Teaching & Learning Guide for: Victorian Life Writing

© 2007 The AuthorJournal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Literature Compass Teaching & Learning Guide, Literature Compass 4/5 (2007): 1504–1508, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2007.00490.x

Blackwell Publishing LtdOxford, UKLICOLiterature Compass1741-4113© 2007 The Author Journal Compilation49010.1111/j.1741-4113.2007.00490.xAugust 2007001504???1508???Original ArticlesLiterature Compass Teaching Guide

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Victorian Life Writing

Valerie SandersUniversity of Hull

Literature Compass 1/1 (2003–4), 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2004.00113.x

Author’s Introduction

The Victorian period was one of the great ages for life-writing. Thoughtraditionally renowned for its monumental ‘lives and letters’, mainly of great men,this was also a time of self-conscious anxiety about the genre. Critics andpractitioners alike were unsure who should be writing autobiography, andwhether its inherent assertiveness ruled out all but public men as appropriatesubjects. It was also a period of experimentation in the different genres oflife-writing – whether autobiography, journals, letters, autobiographical novels,and narratives of lives combined with extracts from correspondence and diaries.Victorian life-writing therefore provides rich and complex insights into therelationship between narrative, identity, and the definition of the self. Recentadvances in criticism have highlighted the more radical and non-canonical aspectsof life-writing. Already a latecomer to the literary-critical tradition (life-writingwas for a long time the ‘poor relation’ of critical theory), auto/biography stressesthe hidden and silent as much as the mainstream and vocal. For that reason, studyof Victorian life-writing appeals to those with an interest in gender issues,postcolonialism, ethnicity, working-class culture, the history of religion, andfamily and childhood studies – to name but a few of the fields with which thegenre has a natural connection.

Author Recommends

A good place to start is the two canonical texts for Victorian life-writing: GeorgeP. Landow’s edited collection, Approaches to Victorian Autobiography (Athens, OH:Ohio University Press, 1979) and Avrom Fleishman’s Figures of Autobiography:The Language of Self-Writing in Victorian and Modern England (Berkeley and LosAngeles, CA: University of California Press, 1983). These two re-ignited interestin Victorian life-writing and in effect opened the debate about extending thecanon, though both focus on the firmly canonical Ruskin and Newman, amongothers.

By contrast, David Amigoni’s recently edited collection of essays, Life-Writingand Victorian Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate 2006) shows how far the canon hasexploded and expanded: it begins with a useful overview of the relationship


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between lives, life-writing, and literary genres, while subsequent chapters bydifferent authors focus on a particular individual or family and their culturalinteraction with the tensions of life-writing.

As this volume is fairly male-dominated, readers with an interest in women’slife-writing might prefer to start with Linda Peterson’s chapter, ‘Women Writersand Self-Writing’ in Women and Literature in Britain 1800–1900, ed. JoanneShattock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 209–230. This examinesthe shift from the eighteenth-century tradition of the chroniques scandaleuses tothe professional artist’s life, domestic memoir, and spiritual autobiography. MaryJean Corbett’s Representing Femininity: Middle-Class Subjectivity in Victorian andEdwardian Women’s Autobiographies (New York, NY: Oxford University Press,1992) begins with material on Wordsworth and Carlyle, but ‘aims to contest theboundaries of genre, gender, and the autobiographical tradition by piecingtogether a partial history of middle-class women’s subjectivities in the nineteenthand early twentieth centuries’ (3).

Corbett is particularly interested in the life-writing of actresses and suffragettesas well as Martineau and Oliphant, the first two women autobiographers to bewelcomed into the canon in the 1980s and 90s.

Laura Marcus’s Auto/biographical Discourses, Theory, Criticism, Practice (Manchesterand New York, NY: Manchester University Press, 1994) revises and updates thetheoretical approaches to the study of life-writing, stressing both the genre’shybrid qualities, and its inherent instability: in her view, it ‘comes into being asa category to be questioned’ (37). Another of her fruitful suggestions is thatautobiography functions as a ‘site of struggle’ (9), an idea that can be applied toaesthetic or ideological issues. Her book is divided between specific textualexamples (such as the debate about autobiography in Victorian periodicals), andan overview of developments in critical approaches to life-writing. Her secondchapter includes material on Leslie Stephen, who is also the first subject of TrevLynn Broughton’s Men of Letters, Writing Lives: Masculinity and Literary Auto/biography in the Late Victorian Period (London: Routledge, 1999) – her other beingFroude’s controversial Life of Carlyle.

With the advent of gender studies and masculinities, there is now a return tomale forms of life-writing, of which Martin A. Danahay’s A Community of One:Masculine Autobiography and Autonomy in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Albany, NY:State University of New York Press, 1993) is a good example. Danahay arguesthat nineteenth-century male autobiographers present themselves as ‘auto-nomous individuals’ free of the constraints of social and familial contexts, thusemphasizing the autonomy of the self at the expense of family and community.

Online Materials

My impression is that Victorian life-writing is currently better served by booksthan by online resources. There seem to be few general Web sites other thanUniversity module outlines and reading lists; for specific authors, on the otherhand, there are too many to list here. So the only site I’d recommend is TheVictorian Web: http://www.victorianweb.org/genre/autobioov.html

This Web site has a section called ‘Autobiography Overview’, which beginswith an essay, ‘Autobiography, Autobiographicality and Self-Representation’, byGeorge P. Landow. There are sections on other aspects of Victorian autobiography,

http://www.victorianweb.org/genre/autobioov.html

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including ‘Childhood as a Personal Myth’, autobiography in Dickens andElizabeth Barrett Browning, and a list of ‘Suggested Readings’. Each section isquite short, but summarizes the core issues succinctly.

Sample Syllabus

This sample syllabus takes students through the landmarks of Victorian life-writing, and demonstrates the development of a counter-culture away from themainstream ‘classic male life’ (if there ever was such a thing) – culminating inthe paired diaries of Arthur Munby (civil servant) and Hannah Cullwick(servant). Numerous other examples could have been chosen, but for those newto the genre, this is a fairly classic syllabus. One week only could be spent onthe ‘classic male texts’ if students are more interested in pursuing other areas.

Opening SessionOpen debate about the definition of Victorian ‘life-writing’ and its many varieties;differences between autobiography, autobiographical fiction, diary, letters,biography, collective biography, and memoir; the class could discuss samples ofselected types, such as David Copperfield, Father and Son, Ruskin’s Praeterita, andGaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë. Alternatively, why not just begin with Stave Twoof Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843), in which the First Spirit takes Scroogeback through his childhood and youth? This is a pretty unique type of life-writing, with Scrooge ‘laughing and crying’ as his childhood and youth are revealedto him in a series of flashbacks (a Victorian version of ‘This is Your Life?’). Thedual emotions are important to note at this stage and will prompt subsequentdiscussions of sentimentality and writing for comic effect later in the course.

Week 2Critical landmarks: discussion of important stages in the evolution of criticalapproaches to life-writing, including classics such as Georges Gusdorf ’s ‘Condi-tions and Limits of Autobiography’, in Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Crit-ical, ed. James Olney (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 28–47;Philippe Lejeune’s ‘The Autobiographical Pact’, in On Autobiography, ed. PaulJohn Eakin, trans. Katherine Leary (original essay 1973; Minneapolis: Universityof Minnesota Press, 1989), 3–30; and Paul De Man’s ‘Autobiography as De-Facement’, Modern Language Notes 94 (1979): 919–30. This will provide a criticalframework for the rest of the course.

Weeks 3–4Extracts from the ‘male classics’ of Victorian life-writing: J. S. Mill’s Autobiography(1873), Ruskin’s Praeterita (1885–89), and Newman’s Apologia pro Vita Sua(1864). What do they think is important and what do they miss out? How openor otherwise are they about their family and personal lives? Are these essentially‘lives of the mind’? How self-aware are they of autobiographical structures? Arethere already signs that the ‘classic male life’ is fissured and unconventional? Anoption here would be to spend the first week focusing on male childhoods, andthe second on career trajectories. Perhaps use Martin Danahay’s theory of the‘autonomous individual’ (see above) to provide a critical framework here: how isthe ‘Other’ (parents, Harriet Taylor) treated in these texts?


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Weeks 5–6Victorian women’s autobiography: Harriet Martineau’s Autobiography (1877) andMargaret Oliphant’s Autobiography (1899): in many ways these are completelyunalike, Martineau’s being ordered around the idea of steady mental growth andpublic recognition, while Oliphant’s is deeply emotional and disordered. Can wetherefore generalize about ‘women’s autobiography’? What impact did they haveon Victorian theories of life-writing? Students might like to reconsider Jane Eyreas an ‘autobiography’ alongside these and compare scenes of outright rebellion.The way each text handles time and chronology is also fascinating: Martineau’sarranged to highlight stages of philosophical development, while Oliphant’sswitches back and forth in a series of ‘flashbacks’ to her happier youth as hersurviving two sons die ‘in the text’, interrupting her story.

Week 7Black women’s autobiography: how does Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in ManyLands (1857) differ from the Martineau and Oliphant autobiographies? What newissues and genre influences are introduced by a Caribbean/travelogue perspective?Another key text would be Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave-Girl(1861). How representative and how individual are these texts? Do these authorssee themselves as representing their race as well as their class and sex?

Week 8Working-class autobiography: Possible texts here could be John Burnett’s Useful Toil(Allen Lane, 1974, Penguin reprint); Carolyn Steedman’s edition of JohnPearman’s The Radical Soldier’s Tale (Routledge, 1988) and the mini oralbiographies in Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor (1861–62)(e.g., the Water-Cress Seller). There is also a new Broadview edition of FactoryLives (2007) edited by James R. Simmons, with an introduction by JaniceCarlisle. This contains four substantial autobiographical texts (three male, onefemale) from the mid-nineteenth century, with supportive materials. SamuelBamford’s Passages in the Life of a Radical (1839–42; 1844) and Early Days(1847–48) are further options. Students should also read Regenia Gagnier’sSubjectivities: A History of Self-Representation in Britain 1832–1910 (OxfordUniversity Press, 1991).

Week 9Biography: Victorian Scandal: focus on two scandals emerging from Victorianlife-writing: Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857) (the Branwell Brontë/LadyScott adultery scandal), and Froude’s allegations of impotence in his Life of Carlyle(1884). See Trev Broughton’s ‘Impotence, Biography, and the Froude-CarlyleControversy: ‘Revelations on Ticklish Topics’, Journal of the History of Sexuality,7.4 (Apr. 1997): 502–36 (in addition to her Men of Letters cited above). Thebiographies of the Benson family written about and by each other, especiallyE. F. Benson’s Our Family Affairs 1867–1896 (London: Cassell, 1920) reveal thedomestic unhappiness of the family of Gladstone’s Archbishop of Canterbury,Edward White Benson, whose children and wife were all to some extenthomosexual or lesbian. Another option would be Edmund Gosse’s Father andSon (1907) in which the son’s critical stance towards his father is uneasy andcomplex in its mixture of comedy, pity, shame, and resentment.

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Week 10Diaries: Arthur Munby’s and Hannah Cullwick’s relationship (they were secretlymarried, but lived as master and servant) and diaries, Munby: Man of Two Worlds:The Life and Diaries of Arthur Munby, ed. Derek Hudson ( John Murray, 1972),and The Diaries of Hannah Cullwick: Victorian Maidservant, ed. Liz Stanley (NewBrunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1984): issues of gender and classidentity; the idealization of the working woman; the two diaries compared. Halfthe class could read one diary and half the other and engage in a debate aboutthe social and sexual fantasies adopted by each diarist. It would also besensible to leave time for an overview debate about the key issues of Victorianlife-writing which have emerged from this module, future directions forresearch, and current critical developments.

Focus Questions

1. To what extent does Victorian autobiography tell an individual success story?Discuss with reference to two or three contrasting examples.2. ‘All life writing is time writing’ ( Jens Brockmeier). Examine the way in whichVictorian life-writers handle the interplay of narrative, memory, and time.3. To what extent do you agree with the view that Victorian life-writing was ‘aform of communication that appeared intimate and confessional, but which wasin fact distant and controlled’ (Donna Loftus)?4. ‘Bamford was an autobiographer who did not write an autobiography’ (MartinHewitt). If autobiography is unshaped and uninterpreted, what alternativepurposes does it have in narrating a life to the reader?5. ‘Victorian life-writing is essentially experimental, unstable, and unpredictable.’How helpful is this comment in helping you to understand the genre?

Documents

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Victorian Life Writing