Gift of Mrs. Harold W. Mundy
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| Alfred Tennyson. “Enid,” in Idylls of the King. Illustrated by Gustave Doré. London: Edward Moxon, 1868. 7A 44 Gift of Mrs. Harold W. Mundy |
Mid-Victorian Britain became fully visible in the 1850s as an economic and political colossus bestride the world. The decade began with the triumphant world’s fair at the Crystal Palace. It ended with an annus mirabilis for literature – a remarkable, indeed unparalleled outpouring of great works of both immediate and enduring importance.
This Newberry Spotlight Exhibition focuses on the most notable books that appeared in Great Britain during 1859. In order of publication, they are as follows.
Also appearing for the first time in 1859 were two more British icons: Big Ben and the Liberal Party. The year was memorable as well for the birth of Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, and the death of Thomas Babington Macaulay, the great essayist, politician, and historian. In addition, it saw the publication of two more novels that have stood the test of time, George Meredith’s Ordeal of Richard Feverel and Wilkie Collins’s Woman in White. We associate 1859 with Darwin and evolutionary theory, but as Americans and Britons quickly became aware it stood out then for much more than the Origin, and it continues to do so now.
Britain in 1859
National Society for Promoting Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church. Maps Illustrative of the Physical, Political, and Historical Geography of the British Empire.
London [1858]
Baskes folio G1805 .M37 1858
The Roger Baskes Collection
“Big Ben. An Ode,” Punch, October 15, 1859
A 51 .765
The great census of 1851 had revealed that Britain had become not only the first industrial nation but also the first nation whose population was more urban than rural. Exhibited here are maps that graphically display information about Mid-Victorian population and economic activity. The bell tower in the Houses of Parliament building in Westminster was finished with the installation of a thirteen-ton hour bell, which sounded for the first time on May 31, 1859 and evoked much comment in the periodical press, including Punch. Because too large a hammer was used upon installation, Big Ben cracked in September; it was out of service for three years. Meanwhile, Lord Palmerston, whose second government was formed in June, remained Prime Minister, with the rising William Ewart Gladstone as Chancellor of the Exchequer and Lord John Russell as Foreign Secretary. Gladstone’s Liberals and Disraeli’s Conservatives would duel for years thereafter.
Charles Darwin (1809-82) and On the Origin of Species
Charles Darwin. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or, The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. First edition.
London: John Murray, 1859.
Vault Ruggles 87
The Rudy L. Ruggles Collection
Samuel Wilberforce. Review of Origin of Species, in Quarterly Review.
Vol. 108, No. 215 (July 1860)
A 51 .767
Thomas Henry Huxley. Review of Origin of Species, in Macmillan’s Magazine.
Vol. 1 (Nov. 1859-Apr. 1860)
A 51 .545
Darwin had been working on his big book for many years when the 1858 news of Alfred Russel Wallace’s closely similar theory of evolution prompted him to finish the job. Even so, the Origin of Species was not ready for publication until November 22, 1859. Its first U.K. edition of 1,250 copies promptly sold out that day, giving Darwin an enormous reputation and putting Wallace in the shade. The American edition appeared in January 1860.
Darwin’s profound ideas and equally profound scholarship helped propel the concept of evolution in species; so did support from his “bulldog,” the English biologist, paleontologist, and science popularizer Thomas Henry Huxley. Huxley’s showcase review in the new Macmillan’s Magazine rightly pointed out how similar to Darwin’s were his own evolutionary ideas. Contrary to the standard storyline, it took decades after 1859 for natural selection to gain acceptance as evolution’s mechanism. And some of Darwin’s chief ideas, such as the crucial parts played by competition, struggle for survival, and diversity in nature, were much in the air: Tennyson had long before written about “Nature, red in tooth and claw,” and Mill’s On Liberty enshrines both competition and diversity as valuable to social progress. Nor were British Christian intellectuals unthinking critics of evolution, as has frequently been suggested. Darwin himself said that the assessment in the Conservative Quarterly Review, by Bishop of Oxford Samuel Wilberforce, “picks out with skill all the most conjectural parts, and brings forward well all the difficulties.” On June 30, 1860 Wilberforce and Huxley tangled at Oxford in a famous meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science; it remains unclear who was perceived by the audience as the winner of that “debate.” Some intellectuals found the book’s dense style problematic: Marian Evans and her partner and fellow intellectual George Henry Lewes started reading it on November 23, leading her to comment in her journal that “it seems not to be well written: though full of interesting matter, it is not impressive, from want of luminous and orderly presentation.” The book’s one example of graphic display of information, a fold-out diagram, is certainly more effective than the text.
Charles Dickens (1812-70) and A Tale of Two Cities
Charles Dickens. A Tale of Two Cities, serialized in All the Year Round.
Final installment. Vol. 2, No. 31 (Saturday, November 26, 1859)
London: Charles Dickens, 1859.
A 51 .03
Charles Dickens. A Tale of Two Cities. First edition.
London: Chapman and Hall, 1859.
Case Y 155. D5775
Gift of Mrs. James Warde Thorne, 1954.
Charles Dickens. A Tale of Two Cities, serialized in Harper’s Weekly.
First installment. Vol. 3, No. 123 (May 7, 1859).
A5. 392
Long a celebrated author in the United States as well as Great Britain, Dickens reached his widest audience with A Tale of Two Cities, which was serialized in both countries during 1859, appearing in Britain starting April 30. That same year, his new journal for mass consumption, All the Year Round, achieved circulation of 120,000 copies. The journal featured Wilkie Collins’s The White Woman, which readers eagerly embraced as a follow-up novel to A Tale of Two Cities. American readers could pursue, almost simultaneously, the exciting developments of Dickens’s story about Revolutionary-era France and England in the pages of Harper’s Weekly, with illustrations unmatched by All the Year Round.
Over the last 150 years, A Tale has sold more copies than any other book in English except the Bible. Dickens tells a story that explores madness caused by imprisonment, paints the English in much brighter hues than it does the French, and displays human wickedness fully developed among not only the French nobility but also the Third Estate. His account of the taking of the Bastille and one of his principal French characters undoubtedly derived from reading he did in Thomas Carlyle’s French Revolution. Toward the end of the novel, a New Testament-style theme of redemption appears full-blown, in a character who exhibited pure Arthurian-style love despite being what Tennyson would have called a “churl.” The novel is the source of great if largely unacknowledged quotations, such as, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times . . . ,” and “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than any I have ever done. . . .” As with Adam Bede, the setting is the end of the eighteenth century.
George Eliot (pseudonym for Marian Evans, 1819-80) and Adam Bede
George Eliot. Adam Bede. First edition, 3 vols.
Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood, 1859.
Case Y 155 .E432
Review of Adam Bede in Westminster Review.
New series, Vol. 15, No. 2 (April 1859).
A 51 .95
Review of Adam Bede in Edinburgh Review.
Vol. 110, No. 223 (July 1859)
A 51 .296
Ludwig Feuerbach. Essence of Christianity, translated by Marian Evans.
London: J. Chapman, 1854.
C 52 .293
Best known today by her penname of “George Eliot,” Marian Evans was one of mid-Victorian England’s most important intellectuals before she became a novelist. She helped to edit the radical Westminster Review and translated two important works of German scholarship, including the Young Hegelian Ludwig Feuerbach’s provocative Essence of Christianity. Having just begun to publish fiction in late 1857, she burst upon the literary scene in 1859 with Adam Bede, which sold 10,000 copies in its first year. Much admired, by Dickens among others, the book created intense interest in its storyline, its subtle psychological exploration of characters, and its use of regional dialect – as well as in the identity of “George Eliot.” The review in her home journal, the Westminster, exemplifies the quickly expressed idea that the author was a woman. Evans worked vigorously with her publisher to deny the claims to authorship associated with a Midlands man named Liggins. Evans’s personal life (she had traveled and was living with a man married to another woman) was the stuff of scandal, and her religious views (she was an ardent agnostic, just before the term entered regular use) were rather advanced. On both these grounds the use of a pseudonym made sense; moreover, she had written a vigorous critique of “silly novels by lady novelists.” Adam Bede itself presents values that harmonized with those presented in both Smiles and Tennyson. The sturdy, diligent, autodidactic Adam Bede could in some respects have served as an example of the principles extolled in Self-Help, while the unvillainly villain of the story, Arthur Donnithorn, was less like King Arthur than like the morally weak members of Arthur’s court.
John Stuart Mill (1806-73) and On Liberty
John Stuart Mill. On Liberty. First edition.
London: J.W. Parker, 1859.
J 35 .575
Review of On Liberty in The Athenæum.
Feb. 26, 1859
A 51 .1
“Mill’s Logic: or, Franchise for Females,” in Punch.
Vol. 52 (March 30, 1867)
A 51 .765
Known as a utilitarian in philosophy and a radical in politics, Mill published his most renowned work in February 1859, just weeks after the death of his wife, Harriet Taylor, in late 1858. On Liberty embodies the classical liberalism of mid-century British Whigs. Like Tocqueville, Mill worried about the tyrannizing potential of the majority in developing democracies. He saw in Victorian society a healthy interest in moral improvement and philanthropy coupled with limiting conformism and a passive, negative Christian morality that emphasized self-government at the expense of rounded self-development. Freedom of thought, expression, and action, Mill argued, contributed crucially to social progress. It fostered among individuals thousands or even millions of centers for innovation, and therefore government should interfere in the lives of individuals as little as feasible. How to “make the fitting adjustment between individual independence and social control” was the great question he explored in On Liberty.
Mill’s thinking continued to evolve, however, and he became somewhat more comfortable with the idea of “a state that dwarfs its men,” which the final page of On Liberty had condemned. In addition, the 1860s saw Mill focus increasingly on the rights of women, thereby opening himself to lampooning by traditionalists. A Punch cartoonist observed his shift to a non-gendered nomenclature: “Please clear the way, there, for these – a – persons.” During the last dozen years of his life, practical politics as a Member of Parliament and concern with the “social questions of the future” overtook his earlier interests in philosophy and nudged his liberalism closer to socialism.
Samuel Smiles (1812-1904) and Self-Help
John Todd. The Young Man: Hints Addressed to the Young Men of the United States. Fourth edition.
Northampton, Mass.: Hopkins, Bridgman, 1850.
B 692. 878
Success in Life: A Book for Young Men.
London: T. Nelson, 1857.
B 692 .854
Samuel Smiles. Self-Help: With Illustrations of Character, Conduct, and Perseverance. New edition.
London: John Murray, 1866.
B 692. 821
Samuel Smiles. Self-Help: With Illustrations of Character, Conduct, and Perseverance. Revised and enlarged edition.
Chicago: Belford, Clarke, 1887.
Case oBJ 1611 .S6 1887
Gift of Gerald A. Danzer, 1996.
Classic “Victorian virtues” such as perseverance, the idea of the self-made man, and general optimism all emerged in a stream of English literature during the 1850s. Smiles’s book, which appeared in November 1859, offers the crowning example, with its celebration of character and its myriad stories of men who had achieved despite adversity or other impediments. Among John Murray’s most successful publishing ventures, the volume sold 20,000 copies in its first year and more than 250,000 by the turn of the century. A Scot by birth and a physician by training, Smiles was encouraged to pursue the subject, in part, by his experience with railroads and railroad pioneers, and by a recent anonymous English book, Success in Life, which had emphasized the character traits needed for success in the broadest sense. The author of Success in Life acknowledged in his preface that he had borrowed significantly from an American work, John Todd’s The Young Man, which had initially been published in 1844. American editions of Self-Help, like British, appeared for decades, including the Chicago edition displayed in this exhibition.
The list of virtues explored in Self-Help, especially through biographical exemplification of famous and less famous men, differs rather substantially from the virtues upheld by Tennyson in Idylls of the King. In editions after the first, Smiles explicitly refers to Mill and principles drawn from On Liberty.
Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-92) and Idylls of the King
Alfred Tennyson. “Guinevere,” in Idylls of the King. First edition.
London: Edward Moxon, 1859.
Case Y 185 .T2685
Alfred Tennyson. “Enid,” in Idylls of the King. Illustrated by Gustave Doré.
London: Edward Moxon, 1868.
7A 44
Gift of Mrs. Harold W. Mundy in memory of her husband.
Like Lincoln and Darwin, Tennyson turned 50 in 1859, soon after his most influential achievement, Idylls of the King, had appeared. The Poet Laureate had worked on elements of these poems for years, and into the 1880s he continued to add idylls and make adjustments. Illustrations of memorable scenes soon appeared, culminating in the lush presentation of an 1868 edition magnificently illustrated by the French artist Gustave Doré, whose recent London exhibition had proved a big success. The poem and the many images that appeared as illustrations in the next decades responded in part to Victorian popular interest in medieval revivalism. Tennyson’s interest in chivalry, pure love, and faithfulness – with associated values largely distinct from the more mundane virtues featured by Smiles – sprang in part from his own and his era’s anxiety over moral decadence and sexual passion. The 1859 idylls of Geraint and Enid, however, belie easy generalizations about gender roles in Tennyson, and among the Victorians. The last idyll published in 1859, “Guinevere,” included lines of lament from King Arthur about the decline of his Round Table that had followed his Queen’s unfaithfulness with Lancelot. The virtues embodied in Arthur were not those that made Samuel Smiles’s questing middle class; as Tennyson said twice in the completed Idylls, “the old order changeth.”