Overtones
Benny Green
Victorian Fantasy Stephen Prickett (Harvester £12.50) Pricketi is an auspicious name for The author of a book about Victorian sublimations; it is like a brewer being called Ciatsby, or an Irish political aspirant trading under the name of Finn. It was Alice Liddell's governess, Miss Prickett, who is said to have been the inspiration for the Red Queen in Through the Looking Glass; also for the riot of .misinformation in 'The Mock Turtle's Story'. Ironically, Mr Prickett's otherwise exhaustive study of the symbolism of Victorian literary fantasy makes very little of Wonderland, almost as though he 'senses that for once his enormous academic arrnotiry will not serve the purpose.. The chapter in which Lear and Carroll are treated as twin deities is excellent on Lear but curiously muted on Carroll, and it is just possible that Carroll, although unavoidable in the context of the book's title,'sits Uncomfortably among the Romantics who comprise the author's speciality; his previous publications include studies of those fascinating dreamers Coleridge and Wordsworth, who could not help believing six impossible things before breakfast and after, If the reviewer's purpose is to prepare the reader for what he may find, then I should say that , Mr Prickett's book is required reading for anyone who has ever deriVed, pleasure and puzzlement from Lear and Carroll, George Macdonald and Charles Kingsley, and Zic at the opening essay which follows the evolution of the word 'fantasy,' should not mislead them into thinking they have been hit on the head with a loaded sock. Mr Prickett's academic vocabulary is daunting, the convolutions of his thought occasionally, self-defeating, but there is no question that once he is launched into the lives and works of the writers who interest him, he conducts his explorations in a style which reflects much of the fascination of the models from which he is working.
This first becomes apparent in the analysis of 'A Christmas Carol', in which he works towards the conception of the tale which, for all its title, stands on its secularity; the fantastical clement, says Prickett, 'performs a dual role. It offers, in an amazing technical tour de force, a non-Christian Christmas "magic" while at the same time linking personal self-discovery directly with universal social problems without any kind of divine intermediary that might soften the stark choice'. In fact Prickett is especially vigilant on the issue of the religiosity of literary fantasy, and in dubbing Edith Nesbit 'the greatest Platonist of them all', he actually suggests that those of Nesbit's contemporaries who scrutinised the children's book closely enough could hardly have been surprised by Nesbit's entry into the Catholic Church.
The discussion on allegorical overtones in The Water Babies is perhaps the most demanding section in the book, and perhaps in any book; after reading it three times I was still not quite sure whether Prickett sees Kingsley as a sweep or a water baby, but the important thing is that the chapter, leaves a vivid impression of Kingsley's towering originality. As an example of Prickett's assumptions about the reader's range of critical experience, here is one of the key passages: We are never clear if The Water Babies is about life, or life after death. If it is the latter, then what is Kingsley, the great anti-Catholic who regarded Romanism as heresy, doing with notions of purgatory? If the former, then what are we to make of Grimes's punishment . . It is clear that these are questions we cannot ask, any more than we can question the variations in Pantagruel's size, according to the needs of Rabelais's particular episode. The way in which Kingsley flaunts such massive structural inconsistencies at us is itself the best clue to the kind of story The Water Babies is.
Such inelegancies of style, into which the complexity of Prickett's theories sometimes leads him, is a small price to pay for his critical acumen, his use of social history to illuminate what appears to be a blandly escapist passage, and his close study of an area often shoved into a backwater by those formalists who are unable to work the likes of Alice and Kim into the grand design of their own theses.
This comes through most strikingly of all in the section headed 'Dreams and Nightmares', in Which we encounter yet again that prime example of critical tomfoolery, the decision that Wuthering Heights stands 'alone,' that it is related to no other of its epoch, that it is a 'freak' not explicable in conventional literary terms. In discussing the fate of Wuthering Heights and also the verdict of George Levine on Frankenstein Mr Prickett earns the accolade with this splendid passage: Levine commented that 'Frankenstein should have died shortly after its first popular success'. One recalls a similar tone in Leavis's baffled strictures on Wuthering Heights. Both critics seem nonplussed by the combination of evident power and absurd irrationality that seems to characterise so many of the great myths of gothic literature. Both actually use the same description, 'one of the great freaks', of the two books. It is as if the whole Gothic convention somehow eludes the normal methods of criticism.
It is that last phrase 'normal methods of criticism' which is the key to Prickett's book. By bringing to bear on calculated irrationality a shrewd mind, he succeeds in bringing Carroll, the Brontes and company into the Victorian fold — where they have always belonged.
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