​The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 10th Edition: Volume E, The Victorian Age. Reader's comments.

I was asked to provide a reader's evaluation of the Norton Anthology 10th Edition's Victorian Volume. It was an honor to be contacted for this work and I was grateful for the chance to share my understanding of this important project with the editorial team. Because my comments open onto wider questions of canonicity and field-formation -- and draw on recent work by many in the field, some of whom are named here and many others who are not-- I thought the report might be usefully put into a more public frame. I welcome feedback on this feedback, and thank those scholars whose work has helped push toward a thoroughgoing reevaluation of our object of study, named here "The Victorian Age." 

The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 10th Edition: Volume E, The Victorian Age
 
Evaluation by Nathan K. Hensley, Georgetown University

We are particularly keen to hear what you think about how the book succeeds and how it might be revised. In a concluding paragraph or two, we’d welcome comments on any of the following: the anthology as a whole (and as a genre in general); how the teaching of literature is changing at your institution, especially in how it is taught to nonmajors; and the role digital media plays in your classes.
 
The Norton Anthology, Volume E: The Victorian Age is a work of massive skill and vast expertise that will continue to be a reliable option for instructors looking for a capacious selection of texts to help buttress their teaching of the British nineteenth century. From within the perspective of a normative version of Victorian Studies, a phrase I describe below, the view of the period it offers is total, and yet the strength of the anthology is its relentlessly particularizing view, evident in headnotes and editorial interventions. This focus on telling details and vivid quotations helps specify and thus enliven what I take to be a crucial period in the unfolding of literary and political modernity. It is a great strength of this volume’s Introduction and headnotes that they use the words of Victorians themselves to make broader historical and literary arguments. This has the effect of texturing the account with density and suggesting avenues of further investigation without sacrificing argumentative sweep or clarity of conceptual framing. The union between wide-angle view and tiny detail is bracing.

The biographical headnotes for each author are likewise razor sharp and, with impressive economy, consistently open up new avenues for thinking while tracking reliably the details of the given subject’s life and larger contexts – here, too, a great strength being the particularity of detail and avenues for further study opened up by that granularity. Tennyson’s siblings in an insane asylum; Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s slave-money English estate, “Hope End”: in these and other vivid details entire worlds open up to view, for professors and for students. There is a wide gulf between the vivid sharpness of these entries and basic online biographies.

Explanatory notes for the selected texts are pitched, in my view, perfectly: they offer clarification of historical facts, describe literary convention, and light up sometimes murky allusions, while offering tips and useful bits such as the proper pronunciation of quay (181) or the definition of “oakum” (870). The footnotes for such points of clarification work in tandem with inline glosses of vocabulary, a mix of readability and useful annotation that has been balanced very ably, I think, between the poles of intrusiveness and helpfulness. It is obvious that much care has gone into the editing of these selections. Other anthologies I know work far less elegantly to allow for both delight and instruction; too many undergraduate-focused editions condescend by glossing basic vocabulary and explaining plot-points that should be obvious to average readers. The Norton, by contrast, saves the explaining for things that need it: the timeline of political and social events, for example, 28-29; or the system of British money (A34-A38), a wonderful resource; or specialized literary terms necessary for the study and appreciation of historical works of literary art. I want to single out for special praise this new section on “Literary Terminology,” which is especially welcome and sharply done. I will be using it as a resource going forward, even in (non-Victorian) classes for which I do not set the Norton. All of these appendices embody for me the excellent “pitch” of the present Norton, presuming intelligence on the part of its readers but explaining the culturally or aesthetically foreign without condescension.
 
The result is a set of well-chosen texts and representative authors that is, in my view, the state of the art anthology for Victorian studies at the undergraduate level. Other anthologies offer more specialized or “deeper” views of given subsets of Victorian literature: The Broadview Anthology of Victorian Poetry and Poetic Theory (Thomas J. Collins & Vivienne J. Rundle, eds.) is one example. But no anthology I know offers the same sweep of historical contextualization, acuity of biographical and social detail, and reliably edited, usable texts for the undergraduate classroom. The images are a bonus (though I will offer suggestions for selection edits below), and the physical nature of the book as an object – thin but readable paper, good for notetaking; a solid but not overbearing heft; durable binding – all helps make it a reliable performer for survey courses.

To this point I myself have tended to eschew using anthologies as set texts in my courses. One reason is that I prefer not to make students spend money that will go to large academic publishing corporations when other, free versions are available. [Since I submitted this report I learned that Norton is in fact an independent and employee-owned company, with something like 400 employees -- hardly a conglomerate.] But even more importantly I have found that the way I approach what is here called “The Victorian Age” works to cut against the anthologizing impulse itself, and tries more often --at least I hope it does-- to scrutinize the logics of field-formation implicit in the anthology-form, rather than lean into them. I’ll say more about this below. But even despite my reticence towards anthologies in general, I have used sections from the Norton in topical courses like Victorian Literature and Globalization, which made use of the Empire material as a jumping-off point, and The Nineteenth Century Novel, where I deployed some of the Norton’s biographical notes and appendices in PDF form. In several courses I have had recourse to the timelines or supplementary materials.

Any anthology freezes into solidity a certain vision of the field of inquiry it delimits. So what is the vision of the field marked out by the Victorian Norton’s 10th edition? I see the Norton as the state-of-the-art Anthology for undergraduate teaching of Victorian Studies in a certain normative form – a version of the field in which, I hasten to add, I was trained, and that many practitioners of Victorian studies still teach. What are the features of this normative form?

It is committed to gender, or at least to what we should I think call white feminism – a version of feminist practice that has long defined the study of Victorian texts in English. This commitment to investigating The Woman Question from the perspective of bourgeois white women is evident, for example, in the special section on that topic, of course, but also in the selections from George Eliot – who gets two entries on gender and writing (“Silly Novels” and an essay on Fuller and Wollstonecraft) but nothing, for example, on realism (the famous chapter from Adam Bede, say) or historical process (“Natural History of German Life”), nor yet politics (“Address to Working Men by Felix Holt”), or even aesthetics (“Notes on Form in Art”). I imagine the editors foreshortened Eliot because it was presumed students would examine a freestanding novel by her elsewhere in any Victorian literature course – which is reasonable. But then, there is Charles Dickens, taking up sixty pages with A Christmas Carol, even as he also appears, in the good Hard Times excerpt, as commenter on “Industrialism.” Here Eliot seems strangely conscripted as metonym for a topic, “gender,” while Christmas Dickens gets to stand simply as Victorian Novelist. More radical voices, to supplement the very good anonymous letter by a prostitute (666-70), might include Elizabeth Braddon (the short stage version of Lady Audley teaches beautifully); Wilkie Collins (who had many short stories that touch on complex legal issues, women, disability, and other important topics and are quite formally experimental); or any excerpts on “suttee” (sati) or any evidence of the postcolonial critique or analysis of that discourse. I note here that in general, the experiences of nonwhite women of the Victorian world are absent here, not presumed to be part of the volume’s purview.

The headnote to the larger Anthology project describes the continued expansion of texts by women, “significant authors who had been marginalized or neglected by a male-dominated literary tradition” (xix). This is excellent, even as it leaves undefined what would constitute “significan[ce]” in this context – an ambiguity that opens the gate to transhistorical presumptions about “literary value” of the kind that the general introduction elsewhere indulges in, as I note below.  Still, this widened principle of inclusion is welcome, and might work on other axes too, such as sexuality or queerness. The appearance of Michael Field in the current volume is excellent, as of course the more expected Oscar Wilde. Much classic scholarship as well as new monographs like Dustin Friedman’s Before Queer Theory help us see not just that nonnormative sexualities are trackable through the Victorian archive, but also (more narrowly) that an author like Vernon Lee should probably be represented here. Maybe we could lose some Kipling to make room?

Given the efforts apparently made here to include “marginalized” and “neglected” women authors shoved aside by “a male dominated literary tradition,” it must be repeated that even this recuperated and expanded vision of the Victorian World is, alas, profoundly white and very middle class –this despite the evident efforts on the part of the editors to make overtures toward the problem of Empire and “National Identity,” as race is here euphemistically, even evasively redescribed. The inclusion of Thomas’s Froudacity and Mukharji’s “Visit to Europe” is welcome. But there is nothing here from Mary Seacole, nothing from Toru Dutt, not a single indigenous writer to speak of, no account of the Australian genocide or the forest-clearings in New Zealand or the Maori wars that accompanied it. No First Nations testimony from Canada. Something like 30 pages are allocated to “Empire and National Identity,” but 44 are given for “Education,” a perverse imbalance – as I see it-- that discloses that the anthology has been imagined from the outset along a relatively provincial national-political vision that sees issues like “race” or “empire” as separate topics within the study of the Victorian period (“it’s Empire day!”) rather than the defining foundations of what enables us to refer to this period as Victorian in the first place. As Thomas Macaulay himself predicted, such an impulse to quietly universalize white Englishness is itself probably an artifact of the canonization of “English Literature” in projects such as this very anthology.
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The present project is, then, an anthology on “English Literature” that construes Englishness narrowly to exclude, with some few exceptions, material written in the colonies or by colonial writers; there is little that would open a window onto experiences of Victorians living in “Greater Britain,” or that might see the adjective “Victorian” to apply to nonwhite or non-English subjects of the crown. Yet as the headnote to the Empire section tells us, there were some 400 million nonwhite Victorians (682), far more than lived in England, for example – yet these experiences have only glancingly been construed under the heading Victorian. It is excellent to see the excerpt from Ruskin on Turner’s Slave Ship, since this selection at least indexes the absence of (e.g.) Black perspective as an absence. But in the too many pages of Carlyle that open the book, there’s no selection from the author’s “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question,” none of his pumpkin-eating “negroes” beneath trees, none of his many statements in favor of genocide in Jamaica (though these are alluded to in the headnote). This whitewashed Carlyle, while “a violent conservative or, as some have argued, virtually a fascist,” appears here, despite all that, in his old habiliments as Victorian Sage: “a man of letters…who strove tirelessly to create a new spiritual and political philosophy adequate to the age” (33). I dwell on this internally-conflicted characterization of Carlyle, which ends on cliché, because it is symptomatic of the normative vision of “Victorian Literature” still being defended in this nevertheless conscientious anthology. This minorly-revised vision of the field aims to take on board critique, include other voices, or acknowledge limitations without changing fundamentally the architecture of its object of primary study. We are still studying the Victorian Sage and the Age and Temper (5) that produced him, and indeed consolidating those objects as valid ideas: it’s just that we are now noting that these formations are “problematic” in various ways and need to be supplemented by some few “other perspectives” now granted several pages in the book. But euphemism and superficial acknowledgement are no substitutes for what is actually called for, which is a full reevaluation of the anthology’s object of study. The fact that description of the Jamaica Rebellion and Indian uprising fall under the section devoted to 1870-1901, “Decay of Victorian Values,” rather than in the chronological period in which those events actually took place, shows up again this problem of perspective. The problem is that the story of “Early,” “Middle,” and “Late Victorian” life advanced here is told from the perspective of a normative, that is, middle class and white, Victorian point of view. This is, I understand, largely to be expected from an anthology that has made its name as the standard account of literary history. As noted above, the work of any anthology is to consolidate a given perspective on a field or period and mark it out as normative; for the Norton, this vision is necessarily one that is in a continuum of tradition with prior canonical versions of what constitutes this (I think) nonexistent thing, “The Victorian Age.” And in English literature classrooms, anyway, this story has been told since time immemorial from the perspective of the bourgeois subjects who have long laid claim to the adjective Victorian. From within this limited and I think objectionable perspective, the “rebellions, massacres, and bungled wars” mentioned in the Late-Victorian section can only be seen as part of a “decay of Victorian values,” because Victorian values are quietly construed (erroneously) as separate from those projects. Again a more capacious vision is gestured at, in the early reference to the “incalculably devastating effects” of British imperialism (11). But such a statement can only read as jarring –-cutting against the grain of the project itself-- in the context of a description of the wonder and “romance” of the period (qtd 10). The issue once again is of perspective: the shape and structure of the period-concept set out by this anthology has not been changed in light of the perspectives that the editors nevertheless acknowledge to be important. The Introduction’s citation of Barrett Browning and the “Cry of the Children” is again symptomatic, since there are any number of working-class poets and voices who said the same thing, and arguably more vividly -- but it is the middle-class slum tourist and canonical Victorian who has been granted the power to speak.
 
Is the Norton Victorian volume a monument to whiteness? As I’ve tried to indicate, it doesn’t want to be: crucial notes acknowledge the middle-class nature of the movement for women’s rights in the period (18), and the seemingly revised and I think improved headnote on Empire certainly acknowledges the immiserating power of that decisive world-historical formation. Still, despite the Anthology’s general avowal that “English literature is not confined to the British Isles; it is a global phenomenon” (xviii), the selections of the Victorian volume construe the “English” in “English Literature” as national rather than linguistic. The Anthology’s general introduction, that is, notes that English refers to a broad “linguistic community” that “stubbornly refuses to fit comfortably within any firm geographical or ethnic or national boundaries” (xviii). And the Twentieth Century volume describes heavy additions of Black writers from what we could call global England – the territories of the Empire and its aftermaths. The new version of the Romantic Period volume has received a fresh section about war and another on orientalism; there’s also an excerpt from “The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave.” Such globalizing revisions do not yet seem to have reached the Victorian volume yet, and any reorganization at the level of the period’s broader storyline has not occurred, such that “Empire and National Identity” is still treated separately from other social issues, all of these bracketed away (as “social issues”) from the texts able to stand here as Literary.
 
The below message on Twitter from Manu Samriti Chander raises this entire suite of questions more economically. “What are the monuments to racists in your field?” asked a poster, and “[h]ow are you tearing them down?” Chander replied: “The Norton Anthology of English Literature.”

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Chander, Manu Samriti (@profchander). “What are the monuments to racism in your field? / the norton anthology of english literature.” Tweet. July 5, 2020.

It is a difficult judgment to hear. But I think the point captures something about the nature of canonicity in a moment where many students and teachers are reaching for justifications for a field of inquiry that do not rest on national-cultural mythologies, still less do they work to further them. Students and their teachers are hungry, I mean, for accounts of why it matters to read nineteenth-century texts that are diverse, alive to contradiction, and substantial – and go beyond maxims (such as those offered in the Volume’s general introduction) about “the special joy that comes with encountering significant works of art” (xvii).
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The residual and I think indefensible evaluative language that marks the Anthology’s overarching mission statement is, I think, complicit in the very occlusions of perspective that mark the Victorian volume’s limitations today as a tool for learning. I write directly here because the point is important. Boilerplate statements about “[t]he power of great literature to reach across time and space” construe literature as a “precious resource” from which we might “derive the full measure of enlightenment and pleasure” (xvii). Such phrases name the very mechanisms of cultural filtration and racialized gatekeeping that have resulted in the lack of Toru Dutt’s “Our Casuarina Tree,” for example, from this table of contents. It is why we have not one but two massive poems by Matthew Arnold but no excerpt from Seacole’s Wonderful Adventures, among the first autobiographies of a mixed-race woman in English and fascinating for that and other reasons.

I note that the general editors’ stretched and recycled language of value also comes alongside generational clichés about “a period obsessed with the present at its most instantaneous” (xvii), where strawman millenials and their allegedly failed attention spans are the figures against which “literature” is positioned as a timeless and slow alternative. No useful anthology can begin from such premises today. Whatever other problems it has, this generational agon is fruitless as a tactic to lure students toward literature today, and no backward looking romanticism can, in my view, assist us in making the case for why literature matters now. We need not become sociologists, and should not; nor yet historians. (This is why the new selection of literary terms is so wonderful.) But the unfolding of a diverse and contested cultural history is a matter of subjecting terms like “Victorian” to scrutiny rather than burnishment: our work is to understand how such period-concepts came to be; how they came to denote certain types of people but not others; what perspectives were snuffed out and occluded to make way for normative concepts like “Victorian” to come into being; and how the work of reading can cut against such mythologizing tendencies. The fact is that our students today are not “obsessed with the present” but, instead, deeply concerned with history: it’s just that the history that interests them is an active rather than static one, a prehistory of the present rather than a warehouse of statues to be worshipped --a history of upheaval and contestation and fraught negotiation, of which the dynamic literary forms we love are both cause and symptom.
 
Even in the absence of sermons about the nature of the field such as the above, there will be, in any anthologizing process, quibbles about ratios and choices. For me, and even within the anthology’s own premises of selection, there is too much Robert Browning, and rather a lot of Matthew Arnold, especially given the idiosyncratic and pretty small slice of space allotted to Swinburne. Which is generally okay, given Arnold’s more straightforward and multi-channel commentary on English modernization. But “The Scholar-Gypsy,” for example, gets a full headnote and almost 7 pages of the volume, and is an example of a previously essential or unmissable text that could easily be switched out for a text by a nonwhite Victorian – especially given that we also get “Stanzas from the Grand Chartreuse,” which takes up another 6+ pages. It is worth noting here that both the Jamaica Rebellion and the Indian Mutiny captured the minds of the era’s greatest writers and produced important literary expressions, as the inclusion of Russell’s India Diary in the Empire section correctly shows. But Marx’s dispatches on India might add further texture, and in the case of so-called Mutiny Ballads, England’s global engagements also produced entirely new literary genres that would enable students to study of convention and mass-media circulation in ways that might connect with the admirable parts of the volume devoted to mass literacy and print culture. How about Dickens’s fantastical letters on the Eyre controversy?

In the color plates, we might include, for example, a photograph of a Black Victorian like Sara Forbes Bonetta (photographed by Julia Margaret Cameron and others) or Seacole herself, also a famed subject for portraiture in the period. Or literally any Indian figures or scenes? I am partial to the war photography of Felice Beato, but there’s also the more celebrated work of Roger Fenton. A representation of the fading sugar colonies, sites of post-enslavement unrest, as described in Christopher Taylor’s recent Empire of Neglect, would also be welcome; Jamaica was depicted in vivid ways by (just) pre-Victorian watercolorist William Berryman. But without meaning to dwell, I must say that instead of any of this we have a double page of Pre-Raphaelite stunners and Cameron’s medievalist fantasia about Arthur. I understand that these selections connect with the poetic selections like Idylls and “Body’s Beauty,” etc., but that actually only points up the larger issue, which has to do with what throughlines have been deemed central to the plot of the period we call Victorian. Fanny Eaton, born in Jamaica, was a Black model that Rossetti and others painted multiple times; “The Beloved” (1865) includes a Black child DGR apparently found on the street and invited to sit as a model, thus conscripted into the retinue of admirers around the characteristic figure of White Beauty that is, unfortunately, still the implicit focus of the present anthology.
 
At a moment of massive shifts in our understanding of what the referent “Victorian” is to mean, the matter of selection becomes sharper and the questions raised by selection and choice more pressing. The Twentieth Century volume seems to take seriously the general introduction’s statement that The Norton Anthology of English Literature refers to literature in English, rather than literature associated with the nation of England. As I was preparing this report, Ronjaunee Chatterjee, Alicia Mireles Christoff, and Amy R. Wong published a provocation entitled “Undisciplining Victorian Studies” that took aim at what they called “the racism that undergirds Victorian Studies and maintains it, demographically, as an almost entirely white field.” The term undergirds is important here and concerns the question of the present evaluation. To address race or empire in Victorian studies, or in an anthology meant to freeze it into knowability for students, will involve more, I think, than including sections devoted to those nouns, or including one or several Black or indigenous writers. Rather it calls for a full-scale reevaluation of the way we tell the story of the period. Such a reevaluation will be the foundation, I think, for the ongoing effort to impress upon our students the continuing vitality, even urgency of studying nineteenth-century literature today.

So my overall impression is that Volume E of the Norton provides a clear, accurate, and intelligently-unfolded narrative that will be an asset to any course on “The Victorian Age” that is interested in furthering what I will call a normative or standard view of the period. Indeed because of its clarity and grace and editorial bona fides, the Norton’s articulation of that period is the one against which any other view of that “Age” must position itself. Yet it is my belief that we serve our students best – and make the most persuasive case for our work – when we understand that “Age” in terms that do not recapitulate the myths that gave it life but subject them to probing, reparative pressure: that is, to careful reading.
 
July 2020