Victorian Review

IN HER approach to recovering and contextualizing Fiction without Romance, or The Locket-Watch (1830), the only novel known to have been written by Maria Polack, the first English Jew identifying as Jewish to publish a novel, Heidi Kaufman set herself two primary tasks. The first was to track down all that she could discover about Polack’s life, work, and environmental influences, a task to which the archival, the quasi-archival, the anecdotal, and the serendipitous all made their contributions. The second was to use what she discovered to both theorize and politicize the unique status of archives as spaces “whose boundaries, provenance, infrastructure, and selected/saved content work to recover, shape, and sometimes silence East End voices,” and, by extension, the voices of other marginalized groups. This necessitates reading absences as much as presences, exclusions as much as inclusions—in short, adducing as evidence, albeit of a very speculative kind, what cannot be found in archives as well as what can.

In the first part of that mission, she succeeds admirably. While her research has brought to light little substantive new information about Polack, it leaves the grounds for our relative ignorance of her on clearer view. Through assiduous work in the London Metropolitan Archives and allied resources, and the good fortune that the British Library copy of Fiction without Romance retains its printed subscription list, Kaufman has been able to assemble surprisingly detailed information about Polack’s probable social networks, from which she establishes plausible connections in not only London’s East End but also [End Page 166] London (and England) more widely, Ireland, and, particularly fruitfully, the West Indies. While this does not lead to one of the main ends for which Kaufman came to hope—discovery of a firmer association between Polack and her contemporary Emma Lyon, the Jewish poet—it does lead, via the most serendipitous element in her researches, to a diary kept intermittently in London, Barbados, and Jamaica by one of Emma Lyon’s brothers, Abraham Septimus Lyon. Thanks to Kaufman’s energy and diplomacy, the Lyon Archive (including a digital copy of the diary) and the Polack Archive (including a digital copy of Fiction without Romance) now form the core of the East End Digital Library (eastendarchives.net). Some of the Kaufman-created ancillary materials in this archive seem, to this reviewer at least, to have more questionable claims on our attention. For example, “student exhibit essays, and a soundscapes map that imagines what A.S. Lyon might have heard on his daily journeys from the East End to the West End of London” (89) seem to have less to do with illuminating A.S. Lyon’s diary or Kaufman’s findings than with advancing the increased institutional imperative to involve undergraduates in research. But these reservations notwithstanding, Kaufman has provided a valuable service to historians and literary scholars, in a range of areas, in constructing this digital archive.

The conclusions Kaufman comes to from long immersion in these materials are somewhat less satisfying than her revelation of their existence. One argumentative hare started by the presence on the subscription list of names with West Indian connections raises the taint of Polack family implication in slavery—without question a discovery worth pursuing. But if that pursuit leads only to the claim that five people out of a subscription list of 147 owned slaves, while two more participated in West Indian slave economies (when, arguably, anyone in Britain who, for example, ate sugar or drank rum was participating in West Indian slave economies), is that in itself sufficient to support the conclusion that “the system of slavery [drives] the novel’s funding and marketing strategies” (68)? Special pleading advances from mere unwise hyperbole to absurdity in an accompanying endnote:

While the novel does not directly mention Atlantic slavery, it does still include metaphoric references to the institution of slavery. For example, characters mention being “enslaved by ideas.” In another passage a women [sic] victimized by a man who took advantage of her is compared to an enslaved woman. Such allusions suggest that Polack was well versed with [sic] the language of slavery, even though she doesn’t make explicit reference to the Atlantic contexts evoked by the word.

(194)

Such desperate argumentative strain can only undermine the evidential base it is designed to support. [End Page 167]

While Kaufman’s relish for the chase is intermittently infectious, her enthusiasm for her ultimately unresolved search leads her to privilege process over findings in distracting ways that too often substitute the journalistic for the scholarly. This results in a presumably unintended focus on authorial personality, with an overgenerous deployment of the first-person pronoun. The following laboured exercise in anecdote may constitute something of a litmus test for a reader’s likely response to this study’s rhetorical strategies. Kaufman’s researches have taken her to Jamaica, in pursuit of Jewish East End connections. While there, she does volunteer work creating an inventory for a Jewish cemetery:

It was in my fourth year of volunteering in Jamaica that I experienced a little luck. Just after finishing breakfast, we realized the transportation company had sent the wrong size van. Our leader approached one of the new volunteers, who had just arrived with her husband. “Diane, could your husband drive a few of us to the cemetery? It’s not far. The van they sent is too small for all the volunteers.” I observed the conversation passively with jet-lagged eyes, warming my hands on a mug of coffee. Moments later we were nudged out of the dining area to the vehicles that would take us to the cemetery. Three of us squeezed into the back of the car driven by Mike, Diane’s husband, while Diane navigated. We were instructed to follow the van through Kingston rush-hour traffic to the historic Orange Street Cemetery, Jamaica’s only Jewish cemetery still in use. I made small talk with the strangers in the front of the car as we pulled out of the hotel driveway.

(91)

And so it goes on, with three more pages in a similar vein, studded with scene-setting inconsequentialities and passages of conversation in implausible direct speech (surely a tape-recorder was not in operation for these banal chance exchanges?). This chatty verbosity is deemed necessary to convey the straightforward fact that one of Kaufman’s fellow passengers knows of A.S. Lyon’s unpublished diary, which may contain something relevant to Polack’s possible relationship with the Lyon family. In the event, it doesn’t, though it does in turn lead to the other main component of what becomes the East End Digital Library.

This tendency for contextual circumstantial detail to be used to pad out the thinness of substantive findings invites a question relevant to many a scholarly monograph these days: whether the necessary expressive rigour of shaping material to the dimensions allowable to two or three articles might not have been preferable to indulging authorial taste for lengthy scene-setting in the capaciousness of a book-length study, more useful as books may be [End Page 168] to an evolving career. Failing that, a tighter editorial hand would certainly have made for a more disciplined, if shorter, monograph and ideally one that realizes that tenant is not a synonym for tenet and in which modifiers are less prone to dangle.