British and Romantic Victorian Cultures

Victorian Pasts

Course convenor: Dr Clare Pettitt
Module credit value: 20 credits
Teaching Arrangements: 1 two-hour weekly seminar
Assessment: 1 x 4000 word essay

Course Outline:
This course explores the ways in which Victorians managed the development and impact of the many competing views of the past that were emerging in the nineteenth century. Within our own collective memory, the nineteenth century occupies a pivotal place as an age of progress and tradition. The Victorians had a constant, often agonized awareness of their responsibility for creating the future, and also unparalleled access to the past. The problem of multiple pasts and the choice of using or transcending them preoccupied the Victorians at all conceptual levels, from the individual's sense of personal development to the global question of the fate of empires. Which pasts should be abandoned, which cherished as foundational? The course has partly developed out of a five-year Leverhulme-funded cross-disciplinary research project of which Dr Pettitt is a Research Director.

The course is structured broadly chronologically around texts or events that represent or negotiate with a particular material past or a particular view of the past. Through this study students will gain an awareness of the significance of both the actual and the literary past to the emergence of modernity in Britain in the nineteenth century. They will also learn about Victorian culture more widely – encountering ideas of national identity, empire, self-help, religious doubt, Darwinism, and so on. Painting, architecture, and design will be studied alongside literary texts where appropriate. The course assumes no prior knowledge of Victorian literature or culture but students will be expected to engage with these contexts as the course progresses. A course pack will be provided, and further specified reading will be recommended each week.

Much of the material for this course will be provided in the course pack.
In addition, the following full texts will be studied, and students will be asked to provide these for themselves, or to access e-texts:
• Short stories and novellas: Walter Scott, ‘The Highland Widow’; Elizabeth Gaskell, Cousin Phillis; H.G. Wells, The Time Machine
• Novels: Charles Dickens, Hard Times; Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun; H. Rider Haggard, She; Thomas Hardy: The Mayor of Casterbridge; Henry James, The Spoils of Poynton; Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward
• Poetry: Walter Scott, The Lay of the Last Minstrel: A Poem; William Wordsworth, poems from Lyrical Ballads; Arthur Hughes Clough, Amours de Voyages
• Drama: Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
• Art History: Walter Pater, The Renaissance

Please be sure to have read these texts before the course starts.

Seminar programme:
1. Introduction: Modernity and the Past: William Wordsworth, selections from Lyrical Ballads (1798); Walter Scott, The Lay of the Last Minstrel(1805)and ‘The Highland Widow’ (1827).
2. ‘The Olden Times’: William Harrison Ainsworth, The Tower of London (1840), illustrated by George Cruikshank. Pictures by various artists; the Westminster murals competition (1843).
3. Rural Nostalgia: Victorian Wordsworth; Extracts from Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton(1848) and Cousin Phillis (1863).
4. Escaping the Past: Self-Help: Selections from Samuel Smiles, Self-Help (1859); Charles Dickens, Hard Times (1854).
5. Neo-Medievalism: Selections from Carlyle, Past and Present (1843); Pugin, Contrasts (1836); John Ruskin, selections from Stones of Venice (1851-3); Pre-Raphaelite pictures and poetry; early Tennyson.
6. The Classical Past: Arthur Hughes Clough, Amours de Voyage (1858); Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun (1860); paintings by Burne Jones, Leighton and Alma Tadema.
7. Reading Week
8. Old Things: Henry James, The Spoils of Poynton (originally published as The Old Things in 1896); Charles Lamb ‘On Old China’ and extracts from Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit.
9. Re-animating the Renaissance: Robert Browning, Selections from Men and Women (1855) and Dramatis Personae (1864); Walter Pater, The Renaissance (1873).
10. Empires Past and Present: Extracts from Austen Henry Layard, Discoveries Among the Ruins of Ninevah and Babylon (1853); W.H. Stone ‘The Ninevah Bull’ (1851); the Ninevah Court at the Great Exhibition, D.G. Rossetti, ‘The Burden of Ninevah’ (1856); Painting by John Martin, The Fall of Ninevah (1829); H. Rider Haggard, She (1886).
11. Inescapable Pasts: Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886); Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895).
12. The Past as the Future: Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward (1888); H.G. Wells The Time Machine (1895)
Supplementary Bibliography:
This is a broad bibliography of general and theoretical texts. Specific suggestions will be made each week for reading related to particular literary texts.

Michael Alexander, Medievalism: The Middle Ages in Modern England (2007)
Olive Anderson, ‘The Political Uses of History in Mid-Nineteenth Century England’, Past & Present 36 (1967)
Jeffrey A. Auerbach, The Great Exhibition of 1851: A Nation on Display (1999)
M.M. Bakhtin, ‘Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel’ in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (1981)
Stephen Bann, The Clothing of Clio: A Study of the Representation of History in 19th-Century Britain and France (1984)
Stephen Bann, The Inventions of History: Essays on the Representation of the Past (1990)
Stephanie Barczewski, Myth and National Identity in Nineteenth-Century Britain: The Legends of King Arthur and Robin Hood (2000)
John Barrell (ed.), Painting and the Politics of Culture: New Essays on British Art 1700-1850 (1992)
Tim J. Barringer, ‘The South Kensington Museum and the Colonial Project’, in
T.J. Barringer & T. Flynn (eds.), Colonialism and the Object (1998)
T.J. Barringer & T. Flynn (eds.), Colonialism and the Object: Empire, Material Culture and the Museum (1998)
Ann Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1740-1860 (1986)
Patrick Brantlinger, Bread and Circuses: Theories of Mass Culture as Social Decay (1983)
J.B. Bullen, Continental Crosscurrents (2005)
David Brown, Walter Scott and the Historical Imagination (1979)
William St. Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (2004)
Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837 (1992)
Nicholas Dames, Amnesiac Selves: Nostalgia, Forgetting, and British Fiction, 1810-1870 (2001)
Ian Duncan, Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel: the Gothic, Scott, Dickens (1992)
Charles Eastlake, A History of the Gothic Revival (1872)
Stephen Gill, Wordsworth and the Victorians (1998)
Mark Girouard, The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman (1981)
Helen Groth, Victorian Photography and Literary Nostalgia (2004)
J.R. Hale, England and the Italian Renaissance: The Growth of Interest in its History and Art (1954)
Robin Hamlyn, Robert Vernon's Gift: British Art for the Nation 1847 (1993)
Francis Haskell, ‘The Manufacture of the Past in Nineteenth-Century Painting’, Past & Present 53 (1971)
K.M. Heleniak, ‘Victorian Collections and British Nationalism: Vernon, Sheepshanks and the National Gallery of British Art’, Journal of the History of Collections 12 (2000)
Elizabeth Helsinger, Rural Scenes and National Representation: Britain 1815-1850 (1997)
Elizabeth Helsinger, ‘Ruskin and the Politics of Viewing: Constructing National Subjects’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts 18 (1994)
Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition (1983)
‘Thomas Ingoldsby’ [R.H. Barham], The Ingoldsby Legends (1840-7), a spoof on some contemporary fashions for medieval history
Colin Kidd, ‘The Strange Death of Scottish History Revisited: Constructions of the Past in Scotland, c.1790-1914’, Scottish Historical Review 76 (1997)
Philippa Levine, The Amateur and the Professional: Antiquarians, Historians and Archaeologists in Victorian England, 1838-1866 (1986)
Margot K. Louis, ‘The Revival of Paganism and the Re-making of Mythography through the Nineteenth Century’ Victorian Studies 47:3 (Spring 2005): 349-360.
David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (1985)
Lukács, Georg,The Historical Novel (1937), trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (1962)
J.M. MacKenzie (ed.), Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts (1995)
Peter Mandler, ‘“In the Olden Time”: Romantic History and English National Identity, 1820-1850’, in L. Brockliss & D. Eastwood (eds.), A Union of Multiple Identities: The British Isles, c. 1750 - c. 1850 (1997)
Peter Mandler, ‘“The Wand of Fancy”: The Historical Imagination of the Victorian Tourist’, in M. Kwint et al. (eds.), Material Memories (1999)
Martin Meisel, Realizations: Narratives, Pictorial and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-Century England (1983)
Rosemary Mitchell, Picturing the Past: English History in Text and Image 1830-1870 (2000)
Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in 19th-Century London (2000)
Ian Ousby, The Englishman’s England: Taste, Travel and the Rise of Tourism (1990)
Alex Potts, ‘Political Attitudes and the Rise of Historicism in Art Theory’, Art History 1 (1978)
C. & J. Riding (eds.), The Houses of Parliament: History, Art, Architecture (2000)
Paul Readman, ‘The Place of the Past in English Culture c. 1890-1914’, Past and Present 186 (2005)
Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (2001)
Dianne Sachko Macleod, Art and the Victorian Middle Class: Money and the Making of Cultural Identity (1996)
Raphael Samuel, Island Stories: Unravelling Britain (1998)
James A. Secord, ‘Monsters at the Crystal Palace’, in S. de Chadaverian & N.Hopwood (eds.), Models: The Third Dimension of Science (2004)
Gavin Stamp, The Changing Metropolis: Earliest Photographs of London 1839-79 (1984)
George Stocking, Victorian Anthropology (1987)
Roy Strong, And When Did You Last See Your Father? The Victorian Painter and British History (1978)
Tamara S. Wagner, Longing: Narratives of Nostalgia in the British Novel, 1740-1890 (2004)
Clive Wainwright, The Romantic Interior:The British Collector at Home 1750-1850 (1989)
Martin J. Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit 1850-1980 (1981)
Christopher Whitehead, The Public Art Museum in Nineteenth Century Britain (2005)
Raymond Williams, Culture and Society 1780-1950 (1958)
Patrick Wright, On Living in an Old Country (1985)