American dime novels, first published under that term in 1860, built on earlier movements in American literary traditions. Critics for over a century have recognised that this popular form emphasised the same sense of literary nationalism strongly at play in the nineteenth century when cultural pundits sought to define and assert a properly American character for so-called “serious” publications. This essay expands that understanding by directly grounding the dime novel within the tenets of the 1830s and 1840s Young America movement, as it formed around the New York circle of Evert Duyckinck. Recovering that heritage stresses how Americanness was intrinsically associated with youth, innovation, and promise. It recovers as well another movement behind the growth and popularity of the dime novel: the juvenile tradition of teenage writers that had flourished in Britain and America at the beginning of the nineteenth century. This tradition found a new form in popular fiction as young writers moved into the new markets of the dime industry. In addition to resituating the dime novel within the debate over what made literature American, augmenting literary history through an attention to the role of juvenile writing expands understandings of the changing definition of authorship. Wide-awake youth figured a new mode of authorship – not so much visionary and romantic as pragmatic, productive, capable.
{"title":"Young America: Dime Novels and Juvenile Authorship","authors":"Laurie Langbauer","doi":"10.46911/zcyu5206","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.46911/zcyu5206","url":null,"abstract":"American dime novels, first published under that term in 1860, built on earlier movements in American literary traditions. Critics for over a century have recognised that this popular form emphasised the same sense of literary nationalism strongly at play in the nineteenth century when cultural pundits sought to define and assert a properly American character for so-called “serious” publications. This essay expands that understanding by directly grounding the dime novel within the tenets of the 1830s and 1840s Young America movement, as it formed around the New York circle of Evert Duyckinck. Recovering that heritage stresses how Americanness was intrinsically associated with youth, innovation, and promise. It recovers as well another movement behind the growth and popularity of the dime novel: the juvenile tradition of teenage writers that had flourished in Britain and America at the beginning of the nineteenth century. This tradition found a new form in popular fiction as young writers moved into the new markets of the dime industry. In addition to resituating the dime novel within the debate over what made literature American, augmenting literary history through an attention to the role of juvenile writing expands understandings of the changing definition of authorship. Wide-awake youth figured a new mode of authorship – not so much visionary and romantic as pragmatic, productive, capable.","PeriodicalId":34865,"journal":{"name":"Victorian Popular Fictions","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70654419","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article examines Juana Manso’s Mistérios del Plata, published in Rio de Janeiro in 1852, in the context of what the authors argue was a global mystery novel tradition. Where previous scholars have argued that mid-nineteenth century mysteries novels are a mere subset of the crime literature genre, the authors take a different approach: they point out that these novels were a transnational corpus of texts which incorporated many genres. Outside of Europe, in the Empire of Brazil, Manso adapted the form of the mysteries tradition but extended its parameters. Manso’s novel was different to the European mysteries novel because, unlike her male counterparts Eugene Sue and George W.M. Reynolds, she told a tale of political refugees who fled from Juan Rosas’s Argentina into Uruguay and then Brazil. The authors contend that a consideration of Latin American mysteries novel, with a case study on Manso’s text, is one means through which scholars of Victorian popular fiction can begin conversations with researchers from outside the Anglosphere and become truly “global.”
这篇文章考察了胡安娜·曼索(Juana Manso)于1852年在巴西里约热内卢出版的《mistimrios del Plata》，在作者认为是全球神秘小说传统的背景下。先前的学者认为19世纪中期的推理小说仅仅是犯罪文学类型的一个子集，而作者们则采取了不同的方法:他们指出，这些小说是一个跨国文本的语料库，包含了许多类型。在欧洲之外的巴西帝国，曼索采用了神秘传统的形式，但扩展了它的参数。曼索的小说与欧洲的推理小说不同，因为与尤金·苏和乔治·w·m·雷诺兹的男性小说不同，她讲述了一个政治难民的故事，他们从胡安·罗萨斯的阿根廷逃到乌拉圭，然后又逃到巴西。作者认为，考虑拉丁美洲的推理小说，并以曼索的文本为例进行研究，是维多利亚时代通俗小说学者开始与来自英语圈以外的研究人员进行对话的一种方式，并成为真正的“全球”。
{"title":"Juana Manso’s Mistérios del Plata (1852) and a Global “Mysteries” Tradition","authors":"S. Basdeo, Luiz F. A. Guerra","doi":"10.46911/tcwh4587","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.46911/tcwh4587","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines Juana Manso’s Mistérios del Plata, published in Rio de Janeiro in 1852, in the context of what the authors argue was a global mystery novel tradition. Where previous scholars have argued that mid-nineteenth century mysteries novels are a mere subset of the crime literature genre, the authors take a different approach: they point out that these novels were a transnational corpus of texts which incorporated many genres. Outside of Europe, in the Empire of Brazil, Manso adapted the form of the mysteries tradition but extended its parameters. Manso’s novel was different to the European mysteries novel because, unlike her male counterparts Eugene Sue and George W.M. Reynolds, she told a tale of political refugees who fled from Juan Rosas’s Argentina into Uruguay and then Brazil. The authors contend that a consideration of Latin American mysteries novel, with a case study on Manso’s text, is one means through which scholars of Victorian popular fiction can begin conversations with researchers from outside the Anglosphere and become truly “global.”","PeriodicalId":34865,"journal":{"name":"Victorian Popular Fictions","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70654526","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s responses in her earliest novels to the mid-century city mysteries genre – an internationally popular form of penny fiction – allowed her to develop the detective genre in important ways. While attention to Braddon’s early work usually considers how it helped to establish the “sensation” fiction of the 1860s, this article examines how Braddon’s embrace of the earlier urban mysteries narrative both advanced the evolution of the Mysteries genre in the second half of the century and brought its maverick, socially marginal detective characters to new audiences. I argue that because of their roots in the penny Mysteries, Braddon’s detective characters act as agents of social equity rather than figures of surveillance, and they work to challenge many of the social hierarchies, stereotypes, and prejudices that form and undermine “civilised life,” often by magically dismantling or overcoming them.
{"title":"“The Magician of Civilised Life”: The Literary Detective in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Early Penny Fiction","authors":"Sara Hackenberg","doi":"10.46911/lfge1487","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.46911/lfge1487","url":null,"abstract":"Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s responses in her earliest novels to the mid-century city mysteries genre – an internationally popular form of penny fiction – allowed her to develop the detective genre in important ways. While attention to Braddon’s early work usually considers how it helped to establish the “sensation” fiction of the 1860s, this article examines how Braddon’s embrace of the earlier urban mysteries narrative both advanced the evolution of the Mysteries genre in the second half of the century and brought its maverick, socially marginal detective characters to new audiences. I argue that because of their roots in the penny Mysteries, Braddon’s detective characters act as agents of social equity rather than figures of surveillance, and they work to challenge many of the social hierarchies, stereotypes, and prejudices that form and undermine “civilised life,” often by magically dismantling or overcoming them.","PeriodicalId":34865,"journal":{"name":"Victorian Popular Fictions","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70654082","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Review of Jessica Valdez, Plotting the News in the Victorian Novel","authors":"Victoria Clarke","doi":"10.46911/mvtw4905","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.46911/mvtw4905","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":34865,"journal":{"name":"Victorian Popular Fictions","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70654152","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
First published serially 1845–7, James Malcolm Rymer’s Varney the Vampire taps into the emergent class tensions of its period. The novel’s running focus on marriage reads as a critical response to recent Sanitation Acts and, specifically, social reformers’ preoccupation with rewriting working-class domestic plots and spaces. However, in Varney, such domestic plots remain elusive as the eponymous vampire repeatedly fails to find true love (“companionate marriage”) as a cure for his monstrous condition; instead, time and again, Varney’s romantic adventures uncover the real monsters to be the middle- and upper-class humans who seek to profit, vampire-like, by pushing their daughters into mercenary marriages (“kinship marriage”). While, in typical Gothic fashion, Rymer’s penny dreadful imagines how the past informs the present, Varney is also astonishingly forward-looking with its critique of domestic plots haunted by structures of kinship. At the same time, Varney implicitly acknowledges that the working class had its own marriage model – one built upon working wives’ equal economic contribution – and thereby encourages these same readers to question, if not reject, middle-class domestic models as a solution to their social problems.
詹姆斯·马尔科姆·赖默(James Malcolm Rymer)的《吸血鬼瓦尼》(Varney the Vampire)于1845年至1847年首次连载，揭示了那个时代新兴的阶级紧张关系。小说对婚姻的持续关注读起来是对最近的《卫生法案》的一种批判回应，特别是对社会改革者专注于改写工人阶级家庭情节和空间的回应。然而，在《瓦尔尼》中，这样的家庭情节仍然难以捉摸，因为同名吸血鬼一再未能找到真爱(“伴侣婚姻”)来治愈他的怪物状态;相反，一次次地，瓦尼的浪漫冒险揭示了真正的怪物是中上层社会的人类，他们像吸血鬼一样，通过强迫自己的女儿嫁给雇佣兵(“亲属婚姻”)来寻求利益。在典型的哥特风格中，赖默的《可怕的penny》想象了过去是如何影响现在的，而瓦尼对受亲属关系结构困扰的家庭情节的批判也令人惊讶地具有前瞻性。同时，Varney含蓄地承认工人阶级有自己的婚姻模式——一种建立在工作妻子平等的经济贡献之上的婚姻模式——从而鼓励这些读者质疑，如果不是拒绝，中产阶级家庭模式作为解决他们社会问题的方法。
{"title":"Domestic Plots and Class Reform in Varney the Vampire","authors":"Brooke Cameron","doi":"10.46911/vjxp7684","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.46911/vjxp7684","url":null,"abstract":"First published serially 1845–7, James Malcolm Rymer’s Varney the Vampire taps into the emergent class tensions of its period. The novel’s running focus on marriage reads as a critical response to recent Sanitation Acts and, specifically, social reformers’ preoccupation with rewriting working-class domestic plots and spaces. However, in Varney, such domestic plots remain elusive as the eponymous vampire repeatedly fails to find true love (“companionate marriage”) as a cure for his monstrous condition; instead, time and again, Varney’s romantic adventures uncover the real monsters to be the middle- and upper-class humans who seek to profit, vampire-like, by pushing their daughters into mercenary marriages (“kinship marriage”). While, in typical Gothic fashion, Rymer’s penny dreadful imagines how the past informs the present, Varney is also astonishingly forward-looking with its critique of domestic plots haunted by structures of kinship. At the same time, Varney implicitly acknowledges that the working class had its own marriage model – one built upon working wives’ equal economic contribution – and thereby encourages these same readers to question, if not reject, middle-class domestic models as a solution to their social problems.","PeriodicalId":34865,"journal":{"name":"Victorian Popular Fictions","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70654675","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Review of Rob Breton, The Penny Politics of Victorian Popular Fiction","authors":"Nicole C. Dittmer","doi":"10.46911/pozh4404","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.46911/pozh4404","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":34865,"journal":{"name":"Victorian Popular Fictions","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70654226","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Robert L. Mack’s coda, a memoir in miniature, demonstrates why penny fiction should matter to global popular audiences today. Mack recovers an important moment in the history of the metafictional transmedia traditions that penny fiction generated: the 1979 appearance of Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s revolutionary Broadway operetta Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street, a Musical Thriller. With Sweeney Todd’s premiere, the murderous barber got his chance to go global and succeeded terrifically. Drawing upon journalism, archival evidence, and personal experience, Mack reconstructs that moment and considers how myths about Sweeney Todd’s origins have impacted our understanding of the historical past. Namely, since 1979, the greater number of spectators on both sides of the Atlantic appeared to remain convinced that the barber’s murderous history was nothing less than a matter of verified and verifiable historical record. Mack explains how that misapprehension arose and reflects upon his quest for the sources of the legend.
罗伯特·l·麦克(Robert L. Mack)的结尾处是一本袖珍回忆录，展示了为什么廉价小说对今天的全球大众读者来说应该很重要。麦克重现了由廉价小说产生的元虚构跨媒体传统历史上的一个重要时刻:1979年斯蒂芬·桑德海姆和休·惠勒的革命性百老汇轻歌剧《理发师陶德》的出现，《Fleet Street的恶魔理发师》是一部音乐惊悚片。随着《理发师陶德》的首映，杀人狂理发师得到了走向全球的机会，并取得了巨大成功。根据新闻报道、档案证据和个人经历，麦克重构了那个时刻，并思考了关于斯威尼·托德起源的神话是如何影响我们对历史的理解的。也就是说，自1979年以来，大西洋两岸越来越多的观众似乎仍然相信，理发师的杀人历史无非是一个经过核实和可核实的历史记录。麦克解释了这种误解是如何产生的，并反思了他对传说来源的追求。
{"title":"Confronting the ‘Real’ Sweeney Todd: a Personal Journey of Discovery","authors":"R. Mack","doi":"10.46911/ukud3206","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.46911/ukud3206","url":null,"abstract":"Robert L. Mack’s coda, a memoir in miniature, demonstrates why penny fiction should matter to global popular audiences today. Mack recovers an important moment in the history of the metafictional transmedia traditions that penny fiction generated: the 1979 appearance of Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s revolutionary Broadway operetta Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street, a Musical Thriller. With Sweeney Todd’s premiere, the murderous barber got his chance to go global and succeeded terrifically. Drawing upon journalism, archival evidence, and personal experience, Mack reconstructs that moment and considers how myths about Sweeney Todd’s origins have impacted our understanding of the historical past. Namely, since 1979, the greater number of spectators on both sides of the Atlantic appeared to remain convinced that the barber’s murderous history was nothing less than a matter of verified and verifiable historical record. Mack explains how that misapprehension arose and reflects upon his quest for the sources of the legend.","PeriodicalId":34865,"journal":{"name":"Victorian Popular Fictions","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70654608","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article discusses Baz Luhrmann’s 2001 juke-box musical film Moulin Rouge! and its failure to re-think gender despite its clever remix of late-Victorian mass media. After introductions that consider the film’s postmodern mashups of high and low, commonplaces from nineteenth- and twentieth-century popular cultures, the article examines courtesan narratives rooted in two famous novels that the film plays with: La dame aux camélias (1852) by Alexandre Dumas fils and Nana (1880) by Émile Zola. It contrasts them with the lives of real, French celebrity courtesans in order to show the narrative paths of successful powerful women at the fin de siècle that Moulin Rouge! chose not to travel, preferring to endorse, however, ironically, the conservative gender stereotype of women as objects punished for attempting to take charge of their lives and destroyed by consumption in its double sense.
{"title":"Material Girls: Moulin Rouge!’s Neo-Victorian Spectacle and the Real Courtesans of Paris","authors":"Helena Esser","doi":"10.46911/irpl4110","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.46911/irpl4110","url":null,"abstract":"This article discusses Baz Luhrmann’s 2001 juke-box musical film Moulin Rouge! and its failure to re-think gender despite its clever remix of late-Victorian mass media. After introductions that consider the film’s postmodern mashups of high and low, commonplaces from nineteenth- and twentieth-century popular cultures, the article examines courtesan narratives rooted in two famous novels that the film plays with: La dame aux camélias (1852) by Alexandre Dumas fils and Nana (1880) by Émile Zola. It contrasts them with the lives of real, French celebrity courtesans in order to show the narrative paths of successful powerful women at the fin de siècle that Moulin Rouge! chose not to travel, preferring to endorse, however, ironically, the conservative gender stereotype of women as objects punished for attempting to take charge of their lives and destroyed by consumption in its double sense.","PeriodicalId":34865,"journal":{"name":"Victorian Popular Fictions","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-06-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44546765","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In his early twenties, John Maxwell entered the London publishing scene as a scrappy and ambitious Irish immigrant with a strong desire to make a name for himself. What Maxwell lacked in gentility he made up for with his willingness to take risks and flaunt convention. Within a decade he had become one of the leading magazine entrepreneurs of his age. Between 1860 and 1862, a period in which he was frantically launching new periodicals and solidifying his partnership with Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Maxwell regularly appeared in the Court of Chancery as a party to copyright infringement lawsuits, some of which stemmed from his attempts to republish works by contributors to his magazine the Welcome Guest without seeking explicit authorial permission. This essay investigates what these disputes tell us about conceptions of the often vague laws pertaining to reprinting in the periodical press and examines how the outcomes of these cases shaped the development of Maxwell’s publishing business as well as his bourgeoning relationship with Braddon.
{"title":"John Maxwell’s Copyright Disputes: Manufacturing Cheap Fiction in the Welcome Guest and the Shilling Volume Library","authors":"Jennifer Phegley","doi":"10.46911/mqtr7637","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.46911/mqtr7637","url":null,"abstract":"In his early twenties, John Maxwell entered the London publishing scene as a scrappy and ambitious Irish immigrant with a strong desire to make a name for himself. What Maxwell lacked in gentility he made up for with his willingness to take risks and flaunt convention. Within a decade he had become one of the leading magazine entrepreneurs of his age. Between 1860 and 1862, a period in which he was frantically launching new periodicals and solidifying his partnership with Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Maxwell regularly appeared in the Court of Chancery as a party to copyright infringement lawsuits, some of which stemmed from his attempts to republish works by contributors to his magazine the Welcome Guest without seeking explicit authorial permission. This essay investigates what these disputes tell us about conceptions of the often vague laws pertaining to reprinting in the periodical press and examines how the outcomes of these cases shaped the development of Maxwell’s publishing business as well as his bourgeoning relationship with Braddon.","PeriodicalId":34865,"journal":{"name":"Victorian Popular Fictions","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-06-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46503783","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In 1886 appeared a late sensation novel called A Cruel Necessity by Evangeline Smith. Despite favourable reviews, the novel never sold well because of the unreliability of its publisher. It is of interest today because of what it tells us about domestic collaborative writing practices, because of its clear engagement with Milton, and because of its working out of religious debates. Making use of the Smith family diaries now in Dorset History Centre along with printed materials concerning the family, this article continues work first published in 1973 by exploring the novel in two new ways. First, after an introduction, I show how the diaries reveal the novel to be the result of a family collaboration (especially between Evangeline and her sisters). In the most substantial section of the article, I discuss the novel’s engagement with religion, as manifested in the recovery of its heroine’s romantic love and of her faith. I argue that the novel exploits strongly Miltonic religious symbolism and action as well as a great deal of Biblical allusion while portraying the social life and Victorian gentility of the established church in a way familiar from mid-Victorian realism, all the while following many of the conventions of the sensation novel. The theology that governs the novel’s resolution is that of the established Anglican Church, with little if any acceptance of either Calvinist Nonconformity or Anglo-Catholic ritualism which were growing in importance at the time. This is perfectly in accord with the Smith family’s conventional antidisestablishmentarian position, as evidenced by material concerning Evangeline’s brother.
{"title":"Neglected Novelist or Cruel Necessity? The Forgotten Work of a Sensational Sisterhood","authors":"M. Bath","doi":"10.46911/dhrl6389","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.46911/dhrl6389","url":null,"abstract":"In 1886 appeared a late sensation novel called A Cruel Necessity by Evangeline Smith. Despite favourable reviews, the novel never sold well because of the unreliability of its publisher. It is of interest today because of what it tells us about domestic collaborative writing practices, because of its clear engagement with Milton, and because of its working out of religious debates. Making use of the Smith family diaries now in Dorset History Centre along with printed materials concerning the family, this article continues work first published in 1973 by exploring the novel in two new ways. First, after an introduction, I show how the diaries reveal the novel to be the result of a family collaboration (especially between Evangeline and her sisters). In the most substantial section of the article, I discuss the novel’s engagement with religion, as manifested in the recovery of its heroine’s romantic love and of her faith. I argue that the novel exploits strongly Miltonic religious symbolism and action as well as a great deal of Biblical allusion while portraying the social life and Victorian gentility of the established church in a way familiar from mid-Victorian realism, all the while following many of the conventions of the sensation novel. The theology that governs the novel’s resolution is that of the established Anglican Church, with little if any acceptance of either Calvinist Nonconformity or Anglo-Catholic ritualism which were growing in importance at the time. This is perfectly in accord with the Smith family’s conventional antidisestablishmentarian position, as evidenced by material concerning Evangeline’s brother.","PeriodicalId":34865,"journal":{"name":"Victorian Popular Fictions","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-06-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46915724","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：