The Little Professor

This Week's (Belated) Acquisitions

• Stanley G. Crawford, Some Instructions to My Wife (Dalkey Archive, 1985).  Reprint of Crawford's parody of Victorian marriage manuals.  (eBay)
• L. H. Myers, The Root and the Flower (NYRB, 2001).  Reprint of a series of novels set in sixteenth-century India.  (eBay)
• Caroline Levine and Mark W. Turner, eds., From Author to Text: Re-Reading George Eliot's Romola (Ashgate, 1998).  Critical essays on what is arguably Eliot's least-read novel.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Mary Jean Corbett, Allegories of Union in Irish and English Writing, 1790-1870: Politics, History, and the Family from Edgeworth to Arnold (Cambridge, 2000).  Figures for the Anglo-Irish relationship in fiction and nonfiction.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Pat Garrett and Dennis Butts, ed., From the Dairyman's Daughter to Worrals of the Waaf (Lutterworth, 2006).  Critical essays on the history of the RTS and Lutterworth.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Callum Brown, The Death of Christian Britain (Routledge, 2001).  The history of secularization in Britain; argues that the process really began in the twentieth century,  not in the nineteenth.  (Amazon [secondhand])

Thought experiment: a "bookless library"

This morning, I read that "'the library, as a place, is dead.'"  Enter the "bookless library," which is all pixels, all the time. 

What kind of "bookless library" would satisfactorily replace a bound collection? What sort of obstacles would it face?

1.  We'd need a full subscription to the final form of GoogleBooks, as well as to any other substantial collection of digitized books.  If we can't check books out of the library, then we have to be able to read them on our own computers.  That means that a single, on-site license wouldn't work--the library would have to splurge for unlimited offsite use.

2.  That's a full subscription to everything.  Yes, scientists now do much of their publishing online.  Alas, books in the humanities primarily exist in the material world.  This may come as a shock, but we can't expect students doing a research paper to cough up $ to Google (or Amazon, or whomever) every time they want to cite a source.  In fact, we can't expect faculty to do that, either (because most of us don't make that kind of $).  I imagine that this will cause all sorts of copyright havoc. 

3.  Google needs to fix its preview and snippet functions.  According to the article linked above, we aren't going to "shelfwalk" anymore.  And yet, given that Google's snippet view CONTINUES TO BE ONE OF THE MOST MIND-BOGGLINGLY, INFURIATINGLY, AND SUBLIMELY USELESS SEARCH FUNCTIONS IN THE KNOWN GALAXY, AND QUITE POSSIBLY THE UNKNOWN GALAXY AS WELL (INCLUDING REGIONS REACHABLE ONLY BY STABLE WORMHOLES), we still need to shelfwalk.  Because we cannot tell what's in the book by using Google's search results.  I'm still getting "snippets" that turn out to be blank margins. (Which, again, means that the library would have to splurge on a license that gives us full access to everything Google scans.) 

4.  Google needs to actually develop something that bears a vague passing resemblance to quality control.  Recent weeks have turned up creased pages, blurring, pages scanned in the wrong order, missing pages, and, of course, the ever-present thumbs.  If we're going to have bookless libraries, then perhaps we first need the substitutes to be, well, useful?

4.  Are we assuming that all publishers will cheerfully release their books for electronic distribution? Er...are we? Where do we put the books that aren't digitized? 

5.  Got rare books? Never mind Google.  Will libraries with substantial rare book collections agree to digitize them and make them readily available to its own users, let alone to the World At Large? Many older books cannot be digitized by sticking 'em flat on a scanner bed--the bindings are either too tight or too fragile to survive the process.  What about manuscripts? I would expect that many special collections either won't be digitized or can't be digitized without considerable expense.  Which means that libraries will still have books in them.

6.  Where will all the books go? Are we assuming that everybody will just stow their collections offsite (because all universities can afford to shell out the cash to store a few hundred thousand...or a few million...books somewhere else, in the right physical and climate conditions), or that libraries will have fire sales to raise money to buy databases? (Hey, I'm always willing to acquire a few texts...)

7.  How are bibliographers to do their work? For any serious bibliographer, scanned copies will be useless: it's difficult (or impossible) to see watermarks, illustrations often reproduce poorly, the book's material aspects (bindings, etc.) will be obscured, and so forth.  (ETA: Forgot to mention Thomas Freeman's "Texts, Lies and Microfilm," Sixteenth Century Journal 30 [1999]: 23-46; obviously, Freeman is talking about the problems of working with microfilm, but several of his observations carry over to digital texts.)  

I'm sure my readers can think of many other issues. 

Random shelving observations, with lots of pictures of books

There is a downside to alphabetizing and categorizing your books--namely, that shelving new books eventually turns into a full-scale Broadway production, complete with falling chandeliers and singing cats.   Running commentary generally results, like so:

There are times when I think I have rather too much Emily Sarah Holt on my shelves.  Then again, she did set novels at just about every major turning-point in British history, so she's always useful for something.  (Some of J. F. Shaw's covers are quite pretty, but the house made no attempt to match covers to texts--which is why a woman who looks like she's dressed in an Alma-Tadema knockoff is attached to a novel about the Armada.)

I hate moving these novels around, for obvious reasons. This is a rapidly self-deconstructing set of Disraeli's novels (the Edmund Gosse edition).  I did contemplate having these rebound, only to faint once the binder quoted a price of $70/volume.  (The set came in this condition, which is how I managed to afford it in the first place.) 

Victorianists speak of Wilkie Collins' other novels in deeply hushed tones, of the sort you generally use when discussing an embarrassing relative.  I picked up these "Pocket Classics" reprints in London when I was working on my doctoral dissertation, and have somewhat gloomy memories of reading them in a spartan University of London dorm room (Campbell Hall, I think it was), by the light of a single, unshaded bulb. 

As an undergraduate, I had twice as much Nabokov as this.  However, they were packed away in my parents' garage loft, and...well...there was an invasion.  Of multiple-legged, non-mortgage-paying residents with fur and hairless tails.  So much for Nabokov (and also for The Closing of the American Mind, which was extremely well-chewed). 

This set of Charles Reade testifies to my dedication to scholarship: I bought the entire set at one go (at the Powell's in Chicago's South Loop), lugged it several blocks to the nearest bus stop, and finally lugged it several blocks from the Hyde Park bus stop to my apartment building.

OK, maybe it testifies to my willingness to risk permanent injury for the sake of a third-rate Victorian novelist. 

I earnestly recommend full sets of Charles Reade to anyone interested in body-building.  Don't buy weights--it's ever so much more economical to just tote seventeen volumes of Reade around!

I haven't the slightest clue how I managed to wind up with two copies of this utterly obscure Irish novel.  At least they were both cheap copies. 

And this isn't even all of Trollope.  (That's his mother right next to him.)

You may note that despite my exasperation with LOTR, I managed to hack my way through the Silmarillion.  Which...did not improve matters, I have to say.

The Victorian Christian periodicals are starting to take over this bookcase.  Now, if only some nineteenth-century Anglo-Jewish periodicals would start coming my way...

The Vicar of St. Margaret's

When I first started working seriously on religious fiction, other Victorianists told me that they were startled by how many anti-Catholic novelists I was finding at the end of the nineteenth century--surely the Victorians were over anti-Catholicism by then, what with Emancipation and all decades earlier? And I couldn't find anybody who had even heard of anti-Ritualism within the Church of England.  At the end of the nineteenth century, the Religious Tract Society did its darndest to keep both attitudes going strong, whether by developing new book series (e.g., the extremely anti-Catholic "For Faith and Freedom" novels) or setting prize themes.  M. G. Murray's The Vicar of St. Margaret's (c. 1899/1900) is an example of the latter strategy; both it and Margaret Cunningham's Until the Day Declare It (which I haven't been able to see yet) won the RTS' competition for novels about "the evils of sacerdotalism." Like the many other anti-Ritualist novels that preceded it, The Vicar of St. Margaret's dwells on the combined dangers of the confessional, sisterhoods, and clerical deception.

Christopher Brownlow (a name intended to remind us of Oliver Twist?) returns from abroad to deal with his widowed sister's family: while she lies on the verge of death, tended by an Anglican Sister of Mercy (much to Christopher's dismay), Imogen and Cecily attend services at the very Anglo-Catholic church.  Imogen, it turns out, has fallen under the spell of Father Adair, a Ritualist priest; worse still, he is Imogen's confessor.  Her recourse to the confessional enrages her beau, Maurice, who later tells Christopher that "'[h]e has had the impudence to question Imogen about her feelings towards me--in the confessional, too! where the poor child thinks she is bound to answer; and then he takes upon himself to warn her against  me, and tries to persuade her that I am a temptation of the devil!'" (51)  Christopher ejects the Sister of Mercy and bans Imogen from further dealings with Father Adair, but this has an unexpected result: she runs away from home, apparently with Father Adair.  The plot then turns into one long chase scene, as Christopher and Company try to run down the two escapees--who, as it turns out, are not together.  Father Adair, we discover, has actually decamped for the Roman Catholic Church (along with some of the Sisters of Mercy).  Imogen, meanwhile, has been hiding out in a sisterhood in Edinburgh, but her kind feelings for the sisters take a dark turn once she discovers, thanks to Maurice, that they have been stealing her letters.  (Anti-Catholic and anti-Ritualist novels frequently feature characters who hijack the post.)  She returns home too late to see her mother on her deathbed--clearly a providential rebuke--but, thanks to a long sojourn in Europe, her uncle Christopher's advice, and some friendly clerical guidance, she winds up firmly ensconced in the "just medium" (121) of the Church of England.  Maurice comes back, Imogen agrees to marry him, and everyone lives happily (and Protestantly) ever after. 

Arguably, the most interesting thing about this novel is the title character--because he's almost entirely absent from the text.  We see him briefly at a service, a man with a "striking face," "eyes [that] were dark and piercing," and an aura of "strength and energy" (20); Christopher, watching Father Adair "almost prostrat[e] himself in front of the altar," first concludes "that this was an intentionally theatrical display," but then tells himself that "[i]f he really believed that there were anything worthy of adoration present upon the altar, was he not right in worshipping it?" (20)  And...that's it for Father Adair's physical presence.  Maurice grumbles about him, his curates worship him, and everybody chases after him, but we never see him again.  But, in a sense, Father Adair was never "there" in the first place, for he had already "gone over" to the RCC well before he formally converted.  The novel thus posits a void where the Anglican clergyman ought to be.  Never present as a Protestant, Father Adair turns out to be less important as a character than he is as a corrupting influence; we know his presence only through his deadly moral effects on Imogen and the Sisters.  As Imogen's confessor, Father Adair controls her subjectivity, her entire world-view.  Her proximity to him inexorably taints her mind, especially insofar as her mind dwells on her beloved Maurice.  In this standard-issue rendering of the confessional's effects, the priest's intellect takes over that of his penitents--an invasion of the spirit snatchers, if you will--so that he need not be present to dominate every aspect of their domestic lives.  Moreover, Father Adair eroticizes his relationship with Imogen by forcing her to reflect on Maurice: the priest not only competes with Maurice for Imogen's attentions, but also injects himself into the relationship by dictating her responses.  In that sense, he plays the woman's part along with the man's.  Not coincidentally, Tom Lestrange, a curate who ultimately converts back to evangelicalism, is a manly man whose "huge form" sits rather oddly with the "black petticoats" (18).  Real men, it's clear, always turn out to be firmly Protestant. 

Otherwise, the novel resolutely hits the usual high points in anti-Ritualist argument.  Ritualism inevitably leads to Roman Catholicism; Ritualists are liars; Ritualists don't understand the Prayer Book, the Bible, Protestant theology, or even their own theology (Tom is rather embarrassing on this score); Ritualists abandon their own minds to follow their priestly leaders; Ritualists are selfish.  One suspects that this book won a prize not because of its originality, but because it so staunchly followed the party line. 

This Week's Acquisitions

• "Frank Briton" [prob. John Kensit], By and By: A Thrilling Tale.  Deeply Interesting to Every Britisher Who Loveth Britain (John Kensit, c. 1888).  Lurid anti-Anglo-Catholic novel, featuring several chapters devoted to assaults on Gladstone.  Speaking of assault, the cover and frontispiece represent a young man preparing to slug a priest (which, in case you're wondering, the novel considers a good thing).    (eBay)
• Simon Mawer, The Glass Room (Other Press, 2009).  Fate of a Czechoslovakian home and its inhabitants during and after WWII.  (Lift Bridge)

Halloween Horrors, 2009: Inconveniently Active (And Otherwise Unpleasant) Artwork Edition

To quote myself: "If the painting moves or appears in your dreams,  it is generally advised that you relocate.  Immediately."  (Moving photographs should also be avoided at all costs.)

All Horror Masters files are PDFs.

• Gertrude Atherton, "The Bell in the Fog" (Literary Gothic)
• E. F. Benson, "The Cat" (Horror Masters)
• ---, "The Room in the Tower" (Gaslight)**
• ---, "The House with the Brick-kiln" (Horror Masters)
• Franz Hartmann, "An Authenticated Vampire Story" (Horror Masters)
• Tom Hood, "The Shadow of a Shade" (Horror Masters)
• M.  R. James, "The Mezzotint" (Ghost Stories of M. R. James)
• ---, "Canon Alberic's Scrapbook" (Ghost Stories of M. R. James)
• H. P. Lovecraft, "Pickman's Model" (Complete Works of H. P. Lovecraft)
• Edith Nesbit, "Man-size in Marble" (Horror Masters)
• ---, "The Ebony Frame" (Horror Masters)
• Hume Nisbet, "The Old Portrait" (Horror Masters)
• Margaret Oliphant, "The Portrait" (Gaslight)
• Elia W. Peattie, "Story of an Obstinate Corpse" (Horror Masters)
• E. G. Swain, "The Man with the Roller" (Horror Masters)
• Katherine Tynan, "The Picture on the Wall" (Horror  Masters)
• Mary Wilkins-Freeman, "The Hall Bedroom" (Horror Masters)

**--For what it's worth, this story gave me nightmares when I first read it, way back when in graduate school. A very different kind of horror than "Pickman's Model," but still exceptionally frightening.

If characters in Victorian literature had "couple names"

Those of us who specialize in fuddy-duddy Victorian fiction are frequently urged to get with the program, go modern, become relevant, etc., etc., etc.  What better way than to jump on one of the more recent pop culture bandwagons? I speak, of course, of couple names--two character names squashed together to indicate that they're an item.  (Or that the fans want them to be an item.) E.g., "CarJax."  Or "Huddy."  I don't see why Victorianists can't do something similar.

• Pip + Estella, Great Expectations = Pestella
• Pip + Herbert Pocket, Great Expectations = Picket
• Dorothea Brooke + Will Ladislaw, Middlemarch = Dill
• Jane Eyre + Mr. Rochester, Jane Eyre = Jester
• Gilbert Markham + Helen Graham, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall: Markaham
• Walter Hartright + Laura Fairlie, The Woman in White: FairHart
• The Lady of Shalott + Sir Lancelot, "The Lady of Shalott": Lancelott
• The Governess + the Master of Bly, The Turn of the Screw: The Governaster

Bright Star

At one point in Jane Campion's new biopic Bright Star, John Keats starts spouting his famous definition of the "poetical Character": "A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity—he is continually in for—and filling some other Body—The Sun, the Moon, the Sea, and Men and Women who are creatures of impulse are poetical and have about them an unchangeable attribute—the poet has none; no identity—he is certainly the most unpoetical of all of God's Creatures."  This moment simultaneously illustrates the film's narrative strategy and its most significant flaw.  Like so many biopics, Bright Star consists of repurposed quotations.  Characters quote their letters, their poems, their memoirs; written language and speech become one.  Published work (or work produced for very different audiences) turns out to be grounded in, yet apparently removable from, everyday encounters.  John Keats and Fanny Brawne even recite Keats' poems to each other, turning a poem like "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" into a prewritten substitute for lovers' conversation.  It's not surprising that such omnipresent quotation has become an essential convention in biopics devoted to authors: the most interesting thing an author can do, after all, is write, but that's the least interesting thing imaginable for an audience to watch.  If dramatizing the process turns out to be pretty much impossible, then, the least you can do is flaunt the product.  In a metafictional moment from the musical 1776, the playwright Peter Stone notes the pitfalls of this approach:

ADAMS: Dammit, Franklin, you make us sound treasonous!

FRANKLIN: Do I? Treason: "Treason is a charge invented by winners as an excuse for hanging the losers."

ADAMS: I have more to do than stand here listening to you quote yourself.

FRANKLIN: No, that was a new one!

Inventing "new ones" when the author is John Keats may well have been a daunting challenge.  However, the film's primary flaw may well be that the author is John Keats.  Never mind whether or not Keats had a pronounced "identity"--to what extent does he hold the screen as a dramatic figure, apart from his early death and his poetic talents? Wordsworth and Coleridge both had their youthful adventures and their intriguing character flaws; Byron and Shelley, of course, had scandalous private lives; Blake...well, Blake was on the eccentric side.  Of the Romantic Big Six, Keats appears to have been the nicest and most humane.  This was good for his friends, but not so good for anyone trying to produce a conventional biopic.  All of the film's conflicts come from outside, in the combined form of Charles Armitage Brown (Keats' close friend) and money troubles.  But as a character, Keats himself proves elusive.  The words "fill" in for him, as it were.

The  John Keats Problem may explain why the film turns out to be so formless.  It opens with Fanny Brawne encountering Keats; it closes when he dies.  We have no sense of Fanny Brawne's existence before she meets (and is transformed?) by Keats, let alone of her existence afterwards.  At the end, the film describes her long mourning for Keats, but neglects to mention that she did, in fact, eventually marry and have children.  Campion keeps trying to structure the film by gesturing to potential oppositions and conflicts: Fanny's sewing (which bookends the film) vs. Keats' poetry, male vs. female love, female domesticity vs. male artistry, money vs. passion, etc.  Yet none of these conflicts ever emerges fully into the light.  There's no framework, for example, for the most obvious opposition, that between stitching and writing: are we to evaluate Fanny's fashion design as equal to, lesser than, superior to Keats' creations? Is there a feminist critique of gendered forms of creativity? What should we make of Fanny's boast that her work, at least, will bring in some cash? As Ellen Moody very accurately notes, Fanny "has no interest but loving Keats and silently sewing"--is this meant to be a factual report (the film is, in fact, pretty accurate when it comes to details), an idealized vision of the poet's beloved, an attempt to render the beloved as the poet sees her, a feminist critique of a woman's destiny...? Campion's The Piano had its own problems, but it at least managed to be reasonably coherent.  (Whether or not you liked what it was coherent about, of course, was a different matter.) 

Dracula the Un-Dead

Vampires have never gone out of fashion, exactly, but they've certainly been enjoying a higher profile in the past few years--what with Janeite vampires, glittery vampires, and vampires who just want to have fun.  Count Dracula himself has cropped up in novels like Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian and Barbara Hambly's Renfield, the latter of which also jumps on the vampire romance train.   (Or should that be "carriage"?)  Perhaps it was only a matter of time, then, before we got something like Dacre Stoker's and Ian Holt's Dracula the Un-Dead: The Sequel to the Original Classic (2009), set twenty-five years after the end of Dracula. Alas, even though Van Helsing and company did in the Count, all is not well in the twentieth century.

Dracula the Un-Dead is a sort of Clash of the TItans, only with vampires instead of Greek gods and clockwork owls.   Our new villain is Countess Elizabeth Bathory, still undead and bloodthirsty after three hundred years.  And, killing two birds with one stone (so to speak), she's also Jack the Ripper.  Dracula, it turns out, was completely misunderstood: far from being a demonic figure, he is "still doling out God's justice" (357) even as one of the undead.  Granted, he admits, "I am unschooled in the ways of this modern age" (357)--although, given that the novel takes place just a couple of years before WWI, he is perhaps not that much out of place--but he is nevertheless a force for good.  The Countess, by contrast, plans to "tear down the churches with her bare hands and force her blood down the Pope's throat" (323); when an unfortunate priest calls her the "Antichriste" (346), he's clearly not far off.  Not surprisingly, their final battle verges on the apocalyptic, their swords "[ringing] out like the chimes at midnight signaling the end of all things" (369). 

While Dracula and the Countess dodge and parry their way through the novel, the protagonists of the original novel find themselves getting offed in a variety of unpleasant  ways.  Most creatively, Jonathan Harker winds up impaled.   In the middle of Piccadilly Circus. By the end of the novel, all of the original characters are either kaput or un-kaput, leaving poor young Quincey--who has had some rather unsettling news about his parentage--to skedaddle off to America on the Titanic.  (Oopsie.)  Quite a lot of other characters meet their doom by decapitation, disembowelment, or similarly inconvenient methods.  For that matter, Bram Stoker, who turns up as himself, discovers that Dracula is none too pleased about Stoker's not-yet-bestselling novel; this turns out to explain one of the strokes heralding Stoker's impending death.  

The presence of Dracula in a world where Dracula exists is one of the novel's better ideas.   Stoker and Holt also manage to suggest the collapse of Victorian culture's final vestiges, thanks to a combination of telephones, airplanes, and automobiles.  The first generation of male characters, meanwhile, have all imploded in one way or the other: Seward is doped up, Harker an alcoholic, Van Helsing a fanatic, and Lord Godalming a man with a death wish.  Under the circumstances, such decay looks like the most plausible outcome of the original novel's events; it's hard to imagine having a cheerful home life after going around and driving stakes into various vampiric hearts.  However, it's also the novel's thesis that their crusade against Dracula was a mistake, based mostly on Van Helsing's inability to understand the vampire's true nature; in fact, Dracula (the novel) turns out to be Van Helsing's attempt to cover his tracks by inventing the Dracula-as-demonic-monster myth.  That's right: Van Helsing is one of the bad guys (or, at least, less-good guys), albeit thanks to error instead of evil.  

Unfortunately, Stoker and Holt fail to animate any of these ideas, even with the fragmentary assistance of Bram Stoker's surviving memoranda.  This is their first novel, jointly or singly, and they just aren't skilled enough yet to produce a competent work of genre fiction.  (I'm apparently being contrarian here, given some of the reviews I've seen; so be it.)  To begin with, the Dracula vs. Elizabeth Bathory/Jack the Ripper plot dangerously resembles something like AVP: Alien vs. Predator.  Or, depending on where you are in the narrative, Bud Abbott and Lou Costello Meet Frankenstein.  The problem is not that Big Scary Popular Monster vs. Big Scary Popular Monster is a mighty old-fangled horror movie plot; it's that it's usually a silly old-fangled horror movie plot, even when Abbott and Costello don't appear.  And that's the case here, even before you introduce the Elizabeth-Bathory-as-Jack-the-Ripper twist.  Actual human beings turn out to be nothing more than collateral damage in the earth-shattering conflict of Vamp vs. Vamp, sliced and diced like teenagers in a low-rent horror film franchise. The Jack the Ripper angle seems entirely extraneous, despite Dacre Stoker's defense to the contrary--which begins by admitting that "[t]he next question you may ask is, Why drag Jack the Ripper into a sequel to Dracula?" (404)  Surely Jack the Ripper's humanity makes his crimes all the more terrifying,  not his literal monstrosity? 

In fact, their decision to shoehorn Jack the Ripper into a plot already overstuffed with monsters points to a different problem: this simply isn't a particularly original novel.  Stoker and Holt claim that "it  was our most important goal with this sequel to right the wrongs to Bram's original classic" (413), and yet the only really innovative thing in the book (Jack the Ripper as a woman) has nothing to do with the Count. The Dracula-Ripper connection itself is, of course, not new, since Stoker brought it up himself.       Dracula as misunderstood chap has apparently been done.   Dracula vs. Whoever novels have also been done (e.g., Sherlock Holmes vs. Dracula).  The Dracula scholar Elizabeth Miller admits in her afterword that identifying Dracula with Vlad the Impaler "is hardly new" (395).  Heroic vampires and vampire romance are now absolutely mainstream, and the authors admit that the Dracula-Mina romance is a sop to fans accustomed to it (408).    Hambly's Renfield posits that vampires might devote themselves to ridding the world of evil.  (In fact, Hambly's short story "Sunrise on Running Water" also features a vampire hanging out on the Titanic.)  Arguably, the novel's claim to fame rests on it being a parallel novel, like Peter Carey's Jack Maggs or Louis Bayard's Mr. Timothy, and certainly Miller argues that Stoker and Holt "reestablish the 'true' text of Dracula, which in turn forms the basis of this sequel; at the same time, they recognize in that sequel that there is no single Dracula but many Draculas, ranging from Stoker's earliest Notes to the latest Hollywood adaptation, and that the boundaries between them are blurred indeed" (397).   But there's no real revision or reappropriation here, because the people who "wronged" Dracula in the first place have also anticipated the novel's attempts to reclaim the character.  If you've spent any amount of time with vampire fiction in general or Dracula knock-offs in particular, then you've already read most of what this novel offers.  The end result looks more like an attempt to bring Dracula in line with the current fad for sexy vampires than to save the novel from its own spawn. 

Speaking of vampire romance, the novel is at its creepiest not when it describes people having parts amputated, or whatever, but when it tries to do sex.  You can't separate sex from vampire fiction, of course, but at this point in time, one does expect rather more...self-awareness?...about the tropes.   Elizabeth Bathory, the embodiment of all evil, a virtual Antichrist, is also a lesbian who enjoys wearing men's clothing; as a teenager, Elizabeth is seduced by her aunt, who in turn manages to have Elizabeth's One Twoo (Age Appropriate) Wuv executed on a trumped-up charge.  Between her incestuous aunt and her brutish husband, Elizabeth turns into a sexual predator on an intergalactic scale, happily raping and murdering her way through the centuries (two undead wives in tow).   In one encounter, Mina experiences "almost unbearable pleasure" when she is sexually stimulated by a mist (hey, I'm just writing this review) that she thinks must be Dracula, only to realize that it's Elizabeth Bathory, her "misty rapist" (182).   So, let's get this straight: the villain is a man-hating lesbian sexual predator...on steroids. At the same time, one cannot help noting that Dracula turns out to be Heterosexual Superman, the only "real man" in the entire novel.  Mina, we discover, coupled with the Count during the original novel, which (together with her infection by vampirism) makes her "insatiable in the bedchamber" (102)--far too much woman for Jonathan, who apparently can't perform.  Lord Godalming, although married, has never recovered from Lucy's death, and his marriage is childless; except for Elizabeth's horrible husband and the happily married Sergeant Lee, the other male characters all seem to be virtually asexual.  Dracula, though, makes Mina "feel like a woman," thanks to his "gentle" touch and the "avarice and awe" with which he contemplates her "nakedness"; better yet, "[b]y the way he caressed her, the way he entered her, she knew that her pleasure was more important than his own" (361).   Besides the whole teeth thing, then, Dracula is every woman's erotic ideal.  Let's recap: the novel pits the Ungodly Undead Lesbian Rapist against the Godly Undead Straight Hot Lover.  This seems...problematic, somehow.  Even the novel's half-hearted attempts to create some kind of moral equivalency quickly fall flat: Mina, while initially sympathizing with Elizabeth's suffering, is soon "disgusted" (understandably) by how Elizabeth murders her husband (224), and realizes that while "Dracula had always had a purpose, a reason," Elizabeth "killed for sport" (227).   By contrast, she willingly buys into Dracula's self-defense.  (Apparently, some mass murderers are more equal than others.)  For that matter, while we're clearly supposed to sneer at Lord Godalming's misogyny, Mina's sole hope after coupling with Dracula once is apparently to couple with him again; only Heterosexual Superman can handle the Heterosexual Superwoman that he himself has created.

Last but not least, the authors still need to spend more time on basic craft and prose style.  To begin with, they jettison the original's epistolary/journal structure...which was one of the most interesting things about it.  Then again, they have not yet mastered how to differentiate characters through dialogue, so perhaps a shift to third person was for the best.  As for the plot, this is the sort of novel in which the story requires characters to behave stupidly.  (Quincey, in particular, wins the prize for sheer idiocy.)  Villains spend too much time exulting over their victims before attempting to kill them, thereby allowing the would-be victims to escape.  And for reasons unclear to me, Stoker and Holt turn Bram Stoker into a plagiarist.  (Really. He gets the story from Van Helsing, but doesn't feel the need to mention that it's not his idea.)  Etcetera.  Meanwhile, cliches run in innocent nakedness through narrative thickets, before they trip and fall over unfortunate moments of bathos.  Thus, trying to make Mina blink, Inspector Cotford announces that "[s]omeone took great effort to erect a vast stake in Piccadilly Circus and impale your husband upon it.  That is not a spontaneous act; this took planning" (127).  I should say so.  Similarly, when the "actor" Basarab denounces Bram Stoker's novel, his account of Stoker's crimes against Dracula climaxes in "You are, in fact, guilty of slander!" (208)  Um...horrors? The novel hits its stylistic low point in its only moment of attempted gallows humor, with a truly awful pun in the starring role; presumably, the pun is supposed to be like the knocking at the gate in Macbeth, but it's so glaringly out of place that I cringed in embarassment instead of smiled.    There are ideas here, to borrow a turn of phrase from E. M. Forster, but Stoker and Holt don't have the technique to rework Bram Stoker's Dracula (and I speak as someone who isn't a huge Dracula fan). 

This Week's Acquisitions

• Jonathan Lethem, Chronic City (Doubleday, 2009).  Ex-star and unsuccessful critic meander through life in 21st century NYC.  (BOMC)
• Dacre Stoker and Ian Holt, Dracula the Un-Dead (Dutton, 2009).  And here you all thought that the Count was really, most sincerely dead.  An "authorized" sequel (Stoker is indeed a relative).  (BOMC)
• Hilary Mantel, Wolf-Hall: A Novel (Holt, 2009).  Thomas Cromwell deals with aggravating people like Henry VIII, various queens, etc.  (Amazon)
• Jay Clayton, Charles Dickens in Cyberspace: The Afterlife of the Nineteenth Century in Postmodern Culture (Oxford, 2003).  Using Victorian literature to diagnose contemporary problems in cultural criticism.  (eBay)
• Geoffrey Robson, Dark Satanic Mills? Religion and Irreligion in Birmingham and the Black Country (Paternoster, 2002).  Industralism and religion.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• David Bebbington, Holiness in Nineteenth-Century England (Paternoster, 2007).  Lectures on the emergence of the Holiness movement.  (Amazon [secondhand])

Things the innocent reader rarely, if ever, knows about the text of a religious novel

D. G. Myers' comments apropos of the relationship between literary criticism and the authority (or not) of the text reminded me of a very great inconvenience indeed.  In my chosen line of work, one rarely, if ever, stumbles across a scholarly edition.  Of, well, anything.   Because nobody in their right mind wants to write about nineteenth-century religious fiction, right? (Michael Galchinsky's one-volume edition of Grace Aguilar's fiction is a recent exception.)  Even Robert Lee Wolff's valuable Novels of Faith and Doubt reprints don't come with a full-fledged account of the texts' editorial and publication histories--the individual volumes have no apparatus at all, and Gains and Losses (the overarching introduction) focuses on literary and historical context.  This means that when dealing with any given novel, there are many things that the Gentle Scholarly Reader absolutely Does Not Know, because no Brave Soul has ever tried to Hunt These Things Down:

1.  Author vs. editor.  Ever try looking for the original manuscripts of a popular religious novel?  The Gentle Scholarly Reader usually knows nothing about editorial interventions, whether writ large (changes to the story) or small (accidentals--Victorian novelists frequently let the house handle their punctuation).  

2.  Serial vs. volume.  Religious periodicals did serialize novels, some of which were then repurposed in volume form.  It would be awfully nice to know if anything changed; in fact, it would be awfully nice to know if the novel was serialized in the first place.

3.  Full vs. abridged.  Longer religious novels could be abridged, especially when they were pirated reprinted on the other side of the pond.  But what was abridged? (This is why I own two copies of G. E. Sargeant's Story of a Pocket-Bible--the UK original and the American abridged version.)  

4.  UK and Ireland vs. American.  In general, and somewhat inconveniently, a Gentle Scholarly Reader of the USAian persuasion may find herself confronted only with the US reprints, and not with the UK originals.  This makes it difficult to compare texts (see above).

5.  Reality effect.  Fictional conversion narratives are particularly slippery beasts.  There are still readers who are convinced that Leila Ada is an authentic account of a Jewish woman's conversion to Protestantism, and I recently discovered a historian citing another conversion fiction as a factual document (and not in the "local color" sense).  

6.  Author.  Identifying anonymous authors ranges from not-so-difficult to impossible, depending on the state of the publisher's archives, available obituaries, self-identification by title, etc. 

Some of these thing, like the serializing, can now be double-checked with some judicious GoogleBooking.  Others, though, range from impossible (many MSS have apparently just vanished into thin air) to improbable (it takes a while to scrape up enough cash to trek across the pond).  The sheer rarity of some novels no doubt makes editing them an unappetizing task, as scanning them may be out of the question.  (Anyone up for transcribing a three-volume Catholic novel? Anyone?)

A Victorian reviewer on controversial fiction (1842)

"Father Oswald ; a Genuine Catholic Story," fortunately is comprised in one neat volume. We say fortunately, not only because it has saved us a considerable amount of trouble, but that religious, especially controversially theological, fictions, can neither be very faithful pictures of life or character, nor attractive reading to neutral parties, even when truthful representations. To be truthful, however, is next to impossible; so that they generally serve to aggravate and to embitter that which was before offensively virulent. When a partisan sets about feigning personages, actions, and situations, how can he avoid making them to suit exactly his own notions and purposes? And seeing that in nothing do men adopt more narrow and false notions than when they have to figure to themselves what are the religious creeds and practices of other classes, one may be sure that truth, although intentionally sought, can hardly ever be attained in this way.

--"Novels," The Monthly Review 3.4 (December 1842): 520.

This Week's Acquisitions

• Emma Leslie, Hilda; Or, the Golden Age (RTS, c. 1877).  Historical novel about the early church in Britain.  (eBay)
• Peter Ackroyd, The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein (Talese, 2009).  Percy Bysshe Shelley hangs out with Victor Frankenstein.  (Lift Bridge)
• A. S. Byatt, The Children's Book (Knopf, 2009). The fortunes of a late-Victorian and Edwardian family.  (BOMC)
• Marguerite Yourcenar, Two Lives and a Dream, trans. Walter Kaiser (FSG, 1987).  Three novellas set in early modern Europe.  (Phoenix Books)
• Julia O'Faolain, Women in the Wall (Carroll & Graf, 1988).  An anchorite's adventures (as it were).  (Phoenix Books)
• Jim Reilly, Shadowtime: History and Representation in Hardy, Conrad, and  George Eliot (Routledge, 1994).  Influential monograph on late-Victorian realism.  (The Bookery)
• John Goodby et al., Irish Studies (Arnold, 2003).  An introductory reference guide.  (The Bookery)
• Church Association Tracts, six vols. (Church Association, 1901).  Collects three hundred (!) tracts published between 1865 and 1901 by this anti-Ritualist (and still extant) Church of England organization.  (eBay)

Creditable

I always include some sort of extra-credit question on exams.   They're not worth a heck of a lot, but they do require some thought, and can make up for some unfortunate boondoggling elsewhere.   The questions take one of two forms: 1) identify the work from a parody; 2) identify the author from the work (not read for class).  For obvious reasons, the second type requires much more effort, since the student must be able to recognize an author's stylistic quirks in order to respond.  This time around, I recycled an identification that had had virtually no takers when I put it on an exam three years ago, and added a not-so-subtle hint.  (Look! There's a major clue! Elsewhere on the exam!) The results were much better, but I don't know if I'll use it again. 

As an undergraduate, the best extra-credit question I ever saw came in a Chaucer course.  The professor, Stephen Barney, had edited Troilus and Criseyde for the Riverside Chaucer (which I see he has repurposed for Norton).   There I was, noodling my way through the exam, and...

"Who edited Troilus and Criseyde in the Riverside Chaucer?"

It was easy to pinpoint when a student stumbled across that question, thanks to the sudden cascade of giggles.  This may have been the only time when an exam made students jovial instead of glum--for a moment, anyway.  (Still, I suspect that anyone who missed that question--or failed to answer it, at least--might have been in trouble...) 

If Victorian fiction had been written like a Star Trek script

(So to speak.)

1.  Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford: It was a [atmosphere] and [atmosphere] [time of day]...

2.  Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities:  It was the [positive], it was the [negative], it was the [positive], it was the [negative], it was the [positive], it was the [negative], it was the [positive], it was the [negative]...

3.  Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre: Reader, I [verb] him.  

4.  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet: Here is a gentleman [detail], [detail].  Clearly a [detail], then.  He has just [detail], because [detail], and that is not the [detail], because [detail].  He has [detail] and [detail], as his [detail] says clearly.  His [detail] has been [detail].  He holds it in a [detail].  Where in the [detail] could a [detail] have [detail] and [detail]? Clearly [answer]. 

5.  Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray: [Paradox]