Stefano Evangelista and Carlotta Farese
The title of this issue of La questione Romantica is deliberately ambiguous as it might be understood in two different ways: on the one hand, it stresses the survival of Romantic features within Victorian literary culture (that is, exploring the extent to which the Victorians themselves might be considered ‘Romantic’); or, on the other, it may refer to ways in which the Victorian reception of Romantic authors, ideas and genres has made the Romantics themselves appear Victorian over the course of time. Although distinct, these two modes of survival are almost inextricably intertwined. This collection of essays intends to provide new insights into both.
The picture that appears on the cover of this issue – J. W. Waterhouse’s Lamia (1909) – functions as an ideal illustration for such an endeavour. It provides an excellent example of the visual treatment, by a late-Victorian artist, of a theme that inspired one of the great texts of the canon of Romantic poetry: John Keats’s Lamia (1820). Waterhouse celebrates Keats’s Romanticism as a richly imaginative territory where later readers, viewers and artists can discover different desires and find new powers of expression. However, another relevant feature of the painting is to be found in its problematic and fascinating ‘belatedness’: if it is perfectly legitimate to describe Waterhouse as a ‘late-Victorian artist’ (as we have just done) it must also be acknowledged that the date of Lamia’s completion – 1909 – clearly exceeds the chronological limits of what is conventionally deemed to be ‘Victorian’. Such a form of belatedness is not limited to the picture as such, but seems to extend to Waterhouse’s biography itself, and indeed to his work as a whole. Some twenty years younger than the Pre-Raphaelites and still faithful to their aesthetics more than half a century after the dissolution of the Brotherhood, Waterhouse could be seen as the backward epigone of an out- dated school. However, as the curators of a recent retrospective dedicated to him have stressed, Waterhouse was also a «modern Pre-Raphaelite»: the mediator between the style of the Rossetti generation and the technical innovations brought about by the Impressionists in the second half of the century
Waterhouse’s painting portrays Lamia when she has just undergone the metamorphosis from the monstrous serpentine creature she used to be into a beautiful woman: looking, like Narcissus, at her own reflection in the pond she has to become aware of her new self and confront the otherness of a still unknown image. But Waterhouse also shows the uncanny persistence of her past identity (the shiny skin of the snake) from which she cannot completely disentangle herself. Caught in the act of a transformation that involves the need to re-define the relationship between self and other as well as between past and present, Lamia could be considered a visual equivalent of the Victorian artists and writers’ necessity to measure and define themselves against their Romantic predecessors. Following the path marked by recent criticism [BARFOOT 1999; CRONIN 2002; FAFLAK, WRIGHT 2004; RADFORD and SANDY 2008; CASALIGGI and MARCH-RUSSELL 2012] this collection will question the continuity between the two periods, both in terms of the legacy that Romanticism handed out to the ensuing Victorian literature and in terms of the Victorian construction and appropriation of the Romantic canon. If, as noted by Faflak and Wright in the introduction to their volume, the Victorians «invented Romanticism», the relationship between the two periods can be understood not only as a case study in the traditional dynamics of literary influence, but also «in the ways in which literary debts are defined by those who owe them, and literary periods are constructed retroactively» [FAFLAK, WRIGHT 2004, p. 3].
The essays in this volume reconsider the persistence and redefinition of Romanticism in the Victorian period from a variety of perspectives: aesthetics, genre, politics, gender, publication and media technology, and the afterlife and influence of individual authors. Chronologically, they cover the breadth of the Victorian period, from the transitional 1820s and ’30s to the fin de siècle, when authors and readers looked back to Romanticism in self- conscious reaction to the aesthetic, moral and political values that had dominated the Victorian decades. Starting from the years in which the boundaries between Romantic and Victorian literature are least well-defined, Serena Baiesi studies the emergence of annuals in the 1820s. Baiesi traces the genealogy of this new publication format to Romantic periodical culture, focusing on how contributions by women authors negotiated early nineteenth-century consumer culture in order to highlight issues of gender. The periodical press is also a key concern for Luisa Calè who, in her analysis of Leigh Hunt’s responses to Old Masters paintings, shows that the 1830s and ’40s saw the emergence of new tastes and critical practices that gradually departed from romantic models (notably Coleridge’s aesthetic theories): critics’ spatial encounters with the new public displays of art and modern reproduction technologies of the emerging Victorian era prompted a «counter-poetics of fancy», according to Calè.
As the century progressed, readers and writers inevitably developed a sense of historical and critical distance from Romantic authors and their works. This increasing distance, though, is in itself a productive site of meaning. One of the ways of interpreting the widening gap between Romantic writers and their Victorian readers is by investigating how genres that were popular with Romantic authors are adapted by their Victorian successors. Francesca Orestano explores this issue in relation to the fairy tale: her study of Anne Thackeray Ritchie’s English versions of some of the tales originally collected and published in German by the brothers Grimm shows that Thackeray uses this apparently innocuous genre in order to launch a subtle critique of Victorian gender politics. In the following article Carlotta Farese shows that Thackeray also plays a crucial role in the Victorian reception of Jane Austen – a process that canonised Austen as a popular author but domesticated her at the same time, reading into her novels typically Victorian ideas about gender. Farese charts this phenomenon from the publication of James Edward Austen Leigh’s groundbreaking Memoir in 1869 to contemporary cinematic adaptations, arguing that the Victorian biographical and literary myth about Austen still informs how we read her works today. While Farese brings to light an instance of domestication, Elisabetta Marino, in her essay in the Marginalia section, documents how literary culture provides a medium for the survival of radical ideals associated with Romanticism. Marino demonstrates that Mary Shelley’s understudied romance Falkner, whose publication date in 1837 places it within the Victorian period, represents an important document of Shelley’s ongoing commitment to social reform in her late writings. As with Waterhouse, the case of Mary Shelley highlights the limits of periodisation, implicitly arguing for more fluid and subtle models of literary history.
As many of the essays in this volume show, studying Victorian responses to Romantic literature throws light on the workings of literary reputation – the wider cultural dynamics whereby authors are remembered or forgotten, canonised or dethroned, monumentalised or written away. Gioia Angeletti deals with the author who was arguably the most remembered Romantic for much of the Victorian period: Byron. Through a series of detailed close readings Angeletti demonstrates that in his poems «Amours de Voyage» (1858) and «Dypsychus and the Spirit» (1865) Arthur Hugh Clough deliberately sets up a sustained intertextuality with Byron which consists of a complex, unstable and sometimes unsettling mixture of emulation and irony. Clough’s multi-layered texts thus also work as meta-reflections on the artistic and cultural phenomenon of Victorian Byronism. Both Byron and Clough set their poems in Italy, utilising locations that had been made famous by the vogue for the grand tour. Indeed, the fascination with Italy provides a strong element of continuity between the Romantic and Victorian British traditions. The successful popular novelist Ouida permanently settled in Florence only a few years after the publication of Clough’s poems and remained there until her death. But, as Stefano Evangelista shows, the Italian landscape for Ouida brought back echoes of Shelley. Starting from Oscar Wilde’s characterisation of Ouida as «the last of the romantics», Evangelista explores the important role that Romanticism plays in Ouida’s popular romances and in her little-known critical essays.
If Walter Scott and, as Angeletti shows, Byron were firm mid-Victorian favourites, in the last decades of the century popular taste shifted to Shelley and Keats, who had otherwise been the objects of a lukewarm reception in the mid century. These two poets are the focus of essays by Patricia Pulham and Catherine Maxwell. Pulham uncovers a dialogue with Keats in Oscar Wilde’s poem «Charmides», which she relates to a rich corpus of Victorian engagements with the myth of Pygmalion. Moving between the classical and nineteenth-century traditions, she argues that in his poem Wilde mobilises a sculptural aesthetics in order to create a sense of proximity and communion with his Romantic predecessor. Maxwell shifts the focus onto late-Victorian colonial romance, unearthing a number of references to Shelley in Rider Haggard’s She, by means of which she rereads the gender politics of this novel, stressing elements of continuity between Romantic and Victorian portrayals of the figure of the femme fatale. Maxwell’s essay contains a suggestive portrait of Rider Haggard as a reader of Romantic poetry. Indeed her essay, together with Evangelista’s, makes a plea to look for the influence of Romanticism beyond high culture, in the vast and still understudied canon of popular literature of the late-Victorian decades. The volume’s chronological cover of the Victorian period finishes with Nicholas Halmi, who takes us to the moment in which late-Victorian poetics blurs into modernism. Going back to Frank Kermode’s seminal study The Romantic Image, Halmi reconsiders the affinities between the use of symbolism by Romantic and turn-of-the-century poets.
Halmi’s essay takes us back to Waterhouse’s Lamia, showing that the Victorian period had an enormous influence in mediating Romanticism into the twentieth century and beyond. Victorian readers, authors and critics stand as an at-times invisible filter between us and the Romantics, a layer of history that it would be impossible to strip away. In this sense, our own understanding of Romanticism is always, inevitably conditioned by the ways in which the Victorians experienced, reconstructed, celebrated, rejected, read or misread their Romantic predecessors, paving their way for their later reception. The essays in this volume reconstruct selected parts of this rich history of literary engagement. They demonstrate that Romanticism all but died with the advent of the Victorian period, remaining a lively and contested field of literary, aesthetic and political engagement for the whole of the nineteenth century.
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