Executive Committee of the Association: Officers--Susan Thach Dean, President; Micael M. Clarke, Loyola University-Chicago, Vice President and President-Elect; Anne M. Windholz, Augustana College-SD, Executive Secretary; Julie Melnyk, University of Missouri, Treasurer; Robert Koepp, Illinois College, Past Executive Secretary; Members-at-Large--Florence Boos, University of Iowa; William McKelvy, Washington University; Thomas Prasch, Washburn University; James Sack, University of Illinois-Chicago.
 
 

Victorian Borders will be the focus for the MVSA'sTwenty-Sixth Annual Meeting, to be held in Chicago, April 19-20, 2002, hosted by the University of Illinois at Chicago.  The call for papers is as follows:

We invite proposals for papers on the conference theme of Victorian Borders: racial, social, sexual, national and international; colonial, professional, literary, or religious; borders between centuries, periods, or professions; teaching across borders. Interdisciplinary topics are encouraged, as are submissions from historians, art historians, musicologists. Please direct inquiries and 500-word abstracts to:

Deadline for proposals: November 1, 2001
 
 

Victorian Endings, the 2001 Annual Meeting-and the 25^th Anniversary celebration of MVSA--was held at Loyola University's Water Tower Campus in downtown Chicago this past April. Besides the fine paper presentations ranging in subject from the death of the Queen to autobiographical endings to spirit photography to cemetery design (see the abstracts further on in this newsletter), highlights of this conference include the awarding of the tenth Arnstein Prize and the first Burgan Prize, along with special anniversary presentations and remarks. Conference attendees were also treated to an evening reading of the work of Gerard Manley Hopkins by actor Nick Weber. Special thanks go to Dean John Smarrelli of Loyola's College of Arts and Sciences and to the Loyola English Department for hosting the conference. MVSA also thanks newly-elected Vice President Micael Clarke for her outstanding efforts in making so many of the local arrangements for this most successful meeting.
 
 

New MVSA Officers warmly greeted by members attending the spring 2001 Chicago meeting include Susan Thach Dean, President, Micael M. Clarke, Vice President and President-Elect, and Anne M. Windholz, Executive Secretary. Those present at the business meeting also expressed hearty appreciation to Julie Melnyk for her willingness to continue in the office of association treasurer.
 
 

Congratulations, to Julie Melnyk, by the way, as she undertakes her new position of Associate Director of the Honors College at the University of Missouri-Columbia.  Please note that Julie's new address is:

Julie Melnyk, Associate Director
The Honors College
University of Missouri-Columbia
211 Lowry Hall
Columbia, MO 65211

Some Parting Words from out-going President Kris Garrigan:
As MVSA heads into its next quarter century, I'd like to get in the last word, as it were, from the previous one. From the start, one of our greatest strengths has been the individual members who have given their time and energy so liberally to serving the organization as officers and as members of the Executive Committee. Their names make up an honor roll of collegiality and intellectual dedication on the closing pages of the special 25th Anniversary Issue of the Bulletin (Spring 2001), edited by our founder Larry Poston.

But I'd like to convey special appreciation to two members who did so much to see us splendidly into our next phase and who exemplify the kind of spirit that has kept us vital. First, Mike Clarke of Loyola, Executive Secretary from 1988-92, who worked tirelessly (a cliché, but a literally apt one) on endless details of local arrangements for our 2001 meeting-the facilities, the menus, the hotel accommodations, the wonderful Hopkins presentation by Nick Weber, not to mention the very generous financial support she negotiated from her university. And all this with a cast on her leg! Second, Bob Koepp of Illinois College, who has just concluded a three-year stint as Executive Secretary. As I pointed out at our business meeting, Bob has the creativity of an artist and the thoroughness of a CPA, an unlikely combination but a fortunate one for us. Always on top of things, whether composing a wittily enticing call for papers or solicitously consulting us on program costs, meeting every deadline with amazing good cheer, updating us by instituting our wonderful home page-and consenting to stay on as webmaster for a while, he's done a simply outstanding job of making everyone else's job easier, especially mine!

Best thanks, as Ruskin would say, to you both.
 
 

And a note from incoming President Susan Dean:
I am honored to become President of MVSA in this 25th anniversary year. Having attended the first MVSA meeting in 1977 and most of those thereafter, I can testify to the energy, enthusiasm, and dedication of all of our past officers. I would particularly like to thank two of them, Bob Koepp and Kris Garrigan. Bob, as Executive Secretary, brought MVSA into cyberspace, enabling us to reach a vast number of potential members and paper-givers. Kris's two years as President capped many years of hard work on MVSA's behalf in a number of roles, including that of Executive Secretary. I am sure the entire membership joins me in sending them hearty thanks and best wishes.
 
 

The Treasurer's Report:
The generous contributions of MVSA members and the magic of compound interest have pushed the Arnstein fund over the $20,000 mark: as of June 30, 2001, the Arnstein total stood at $20,120.38-not yet enough fully to endow the prize, but well on the way. Thanks to all who contributed! Our operating funds are still healthy, with $3,946.37 in the MVSA checking account.

An added note from the editor: MVSA members are encouraged to send in annual dues ($20.00, regular membership) as soon as possible in the new academic year. Look for a membership form at the end of this newsletter, or print a form off the MVSA website. And remember-donations to the Arnstein Fund, like all contributions to MVSA, are tax-deductible. Feel free to send a check anytime.
 
 

Congratulations to Amy Woodson-Boulton, Ph.D. candidate in History at UCLA, winner of the 2001 Arnstein Prize. Her dissertation is titled "Temples of Art in Cities of Industry: Liverpool, Manchester, and Birmingham, 1880-1914." The following is a brief excerpt from Amy's Arnstein Prize application which describes her research:

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, nearly every major city in England built an art museum. What did their founders expect these museums to accomplish? Why was art so central to moral and industrial improvement? How did this interest in art relate to the continued processes of urbanization and industrialization, to increasing nationalism and to the Empire? What sort of art was appropriate for the new mass publics of the industrial age, and could speak a universal language to all classes? These are questions that my dissertation, a cultural history of the nineteenth-century civic art museums in Liverpool, Manchester, and Birmingham, will seek to answer. My project thus fills an important lacuna in British cultural history as well as in the field of museum studies, and offers a new approach to questions of art and power, the uses of culture for urban improvement, and problems of cultural utility, accessibility and elitism. It restores late nineteenth-century art to its position at the center of debates about materialism and religion, morality and education, class conflict and democracy.

The Eleventh Annual Arnstein Prize Competition:  Application materials for the Arnstein Prize are now available from Prize Committee chair Micael Clarke. Those interested should contact Micael as follows:

A Special 25th Anniversary Edition of the MVSA Bulletin was published this past spring under the editorship of our founding member Lawrence Poston. Those who attended the Annual Meeting in Chicago should have picked up a copy, but others who were unable to attend-especially members of long-standing--may well want to enjoy this collection of reminiscences shared by a variety of MVSAers who have had some truly memorable experiences in the association over the years. If you would like your own copy of this special publication, please e-mail your request to either Larry Poston (lsposton@uic.edu) or Bob Koepp (rkoepp@hilltop.ic.edu), and arrangements will be made to send this to you.
 
 

Congratulations to Sarah Heidt, winner this past April of the first annual Burgan Prize, an award for the best paper presentation by a graduate student at the Annual Meeting. This prize was recently established through a generous donation by former Executive Secretary Keith Welsh, so that he might honor two of his fine professors and mentors who encouraged him throughout his graduate studies at Indiana University-namely, Mary and Bill Burgan. At the Chicago meeting, Keith was on hand to introduce Bill Burgan, who in turn introduced Sarah and presented her with the prize. Sarah's paper was entitled "Executing Autobiographies: The Case of John Addington Symonds and Margaret Oliphant." (See below for the abstract of this presentation.)
 
 

Booknotes: MVSA members with publication announcements include the following: Nancy Weston, Professor of Art History at St. Cloud State University in Minnesota, writes to share news of the recent publication of her book, Daniel Maclise: An Irish Artist in Victorian London, by Four Courts Press. Alyssa Clapp-Itnyre, Assistant Professor of English at Indiana University East in Richmond, IN, writes to inform us of the upcoming publication by Ohio University Press in 2002 of her book on music in Victorian fiction.
 
 

Jolene Zigarovich, "Missing Bodies: Death, Absence, and Mourning in the Victorian Novel"

"Storytelling," as J. Hillis Miller writes, "is always after the fact, and it is always constructed over a loss." Walter Ong maintains that "a text is so much a thing of the past that it carries with it necessarily an aura of accomplished death." Indeed, because the ideas that fill a text are inherently posthumous, they are written "after the fact," fiction is entangled with and based upon several "little deaths." And in truth, death itself is a fiction: it is always distant, other, never truly our own. Allan Friedman observes: "Like history, death is narrative as well as event: a process created, ordered, and performed by survivors." Writing and death are complicit: writing reminds us of the mortality of the speaker, it stands in for the speech of the dead.

For the Victorians especially, the narrating of death was important to the social and cultural understanding of absence, separation, and displacement. Rapid industrialization and urbanization, along with the decline in faith and belief in the afterlife, resulted in attempts to invent performances of spiritual certainty, seen in the aestheticization of mourning rituals and the overall Victorian "cult of death." Narrative endings could be seen as a form of assurance in a world of change and uncertainty, and death in literature became commonplace. Death bed and grave bed scenes, exhumations and resurrections, ghosts and figures of living death populate the Victorian novel. In a world of doubt, the Victorian novel therefore questions notions of the afterlife while dramatizing the immortal and liminal spaces of fictional death.

This presentation will argue that the trauma of death creates textual gaps in narrative, exemplified by the missing corpse. The novels in this study all feature a missing dead body, one whose re-presence threatens both the characters in the text and the stability of the narrative. In Bronte's Villette, the narrator suffers from suspended mourning and thus her memoir abounds with resurrections, burials, and metaphoric deaths--all attempts to bury missing corpses. Like Villette , Collins's The Woman in White enacts a series of burials and resurrections, hauntings and ghost sightings. As part of its suspenseful plot, the novel is vulnerable to mis-readings of death; in fact, it prematurely buries and postpones exhumations. The themes of haunting, drowning, salvaging, and resurrection make up the larger theme of Dickens's Our Mutual Friend. As in The Woman in White, here bodies, corpses and identities are doubled, those who are thought to be dead miraculously appear un-dead, the plot centers on inheritance, and capitalism is parodied in the commodification of the corpse: death provides life. Eliot's Daniel Deronda, like the other novels in this study, re-visions Gothic themes and conventions in its expression of death and the return of the dead. It will be argued that the text's hysteric response is representative of the inability for death to be truly accepted by the narrative itself.

In mourning for something lost, these texts attempt to speak the unspeakable, they repeatedly represent and perform loss. They point to events that can never be truly related, to continuous referrals of meaning, to mere imitations instead of realities. These liminal spaces of death are textual symptoms of cultural doubt, loss, and repression. In a sense, all of these Victorian novels are representative of not only cultural anxieties regarding mortality, but the modern dilemmas of language, signification, and representation.
 

Jane W. Stedman, "The Sweet, Sad Music of Mortality: the Death of Children on the Victorian Stage"

I propose to deal with the way that Children's deaths were staged in popular Victorian plays, considering primarily the demise of Little Eva (Uncle Tom's Cabin) , Little Willie (East Lynne), Little Nell (The Old Curiosity Shop), and Jo (Bleak House) .I do not necessarily intend to limit myself to these characters only (if I can squeeze more in) .All were popular for many years on the stage, and all were tear-jerkers.

Years ago, a university student told me that the Victorians must have disliked Children, because they killed off so many in their literature. Poor child! --she did not know that "there is no flock so often tended/ but one lost lamb is there", and usually more than one, necessitating a catharsis for mothers, who saw that death enacted on stage. (Helen Papashvily made this point long ago.) The question, how was this catharsis achieved? Mere death was not enough; there had to be more. This "more" first of all included religion, even if the audience might sometimes contain a number of "free thinkers". Religion meant a promise of life to come, an afterlife safe in the bosom of a divine being, a happiness as the child waited for its parents to join him or her. If the child was an orphan, its death might be seen as a reunion with its parents, or if. like Dickens's Jo, the child had no experience of any religious kind, death might be the means of introducing it to such an experience. There had also to be duration --no child (in fact scarcely any Victorian character) could simply drop dead. He or she had to be conscious of what was happening or occasionally sweetly and naively unconscious of it but somehow prescient. Little Willie's death is a fully realized one, however. His guilty mother has returned anonymously to become his governess. She sits by his death bed as nurse. "Fading Away" plays softly. He asks her questions about the hereafter, will they know everyone there? Will his own mother be there? He can see only a shining light, a beautiful garden, and hears sweet singing. He points upward and dies as his mother fall sobbing on his body, uttering what was probably the most famous line on the stage: "Dead, and never called me mother." This is an almost perfect example of the catharsis provided by a child's death. It seems to be painless, it implies reunion in Heaven; it gives a glimpse of that Heaven as supernaturally beautiful and bright, and it allows a welter of adult tears in which the audience not only could join, but were scarcely able not to join, remembering their own lost little Willies or the possibility of Little Willies to come, or taking part in a massive, and catching, expression of grief. Male adults, in contrast, merely died violently on stage; females sometimes hopelessly (from broken hearts, consumption, etc.) or, if virginal, in circumstances like those of children but rarely with specific visions of heaven. (I will say this, but will scarcely have time to develop it).
 

Elaine Ostry, "Denying the Happy Ending in Victorian Fairy Tales"

Many genres favoured by the Victorians, such as the melodrama, sensation novel and domestic saga, feature endings with a strong sense of closure, closure that rewards the good and punishes the wicked. The fairy tale, which was so popular in Victorian England, particularly delights in such decisive endings. I will focus on literary fairy tales of social protest that do not end happily. These unhappy endings challenge the expectations of the genre as well as criticize society, thus adding a new dimension to the large body of Victorian literature promoting social and individual reform.

The fairy tale, as Jack Zipes and others have shown, reflects the ideology of the tellers and their times. In the tales I discuss, the writers use the genre to protest the corrupt values of Victorian society, particularly those of the government: materialism, greed, mistreatment of the poor, pollution and bureaucracy. They often take place in a corrupt court that is contrasted with a pure country setting: Granny's Wonderful Chair by Frances Browne, "The Star-child" by Oscar Wilde and The Princess and Curdie by George MacDonald are just a few examples. In "The Thousand and One Humbugs," Dickens uses an Arabian Nights court setting to show the Sultan's fruitless search for a good "How sa Kummuns" (he is disappointed by the lovely "Reefawm.") In "Prince Bull," Dickens protests the tragedies of the Crimean War that were caused by red tape. Prince Bull--the name recalls "John Bull," representing England--is prevented from properly managing the war against Prince Bear (Russia) by his evil fairy godmother, "Tape," who is bright red and spoils every plan.

All of the writers foil their readers' expectations of the happy ending associated with the fairy tale. In the above tales by Dickens, the countries are left in shambles. In "The Water-drops" by Henry Morley, water drops come down to London to do some good to those below, only to be mixed with poison and filth. Most effectively, some writers give the readers a happy ending only to withdraw it at the last moment. In The Princess and Curdie, for example, MacDonald ends with the children restoring the court to its proper, good ruler, Irene's father. They succeed him, and their rule is golden. However, they have no children, and their successor is so greedy for gold that he mines the foundations of the capital. It collapses in ruins, and is wiped out even from memory. Similarly, the pure child of Granny's Wonderful Chair restores Prince Wisewit to the throne, ending the greedy abuses of power committed by Queen Wantall. However, Browne adds a sad ending by saying that Prince Wisewit has since "fallen under a stronger spell," and that the factories have frightened away the fairies. In "The Star-child," the successor to the reformed hero "ruled evilly."

I suggest that the writers end their fairy tales unhappily to protest the selfish mismanagement of English society. They play with the readers' expectations of the fairy-tale ending--including the underdog's rise to power-- in order to emphasize their social protest more effectively. The writers who withdraw their initial happy endings in favor of unhappy ones are forcing their readers to wonder why such happiness is curtailed. Victorian society, these writers claim, is too corrupt, materialistic and selfish to maintain the happy ending. The happy fairy-tale ending of social justice, they thus suggest, requires constant personal and social vigilance against corruption, and a continual renewal of faith and hope.
 

Lawrence Poston, "How Victorian Autobiographies End"

No one can mistake the characteristic ending of the massive, usually two-volume Victorian memoir or biography in which the public figure who has recently made his or her exit is respectfully entombed in an act of filial piety. Reginald Wilberforce balances the all-too-abrupt death of his father upon falling from his horse, with a generous and measured account of the body lying in state in Abinger Hall, the last ride to Lavington, a consolatory letter from the Prince of Wales, and the tributes in the House of Lords. By contrast, Frederick Maurice the younger need only provide a brief two-page aftermath because of his father's gratifying long deathbed progress, exquisitely timed so that the final consummation takes place at the end of Easter Sunday after Frederick Denison Maurice has blessed those standing around the bedside. Hallam Tennyson rounds off the funeral in Westminster Abbey, including the list of pallbearers and the music for the occasion, with a quotation from his father's equally respectful celebration forty years earlier of the life and ending of the Duke of Wellington.

The sense of an ending, however, is quite different in autobiography, that form to which Victorian writers gave renewed and indeed innovative vitality. Though in theory the autobiographer may literally hold pen in hand until death, he or she by definition cannot finish the narrative from the grave. Any ending for an autobiography, therefore, is intrinsically a fictionalizing act. While constrained obviously by the inescapable bedrock of biographical facts, autobiography imaginatively shapes the life that has not yet closed physically by a device of artificial closure, a constructed ending from which we are encouraged to look back to the writer's beginnings and to accept a kind of narrative inevitability. The shape of closure is at the same time a clue to the career as well as to the structure of thinking that has characterized the autobiographer's progress through life, dealings with others, and retrospective conclusions on the meaning of the experience.

The purpose of this paper is to examine several autobiographical endings that are also ends, that is, which reflect in their formation the purposes that motivated the act of self-representation to begin with. The examples on which this paper draws are autobiographies of Newman, Mill, Ruskin, and Gosse. As a concluding framing of the action, the ending of an autobiography is also in some sense a comment on a passing cultural moment. To explore how these writers sum up their contributions to the Victorian scene is to engage in a task of interest equally to the student of literature and the historian.
 

Sarah Heidt, "Executing Autobiographies: The Case of John Addington Symonds and Margaret Oliphant"

In her Preface to Margaret Oliphant's Autobiography, Oliphant's second cousin and literary executor, Annie Coghill, describes the process of assembling Oliphant's autobiographical "scraps"--a process which ultimately excluded more than a quarter of those "scraps," chiefly passages of to-the-moment lament and anguished prayer following her three children's deaths in 1864, 1890, and 1894. Thus, the 1899 Autobiography and Letters of Mrs. M.O.W. Oliphant, Arranged and Edited by Mrs. Harry Coghill ultimately bore only partial resemblance to the "scraps more or less autobiographical" with which Annie Coghill and her assistant, Oliphant's niece Denny, had begun. Just how partial was not fully known until Elisabeth Jay discovered the two volumes of Oliphant's autobiographical manuscript in the 1980s and proceeded to publish what she framed as a virtually unmediated "Complete Text" of the Autobiography in 1990. In the face of a text that she views as corrupted by literary market forces and a decorous "blueprint for feminine behavior," Jay posits her own "[r]estoring the full text of [the] autobiography" as a provision of access to Oliphant's "individual voice" at a moment prior to editorial interference. However, in employing an impossibly dehistoricized standard of textual value and editorial ethics to evaluate the differences between her own and Oliphant's executors' treatment of the "scraps more or less autobiographical," Jay obscures the more intriguing questions which her own recovery work has made available. How, for instance, did Oliphant's awareness of her potential readerships and editors, as well as of the variables of posthumous publication, actively shape what Jay has called the "individual voice" of the Autobiography's "original" text? If an autobiographer foresees or even (as Oliphant does repeatedly) suggests possible narrative excisions which are then carried out, what can or should constitute our sense of a "complete" autobiographical text, of editorial propriety, and of the proper "ends" of an autobiographical manuscript?

These questions are rendered even more pertinent by Oliphant's repeated self-presentation as a practicing reader of other Victorians' auto/biographical work, since her accounts of reading such texts as Elizabeth Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Brontë and Anthony Trollope's Autobiography generally give rise both to reflections on her own autobiographical method and to speculations about future readers' reception of or uses for that method's end product. By far the most provocatively intertextual of Oliphant's references to her autobiographical manuscript's fate beyond her familial realm appears at the end of her description of reading "the life of Mr Symonds" in January 1895. Oliphant presents John Addington Symonds' "elaborate self-discussions" as a foil for her own self-conscious construction of a "little" and "simple" narrative form from what she has earlier described as "a few autobiographical bits" and "fragments." Oliphant proceeds to discuss her narrative's fate, now that her children, formerly that narrative's primary readership, have all died: "It is so strange to think that when I go it will be touched and arranged by strange hands,--no child of mine to read with tenderness, to hide some things,…to turn over all my papers with the consciousness of a full right to do so, and that theirs is by nature all that was mine." Oliphant suggests here that the ideal end of her autobiographical project has been to elicit acts of filial and editorial piety from her sons after her death--acts which will now be performed by "strange hands."

Oliphant could not have known how ironic and poignant was this segue from her initial comparison of herself and Symonds into this meditation on her autobiographical manuscript's indeterminate destiny--in effect, its life after her death. The "life of Mr Symonds" must have been Horatio F. Brown's 1895 John Addington Symonds: A Biography Compiled from His Papers and Correspondence, a text now known as problematic, if not downright notorious, for Brown's complete editorial excision of Symonds' lifelong struggle with his homosexuality, an excision not fully fathomed until the publication of Phyllis Grosskurth's 1984 edition of Symonds' Memoirs. Like Elisabeth Jay, Grosskurth decries Symonds' Memoirs' first editor, claiming, "If [Brown] could not speak the truth, there was no necessity for any sort of publication."

What is perhaps most suggestive about Oliphant's reading of "the life of Mr Symonds," then, is its prefiguration of the situation of readers of Oliphant's own Autobiography and Letters for nearly a century. For Oliphant had no way of knowing or even of suspecting that Brown had strategically concealed a crucial aspect of "the life of Mr Symonds"--that, as Oliver Buckton puts it, Brown had brought "to the term 'literary executor' a … sinister nuance: one who executes (ends the life of) the subject, rather than one who executes (acts out) his literary will." Similarly, though far less dramatically, general readers from 1899 to 1990 could have had no real sense of the scope of excisions effected by Annie Coghill and Denny Oliphant in the interests of what Coghill called the "needful fitting together" of Margaret Oliphant's "scraps more or less autobiographical."

In "The Autobiographical Pact," Philippe Lejeune proposes that "autobiography…is a mode of reading as much as it is a type of writing," stressing the historically variable "reading contracts proposed by different types of texts" and calling for an accordingly historical study of "the different types of readings really practiced on these texts." In exploring the cases of Symonds' and Oliphant's treatment by their literary executors, I will attend to the ways in which the editorial actions--whether modeling, fitting, arranging, or hiding--of these autobiographers' primary readers carried the power to establish textual silences which subsequent readers, unaware of the autobiographers' "true" ends and intents, could not help but reproduce. But I will also examine the problematic ways in which late twentieth-century editors Grosskurth and Jay have attempted to establish the more definitive "truths" of Symonds' and Oliphant's autobiographical texts, in part by discounting both Symonds' and Oliphant's expressed considerations of the sociohistorical conditions which would impinge upon their editors and ultimately shape the posthumously published end products of their autobiographical efforts.
 

Rebecca Steinitz, "Arthur Munby and the Problem of Ending: Diary, Poem, Epitaph, Will"

Best known today as the gentleman who was secretly first the lover and then the husband of maid-of-all-work and diarist Hannah Cullwick, Arthur Munby was himself a man of letters: a compulsive diarist, author of eight books of poetry, and editor of a collection of epitaphs and obituaries. Reading Munby's poetry, it is difficult to believe that nobody guessed at his relationship with Cullwick, for love affairs between servants and gentlemen appear so frequently, both in lyrics and in longer narrative poems, as to become a predominant motif. Faithful Servants, the collection of epitaphs and obituaries, covers similar ground in its valorization of the relationship between servant and master. But the diary, which nobody read at the time, is the primary textual venue in which Munby articulates not just his relationship with Cullwick, but his broader interests in working-class women. That text too was eventually made public, for in Munby's will, which finally revealed his marriage, he left a box of documents, including 40 years of his diaries and 20 years of Cullwick's, to the British Museum to be opened on January 1, 1950, which turned out to be 40 years after his death.

This paper will argue that in these diverse texts, we see Munby struggling to effect textual closure upon a situation, his relationship with Cullwick, that refused easy endings. His poetry and Faithful Servants inscribe utopian endings which both foreground closure itself and insist upon the viability of the happy ending. His will, too, can be seen in this willfully affirmative light. In the diary, however, we see the endless denouement of an emotionally and pragmatically problematic relationship whose terms shifted repeatedly over its 50 years, both before and after marriage. Munby's repeated and failed efforts to end his diaries thus come to signify both his persistent desire for closure, a closure that it seems can only be textual and ideal, and the resistance of his experience to such closure. In the end, as it were, proliferating contemporary critical interpretations of Cullwick and Munby, direct ramifications of his bequest of his documents to the public eye in his will, undermine even the possibility of death as an ending, a possibility which Faithful Servants and his acknowledgement of Cullwick in the same will attempt to reify. If texts thus serve initially as a venue in which the writer works to control endings, they ultimately effect the undermining of ending.

Besides untangling this knot of texts, I want to suggest, more broadly, that Munby can help us to understand both the appeal and the anxiety of the diary in Victorian England, a period deeply enamored of the genre. Defined by its ambiguous endlessness, the diary offers an insistently open-ended representation of experience and subjectivity. Munby's diary at once detailed and exemplified the lack of closure in his relationship with Cullwick; in fact, he returned to the text repeatedly, editing, annotating, and even expurgating it, as if through reshaping the text, he could reshape the events it represented. In an age, then, when the teleological commonplaces were being radically rethought and ideas of progress and the future loomed large, the diary offered a liberating textual way to move forward without any predefined ending; at the same time, as Victorian society coped with the exigencies of such ideologies, the diary could become a frightening symptom of overwhelming formlessness. For Munby, then, as for the culture around him, the diary serves as a powerful symbol of the ambivalent appeal of the ending.
 

Simon Joyce, "The Queen is Dead: Fin-de-Siecle Exhaustion and Modernist Reaction"

This paper is based on research I did last year in the British Library's newspaper holdings at Colindale. I was curious--in that millennial year of 1999-2000--to see how the Victorians reviewed the nineteenth century as it closed, especially given the speed with which the Queen's death also put an end to "the Victorian era." My method was to sample weekly and daily papers from as broad a spectrum of political views as possible, from the high Toryism of the Times or The Saturday Review to the radical analyses of Reynolds Weekly and Justice. My paper is both a presentation of some of the results and a provisional reading of prevailing attitudes towards history, progress, and the standing of the nation at the turn of the century.

Perhaps most striking are the grounds of agreement here, especially that even a lengthy reign like Victoria's could be summarized as a meaningful object of analysis with discernible characteristics. These vary between idealized concepts (progress, the application of common sense, the surprising triumvirate of "Darwinism, tractarianism, and socialism" noted by the Saturday Review) and material factors (especially imperial expansion, the inability to stamp out poverty, the priorities of trade and business in the actions of government), but although such disagreements are significant, it is their consensus that the turn of the century saw the State in jeopardy which interests me: in this context, the radical anticipation of an economic decline, especially in the face of international competition, is consistent with Conservative fears that the Boer War might signal the beginnings of the death of empire. In each case, the conclusions seem dramatically disproportionate to the cited evidence, even though both ultimately turned out to have been correct. Indeed, it is as if the turn of the century itself--especially when it coincided with Victoria's death--produced a discourse of pessimistic prediction. In the words of the Saturday Review, the twentieth century and the Edwardian period will assuredly "not be quite like the Victorian age, will probably differ much from it," even if the ground of that difference seemed elusive a the time. In the sphere of culture, with the passing of a particularly Victorian model of literary statesmanship (shared alike by Carlyle, Dickens, Ruskin, and Tennyson), the future similarly looked both different and bleak.

I want to ask in the second half of this paper whether the consensual analysis that was produced in 1900-01 helped to condition a later Modernist reaction against the Victorian. The work of the Bloomsbury Group in particular sought consistently to distance itself first from a "Victorianism" experienced in childhood, and equally from an "Edwardianism" which failed to deliver on the promise of something different. In the cultural sphere, analyses like Virginia Woolf's "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown" characterized the leading Edwardians (like Wells, Galsworthy, and Bennett) as essentially diminished Victorians, attempting to diagnose a nation in decline through outmoded literary tools; these authors are collectively unable to represent the eponymous "Mrs. Brown" (who is in part a diminished echo of the Queen herself), because they have failed to recognize that "on or about December 1910 human character changed." Georgian modernism typically insisted on a radical break with the past, but also had trouble specifying the precise terms of the change; the drag of the Victorian past proved more powerful than expected, producing assessments like Lytton Strachey's that "[t]he history of the Victorian Age will never be written; we know too much about it." This statement (from the Preface to Eminent Victorians) is consistent with a wider disappointment that "the new" felt much like the past from which modernism sought so hard to distance itself. Indeed, a series of critical and biographical studies--from the memoirs of Leonard Woolf and Robert Graves to George Dangerfield's influential historical work on The Strange Death of Liberal England--continually revised earlier and more confident assessments (like Woolf's) of an historical break, and instead saw powerful continuities in the social and cultural life of the nation, extending into and sometimes beyond World War 1. Both ironic and genuinely nostalgic efforts at reviving "the Victorian" coexisted with the critical tendencies exemplified by Bloomsbury Modernism, with both helping to shape a powerful image of the nineteenth century which Britons are still negotiating today.

1. "To the present generation it seemed that England would not be England without the QUEEN. She figured in our imagination less as a Person than as an Institution - an Institution immovably fixed in the political and social Order of our age, related indeed to the passing men and passing events of history, but not like them. For the earliest recollections of the vast majority of Englishmen are unable to run back to a time when QUEEN VICTORIA had not already for years been seated on the Throne. The period before her accession, when a King and not a Queen reigned in the land, was a period of long past history, so remote as to seem to belong to a different epoch, a different civilization. -- St. James Gazette (Independent-Conservative), Jan 22, 1901 - special issue on death of Queen Victoria.

2. ". . . one of the most marked general characteristics of the [nineteenth] century [is that] much of the false sentimentality and ideality which used to ignore the body, or despise it as an impediment to the soul, has disappeared in proportion as the knowledge has spread that only in sound physical conditions can human beings in the long run preserve their sanity of mind and soul" -- Saturday Review (Conservative weekly), Dec 29, 1900: "The Spirit of the Century."

3. "Politically, the year has been marked by the steady decadence and disintegration of the Liberal Party. While in our own ranks there has been a difficulty, for a number of reasons, in arriving at any definite line of policy in political matters, and while a certain hesitancy to do anything which might be regarded as specifically antagonistic to the Liberal Party has manifested itself in some directions, Liberalism is showing itself to be moribund, and the Liberal Party has demonstrated how little it is entitled to consideration by going over bag and baggage to the party of jingo imperialism. This new imperialism, the creature of sordid hucksters, corrupt politicians, scheming usurers, and swindling adventurers, has had a marked development in the past twelve months and has landed the country in the most disastrous war in which she has been engaged for nearly half a century."-- Justice (Socialist), 30^th December 1899.

4. "There was also a dramatic propriety in the fact that the Queen just outlived by three weeks the century which was so peculiarly her own. Whatever the twentieth century and the reign of King Edward VII may have in store, we may be sure that they will not be quite like the Victorian age, will probably differ much from it." -- Saturday Review, January 26^th, 1901.

5. "With all this material progress went a habit of thought of which it was the natural instigator, which flourished most in the middle of the Victorian Age, and which has now very sensibly declined. We mean the idea that mankind was going to settle everything by logic and common sense; wars would be ended as a ridiculous anachronism; supply and demand account for everything in a practical way . . . Common sense was to rule the world. Well, events have falsified the hope in practical matters, and on the spiritual side we see a revival of what at its best is religious enthusiasm, and at its worst is obscurantism or superstition. In general science the Darwinian theory, which is a very real glory of the age, is found to account for a little less that was hoped of it. In literature the Victorian great men have left few successors. It may safely be said that a fresh burst of genius, which, it must be owned, seems at present unlikely, will be on very different lines from those laid down or used by Tennyson, Dickens, Thackeray, Carlyle, Ruskin. In all these respects the Victorian Age is indeed ended." -- St. James Gazette, January 23, 1901.

6. "It may be said, perhaps, that we have already made our choice and have chosen worthily and well; that the new year will dawn upon the spectacle of an Empire united as it has never been united before, and resolved to persevere in the ploughing of the long and hard furrow of the establishment of its own unquestionable supremacy in South Africa. That, as we rejoice to know, is no more than the truth . . . Nevertheless--and it is well that it should be recalled--good resolutions and sincerity of purpose are not in themselves enough. . . . . Spain, Holland, France, all the nations of the West, have had great Colonial Empires in their time, and have lost them, though France has won another. It is for us to make sure that New Year's Day, 1901, shall not find the Empire of England on the way to the same fate as that of those out of which it has itself been built up. Our destiny is in our own hands, and we must work out our own salvation." -- Pall Mall Gazette (Independent-Conservative), 30^th December 1899: "Behind Us and Before."

7. "In our judgment the first year of the new century will prove to have been the last year of good trade and we must look forward to a period of lean years and to decline in trade as compared with our two great rivals, America and Germany. Unhappily, instead of preparing for this, we have squandered an enormous sum in South Africa and, if we do not make peace, we shall squander much more." -- Reynolds Weekly Newspaper, January 27, 1901
 

Aeron Hunt, "The End of the Trusty Agent? Problems of Confidence in Dickens's Family Firm"

James Carker, the decidedly untrustworthy "trusty agent" at the heart of Charles Dickens's Dombey and Son, is a figure who seems to crystallize the novel's concern with a number of endings of various sorts. Through his self-interested management of the affairs of Dombey and Son, Carker is in no small measure responsible for the eventual bankruptcy of that family firm; he may thus be read as a harbinger of a dangerous new form of enterprise in which a system of business owners controlling day-to-day affairs is replaced by one in which control is passed to a new class of men who do not share the owner's interest or responsibility. His speculations, associated as they are with the railway boom of the mid to late 1840s, similarly link Carker to the new forces that seemed to signal the passing of the old, family firm-dominated economic way of life. Finally, his death under the wheels of a speeding train suggests the destruction that it was feared this new economic mode might entail.

And yet, the novel's vivid depiction of these endings stands in contrast to the picture of British economic life as it is drawn by business and economic historians. While there is no doubt that the Victorian period was marked by great changes, many of these historians see the period as characterized just as strongly by the persistence of the family firm and of the congruence of day-to-day management with ownership of business-indeed, a number of them have blamed precisely this adherence to these institutions and practices for Britain's eventual economic decline relative to other nations. But as literary critics focus their attention on the changes and endings in Victorian economic life that are described so acutely in novels, the extent to which business is characterized by the persistence of what Dombey and Son calls, prematurely, "old fashioned" forms tends to drop out, and the implications of these forms for Victorian literature and culture-in particular the ways that the culture of business remained saturated with values and practices that one might more frequently associate with the private sphere-are overlooked as a subject for analysis. In this paper, therefore, I will explore the question of Victorian endings in a slightly different way, asking what cultural work the positing of endings might be performing in a novel that deals with a form of business, the family firm, that remained dominant, and seeing the endings that are imagined in the novel in relation to its treatment of the persistent tensions that the family firm entailed. In particular, I will focus on the problem of employer-employee confidence, reading Dombey and Son alongside contemporary business manuals, trade publications, and legal cases to construct a historicized account of the novel's treatment of the difficult terrain on which employers and employees negotiated relationships of trust within institutions that blended the personal and the professional as the family firm did. By exploring the significance of the novel's imagined endings in relation to these contemporary debates, I hope to generate a discussion of the need for caution in defining the relevant historical "endings" that literary texts engage, along with a discussion of the risks, as well as rewards, of positing such endings as the entry points for literary and cultural analysis.
 

Karen Odden, "'Hurried to Death': The Victorian Railway and New Endings"

The Victorian railway, which began to offer an alternative to road and canal transport in the 1820s, had an impact on nearly every facet of Victorian culture. Although many Victorians were enthusiastic about the benefits of the railway. it was also seen as posing enormous dangers to people's bodies. Drawing on Victorian medical treatises, newspapers, fiction and poems, I suggest that the railway was widely perceived to bring into being two new types of endings: it created new ways of dying; it also helped bring to an end traditional ways of conceptualizing the body.

The most sensational forms of death by rai1way were crashes such as the one Dickens experienced at Staplehurst, and which were vividly depicted in the newspapers. Railway accidents were sensational not only because they tore heads or limbs from bodies but because they were a new form of death, different from stagecoach or mining accidents: the railway moved at terrific speeds; it could kill hundreds of people at once; travelers could not communicate with the driver; and the train wreck spared no one based on gender, occupation class. Then, in the 1860s medical practitioners began to suggest that railway accidents created a new form of injury that, although less sensational, was no less fatal. Treatises such as John Eric Erichsen's On Concussion of the Spine (1866) proposed that railway crashes caused invisible lesions in the spinal matter, which led to secondary symptoms and, often, to slow and painful death. Other pamphlets, such as " Hurried to death " or, a few words of advice on the danger of hurry and excitement, especially addressed to RAILWAY TRAVELLERS by Alfred Haviland, suggested that railways caused sudden death because unlike "old coaching time" they demanded people force their stomachs to accommodate rigid schedules; and articles in the Lancet reflect growing concern about the effect of the jolts caused by everyday railway travel. These texts began to reconceptualize the relationship between the mind, the spine, the nerves, and the other organs and limbs of the body.

While new forms of death as a result of riding on railways was a riveting concern for medical practitioners and travelers alike, I suggest that this concern was only one facet of the anxiety that developed as Victorians realized that the railway was bringing an end to life as they knew it. As early as 1821, Thomas Gray anticipated that the railway would profound1y affect the lives "of every individual, and, consequently, of all classes of society." By 1870, the Victorian railway had altered practices in engineering, politics. economics and labor relations, law, publishing, immigration, war strategy, food consumption, leisure activities, communication, architecture, the landscape, visual and decorative arts, and ways of conceptualizing space and time. While railway historians have identified and described these changes, I focus on the ways medical and fictional representations of railways reflected and participated in changing ideas about the human body. After addressing the medical treatises, I show how their representations of bodies intersect with those in another group of texts--Wilkie Collins's "The Last Stage Coachman," Mrs. Henry Wood's Oswald Cray, and popular "railway" poems from the 1860s--that represent the end of the old "coaching" lifestyle and the onset of the new "railway" life. The new lifestyle was characterized by "speed," efficiency and abundant energy; and mastery of it depended, in great part, upon conceptualizing the body as having characteristics of the steam engine itself: it was tireless but also profoundly and dangerously fragmented, just as the engine driver was separate from the engine, driving it but at the same time endangered by it. Although medical practitioners recognized that railways created new endings to a body's existence and to some extent refigured the body, this second group of texts contributed to the discourse that reconceptuaJized the body's relationship to the mind, time, work and energy toward the end of the century.
 

Sylvia Pamboukian, "Anatomy of the Afterlife: The X-Ray, Science, and the Occult"

Wilhelm Roentgen discovered the X-ray in 1895, and X-rays were quickly popularized as another in a long line of visual gadgets, such as stereoscopes, that had been a mainstay in the Victorian parlor since the early part of the century. Unlike other visual gadgets, the X-ray offered the macabre thrill of seeing one's own skeleton, and many Victorians were persuaded that it could also reveal hidden thoughts and invisible entities. But, the appeal of the X-ray was part of a larger movement to prove scientifically the existence of spiritual phenomena. As Lisa Cartwright notes, the Victorians' fascination with these gadgets was often linked to the hope of discovering truths about death and the afterlife. The X-ray joined technologies such as spirit cabinets and spirit photography that rendered spiritual phenomena visible so that the afterlife could be catalogued and examined. As unscientific as these attempts to anatomize the afterlife appear, they reveal the extent of science's hold over the Victorian imagination and an ongoing faith in empirical observation. As Jonathan Crary states, visual gadgetry forms a nexus of scientific, philosophical and aesthetic discourse. Certainly, the X-ray craze was nourished by both the popular respect for science and the widespread appeal of the occult. This dual appeal belies the traditional distinction between the occult and science, an overlap also apparent in spiritualist organizations such as the Society for Psychical Research that mirrored scientific organizations like the Roentgen Society. Both habitually used photography to document their investigations, although some spiritualists also used photography to create fraudulent or simply erroneous prints of ghosts and skeletons. The connection between the occult, science and fraud is also evident in texts such as Wells' Invisible Man and "The Truth About Pyecraft" in which science is implicated in occult activity and Kipling's "Phantom Rickshaw" in which a doctor documents the psychic persecution of an Anglo-Indian adulterer.

Certainly, the Victorians were attracted by visual gadgetry of all sorts, and not solely for its technological achievement and novelty. These X-ray participated in the Victorians' endeavor to render the afterlife visible to the scrutiny of science, extending the scientific gaze into the realm of death itself.
 

Dominique Berthiaume, "Stranger than Fiction: Spirit Photography and the Documentation of the End"

The filming of Queen Victoria' s funeral presents a momentous ending in the terms of a no less momentous beginning. It is not surprising that the Queen (a voracious consumer and willing subject of photography) should be memorialized by the newest recording technology. The extensive mechanical reproduction of Victoria's image is both characteristic and productive of the Victorian enthusiasm for documenting, archiving and collating all manner of data. The Victorians -Carlyle's "intensely self conscious. ..society" -were the first to document themselves as they did. Photography is by its nature an attempt to arrest the moment as it inexorably recedes -to impose an end. Of the many photographic means and ends which image the period perhaps the most conflicted and contentious is spirit-photography. The project of summoning the dead to appear for the camera runs counter to the evidentiary status and seeming transparency of the photograph. Like other ghost-producing mechanisms haunting Europe at the time (magic lantern shows, seances, X-rays) spirit photography questions death's finality and challenges it borders.

We find an intimate and fragile satisfaction in the photograph and credit it with sanctifying the dead and arresting the living moment. But we know that photograph's moment is illusory because the image it produces does not tell of a moment which we have lived in real time. Instead, it is a thing unto itself, manufacturing a past too distinct and too fleeting to have ever occurred to our unaided perception. The ever-present truth of photography is the uncanny way in which it covets and negotiates death: "the terrible thing which is there in every photograph: the return of the dead" (9) as Roland Barthes put it. Photography's terminating impulse places it in a privileged relation to death. The Victorians were particularly sensitive to and compelled by the camera' s power to conjure ghosts. Photography's earliest beholders seem to have been acutely aware of its necromantic agency. Contemporary commentators never quite dispense with the idea of photography's mesmeric quality: "full of misty shadowings of corpse- like colour" ( qtd. Haworth-Booth 21) in the words of an All the Year Round essayist.

Of course, the Victorians did not invent the ghost, but they may have been the first to experience the apparition as an effect of technology --to find a ghost in the machine. The author of Photographing the Invisible: Practical Studies in Spirit Photography ( 1911) insists: " Although the existence and the perception of ghosts, apparitions, doubles, is not new, the idea of their objectivity in the Invisible and that they can be photographed is." (xx) Walter Benjamin will later add: "What makes the first photographs so incomparable is perhaps this: that they present the earliest image of the encounter of machine and man." (Arcades 678) The spirit photograph --a spectral, illuminating mechanism with spectacular imaginative resonance -- marks a similarly prescient encounter. Photography's credibility is upheld by its apparent technical perfection: its ability to distinguish and record the most detailed minutiae of time and form. Spirit portraiture capitalizes upon this credibility to redraw the limits of human existence.

I would like to present and discuss spirit photographs as exemplary and constitutive of a Victorian desire to re-imagine (and re-image) death. The Victorians raised death to an elaborate (preferably opulent) observance--a performance which should have resounded with finality. But in a curiously tautological way the very effort to record a passage (especially in the realist photographic manner) allows the legally deceased to live on eternally. Spirit photography is the issue of this contradiction. By attending to the arguments of both practitioners and detractors of this black art, I hope to raise questions and gain a sense of how the Victorians documented the real- how they "saw things." Photography's claim of transparency, its cold forensic truth, and its realist agenda are threatened by the very notion of spirit "extras" (Photographing the Invisible) unaccountably revealing themselves. The ghosts in these images mediate between the dead and the living, the night and the day, "'only waiting, as they say ghosts do, to be addressed.'" (Bleak House 721)
 

Cathrine Frank, "Dissolving Prospects: Identity and the Last Will and Testament"

Under the Wills Act of 1837, instituted in the first year of Victoria's reign, the last will and testament acquired its contemporary shape as a specifically written document. This birth of the will-as-document suggests that, like the birth- and marriage-certificate, it functions rhetorically as the testator's legal identity, or identity under the law, that comes into existence through the writer's interaction with the legal codes governing inheritance of goods. By examining the relationship between testatorial agency, or will-as-imperative, and the dictates of the law, I argue that the last will and testament raises the important questions as to how much control an individual has in the construction of his own identity (especially after his demise) and in that of his beneficiaries, and, conversely, how they do or do not fit themselves into the molds established by the testator and sanctioned by the law.

In the burgeoning capitalism of the nineteenth century, the will, that catalog of one's possessions, becomes synonymous with a sense of self. Moreover, the development in the sciences and general social acceptance of the idea of empiricism, the notion that meaning is locatable on the surface of things, as the governing epistemological model makes the will itself the empirical register of identity. What makes the will a quintessentially Victorian concern is the fear of what happens to the goods it documents when one dies and enters into oblivion. Anny Sadrin makes the point specifically for Dickens that "if essence and existence are to be reconciled in a worldly society, man must 'have' in order to 'be'" (Parentage and Inheritance 4). If one is what one has, then the individual can outlive himself as long as he maintains control of the goods comprising that identity; the will seeks to provide just such a mechanism of control.

However, the decline of empiricism's cultural currency throughout the century required new models for identifying the True or the Real. The effect of this shift in empiricism on the will-as-document highlights the importance of the will-as-imperative. One response to the challenge is the open acknowledgment and investigation of this epistemological and ontological conflict that informs those Victorian novels that take the legal will as their subject. At issue here is the constructedness of both meaning and identity, the role of the will-as-imperative in that construction, and the extent to which both those individual and cultural identities and meanings are negotiable. Victorian novels that self-consciously tackle these issues, acknowledging empiricism's sway to the extent that makes it's a worthy subject of debate, presage the insurgency of those issues at the turn of the century and the shirt toward more abstract Modernist attempts to represent the Real.

If the will-as-document in realistic Victorian novels provided an eligible rhetorical strategy for discussing the formation and transmission of identity, both individual and cultural, then in the new century, Modernist writers turned their attention away from the external markers privileged by their Victorian forbears and opted for depictions of an internalized identity or consciousness as the more authentic expression of real experience. Thus, in this essay I focus on the changing position of the testator in Victorian and Edwardian novels-- including Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit (1844) and Dombey and Son (1848), Eliot's Middlemarch (1872), Trollope's Dr. Thorne (1858) and Ralph the Heir (1871), Butler's The Way of All Flesh (1903), Galsworthy's The Forsythe Saga (1922), Bennett's Clayhanger (1910), and Forster's Howards End (1910)-in order to establish as a subgenre the novel of wills and to suggest that the will-as-imperative steps forth in arguably more meaningful ways in the sense that the "end" of Victorianism and the rejection of empiricism required the development of new identities and, indeed, of alternative methods of defining one's self and culture that are traceable in the novelistic bequests of the Victorian and Edwardian period.
 

Mary Hotz, "Bodies at Rest: John Claudius Loudon and Victorian Cemetery Design"

Victorians, especially those in cities encountering massive urban growth, faced a life in which widespread disease and death struck quickly and without warning. Social reformers of the period, writing under the assumption that miasma spread disease, often concentrated on the grisly conditions of churchyards where effluvia from decomposing bodies supposedly proved fatal to neighbors. Social reformers' discussions about dangerous burial practices and the need to reform them focused attention on the problem of the working-class corpse more sharply than it had been focused before. At stake in the representation of the corpse and attention to its corporeality were certain ideologies and cultural constructs vigorously contested at mid-century. A newly enfranchised middle class, for example, increasingly defined its interests in national and economic terms and claimed the power to identify and classify the working classes according to those interests. Discussing whether to use local medical officers to evacuate the working-class home of a corpse became a polemic for national systems of inspection and regulation, justified to meet society's need to protect working-class survivors for the labor market. Arguments over neighborhood churchyards quickly turned into a battle between local vestries and centralized commissions who wanted control over national cemeteries and funeral services by government contract.

In this competition for control of the working-class corpse, John Claudius Loudon's designs for Victorian cemeteries were also considered to be part of the debate. Loudon's work, in fact, underwrites much of what Edwin Chadwick proposes by way of cemetery reform in his Supplementary Report on the Results of a Special Inquiry into the Practice of Interments in Towns (1843). In this paper I would like to consider Loudon's cemetery designs as artifacts which reveal not only changing attitudes toward death, but, more importantly, as evidence of "cultural forms which sought to reframe death, to assert new structures of experience and to establish the moral authority of those who stood behind those forms." [Lawrence Taylor, "The Uses of Death in Europe," *Anthropological Quarterly* 62 (1989): 150.]

John Claudius Loudon, devoted landscape architect and editor of The Gardener's Magazine, enunciated the twin effects of mid-Victorian cemetery design in his On the Laying Out, Planting, and Managing of Cemeteries; and on the Improvement of Churchyards, with Sixty Engravings (1843), namely, the isolation and containment of the dead and the moral reformation of the lower classes. The Victorian marriage of pragmatism to morality Loudon manifests by claiming two purposes to his cemetery designs: "the disposal of the remains of the dead in such a manner as that their decomposition, and return to the earth from which they sprung, shall not prove injurious to the living; either by affecting their health, or shocking their feelings, opinions, or prejudices"; the secondary object of cemeteries "is, or ought to be, the improvement of the moral sentiments and general taste of all classes, and more especially the great masses of society" (1). I will suggest that to achieve this advance in morality, Loudon, a utilitarian and friend of Jeremy Bentham, deploys panoramic language not only to say how important it is "to take in the whole of the cemetery with a single view . . . without going over any part twice," but to represent the cemetery, just as Wordsworth represents the monuments in a rural churchyard, as conscience and monitor of human behavior (11). A well-designed cemetery, Loudon claims, develops the value of mercy and portrays vice as ugly, virtue lovely, selfishness a sin, patriotism a duty (11). With the help of slides, I will show how Loudon's emphasis on the moral life is further developed in the renovations of existing churchyards. For Loudon, cemeteries are not only scenes calculated to segregate death from society and to improve the morals and taste of the great masses, but they shape the identity of these masses in relation to the upper classes.
 

Christopher Oldstone-Moore, "The Apotheosis of Liberal Failure: The Controversy Over the Cromwell Statue, 1894-1900"

On November 14, 1899, a large statue to Oliver Cromwell was quietly, and without ceremony, unveiled at 7:30 in the morning by two workmen in the garden along the western wall of Westminster Hall. There was no ceremony because the statue was controversial, and all sides wished to prevent an unpleasant public scene.

Two years ago I presented a paper to the American Historical Association convention about the parliamentary debate preceding the erection of the Cromwell statue and its relation to the design of the statue itself. I interpreted the Cromwell controversy as representative of Victorian cultural conflict. The paper I am proposing here is based on additional research in the extensive literature about Cromwell in the 1890s, and will become part of a larger work I hope to submit to Victorian Studies.

This paper fits the topic for the spring conference very well. Although it is unlikely that many could have seen it at the time, the statue and the dispute about Cromwell that surrounded it, was indeed the symbolic end of Gladstonian Liberalism, a political tradition that had shaped Britain for a generation. In an attempt to define itself through a public rendering of a key portion of British history, the Liberal party actually managed to expose its contradictions and weaknesses. The Cromwell statue had been intended by the Liberal leader, Lord Rosebery, as a means to underscore the strength and values of the Liberal tradition, and in particular to celebrate the Nonconformist backbone of the party. when members of the Irish party in concert with the Conservative opposition killed funding for the statue, Rosebery commissioned the work at his own expense. The final act of the last Victorian Liberal government was to arrange for placement of the future Cromwell statue at Westminster.

In one respect, Cromwell was a good choice as a Liberal symbol. He fascinated Victorians as a man of religion and action. Academics, religious leaders, journalists and most leading politicians contributed to a veritable wall of books and pamphlets about Cromwell. John Morley, a member of Gladstone and Rosebery cabinets, contributed a widely-read biography, as did Vice President Roosevelt. In several respects, however, Cromwell was a poor choice as the apotheosis of Liberal values and unity. He was a morally ambivalent figure. It was a particularly unfortunate irony that Cromwell was the one who had greatly extended the mailed fist of English power in Ireland that Gladstone had staked his party and his career to amend.

Cromwell's religious ideas were, finally, at odds with Victorian sensibility. Nonconformists idolized his stand for religious tolerance. To most Victorians, however, his mystic providentialism was baffling. Rosebery himself referred to Cromwell as a "strange mixture" of practicality and fatalism. The leading Cromwell scholar, C.H. Firth, observed that Cromwell based his politics on religion, and as ruler of Britain placed religious freedom over political freedom. Events of the 1890s suggested that in the more skeptical and moralist Victorian age, that priority had been reversed. Religion and religious groups were not to be trusted in politics. Victorians, in the end, could never quite embrace Cromwell as a hero, and Rosebery's attempt to shore up Liberalism by association with Cromwell symbolized, and indeed hastened, the end of Victorian Liberalism.

When the statue was completed, the Conservative leader of the Commons, Arthur Balfour, ignored his own earlier criticism of a Cromwell statue, and approved its erection. The crafty Balfour, perhaps more than anyone, recognized that he was building a monument to Liberal division and failure. In the end, no one wished to be present at its arrival.
 

Andrea Hibbard, "Monumental Endings: The Great Exhibition and the Albert Memorial"

Although the National Memorial to the Prince Consort in Hyde Park was not completed until 1874, it commemorated the Great Exhibition of 1851 at least as much as it glorified Albert. The Memorial and its guidebooks are saturated with references to the Exhibition and the Prince's role in its creation. More importantly, though, the Exhibition's narratives of nation and education achieved their own decadence in the Memorial's design and iconography.

The Memorial contains a condensed and highly stylized expression of the Exhibition's narratives of nation. To begin with, Victorian observers aspired to make the Memorial express Englishness. And like the Exhibition, the Memorial delineates Englishness by juxtaposing it with other national identities. On a practical level, the Memorial uses four sculptural groups of the continents to make this juxtaposition architectural. On a theoretical level, the sculptural groups-what the Memorial's architect called the "continental sentiments"-reduce the rest of the world to nothing more than an additional series of abstract ideas to be mastered aesthetically. Like the Exhibition, the Memorial brings "all the world" to London. It colonizes the rest of the world by symbolically importing it into its Hyde Park precincts and then reconstructing it according to British interests. Meanwhile, it uses a strategy of what anthropologist Renato Rosaldo terms "imperialist nostalgia" to conceal the real world complement to this symbolic domination.

So for example, in the Asia group, four figures surround a partially disrobed woman reposing on an elephant. As language in the Memorial's earliest guidebooks makes all too clear, this erotically charged vignette is based on the familiar contrast between a masculine (Western) progress and a feminized (Eastern) stasis. Asia was a part of the world that had recently enough proved itself troublesome. India and China were newly suppressed, not unlike the "prostrated" elephant at the center of the Asia group. My paper demonstrates that what this statue signifies, therefore, is England's nostalgia for an earlier time, before the Indian Mutiny and the Opium Wars, a time when subjection seemed willing and coercion was not required because "influence" sufficed.

Ultimately, the Memorial is world-engulfing in more than one way, however. Besides its statues of the continents, its complicated iconographic program embraces references to what one of the most recent guidebooks to the Memorial calls "the ideals and aspirations of the whole Victorian age." The Memorial is literally fraught with symbolism. In fact, much of the writing about the Memorial has been devoted to teasing out interpretations of its allegories, deciphering its symbols, and elucidating the significance of the many historical figures who ring its base. As my own readings of its statues suggest, the Memorial positions the viewer in just this way.

Pursuing this line of thought, I want to suggest that the Memorial's overdetermined iconography is just one more expression of its decadence. Walter Benjamin argues that the overwrought style characteristic of decadence signifies a temporary historical disjunction between the effects to which an art form aspires and the technical idiom available for producing those effects. What I am contending is that behind the Memorial's surfeit of symbolism was an aspiration to render the Exhibition's narratives of rational recreation performative, an aspiration which was, in one important respect, more fully realized in what Eric Hobsbawm characterizes as the ritualized open spaces of Edwardian London. While symbol-laden statuary might educate viewers and even encourage emulation, the public spaces Hobsbawm describes were better equipped to promote the class mixing that was so central to the larger ideal of rational recreation and so important to Victorian promoters of both the Exhibition and the Memorial. Accordingly, the decadence of the Memorial's narratives of nation and rational recreation is not just a symptom of the ending (or exhaustion) of these narratives; it also connotes the beginning of new narratives.
 
 

Some final words from the editor:

I want to offer a warm welcome to Anne Windholz, our new Executive Secretary-and new editor of the Bulletin (among other titles and roles). I know Anne will do a fine job in this position. I ask all members to give her every word of encouragement and plenty of supportive, cooperative effort as we continue to keep MVSA strong.

I also want to add my thanks to those expressed by others elsewhere in this newsletter-thanks to all who serve MVSA and whose commitment to the association makes it the wonderful organization of scholars that it is. Serving for the past three years as MVSA's executive secretary has been a privilege and a pleasure. Any effective work I have done has been possible only because I've been the fortunate recipient of the steady support and generous assistance of Executive Committee members-particularly the presidents with whom I've served, Richard Davis and Kris Garrigan-as well as the beneficiary of fine efforts by Local Arrangements Committee members who have done so much to make our Annual Meeting a success each of the last three years.

I will continue to serve for a while longer as webmaster of the MVSA website. Anyone with ideas for the further development of this site should contact me directly or through Anne. Please remember to refer anyone who is interested in finding out more about MVSA to our website at www2.ic.edu/MVSA.

A final, final word: Don't forget to renew/update your membership sometime in the coming months. Indeed, as you finish reading the Bulletin, this might be a good time to renew. Use the form provided to submit current information for the directory along with your dues check, or look for the membership form on the website.

All the best!