The Spectacle of Intimacy: A Public Life for the Victorian Family (Literature in History) - Hardcover

Chase, Karen; Levenson, Michael

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0691006687 ISBN 13: 9780691006680

Verlag: Princeton University Press, 2000

Inhaltsangabe

Love of home life, the intimate moments a family peacefully enjoyed in seclusion, had long been considered a hallmark of English character even before the Victorian era. But the Victorians attached unprecedented importance to domesticity, romanticizing the family in every medium from novels to government reports, to the point where actual families felt anxious and the public developed a fierce appetite for scandal. Here Karen Chase and Michael Levenson explore how intimacy became a spectacle and how this paradox energized Victorian culture between 1835 and 1865. They tell a story of a society continually perfecting the forms of private pleasure and yet forever finding its secrets exposed to view. The friction between the two conditions sparks insightful discussions of authority and sentiment, empire and middle-class politics. The book recovers neglected episodes of this mid-century drama: the adultery trial of Caroline Norton and the Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne; the Bedchamber Crisis of the young Queen Victoria; the Bloomer craze of the 1850s; and Robert Kerr's influential treatise, celebrating the ideal of the English Gentleman's House. The literary representation of household life--in Dickens, Tennyson, Ellis, and Oliphant, among others--is placed in relation to such public spectacles as the Deceased Wife's Sister Bill of 1848, the controversy over divorce in the years 1854-1857, and the triumphant return of Florence Nightingale from the Crimea. These colorful incidents create a telling new portrait of Victorian family life, one that demands a fundamental rethinking of the relation between public and private spheres.

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Karen Chase & Michael Levenson

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"A major, often dazzling work of fascinating implications and interest. Scholars of such diverse subjects as Dickens, Tennyson, Victorian sensation fiction, the Divorce Bill of the 1850s, Lord Melbourne, Victorian feminism, the history of sexual scandal, or changing ideas of Empire will want and need to consult this book. Students of epistemes, eras, and broad cultural phenomena will also have to reckon with it. Written with clarity and wit,The Spectacle of Intimacy is a pleasure as well as an intellectual boon to read."--Robert M. Polhemus, Stanford University

"The Spectacle of Intimacy offers wonderfully intelligent and vivacious literary and cultural analyses of domesticity in Victorian Britain. It approaches its subject through a broad array of sources and engages those materials with great canniness, cogency, subtlety, and wit. Any reader interested in Victorian Britain will want to read this book."--James Eli Adams, Indiana University

"An important study. This is a major work in Victorian and nineteenth-century scholarship. It functions both as a synthesis of cultural material and as an analysis of particular subjects. It is also a pleasure to read and a scholarly and intellectual boon to read clear, lucid, witty, and expert prose by Chase and Levenson, it has point, simplicity, and elegance."--Robert Polhemus,Novel: A Forum on Fiction

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"A major, often dazzling work of fascinating implications and interest. Scholars of such diverse subjects as Dickens, Tennyson, Victorian sensation fiction, the Divorce Bill of the 1850s, Lord Melbourne, Victorian feminism, the history of sexual scandal, or changing ideas of Empire will want and need to consult this book. Students of epistemes, eras, and broad cultural phenomena will also have to reckon with it. Written with clarity and wit,The Spectacle of Intimacy is a pleasure as well as an intellectual boon to read."--Robert M. Polhemus, Stanford University

"The Spectacle of Intimacy offers wonderfully intelligent and vivacious literary and cultural analyses of domesticity in Victorian Britain. It approaches its subject through a broad array of sources and engages those materials with great canniness, cogency, subtlety, and wit. Any reader interested in Victorian Britain will want to read this book."--James Eli Adams, Indiana University

"An important study. This is a major work in Victorian and nineteenth-century scholarship. It functions both as a synthesis of cultural material and as an analysis of particular subjects. It is also a pleasure to read and a scholarly and intellectual boon to read clear, lucid, witty, and expert prose by Chase and Levenson, it has point, simplicity, and elegance."--Robert Polhemus,Novel: A Forum on Fiction

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The Spectacle of Intimacy

A PUBLIC LIFE FOR THE VICTORIAN FAMILYBy Karen Chase Michael Levenson

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2000 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-00668-0

Contents

List of Illustrations................................................................................................ixAcknowledgments......................................................................................................xiIntroduction The Trouble with Families..............................................................................3Chapter One The Trials of Caroline Norton: Poetry, Publicity, and the Prime Minister................................21Chapter Two The Young Queen and the Parliamentary Bedchamber: "I never saw a man so frightened".....................46Chapter Three Sarah Stickney Ellis: The Ardent Woman and the Abject Wife............................................65Chapter Four Tom's Pinch: The Sexual Serpent beside the Dickensian Fireside.........................................86Chapter Five Love after Death: The Deceased Wife's Sister Bill......................................................105Chapter Six The Transvestite, the Bloomer, and the Nightingale......................................................121Chapter Seven On the Parapets of Privacy: Walls of Wealth and Dispossession.........................................143Chapter Eight Robert Kerr: The Gentleman's House and the One-Room Solution..........................................156Chapter Nine The Empire of Divorce: Single Women, the Bill of 1857, and Revolt in India.............................181Chapter Ten Bigamy and Modernity: The Case of Mary Elizabeth Braddon................................................201Epilogue: Between Manual and Spectacle...............................................................................215Notes................................................................................................................221Index................................................................................................................247

Chapter One

THE TRIALS OF CAROLINE NORTON: POETRY, PUBLICITY, AND THE PRIME MINISTER

1

When in the last years of the 1830s Caroline Norton fought her successful campaign for the Infant Custody Bill, she displayed in the clearest possible terms the politics of domestic life. Arguing that the law of custody had never been understood and that misinformed women persistently believed that they possessed legal recourse against established immorality, Norton turned away from her imaginative writing in order to produce a series of fiercely polemical works-privately printed or published pseudonymously-that exposed the legal nullity of the wife and mother. Vilely abusive husbands who separated from their wives still enjoyed full and incontestable custody of their children; pining mothers petitioned the courts in vain. Accumulating painful recent stories of marital disaster, Norton took her own life as the most compelling of examples. If history has granted her the dignity of heroic begetter of the Infant Custody Act of 1839, she purchased her reputation with humiliating exposure to the wide public eye.

But to speak of the politics of domesticity here is to refer not only to the systematic constraints of family law but also to the less formal, but no less palpable, workings of domestic power. At a time of rapidly changing attitudes, the failure of Norton's marriage became a spectacular figure of domestic pathology. In a letter written in 1837 and published soon after, Norton etches the bloody outline of the struggle.

I can prove (if indeed Mr. N will ever dare the investigation) that not only was he a careless husband, but that he was a most violent and cruel one; that in his rage there is nothing he has not attempted, short of murdering me, and that on the most trivial occasions of dispute. I can prove, that when I was within three months of my confinement of my youngest child, he kicked the drawing-room door off its hinges, and dragged me out by main force, flinging me down the stairs; and I mention this instance not because it is worse than others, but because, by a fortunate chance, I have the admission and defence of it in his own handwriting to my brother.

They were married in 1827; he was twenty-six, and she nineteen. George Norton was younger brother to the present Lord Grantley, with whom he was on the most fragile terms, but whose childlessness meant that the lordship was likely to pass into George's family. A staunchly Tory line, the Nortons liked to trace their pedigree back to the Conquest. For her part, Caroline Norton saw her grandfather Richard Brinsley Sheridan as the eminent precursor, referring to herself, at moments of argumentative stress, as the "granddaughter of Sheridan." The playwright had no blood pedigree, but through a long, low ebb in British drama, his achievement kept its luster, and then, too, Norton's relation to this patriarch carried far more than literary implication. Sheridan was still remembered as the celebrated partisan, the legendary parliamentary orator, whose intimacy with the great Whig families would have important bearing on his granddaughter's marriage.

Alongside the sharp contrasts in temperament, these party differences might have counted for less, had it not been that the problems in the Norton marriage coincided with the political crisis of the late 1820s. In the intensity of debate over Catholic Emancipation, in the weakening and then the fall of the long Tory rule, and then, climactically, in the agitation over the Reform Bill, party politics assumed a scarcely precedented intensity. For the young Norton marriage, the public turmoil was no greater than the private shudder. George Norton, who had been MP for Guildford, lost his office in the landmark election of 1830: it certainly cannot have encouraged marital harmony that his political career foundered in the reformist campaign blithely championed by his wife.

And yet, Caroline Norton's staunch reformism, her willingness to challenge entrenched customs through barbed prose polemic or sentimental verse, needs to be placed in the still more immediate context within which she suffered and wrote. Her relation to Whig politics came not only, or first of all, through her commitment to the ideals of social renewal; it came through her family relations to the great Whig aristocrats who led the party and, beyond that, to the royal patronage extended by the prince regent. After the death of her father Thomas Sheridan, son of the playwright, her mother was given apartments in Hampton Court, where the seven Sheridan children came into daily contact with the titled and the parasitic. Lacking both high birth and high fortune, the Sheridans nevertheless cast their social identity with those at the summit of power. The three daughters in the family, each of legendary beauty, entered a difficult marriage market, where their charms had to stand in place of blood and money and where their liberal politics counted less than their deportment. Set on parade in the London season, they endured such rituals of display as the "Fancy Quadrille of the Twelve Months," in which each of the year's debutantes danced with a different basket of flowers and fruits on her head.

Norton's coming to a writing career and her coming to consciousness of her body met violently, met productively, and no reflection on...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Princeton University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2000
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0691006687
• ISBN 13: 9780691006680
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 264
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland