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joyce.i-x 5/31/07 11:44 AM Page i

The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror

joyce.i-x 5/31/07 11:44 AM Page ii
joyce.i-x 5/31/07 11:44 AM Page iii

THE
VICTORIANS
IN THE
REARVIEW
MIRROR

d
Simon Joyce

Ohio University Press

Athens
joyce.i-x 5/31/07 11:44 AM Page iv

Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 45701

www.ohio.edu/oupress
© 2007 by Ohio University Press

Printed in the United States of America

All rights reserved

Ohio University Press books are printed on acid-free paper ƒ ™

14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Joyce, Simon, 1963–

The Victorians in the rearview mirror / Simon Joyce.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8214-1761-4 (hc : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-8214-1761-4 (hc : alk. paper)
ISBN-13: 978-0-8214-1762-1 (pb : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-8214-1762-2 (pb : alk. paper)
1. English literature—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Literature and
history—Great Britain—History—20th century. 3. Great Britain—History—
Victoria, 1837–1901—Historiography. 4. Great Britain—Civilization—19th
century—Historiography. 5. Authors, English—20th century—Political and
social views. 6. Authors, English—20th century—Aesthetics. 7. Modernism
(Literature)—Great Britain. 8. Social values in literature. 9. Nostalgia in
literature. I. Title.
PR478.H57J69 2007
820.9'358—dc22
2007019541
joyce.i-x 5/31/07 11:44 AM Page v

Contents

List of Illustrations vii

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1

Chapter One On or About 1901

Bloomsbury Looks Back 17

Chapter Two The Politics of Nostalgia

Conservative Modernism, Victorian Kitsch,
and the English Country House 41

Chapter Three Victorian Vision and Contemporary Cinema

The Visual Inheritances of Heritage Culture 74

Chapter Four Victorian Values?

Neoconservatives and the
Welfare of the Modern State 111

Chapter Five Other Victorians and the Neo-Dickensian Novel 140

Epilogue: Postcolonial Victorians 166

Notes 175
Works Cited 195
Index 205

v
joyce.i-x 5/31/07 11:44 AM Page vi
joyce.i-x 5/31/07 11:44 AM Page vii

Illustrations

Figure 1. Brideshead as we first see it, at a distance 81

Figure 2. Charles and Julia entering Brideshead 81
Figure 3. Reverse shot: Sebastian 82
Figure 4. Sebastian and Charles, dwarfed by the
reconstructed Italian fountain 83
Figure 5. Leonard Bast, framed by other people’s possessions 86
Figure 6. Helen and Leonard 87
Figure 7. “A final Constable-like image” 89
Figure 8. William Henry Fox Talbot, “The Open Door,”
from The Pencil of Nature (1844) 91
Figure 9. Oscar Gustave Rejlander,
“The Two Ways of Life” (1857) 98
Figure 10. Oscar Gustave Rejlander, “Hard Times” (1860) 101

vii
joyce.i-x 5/31/07 11:44 AM Page viii
joyce.i-x 5/31/07 11:44 AM Page ix

Acknowledgments

A book like this one is, inevitably, less a survey than a sampling of related
topics, each of which hopefully contributes to a coherent argument. Those
topics necessarily reflect my own interests—and they are an eclectic
bunch. Thanks, then, to all of those people over the years (and it has been
a lot of years) who have shared or simply humored those interests. Some
people listed here might swear that this book came out a long time ago.
I think of myself a reluctant Victorianist, and of this book as an attempt
to work through my reservations about the nineteenth century, and more
particularly the professional study of it. Too often, it feels like a period
freighted with too much baggage, most of it negative—which means that
people in my position can sometimes make a pretty good living essentially
denouncing the thing they study. In working through my argument, I seek
to draw out what I see as some unmitigated positives from the Victorians,
things they can still teach us, in addition to pointing to some of the ways
in which we have learned to misrepresent the period.
It helps that I have rarely worked as a strict Victorianist. In many ways,
this book is an unintended consequence of the dreadful academic job
market of the 1990s (and beyond). While I feel lucky to have found any
work at all, I am even more lucky to have found institutions that have not
wanted to hire in narrow boxes. The early chapters of this book took shape
when I taught at Texas Christian University, where I was supposed to
display some expertise in nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction. In
trying to prove my credentials in the later period, I somehow worked up
an idea about modernism, so I am very grateful to colleagues and students
who indulged me while I did so—most especially Melissa Blackman, Chu-
Chueh Cheng, Linda Hughes, and Elizabeth Macleod-Walls.
The bulk of this book was written after I was hired at the College of
William and Mary, which rashly thought I could direct a program in
literary and cultural studies. Faculty colleagues in the English department
and in the LCST program have kindly indulged my teaching forays into

ix
joyce.i-x 5/31/07 11:44 AM Page x

Acknowledgments

x film studies, heritage culture, and contemporary fiction, only occasionally

asking me to say something about the Victorians. The last three chapters
of this book are the results of those forays, and of a generous release
program offered by the College of Arts and Sciences, which gave me a
year off to write. Among the many friends that have made me very
welcome in Williamsburg, I most want to thank Elizabeth Barnes, Varun
Begley, Colleen Kennedy, Arthur Knight, Jack Martin, and Deborah
Morse (with whom I first thought through the material of chapter 3, in a
conference paper and team-taught course on “The Victorians and Film”).
Rob Nelson provided invaluable assistance in preparing the illustrations.
Elsewhere, I have benefited from the advice, friendship, and expertise of
Tammy Clewell, Barry Faulk, Stephanie Foote, Jim Holstun, Christine
Krueger, Andrew Miller, Janet Sorensen, and Joe Valente. David Sanders
at Ohio University Press has been supportive from the beginning, as were
two very helpful and sympathetic readers of an early draft. I’d like to thank
them for some very useful suggestions that helped me rethink the final
chapter and epilogue.
The prize for best reader, however, goes to Jenny Putzi, my colleague,
partner, and true love. Her careful reading, insightful commentary, and
unfailing support have made this book a whole lot stronger; my life, too,
has been made immeasurably better by her presence in it. Our son Sam
generously put off being born until I finished the manuscript, but he has
also made every day delightful since then. I hope that as an Anglo-
American child of the twenty-first century, he can learn some things from
the Victorians, while rejecting the kind of “neo-Victorian” moralizing that
has often passed for political and cultural thought in recent times.

May the road rise with you all.

An early version of the introduction was published as “The Victorians in

the Rearview Mirror,” in Functions of Victorian Culture at the Present Time, ed.
Christine Krueger (Ohio University Press, 2002). Chapter 1 first appeared
in Victorian Studies and is reprinted with the permission of Indiana University
Press. Portions of chapter 4 were published as “Victorian Continuities:
Early British Sociology and the Welfare of the State,” in Disciplinarity at the
Fin de Siècle, ed. Amanda Anderson and Joseph Valente. © 2002 by Princeton
University Press. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press.
joyce.1-73 5/31/07 11:41 AM Page 1

Introduction

d It was probably inevitable that the years 2000–2001 would

bring with them another series of reevaluations of the
nineteenth century. Just as surely, while the United States
and many other industrialized nations dabbled in a mo-
mentary technophobia incited by the anticlimactic “mil-
lennium bug,” Britain obsessed about its relationship with
its own past. The Observer of 2 January 2000 reprinted ar-
ticles from 1800 and 1900, noting hopefully that “[t]his
time round, our first editorial of the century—and of the
millennium—does not have to fear Britain suffering inva-
sion, war and conquest,” even though the date technically
opened neither the century nor the millennium (and mean-
while, Afghanistan, Iraq, and the so-called War on Terror
were all waiting in the wings to mock the paper’s false
hope).1 Three days earlier, the Guardian had similarly led
off with a look back, wondering “What would they make
of us now, those cheerful, confident subjects of the old
queen, secure in the certainty that Britain was great and
progress would make it still greater, who launched us 99
years ago into the 20th century?”2
It is an impossible question to answer and a strange
one to ask. It assumes that “those cheerful, confident sub-
jects” might all speak with one voice and then agree in
their assessments of their own era and of what a new cen-
tury promised. Predictably, the Guardian could only answer

1
joyce.1-73 5/31/07 11:41 AM Page 2

The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror

2 with ambivalence, noting that “[i]n some ways, they would find our world
reassuringly familiar,” but “elsewhere, our lives would astonish them”: the
continuity of the monarchy, cricket matches, and debates about electoral
reform and hunting reflected the former possibility, while space explo-
ration, a greater tolerance for homosexuality, genetic engineering, and the
millennium bug exemplified the latter. The exercise itself is a peculiarly
British one, and self-defeatingly incoherent in ways that recall the official
centerpiece of London’s celebrations in 2000, the Millennium Dome in
Greenwich. That structure also claimed to look ahead via a backwards
glance that simultaneously referenced the nation’s imperial past, its staging
of spectacles like the Great Exhibition of 1851, and the symbolic signifi-
cance of Greenwich Mean Time: as one Londoner commented, “We may
no longer own an empire, but we still own time.”3 Ronald Thomas notes that
the dome itself was surprisingly empty of commodities and big ideas, thus
forming the reverse of 1851’s Crystal Palace; indeed, as a kind of “enter-
tainment experience” or “pure monument,” it almost seemed designed to draw
a negative comparison with the past. “Rather than ‘ Time for a Change,’”
Thomas observes, “it took as its motto ‘Essentially British,’ in an effort to
bolster attendance from the ‘domestic market’ and, it would seem, shore up
the ruins of the lost Victorian fantasy of a distinctly British nationality.”4
The disease of looking backwards at century’s end also infected the
Economist, which under the heading “Still Victorian” pointed out some strik-
ing commercial continuities and better-than-expected comparisons: for in-
stance, the British economy had slipped just a little from third to fourth
place worldwide, and investment was still high, surpassed only by levels in
the United States. As if not wanting to sound too complacent, however, it
also noted that “[t]he British citizen, of course, has changed out of all
recognition, and the social structure has been overturned,” before shifting
back to a discussion of similarities that seem far less important: “Funny,
though, that crowds still go to Ascot; Eton College remains the country’s
foremost school,” and so on.5 There is something both shocking and symp-
tomatic about this focus on the trivia of aristocratic life, as if it might can-
cel out what the Economist admits is a fundamental remaking of the British
social structure and citizenry, just as the Guardian editorial appears to place
debates concerning the ethics of hunting and genetic engineering as equal
weights on a balance scale. Inventing the Victorians (2001), by Guardian jour-
nalist Matthew Sweet, also offers an inventory of the ways in which we re-
semble our predecessors. “Most of the pleasures we imagine to be our own,”
he argues, “the Victorians enjoyed first” in a culture “as rich and difficult
joyce.1-73 5/31/07 11:41 AM Page 3

Introduction

and complex and pleasurable as our own.” Indeed, “they are still with us,” 3
Sweet concludes, “walking our pavements, drinking in our bars, living in our
houses, reading our newspapers, inhabiting our bodies.” 6
It is tempting to infer from such accounts a kind of Victorian vampire
that has suddenly reawakened to haunt Britain after a century’s rest—except
that such positings of an essential and unbroken connection with the past
appeared throughout the twentieth century as well. The Victorians, we
might say, have attracted as much as they repulsed those that have come
afterwards, and each attempt at drawing a definitive line in the sand has
subsequently been shown to disguise a more telling continuity, as the fol-
lowing sequence demonstrates. In the year of Queen Victoria’s death, 1901,
the New Liberal theorist and politician C. F. G. Masterman opened his
book The Heart of the Empire with the bold assertion that “[t]he Victorian Era
has definitely closed.” 7 Yet Virginia Woolf, for one, did not agree with his
assessment, famously noting in Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown (1924) that “on or
about December 1910 human character changed.”8 In that essay, as we
shall see in chapter 1, she accuses the Edwardians of failing—especially in
the cultural sphere—to enact the definitive break with the past that was
being predicted on Victoria’s death, and which Woolf now associated with
the first postimpressionist exhibition in London ten years later. Among
others, Robert Graves pushed back her date for the decisive change a few
years, so that the experience of military service during World War I became
the key transitional moment, just as Leonard Woolf’s memoirs later concurred
that “the war of 1914 destroyed a new, and civilized or semi-civilized, way
of life which had established itself or was establishing itself all over Eu-
rope.” 9 Yet in 1935 George Dangerfield surveyed the recent history of
Britain and wrote critically of the idea that it was the war that finally broke
the hold of the past: “It is easier,” he notes, “to think of Imperial England,
beribboned and bestarred and splendid, living in majestic profusion up till
the very moment of war. Such indeed was its appearance, the appearance
of a somewhat decadent Empire and a careless democracy. But I do not think
its social history will be written on these terms.” Dangerfield concludes
that an uneven but decisive shift in the national character had in fact already
begun, almost subconsciously, in the early years of George V’s reign.10
Clearly, these commentators found no consensus about what consti-
tuted the Victorian “character” or about what might constitute a final break
with it. Indeed, if we wanted to bring the sequence up to date, we could
add Stefan Collini’s tongue-in-cheek suggestion that “in or about May 1979,
human character changed,” a reference to the election of the Thatcher
joyce.1-73 5/31/07 11:41 AM Page 4

The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror

4 government with its stated intention of a return to “Victorian values”—pre-

sumably the same ones that, if we take his statement at face value, Collini
believes had actually been retained up to that point.11 The entire sequence
is strikingly reminiscent of what Raymond Williams once described as a
moving escalator of nostalgic remembrance in his work on the literary pas-
toral.12 If that genre consistently finds the present wanting when set against
an idealized version of the past, usually located in the writer’s own child-
hood, then assertions of modernity seem conversely to privilege the here
and now as an escape from the pressing weight of history. On Williams’s
account, however, we never actually arrive at the golden age of pastoral
perfection, since one person’s youthful paradise is always also another’s de-
based present: thus, the escalator moves backward from Leavis’s disappear-
ing “organic community” to Hardy and George Eliot recalling the 1830s,
and back through Cobbett and Clare and Goldsmith and so on, until the
search ends at Arcadia or Eden, or some other space that seems to exist
outside of history itself. Modernist accounts throw the escalator into re-
verse, pushing the decisive point of transformation forward instead of back
in time, but the effect seems almost identical; indeed, it is tempting to con-
clude that a pure moment of modernism, free from the hangovers of the Vic-
torian past, is just as mythical as the Arcadian paradises of pastoral.
The starting point for this study, then, is the observation that we never
really encounter “the Victorians” themselves but instead a mediated image
like the one we get when we glance into our rearview mirrors while driv-
ing. The image usefully condenses the paradoxical sense of looking for-
ward to see what is behind us, which is the opposite of what we do when
we read history in order to figure out the future. It also suggests something
of the inevitable distortion that accompanies any mirror image, whether
we see it as resulting from the effects of political ideology, deliberate mis-
reading, exaggeration, or the understandable simplification of a complex
past. Margaret Thatcher’s call for a return to “Victorian values,” encoded in
a 1983 speech that enumerated hard work, self-reliance, thrift, national
pride, and cleanliness among the so-called perennial values inherited
from her Victorian grandmother, is perhaps the most famous of these, and
incidentally provides us with one example of the surprising closeness of
the past.13
I argue that such elaborations of the essence of the Victorians provide
a particular challenge for people who call themselves “Victorianists.” This
may equally be the case with other periods, of course, each of which have
suffered from the processes of simplification that are the necessary starting
joyce.1-73 5/31/07 11:41 AM Page 5

Introduction

point for descriptions of anything like “the Elizabethan World Picture” (in 5
E. M. Tillyard’s famous phrase) or other versions of the periodic zeitgeist or
weltanschauung. With few exceptions, though, those other periods have
not had the kind of purchase on the present that Thatcher’s appeal exem-
plifies, in part because they are simply more distant in time; it is hard, for
instance, to imagine anyone taking seriously a similar call to return to Ja-
cobean or Regency values. This is not to suggest that Thatcher found unani-
mous consent for her particular version of the Victorian past, of course; in
a strikingly ineffective example of what I will be describing as a strategy of
simple inversion, future Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock responded that
“[t]he ‘Victorian Values’ that ruled were cruelty, misery, drudgery, squalor
and ignorance,” but his party nonetheless went on to lose the next election
by a wide margin.14
My argument in this book is that such efforts, however well inten-
tioned, do nothing to unsettle commonsense assumptions about what the
Victorians represented and may even paradoxically help consolidate them.
Writing about the project of feminist art history, Janet Wolff has identified
this strategy as “the politics of correction,” arguing that “filling in the gaps”
in a male-centered canon of art will only “modify the discourse in minor
ways, leaving it essentially unchallenged.”15 I will be arguing something
similar about the interplay between a revivalist position like Thatcher’s and
its critical mirror image, that what emerges from their encounter is a pre-
vailing popular consensus about the defining features of the Victorian
age—among which we could list a confidently triumphalist imperialism, a
rigid separation of public and private spheres, a repressive sexual morality,
and an ascendant hegemony of bourgeois values—that can easily accom-
modate elements of either argument. Thus, Thatcher’s personal morality
can appear as the by-product of sexual repression and the Protestant work
ethic, while Kinnock’s painful social conditions might be glossed as the re-
grettable flipside of industrialization. (Two press cuttings from 1998 illus-
trate this particular dichotomy: in one, referencing Thatcher’s emphasis
on the personal, Britain is praised for “becoming less Victorian” in the
wake of Princess Diana’s death, having finally abandoned “the phlegmatic
belief in coping, the buttoned-up stoicism [that] were once not the out-
dated fashion of the ruling class, or only male virtues, but a visible part of
the national character”; in the other, a striking manufacturing worker holds
up a placard that insists on industrial relations as the hallmark of the past
century, proclaiming that “BERISFORD/MAGNET ARE VICTORIAN
EMPLOYERS.”)16
joyce.1-73 5/31/07 11:41 AM Page 6

The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror

6 Faced with the persistence of what Roland Barthes termed the com-
monsensical “doxa” of public opinion about the Victorians, what should a
Victorianist do? There is the sometimes laborious work of opposition, as
illustrated by Kinnock’s counterargument or the assorted reviewers who
painstakingly redressed the blind spots and distortions in Gertrude Him-
melfarb’s tendentiously Thatcherite diatribe, The De-moralization of Society
(1994), which I discuss in chapter 4. Such corrective efforts clearly shade
into ideology critique, asking what John McGowan has termed “the
Bakhtinian question of whom this discourse addresses (answers, contests,
affirms) and to what ends.”17 I want to mention briefly two other strategies
here, each of which has had some success while nonetheless leaving the
basic shape of the doxological Victorian largely intact. The first is exem-
plified by Steven Marcus’s study of nineteenth-century pornography, The
Other Victorians (1966), which—as its title makes clear—is interested in
those who do not belong in our received notions of the Victorians. This
approach readily extends to other “others” (feminists, colonial subjects, so-
cialists, sexual minorities, and so on): indeed, historical scholarship in the
twentieth century is full of such efforts to elevate those excluded from the
dominant records, from A. L. Morton’s class-conscious A People’s History of
England (1938) through Sheila Rowbotham’s landmark work of feminist re-
covery, Hidden from History (1974), to a text of the same name, edited by
Martin Duberman and others (1989), aimed at “reclaiming the gay and les-
bian past.”18 Implicit in this rhetorical framework, though, and made ex-
plicit by Marcus, is the way in which it presumes a normative definition
against which “otherness” can be measured: indeed, he notes that “this
otherness was of a specific Victorian kind,” and after exhaustive evidence
of this he concludes that “[t]he view of human sexuality as it was repre-
sented in the subculture of pornography and the view of sexuality held
by the official culture were reversals, mirror images, negative analogues of
each other.”19 The problem, of course, is that such an approach tends to
leave uninterrogated that “official” view as the normative pole of definition,
although it should be said that the work of Michel Foucault, Eve Kosof-
sky Sedgwick, and others has done much to complicate this kind of binary
thinking.
A second strategy, which resonates in part with Marcus’s “others” and
with Matthew Sweet’s archaeology of surprisingly modern Victorian pleas-
ures, is to stress those elements of nineteenth-century society or culture
that most closely resemble our own. In their introduction to a collection
of essays called Victorian Afterlife (2000), John Kucich and Dianne Sadoff sug-
joyce.1-73 5/31/07 11:41 AM Page 7

Introduction

gest that “[r]ewritings of Victorian culture have flourished, we believe, be- 7

cause the postmodern fetishizes notions of cultural emergence, and because
the nineteenth century provides multiple eligible sites for theorizing such
emergence. . . . [T]he cultural matrix of nineteenth-century England,” they
continue, “joined various and possible stories about cultural rupture that,
taken together, overdetermine the period’s availability for the postmodern
exploration of cultural emergence.”20 Such an approach, which Jay Clay-
ton terms “identitarian” in his Charles Dickens in Cyberspace (2003), yields
some immediate benefits, enabling a full-fledged narrative—or multiple
narratives—of Victorian otherness to be glimpsed beneath the surface, as
it were, of our understanding of the period itself.21
In suggesting that such an attention to emergent formations allows for
a reconsideration of the temporality of historical rupture, by positing in-
stead multiple and overlapping processes of transition, the approach laid
out by Kucich and Sadoff would presumably problematize the conven-
tional modernist historiography, which sees “the Victorian” as superseded
by something else—variously termed “the modern,” “the Edwardian,” or
“the Georgian.” We might, however, see emergence itself as a problematic
concept, which only defers the troubled question of definition: after all, if
what draws us to the nineteenth century are those ways in which it antici-
pates the postmodern present, then how do we characterize that? As was
the case with Marcus’s “other Victorians,” it is hard to shake the suspicion
that our understanding of the norm has remained, even if (as famously for
Marx’s version of capitalism) it can be shown to contain its own grave dig-
gers; regardless of whether it is seen as being transcended by its own emer-
gent possibilities or challenged by its debased and dissenting voices, a base-
line conception of “the Victorian” has essentially stayed the same. In a way,
we are back to Thatcher versus Kinnock and a logic of split perception
that only reaffirms the ways in which such binaries get set up in the first
place. (Who, after all, would question that periods produce their own oth-
ers and/or anticipate their successors and /or contain unprocessed elements
that might turn out to be potentially useful in the future?) One possibility
I consider in this book is that our idea of “the Victorian” in fact serves as a
condensation of contrary tendencies and oppositions, which we can see
hardening over the subsequent century into doxological assumptions and
attitudes that are henceforth available for a range of political and cultural
forces; these in turn advance by positioning themselves as for or against a
partial image of the whole, in the process helping to constitute each other
in a form of dialectical spiral. In a sense, “the Victorian” has become a kind
joyce.1-73 5/31/07 11:41 AM Page 8

The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror

8 of style and is thereby subject to the vicissitudes of twentieth-century fash-

ion, with its rapid cycles of obsolescence and revivalism.

d
Each of the assessments I have noted up to now has begun by posing
what would seem to me to be false questions: was the Victorian age a good
or bad thing, and are we for or against it? In each case, what goes unre-
marked is precisely the extent to which these questions are always already
inflected by those doxological assumptions about what the age represents
in the popular consciousness. Matthew Sweet’s Inventing the Victorians is the
most obvious example here, with its telling opening inviting his readers
to “[s]uppose that everything we think we know about the Victorians is
wrong.” 22 Setting aside his imagining of a contemporary consensus here—
would “we” all agree?—what seems most remarkable about his book is that
it focuses so heavily on the everyday lives and mass culture of the nine-
teenth century: sensation, advertising, drug use, table manners, furnishings,
and so on. As each chapter ends with the repeated revelation that the Vic-
torians in fact anticipated contemporary attitudes and amusements, it is
hard not to conclude that this could be true in each case and still not fun-
damentally revise our understanding of the period. Such a conclusion is
even more explicit in journalistic accounts like the Economist’s, which can
recognize a continuity in the daily lives of the privileged and also a fun-
damental reorganization of the national social structure, or the Guardian’s
counterbalancing of space exploration and cricket matches. I am not point-
ing to a category mistake here, as if economics were necessarily more cru-
cial than entertainment in our retrospective assessments. Instead, it is the
central premise of critical judgment that seems to be at fault, with the as-
sociated inference that any such listing or balance sheet might point us to
“the spirit of the age,” to use an appropriately Victorian phrasing.23 Even
Margaret Thatcher and Neil Kinnock could have been equally right about
the inheritances of the past and yet hopelessly mistaken to the extent that
they each sought to identify the definitive values of the time.
Interestingly, there was little consensus about the central meaning of
the period on the near-simultaneous ending of the nineteenth century and
(a month later) Victoria’s reign. Some retrospective summaries in the press
might strike us now as just plain odd, as when the normally conservative
Saturday Review listed as the three abiding features of nineteenth-century
life “Darwinism, tractarianism, and socialism,” before suggesting that the
period dispelled forever “the false sentimentality and ideality which used
joyce.1-73 5/31/07 11:41 AM Page 9

Introduction

to ignore the body, or despise it as an impediment to the soul.” 24 Looking 9

in the opposite direction, the St. James Gazette wrote that the “material
progress” of the Victorian age had unfortunately brought with it the de-
bilitating assumption “that mankind was going to settle everything by
logic and common sense” or “supply and demand.” Darwinism, it noted,
has been shown “to account for a little less than was hoped of it,” which
explained a continuing and even virulent strain of religious enthusiasm and
superstition.25 On the Left, Reynolds Weekly Newspaper mocked claims to na-
tional progress, commenting that while “the world has seen some changes
in the Victorian Era,” the labeling of these shifts as “improvements” or
“progress” requires us to ask in what direction the nation was progressing:
“To loftier ideals, a happier common life, a lessening of the strain after sor-
did things? No; the progress has not been in that direction; on the con-
trary it has been the reverse.”26
If these excerpts give us some sense of the public discourse at the mo-
ment of Victoria’s death, others illustrate the difficulty of looking ahead to
a new century or a new reign. On the Right, the Saturday Review expressed
a palpable hesitation: “Whatever the twentieth century and the reign of
King Edward VII may have in store,” it editorialized, “we may be sure that
it will not be quite like the Victorian age, will probably differ much from
it.”27 Toward the political center, we find a similarly cautionary tone in the
Pall Mall Gazette, which predicted possible disaster in the Boer War: “It is
for us to make sure that New Year’s Day, 1901, shall not find the Empire of
England on the way to the same fate as those out of which it has been built
up.” 28 On the Left, the certainties of Reynolds again: “In our judgment, the
first year of the new century will prove to have been the last year of good
trade and we must look forward to a period of lean years and to decline in
trade as compared with our two great rivals, America and Germany. Un-
happily, instead of preparing for this, we have squandered an enormous
sum in South Africa and, if we do not make peace, we shall squander much
more.”29 Clearly, these statements are articulating real political differences,
but what links them is a rhetoric of incipient panic, which predominates
whether or not the journal is for the queen, the empire, or “progress.”
Each of these statements contains what I take to be a decisive feature
of twentieth-century anti-Victorianism: the idea that something termed
(on the basis of variable determining factors) “the Victorian” has, for bet-
ter or worse, now come to an end. One of the most telling responses to the
end of Victoria’s reign came from the St. James Gazette, which wrote on her
death of how “[t]he period before her accession, when a King and not a
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The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror

10 Queen reigned in the land, was a period of long past history, so remote as
to seem to belong to a different epoch, a different civilization. . . . She fig-
ured in our imagination less as a Person than as an Institution—an Institu-
tion immovably fixed in the political and social Order of our age, related
to the passing men and passing events of history, but not like them.”30
Here, the age of Victoria stretches back into the recesses of remembered
time, while its ending provoked a kind of existential crisis for the nation,
which now had to reimagine those institutions and social structures that
had seemed so inextricably associated with the monarch herself.31 In reality,
of course, those same structures were readily transformable, in part through
a redefinition of the function of the state, which benefited from now being
recognized as possessing a relative autonomy from the sovereign. At the
same time, Edwardian and Georgian modernists set about the demystifica-
tion of the figure of the queen, as illustrated by Virginia Woolf’s use of the
name “Mrs. Brown” for her emblem of stolid subjectivity: as John Madden’s
1997 film of the same name reminds us, the epithet was used by Punch in
particular to mock the widowed queen’s relationship with her Scottish ser-
vant, John Brown.32
While the Woolfs, Lytton Strachey, and the rest of the Bloomsbury
Group are usually thought to have sparked a modernist anti-Victorianism,
peaking in 1918 with the publication of Strachey’s Eminent Victorians, I am
suggesting that the groundwork had been prepared immediately on the
queen’s death—and indeed, in the “decadent” nineties. It is less my project
here, though, to trace the roots of this discourse than it is to track its in-
ternal contradictions and limits, which led to its continual reassertion and
restatement throughout the twentieth century. The Bloomsbury critique of
the ruling ideology they inherited from the recent past can seem as
vaguely incoherent as the “Group” itself, which renounced any collective
identity beyond a loose agglomeration of friends; rejecting this fashioned
self-image, Raymond Williams has usefully identified it as a recognizable
“fraction of the existing English upper class . . . at once against its dominant
ideas and values and still willingly, in all immediate ways, part of it.” While
it came to be connected, in sometimes quite tangential ways, with forces
of liberalization and modernism, the Bloomsbury hallmark was, he con-
cludes, its expression of “a new style,” the keynote of which was an outward
projection of the personal register of conscience. Crucially, the various po-
sitions they advocated did not need to cohere in any programmatic way,
because (as Williams argues) their “individual integration has already taken
place, at the level of the ‘civilized individual,’ the singular definition of all
joyce.1-73 5/31/07 11:41 AM Page 11

Introduction

the best people, secure in their autonomy but turning their free attention 11
this way and that, as occasion requires.” 33
Extending this analysis, we might say that for Bloomsbury “the Victo-
rian” also denoted a style, ironically one with its roots in the very areas of
culture and domestic life that Matthew Sweet and the Economist saw as con-
tinuing far into the twentieth century. Such assessments are almost by defi-
nition subjective and inconclusive, which helps explain the evident note of
disappointment that recurs throughout the early decades of the twentieth
century each time commentators such as Woolf, Strachey, Robert Graves,
and George Dangerfield recognized that society as a whole had not been
fundamentally transformed by a new monarch on the throne, or by postim-
pressionism, or even by World War I. In this sense, the realization that oth-
ers did not feel especially “modern” was what could sustain the fractional
status of the Bloomsbury vanguard, while also undermining its efforts at a
social analysis that always took the Group’s own immediate experience as
its starting point.
Chapter 1 of The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror uses a close reading of
the writings of the Woolfs, Clive Bell, and Strachey to suggest that there
is little concrete agreement even among the Bloomsbury friends about what
actually constituted the sins of the Victorian period; indeed, I argue that
Eminent Victorians expresses instead the radical unknowability of the previ-
ous century, which for Strachey represented an age defined by contradic-
tion. As a result of that instability, as I argue in chapter 2, Bloomsbury anti-
Victorianism rapidly gave way to a more positive view of the past that was
articulated at the fringes of modernism (and of Bloomsbury itself) by fig-
ures such as E. M. Forster and Evelyn Waugh. And yet, the force of earlier
critiques conditioned the form and extent of their nostalgia, which never
quite manages to articulate a full-fledged endorsement of the Victorians.
Instead, texts such as Howards End (1910) and Brideshead Revisited (1945) situ-
ate themselves at an important fault line of modernism, managing at once
to argue a necessarily backward vision in the face of an increasingly ab-
horrent modernity—one that, incidentally, bore many of the characteristics
previously attributed to the nineteenth century—as well as the impossibil-
ity of an unproblematic nostalgia. In that sense, I see these texts as inherit-
ing from Strachey a view of the past that is internally divided and thus open
to a deconstructive close reading that looks to accentuate the conflicted
nature of modernist attitudes toward the nineteenth century.
One symptom of that conflict, as I have suggested, is the effort to re-
duce the Victorian to a style—and one whose primary appeal lay as much
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The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror

12 in terms of dress and design as in a set of ideological or ethical beliefs. As

I highlight at the end of chapter 2, such a move worries a commentator like
Roger Fry, whose 1919 essay on “The Ottoman and the Whatnot” mocks
the revivalist fashion from within the terms set by Bloomsbury. What it
manages to achieve, for him, is the reduction of the nineteenth century to
a set of aesthetic objects and, at the same time, the denial of aesthetic value
itself, since he can only view a fondness for Victoriana as produced out of
an associated set of “historical images they conjure up” that are just as in-
evitably false. What matters, he concludes with an air of resignation, is
that such images “exist for us, and for most people, far more vividly and
poignantly than any possible aesthetic feeling.” 34 But this reading seems
conditioned by the prior assumption that an ottoman can furnish no pleas-
ures other than through its association with a (sufficiently distanced) way
of living. What it crucially misses is the spirit of irony that underpins the
revival of Victoriana among the social and artistic elites, including a circle
of undergraduates at Oxford centered around Waugh. In part, then, this de-
velopment reflects an outflanking maneuver by a new generation of avant-
gardists who sought to displace Bloomsbury by reversing its hatred of the
past. As Robert Graves and Alan Hodge describe it in their 1940 memoir
The Long Week-End, the “neo-Victorianism” of the twenties sought to revive
forms of nineteenth-century dress in particular (including bowler hats,
stockings, printed chiffon, and cameo jewelry) and yet married it with “the
neo” of modern materials, such as chrome and Bakelite.35
From this point on, I would argue, “the Victorian” serves as a continuous
reference point of twentieth-century discourse, whether it is seen primarily
in terms of politics or fashion.36 Chapter 3 examines a later stage in this his-
tory from the 1980s, with the phenomenon of “heritage cinema” in Britain at
the time of Thatcherism’s political ascendancy. Whereas this cycle of visual
adaptations (most famously, the films of Ismail Merchant and James Ivory,
and the literary productions broadcast on public television’s Masterpiece The-
atre) has typically been seen by critics as a cultural by-product of Thatcher’s
promotion of “Victorian values,” I argue that we need to look elsewhere to
understand the connection to the nineteenth century. Their source material
is only selectively drawn from the period, with major clusters in the Regency
(most notably, the novels of Jane Austen) and at the fin de siècle. That latter
group of texts, including works by Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, Henry
James, and Merchant-Ivory’s beloved E. M. Forster, exemplifies a literary im-
pressionism that paradoxically seems particularly ill-suited to visual transla-
tion, given their stress on narrative unreliability and perspective.
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Introduction

This insight leads me to consider that what makes heritage cinema seem 13
“Victorian” is its visual style, which emphasizes a concrete material reality
through its overriding concern for the authenticity of period details (such
as costume, props, and settings). In this sense, I argue along with Jennifer
Green-Lewis that we habitually think of the Victorians in retrospect as
championing an unequivocally mimetic visual aesthetic, “humorless realists
about to be shattered by modernism and the cubist war.” 37 In challenging
such an assumption, I trace out an alternative trajectory, beginning with
Victorian art-photographers like Oscar Gustave Rejlander, who conducted
early experiments with combination printing and montage, and extending
through antirealist tendencies in early cinema associated especially with
Georges Méliès and Sergei Eisenstein. Those influences, I suggest, can be
seen in a group of metacinematic heritage films, including The French Lieu-
tenant’s Woman (Karel Reisz, 1981), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (Francis Ford Cop-
pola, 1992), and The Governess (Sandra Goldbacher, 1997), that seek to place
past and present in dialogue through a sustained investigation of the sup-
pressed ideological history of visual techniques. Each film argues that there
is no necessary connection between cinematic realism and either the process
of literary adaptation or the Victorian period, and instead stages a far-
reaching debate about the integrity of cultural texts as they are translated
across artistic genres and forms.38
Beginning with chapter 3, I shift from the more neutral tone of the de-
constructionist, who is content to highlight the internal tensions within
modernism’s relationship to the past, to a more assertive one that also seeks
to restore and revalue aspects of that past that have been consciously oc-
cluded in late-twentieth-century public discourse about the Victorians: an
experimental visual culture, a commitment to a welfare safety net provided
by the state, and a “Dickensian” novel form that stresses the structural in-
terdependence of diverse social groups and classes. In doing so, I hope to
resist succumbing to the approach I discussed earlier that holds up re-
pressed or anticipatory elements as the true essence of the period. What
marks these elements, as I discuss them in the final three chapters of this
book, is the conflicted and contradictory nature of each: art photography,
for instance, is initially undertaken and justified as a superior form of mimetic
realism; state welfare provision accepts many of the assumptions behind
private and philanthropic approaches, especially concerning the moral re-
sponsibilities of the individual; and what I term a “neo-Dickensian” literary
realism in postwar fiction emerges alongside a simultaneous experimenta-
tion with modernist stream-of-consciousness narration.
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The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror

14 In chapter 4, I address what is perhaps the least acknowledged (or

most suppressed) inheritance of the Victorian period, its progressive con-
ception of the responsibilities of the state. Assessing the ideal balance be-
tween the central state and the liberal subject is, I argue in the early chap-
ters of The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror, one of the key fault lines within the
Bloomsbury Group, for whom the Victorians come to represent both a sys-
tematic organization of public life (one that presses upon the private indi-
vidual) and—often at the same time—the principle of laissez-faire. Thus,
when E. M. Forster called for a combination of the “new economy” and the
“old morality,” 39 he saw the recent past as representing a valuable reposi-
tory of the latter, needing only to be supplemented by a planned economic
system that could centralize the provision and distribution of goods and
services; yet this is precisely the kind of thinking to which the Woolfs ob-
jected, as a residue of a discredited Victorianism that privileged collective
social obligations at the expense of the needs of the individual.
Thatcherism’s proposed welfare reforms, by contrast, were rooted in a
version of the Victorian period that stressed a minimalist state and maxi-
mum freedom for the individual and private enterprise. And yet, by the
end of the nineteenth century, there seems to have been a growing con-
sensus that only a centralized state could redress the large-scale problems
that were the inevitable consequences of an unstable business cycle, most
notably mass unemployment. This is the implication of the descriptive
studies undertaken by Charles Booth and other late-nineteenth-century
sociologists, and it finds its expression in the policy recommendations of
the Minority Report of the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws and the
actions of the New Liberal government that came to power in the first
decade of the twentieth century. At a more theoretical level, Matthew
Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy (1869) made a parallel case for state education
by arguing that only a standardized curriculum would avert the problems
that follow from leaving schooling in the hands of particular professions,
classes, or churches—a system that stresses sectional identities at the ex-
pense of any sense of a greater national good and as such merely reproduces
existing political interests and antagonisms. On such evidence, I argue that
the Victorians provide a better basis for defending than attacking the foun-
dation of the modern welfare state, which has come under considerable
pressure from neoconservatives in Britain and the United States.
Thatcherism’s debate about the relative responsibilities of the indi-
vidual and the state finds a fascinating corollary in a simultaneous division
inside contemporary fiction, which moves in one direction to develop high
joyce.1-73 5/31/07 11:41 AM Page 15

Introduction

modernism’s experiments with first-person narration and in the other back 15

to an earlier model of Dickensian realism. At a time when Thatcher herself
proclaimed that there was “no such thing as society,” 40 I argue through a
reading of novels by John Irving, Peter Carey, and Sarah Waters that the
latter tendency works instead to assert networks of intersubjective con-
nection and dependence, whereas the first-person narratives of novelists
such as Irving Welsh and James Kelman suggest a homologous retreat into
the (typically damaged) subjectivity of a private consciousness. Irving’s The
Cider House Rules (1985), Carey’s Jack Maggs (1997), and Waters’s Fingersmith
(2002) all significantly revise and extend the fictional template they inherit
from novels like Oliver Twist and Great Expectations, however: all three, for
instance, improvise upon Dickens’s orphan stories to comment upon con-
temporary political debates about public welfare and abortion rights while
incorporating a more explicit discussion of sexual identities and practices
than the Victorian novelist could. Jack Maggs goes furthest, perhaps, in pur-
suing a revisionary agenda, seeking to rewrite Great Expectations from the per-
spective of the convict Maggs (a modified version of Magwitch), who comes
finally to affirm an Australian identity at the expense of a cherished fantasy
of Englishness that cannot be sustained once he returns to the imperial me-
tropolis. In this way, as well as in Waters’s depiction of the “other Victorian”
world of pornography, the prototype of the Dickensian novel is lauded for
its effort at representing an expansive and interdependent social world, yet
also criticized for placing explicit limits on that world by enforcing the
boundaries of national identity and cultural respectability.
In a closing epilogue, “Postcolonial Victorians,” I use Jack Maggs as a
starting point for considering more fully the spatial dimensions of the Vic-
torians’ legacy, mindful that their influence was felt throughout the vast ex-
panse of the British empire. Just as it would be absurd to assume that such
influence disappeared overnight in Britain itself, whether in 1901 or 1914 or
any other date we might select, so we need to understand the precise forms
and areas of life in which it has lingered in places like India, Africa, Aus-
tralia, and the Caribbean. In exploring a number of site-specific examples of
a colonial inheritance, I finally consider the possibility that has been implicit
at least in much of this book: that “the Victorian” need not be set in opposi-
tion to “the modern” and may even be a signifier of modernity in some in-
stances. It is only the persistence of a particular version of modernism, in its
earliest revolt against its forebears, that prevents us from recognizing this.
Ultimately, the Victorian inheritance is always a conflicted one that it
makes little sense to wholeheartedly endorse or reject. To the extent that
joyce.1-73 5/31/07 11:41 AM Page 16

The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror

16 people across the globe are still struggling to sort through its influence,
marking and celebrating continuities as well as diversions from a supposed
“Victorian” blueprint of domestic order and political power, this suggests
how little separation we actually have from the nineteenth century. The
iconic warning we see when driving, that “objects in the mirror are closer
than they appear,” thus nicely expresses a feeling we may have about a pe-
riod that no longer seems as distant as we might like to think, but instead
forms the horizon for many of our most pressing debates. In this book I will
discuss a series of such moments, when a recognition of a surprising (and
perhaps frightening) proximity to the past occurred—at very different
times and in different places—to a variety of twentieth-century people.
joyce.1-73 5/31/07 11:41 AM Page 17

On or About 1901
The Bloomsbury Group Looks Back

d
CHåPTER ONE

While the Bloomsbury Group is commonly held to have spear-

headed an early-twentieth-century revolt against the Victori-
ans, the relationship of its key figures to the previous century
is a complex and often contradictory one. Attempting to sum-
marize their collective attitudes, S. P. Rosenbaum makes two
assertions that point in opposite directions: on the one hand,
Bloomsbury “reacted strongly against the Victorian family as
a means of social organisation,” and on the other, “Blooms-
bury was born and bred Victorian. The rational and visionary
significance of the Group’s writing has its origins in Victorian
family, school and university experience.” Against the impres-
sion that is often suggested by their writings (as we shall see),
the revolt did not emanate from some Archimedean position
of external opposition and critique but from within the con-
ventional social and familial structures that helped to form the
Bloomsbury writers. Rosenbaum concludes that “there was in
Bloomsbury a basic ambivalence towards nineteenth-century
middle-class family life,” with one locus of tension being money:
as we shall see from the memoirs of Leonard Woolf, if it rep-
resents a debased standard for judging character or personal
worth, what Rosenbaum terms “[t]he puritan foundations of
sound saving and careful expenditure on which the essential
economic security of Bloomsbury’s Victorian households rested
. . . appears in most of the family memoirs,” forming the basis
in particular for a cherished economic independence.1 Thus,

17
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The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror

18 wealth becomes one of a series of objects that are actively disavowed, ac-
knowledged as belonging to an antagonistic set of structures yet at the
same time deemed necessary as the components of an evolving alternative.
It is possible, in this sense, to be wholeheartedly opposed to “ Victorian-
ism” as a system while still tied to many of its core elements. Indeed, at
times, the Victorian seems to refer simply to any kind of systematic or-
ganization or structural analysis that would constrict the freedoms of the
sovereign individual—including the right to hold such ambivalent and
contradictory attitudes toward the past.
Virginia Woolf’s “A Sketch of the Past,” from 1939–40, ends on this
point, illustrating a characteristic need to make firm distinctions between
past and present as well as the inevitability that terms begin to bleed into
each other. “No more perfect fossil of Victorian society could exist,” she
writes, than the family she recollects from childhood, with her father “a
typical Victorian” and her older half-brother, George Duckworth, as his
natural heir, having “accepted Victorian society so implicitly that an archae-
ologist would find him of the greatest interest.”2 The geological metaphor
suggests the kind of absolute distinction between historical strata that the
memoir makes explicit by counterposing “[t]wo different ages confront[ing]
each other in the drawing room at Hyde Park Gate: the Victorian age; and
the Edwardian age. We were not,” Woolf continues, their father’s “children,
but his grandchildren,” already living in 1910 while throwbacks such as
George Duckworth and Leslie Stephen remained stuck in 1860 (126–27).
It is easy to fill out the terms of this opposition, just as we can for Woolf’s
more famous version of it in her 1924 essay Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown: living
in 1860, for example, includes her father’s sense that “the woman was his
slave,” his inability to understand “what other people felt,” the “pressure of
society,” and a set of public family rituals (125–28). In the last instance, the
distinction is predicated upon a larger split between public and private
space that is itself the hallmark, for Woolf, of a Victorian mode of organi-
zation. Since she and her father both retreat for large parts of the day into
their private rooms and thoughts, it is not the public, externalized per-
formances of meals or society functions that define the past so much as the
ways in which they puncture and impinge upon the intervening times
“when we escaped the pressures of Victorian society” (127). In such a con-
text, the past is linked to one column in a set of oppositions—to the public,
social, and ritualized as opposed to the private, reflexive, and spontaneous—
and also to the larger process of binary thinking itself. In specifying the
defining qualities of the Victorians, in opposition to those of the Edwar-
dians, Woolf is paradoxically thinking like a Victorian.
joyce.1-73 5/31/07 11:41 AM Page 19

On or About 1901

This is only one way in which it proves difficult to maintain the initial 19
sense of an absolute separation between us (living in 1910) and them (stuck
in 1860). Woolf acknowledges that she and her sister Vanessa “both learned
the rules of the Victorian game of manners so thoroughly that we have
never forgotten them. We still play the game.” And while that may be “a
disadvantage in writing,” for reasons that we shall see in a moment, the game
itself is said to be “founded upon restraint, sympathy, unselfishness—all
civilized qualities” and ones that Bloomsbury would seek to value against a
contrasting list (including action, impersonality, and politics) that it also
associated with the Victorians. Again, the distinction seems to be unravel-
ing. In one sense, of course, a figure like Virginia Woolf is herself the prod-
uct of her own late-Victorian upbringing and can play the part of the host-
ess as well as her mother—“handing plates of buns to shy young men and
asking them, not directly and simply about their poems and their novels,
but whether they like cream as well as sugar” (129). In another sense, how-
ever, such a performance instantiates a kind of “civilized” behavior that is
the goal of a post-Victorian ethics, suggesting that the nineteenth century
already contained some elements of its own supersession.
What starts out looking like a simple revolt turns out, then, to be a far
more complex relationship, shot through with ambiguity and contradic-
tion. In what follows, I first look at some of the more celebrated texts of
Bloomsbury anti-Victorianism, including Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown and the
memoirs of Leonard Woolf and Clive Bell. In each case we see repeated,
with minor variations, the same rhetorical gymnastics that shadow any ef-
fort to establish a firm line of departure from a past system and set of be-
liefs that in reality continue to inform the present. In the process, exactly
what constitutes “the Victorian” remains permanently unstable, despite—
or even because of—Bloomsbury’s repeated attempts to dispose of it. This
underlying irony is (ironically enough) acknowledged only in the text that
has been commonly considered the decisive thrust in Bloomsbury’s war
with the Victorians, Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians (1918). There, as
we shall see, Strachey comes closest to recognizing the real stakes and mo-
tives of modernist revolt and provides the tools by which it can be decon-
structed nearly a century later.

Queen Victoria and Mrs. Woolf

Virginia Woolf’s famous assertion, in Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown, that “on or
about December 1910 human character changed” is an intentional over-
statement, designed to force readers to question its claim by sheer rhetori-
cal excess. Indeed, the precision of the month and year is offset by the
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The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror

20 counterbalancing imprecision of “on or about,” a tempering that is ex-

tended in the following paragraph as Woolf insists that it is not a “sudden
and definite” transformation: by now, even the year is in question, as she
backtracks further from her initial certainty, saying only that “since one
must be arbitrary, let us date it about the year 1910” (4). There is a sense,
however, in which the precision of “December 1910” does matter, in terms
of the priorities it sets for Woolf’s essay: it denotes in particular the opening
of the first Postimpressionist exhibition in London, organized by Woolf’s
close friend Roger Fry, and—perhaps more importantly—not the death of
Edward VII, which had occurred in May of that year. Given the responses
to the death of Victoria nine years earlier, and the wide-ranging predictions
of a transformed nation and society that accompanied it, Woolf’s deempha-
sizing of monarchical succession is itself significant, and consistent with
the larger argument of Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown that nominally “ Victorian”
traits of writing and perception were continued by the Edwardian novel-
ists under discussion: in this, as in many other ways, the Edwardians had
failed to engineer a decisive break with the past. Already, we can see the
priority afforded to the cultural sphere here, as postimpressionist painting
(along with selective “Georgian” literary counterparts) is contrasted with
novelistic realism.
It is also significant that the Edwardians she singles out for criticism,
H. G. Wells, John Galsworthy, and Arnold Bennett, asserted an activist
role for fiction in fomenting social change—and indeed, it is partly on this
point that she bases her critique. Just as the change of 1910 is not precipi-
tated by monarchical succession, neither is it the product of explicit politi-
cal measures: predictably enough, it was first glimpsed for Woolf in litera-
ture, in Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh and the plays of George Bernard
Shaw, and then in domestic living arrangements and protocols: reflecting
the priority given to the realm of everyday (bourgeois) experience, she com-
pares “the Victorian cook . . . like a leviathan in the lower depths, formi-
dable, silent, obscure, inscrutable,” with her Georgian successor, who is by
contrast “a creature of sunshine and fresh air . . . in and out of the drawing-
room, now to borrow The Daily Herald, now to ask advice about a hat.” This
renegotiated relationship between masters and servants is also named first
in a list describing how “[a]ll human relations have shifted,” coming before
those among “husbands and wives, parents and children.” Even more
tellingly, as an illustration of Raymond Williams’s contention that Blooms-
bury writers used their personal and collective experiences as the basis for
imagining or projecting larger social changes, Woolf asserts that “when
joyce.1-73 5/31/07 11:41 AM Page 21

On or About 1901

human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, con- 21
duct, politics, and literature” (5). In such a model, religion and politics are
reduced to second-order phenomena, while literature is afforded first and
last mention as the area of life that both signals a larger transformation and
is at the same time its final manifestation.
Literature can appear as the cause and symptom of such a transforma-
tion because—in the same way that “the Victorian” can come to signify bi-
nary thinking in general and also one side of a particular opposition—it,
too, is an internally divided sign running in parallel with human character
and relations. In this sense, Woolf’s “arbitrary” transition of December 1910
is shadowed by the division of writers into “Edwardians” and “Georgians,”
a distinction that literally would have emerged with the royal succession
seven months earlier. The former are represented, as we have seen, by the
high realist triumvirate of Wells, Bennett, and Galsworthy, while the latter
grouping is more heterogeneous and less obviously contemporary in a strict
sense: while the five named authors (Forster, Lawrence, Strachey, Joyce, and
Eliot) were all born within a nine-year period, between 1879 and 1888,
Forster in particular spans the divide, having already published three nov-
els before the watershed of 1910. The collective identity of the group rests,
for Woolf, on matters of form and style, and each can be identified with “the
Georgian writer [who] had to begin by throwing away the method that
was in use at the moment,” a method that she identifies in turn with “the
Edwardian tools” of descriptive detail, external characterization, and social
engagement (18–19). In this way, literature is itself bifurcated around the
same central point of 1910, between those writers who look forward with
a new set of stylistic tools and others who continue on with the old ways.
Summarizing Woolf’s position in this essay, Carola Kaplan and Anne Simp-
son note that it is a distinctively Oedipal one, expressing “the desire and
need to free themselves of the looming figures of their Victorian parents
and, by extension, the Edwardian artists [who] . . . had serious quarrels
with the Victorians” and yet seemed “willing to engage in those quarrels in
the terms their predecessors had taught them.”3 As one revealing charac-
teristic of the new literary movement, for instance, Woolf notes how writ-
ers “do not pour out three immortal masterpieces with Victorian regularity
every autumn” (24), an assessment that identifies Bennett and others with
their own nineteenth-century predecessors by denigrating their accept-
ance of professional protocols and standards for novelists.4
As we shall see later in this chapter and in the one that follows, the
polemic involves a necessary form of oversimplification, a kind of willed
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22 division into two contesting teams that inevitably slide into each other the
more closely we examine the work of the so-called Georgians. The nature
of any such division depends, of course, upon the prior statement of dis-
tinguishing criteria, yet these paradoxically seem to emerge from the ex-
amples themselves in Woolf’s essay. With what we might take to be a clas-
sically “Georgian” distrust of “analyzing and abstracting,” she proposes a
story that will illustrate the differences she has presumed, conjuring up a
scenario of a woman in a railway carriage which she simultaneously tells us
“has the merits of being true” and also embellishes for effect. The most sig-
nificant use of artistic license is her giving the woman the name “Mrs.
Brown,” which—in light of Punch’s jokes about Victoria’s relationship with
her servant, John Brown—would have made her readily identifiable as the
queen herself. Many of the physical details would seem to corroborate
this, suggesting an image of the sovereign monarch and defining symbol of
her age brought down to earth: there is, for instance, “something pinched
about her—a look of suffering, or apprehension, and, in addition, she was
extremely small. Her feet, in their clean little boots, scarcely touched the
floor.” In what seem to be further references to Victoria’s later life and her
concerns about the wayward Prince of Wales, the narrative imagines that
“having been deserted, or left a widow, years ago, she had led an anxious,
harried life, bringing up an only son, perhaps, who, as likely as not, was by
this time beginning to go to the bad” (6). This self-conscious downscaling
of the monarchy seems complete when Woolf imagines the public de-
manding to know “whether her villa was called Albert or Balmoral” (19).
If we are supposed to read the character as a version of Victoria, the
essay works through a form of guilt by association, since we really only get
to see how the Edwardian novelists under discussion might tell her story:
thus, for instance, “Mr. Wells would instantly project upon the window-
pane a vision of a better, breezier, jollier, happier, more adventurous and
gallant world, where these musty railway carriages and fusty old women do
not exist,” while Bennett’s eye for detail “would notice the advertisements;
the pictures of Swanage and Portsmouth; the way in which the cushion
bulged between the buttons” and so on (13). But if these illustrate Woolf’s
assessment of a literary style that keeps missing the human element itself,
we are disappointed in our anticipation of a contrasting “Georgian” ap-
proach: as a representative of the new, Woolf concedes, “[a]ll I could do
was to report as accurately as I could what was said, to describe in detail
what was worn, to say, despairingly, that all sorts of scenes rushed into my
mind, to proceed to tumble them out pell-mell, and to describe this vivid,
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On or About 1901

this overmastering impression by likening it to a draught or a smell of 23

burning.” By this point, with the joking admission that “I was also strongly
tempted to manufacture a three-volume novel about the old lady’s son,” the
Edwardian/Georgian distinction seems to have evaporated, and Woolf ad-
mits that she has “pull[ed] my own anecdote to pieces” (17–18). Her stated
point is that contemporary novelists have only the Edwardians available to
them as role models, but we might equally conclude that the story has less
to do with style than with content: the “Georgians” simply would not be
writing about Mrs. Brown/Victoria in the first place, while the failed ef-
forts of Wells and Bennett only serve to underscore their status as dimin-
ished Victorians, who cling to the old techniques but are no longer capa-
ble of contributing to an evolving canon of fiction that Woolf describes in
the essay, including works by such nineteenth-century novelists as Char-
lotte Brontë, Thackeray, and Hardy.5
That canon is also distinguished from the work of the Edwardian nov-
elists on account of its attitude toward the external world. Where, for the
likes of Jane Austen or Laurence Sterne, “everything was inside the book,
nothing outside,” writers such as Wells “were interested in something out-
side,” and this produced “incomplete” works for which “it seemed neces-
sary to do something—to join a society, or, more desperately, to write a
cheque” (12). A passage like this would seem to cement Virginia Woolf’s
reputation as lacking any interest in social causes, as (in the words of her
husband Leonard) “the least political animal that has lived since Aristotle
invented the term.”6 It is not my purpose here to recycle the standard read-
ing of an apolitical Bloomsbury: as Patrick Brantlinger has argued in re-
sponse to this cliché, the Group’s collective record on sexual politics,
World War I, and imperialism is a worthy one, even when checked by their
own “confessions of naivete and failure, of ineffectiveness and distaste for
politics.”7 What seems key in Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown is not the simple
preference for art over politics so much as the denigration of the latter as
a subject for art; in a manner that is reminiscent of the writers of the fin de
siècle, a “pure” form of literature where “everything [is] inside” is held up as
superior to the necessarily incomplete style that requires external valida-
tion or makes activist demands upon its readers.8 Such a style is implicitly
“ Victorian” to the extent that the nineteenth century was itself viewed as
a mechanical age, where what often dominated public discussions were
precisely the kinds of obligations and responsibilities that tied person to
person or a government to its citizens. In that sense, Raymond Williams
is surely right that the Bloomsbury Group’s ethos and aesthetic were
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24 grounded in the individual, even when its members gave support to col-
lective movements and bodies from the Independent Labour Party to the
League of Nations.

“The Last Days of Victorian Civilization”?

If, as this suggests, Bloomsbury attitudes were shaped by an Oedipal op-
position to a holistic projection of “the Victorians,” the best account of the
process can be found in Leonard Woolf’s autobiography, published in the
1960s, and similar recollections such as Clive Bell’s Old Friends (1956).
Without wishing to force anything so solid as a shared “line” on these
memoirs, enough common features exist to indicate areas of agreement
that might form the basis for a Bloomsbury orthodoxy: that “Victorianism”
is best approached as a set of conventions governing behavior rather than
an overt political outlook; that politics is, nonetheless, a category that might
be subsumed within the framework of the Victorian, especially as opposed
to the more “subjective” mode of feeling; that class is no longer a privileged
term for thinking about the opposed forces of progress and reaction—nor
for pinpointing what (if anything) united those who came to define the
core membership of the Bloomsbury Group itself. In the second volume of
his autobiography, Growing (1961), Leonard Woolf recalls a youthful letter to
Lytton Strachey during his time spent as a colonial administrator in Cey-
lon, bemoaning that “there is nothing to say to you, nothing to tell you of
except ‘events.’ I neither read nor think nor—in the old way—feel.”9 Events,
as they are disparaged here, are closely related to the need “to do some-
thing” that Virginia Woolf found so troubling in the novels of the same pe-
riod; reading, thinking, and feeling are, by contrast, states of being where
“everything is inside.”
Working in opposition to “feeling” is “ Victorianism,” a force that often
seems to be merely a set of conventions and attitudes that are propagated
and recycled through key public institutions, in particular the schools, and
that operate to construct and restrict the sovereign individual from the
outside. Here, for example, is Leonard Woolf’s description of the terms of
the struggle, from the first volume of his memoirs:

Our youth, the years of my generation at Cambridge, coincided

with the end and the beginning of a century which was also the
end of one era and the beginning of another. When in the grim,
grey, rainy January days of 1901 Queen Victoria lay dying, we al-
ready felt that we were living in an era of incipient revolt and that
joyce.1-73 5/31/07 11:41 AM Page 25

On or About 1901

we ourselves were mortally involved in this revolt against a social 25

system and code of conduct and morality which, for convenience
sake, may be referred to as bourgeois Victorianism. . . . People of
a younger generation who from birth have enjoyed the results of
this struggle for social and intellectual emancipation cannot real-
ize the stuffy intellectual and moral suffocation which a young
man felt weighing down upon him in Church and State, in the
“rules and conventions” of the last days of Victorian civilization.10

If “Victorianism” is a system, then, it is not one founded in economics or

politics so much as the conventional “code of conduct and morality,” the
unspoken and supposedly commonsensical rules of behavior that Louis
Althusser would later identify with the work of Ideological State Appara-
tuses, among which he gave pride of place to the educational system.11
To offer a minor yet instructive example, Woolf remarks that he would
invariably use surnames even when referring to close friends, and that
“[t]he shade of relationship between Woolf and Strachey is not exactly the
same as that between Leonard and Lytton.” Blame here again attaches to
“that curious formality and reticence which the nineteenth-century public
school system insisted upon in certain matters,” and it is seen as a clear bar-
rier to the expression of intimacy and feeling (Sowing, 119–20). Along the
same lines, Clive Bell marks as a significant “date in the history of Blooms-
bury” his own engagement to Vanessa Stephen in 1906, when Strachey in-
sisted on congratulating them using first names: “ T he practice became
general,” Bell recalls with a hint of self-mockery, “and though perhaps it
marked a change less significant than that symbolised by the introduction
of the Greek dual, it has had its effect. Henceforth between friends man-
ners were to depend on feelings rather than conventions.”12 The negative
impact of an outdated system of rules of conduct on those who came to be
referred to as the Bloomsbury Group can be glimpsed in other elements of
everyday life, including sexual knowledge and dress styles: of the former,
for instance, Leonard Woolf observes that “[h]ow dense the barbaric dark-
ness in which the Victorian middle-class boy and youth was left to drift
sexually is shown by the fact that no relation or teacher, indeed no adult,
ever mentioned the subject of sex to me” (Sowing, 82), while the fashion re-
volt of “bright green flannel collars” is viewed as “a kind of symptom of the
moral breakdown of the Edwardian era, the revolt against Victorianism,
particularly in so far as it affected the formal male respectability in dress
with its boiled shirt and starched white collar” (Growing, 37).
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The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror

26 What seems deliberately elided here is the question of politics. While

speaking of Cambridge, for instance, Woolf notes that “[e]xcept for the
Dreyfus case and one or two other questions, we were not deeply con-
cerned with politics” (Growing, 25). Bell concurs, saying of the same period
that “politics we despised.”13 At times, as with Virginia Woolf’s critique of
Edwardian fiction, it appears as if politics itself needs to be placed in the
column of the Victorians, as something to be transcended by a new civi-
lization predicated on personal freedom and feeling. Both Clive Bell and
Leonard Woolf seem to consider World War I in this way, as an unwelcome
resurrection of politics to check a collective process of personal growth
and experimentation. The former, for instance, speaks of a “new renais-
sance” in the air but notes acidly that “the statesmen came to the rescue,
and Mr. Asquith, Sir Edward Grey and M. Viviandi declared war on Ger-
many. By 1910,” he recalls, “only statesmen dreamed of war, and quite a
number of wide-awake people imagined the good times were just round
the corner.”14 Leonard Woolf’s account is similar in its implicit opposition
of the politicians and (some) people: “It was, I still believe, touch and go
whether the movement towards liberty and equality—political and so-
cial—and toward civilization, which was strong in the first decade of the
20th century, would become so strong as to carry everything before it. Its
enemies saw the risk and the result was the war of 1914.”15 The key term
here, as elsewhere in Bloomsbury writing, is “civilization,” which is coun-
terposed to the barbarism of war and politics as well as to the constricting
conventions of “Victorianism.” Implicitly, at least, the warmongering states-
men of 1914 represent a throwback to the past just as surely as novelists
like Bennett and Wells, and each is working against the interests of “wide-
awake people.”
With such a phrase, we approach another ambiguity in Bloomsbury
self-presentation, concerning the question of class. In their protestations to
be no more than just “a circle of friends” (a claim I shall examine momen-
tarily), memoirists such as Bell and Woolf assert that the “Group” repre-
sented little more, and maybe even less, than the sum of its parts; in other
places, however, they seem to spearhead a larger movement for social
change, as in the above passage from Woolf or his assertion elsewhere that
“we were in the van of the builders of a new society which should be free”
(Sowing, 161). While this statement echoes the conceptual language of
Leninism, with its notion of the vanguard party, it is assuredly not designed
to invoke the register of class analysis, which would represent another
nineteenth-century holdover. Whenever that language is used, as was the
joyce.1-73 5/31/07 11:41 AM Page 27

On or About 1901

case earlier with the illustration of the inadequacies of “the Victorian 27

middle-class boy,” it is usually yoked to a negative characterization of the
past: indeed, the phrase “bourgeois Victorianism” reinforces the connec-
tion, while also suggesting that the significant legacies of the past were
themselves the result of the triumphant hegemony of the middle class. At
times, it seems as if class inequalities have all but vanished, along with Sow-
ing’s sentimental vignettes of “a vast reservoir of uncivilized squalor and
brutality” in the 1880s and ’90s that “no longer exists”: from his vantage
point in the twentieth century, Woolf claims to look back and be “struck
by the immense change from social barbarism to social civilization which
has taken place in London (indeed in Great Britain) during my lifetime. The
woman, the policeman, the nurses, the small boy, the respectable passers-
by averting their eyes—all these are inhabitants of a London and a society
which has passed away” (57–58).
While seeming to wish away the continued existence of the poor here,
Woolf is less certain about the middle class to which he himself belonged.
Sowing begins with a rare—and highly qualified—endorsement of the Vic-
torian bourgeois lifestyle into which he was born. True, he condemns it as
a socialist for “its economic basis and its economic effect upon other
classes,” “its snugness and smugness, snobbery, its complacent exploitation
of economic, sexual, and racial classes,” and “its innate tendency to . . .
spiritual suburbanism”—and yet it finds praise for its “high psychological
and aesthetic values,” the extraordinarily human and humane “relations
that might pertain between peoples if only the world was viewed as either
black or white, good or bad” (36–37). While this is at best a lukewarm af-
firmation, it does contrast sharply with Woolf’s experiences in families like
the Stephens and the Stracheys, who possessed a more secure status among
the traditional British ruling class and among whom “I was an outsider . . .
because, although I and my father before me belonged to the professional
middle class, we had only recently struggled up into it from the stratum of
Jewish shopkeepers.” His future in-laws, for instance, had “an intricate tan-
gle of ancient roots and tendrils stretching far and wide through the upper
middle classes, the county families, and the aristocracy” (Beginning Again,
74–75), while the Stracheys’ dining room contained an atmosphere “of
British history and of that comparatively small ruling middle class which for
the last 100 years had been the principal makers of British history” (Sow-
ing, 190).
It is significant that Woolf seems to want to naturalize his relations with
such families as essentially interclass alliances among the bourgeoisie, at
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The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror

28 the same time that he records his initial discomforts and distance from them.
In such a conflicted response, we can glimpse what Raymond Williams has
in mind in terming Bloomsbury “a forerunner in a more general mutation
within the professional and highly educated sector, and to some extent in
the English ruling class more generally,” and thus a “fraction” that is in op-
position to traditional and hegemonic values but at the same time the
product of them.16 This “mutation” anticipates the later-twentieth-century
development of the “professional-managerial class” (as first defined by Bar-
bara and John Ehrenreich),17 and its history can be traced back, as Williams
notes, to the late-nineteenth-century reforms of the universities and colo-
nial administration that enabled a social connection to be established be-
tween Leonard Woolf and his Cambridge friends and future in-laws. But
whereas he travels a considerable distance from his “Victorian bourgeois”
upbringing, the same is not necessarily so for his wife: while she and her
siblings had “broken away from” their own social milieu, “and from Kens-
ington and Mayfair to live in Bloomsbury what seemed to their relations
and old family friends a Bohemian life, there was no complete rupture” (Be-
ginning Again, 74). In this sense, Bloomsbury speaks to and from within a
hegemonic ruling class that contains both the upwardly mobile bourgeoisie
and remnants of the old aristocracy, with what Williams terms “a persist-
ent sense of a quite clear line between an upper and a lower class.”18 Left
behind, in particular, are those “ Victorian” habits of highlighting and mul-
tiplying the internal divisions that might have excluded an earlier version
of Leonard Woolf from such ranks; by now, as we shall see in chapter 2, the
appropriate figure for the outsider might be the aspiring petit-bourgeois
bank clerk Leonard Bast, from E. M. Forster’s Howards End.
A composite picture emerges from these memoirs of an abstracted
Victorianism, often particularized as the “Victorian bourgeois” and codified
in externalized social prohibitions and rules of conduct, against which is
arrayed an equally abstracted force of rebellion. Assessing their shared world-
view in this way helps clarify the striking pattern of disavowal that runs
through the memoirs of Woolf and Clive Bell concerning the status of a
coherent Bloomsbury “Group.” Typically marshaled in response to nega-
tive attacks, the use of “Bloomsbury” as a term of abuse (Woolf) or “some-
thing nasty” (Bell), the immediate defense is to deny the very existence of
such a collectivity by branding it “a largely imaginary group of persons
with largely imaginary objects and characteristics” (Beginning Again, 21),
or—as Bell repeatedly does—challenging its critics to define its mem-
bership and views.19 Both, however, acknowledge that the term does have
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On or About 1901

meaning, either as “Old Bloomsbury” for the first generation of friends that 29
came together in 1912–14 or as Molly MacCarthy’s affectionately named
“Bloomsberries,” and they are happy to provide their own senses of who
would have belonged: of the fifteen names offered for inclusion by Bell (in-
cluding four on the periphery), thirteen appear on a similar list drawn up
by Leonard Woolf, suggesting a remarkably high correlation between
what each offers up as provisional listings of what the latter terms merely
“a group of friends” (Beginning Again, 23).20
The mechanism of disavowal at work here parallels the issue of class,
which is simultaneously affirmed and denied as being critical to the oppo-
sition between Bloomsbury and “Victorianism.” Thus, while Leonard Woolf
asserts that the basis of “our group . . . was friendship, which in some cases
developed into love and marriage” (Beginning Again, 25), he also specifies
where and how that circle came together, noting that of the ten men on
the list “nine had been at Cambridge, and all of us, except Roger, had been
more or less contemporaries at Trinity and King’s” (23). As Williams notes,21
the same sense of incestuous intermixing appears when Woolf recalls the
student body at Cambridge, who “intermarried to a considerable extent,
and family influence and the high level of their individual intelligence car-
ried a surprising number of them to the top of their professions” (Sowing,
186): his own initial exclusion on the basis of family upbringing is deftly
deflected by the inclusion of intelligence as an equal factor, once again
naturalizing the basis on which a new ruling formation was in the process
of emerging.
What remains is the broad generality of a collective rebellion against
the enemy of the past, shared among these “friends” but extending far be-
yond them, in which an undefined “we”—not exactly generalizable as ei-
ther a class or a generation, but presumably something more than just a
small and loose grouping—“found ourselves living in the springtime of a
conscious revolt against the social, political, religious, moral, intellectual,
and artistic institutions, beliefs, and standards of our fathers and grandfa-
thers” (Sowing, 160). As we have seen from Virginia Woolf’s Mr Bennett and
Mrs Brown, the preferred ground for this battle was culture, with artistic
style as one of its central weapons. In moving now to a consideration of
Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians (1918), I propose to focus on one of its
key sites, a text that fixed the terms of the modernist attitude toward the
previous century through an immanent critique of the Victorians’ own core
beliefs and values. At the same time, Strachey’s affinities with Oscar Wilde,
a celebrated—if also largely proscribed—figure of the immediate Victorian
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The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror

30 past, suggest a different line of influence, rooted in a self-reflexive criticism

of the period that is often erased by the sweeping generalities that Blooms-
bury writing helped to popularize.22

Eminent Victorians
As we have already seen with Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown, Virginia Woolf was
quite content to draw a line between the Georgian/modernist and Victorian-
Edwardian/traditionalist on the grounds of literary stylistics. Leonard’s rec-
ollections describe the same tendency during his days at Cambridge, yet
they also suggest a reconsideration of this viewpoint with the benefits of
hindsight. Initially, as Sowing makes clear, the literary tastes of the group
that would form the core of “Old Bloomsbury” had their basis in a simple
taxonomy similar to that offered by his wife: thus, Ibsen and Shaw were
lauded for “saying ‘Bosh!’ to the vast system of cant and hypocrisy” inher-
ited from the nineteenth century, while Thackeray and Dickens “meant
nothing to us or rather they stood for an era, a way of life, a system of
morals against which we were in revolt” (165). Arguable cases, predictably
enough, could be drawn from the ranks of late-nineteenth-century novel-
ists, and Woolf insists on correcting his earlier enthusiasms for Meredith—
who “appealed to us as breaking away” from the model set by those two
mid-century giants, even though “I am not sure now that he did”—and for
James, whom he now acknowledges “was never really upon our side in that
revolt” (166).
After admitting to a youthful weakness also for Swinburne, Woolf is
led to a reconsideration of the pitfalls of periodization: after all, he now
reasons, “Every out-of-date writer of any importance was once modern,
and the most modern of writers will some day, and pretty rapidly, become
out-of-date. For us in 1902 Tennyson was out-of-date and we therefore un-
derestimated his poetry; today another fifty years has evaporated much of
his datedness, and his stature as a poet has become more visible. I daresay
that we overestimated Swinburne’s poetry, but I have no doubt that it is
generally underestimated today” (169).
Just as Meredith and James can come to seem less “modern,” and in
that sense still “ Victorian” in some of the same ways that Bennett and Wells
would appear to his wife, so too might canonical figures such as Tennyson,
Thackeray, and Dickens need to be reevaluated with the benefit of hind-
sight. As the above passage suggests, a writer paradoxically might appear
less dated as time continues to pass and be relegated to the recesses of his-
tory—at which point, Woolf implies, they can be judged more fully on
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On or About 1901

issues of form and style. The simple binaries of Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown 31
make clear, however, that such a reevaluation was difficult to make in the
mid-1920s, when the modernists still struggled with the legacies of the
past and “ Victorian” was still a potent term of abuse.23 Within Bloomsbury
circles, the author who most clearly articulated these problems of histori-
cal proximity and distance was actually one of Virginia Woolf’s charter
Georgians, yet also one for whom Leonard felt “the eighteenth century
was more congenial and, in a sense, more real than the nineteenth or the
twentieth” (190).
Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians opens on this issue of distance by
famously asserting that “[t]he history of the Victorian Age will never be
written: we know too much about it.” Faced with what Strachey charac-
terizes as “so vast a quantity of information that the industry of a Ranke
would be submerged by it, and the perspicacity of a Gibbon would quail
before it,” he recommends instead a more oblique and selective strategy:
dropping “here and there, a little bucket” into such an enormous ocean of
material and attacking it “in unexpected places.”24 Whether entirely sincere
or not, these considerations should at least make us question, as few of its
original or subsequent readers appear to have done, whether Strachey in-
tended a systematic assault on the previous century in his case studies of
Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Thomas Arnold, and General
Gordon, and whether they are even supposed to be taken as representa-
tives of their age. Echoing Virginia Woolf’s mistrust of “analyzing and ab-
stracting” in Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown, his preface proceeds to rationalize his
choice of subjects as “haphazard” and “determined by no desire to con-
struct a system or to prove a theory, but by simple motives of convenience
and art.” The age is—or at least was, at such a short remove—incapable of
being reduced to a simple “précis,” just as Strachey himself refuses to fol-
low the example of the period itself by modeling biography as the produc-
tion of “[t]hose two fat volumes, with which it is our custom to commemo-
rate the dead,” and so all he promises at the outset are “certain fragments
of the truth which took my fancy and lay to hand” (viii).
It is worth quoting the preface at some length, because the text has
been consistently read as attempting exactly what it disavows here. As
Strachey’s biographer, Michael Holroyd, comments, “ The general reader
was taught to think of Eminent Victorians as a ‘debunking’ biography”25 by its
admirers as much as its critics: thus, for Cyril Connolly it was “the first
book of the ‘twenties’ . . . a revolutionary text-book on bourgeois society,”
and for Edmund Wilson an effort “to take down once and for all the pre-
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32 tensions of the Victorian Age to moral superiority.”26 The more skeptical

Edmund Gosse saw its purpose as “to damage and discredit the Victorian
Age,” motivated by “an intense desire to throw off the shackles of a dying
age.”27 In part, such assessments depend upon a consideration of whether
Strachey’s four subjects are in fact representative of the period and to what
extent the designation of their “eminence” is intended literally. The re-
viewer for the Times Literary Supplement, for example, assumes both to be the
case, noting that “Mr Lytton Strachey has made a very sincere and schol-
arly attempt to understand the generation which preceded his own . . . to
find out what this time really was” by studying “its eminent figures, the
things they really stood for, what motives moved them, and what they
contributed of permanent value to the improvement of society and the en-
lightenment of the human mind.” To read Eminent Victorians in such a con-
text is, then, already to impute ambitions beyond its own stated purpose
and to presuppose what are surely called into question by its title: the is-
sues of who should come to represent the Victorians and on what basis the
characterization “eminent” might be conferred on such figures, especially
with the benefits of hindsight. On this last question, the reviewer seems to
feel that eminence is a negative quality for Strachey, as implied by the con-
sideration of what he might have produced “if he would write not only
about ‘eminent’ but also about those he considers admirable Victorians.”28
Ironically, something like this had been Strachey’s original ambition
when he set out to begin a larger project titled “ Victorian Silhouettes,”
with a greater number of biographical subjects and split between positive
and negative portraits.29 The eventual condensation may have come as a
result of the outbreak of World War I or the slow pace of composition,
caused in part by wartime anxieties, but I would suggest that one effect is
to compress that original balance sheet so that a sense of the admirable
and detestable features of the period emerge within individual essays—
and also within the individuals themselves. It may be that the text now
reads as a more positive assessment of the past than it first seemed; U. C.
Knoepflmacher has commented that the biographies are “for all their irony,
sketched with considerable empathy, even affection,” for instance, and
notes Strachey’s “intense identification with his subjects” in the cases of
Florence Nightingale, General Gordon, and Cardinal Newman (as the foil
for Manning) in particular.30 The first of these even momentarily joins the
ranks of privileged Bloomsbury authors when Strachey compares her pri-
vate writing—“a virulent invective upon the position of women in the
upper ranks of society”—with the published work of Ibsen and Samuel
joyce.1-73 5/31/07 11:41 AM Page 33

On or About 1901

Butler, although it is his central point that such criticisms needed to remain 33
private, even for a celebrated figure like Nightingale, possessed as she was
with every advantage except “the public power and authority which be-
longed to the successful politician” (193, 172).
Among Nightingale’s supporters was the monarch herself, a figure who
similarly confused the boundaries between public and private selves, com-
bining a feminine deference that was appropriate for the time with tremen-
dous power and authority.31 The gendering of such split personalities is
made clear in the case of Nightingale, as Strachey explodes the cliché of
“the Lady with the Lamp” to show in its place a more complex personality
beneath the surface of public mythology: thus, he notes, “[w]hile superfi-
cially she was carrying on the life of a brilliant girl in high society,” at the
same time “internally she was a prey to the tortures of regret and of remorse,”
and could resolve the conflict only in a massive and unceasing expenditure
of energy to acquire “the experience which alone could enable her to do
what she had determined she would do in the end” (139). Such a split is not
exclusive to Victorian women, though, as something similar emerges in the
study of General Gordon, a man possessed of “intricate recesses where
egotism and renunciation melted into one another, where the flesh lost it-
self in the spirit, and the spirit in the flesh” (260). If anything, it is this
collapsing of the boundaries between the material and spiritual that is
common to each of Strachey’s portraits, uniting those figures he admires
with those he criticizes.32
Cardinal Manning, for instance, emerges from Eminent Victorians as a
figure who combines Nightingale’s struggles with public and private per-
sonae with Gordon’s problematic conflation of ego with its renunciation.
The former characteristic appears most fully in Manning’s rivalry with
Newman, whose death he privately marked by noting, “Poor Newman! He
was a great hater!” even as he publicly mourned that “ [w]e have lost our
greatest witness for the Faith, and we are all poorer and lower for the loss”
(123). Here, as with Nightingale, it is tempting to read the private utter-
ance as emanating from a more truthful self beneath the public façade, or
even—in terms that Strachey would have encountered in Freud—as an un-
derlying id (like Nightingale’s “demons”) being held in check by the super-
ego.33 In the matter of ambition, Manning more successfully negotiates the
pitfalls encountered by Gordon by allowing surrogate figures to satisfy his
repressed wants. Commenting on his refusal, even in his private writings,
to acknowledge an appetite for personal recognition and status, Strachey
notes that Manning “vowed to heaven that he would seek nothing—no, not
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The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror

34 by the lifting of a finger or the speaking of a word. But if something came

to him—? He had vowed not to seek; he had not vowed not to take” (73;
emphasis in original). Reading passages like this, it is hard to distinguish de-
cisively the evils of a Manning, working behind the scenes in the Vatican
to undermine Newman yet refusing even privately to admit his culpability,
from the heroism of a Nightingale, who similarly employed surrogate fig-
ures such as Sidney Herbert to advance her political aims.
The protagonists of Eminent Victorians persistently struggle against en-
trenched authorities, whether in the clergy, army, or government, and some-
times (as with the case of Cardinal Manning) succeed only in joining their
ranks. In the process, they experience—or perhaps exacerbate—an inter-
nal split in personality that is either beneficial or detrimental to their ef-
forts, depending in part on whether their self-division is seen as inherent,
as might be the orthodox Freudian explanation, or instead as symptomatic
of a wider social contradiction. The latter point centrally distinguishes Stra-
chey’s view of the Victorians from that of the Bloomsbury Group as a whole,
which tended to see the ruling culture of the period as essentially me-
chanical and instrumentalist in its exercising of power. In such a frame-
work, it is relatively easy to see the rigid orthodoxies of the War Office,
the Vatican, Thomas Arnold, or the government as institutions against
which other individuals—Nightingale, Gordon, Newman, or Rugby school-
boys—engage in a heroic and often fatal struggle. But Strachey’s approach is
a more complex one, which insists on seeing the Victorian period itself as in-
ternally fractured and the popular image of it as coherently one-dimensional
as part of the mythology that surrounds it. We can glimpse something of
Strachey’s revisionism in his portrait of one of Gordon’s government adver-
saries, Lord Hartington, a man who was widely viewed as possessing “an
honesty which naturally belonged to one whom, so it seemed to them, was the
living image of what an Englishman should be” and “the qualities by which
they themselves longed to be distinguished, and by which, in their happier
moments, they believed they were” (322–23; emphasis added). This suggests a
closed feedback loop of ideological mystification, within which the Victo-
rian public was brought to consent to supposedly natural qualities—in-
cluding “solidity” and common sense, in addition to honesty—as the defin-
ing characteristics of the national identity, even though neither they
themselves nor their official representatives could adequately embody
them. We might conclude that Bloomsbury’s critiques, with the exception
of Eminent Victorians, did more to perpetuate this mystification than they did
to challenge it, with the result that such character traits and associations
still persist in the public imagination a century later.
joyce.1-73 5/31/07 11:41 AM Page 35

On or About 1901

The figure of William Gladstone most fully illustrates Strachey’s re- 35

assessment of the period’s own complexities. Early on in the essay on Gor-
don, the prime minister is offered, alongside Lord Hartington and Gordon
himself, as evidence that the national character at this time combined in
equal measures eccentricity and conventionality, “matter-of-factness” and
romance (246). Whereas some of these qualities might predominate in one
figure or another—so that Gordon’s eccentricities could be ranged against
Hartington’s conventionality—they converge in the persona of Gladstone.
He is said to invite “the clashing reactions of passionate extremes”—to
have been equally worshipped and despised—and it is Strachey’s view that
neither response was really wrong: “It might have been supposed,” he com-
ments, “that one or the other of these conflicting judgments must have
been palpably absurd, that nothing short of gross prejudice or willful
blindness, on one side or the other, could reconcile such contradictory
conceptions of a single human being. But it was not so.” The immediate
explanation for this is that, like Gordon and the period itself, Gladstone
is “a complex character,” but Strachey goes on to note a further level of
complexity in him: while his speeches might reveal “the ambiguity of
ambiguities” and thus baffle listeners who would analyze them to under-
stand his true personality and beliefs, “[i]n spite of the involutions of his
intellect and the contortions of his spirit it is impossible not to perceive a
strain of naiveté in Mr. Gladstone.” Thus, as ironically representative of a
time that saw itself as solid and honest even when it failed to satisfy such
ambitions fully, the prime minister might be subjected to intensive scrutiny
and close reading, only to reveal beneath his surface ambiguities an un-
derlying simplicity: a “singularly literal” faith in a limited range of princi-
ples, a “simple-minded” egoism, “uncritical” views on religion, and no sense
of humor (307–8).

Camp Stylistics
For Strachey, this last quality may have been Gladstone’s most serious flaw,
as well as the key to his contradictory appearance. Leonard Woolf de-
scribes his friend’s method of thought as follows: “he had developed a pro-
tective intellectual façade in which a highly personal and cynical wit and
humour played an important part. It was very rarely safe to accept the face
value of what he said; within he was intensely serious about what he
thought important, but on the surface his method was to rely on ‘sugges-
tion and instruction derived from what is in form a jest—even in dealing
with the gravest matters’” (Sowing, 151). In this, he is both like and unlike
his subjects in Eminent Victorians, especially Gladstone: deeply committed to
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The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror

36 principles and beliefs, yet superficially ambiguous or contradictory. The

difference is that Strachey self-consciously employed this as a strategy,
one we now readily associate with camp. Citing Susan Sontag’s influential
definition of a modern gay sensibility working through the deliberate pro-
duction of incongruity and exaggeration, Barry Spurr has labeled Stra-
chey’s literary style as “Camp Mandarin,” and he provides a catalogue of its
rhetorical techniques: indirect meaning, pastiche, the use of quotations and
clichés for ironic purposes (and often revised for the sake of antithesis or
bathos), a reliance on aphorisms and epigrams, and so on.34 In camp, we
can see the willed production of insincerity and a playful delight in con-
tradiction, two qualities that seem for Strachey to be the unwanted or un-
conscious by-products of the Victorian age, even though they were wide-
spread enough to be present in some of its leading figures.
As Spurr suggests, its camp style helps to explain the lasting reputa-
tion of Eminent Victorians as the work of a “contemptible sniggerer.”35 By fo-
cusing on its humorous effects, however, the book’s critics neglect its other
side, that aspect of Strachey’s thinking that Leonard Woolf calls being “in-
tensely serious about what he thought important.” In this aspect, Stra-
chey’s most influential forerunner is clearly Wilde, a figure whose notori-
ety nonetheless rendered him largely taboo for Bloomsbury modernism, as
Ann Ardis has shown; indeed, it was largely as a stylist that Wilde could be
spoken about in the early twentieth century, given the general prohibi-
tion against discussions of his sexual politics.36 In his important analysis of
Wilde, however, Jonathan Dollimore has usefully remarked of his political
project that it is focused on “a parodic critique of the essence of sensi-
bility as conventionally understood,” which includes for him those same
qualities—truthfulness, sincerity, authenticity, and depth—that Strachey
exposes as the mythological characteristics of nineteenth-century Britain.37
Just as his method is to reveal the immanent tensions and contradictions
within the self-presentation of his Victorian subjects, relying on their first-
hand testimony as his symptomatic evidence, so Dollimore suggests that a
subversive strain of camp “undermines the depth model of identity from in-
side, being a kind of parody and mimicry which hollows out from within,
making depth recede into its surfaces.”38 This is a radically different proj-
ect from the work of sustained opposition to “Victorianism” that Leonard
Woolf outlines in his memoirs, which (as we have seen) consisted of pin-
ning down the supposed essence of the period and then substituting anti-
thetical values and qualities in its place.
The difference is very similar to one that has been developed in criti-
cal theory between a deconstructive practice on the one hand and simple
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On or About 1901

strategies of inversion on the other. Bloomsbury’s oppositional attitude to- 37

ward the nineteenth century can be seen, from this perspective, as a form of
carnivalesque reversal, in which the supposedly dominant or valued quali-
ties of the past—a society structured by convention and class relation-
ships, say, or placing a priority on active “doing,” especially in the politi-
cal sphere—are replaced by their polar opposites: the “civilized” individual
and the introspection of “feeling” as the cornerstone of cultural practice. As
we shall see throughout this study, the problem with such an approach is
that it leaves the initial characterization in place rather than unsettling it,
so that “the Victorian” hardens as an analytical concept the more it comes
under attack; it is thus available, in turn, as a reference point or rallying cry
for forces of reactionary counterinversion, as we shall see in the cases of
Evelyn Waugh in chapter 2 or Margaret Thatcher in chapter 4. The effect
is reminiscent of what some critics have identified as the weakness in
Bakhtin’s theory of the carnivalesque, where the licensed misrule and excess
of a public holiday like Mardi Gras perversely serves to train its partici-
pants in a more efficient and productive use of their “regular” work time.39
Deconstruction, by contrast, considers the strategy of inversion to be
only the first—but nonetheless a crucial—step in dismantling the hierar-
chies of power. Like Strachey, it insists that the dominant is never a co-
herent entity but instead contains contradictory elements and ambiguities;
indeed, to the extent that what it opposes is inherent within it as a con-
stituent aspect of its own identity, the dominant might be imagined as
something like Strachey’s General Gordon, a figure consisting of “inter-
twining contradictions.” The intervention of a deconstructionist reading
consists, in this account, of an active foregrounding of those contradic-
tions, which pushes fixed definitions to the point of collapse or chiasmus,
when one term of the binary inevitably entails its supposed opposite. The
aphorisms of Oscar Wilde are exemplary here, because what seems on the
surface to be a simple reversal—“If one tells the truth, one is sure, sooner
or later, to be found out,” for instance40—in fact works to delink habitual
associations (of truth with transparency, or falsehood with exposure) and
undermine the basis for a strict separation of terms. Strachey’s sympathetic
portrait of Cardinal Newman, committed to a complex casuistry that is si-
multaneously propelling him toward and resisting a conversion to Catholi-
cism, provides us with a perfect instance of the inseparability of charac-
teristics that would be conventionally thought of as antithetical: “ The idea
of deceit,” Strachey suggests, “would have been abhorrent to him; and in-
deed it was owing to his very desire to explain what he had in his mind ex-
actly and completely, with all the refinements of which his subtle brain was
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The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror

38 capable, that persons such as Kingsley were puzzled into thinking him dis-
honest. Unfortunately, however, the possibilities of truth and falsehood
depend upon other things than sincerity. A man may be of a scrupulous and im-
peccable honesty, and yet his respect for the truth—it cannot be denied—may be insuffi-
cient” (32–33; emphasis added).
His point here is not, I think, that Newman is anything as simple as a
hypocrite, who pretends to particular public qualities (honesty, moral pur-
pose, or heroism) in order to cover up real, private ones that suggest the
opposite (deceit, confusion, or the intimidation of the weak). It is rather
that the period itself, and possibly any period, makes contradictory demands
upon its subjects: as a result, even—or especially—for these “eminent Vic-
torians,” piety produces fanaticism just as an overriding emphasis on per-
sonal duty is shown to generate massive egos and rampant self-glorification.
At an immediate level, then, we can conclude that “ Victorianism” does
not exist except as an amalgamation of such contradictions or as a retroac-
tive construction that necessarily neglects half of the picture. More signifi-
cantly, the period itself comes to signify the very opposite of the stolid,
one-dimensional entity imagined by Bloomsbury. The effect of Strachey’s
rhetorical strategy is accurately described by Dollimore when he writes of
Wilde’s “transgressive aesthetic” that it illustrates the case where inversion
“is not just the necessary precondition for the binary’s subsequent displace-
ment, but often already constitutes a displacement, if not directly of the
binary itself, then certainly of the moral and political norms which cluster
dependently around its dominant pole and in part constitute it.”41 What
emerges from this is not the simple reversal of polarities that might claim
that the modern is somehow better—truer to its convictions, say, or more
complex—than the Victorian, but the larger question of whether we can
fully the distinguish the Victorian from the modern, especially given the
former’s capacity for self-contradiction.
Strachey seems to have had something like this in mind when he
opened his essay on Cardinal Manning by presenting his subject as nomi-
nally opposed to the spirit of his age, in the style of a General Gordon, and
yet also one who—far from experiencing the disappointments and frustra-
tions of the latter—personally thrived within it: “born in the England of the
nineteenth century,” he writes of Manning, “growing up in the very seed-
time of modern progress, coming to maturity with the first onrush of Lib-
eralism, and living long enough to witness the victories of Science and
Democracy, he yet, by a strange concatenation of circumstances, seemed
almost to revive in his own person that long line of diplomatic and ad-
joyce.1-73 5/31/07 11:41 AM Page 39

On or About 1901

ministrative clerics which, one would have thought, had come to an end 39
with Cardinal Wolsey. In Manning, so it appeared, the Middle Ages lived
again” (3).
The paradox can be resolved in any of three ways. It is possible, al-
though unlikely given Strachey’s methodology, that the “great men” the-
ory of history applies here, in which case the “dominating character” of
Manning has “imposed itself upon a hostile environment.” Or the opposite
explanation might apply, that his is in fact a less forceful personality, capa-
ble of being “supple and yielding” when necessary—though still driven, as
we have seen, by an overarching ambition and a ruthless sense of Realpolitik
in his dealings with Newman and the Vatican. Most interesting for my pur-
poses is the hypothesis that is briefly considered in between these two,
which involves a reconsideration not of Manning but of the age with which
he appears to come into conflict: “was the nineteenth century, after all,”
Strachey wonders, “not so hostile? Was there something in it, scientific
and progressive as it was, which went out to welcome the representative of
ancient tradition and uncompromising faith?” (4). Evidence presented in
the rest of the text would suggest that this indeed might be so, and that
the century’s attitudes toward the spiritual and the material in particular
might need to be rethought.
It is to this same end, of revising what we think we know of the nine-
teenth century to accommodate an understanding of some of its leading
figures, that Strachey approaches the issue of the Victorian zeitgeist in the
essay on Gordon. The recent past is first actively defamiliarized, so that his
readers are able to catch “a vision of strange characters, moved by myste-
rious impulses, interacting in queer complication, and hurrying at last—so
it almost seems—like creatures in a puppet show to a predestined catas-
trophe.” But if this might seem like modernist condescension, marking its
own palpable distance from the past, what follows works to collapse the
gap by insisting that such odd personalities are nonetheless “curiously En-
glish” and defined by their capacities for self-contradiction: “What other
nation on the face of the earth,” Strachey asks, “could have produced Mr.
Gladstone and Sir Evelyn Baring and Lord Hartington and General Gordon?
Alike in their emphasis and their lack of emphasis, in their eccentricity and
their conventionality, in their matter-of-factness and their romance, these
four figures seem to embody the mingling contradictions of the English
spirit” (246).
In answering his own question in this way, I would suggest, Strachey
implicitly poses others. Can a nation be said to be animated by a defining
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The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror

40 spirit if part of what defines it are those “mingling contradictions” that he

has noted throughout Eminent Victorians? If so, and if it can be represented
by eccentrics like Gordon just as successfully as by establishment figures
like Gladstone and Manning, then isn’t the search for a distilled essence—
of the nation or the age—a pointless one? At the very least, Strachey’s view
of the Victorian period as necessarily and definitively self-divided high-
lights the inadequacy of the larger Bloomsbury orthodoxy, which pre-
ferred to define the past as one-dimensional and the present as marked by
complex ambiguities. If we take Eminent Victorians at face value, there is no
benefit that accrues from such attempts to pin down the past, except the
illusory consolation of feeling that it is really and truly over, and it seems
equally unproductive to debate, as we shall see others doing throughout
this study, whether one is for or against the Victorians.
Another random document with
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events and changes to accidents inconsiderable in themselves, have
maintained that the first volley of fire-arms that startled the echoes
of Lake Champlain, decided the fate and fixed the limits of French
dominion in America. Nor is this theory to be lightly dismissed as
fanciful; for it cannot be doubted that the subsequent spread of the
Anglo-Saxon race over the hunting-grounds of the Mohawks, and
through them to the further west, was owing to the favourable
treaties which the English were able to effect with the Iroquois in the
days of their power,—treaties which, had they been secured by the
French, would have opened the whole region now called New York to
their countrymen, and filled it with a mongrel population under the
absolute control of Jesuits and political adventurers. Nor can any
thing be ascertained more decisive of what was at first a game and a
problem, than the collisions I have described. The Iroquois soon
found out the secret of their discomfiture, and associated the name
of a Frenchman with that of the Algonquins in their inveterate
hatred. And when they in turn found Pale-faces to seek their alliance,
and supply them with arms, they became the barrier of British
enterprise against the encroachments of France; and so it was that
the beautiful vale of Mohawk, the shores of Erie and Ontario, and the
rugged mountains of Vermont, came to be filled with the sons of
Englishmen, and not with the dwarfish overgrowth of the French
Canadian provinces. The laws, civil institutions, and the religion of
England thus found a footing in that great territory, which, as more
or less influencing all the other members of the American
confederacy, is called the empire state:—and perhaps the bells that
ring for the English service throughout that region would have been
tolling for the Latin mass, but for those early encounters on the
shores of Lake Champlain.
Our delay at Whitehall was owing to a blunder of Freke’s. He had
assured us that we would certainly arrive in time to take the steamer
down the lake to St John’s; but it had been several hours on its way
when we arrived at the inn. Since the burning of a steamer several
years before, there had been but one on these waters; and as it was
now on its downward trip, it could not again leave Whitehall for
several days. Here was a pretty mess for some half-dozen of us!
There was nothing for us but bedtime; and poor enough beds it
brought us. I was up before the sun had found a chance to send a
squint into the town over its rocky eastern wall; and I wonder not
that the sun is slow to visit it, for it is altogether a disagreeable hole.
For this I was unprepared. Whitehall hath a royal prestige, and the
notion of the head of a lake had given me the pleasing expectation of
a picturesque little harbour, and a romantic water view. There is
nothing of the sort. The harbour is well called the basin; and Wood-
creek, the canal, and the lake, just here, are all ditches together.
Vessels of different sorts and sizes lie huddled and crowded at their
confluence, and the waters are precisely of the colour of café-au-lait!
Shade of merry Charles, how came they to change Skenesborough
into Whitehall?
I have compared the ditch-water to café-au-lait; but all I can say of
my breakfast is, that its coffee was not comparable to ditch-water.
Freke was despatched to look us out a vessel willing to take us any
where, for staying here was out of the question. He had given us the
Indian name of the place as Kaw-ko-kaw-na, assuring us that this
euphonious polysyllable was good Iroquois for the place where they
catch fish. This little item of knowledge proved to us a dangerous
thing, for it suggested a fishing excursion to fill up the hours of
Freke’s anticipated absence. We rowed ourselves for some distance
along a narrow channel, with marshes on both sides, which looked
like the stronghold of that cohort of agues and fevers which, since the
days of Prometheus, have delighted in burning and shaking the race
of mortals. Wood-creek throws itself into the basin with a foaming
cataract of waters; and beyond the marshes are precipitous walls of
rocks, that confine the view. These rocks they call the Heights; and I
doubt not they would look well at a distance, but the mischief is,
there is no viewing them in so favourable a way. They rise like a
natural Bastile, and so near your nose, that your only prospect is
perpendicular; and you are consequently obliged to think more of
your nose than the prospect. In the moonlight, the evening before, I
did think there was something magnificent about the Heights; but
this impression, like other visions of the night, did not survive the
daybreak. I should think a geologist or a stone-mason might find
them interesting; and an unprincipled inhabitant of Whitehall, out of
patience with life in such a place, or emulous of the Lesbian Sappho,
would doubtless find them suitable to the nefarious purpose of
breaking his neck. This is all I can say for them; and as for the fishing
excursion, we soon gave it up, and paddled back to the quay, out of
patience with Freke for his instructions in Indian philology, and
heartily tired of attempting to catch fish in Kaw-ko-kaw-na.
Freke, for once in his life, had been employed to some purpose. He
met us on the quay, and immediately conducted us to a gay little
sloop, to which he had already transferred our luggage, and which
was ready for a start down the lake to Plattsburgh. We were
introduced to a raw-boned, barethroated Vermonter as “Captain
Pusher,” and, ratifying the bargain of our commissary, were soon
snugly on board his vessel; of which I regret that I forget the name,
though I distinctly remember the letters that shone on the painted
sterns we passed—such as the Macdonough, the Congress, the
Green-Mountain-Boy, and the Lady of the Lake. Whatever was its
name, its deck contained several baskets of vegetables and joints of
meat, which gave us promise of a good dinner; and scarcely were we
under weigh, before Sambo the cook began to pare turnips, and grin
from ear to ear over savoury collops of mutton, which he was
submitting to some incipient process of cookery.
We were favoured with a good breeze; but the channel of which I
have spoken seemed to drag its length like an Alexandrine. We
reached a place where it is so narrow, and makes an angle so abrupt,
that there is a contrivance on the bank which steamers are obliged to
employ in turning. It is best described by the name which has been
given to it by the sailors, from
“A pigmy scraper wi’ his fiddle,
Wha used at tryste and fairs to driddle,
Wi’ hand on haunch, and upward e’e.”

They call it the Fiddler’s Elbow; and as it seems the limit of

Whitehall, we were glad to double the cape as speedily as possible. A
squadron of ducks that were puddling in the dirty water of the
marshes gave point to a quotation from Voltaire, with which one of
our company paid his parting compliments to Kaw-ko-kaw-na, as its
author did to Holland—Adieu! canards, canailles, canaux.
After clearing this place, we found an object of interest in the
decaying hulks of the two flotillas that came to an engagement in
Plattsburgh bay, in the year 1814. The British and America galleys lay
there rotting together, with many marks of the sharp action in which
they had well borne their part. The more imposing proportions of
Captain Downie’s flag-ship the Confiance arrested our particular
attention. She was a sheer hulk, charred and begrimed by fire, and a
verdant growth of grass was sprouting from her seams and
honourable scars. A few years before, she was a gallant frigate,
cruising upon the open lake, and bearing proudly in the fight the red-
cross of St George. Her commander fell upon her deck in the first
moment of the action; and after a fierce engagement, during which
she received 105 round-shot in her hull, she was surrendered. There
was something in the sight of these rival squadrons thus rotting side
by side, that might have inspired a moralist. How many brave fellows
that once trode their decks were likewise mouldering in the dust of
death! But in another view of the matter there was something
inspiring. They were a witness of peace between the two nations who
hold Lake Champlain between them; and long may it be before either
shall wish to recall them from the nothingness into which they have
long since crumbled!
The lake becomes gradually wider, and though not remarkable for
beauty, affords scenes to engage the eye and occupy the mind. It is
rather river scenery, than what we naturally associate with lakes. On
the left are the mountain ridges that divide its waters from those of
Lake George; on the right, is the rocky boundary of Vermont. The
lake occupies the whole defile, lying very nearly due north and south.
As we approached Ticonderoga, the region became more
mountainous, and the view was consequently more attractive. Before
us on the east was Mount Independence, and just opposite, on the
west, rose the bold height of Mount Defiance, completely covering
the fortress, which we knew lurked behind it to the north. By the help
of a good wind, we were not long in reaching the spot where the
outlet of Lake George debouches. It comes into Lake Champlain,
apparently from the north-west, at the foot of Mount Defiance; the
lake making a bend and winding eastward; and between the lake and
the outlet, on a sloping and partially wooded promontory of some
hundred feet in height, rise the rough but picturesque ruins of
Ticonderoga. They present an appearance not usual in American
scenery; and having every charm of association which Indian,
French, British, and patriotic warfare can throw around such places,
are naturally enough endeared to Americans, and gratifying to the
curiosity of travellers.
 This fortress was originally built by the French, in 1756; and
subsequently, until the ascent of Mount Defiance by Burgoyne
proved its exposure to attack on that point, it was contested,
captured, and recaptured, and held by French, English, and
Americans, as a stronghold of mastery and power. It commanded the
avenue to the Hudson, and the pass to Lake George. The name
Ticonderoga, in which every ear must detect a significant beauty, is
said to denote, in the Indian dialect, the noise of the cataracts in the
outlet; but the French called the fort Carillon, and afterwards
Vaudreuil, in honour of one of their governors in Acadie, the Marquis
de Vaudreuil. In 1757, when Montcalm (who fell in the defence of
Quebec two years afterwards) was making his expedition against the
English forts on Lake George, he remained at this place awaiting that
powerful reinforcement of savages, whose treachery and thirst for
blood rendered the campaign so lamentably memorable. To one who
stands, as I did, on that beautiful peninsula, and surveys the quiet
scene of land and water—sails betokening civilised commerce, and a
trading village in Vermont, exhibiting every mark of prosperous
thrift—it seems incredible that within the lifetime of persons yet
surviving, that very scene was alive with savage nations who called it
their own, and gave it to whom they would; but of whom nothing
remains but wild traditions, and the certainty that they have been.
Yet, only forty-three years before British and American flotillas were
contending for this lake, in sight of a village with spires, and with
none other than civilised arts of war, the same waters were covered
with two hundred canoes of Nipistingues, Abnakis, Amenekis, and
Algonquins, paddling their way to the massacre of a British force in a
fortress at the head of Lake George. From Father Roubaud, a Jesuit
priest who accompanied them, the particulars of that expedition
have been handed down. He describes the savages as bedaubed with
green, yellow, and vermillion; adorned with glistening ornaments,
the gifts of their allies; their heads shaven, saving their scalp-locks,
which rose from their heads like crests, stiffened with tallow, and
decorated with beads and feathers; their chiefs bedizened with
finery, and each nation embarked under wild but appropriate
ensigns. Such were the Christians with whom Father Roubaud
travelled as chaplain, and whom he led against his fellow Christians
like another Peter the Hermit pursuing Turks. It is the plague of
Popery that it often expends itself in inspiring the deepest religious
sentiment, without implanting the least religious principle. The
Italian bandit kneels at a wayside crucifix, to praise God and the
Virgin for the plunder he has taken with bloodshed; the Irish priest,
at the altar, devotes to death his unoffending neighbours, with the
very lips which, as he believes, have just enclosed the soul, body, and
divinity of the world’s Redeemer; and the Jesuit missionary of New
France had no scruple in consecrating with the most awful rites of
religion, an expedition whose object was the scalps of baptised men,
and whose results were the massacre of women and children. The
holy father himself is particular to relate the fact that he celebrated a
mass before the embarkation, for the express purpose of securing the
Divine blessing, and he compliments the fervour with which the
savages assisted at the solemnity! He had described the English to
them as a race of blasphemers, and they, at least, were not to blame
for embarking in the spirit of crusaders “against black Pagans, Turks,
and Saracens.” Daily, for a whole week, as the armament advanced,
did the wily Jesuit land them on one of the many isles that gem the
lower waters of Lake Champlain, on purpose to renew the august
sacrament of the altar before their eyes: and he describes these
savages as chanting the praises of the Lamb of God, with a fervour
from which he augured the consummation of their character as
Christians. At the end of a week, they descried with joy the French
lilies as they waved over the walls of Carillon; and in order to make
their approach more imposing, they immediately arranged their
canoes under their ensigns, and advanced in battle array. From the
height on which I stood, Montcalm beheld his allies, on a bright July
morning, their hatchets and tomahawks gleaming in the sun; their
standards and scalp-locks fluttering in the breeze; and their
thousand paddles hurrying them through the waves of that beautiful
water: such a sight as no eye will ever see again. To a nobleman fresh
from the gallantries of Versailles, it must have been a spectacle full of
wild and romantic interest; and the picture is altogether such a one
as any imagination may delight to reproduce. Yet, when we reflect
that it is even now but fourscore years and ten since such a scene was
a terrible reality, how striking the reflection that it has as absolutely
vanished from the earth, beyond the possibility of revival, as the
display of tournaments, and the more formidable pageants of the
Crusades.
 The following year an expedition against this fort was made by the
gallant Abercrombie, who approached it from Lake George, and
endeavoured to take it by storm. It is commonly said that Lord Howe
fell in this assault before the walls; but in fact he fell the day before,
while leading an advanced guard through the forest. Ticonderoga
was garrisoned by about four thousand men—French, Canadians,
and Indians—and their entrenchments were defended by almost
impregnable outworks. The British troops nevertheless made the
attack with the greatest intrepidity, and in spite of a murderous fire,
forced their way to the walls, and even scaled them, to be
immediately cut down. But after repeated assaults, and the loss of
two thousand men, General Abercrombie was forced to desist from
the attempt; and the French kept the post for a time. It of course
became English in the following year, when the French power in
America was destroyed by the taking of Quebec.
I have already referred to its seizure by the eccentric Ethan Allen,
on the breaking out of the American war in 1775. This officer was a
native of Vermont, who had been an infidel preacher, and was
notorious as the editor of the first deistical publication that ever
issued from the American press. The revolution was hardly begun,
when the province of Connecticut gave him a commission to capture
Ticonderoga. With about three hundred of his hardy “Green-
mountain-boys,” he was hastening to the spot, when he fell in with
Arnold, bearing a similar commission from Massachusetts. After
some dispute as to the command, Allen was made leader, and Arnold
his assistant. They arrived by night on the Vermont shore, opposite
the fort. There they found a lad who had been accustomed to visit the
fort every day with provisions and pedlar’s wares, and crossing by his
directions, without noise, they were shown a secret and covered
entrance into the fort itself. Climbing up through this passage, Allen
led his men within the walls, and drew them up in the area of the
fortress, having silenced and disarmed the only sentry who guarded
the entrance. The commander of the post, who hardly knew there
was war, was actually startled from his sleep, by Allen’s demand for
its surrender. The drowsy officer inquired—“By what authority?” And
was answered by Allen, half in banter and half in bombastic earnest,
—“In the name of the Great Jehovah, and of the Continental
Congress!” To one in his straits, with a sword at his naked breast,
such a reply, however unintelligible, was sufficiently overpowering,
and the post was surrendered without resistance. Its reduction in
1777, by Burgoyne, has been already described; but Ticonderoga is
for ever endeared to Americans from the fact, that the flag of their
independence was so early given to the breeze from its summit.
A guide, who called himself Enoch Gold, led me over the ruins. He
pretended to have been with St Clair, and to have seen Burgoyne and
his men on Mount Defiance. He showed us the way through which
Allen gained his entrance, and took us down into the vaults and
magazines. A subterranean apartment was shown as a kitchen, and
the old fellow declared he had eaten bread hot out of its ovens. We
gave the soi-disant veteran the liberal rewards of a hero; but I
suspect we were paying him for his imagination, rather than for his
hardships.
The shadows of the fortress were beginning to lengthen on the lake
before we returned to our bark. The mountains of Vermont, which
are mostly well wooded, looked brightly green in the broad sunshine,
and tempted us to wish we had time for an excursion to their heights.
It was afterwards my happiness to go into Vermont, on a visit to Lake
Dunmore, which lies among its mountains, and supplies delicious
fish. I found it a truly Arcadian region, abounding with streams and
pasturages, and rich in flocks and herds. It breeds a rugged race of
men, with some characteristics decidedly Swiss. It is said, indeed,
that a Switzer, who had come to settle in America, preferred these
diminutive Alps, with their lakes and mountaineer population, to any
other part of the country; and, fixing his dwelling accordingly, soon
ceased to be home-sick, and sigh at the ranz des vaches.
Crown Point, the twin sister of Ticonderoga, is only ten miles
beyond; but we did not reach it as soon as we had expected, for the
wind had changed, and we were obliged to tack. Every now and then,
the man at the helm, which was our gallant captain himself, would
cry out,—“Heads!” and the boom would come sweeping across the
deck, with woe to the head that wore a hat, or did not bow soon
enough to save it. Several times I expected to see our friend Freke
carried overboard bodily, and engulfed like another Corlaer; for so
profoundly was he engaged with his cigar, as he sat, or rather
squatted, on the hatches, that the captain’s monotonous warning
failed to alarm him till the whole company had echoed “Heads!” and,
with other demonstrations of affectionate solicitude, forced him to
fall on all-fours.
At Crown Point the lake greatly improves. The water appears much
clearer, and the width of the lake is nearly if not quite fourfolded. It
continues to expand till it becomes ten or twelve miles in breadth,
and islands begin to be numerous. To the northward the higher
peaks of the Green Mountains stretch away with magnificent
outlines; and on the west, a bleak and craggy range of hills, which are
said to harbour even yet the wolf and the bear, approach, and then
recede from the shore. Here, as early as 1731, the French built Fort
Frederick, as the first move towards the seizure and claim of the
whole surrounding territory; and from this point they made their
bloody and atrocious incursions into New England, and towards the
Mohawk, or dismissed their hireling savages to do it for them. The
recesses of Fort Frederick are believed to have rivalled the dungeons
of the Inquisition in scenes of misery and crime. In its gloomy cells
were plotted the inhuman massacres which drenched the American
settlements in blood. There, it is said, the Indian butchers received
their commissions to burn, tomahawk, and scalp; and there, in the
presence of Jesuit fathers, or at least with their connivance, was the
gleaming gold counted down to the savages in return for their
infernal trophies of success; the silvery locks of the aged colonist, the
clotted tresses of women, and the crimsoned ringlets of the child. In
1759 this detestable hold of grasping and remorseless tyranny was
blown up, and abandoned by the French to General Amherst. Soon
after, the British Government began to erect a fortification in the
vicinity of the ruins, and a noble work it was; though it proved of no
use at all, after the enormous sum of two millions sterling had been
expended on its walls of granite, and ditches blasted in the solid rock.
The exploits of Arnold and Sir Guy Carleton in this vicinity have been
already described. Since the close of the war of the Revolution, the
costly works at Crown Point have been suffered to fall into decay;
and they are now piles of ruin, covered with weeds, among which the
red berries of the sumach are conspicuously beautiful in their time.
Though “Captain Pusher” made a landing at this point to procure a
little milk for our tea, we did not go ashore, and were soon on our
way once more with a freer prospect, and perhaps with somewhat
expanded spirits. The setting sun, in the clear climate of America, is
in fair weather almost always beautiful; and my recollections of the
rosy and purple tints with which it adorned the feathery flakes of
cloud that floated around the peaks of the Green Mountains, are to
this day almost as bright in memory as when they first made my
heart leap up to behold them in the soft summer sky of Vermont. As
the lake grew wider and the darkness deeper, there was of course less
and less to be seen; and the noble scenery at Burlington, where the
width of the lake is greatest, and the shores assume a bolder and
higher character of beauty, was to our great regret unavoidably
passed in the night. Still, there is something in starlight upon the
waters, in new and romantic regions, which peculiarly inspires me.
The same constellations which one has long been accustomed to view
in familiar scenes and associations, come out like old friends in the
heavens of strange and untried lands; shining witnesses to the
brotherhood of differing nations, and to the impartial benevolence
and unsleeping love of God. But I have no reason to regret that the
only night I ever passed on Lake Champlain was mostly spent in
watching; for long before I was tired of gazing at Orion and the
Pleiads, I was rewarded by the sight of one of the most splendid
auroras that I ever beheld. In a moment, the whole northern heaven
was illuminated with columnar light; and the zenith seemed to rain it
down, so to speak—while the surface of the lake reflecting it, gave us,
to our own eyes, the appearance of sailing in some bright fluid,
midway between a vault and an abyss of fire. This display of glory
continued to flash and quiver above us for several hours. There were,
in quick succession, sheets and spires and pencils of variegated light,
rolling and tremulous, wavy and flame-like, blazoning heaven’s azure
with something like heraldic broidery and colours. Towards
morning, the intense cold and heavy mountain dews drove me for a
season to my berth; but I was on deck again in time to see the moon
make her heliacal rising over the eastern peaks, in the wan paleness
of her last quarter. The approach of day was attended with a fog; but
it soon thinned off, and we made Plattsburgh in good time. Here we
parted with our vessel, and her worthy commander; and though we
neither gave him a piece of plate nor voted him an accomplished
gentleman, we left him with such wishes as, if they have been
fulfilled, have long since removed him from the helm of his sloop,
and the waters of Lake Champlain, to a snug little cot at Burlington,
and the company of any number of rosy little Green-Mountain boys
and their interesting mother.
Plattsburgh is situated on the western bank of the lake, just where
the crescent shore of a bold peninsula begins to curve round a broad
semicircular bay, several miles in circumference, and of liberal
depth. Here the American squadron, under Commodore
Macdonough, was anchored on the 11th of September 1814, in order
to assist the land forces under General Macomb, in repelling an
expected attack from the British troops under Sir George Prevost.
The English flotilla had been ordered up from the Isle-aux-Noix to
engage Macdonough, and divert his fire from the shore; and
accordingly, at about eight o’clock in the morning, was seen off the
peninsula of Cumberland Head, and hailed by both armies with
vociferous acclamations. The cannonade instantly began from the
ships and on the land, and for two hours and twenty minutes the
naval engagement was continued with the most stubborn resolution
on both sides. Though the battle on shore was sorely contested, the
action between the squadrons was anxiously watched by both armies,
and by thousands of deeply interested spectators, who surveyed the
field and the fleets from the neighbouring heights. Macdonough’s
flag-ship, the Saratoga, was twice on fire; and though Downie had
fallen in the first moment of the conflict, the Confiance had
succeeded in dismantling all the starboard guns of her antagonist,
when the bower-cable of the Saratoga was cut, and a stern-anchor
dropped, on which she rounded to, and presented a fresh broadside.
The Confiance was unable to imitate this manœuvre, and she was
obliged to strike, the remainder of the flotilla soon following her
example. A few of the British galleys escaped, but as there was not
another mast standing in either fleet, they could neither be followed
by friends or by foes. The decision of the contest was vociferously
cheered from the shore; and Sir George, perceiving the fate of his
fleet, commenced a retreat, having suffered the loss of nearly a
thousand men. This brilliant action in Cumberland Bay has made the
name of Macdonough the pride and glory of Lake Champlain; and
deservedly so, for his professional merit appears to have been no
greater than his private worth. The brave but unfortunate Downie,
who, with a squadron wanting a full third of being as strong as that
of his antagonist, maintained this gallant contest, sleeps in a quiet
grave at Plattsburgh, under a simple monument erected by the
affection of a sister. He is always mentioned with respectful regret;
but Macdonough is, of course, the hero of every panegyric. An
anecdote which we heard at Whitehall gives me a higher opinion of
the latter, however, than all that has been justly said of his merits as
an officer. A few minutes before the action commenced, he caused
his chaplain to offer the appropriate prayers in the presence of all his
fleet—the men standing reverently uncovered, and the commander
himself kneeling upon the deck. An officer of the Confiance is said to
have observed this becoming, but somewhat extraordinary, devotion
through his glass, and to have reported it to Captain Downie, who
seemed to be immediately struck with a foreboding of the result. The
sailors on our little sloop told us another story of the action with
great expressions of delight. It seems the hen-coop of the Saratoga
was struck in the beginning of the action, and a cock becoming
released flew into the rigging, and, flapping his wings, crowed lustily
through the fire and smoke. The gunners gave chanticleer a hearty
cheer, and taking the incident as an omen of victory, stood to their
guns with fresh spirit and enthusiasm. Smaller things than this have
turned the tide of battles far greater, and more important to nations
and the world.
We spent a day at Plattsburgh surveying the field and the fort, and
picking up stories of the fight. Relics of the battle were every where
visible; and grape-shot and cannon-balls were lying here and there in
the ditches. The evening was fair, and we drove out to an Indian
encampment on the peninsula, the first thing of the kind I ever
beheld. Entering one of the wigwams, or huts, I found the squaws
engaged in weaving small baskets of delicate withes of elm, dyed and
stained with brilliant vegetable-colours. An infant strapped to a flat
board, and set like a cane or umbrella against the stakes of the hut,
was looking on with truly Indian stoicism. The mother said her child
never cried; but whether it runs in the blood, or is the effect of
discipline, is more than I could learn. On the beach were canoes of
bark, which had been newly constructed by the men. A squaw, who
desired us to purchase, lifted one of them with her hand; yet it could
have carried six or seven men with safety on the lake. We observed
that males and females alike wore crucifixes, and were evidently
Christians, however degraded and ignorant. They spoke French, so
as to be easily understood, and some English. These poor and feeble
creatures were the last of the Iroquois.
 Next day, in post-coaches, we came into Canada. At St John’s,
where we dined, Freke boisterously drank to his Majesty. So deep
were the loyal feelings of our friend, however, that he continued his
bumpers to “all the royal family,” which, though not quite so great an
achievement then as it would be now, was quite sufficient to consign
him to the attentions of our host, where we left him without an adieu.
We were much amused by the novelties of our road, so decidedly
Frenchified, and unlike any thing in the States. Women, in the
costume of French peasants, were at work in the fields; and we saw
one engaged in bricklaying at the bottom of a ditch or cellar. The
men in caps, smock-frocks, and almost always with pipes in their
mouths, drove by in light charettes, or waggons with rails at the
sides, drawn by stout little ponies of a plump yet delicate build, and
for cart-horses remarkably fleet. For the first time in my life I
observed also dogs harnessed in the Esquimaux manner, and
drawing miniature charettes, laden with bark or faggots. Every thing
reminded us that we were not in England or America, but only in
Acadie.
We were jaunting merrily along, when vociferous halloos behind
us caused our whip to pull up with a jerk. A Yorkshire man, in terror
of footpads, began to bellow Drive on! and our heads were thrust
forth in farcical preparation for a stand-and-deliver assault, when a
waggon was discovered approaching us, in which were two men, one
without a hat, his hair streaming like a meteor, and both bawling
Stop, stop! like the post-boy at the heels of John Gilpin. In a moment
we recognised Freke. With any thing but a volley of compliments, he
assailed the driver for carrying off his luggage, which sure enough
was found in the boot, with his splendid initials inscribed in a
constellation of brass nails. His hat had been blown off in the
pursuit; but after adorning himself with a turban, he was again
admitted to our company, though not without some reluctance
expressed or understood. The fumes of his dinner had not entirely
subsided; and I am sorry to say, that his enthusiasm for his king and
country was about in inverse proportion to the honour he did them
by his extraordinary appearance. I wish it had exhausted itself in
song and sentiment; but it was evident that a strong desire to fight
the whole universe was fast superseding the exhilaration of reunion
with his friends. Unfortunately a poor Canadian, in passing with his
charette, struck the wheels of our coach; and though he alone was
the sufferer, being knocked into a ditch instantaneously, Freke was
upon him in a second, inflicting such a drubbing as reminded me
forcibly of a similar incident in Horace’s route to Brundusium. It was
with difficulty that we succeeded in reducing our hero to a sense of
propriety, and compelling him to console the astounded provincial
with damages. The sufferer, who thanked him in French for the not
over generous remuneration, seemed altogether at a loss to know for
what he had been beaten; and I am happy to say that the politeness
of the peasant seemed to restore our military friend to
consciousness, and a fear that he had behaved like a brute. At the
next stage he provided himself with a Canadian cap, and on
resuming his seat overwhelmed us with apologies; so that we were
compelled to forgive the aberration, which was doubtless, as he said,
attributable solely to his loyal concern for the health of his Majesty,
and to an overflow of spirits at finding himself once more in the pale
of the British empire.
It was late in the afternoon when we arrived at Laprairie, that little
old Canadian town on the St Lawrence, where passengers take the
steamer to Montreal. Here was celebrating some kind of fête which
had brought a procession of nuns into the street, around whom were
congregated groups of smiling children in their holiday dresses. I
entered a church, which I found nearly deserted. A few of the poorer
sort of persons were at prayer, saying their aves and paters by the
rosary—not, as is sometimes supposed, through voluntary devotion,
but in performance of appointed penances, which they make haste to
get through. Some funeral ceremony seemed to be in preparation; for
the church was dark, and a catafalque near the entrance gave me a
startling sensation of awe. All that Laprairie could show us was soon
beheld; but our usual fortune had attended us to the last, and we
were again too late for the steamer. It would not cross again till the
morrow; yet there was the city of Montreal distinctly visible before
our eyes. From the quay we could discern, down the river, the tin
roof of the convent of Grayfriars, glittering brightly in the descending
sun. In fact, the whole city was glittering, for every where its spires
and roofs shone with a sheeting of the Cornish material, which
somehow or other, in this climate, seems to resist oxidisation. In
other respects, the scene was not remarkable, except that there was
the river—the broad, free, and magnificent St Lawrence, with its
rapids and its isles. Nuns’ Isle was above us, and abreast of the city,
with its fortress, was the green St Helen’s, said to be musical with the
notes of birds, and fragrant with its flowers and verdure.
We were regretting the premature departure of the steamer, when
one of our party came to announce that some Canadian boatmen
were willing to take us over in a batteau, if we would embark without
delay. It was nine miles, and the rapids were high; but we were
informed that our ferrymen were born to the oar, and might
confidently be trusted with our lives. We therefore lost no time in
stowing ourselves, and part of our luggage, into a mere shell of a
boat, manned by half-a-dozen Canadians, who pulled us into deep
water with an air and a motion peculiarly their own. Once fairly
embarked, there was something not unpleasant in finding ourselves
upon the St Lawrence in a legitimate manner; for steamers were yet a
novelty in those waters, and were regarded by the watermen with the
same kind of contempt which an old English mail-coachman feels, in
the bottom of his soul, for stokers and railways. Finding ourselves, by
a lucky accident, thus agreeably launched, we naturally desired to
hear a genuine Canadian boat-song, and were not long in making the
oarsmen understand that an augmentation of their pay would be
cheerfully afforded, if they would but favour us with music. Every
one has heard the beautiful words of Tom Moore, inspired by a
similar adventure. He says of the familiar air to which they are set,
that though critics may think it trifling, it is for him rich with that
charm which is given by association to every little memorial of by-
gone scenes and feelings. I cannot say that the air of our voyageurs
was the same; yet I am quite inclined to think that the words which
he gives as the burden of the Canadian boat-song which he heard so
often, were those to which we were treated. Barbarous, indeed, was
their dialect if they attempted to give us any thing so definite as the
chanson,
“Dans mon chemin j’ai rencontré
Deux cavaliers, trés-bien montés;”

but there was a perpetually recurring refrain which sounded like do

—daw—donny-day, and which I suppose to be a sort of French fol-
de-rol, but which I can easily conceive to have been, as our English
Anacreon reports it—
“A l’ombre d’un bois je m’en vais jouer,
 A l’ombre d’un bois je m’en vais danser.”
Rude as was the verse and the music, however, I must own that, in
its place on that majestic river, as we were approaching the rapids
whose white caps were already leaping about our frail bark, with the
meditative light of sunset throwing a mellow radiance over all, there
was something that appealed very strongly to the imagination in that
simple Canadian air. I am not musical, and cannot recall it; yet even
now it will sometimes ring in my ears, when I go back in fancy to that
bright season of my life when I too was a voyageur; and I have often
been happy that accident thus gave me the pleasure of hearing what I
shall never hear again, and what travellers on the St Lawrence are
every year less and less likely to hear repeated. Indeed, I am almost
able to adopt every word which Moore has so poetically appended to
his song. “I remember,” says he, “when we entered at sunset upon
one of those beautiful lakes into which the St Lawrence so grandly
and so unexpectedly opens, I have heard this simple air with a
pleasure which the finest conceptions of the finest masters have
never given me; and now there is not a note of it which does not
recall to my memory the dip of our oars in the St Lawrence, the flight
of our boat down the rapids, and all the new and fanciful impressions
to which my heart was alive during the whole of this very interesting
voyage.”
But our trip was not all poetry and song. When we were fairly upon
those bright-looking rapids, we found our little nutshell quite too
heavily loaded, and were forced to feel our evident danger with
somewhat of alarm. The billows whirled and tossed us about, till our
Canadians themselves became frightened, and foolishly throwing up
their oars, began to cross themselves and to call on the Virgin and all
the saints. The tutelar of the St Lawrence is said to inhabit hard by,
at St Anne’s,—but such was our want of confidence in his power to
interfere, that we met this outbreak of Romish devotion with a
protest so vehement that it would have surprised the celebrated diet
of Spires. Certain it is that, on resuming their oars, the fellows did
much more for us than their aspirations had accomplished, when
unaided by efforts. We soon began to enjoy the dancing of our
batteau, which gradually became less violent, and was rather
inspiring. Still, as no one but a coward would sport in safety with
dangers which were once sufficient to appal, let me confess that I
believe I should be thankful that my journey and my mortal life were
not ended together in those dangerous waters. I trust it was not
without some inward gratitude to Him who numbers the very hairs
of our head, that we found ourselves again in smooth tides, and were
soon landed in safety on the quay at Montreal.
 THE CONQUEST OF NAPLES.[16]

The stirring period of the middle ages, rich in examples of bold

emprise and events of romantic interest, includes no more striking
and remarkable episode than the invasion and conquest, by the
brother of St Louis, of the kingdom of the Two Sicilies. As an episode
it has hitherto been treated—introduced, and not unfrequently
crushed into unmerited insignificance, in works of general history.
By both historian and poet fragments have been brought into strong
relief; as an independent whole, no writer, until the present time, has
ventured and chosen to attempt its delineation. The virtues and
misfortunes of the last legitimate descendant of the imperial house of
Stauffen, a house once so numerous and powerful, have been wept
over by the minstrels to whose fraternity he belonged, vaunted by
indignant chroniclers, and sung by the greatest of Italy’s bards. The
gallant and successful insurrection by which the brightest gem was
wrenched from the French usurper’s fire-new diadem, and set in
Arragon’s crown, has been repeatedly recorded and enlarged upon,
and not unfrequently mistold. But the integral treatment of the
conquest of Naples, in a work devoted to it alone, and worthy of the
weight and interest of the subject—the narrative of the ousting of the
German dynasty and establishment of a French one, including the
circumstances that led to the change, and apart from contemporary
and irrelevant history—were left for the elegant and capable pen of
an author honourably known for extensive learning and indefatigable
research. The puissant rule of Frederick the Hohenstauffe—the
heroic virtues and Homeric feats of Charles of Anjou—the precocious
talents, fatal errors, and untimely end of the luckless Conradin—have
found a fit chronicler in the accomplished Count of St Priest.
Besides acknowledged talents and great industry, this writer has
brought to his arduous task a familiar acquaintance—the result of
long and assiduous study—with the times and personages of whom
he writes, a sound judgment, and an honest desire of impartiality. In
his quality of Frenchman the latter was especially essential, to guard
him against the natural bias in favour of an illustrious and valiant
countryman, that might lead, almost unconsciously, to an undue
exaltation of the virtues, and extenuation of the crimes, of the hero of
his narrative. Nor was this the only instance in which he was liable to
temptation. The circumstances and causes of the massacre known as
the Sicilian Vespers, were handed down, in the first instance, by
Italian writers, in the adoption of whose views and assertions
subsequent historians have perhaps displayed too great servility. If
we consider the vindictive and treacherous instincts of the Sicilians,
their fierce impatience of foreign domination, and the slight account
made of human life by the natives of southern Europe generally, we
cannot too hastily reject the assertions and arguments by which M.
de St Priest props his opinion, that the vengeance was greater than
the offence, the oppressed more cruel than the oppressor. History
affixes to an entire nation the stigma of goading a conquered people
to madness, by arrogance, injustice, and excess. M. de St Priest takes
up the defence, and, without claiming for his client an honourable
acquittal, strives, by the production of extenuating circumstances, to
induce the world to reconsider its severe and sweeping verdict. He
asks whether the evidence has been sufficiently sifted, whether the
facts have been properly understood and appreciated, or even
known. “I think,” he says, “they have not. The Sicilians themselves
acknowledge this. One of their most distinguished writers has
suspected falsehood, and sought the truth; but he has done so only in
a very exclusive, and consequently a very incomplete point of view.
He has aggravated the reproach that rests upon the memory of the
French of the thirteenth century. In my turn, I have resumed the
debate with a national feeling as strong, but less partial I hope, than
that of most of the Italian and German annalists, in whose footsteps
our own historians have trodden with undue complaisance. It is time
to stand aloof from these, and to reply to them.” It would be
inverting the order of our subject, here to dilate upon M. de St
Priest’s views concerning the massacre, to which we may hereafter
recur. He scarcely makes out so good a case for the French victims to
Sicilian vengeance as he does for the most prominent personage of
his book, Charles of Anjou, whose character he handles with masterly
skill. He admits his crimes—sets off with their acknowledgment; and
yet so successfully does he palliate them by the received ideas of the
time, by the necessities and perplexities of a most difficult position,
that the reader forgets the faults in the virtues of the hero, and
receives an impression decidedly favourable to the first French
sovereign of Naples. “Had I proposed,”—we quote from the preface
—“to write a biography, and not a history, to paint a portrait instead
of a picture, I might have recoiled before my hero. The blood of
Conradin still cries out against his pitiless conqueror; but the crime
of the chief must not be imputed to the army. Aged warriors were
seen to weep and pray around the scaffold of a child. The end I
propose is not that of a retrospective vindication—an ungrateful, and
often a puerile task. Charles of Anjou was guilty. That fact admitted,
he still remains the greatest captain, the sole organising genius, and
one of the most illustrious princes of a period fertile in great kings.
Like his brother Louis IX., from whom, in other respects, he was only
too different, he valiantly served France. He carried the French name
into the most distant countries. By his political combinations, by the
alliances he secured for his family as much as by his victories,
Charles I., King of Sicily, seated his lineage upon the thrones of
Greece, Hungary, and Poland. Yet more—he saved the western world
from another Mahomedan invasion, less perceived, but not less
imminent, than the invasions of the eighth and seventeenth
centuries. The bust of Charles of Anjou merits a place between the
statues of Charles Martel and John Sobieski.”
This high eulogium, at the very commencement of the book,
strikes us as scarcely according with the promise of impartiality
recorded upon the following page. The meed of praise exceeds that
we should be disposed to allot to the conqueror of Naples. Still, upon
investigation, it is difficult to controvert his historian’s assertions,
although some of them admit of modification. Here M. de St Priest
rather veils and overlooks his hero’s faults than denies them to have
existed. He says nothing in this place of the misgovernment that lost
Sicily, within a few years of its reduction. Yet to such misrule, more
even than to the excesses of a licentious soldiery—partly consequent
on it—was attributable the temporary separation of that fair island
from the Neapolitan dominions. Subsequently he admits the
imprudent contempt shown by Charles to this portion of his new
kingdom, his injudicious choice of the agents and representatives of
his authority, the exclusion of the natives from public offices and
employments—filled almost wholly by Frenchmen—with many other
arbitrary, oppressive, and unjust measures, sometimes more
vexatious in form than efficient for the end proposed; as, for
instance, the decree disarming the Sicilians, which must have been
wretchedly enforced, since the Palermitans, when the signal for
slaughter was given, were at no loss for weapons to exterminate their
tyrants. Whilst admitting the skill shown by Charles in his foreign
policy, and in the formation of great and advantageous alliances, we
must refuse him, upon his advocate’s own showing, the merit of able
internal administration. His military virtues are less questionable,
although the greatest of his victories, which placed his rival in his
power and secured his seat on the Neapolitan throne, was due less to
any generalship of his own than to the bold stratagem of a gray-
headed crusader.
Apart from its historical importance, M. de St Priest’s work is
valuable as exposing and illustrating the peculiar ideas, strange
customs, and barbarous prejudices of a remote and highly interesting
period, less known than it deserves, and whose annals and archives
few have explored more industriously than himself. In this point of
view are we disposed, whilst glancing at some of the principal events
it records, especially to consider it; and under this aspect it will
probably be most prized and esteemed by the majority. A greater
familiarity than the general mass of readers possess with the
complicated history of the second period of the middle ages is
requisite for the due appreciation of the book, and especially of its
first volume. This is purely introductory to the conquest. The name
of the conqueror is mentioned for the first time upon its last page.
The matter it contains is not the less essential. It sketches the
establishment of the Norman dynasty in Sicily; the elevation of that
country into a monarchy by Duke Roger II.; the fall of the family of
Tancred, and the reign of Frederick II., (Emperor of Germany, and
grandson of Barbarossa,) who inherited the crown of the Two Sicilies
in right of his mother, the posthumous daughter of Roger, and the
last of the Norman line. This brings us into the thick of the long-
standing feud between the Pope and the Empire, which, after having
had the whole of Europe for its battle-field, at last concentrated itself
in a single country. “Towards the middle of the thirteenth century it
was transported to the southern extremity of Italy, to the rich and
beautiful lands now composing the kingdom of Naples. The quarrel
of the investitures terminated by the crusade of Sicily; a debate about
ecclesiastical jurisdiction ended in a dispute concerning territorial
possession. But although reduced to less vast proportions and more
simple terms, the antagonism of the pontificate and the throne lost
nothing of its depth, activity, and strength. Far from becoming
weakened, it assumed the more implacable and rancorous character
of a personal encounter. The war became a duel. It was natural that
this should happen. So soon as a regular power was founded in the
south of Italy, Rome could not permit the same power to establish
itself in the north of the peninsula. The interest of the temporal
existence of the popedom, the geographical position of the States of
the Church, rendered this policy stringent. The Popes could never
allow Lombardy and the Two Sicilies to be united under one sceptre.
A King of Naples, as King of the Lombards, pressed them on all
sides; but as Emperor he crushed them. This formidable hypothesis
realised itself. A German dynasty menaced the Holy See, and was
broken. A French dynasty was called to replace it, and obtained
victory, power, and duration.” When this occurred—when the Pope,
beholding from the towers of Civita Vecchia his earthly sway
menaced with annihilation, and the Saracen hordes of Sicily’s
powerful King ravaging the Campagna, fulminated anathemas upon
the impious invaders, and summoned to his aid a prince of France—
Manfredi, Prince of Tarento, or Mainfroy, as M. de St Priest prefers
to call him, the natural son of Frederick II., was the virtual sovereign
of the Two Sicilies. Frederick, who died in his arms, left him regent of
the kingdom during the absence in Germany of his legitimate son
Conrad—named his heir in preference to his grandson Frederick, the
orphan child of his eldest son Henry, who had died a rebel,
conquered and captive. This was not all. “The imperial will declared
the Prince of Tarento bailiff or viceroy of the Two Sicilies, with
unlimited powers and regal rights, whenever Conrad should be
resident in Germany or elsewhere. Things were just then in the state
thus provided for. Mainfroy became ipso facto regent of the
kingdom; and the lucky bastard saw himself not only eventually
called to the powerful inheritance of the house of Suabia, but
preferred to the natural and direct heir of so many crowns.”
The death of Frederick the Hohenstauffe, who for long after his
decease was popularly known—as in our day a greater than he still is
—as the Emperor, revived the hopes and courage of Pope Innocent
IV., who resolved to strike a decisive blow at the power of the house
of Suabia. Mainfroy was then its representative in Italy. He was only
nineteen—a feeble enemy, so thought Innocent, whom a word from
the pontifical throne would suffice to level with the dust. But where
the sanguine Pope expected to find a child, he met a man, in talent,
energy, and prudence. These qualities Mainfroy displayed in an
eminent degree in the struggle that ensued; and when Conrad landed
in his kingdom, which had been represented to him as turbulent and
agitated, he was astonished at the tranquillity it enjoyed. He
embraced his brother, and insisted on his walking by his side, under
the same dais, from the sea to the city. This good understanding did
not last long. Conrad was jealous of the man who had so ably
supplied his place, and jealousy at last became hatred. He deprived
Mainfroy of the possessions secured to him by his father’s will,
banished his maternal relatives with ignominy, and did all he could,
but in vain, to drive him to revolt. Under these circumstances, it is
not surprising that when Conrad died, at the age of twenty-six,
leaving Berthold, Margrave of Hohemburg, regent of the kingdom
during the minority of his son Conrad V., or Conradin—who had
been born since his departure from Germany, and whom he had
never seen—there were not wanting persons to accuse Mainfroy as
an accessary to his death. Mainfroy had already been charged—
falsely, there can be little doubt—of having smothered, under
mattresses, his father and benefactor, the Emperor Frederick. There
was more probability, if not more truth, in the accusation of
fratricide; for, if Conrad had lived, doubtless Mainfroy would, sooner
or later, have been sacrificed to his jealousy or safety. “The majority
of chroniclers assign to Mainfroy, as an accomplice, a physician of
Salerno; and add, with the credulity of the times, that he killed the
King of the Romans by introducing diamond dust, an infallible
poison, into his entrails. Others, bolder or better informed, give the
name of the poisoner, and call him John of Procida.” Whether this
death resulted from poison or disease, it was hailed as a happy event
by the Italians, and with a great burst of laughter by the Pope, who at
once renounced his project of calling a foreign prince to the throne of
Sicily, and resumed, with fresh ardour, his plans of conquest and
annexation. Advancing to the Neapolitan frontier, he was there met
by the Prince of Tarento and the Margrave of Hohemburg, who came
to place themselves at his disposal, and to supplicate him on behalf
of the infant Conradin. The Pope, who saw a proof of weakness in
this humility, insisted that the Two Sicilies should be delivered up to
the Church; saying that he would then investigate the rights of
Conradin, and admit them if valid. The Margrave, alarmed at the
aspect of things, made over the regency to Mainfroy, who accepted it
with affected repugnance. A powerful party called this prince to the
throne: it was the aristocratic and national party, averse alike to
papal domination and to the government of a child. They entered
into an agreement with Mainfroy, by which they swore to obey him
as regent, so long as the little King should live; stipulating that if he
died a minor, or without direct heirs, the Prince of Tarento should
succeed him as sovereign. The Margrave of Hohemburg, faithless to
the trust reposed in him by Conrad, agreed to these conditions, and
promised to deliver up to Mainfroy the late King’s treasures. Instead
of so doing, the double traitor made his escape with them, leaving
the new regent in such poverty that, in order to pay his German
mercenaries, he was compelled to sell the hereditary jewels and gold
and silver vases of his mother’s family.
If Mainfroy had made good fight in defence of Conrad’s rights, we
may be sure he did not less strenuously strive when his own claim
was to be vindicated. Unfortunate at first, and about to succumb to
papal power and intrigues, he, as a last resource, threw himself into
the arms of the Saracens of Lucera. These unbelievers had been
greatly encouraged by his father, who was passionately addicted to
things oriental. “From his infancy,” M. de St Priest says of Frederick,
“he lived surrounded with astrologers, eunuchs, and odaliques. His
palace was a seraglio, himself a sultan. This was quite natural. In
Sicily all visible objects were Asiatic. The external form of the houses,
their internal architecture, the streets, the baths, the gardens, even
the churches, bore the stamp of Islamism. The praises of God are still
to be seen engraved in Arabic on marble columns; and in the same
language were they traced, in gold and diamonds and pearls, upon
the mantle and dalmatica of Sicily’s Queens and Kings. Palermo was
then called the trilingual city. Latin and Arabic were equally spoken
there; and the Italian, the favella volgare, originated at the court of
Frederick-Roger, under the Moorish arcades of his palaces at
Palermo and Catania. The language of Petrarch was murmured, for
the first time, beside the fountains of the Ziza. The outward forms of
Islamism were then, in southern Europe, the ensign hoisted by that
small number of liberal thinkers, the avowed enemies of
ecclesiastical and monkish domination, who willingly assumed the
name of Epicureans.” Further on we have the following, explanatory
of the peaceable settlement of the infidel in Sicily, and curiously
illustrating the contradictions and bigotry of the time. “With an
audacity previously unheard-of, Frederick II., after fighting and
conquering the Saracens who overran and disturbed Sicily,
transported entire colonies of them to Lucera, in the Capitanata, in
the immediate vicinity of the patrimony of St Peter, thus planting, in
the heart of his kingdom, the Mahomedan standard he was about to
combat in Syria. Decrepid though he was, Pope Honorius felt the
danger and insult of such proximity. What were the arms of the holy
see against an opponent that none of its anathemas could touch? The
Pontiff became indignant, vented threats; but was soon appeased.
When the wily Frederick saw him angry, he promised a crusade;
whereupon the Pope calmed himself, and treated the Emperor as a
son.” Subsequent Popes were less easy to pacify, and ban and
excommunication were heaped upon the Emperor’s head. Gregory
IX., in his bulls, called him “a marine monster, whose jaws are full
of blasphemies;” to which complimentary phrase Frederick replied
by the epithets of “great dragon, antichrist,” and “new Balaam.” A
third extract will complete the sketch of the Saracens, and their
position in Sicily. “Surrounded by odaliques and dancing women;
giving eunuchs for guards to his wife, the beautiful Isabella
Plantagenet, a daughter of the English King; often clothed in oriental
robes; in war-time mounted on an elephant; in his palace
surrounded by tame lions; always accompanied by a troop of
Mussulmans, to whom he showed great indulgence, permitting them
the violation of churches and women, debauch and sacrilege,—
Frederick II., in the opinion of his subjects, was no longer a Christian
prince. During the last ten years of his reign this state of things
reached its height. The number of barbarian troops daily increased.
Seventeen new companies, summoned from Africa, were dispersed,
like an invading army, over the Basilicata and Calabria. Finally, the
Emperor went so far as to instal them in the places of masters of
ports, and in other offices that gave these Mussulmans jurisdiction
over Christian populations.” And when a Saracen captain, named
Phocax, in garrison at Trani, ill-treated a citizen of noble birth,
Messer Simone Rocca, and grossly outraged his wife, the aggrieved
man could obtain no satisfaction. “The Emperor only laughed.
‘Messer Simone,’ he said, to the complainant, ‘dov’è forza non è
vergogna. Go, Phocax will not do it again; had he been a native of
the country, I would have had his head cut off.’” On the death of this
indulgent patron, the Saracen colony in the kingdom of Naples saw
its existence menaced. The infidels were lost if Rome became
mistress of the country. The triumph of the Pope would be the tocsin
of their extermination. They resolved to defend themselves to the
last. They held Lucera, Accerenza, and Girafalco, three impregnable
fortresses; they also commanded at other points, less strong but still
important. They felt themselves numerous, courageous, and
determined. Mainfroy could not doubt that they would gladly rally
round the banner of their benefactor’s son; and in this hope he set
out for Lucera, where John the Moor then commanded. This man, a
slave whom the Emperor’s caprice had raised to the highest dignities,
promised Mainfroy the best of receptions. But when the Prince of
Tarento reached Lucera, the traitor had gone over to the Pope, taking
with him a thousand Saracens and three hundred Germans, and
leaving the town in the keeping of a man of his tribe, Makrizi by
name. On learning this treachery, Mainfroy still did not renounce his
project of confiding himself to the Arabs—so cherished by his father,
so favoured by himself. Only, instead of approaching the fortress
with his little army, as regent of the kingdom, he preferred to go as a
knight-errant, attended only by three esquires, like a paladin of the
Round Table. This portion of Mainfroy’s life, as well as many other
passages in M. de St Priest’s book, reads like an extract from some
old romance of chivalry. After wandering about, in the gloom and
rain of a November night, and losing his way repeatedly, Adenulfo,
one of Mainfroy’s three men-at-arms, and formerly forester to
Frederick II., perceived a white object in the darkness, and
recognised a hunting-lodge built by the Emperor. He conducted the
prince thither, and they lighted a large fire,—a most imprudent act,
for the flame was easily perceptible at Foggia, where Otho of
Hohemburg was then in garrison with a portion of the papal army.
But Mainfroy was young and a poet. At sight of the splendid trees
blazing on the hearth, he forgot the present, and thought only of the
past; perhaps he recalled the time, not yet very distant, when as a
child, on winter nights like that one, and perchance in that very
place, he had seen his father, on his return from an imperial hunt,
seat himself at that same hearth, and talk familiarly with his
attendants of his wars and his amours, singing the praises of the
lovely Catalanas,[17] and venting curses on the Pope. The illusion was
of short duration. At early dawn Mainfroy and his little escort took
horse, and after an hour’s march they beheld, through the misty
morning air, the tall hill of Lucera, and on its summit the Saracen
citadel and its massive walls, crowned with two-and-twenty towers.
But the guardians of the gate refused to open without orders from
Makrizi, who moreover, it would appear, had the key in his keeping.
Sure that he would deny admittance, they urged the prince to enter
as he best might, for that, once within the walls, all would go well.
Beneath the gate was a sort of trench, or gutter, to carry off the rain,
and through this it was not difficult for a young man of twenty,
slender and active like Mainfroy, to squeeze himself. He attempted to
do so, but the Saracens could not support the sight of their
Emperor’s son grovelling on the ground like a reptile. “Let us not,”
they exclaimed, “allow our lord to enter our walls in this vile posture.
Let his entrance be worthy of a prince! Let us break the gates!” In an
instant these were overthrown; Mainfroy passed over their ruins, and
was carried upon the shoulders of the Saracens to the public market-
place, surrounded by a joyous multitude. He met Makrizi, who,
furious at the news of his entrance, was summoning the garrison to
arms. “Makrizi! Makrizi!” cried the Saracens and the people, “get off
your horse, and kiss the prince’s feet!” The Arab obeyed, and
prostrated himself. Mainfroy had valiantly played his last stake, and
fortune favoured his audacity. In Lucera he found the treasures of
Frederick II., of King Conrad, of the Margrave Berthold, and of John
the Moor. Then, as ever, money was the sinew of war. Its possession
changed the aspect of affairs. In less than a month, the proscribed
and fugitive Mainfroy had dispersed the Pope’s army, taken and
executed John the Moor, and marched upon Naples to seize a crown.
And now, for many years, his career of success was unchequered by a
reverse. His arms were uniformly triumphant in the field; he was the
most magnificent prince, and passed as the richest sovereign, in
Europe. At last the marriage of his daughter Constance with the
Infante Don Pedro, son of King James of Arragon, crowned his
prosperity. Concluded in defiance of the court of Rome, this marriage
allied the bastard Prince of Tarento with the French royal family; for
Isabella of Arragon, sister of his son-in-law Don Pedro, became the
wife of Philip, son of Louis IX., and heir apparent to the crown of
France. This last piece of good fortune nearly turned Mainfroy’s
head. Instead of defending himself against the Holy See, he assumed
the offensive, and invaded its territories. Moreover, he now openly
professed, and established as a principle, that the right to dispose of
the imperial diadem was not vested in the Popes, but in the senate
and people of Rome. “It is time,” he added, “to put an end to this
usurpation.” Such maxims, thus publicly proclaimed, rendered the
Pope irreconcilable. The papal dream of annexing the Two Sicilies to
the pontificate had long melted into air before the sun of Mainfroy’s
arrogant prosperity; and Urban IV., convinced that the Church had
need of a valiant and devoted defender, turned his eyes northwards,
whilst his lips pronounced the name of Charles of Anjou.
Charles, the good Count of Anjou, as some of the chroniclers call
him, was married to Beatrix of Savoy, Countess of Provence, whose
hand he obtained in preference to two formidable rivals,—Conrad,
son of the Hohenstauffe, and Pedro of Arragon. The latter we have
just referred to as having subsequently married a daughter of
Mainfroy. Through life Peter and Charles were destined to be rivals;
and if the latter had the advantage at the outset, his competitor
afterwards in some degree balanced the account by robbing him of
the island of Sicily. In 1248, soon after his marriage, Charles
embarked at Aiguesmortes with his brother Louis and their wives, on
a crusade,—was sick to death at the island of Cyprus, but recovered,
and performed prodigies of valour in fight with the Saracen. It
seemed as if the scent of battle sufficed to restore him his full vigour;
and he displayed a furious impetuosity and reckless daring that
almost surpass belief. On arriving off Damietta, and at sight of the
Saracen army waiting on the shore, he and St Louis sprang from
their galley, and waded to land, with the water to their waists.
Surrounded by the enemy, Charles raised a wall of corpses around
him, until his knights came up to the rescue. Heading them, he
charged the infidel host, ordering to strike at the horses’ breasts. The
noble Arab chargers fell by hundreds; the Saracens fled; Louis and
Charles pursued; Damietta was the prize of the Christians. “The
adventurous prince feared the elements as little as he did man. One
day the Saracens threw Greek fire upon the crusaders’ tents. Struck
with surprise at sight of this mysterious enemy, the Christians were
so terrified that they dared not attempt to extinguish the flames. ‘I
will go,’ cried the Count of Anjou. They tried to retain him by force,
but he broke from them like a madman, and succeeded in his design.
At another time, St Louis, from the top of a hill, saw him engaged
single-handed with a whole troop of Saracens, who hurled at him
darts with flaming flags, which stuck into and burnt his horse’s
crupper. Thus did Charles display the first symptoms of a will
incapable of receding even before impossibilities,—a dangerous
application of a great virtue; but then, these feats of the Count of
Anjou delighted every body. Other exploits followed. Like a Christian
Horatius, Charles one day stopped the whole Mussulman army upon
a wooden bridge.” This great bravery was accompanied by pride,
egotism, and hardness of heart, and these qualities caused bickerings
between him and St Louis. Nevertheless, the brothers were fondly
attached to each other; and when Charles returned to Provence he
displayed a depth of emotion on parting from his king that surprised
the army, which did not give him credit for so much fraternal
affection. There was great contrast of character between him and his
royal brother. “They had in common,” says M. de St Priest, “military
courage, chastity, probity, and respect to their plighted word.... St
Louis was a Frenchman, Charles of Anjou a Spaniard. St Louis had
that communicative disposition, that taste for social enjoyment, that
necessity of expansion and gentle gaiety, generally attributed to our
nation. He was evidently the man born beside the waters of Loire or
Seine. Charles, on the other hand, seemed to have received life upon
the rugged rocks of Toledo, or in the naked and melancholy plains of
Valladolid. He was proud and gloomy; no smile ever curved his lips.
Uncommunicative, he confided his designs to no one. Although
hasty, violent, and passionate, he strove to conceal his emotions. He
slept little, spoke less; never forgot a service or an injury. His
indulgence for his partisans and servants was unbounded: if he was
passionately fond of gold, it was especially that he might shower it
upon them. Charles and Louis were a contrast even in form and
colour of face. Louis was fair and ruddy; Charles had black hair, an
olive skin, nervous limbs, and a prominent nose. Goodness was the
characteristic of the king, severity of the count. Both of imposing
aspect,—one as a father, the other as a master—Louis inspired
respect and love, Charles respect and terror. By the admission of all
his contemporaries, nothing could be more majestic than the look,
gait, and stature of the Count of Anjou. In an assemblage of princes
he eclipsed them all. A poet who knew him well, and who calls him
the most seignorial of men, shows him to us at the court of France in
the midst of his brothers, and characterises him by this energetic line
—
‘Tous furent filz de roy, mais Charles le fut mieux.’”

Such was the man who, on the 15th May 1265, embarked at
Marseilles for Rome, with a thousand chosen knights upon thirty
galleys, leaving the main body of his army at Lyons to cross the Alps
with the Countess Beatrix, under the nominal command of the young
Robert de Bethune Dampierre, heir to the county of Flanders, and
the real guidance of Gilles de Traisignies, constable of France. At the
moment of his departure, timid counsellors magnified the peril of the
enterprise, and the superiority of the hostile fleet that watched to
intercept him; but nothing could shake the determination of the
Count of Anjou. “Good conduct,” he said, as he put foot on his
galley’s deck, “overcomes ill fortune. I promised the Pope to be at
Rome before Pentecost, and I will keep my word.” If fortune had not
favoured him, however, it is doubtful if he would have succeeded in
running the gauntlet through the sixty Sicilian galleys, manned with
the practised mariners of Pisa, Naples, and Amalfi, that waited to
pounce, like hawk on sparrow, upon his feeble armament.
Independently of this formidable squadron, the entrance of the port
of Ostia was encumbered, by Mainfroy’s order, with beams and huge
stones, against which the French ships were expected inevitably to
shatter themselves. Altogether, the marine preparations were so
formidable, they were proclaimed with such ostentation, and
Mainfroy appeared so convinced of their efficacy, that at Rome the
partisans of Charles and the Pope lost courage. The decisive moment
arrived, and no fleet appeared; when suddenly a rumour spread that
Charles was shipwrecked and drowned. The Ghibellines, or
imperialists, hailed the report with delight, the Guelfs with terror.
Friends and enemies alike believed the fatal intelligence, when at
break of day, on the eve of Pentecost, a boat, containing ten men,
entered the Tiber. Amongst these ten men was Charles of Anjou. He
owed his safety to his peril; deliverance had grown out of impending
destruction. A violent storm had had a double result: Mainfroy’s