Talking of books
Victoriana
,
tlenny Green
Ni2thing could be more self-defeating than the nd of critical work which tries to place the ;'-reative artist under a glass dome of social VIolability there to be examined at leisure, vis syntax indecently exposed and his cabulary submitted to the prodding t'Peculations of dullards. There are no ivory e?Wers, and the more we discover about the ,.6•1.eat aesthetic escapists of the past, the Wee it begins to look as though there never to ere any. Someone has just compiled a vast roe dealing exclusively with Lord Byron's
petty cash accounts; an anachronistic flourish by the fates in the general direction of penicillin might have left us with the unthinkable spectacle of a white-whiskered Keats scratching his head over Anthony Trollope.
Authors are prone to Acts of Parliament, to inventions, to climate, to the condition of their own underwear, no matter how great as authors they happen to be; indeed the more Powerful the creative urge, the more easily it might get thrown off balance by an indolent laundress or a leaky waterspout. There is somewhere in the letters of George Eliot a touching passage which goes into the most explicit details as to the texture of elastic most ideally suited to the maintenance at a respectable altitude of her bloomers.
Sadly, it is all too easy to step too far in the other direction, and there are moments in Richard Altick's Victorian People and Ideas (Dent; £4.50), when in its brave attempt to chart the shoals of social circumstance which can affect the course an artist takes, tends to have too much regard for the shoals and not enough for the artist. There is a remarkable example of this in Altick's very readable account of our great-grandfathers, in the chapter on Political Economy. Altick wants to tell us that among the most implacable opponents of Thomas Malthus was Charles Dickens, and in order to leave no doubt in our minds, Altick says that, "Dickens not only inveighed against the principle but, like Mr Micawber, he defied it: he fathered ten children." Now you and me, and no doubt Mr Altick too, know perfectly well that when Dickens put Kate so persistently in the family way, he was expressing an emotion a little more subjective than a distaste for Thomas Malthus.
But the suggestion is not only misleading, it is also extremely unwise, because the imputation that the ten Dickens children were the outcome of their father's detestation of Malthus suggests that men, having been won over by a philosophical argument, proceed to spend the rest of their lives resolutely living up to it; the truth is that men invariably follow their own noses, in the course of which hedonistic exercise they eventually stumble on the philosophic theory which most closely defines their antics. What Mr Altick has done, not once, but many times over, is to put the course before the heart.
And yet he has produced a highly readable, highly informative, highly entertaining book, not the least of whose entertainments consists in spotting the half-truths, an exercise always gratifying to the ego of the reader. For instance, the description 'written by office boys for office boys' was of The Daily Mail, not Tit Bits; Bernard Shaw's introduction to Utopian Socialismcame from Henry George and H. M. Hyndman, not from the Fabians; deportation to Australia had stopped by the time the giant conservatory went up at Hyde Park in 1851, although admittedly not through any late burst of altruism on the part of British legislators so much as an early burst of civic pride from the Australians; the unpdpula-ity of Dickens in America was due less to his unsympathetic reports than to his after-dinner speeches on his first visit there in which he berated the locals for the piratical arrangements they favoured with regard to the copyright laws; if we are to bow before the industry of Ruskin's thirty-nine volumes and '1'rollope's fifty volumes, as Mr Altick
suggests, then what contortions of obeisance ought we to perform before the reputations of, say Wodehouse, Priestley, Compton Macken zie, who all topped the hundred? While we have Priestley in mind, Mr Altick should note that his bald description of George III as ' insane ' would not be well received by Priestley, Who, in his book On the Regency a few years back, brought us the pulsating news that the old king was not mad at all, but only suffering from a disease called porphyry, whose symp
toms include the uncontrollable urge to behave as though you are mad.
Why then is Mr Altick's book so enjoyable? Because he is in love with his subject, and because he is approaching it as though addressing a congregation of New Guinea headhunters, which in a way he is, for his book, so far as I can gather, is intended for American beginners rather than English warhorses. This sense of detachment makes it possible for him to dispense with much of the sentimentality accruing to the period. I think though, that even Mr Altick has been guilty of pinning 'Home Sweet Home' to the parlour wall when he says that the immorality of Dickens, Rossetti and George Eliot was untypical of the artists of the period. I shouldn't have thought that Wilkie Collins wbuld be regarded as a pillar of sexual rectitude by Mrs Grundy; nor would Jimmy Whistler, nor Holman Hunt, nor Swinburne, nor Sir Arthur Sullivan ... (Readers are invited to complete the list at their own leisure).
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