Victorian Review

It may seem perverse for my contribution to a forum focused on change and novelty to emphasize continuity instead. Yet, looking back over the nearly three decades I have been teaching Victorian literature—reflections that have perhaps unusual specificity because for around half of that time, I have maintained a blog series¹ about what goes on in my classroom—what stands out to me is that (to paraphrase Simon and Garfunkel), after changes upon changes, my courses are more or less the same.

To be sure, “more or less” is doing a lot of work here. In some respects, my long experience of teaching is actually one of near constant modifications motivated by factors both external and intrinsic to my individual classroom. We are incessantly revising our departmental curriculum, with outcomes that affect both which particular courses I offer and the relationship of those courses to the rest of our program. Details of the courses themselves are affected by developments in English broadly speaking, in Victorian studies specifically, and in my own research: over the years, different texts, topics, and critical approaches have become more or less interesting or urgent. Students’ needs and expectations evolve; so too, for better and for worse, does technology. For all of these reasons, I am constantly playing with my reading lists and varying my assignment sequences, which over the years have included reading journals and class blogs, letter exchanges and collaborative wikis, annotation exercises and research papers, group presentations and Pecha Kuchas, along with many variations on more traditional essay assignments.

And yet the real work of my classroom, as I see it, has not changed much at all since 1995, although I have become more purposeful in planning for it and (thanks in large part to my blog series) more articulate in explaining and [End Page 29] advocating for it. At the heart of my teaching is the conviction that, as Aurora Leigh puts it, “the world of books is still the world” (Barrett Browning 26). This does not mean that my highest priority is engaging with Victorian novels in the spirit of what is sometimes called “presentism,” tying their value—and thus the value of our attention to them—to their relevance to problems in our current world.² It means that I focus on them as modelling ways of being in the world, and on the significance, in that respect, of their form—of what the contemporary novelist Ali Smith calls “the shape the telling takes” (21).

To serve these goals, I need and want our attention to be primarily on the page. Indeed, my main goal for all of my courses, not just those on Victorian literature, is (as I wrote on my blog in 2018) “to engage and train [students] as readers”:

the vast majority of the students I teach at every level (now, really, including graduate students) are not going to enter the academy as professional literary scholars—but they are (I very much hope!) going to keep reading. My goal is to foster both the skills and the commitment they need to carry on reading as well (as intently, curiously, and critically) as we ask them to in our classes.

(“Readers and/or Scholars”)

For me, this attention to reading as a portable, practical, and ethically significant skill is an extension of the underlying premise of most of the nineteenth-century novels I teach, which were never intended to be treated as static aesthetic artifacts but were meant rather as provocations to both thought and action—or, keeping in mind my interest in form, to thought as action. “All of our books,” I wrote in a 2008 blog post summarizing my closing peroration for my nineteenth-century fiction class,

in their own ways ask us to get worked up about “the way we live now”—using fictional techniques (intrusive narration, direct address, thematization, multiple narrators, sensationalism, comedy, pathos) and artistry to engage us. . . . A further, and related, feature of these novels, and one that seems to me of increasing importance, is the imperative they communicate that we, as readers, have a lot of responsibilities: to read well, to judge carefully, and to think about our own role in the social worlds and institutions the novelists examine so imaginatively and often so critically—many of which have continuations or counterparts, after all, in modern society. At heart, this is the demand these novels make on us—to get [End Page 30] involved, as readers—to acknowledge that the world they talk about is always, if not always literally, our own.

(“Review and Conclusions”)

Approaching the readings in this spirit can certainly mean acknowledging connections between the stories they tell and our current reality. When I was teaching Hard Times in 2016, for example, I found that it was a cautionary tale not just for its time but, precisely as its subtitle has it, for these times,

in the U.S., especially, where Mr. Bounderby is running for president, and Gradgrinds dominate state houses and the governing boards of public universities. . . . “You may cut the piece out with your penknife if you like, Tom. I wouldn’t cry!” exclaims Louisa after Bounderby kisses her on the cheek, and the violence of her antipathy seems if anything inadequate to the rage and disgust we feel on her behalf at his creepily pedophiliac obsession with her. Such a grotesque predator should have nothing, be nothing, count for nothing—and the genius of Hard Times is that it makes us feel how horrible it is that such a man gets any kind of respect, and lets us enjoy seeing him exposed for the repellent bully he is.

(“Hard Times”)

Teaching The Warden during Brett Kavanaugh’s SCOTUS hearings in 2018 provoked similar reflections:

Could there be a sharper contrast between meek Mr. Harding—who, faced for the first time with a challenge to the privilege he has so enjoyed (and, by some lights, done such amiable good with), resigns rather than live at odds with his now-provoked conscience—and Kavanaugh, who ranted and raved in outrage at the very idea that he should be investigated thoroughly, never mind held accountable, for any past misconduct? . . . The novel explores at several levels the complicated relationship between individuals and larger systems and institutions, and in doing so it raises timely questions about the possibility of meaningful moral agency in corrupt circumstances.

(“Corpses and Consciences”)

But the novels I teach raise many kinds of questions, and immediate relevance is not a prerequisite for either their value or students’ engagement, as I was happily reminded by a post from March 2017, when we were working through Adam Bede: [End Page 31]

One of the best moments of my whole week—really, of my whole term—was walking back to my office from class on Friday behind a stream of students who were still talking with great animation about Seth . . . whose happy generosity in the face of Adam and Dinah’s marriage does, as the students noted, strain credulity.

(“March Madness”)

This approach does not mean uncritically accepting the novels’ implicit or explicit solutions to the problems they explore, or overlooking ways they or their authors may contribute, thematically or materially, to social or ideological structures we find problematic or worse. Such critiques are part of what it means to read well; at the same time, reading well is essential to determining the force and justice of our antagonisms as well as our enthusiasms.

In general, though, my classroom has always run, not on a hermeneutics of suspicion but on a desire to cultivate appreciation in my students for the merging of artistry and activism in the great nineteenth-century novels, whether by connecting the sprawl of Bleak House to its message about social connectedness or the sentimentality of Mary Barton to Gaskell’s conviction that compassion and communication can heal class divisions; by tracing the narrative structure of Middlemarch to illustrate how it engages us perforce in the mental movement George Eliot believes is fundamental to morality; or by holding up Vanity Fair as a reflection of our own frailties. I hope students will carry away and maybe even cherish some of these specific experiences and insights, but what I wish and strive for even more is that after the course is over they will continue to read fiction with attention, rigour, and engagement, and that their reading will inspire them to answer the call with which Dickens concludes Hard Times: “Dear reader! It rests with you and me, whether, in our two fields of action, similar things shall be or not. Let them be!”