Victorian Poetry and Modern Life

The Unpoetical Age

Natasha Moore

• Editore: Palgrave Macmillan
• Anno: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137537805
• Argomento: Literature
• Categoria: European Literary Criticism

Faced with the chaos and banality of modern, everyday life, a number of Victorian poets sought innovative ways of writing about the unpoetic present in their verse. Their varied efforts are recognisably akin, not least in their development of mixed verse-forms that fused novel and epic to create something equal to the miscellaneousness of the age.

1

The Modern and the Everyday

‘And what endeared Tennyson especially to me, the working man, was, as I afterwards discovered, the altogether democratic tendency of his poems […] not his political opinions, about which I know nothing, and care less, but his handling of the trivial every-day sights and sounds of nature. […] This is what I call democratic art – the revelation of the poetry which lies in common things. And surely all the age is tending in that direction: in Landseer and his dogs – in Fielding and his downs, with a host of noble fellow-artists – and in all authors who have really seized the nation’s mind, from Crabbe and Burns and Wordsworth to Hood and Dickens, the great tide sets ever onward, outward, towards that which is common to the many, not that which is exclusive to the few – towards the likeness of Him who causes His rain to fall on the just and on the unjust, and His sun to shine on the evil and the good; who knoweth the cattle upon a thousand hills, and all the beasts of the field are in His sight.’

Charles Kingsley, Alton Locke (1850)

‘Everyday life’ is today a serious and increasingly fashionable subject of academic study. We have now a sociology, a phenomenology, a philosophy, and a cultural theory of everyday life, drawing on methods as diverse as psychoanalysis, ethnomethodology and dramaturgy in order to capture, comprehend, classify or find sites of resistance or quiet revolution in the daily lives of ‘ordinary’ people. In one sense, of course, everyday life is the common portion of humanity, peculiar to no time or place; yet, as sociologists attest, ‘there is another sense in which everyday life is a relatively recent invention’.¹ It is generally agreed that the work of Georg Lukács in the 1920s marks the earliest appearance of a fully developed concept of everyday life,² a concept that emerges out of a number of shifts within Western social and cultural life over the course of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Bennett and Watson list the major contributing factors to this new form of attention to human experience and history as a gradual expansion of what was considered worthy of public representation; the development of a Foucauldian ‘disciplinary society’, in which more and more in the lives of previously disregarded individuals and social classes is made visible, quantifiable, in order to be better regulated and controlled; and, finally, the rise of social and political movements associated with particular groups of people, such as feminism and the civil rights movement.³ These factors, and the growing interest in the private lives of ordinary citizens that they generated, tend to receive most scrutiny in their twentieth-century incarnations. Yet in the 1830s, in the days before universal suffrage and the ascendancy of social history, Emerson could already draw an explicit link between the contemporary trend towards social and political democratization and changing patterns of representation, declaring triumphantly that the ‘literature of the poor, the feelings of the child, the philosophy of the street, the meaning of household life, are the topics of the time’.⁴ Before Mass Observation came Henry Mayhew’s monumental London Labour and the London Poor (1851), and the parliamentary Blue Books that went some way towards apprising the Victorian middle and upper classes of the appalling living conditions experienced by the rest of the nation in the wake of the industrial revolution. Before the civil and gay rights movements and multiple waves of fully-fledged feminism of the turbulent second half of the twentieth century, the ‘woman question’ emerged as one of the most pressing and vexed concerns of nineteenth-century society. Although such a thing as a theory of everyday life was unknown in the middle of the nineteenth century, these early forms of the principles, tendencies and tensions out of which such a theory would be constructed also give birth to the poetic experiments with modern, everyday life that proliferate during this period.

That in practice the category of the everyday always implies the modern along with it is evident from both nineteenth-century usage of the term and its origins and development as a theoretical concept in the twentieth century. As Richard Altick points out in a discussion of the role played by details of contemporary life in the Victorian novel, ‘[a]lthough the nineteenth century had no monopoly on “everyday life” […] the use of the phrase had a strong implication of modernity: “our everyday life”’.⁵ It is as a result of massive changes to worldview, lifestyle and social organization occasioned by the interrelated industrial, scientific and political revolutions of the previous half-century or so that mid-Victorians, and each succeeding generation, become acutely conscious of the everyday as in some sense problematic. These changes tended to defamiliarize everyday life and thus render it suddenly conspicuous: what was before hidden, a mere background hum to the more intricate and dramatic music of life, now obtruded itself, became loud and discordant. Jürgen Habermas accounts for the dissonance of modern life as an alienation of what he calls the world of ‘system’ – the workings of society, its economic and political mechanisms, the bureaucracy that governs an ever more complex social organism – from the ‘lifeworld’, the world of personal relations, of values and meaning. Modernization effects what Habermas characterizes as an ‘uncoupling of system and lifeworld’.⁶ The theories of everyday life that evolve throughout the twentieth century represent varied and competing attempts, as Ben Highmore puts it, to ‘grapple with the monstrousness of modernity’.⁷

The Bothie of Tober-na-vuolich, Amours de Voyage, The Angel in the House and Aurora Leigh, among numerous other poems of their day, constitute early and comparatively untheoretical responses to these same concerns. They set out to explore the fraught intersection of the modern with the everyday in an effort to restore, if possible, some kind of harmony between system and lifeworld, between the complex and impersonal machinery of modern life and the daily experience of the individual within it. They wrestle with some of the key questions that sociologists and cultural theorists were to begin formulating a century later, such as where the everyday is to be located in the modern world, and whether the goal is to embrace or to transcend the disorder and the banality of the everyday; and each arrive at very different conclusions to the question of what it might mean to grapple with monstrous modernity in verse. Recent theoretical work frequently focuses on the rival spaces of the everyday: the streets of anonymous urban man, native habitat of the aimless flâneur; the increasingly mechanical and dehumanized processes of the assembly line, or the ineffectual paper-pushing of the lowly clerk, the disaffecting workplaces of an industrial and bureaucratic society; the world of home and hearth, with its routines of family life and domestic chores, in which woman is conceived alternately as ruler and hostage. This range of possible options are weighed each in turn by nineteenth-century poets eager to seize and convey the essence of contemporary life – whether in Clough’s ambulatory youths, vainly seeking a channel for meaningful action in the modern world, in Patmore’s homely scenes of household life and social courtesies, or in the sharply juxtaposed slums and drawing-rooms of Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh. Again, like the philosophers and sociologists who would come after them – Georg Simmel, Henri Lefebvre, Michel de Certeau – these poets adopt markedly different goals with regard to the unwieldy, shifting material of everyday life, some endeavouring merely to register the everyday in all its fragmentary, heterogeneous actuality, others to transfigure it for social, political or spiritual purposes. Tennyson, Clough, Patmore, Barrett Browning and many among their fellow poets sought to capture contemporary life in their poetry, but disagreed on what constituted it, and how faithfully it was to be represented. Was the poet of modern life being called upon to poeticize the ugliness of factories and railways, the triviality of drawing-room conversation, or the domestic sphere especially revered by their contemporaries? Or were they to seize the underlying movements of the day, to tackle contemporary social and political problems, sketch the great strides in knowledge being made by modern science, or illuminate the intellectual uncertainty and disquiet of the times? Where was the essence of the age to be located?

These last days of railroads

Overwhelmingly, it seems, for the mid-Victorians, the marker of modernity – the epicentre of all the changes transforming British life and the British landscape – a powerfully ambivalent symbol of progress which gains the force of a metonym for the age itself – is the railway. Introduced at the dawn of Victoria’s reign and very quickly (or so it seemed) ubiquitous, the railroads, and the history of their assimilation into Victorian life and the Victorian psyche, exemplify the complex interplay of the modern with the everyday. Theorist of everyday life Ben Highmore explains how

[i]n modernity the everyday becomes the setting for a dynamic process: for making the unfamiliar familiar; for getting accustomed to the disruption of custom; for struggling to incorporate the new; for adjusting to different ways of living. The everyday […] witnesses the absorption of the most revolutionary of inventions into the landscape of the mundane.⁸

Other features of modern life – umbrellas, policemen, drawing-rooms, trousers – crop up not infrequently as emblems of the distinctive civility and prosaicism of the age, but none is so representative of this process of assimilation, and none carries the same cultural resonance, as the railroads. In an essay of 1860, Thackeray characterizes them as the definitive point of rupture between old and new, modern and ancient:

It was only yesterday, but what a gulf between now and then! Then was the old world. Stage-coaches, more or less swift, riding-horses, pack-horses, highwaymen, knights in armour, Norman invaders, Roman legions, Druids, Ancient Britons painted blue […] But your railroad starts the new era, and we of a certain age belong to the new time and the old one […] They have raised those railroad embankments up, and shut off the old world that was behind them. Climb up that bank on which the irons are laid, and look to the other side – it is gone.⁹

Thackeray defines past and present respectively as ‘the præ-railroad world’ that ‘[w]e elderly people have lived in’ and the present ‘age of steam’. Given rhetoric like this, it is unsurprising that poets grappling with the particularity of the modern world should, more often than not, signal their intentions by the inclusion of this most contemporary of phenomena in the scenery, plotting and imagery of their works.

Indeed, the place accorded to the railways in a poet’s work serves as a kind of index to their treatment of the modern and the everyday more broadly. Tennyson’s railroad referencing, for example, is fittingly non-committal. His ‘Godiva’ opens on a scene at Coventry railway station, the poet hanging ‘with grooms and porters on the bridge’ as he waits for the train, only to revert to the town’s ‘ancient legend’ as its subject. His memorable image of ‘the ringing grooves of change’ is famously based on an inaccuracy,¹⁰ and the prologue to The Princess – again a modern frame to a heavily medievalized tale – features a ‘petty railway’, miniaturized and thus evacuated of the dynamism and menace which make it such a powerful symbol of the modern. To either side of this resolutely middle ground are Wordsworth, Tennyson’s predecessor in the role of Laureate...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: A Poem of the Age
• 1 The Modern and the Everyday
• 2 The Long Narrative Poem
• 3 The Marriage Plot
• 4 The Uses of Genre
• Ends
• Postscript: Finding a Form for Modern Love
• Notes and References
• Works Cited
• Index