Nicholas Dames at Literary Review:
A long time ago, in the far-off 1990s, a mentor warned me that the subject I’d proposed to study, the Victorian novel, was fast approaching its expiration date. Soon enough, he said, its eye-straining bulk would set behind the horizon of cultural memory, following its 18th-century predecessors into antiquarian darkness. It was partly a numbers game, he explained: when the odometer clicked over and the 20th century squatted between the Victorians and us, they would become the-thing-before-the-thing-before, distant and inscrutable. Likewise, not so very long afterwards, the novel itself would probably go, as the elaborate economic and technological apparatus that had kept it going – the printed book, high levels of mass literacy, the not-yet-wholly-captured leisure time of industrial and post-industrial life – would come apart.
It was a whole fin-de-siècle mood, that little speech, blithely helpless about going down the long slide. I resisted it. Did we not still live in a class-stratified but socially mobile, uneasily secularised, urbanised and financialised modernity, the very world Victorian novelists described? Was Mr Micawber going to stop being, among other things, so painfully funny; would throttled dreamers like Dorothea Brooke ever feel entirely unreal; would Lucy Snowe’s self-harming rage or Isabel Archer’s sucker’s bet on unconventional happiness not stir uncomfortable recognition?
more here.
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