognition, of life‐fullness is important and moving and exciting: ‘in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge’.

Online Materials:

The Victorian Database Online offers ‘all things Victorian’: http://www.victoriandatabase.com. I also admire George Landow’s Victorian Web: http://www.Victorianweb.org.

Sample Syllabi:

It would do most service to Victorian Literature to see this article used not simply as an historical phenomenon but as area of debate. I would like to see it represented in a course on Literature and Belief, which would include Mrs Gaskell’s Ruth or George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda amidst the Book of Ruth and of Job from the Bible, Wordsworth’s ‘The Ruined Cottage’, Shakespeare’s King Lear, Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, John Berger’s A Fortunate Man, Oliver Sacks’s A Leg To Stand On. This would be to use the history of human feeling, personally.

In similar vein, I am currently designing a new part‐time M.A. in Bibliotherapy which takes its origin in John Stuart Mill’s preference for reading Wordsworth over Byron in the midst of his nervous breakdown.

My big focus question is: what else is literature for apart from socio‐historical surveys? Can it be what some Victorians wanted it to be – a substitute for religion?