Abstract
On 20 June 1897 Britain and its colonies hailed in enthusiastic terms the 60th anniversary of Queen Victoria’s reign, better known as the ‘Diamond Jubilee’. Thousands of supporting subjects, journalists from across the world, and almost all the ministers of the British Empire attended its huge military procession. Queen Victoria sat in her carriage wearing her black mourning dress. A special service was held at St Paul’s Cathedral and trees were planted to celebrate the festival (at Henley-on-Thames 60 oaks were set in order in the shape of a Victoria Cross). Rudyard Kipling composed a poem entitled ‘Recessional’, which replaced ‘The White Man’s Burden’, the one he had previously intended to use. In ‘Recessional’, strangely enough for a celebratory poem, a feeling of pride is associated with a sense of immanent crisis haunting the empire. Written only five years after the publication of Max Nordau’s debated Degeneration (1892), which connected modernity and urbanisation in Western Europe (in particular in France) with bodily and moral decay, ‘Recessional’ suggests that fin-de-siècle capitalist expansion — of which the British Empire was one of the most representative expressions — was menaced by ‘wild tongues’ and aggressive ‘lesser breeds’. Kipling gave voice to a widespread feeling that progress and advance were counterbalanced by regression.
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Notes
Rudyard Kipling, ‘Recessional’, in Empire Writing: An Anthology of Colonial Literature 1870–1918, ed. Elleke Boehmer (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 272. For Stephen Arata, the Diamond Jubilee ‘served inadvertently to underscore the frailty of the 78-year-old monarch, whose increasing debility could be taken to stand for that of the empire as a whole’. The ‘austerely elegiac tone’ in ‘Recessional’ captured Kipling’s ‘firm commitment to the ideology of the empire, but also his deep sense of historical belatedness’. ‘1897’, in A Companion to Victorian Literature & Culture, ed. Herbert F. Tucker (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), p. 53.
Sir Robert Ensor, England 1870–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), p. 304. As far as foreign politics is concerned, the 1880s were an unsettling period, begun with the 1879 victory of the Zulu and the massacre of the British mission in Kabul, followed by the defeat of the British forces at Majuba Hill in 1881 by the Transvaal Boers (who regained their independence) and the killing of General Gordon in Khartoum in January 1885.
‘The basic conservatism of Gladstone’s Home Rule policy was not appreciated at the time; he was […] a social conservative but a liberal imperialist. From the first, Gladstone defended Home Rule on imperial grounds and insisted that there was no incompatibility between Imperial unity and a Dublin Parliament’. Deirdre McMahon, ‘Ireland, Empire, and the Commonwealth’, in Ireland and the British Empire, ed. Kevin Kenny (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 186.
Patrick O’ Farrell, Ireland’s English Question: Anglo-Irish Relations 1534–1970 (London: B. T. Batsford Ltd. 1971), p. 14.
Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography, eds. Michael Sadleir and Frederick Page, Introduction and Notes by P. D. Edwards (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 62, 65. Further quotations will be from this edition. For Owen Dudley Edwards, ‘Anthony Trollope’s connection with Ireland is unique among the British major creative writers of the nineteenth century. For all of the many differences of their responses to Ireland, Trollope has one quality lacking in the rest of them. Britain made them. Everyone of them saw Ireland as outsiders. Trollope did not. His view of Ireland from first to last was that of a participant: Ireland made him’.
Owen Dudley Edwards, ‘Anthony Trollope, the Irish Writer’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 38.1 (June 1983), p. 1.
See Karen Faulkner, ‘Anthony Trollope’s Apprenticeship’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 38.2 (Sept. 1893), pp. 161–88.
Anthony Trollope, The Landleaguers, ed. Mary Hamer (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 412. Further references will be from this edition, with pages parenthetically given. According to Barbara Arnett Melchiori, ‘Trollope’s orthodoxy can be traced not only in the rewards he distributed (a bride for Frank, a bullet for Florian) but in the very names he gives these characters. Florian, fussy and foreign for the Roman Catholic 10-year-old who lied to his family and Frank, a name which speaks for itself, for his Protestant anti-leaguing brother’. Ferrorism in the Late Victorian Novel (London: Croom Helm, 1985), p. 85. Given Trollope’s ‘locale knowledge’ of Ireland, Barbara Arnett Melchiori considers The Landleaguers as a partial failure: ‘had he looked as closely at Irish economics as he did at the English he might even have made a contribution […] to the solution of the Irish question’ (p. 87).
Robert Tracy, Trollope’s Later Novels (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1978), p. 324. For R. C. Terry, The Landleaguers has basically two faults: ‘Whereas in The Macdermots Trollope was stirred by the ruins of the old house to create a fiction which embodied certain truths about the country, in The Landleaguers he was crusading against law reform agitation, and made up a story to fit his thesis. He broke his cardinal rule, writing not because he had a story to tell, but because he had to tell a story’. Anthony Trollope: The Artist in Hiding (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1977), p. 192.
‘Trollope portrays a mad world where traditional values are turned upside down. With the Phoenix Park and Joyce Muders, happening even as he writes, Trollope is in the midst of a world gone mad, of alienating politics and domestic disorder’. R. C. Terry, ‘The Landleaguers’, in Oxford Reader’s Companion to Trollope, ed. R. C. Terry (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 301. In Trollope’s Irish novels (most notably in The Landleaguers) ‘[there] is a prevalent atmosphere of violence and savagery, which is very different from the atmosphere of the English novels. Violence and savagery do occur in the latter novels, but they are shocking aberrations, out of tune with a general sense of order and civilization. In Trollope’s Ireland they are the norm’.
Robert Tracy, ‘“The Unnatural Ruin”: Trollope and Nineteenth-Century Irish Fiction’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 37.3 (Dec. 1982), p. 360.
‘The inconsistencies in “The State of Ireland” indicate Trollope’s uncertainties about the issues he was raising, as his wish for repressive measures struggled with his genuine liking for the Irish and his awareness of the harsh conditions under which they lived. These uncertainties are equally at work in The Landleaguers itself, as Trollope tries to embody his message about Ireland in a plot. Both essay and novel equivocate’. Robert Tracy, ‘Instant Replay: Trollope’s The Landleaguers’, Eire-Ireland, 15.2 (1980), p. 44.
While the outcome of his plots nearly always support the prevailing ethos of the times, between his beginnings and endings his women live lives and say things which are remarkable for a man of his time to have articulated’. Margaret Marwick, Trollope and Women (London and Ohio: The Hambledon Press, 1997), p. vii. See also Jane Nardin’s gender-oriented analysis in He Knew She Was Right: The Independent Women in the Novels of Anthony Trollope. Ad Feminam (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989). For her, ‘[in] considering Trollope’s attitudes toward women, we must also remember that ambivalence and complexity characterize his moral vision and the fictional structures in which that vision is embodied’ (p. 1).
Anthony Trollope, ‘On the Higher Education of Women’, in Four Lectures, ed. Morris L. Parrish (London: Constable, 1938), p. 71, pp. 74–5. In his essay ‘New York’, included in the collection North America (1862), Trollope defines the manners of American feminists as ‘odious’, and he compares his feelings for these women with those produced by the ‘close vicinity of an unclean animal’. ‘New York’, in North America (Charleston: Bibliobazaar, 2006), pp. 223, 225. John Halperin writes that ‘[on] questions of the day such as the status of women and the rights of Jews, Trollope was unflinchingly reactionary: he hated the new feminism and shared many of the usual prejudices against Jews’.
John Halperin, Trollope and Politics: A Study of the Pallisers and Others (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1977), p. 22.
James Pope-Hennessy notices that ‘[there] is a certain symmetry and a species of fulfillment in the fact that Anthony Trollope’s last novel was, like his first one, on a purely Irish theme’. Anthony Trollope (London: Phoenix Press, 2001), p. 387. For Terry Bareham ‘[in] both his first and last novels Trollope weaves patterns around themes which adumbrate attitudes drawn from experience of a country he had long loved, to which he felt he owed a great debt, and the reality of those tragedy he grasped with more assurance than has been hitherto recognized’. ‘First and Last: Towards a Re-Appraisal of Trollope’s The Macdermots of Ballycloran and The Landleaguers’, Durham University Journal, 47 (1986), p. 317.
Trollope, An Autobiography, pp. 226–7, 256–7, my italics. In a letter to A. P. Watt dated 30 January 1884 in which he deals with An Autobiography, Collins writes an indirect reply to Trollope’s doubts on his writing method: ‘The first part [of An Autobiography] I thought very interesting — but when he sits in judgment on his own novels and on other people’s novels he tell me what I don’t want to know.’ Qtd. in Catherine Peters, The King of Inventors: A Life of Wilkie Collins (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), p. 393. As for Trollope, he considered Collins ‘an incarnate gale of wind. He blew off my hat; he turned my umbrella inside out. Joking apart, as good and staunch a friend as ever lived’. Anthony Trollope: Interviews and Recollections, ed. R. C. Terry (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987), p. 127.
Graham Law and Andrew Maunder, Wilkie Collins: A Literary Life (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2008), p. 179. Collins’s ‘most punishing schedule was undoubtedly in 1886, when he had to complete […] The Evil Genius for Tillotson, plus the stage version, as well as to compose from scratch two final sketches in the “Victims of Circumstances” series for the Boston’s Youth Companion, The Guilty River for Arrowsmith’s Christmas Annual, and “An Old Maid’s Husband” for the Christmas Number of The Spirit of the Times in New York’ (p. 178).
Despite the fact that many critics agree that lack of inspiration, precarious health and increasing dependence on laudanum account for the general decline in the quality of Collins’s late novels, this process ‘is much less relentless than is often assumed’. Jenny Bourne Taylor, In The Secret Theatre of Home: Wilkie Collins, Sensation Narrative, and Nineteenth-century Psychology (London and New York: Routledge, 1988), p. 209. For Nicholas Rance, ‘[a] distressing feature of the later fiction is a diminution in irony. The basis of Collins’s irony had been to play off the orthodox perception of conventions […] as being ordained in perpetuity against his own perception of them as historically relative and thereby transient’. Wilkie Collins and Other Sensation Novelists: Walking the Moral Hospital (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991), pp. 136–7.
See Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Tiction and Film (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1978).
Wilkie Collins, Blind Love, eds. Maria K. Bachman and Don Richard Cox (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2004), p. 62. All further references will be from this edition. This was not the first time Collins used this kind of ‘justificatory’ preface. In introducing Man and Wife (1870), he admitted that ‘[the] story here offered to the reader differs in one respect from the stories which have preceded it by the same hand. This time the fiction is founded on facts’. Man and Wife (New York: Dover, 1983), p. 5. Like The Law and the Lady, Man and Wife was about the inequalities and inadequacies of Irish and Scottish marriage laws. According to Andrew Mangham, ‘[the] serialization of nineteenth-century fiction […] allowed novelists like Collins to respond to important contemporary events. Real crimes, in particular, were a frequent source of inspiration for popular novelists’. ‘Introduction’, in Wilkie Collins. Interdisciplinary Essays, ed. Andrew Mangham (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007), p. 2.
Thomas Carlyle, Chartism (New York: Winley and Putnam, 1847), pp. 324–5. In dividing the Celtic races into three stocks (The Caledonian, The Welsh and the Irish), Robert Knox’s The Races of Men (1850) connects this anthropological problem to a political issue: ‘The really momentous question for England as a nation, is the presence of three sections of the Celtic race still on her soil […] and how to dispose of them.’ The Races of Men, A Tragment (London: Henry Renshaw, 1850), p. 378, my italics. Knox appeals to the ‘Saxon men of all countries’ in attributing the ‘Celtic character’ the following traits: ‘Furious fanaticism’, a love of ‘war and disorder’ and ‘a hatred for order and patient industry’.
‘The progress of the Collins heroine from novel to novel suggests that Collins became increasingly intrigued by the possibilities of his female characters and, at the same time, he seemed to lose interest in his male characters. Collins seems to have admired women and wished to promote them to heroic status -or at least to centrality since some of his best women are villains’. Kathleen O’ Fallon, ‘Breaking the Laws about Ladies: Wilkie Collins’s Questioning of Gender Roles’, in Wilkie Collins to the Forefront: Some Reassessments, eds. Nelson Smith and R. C. Terry (New York: AMS Press, 1995), p. 229.
In Pauline Nestor’s view, ‘an extraordinary public debate raged over women’s capacities for friendship and communal activity’. Female Friendships and Communities: Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), p. 7. The debate raged in particular over the role of unmarried women.
Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994), pp. 73–4.
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© 2012 Saverio Tomaiuolo
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Tomaiuolo, S. (2012). Time Changes: Anthony Trollope’s The Landleaguers and Wilkie Collins’s Blind Love . In: Victorian Unfinished Novels. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137008183_5
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