Victoria's Year: English Literature and Culture, 1837-1838. by Richard L. SteinReview by: Carl DawsonNineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 43, No. 3 (Dec., 1988), pp. 392-394Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3044899 .

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Reviews

R ICHARD L. STEIN, Victoria's Year: English Literature and Culture, 1837-1838. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. Pp. xiv + 314. $32.50.

Richard Stein's study is a rich descriptive analysis of what he calls "Victoria's Year" but what is more accurately-as he makes clear-the era of Victoria's accession, from 1836 to 1839. Stein arranges his book both chronologically and topically. His "Prologue- 1836" and his "Epilogue-1839" emphasize historical progression. The main section of the book, "Victoria's Year-1837-1838," includes "The Golden Year," "Under the Volcano," "The Stolen Child," and "How to Observe," and in these chapters the emphasis is thematic, moving across the focus years with forays backward and beyond. There is no reason why the two approaches should not complement each other. Indeed they do, although sometimes the material seems to bulge, as with the accounts of Darwin's Beagle journey or Harriet Martineau in American prisons. Yet even when far from Victoria's year or Victoria's England, Stein's dis- cussions make good internal sense and add dramatically to a sense of the age.

Victoria's Year concentrates on ways of seeing. Stein speaks of "sur- veying" his materials, and the materials are the known and unknown, the distinguished and undistinguished writing of the era. To survey the "lit- erature" (Stein confronts problems of definition) is to ask about discon- tinuities as well as "interconnections," and Stein refuses to impose an artificial unity or clarity on a subject that requires subtle and, to use his own word, "provisional" looking. What he says of one topic applies to the book as a whole: "Nor do I intend my own exploration... to suggest some clear, stable, final structure of meaning" (p. 55). The method of the book, drawn with discrimination from Foucault and other recent theo- rists, is a kind of archeological exploration of literary and cultural cross sections at the time.

Stein begins his analysis with a brilliant commentary on mapmaking, with its implications for Londoners' sense of their city on the eve of Vic- toria's reign. Like the chapters that follow, "The New Map of London"

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REVIEWS 393

considers issues of epistemology, speculating about the lack of new maps in the 1830s while asking questions, as if from the vantage point of con- temporaries, about "knowing" a city or "surveying" a topic. One corollary of the focus on London is that, while Stein will later follow Martineau to America and Darwin to the Galapagos, London as a "provisional" city serves for Britain as a whole. Victoria's Year makes few excursions to the universities, or to Edinburgh or Dublin, or to other places of literary activity.

Probably any study, which looks at a wide swath of literary history and measures the literature in terms of the age as a whole, has to work by a ruthless synecdoche. Stein makes his choices openly and adroitly. He argues that Victoria's Year cannot be an exhaustive survey, that it has to remain an interpretive statement about a complex and rewarding topic. Even "topic" is not quite the right word, for the study of "Victoria's Year" is also a study of historical understanding and the book in process. It is as self-conscious as the writings of Tennyson, Pugin, Carlyle, and of the many authors whom Stein explores so well. Stein keeps us aware of what, quoting E. H. Gombrich, he emphasizes as "the beholder's share."

Stein speaks of "literature and culture," by which he means literature in historical context and above all, perhaps, in relation to the visual arts. (The book includes many clear and useful illustrations.) He interprets unknown artists like John Orlando Parry, whose watercolor of a London scene Stein describes with uncanny acuity, along with more substantial artists, like Turner, though he limits his remarks on some of the other arts, including literary arts. He has brief commentaries on contemporary drama, but little on theater conditions, reviews, or the relations, say, be- tween set design and other visual arts. He also chooses not to introduce topics such as contemporary religious works (probably the most prolific "literature" of the time), classical and other academic studies, dictionaries, and other potential materials. But the emphasis here should be on the wealth of Stein's materials and the depth of his understanding. He writes extensively about magazines, newspapers, minor fiction, memoirs, public speeches, scientific papers, illustrations, poetry, popular history, even guide books.

Victoria's Year offers its readers an informed sense of what was going on, what it might have felt like, in that era of great change, to read and write and think. Stein shows throughout how historical conditions bear on the interpretation of any artistic production. This is why his reading of Carlyle's French Revolution, for example, is so convincing. Without ad- dressing Chartism and other contemporary political conditions directly, Stein appreciates Carlyle's passionate vision in terms of contemporary events. Similarly with Tennyson on "The Golden Year" or with Pugin on

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394 NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE

contemporary architecture, or with Ainsworth, Bulwer, Mrs. S. C. Hall, and Dickens on "the stolen child." In his discussion of Dickens and Cruik- shank Stein refers more frequently than elsewhere to modern critics, but even here his independent probing and his awareness of Dickens in re- lation to contemporary journalism and literary themes make for fasci- nating reading.

Apart from Stein's historical sense and his informed insights, there is a further reason for his writing success. This is a book characterized by questioning. It seems to have been conceived in an interrogative mode. Stein asks a series of exhaustive questions about his topic-again both in and out of historical limits. Darwin, for example, he follows to South America and to the Galapagos, but he also appreciates Darwin in relation to contemporary assumptions, prejudices, myopia. Then again, he sees a connection between Darwin's response to South American Indians and Dickens's portrait of Fagin as well as articles in the Times on London's economic and social outcasts. Stein's questioning often turns to matters of science and technology, about which he is especially enlightening. His conclusion, about new angles of vision, new ways of observing a changing world, includes a commentary on Fox Talbot's "sun pictures," made known to the public in 1839.

Victoria's Year raises complex questions about early Victorian culture and about the nature of historical inquiry; it blends a thorough immer- sion in primary materials with a sophisticated understanding of both modern scholarship and modern literary theory. Richard Stein should be complimented, not only for his intellectual rigor but also for his personal engagement, which makes his book as readable as it is enlightening.

CARL DAWSON University of New Hampshire

S. L . V A R N A D O. Haunted Presence: The Nu- minous in Gothic Fiction. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1987. Pp. xii + 160. $19.95.

Haunted Presence is essentially a study in the psy- chology of supernatural fiction, invoking Rudolf Otto's concept of the numinous as described in Das Heilige (1917; tr. as The Idea of the Holy by John W. Harvey, 1924). Varnado also gives some attention to C. G. Jung's archetypes and Mircea Eliade's contrast of sacred versus profane.

Otto's system, an outgrowth of Schleiermacher's philosophy of relig- ion, postulated that a universal psychological phenomenon underlay re-

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