THE CRITIC AS CRITIC

A Portfolio of Theatre and Book Reviews

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No 47 : NOVEMBER / DECEMBER 2008

Wilde theatre reviews appear here; Shaw reviews in Shavings; all other theatre reviews in .

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TABLE OF CONTENTS
WILDE
Gert Buelens on Michèle Mendelssohn on Henry James and Oscar Wilde
Gwen Orel on The Selfish Giant and An Ideal Husband
Leonée Ormond on Molly-Whittington-Egan on Frank Miles and Oscar Wilde
OTHER REVIEWS OF FIN DE SIÈCLE INTEREST
Linda Dryden on W.E. Henley and Robert Louis Stevenson
John McRae on Hirschfeld and Roellig on Homosexuals in Berlin
Laurence Talairach-Vielmas on John Glendening on The Evolutionary Imagination
Richard Toye on John Partington on H.G. Wells
REVIEWS ON OTHER PAGES

WILDE REVIEWS

Review by Gert Buelens

Michèle Mendelssohn: Henry James, Oscar Wilde and Aesthetic Culture. Edinburgh UP 2007. ISBN 978 0 7486 2385 3; 310 pp. 65 €

This is a fascinating book that offers a very valuable and corrective contribution to our understanding of the intricate interrelationship between Oscar Wilde and Henry James. It does so by means of a sustained examination of ‘the ambiguities inherent in English and American aesthetic culture’ (4); it is not just Wilde and James, but their cultures ‘that stridently externalised their concerns about one another and themselves while quietly internalising each others’ [sic] values in print ...’ (4). Michèle Mendelssohn regards the dynamics of this relation as testimony to how ‘Aestheticism finds its strength in the continual ruptures it generates – in its arguments, antagonisms and dialectics’: ‘James’s and Wilde’s relationship is an exemplary instance of this type of highly productive interaction’ (14).

Chronologically organized, the study has a strong biographical focus, essentially limiting itself to the period during which the two writers actually knew one another and moved in overlapping socio-cultural circles. The emphasis of the discussion lies on hitherto unsuspected or unexplored convergences between their works. I was sorry I had not had access to the insights of the long Chapter One (at 68 pages, it occupies more than a quarter of a book that has 6 chapters plus an introduction) when I was teaching Washington Square a little while ago, because I would have liked to draw in class on the (for me, highly surprising, but indisputable) fact that George Du Maurier based his drawings of Morris Townsend closely on the images of Oscar Wilde that circulated at the time. I cannot imagine ever teaching this novel again without going into this wonderful link, carefully explored by Mendelssohn. Townsend’s posture in the illustrations (for the original 1881 book edition) shows a ‘stoop that gives the body a marked S- or C-shape’ (63); his dress is vintage Aestheticist garb; in fact, even his ‘face, hair, ... and demeanour mirror the aesthetic persona Wilde affected while in the United States’ (66). (This is especially the case in one illustration, which graces the book’s dust jacket.) Yet, while Mendelssohn quotes James to the effect that he was excited at the prospect of having Du Maurier illustrate this novel, we are not told how he responded to the result (it may well be that this is unknown); neither are we offered clinching textual evidence that would prove the more narrow point that James’s Morris Townsend is a Wilde-like Aesthete. To be sure, there are characteristics that suggest this possibility; there are others which are less easily squared with such a reading. To give two examples: Townsend enjoys Aunt Penniman’s fawning only inasmuch as it helps him achieve his calculated goal–he does not thrive on it per se (as would have been the case with a true Aesthete in the salons of the day) and grows impatient of her as soon as her fantasizing loses all touch with (his) practical reality; Townsend does not make a principle out of cultivating art and taste over business--he is quite willing to be an entrepreneur, as long as he can be in charge and have others do the real work. This is not to say that the argument of Chapter One is wrong, but rather that it is a little one-sided in its understandable eagerness to find in Washington Square ‘an American pre-history for the transatlantic aesthete James had depicted in his earlier tales’ (79); perhaps the chapter echoes somewhat too nicely Dr Sloper’s tendency to think in types and categories.

Chapter Two zooms in on Wilde, offering a very sensitive account of how his Aestheticism ‘brazenly transgresses (and therefore displaces) conventions about literary appropriation and creation, by resisting the commonplaces of intellectual honesty and artistic attribution’ (95). The chapter persuasively locates an ‘ambivalence ... in Wilde’s relations with Whistler and James,’ and argues that such ‘contradictions became, at a given moment in Aestheticism’s career, a new mode of creation of which Wilde is the originator’ (95). Mendelssohn is particularly good at reconstructing sympathetically how Wilde did not so much, or certainly not only, plagiarize the ideas and words of others, but was rather guilty above all of ‘a more specific type of self-plagiarism whereby Wilde returns to his version of someone else’s idea and reinterprets it. Time and time again, Wilde prefers to reuse his version of someone else’s idea, rather than returning to the author’s words and so, ... Wilde takes other authors’ ideas at second- and sometimes third-hand. To call the resulting ideas derivative does not account for the fact that they become more refined, and more Wilde’s own, with every reinterpretation’ (110). The chapter ends with a fairly brief reading of James’s The Tragic Muse that sees a reverberation of Wilde in Nash. However, as Mendelssohn persuasively argues, what we have in Nash is ‘not a pale, objective rendition of a man we might (following Cargill) label ‘Wilde’, but the essence of the impression Wilde created for James, an impression at once highly personal and highly concentrated, the substrate of a repetitive analytical process’ in the Paterian sense (119).

Chapter Three considers ‘Wilde’s impressions of James in Intentions and The Picture of Dorian Gray,’ as the subtitle puts it (127). Mendelssohn’s thesis in this chapter is that ‘While Wilde’s performance opposite James follows an antagonistic pattern similar to his interaction with Whistler, the vigour and single-mindedness with which he criticised James makes James a far more important influence on him than has been assumed’ (128). Jonathan Freedman, too, has focused on the effect on James of the battle between the two minds, ignoring, Mendelssohn feels, the impact on Wilde. An important sequence in the argument first notes the extent to which the aesthetic vision of both was ‘indebted to the Paterian impression’ (135). ‘Rather than uniting James and Wilde, this resemblance drove them further apart. Just as similarities had led Whistler and Wilde’s friendship to turn to antagonism and plagiarism, Wilde attempted to rise above his resemblances with James by attacking him and subtly imitating him’ (135). A strategy Wilde is also said to have used is to read James selectively, zooming in on one aspect of ‘The Art of Fiction’ while ignoring its complementary aspect (‘monocling James, Wilde could only see him as a realist,’ Mendelssohn nicely summarizes this tendency), and selecting certain stories and essays of his but not others, so as to maximize the putative distinctions between the two of them (135).

The fourth chapter traces the ‘strong similarities’ between the two plays that the authors saw staged in early 1895: James’s Guy Domville, which was a popular failure, and was replaced by Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, which was not (164). Both, for Mendelssohn, reveal a ‘shared investment in the ontology of modern selfhood’ (164), in particular the conditions under which a fully formed homosexual identity is not yet available, so that a sense of ‘identities in crisis’ is what we attend to in these works (168). Mendelssohn rightly invokes Foucault’s insight that ‘our modern conception of homosexual identity’ only took shape towards the end of the nineteenth century (166), and that before that time there was (a less repressive) legislating of sexual practices, not sexual identities (a heterosexual identity similarly did not yet exist). Yet, she does not, I think, apply this insight as fully as she might, instead adding theories of community to her framework that were not developed for this context, so that she tends to project onto the Wilde and James cases present-day notions of the need for a supportive (homosexual) community, noting that there was, for a Jack Worthing or Guy Domville, only Einsamkeit (solitude) rather than Gemeinschaft (community) or Gemeinsamkeit (commonality) (167). But if there is no homosexual identity as yet (luckily so, in terms of what legislating against such an identity has meant), then why would there need to be a community of such identities? And why would solitude be the best way of describing the experience of those who practice a less common form of seeking sexual pleasure (possibly alongside being married and being a parent, as was the case with Wilde)? I came away from this chapter with a sense of anachronism, also in how the term ‘modern’ was made to function, without any noticeable distinction between its purchase and that of the competing term ‘postmodern,’ which did not make an entry, yet seemed often to be included under the umbrella of ‘modern’ (for instance: ‘we are all Bunburyists. Modern identity is not woven with a solitary thread; it is a fabric formed by the intersection of several signs and selves’ [190]). Given that we are dealing with texts written on the cusp of the twentieth century, some consideration of how they relate to the transition from Victorian to specifically modern(ist) ways of looking at identity would have been welcome, rather than the generalized link to ‘the’ modern, in particular in relation to the dynamics of sexual identity that were so noticeably in the process of undergoing transformation, rather than having already arrived at the point we have now reached.

In Chapter Five, James’s The Spoils of Poynton is linked to the Wilde trials. The planned title for this novel was ‘The House Beautiful.’ Mendelssohn feels sure that James changed the title because he ‘was trying to fend off associations with the newly unfashionable Wilde who, in 1882, had titled one of his American lectures ‘The House Beautiful’ in order to take advantage of the popularity of Cook’s book’ (201). This is possible. But Mendelssohn does not consider other title changes in James’s long and full career, such as his regret when he realized that Thomas Hardy had already used the title he had in mind for his American travelogue: ‘The Return of the Native.’ Nor does it make all that much sense that the trials are supposed to have had ‘the effect of increasing James’s nervousness about being publicly associated with Wilde,’ yet that they also seem ‘to have increased his desire to discuss more overtly than before matters of a physical and sexual nature’ (206): if he was really that frightened by the trials, then surely he would have clammed up altogether? Mendelssohn is more persuasive when she goes on to note that James’s increased interest in Wilde may be due to the fact that, ‘as a tragic figure stripped of his status, James’s rival became an object of fascination, pity and disgust’ (207). James’s response to various groups on the American scene, I would observe in confirmation of this hypothesis, was similarly determined by their relation to the dynamics of social success: the African Americans who had seen their status rise after the Civil War were less interesting to James than the erstwhile Confederates who had been defeated at the hands of the Yankees. White Southerners were indeed endless sources of fascination, pity and arguably also disgust.

The final chapter relates ‘the fallout of Wilde’s trial’ to ‘a crisis in post-1895 Aestheticism’ that is demonstrated by means of Wilde’s De Profundis and James’s The Turn of the Screw – works that undertake a ‘radical reassessment of the movement’s central tenets, particularly its uncoupling of the aesthetic and the moral’ (241). It is through the figure of the child – ‘fully invested with the most decadent inclinations’ (260) – that this uncoupling is carried through. ‘Wilde portrays Douglas as foul precisely because he fails to live up to the promise inherent in youth’ (263); James ‘radically undermines the premise that beauty is an end in itself and need not be troubled by moral concerns’ (242). In order to argue her case, Mendelssohn unfortunately has to assume ‘that the governess’s record is reliable’ (258). She is aware of the fact that the opposite can be claimed with equal support from the text, yet insists that it is necessary to do so in order to reveal how this, like De Profundis, is a story of ‘aesthetic desire, knowledge and power,’ in which the child figures as an emblem of ‘Aestheticism’s moral underdevelopment and stunted growth’ (259). This is certainly a strong and provocative reading, but Mendelssohn’s urge to see parallels and links between James and Wilde results in some questionable speculation, such as the proposition that the governess’s decision to discipline Flora not by spanking her but by locking her in safe ‘neatly parallels James’s personal belief that Wilde should have been put in isolation rather than being sentenced to hard labour’ (255).

Nonetheless, Mendelssohn overall has a strong case for many under-recognized links between the two authors she has studied in the context of the debate over aesthetic culture. This book greatly enriches our understanding of the network or tapestry of aesthetic references. The study is strikingly well-versed in the cultural biography of the period, throwing out several interesting bits of information that are sometimes not explored as fully as the intrigued reader might want. For instance, I was fascinated by the fact that reports on the Oscar Wilde trial appeared in The Times side-by-side with reports on Lord Russell’s trial, a case brought by his wife on the advice of Sir Edward Clarke, Wilde’s lawyer, on the grounds that Russell was engaging in homosexual activity; to make the irony even more complete, ‘Russell’s lawyer was Sir Henry James, QC,’ no relation of the author’s (230). There are also worthwhile results of archival research, such as a few more suggestive homoerotic phrasings in the typescript of James’s Guy Domville, which were edited out by Leon Edel in preparing the printed edition.

Finally, a few critical remarks on editorial aspects. I am unfamiliar with the practice of placing endnotes at the conclusion of each chapter in a monograph (it is common, of course, with multi-authored volumes). For those who like to follow up notes, this is not a convenient system: much better are either footnotes, or endnotes collected at the end of the book, preferably with a running header indicating which pages of the book the notes grouped there refer to. The editing is not to the highest standard, with a word missing here and there, usually ones that the reader can mentally fill in easily (such as ‘of’ on page 12 in ‘will reveal some the patently positive emotions’; or ‘manifested’ for ‘manifests’ in ‘The exhaustion manifests by Jack reveals ...’, p. 172) or delete, as in ‘a guide to that ‘the unique extrahuman’ poet’ on p. 116. But occasionally there is potentially some real confusion, as in the awkward sentence ‘Five years before James completed The Tragic Muse, in 1885, the painter John Singer Sargent had asked him ...’ (p. 116). We have been reminded on the previous page that this novel was finished in 1890, but a good editor would intervene and rephrase this sentence, less confusingly, as ‘In 1885, five years before James completed The Tragic Muse, the painter John Singer Sargent had asked him ...’. And I may be mistaken, but I suspect the chronology is truly mixed up on p. 141, where we learn that James was one of the members of the Savile Club to support Wilde’s candidacy in ‘October 1888’: ‘Wilde may have felt thankful for James’s support,’ the next sentence says, ‘but his actions defy this sentiment. Instead of a slap on the back, Wilde’s response seems more like a stab in the back. In the January 1888 issue of Woman’s World, Wilde [set about] disparaging James’s work ...’ (141). Either sloppy editing missed that it is a later issue in which this happens (there is no accompanying endnote with a fuller reference), or the implied chronological sequence is simply not supported by the facts.

· Gert Buelens is Director of the Centre for Literature and Trauma (LITRA) at Ghent University. Recent publications includeHenry James and the ‘Aliens’: In Possession of the American Scene (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2002) and Enacting History in Henry James: Narrative, Power, and Ethics (Cambridge: CUP, 1997)

Review by Leonée Ormond

Molly Whittington-Egan: Frank Miles and Oscar Wilde: “such white lilies”. High Wycombe: Rivendale Press 2008 ISBN I 904201 09 I price £12.50 or $25.

Molly Whittington-Egan’s life of Frank Miles sets out to reclaim her subject from his insubstantial supporting rôle in the story of Oscar Wilde. Her title, however, specifically relates Miles to Wilde, making this, to some extent, an account of their relationship. Miles emerges as an artist with a considerable talent. Not a financial hanger-on of Wilde, quite the reverse in fact, he is also revealed as a man of means. The author does not make out a strong case for Miles as an artist, although she is careful to show that he had a considerable success and made a comfortable living.

Frank Miles made his reputation in the 1870s with his drawings of women. These were actresses, fashionable figures in high life or models who posed with names like Laura and Lucy. The titles often refer to literary figures, Tennyson’s poetry being a particular favourite. Through his son, the poet acknowledged the gift of a print of The Gardener’s Daughter, a poem popular with artists of the 1860s. Miles’ best-known sitter was Lily Langtry whom he met in 1876 and who became a friend. Among the others were Virginia Woolf’s beautiful mother, Julia Stephen, the photographer, Eveleen Myers, and the actress, Connie Gilchrist, one of Frederic Leighton’s favourite models. Prints of these circulated widely. The sitters are often posed with leaves and flowers, or, in one of the most popular, Ruth, with wheat ears wound round a headscarf. In the aesthetic mode, they caught the imagination of a generation seeking the beautiful and, occasionally, the exotic. (It was, incidentally, the Punch cartoonist, George Du Maurier, who pilloried the aesthetes, not his son, the actor Gerald, as stated here.)

Oil paintings by Miles are rarer. They sometimes, like his touching study of a young girl in a melancholy reverie, For Pity and Love are Akin, pass through the sale rooms. Pause in the Match, with a seated girl in a white dress holding a tennis racquet, belongs, appropriately, to the Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Club Museum. The American writer of short stories, Bret Harte, is the subject of one of Miles’ male portraits. He also exhibited landscapes at the Royal Academy, but, perhaps because of difficulties in tracing them, none are illustrated here. It would be good to see An Evening on Lough Muck, Connemara, painted while Miles was on holiday with Wilde.

Molly Whittington-Egan gives a through account of Miles’ background and early life. Grandson of a wealthy banker and son of a clergyman, Miles grew up in his father’s rectory at Bingham in Nottinghamshire. His mother was an artist who had taken classes at the Ruskin School in Oxford. The family was a large one, and Frank, his mother and sisters, decorated the church with frescoes, stained glass windows and ironwork.

One of the great strengths of this book is its correction of earlier errors. Frank Miles, we learn, was not, as has been assumed, a fellow Oxford undergraduate of Oscar Wilde, although they may well have met there in 1874 or 1875. There has been much speculation as to the precise nature of their relationship and that riddle remains unsolved. There can be no doubt that Miles and Wilde were close friends and one of the high points of this book is the account (from Wilde himself) of his visit to Bingham Rectory and of his delight in the family and the garden. Frank Miles, an enthusiastic botanist and gardener, would have been the ideal companion. Miles’ drawing of Wilde, reproduced here, represents his subject as wide eyed and serious.

Molly Whittington-Egan sees Miles as an original for some aspects of the character of Basil Hallward in Dorian Gray, published the year before Miles’ death and after the friendship had ended. The case is a convincing one, particularly in the light of another of the author’s corrections to the usual story of Wilde and Miles. Far from being a mere acolyte of Wilde, Miles was actually the benefactor. It was to his studio, in Salisbury Street off the Strand, that Wilde went on coming down from Oxford, although the exact financial arrangements (if any) are uncertain.

The eminence grise of this biography is the sculptor, Lord Ronald Gower. The author clearly establishes (again correcting popular belief) that Wilde and Frank Miles were already close friends when Gower entered the ‘Trinity’. In her view, Gower was the serpent in the garden, leading both men astray: ‘Gower was an extreme corrupting influence on Oscar and Frank’. Seven and ten years older than Miles and Wilde, and far more experienced, Gower mocked Wilde’s attraction to Catholicism and may have led Miles into the seamier side of London life. ‘Gower was an outsider, of the world, in a different league from the cautious, tortured university homosexual of the Walter Pater type.’ If Miles is (at least in part) the model for Basil Hallward, Gower has some points in common with Lord Henry Wotton, although the author questions whether he had anything approaching Wotton’s wit. Molly Whittington-Egan totally dismisses Gower’s work as a sculptor. His popular Shakespeare statue at Stratford is contemptuously, and not entirely fairly, described as ‘ridiculous’.

Another unsolved mystery which Molly Whittington-Egan raises is Canon Miles’ failure to realise that Gower was a corrupting influence upon his son, although he eventually believed this to be the case with Oscar Wilde. Gower’s title perhaps protected him from suspicion. It was Canon Miles who precipitated the rift between Miles and Wilde, writing to his son, and then to Oscar, to protest at some of the sentiments expressed in the latter’s 1881 volume of poetry. Frank’s mother even cut one of the poems out of her copy. The result was that Wilde left their shared home in Tite Street, Chelsea.

From the start, this book hints at disaster. When the blow falls, Miles’ rapid descent into syphilitic madness is dealt with comparatively briefly. Here again the author is correcting the errors of others. Some writers state that Miles died of an accidental overdose in 1888. His family, acutely aware of the shame involved in admitting to insanity in the family, preferred to report that he was dead in that year and obituaries appeared. In fact, he lived in an asylum until 1891.

This comparatively brief and very readable book sets the record straight on several important issues in the life of Frank Miles. One casualty of the reassessment is Robert Harborough Sherard’s dramatic tale of Miles’ fear of arrest and prosecution for sexual relations with underage girls and of Wilde’s holding off a group of policemen while his friend escaped over the rooftops.

Although they lived close to each other in Chelsea, Wilde ruthlessly cut Miles after their quarrel and was unwilling to refer to him either before or after Miles’ death. The author thinks it likely that Wilde ‘did come to full knowledge of Frank’s fate’ and speculates, with percipience, that he was ‘terrified to consider the predicament of his old friend, once close, with whom he had shared so many adventures’.

· Leonée Ormond is Professor Emerita and Fellow of King’s College, London. University of London. She has published monographs, editions, and articles on many nineteenth and early twentieth century artists and writers, and is at present completing a life of the Punch cartoonist, Linley Sambourne.

Two Reviews by Gwen Orel

Oscar Wilde's The Selfish Giant, presented by Literally Alive Children's Theatre as part of 1st Irish 2008 at the Players Theatre, 115 MacDougal St., NYC. 13th September–26th October 2008. www.literallyalive.com

The Selfish Giant by Oscar Wilde represents Wilde's sweet, sentimental, and quite religious side; it is a fairy tale for children with a strong allegorical overtone that would be poignant for any good little Victorian child (like the two sons for whom he wrote it). The musical adaptation presented by Literally Alive Children's Theatre keeps much of the magic and sweetness. However, the mysterious boy whose tears move the giant to open his garden to the little children to play no longer represents the Christ child, whose wounds, the giant learns, are the wounds of love. Instead, the giant realizes that the boy is his own inner child. It's understandable that adaptor Brenda Bell, also producing artistic director, would want to make the substitution, but it's asking a lot of the under-7 set to care about a grownup's inner child (if they even get the concept), and this Wilde fan missed his gorgeous lyricism.

Still, the production, which clocks in at less than an hour, offers a diverting chance for family activity on a weekend morning. In the pre-show workshop, children learn about the music that will be played — all percussion instruments — and have an opportunity to create paper flowers and snowflakes to decorate the selfish giant's garden.

As narrator Oscar Wilde and the giant, Todd Eric Hawkins displays charisma and Wildean aplomb. His deep velvet voice charms, particularly in the opening number "Wilde Imagination" (music by Michael Sgouros, who is also percussionist; lyrics by Bell), which is also the show's catchiest song. Sal Delmonte brings wit to the role of a cheeky servant to the giant, and Eric Fletcher amuses in various roles. Choreography and dance by Stefanie Smith are accomplished if not fully integrated into the play.

· This review was first published in BACKSTAGE, and is republished by kind permission.

An Ideal Husband, produced by the Red Fern Theatre Company at the Times Square Arts Center's Shell Theater, 300 W. 43rd St., NYC. 30th October–16th November 2008.

Adapting An Ideal Husband, Oscar Wilde's 1895 play about a politician with a past, and setting it in a senator's home in 2008 is a smart idea, and Red Fern Theatre Company's stated mission to produce socially conscious plays while partnering with philanthropies whose missions connect to the issues in the plays is even smarter. Pairing a play about politics with New York Common Cause, which advocates for voters, makes eminent sense. Unfortunately, the production doesn't work as well as the concept. Melanie Moyer Williams' direction of her own and Kendall Rileigh's adaptation is uncontrolled and loose, and the cast mangles Wilde's heightened language and mugs for comedy.

The play is a classic melodrama: Unscrupulous Mrs. Cheveley (Crystal Cotton) arrives from Vienna with an incriminating letter, intending to blackmail upright Senator Chiltern (Brad Thomason). Unbeknownst to his idealistic wife, Cynthia (Lindy Flowers), Chiltern built his fortune on a bribe, here related to the Keating Five scandal. Will she still love him if she finds out the truth? Luckily, best friend Arthur Goring (Alex C. Ferrill), a dandy with a heart of gold, has the goods on Mrs. Cheveley.

As the upstanding senator, Thomason projects relaxed honesty. As Mabel Chiltern, Arthur's love interest, Myra Palmero has pert charm. Dan Odell as Governor Goring, Arthur's father, hits the right exasperated notes, while Ferrill's slick dandy is more likable than charming. But Flowers as Cynthia, though natural, lacks the required puritanical edge; where Wilde calls on her to sob like a child, she sits thoughtfully, making nonsense of her subsequent change of heart. Anthony Reimer's forced comic assortment of servants is horrendous. Worst of all is Cotton's Mrs. Cheveley, a scarlet woman clad literally in a scarlet dress by costumer Ryan J. Moller. Though Cotton's tall figure has elegance, her abominable accent makes the plot points she delivers almost incomprehensible. Wilde's complex and witty melodrama drags like a Lifetime movie.

· This article first appeared in BACKSTAGE and is here republished by kind permission.

· Gwen Orel is a New York Theatre critic and an associate editor of www.oscholars.com

Review by Linda Dryden

The Letters of William Ernest Henley to Robert Louis Stevenson. Edited by Damian Atkinson. High Wycombe: The Rivendale Press, 2008. 377 pp. ISBN 1 904201 11 3.

It is generally understood that Long John Silver in Stevenson’s Treasure Island was inspired by the poet and editor William Ernest Henley. One legged, burly and heavily bearded, loquacious, with a quick wit and a sharp tongue, it is not difficult to imagine how Stevenson found in Henley the perfect model for his charismatic pirate. Henley was an intimate friend of Stevenson, and an avid letter writer, as evidenced by over 350 pages of often dense and lengthy correspondence with Stevenson reproduced in The Letters of William Ernest to Robert Louis Stevenson. Damian Atkinson’s work on this volume is thus an important addition to the growing body of research surrounding the author of Treasure Island, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and countless essays, poems, and stories.

The significance of Henley in Stevenson’s career should not be underestimated, but what this volume does is to bring to the fore the intense relationship that ensued from their initial meeting in Edinburgh’s Royal Infirmary in 1875 until their bitter quarrel in 1888. Along the way the reader of these letters is permitted a glimpse of the intimate and gossipy world of the late-nineteenth-century literary and artistic elite. The correspondence is littered with references to Sidney Colvin, Charles Baxter, Stevenson’s cousin Bob, Andrew Lang, and Fleeming Jenkin, figures well-known to anyone familiar with Stevenson’s life. The letters make it clear that, despite his frequent complaints of lack of money or “coins,” as he euphemistically terms it, Henley moved in very intellectual circles indeed: Edmund Gosse, Lesley Stephen, and Henry James are just some of the literary figures with whom Henley was on familiar terms.

These are frequently exuberant, chatty letters, full of literary allusions and references to art, the theatre, and the classics. Henley was extremely well-read, an intellectual, and very opinionated: his remarks can verge on the sarcastic and are often downright rude and punctuated with oaths. He writes to Stevenson in a free and easy style, with frequent “in-jokes,” often referring to relatives and acquaintances with a nickname designed to highlight their qualities or failings: Colvin is the “Archangel,” Henley’s wife, the “Chậtelaine.” Stevenson himself is generally “Dear Boy” or “Dear Lad,” and towards the end of their correspondence, Fanny is referred to as the “Bedlamitish One.” Perhaps these soubriquets were agreed upon by the friends, but given their later quarrel, it is hard to see Stevenson embracing such branding of his wife, even if the rest were accepted as humorous and well-intentioned.

Indeed, during the last third or so of the volume, one can almost read Stevenson’s growing frustrations with his friend between the lines of Henley’s own letters. There is an increasing sense of a developing rift that Henley struggles to grasp. In the early years of their correspondence, the letters seemed almost to flow from Henley’s pen as stream of consciousness: they are conversational, mercurial, and often lacking in any deliberate structure. Lengthy discussions of books and plays, constant suggestions on how their protracted collaboration on the play Deacon Brodie could progress, and numerous suggestions for further collaborations characterize the content. During their time at Bournemouth, however, it seems the Stevensons were subjected to frequent visits from Henley, and it may well be that his constant pressure to produce more plays began to take its toll on both husband and wife. Certainly the later letters tend to be shorter, more business-like, and lacking the sometimes cloying intimacy of Henley’s early correspondence.

By far the most engrossing aspect of this volume is near the end where Stevenson and Henley quarrel over the authorship of Fanny’s story “The Nixie.” Here Atkinson helpfully reproduces Stevenson’s responses to Henley’s inference that Fanny had plagiarized an idea by Katharine de Mattos. We can thus see the impact of the offence given and the painful effects of Henley’s, perhaps misguided, inference. The exchange of letters is very affecting and brings to the reader the full force of this literary estrangement. The occasional letters to Fanny included in the volume are deferential and friendly; but Fanny is addressed as Mrs Louis, and in private correspondence to Charles Baxter in 1881, Henley reveals his true feelings. Urging Baxter not to irritate Fanny, Henley avers: “She’s a fool and a woman, and I fear that she would take remonstrance ill, and perhaps be the means of feeding a quarrel.” Later in the same letter he warns: “You’ll have, therefore, to deal with a sick child, who is the husband of a schoolgirl of forty’ (117). Certainly he had been very prescient in predicting the effect on any relationship with Stevenson if Fanny’s integrity were questioned. In the end the “Nixie” affair buried their friendship and only the occasional letter was subsequently sent from Henley. Stevenson, however, perhaps conscious of Henley’s tireless efforts of his behalf, continued to supply small amounts of money to his impoverished erstwhile friend, but declined to correspond directly.

But the rift with Stevenson cannot be the final word on Henley, and it is to Atkinson’s credit that he has published this volume with its wealth of detail about literary life in the penultimate decade of the nineteenth century. The letters here are replete with details of the social life it was possible to enjoy in London during the 1880s. Theatre outings, gentleman’s clubs, parties and dinners: such was the rich cultural and artistic environment available, even to the “coin-less” Henley. It should also not be forgotten that for years Henley acted as Stevenson’s unpaid factotum, declining payment even when pressed directly, as here in 1883: “The idea of commission is pleasing. Very. Oh, very pleasing indeed! But I’ll see you dam [sic] first” (188). In fact Henley was responsible for ushering some of our most enduring literature into print, as he acknowledged himself in 1886: “When I think that Cassell owes me Treasure Island, & Kidnapped, & King S’s Mines, & that I stand here penniless … I feel something like a damned fool” (324). Neither should it be forgotten that Henley played a crucial role in bringing to public notice a new and influential generation of writers that included H. G. Wells, Kenneth Grahame, Rudyard Kipling and W. B. Yeats.

This is a handsome volume, beautifully presented, and very well-researched. Atkinson is to be congratulated on bringing together this important correspondence that will help inform future scholars not only of Stevenson, but of a host of literary and cultural figures from the fin de siècle. If the letters are at times trivial, overlong, and filled with irrelevant detail, they are also packed with fascinating insights into the literary mind of one of the most enigmatic figures of the late-nineteenth century. This collection of letters will be an invaluable resource for any scholar of the period, and certainly for scholars of Robert Louis Stevenson.

· Linda Dryden, Napier University, Edinburgh, is co-editor of The Journal of Stevenson Studies.

Review by John McRae

Magnus Hirschfeld : Les Homosexuels de Berlin (1908), 215 pp., and Ruth Margarete Roellig : Les lesbiennes de Berlin (1928), 43pp. Présentation by Patrick Cardon; published as number 52 of Les Cahiers Question de Genre/GKC, Lille, 2001. http://www.gaykitschcamp.com

Patrick Cardon’s work under the imprint GayKitschCamp (nothing if not explicit) deserves to be widely recognised – he is almost single-handedly recovering the documentation of twentieth century European queer history in French, and this volume, which he published in 2001, is a classic which deserves to be widely read and studied.

The name of Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935) is well known, or perhaps I should say was well-known in much the same way as, for example, Havelock Ellis was known – medical men who took a more or less scientific approach to sexual deviance and variety in the early twentieth century when even the literature of the time still recoiled from the love that dare not speak its name and retreated into wells of loneliness.

Les homosexuals de Berlin was first published in Berlin in German in 1904 and in French in 1908; it was also published in Saint Petersburg, which says much for the interest in deviant culture before the Russian Revolution. Cardon’s notes tell us that 28,000 copies of the German edition were sold, which is truly surprising, in the climate of the decade after Oscar Wilde’s trials, which, inevitably, Cardon takes as one of his starting-points for his excellent and very thoroughly documented introduction.

Les lesbiennes de Berlin, which I hesitate to call a companion piece, dates from 1928. Its 48 pages are, dare I say, inverted, at the end of the Hirschfeld volume, with the back cover carrying Ruth Margarete Roellig’s name and a nice drawing of ‘deux soeurs’ by Otto Muller from 1919, reflecting the male ‘amis’ on the other cover by an unknown artist, dated from about 1929. These companion piece drawings are an indication of the care, style, and quality that Cardon puts into all his work. This piece carries an introduction by Hirschfeld himself, described intriguingly as a conseiller sanitaire, and is translated by Charles Adam, who has also furnished some notes.

Berlin was full of clubs and salons, from Le Dorian Gray to Le Club des Joueuses de Pipeau du Café Princesse, and the book simply takes us through these in delightful brief cameos, a reportage of enticing glimpses and fruity characters, not unlike the way a listings guide would describe such places today – only with infinitely more style and decorum.

The academic content of Cardon’s preséntation or introduction on Hirschfeld and the Berlin scene is considerable – he is immensely well read in German and French, and calls upon vast resources and documentation in his setting out of the psychological and psycho-social contexts of homosexuality in Berlin.

The actual text (Le Troisieme Sexe, running to about 50 pages) is neither apologia nor paean – it aims for a kind of seriousness of approach which today can seem plaintively charming. The terminology is still largely Uranian, after Symonds, and frequently the categorisation of ‘types’ can be irksome. But if we remember the kind of books which were still being put out by otherwise reputable publishers until fairly recently (I am thinking of Penguin’s long in-print Homosexuality by D.J. West, for example), it is clear that Hirschfeld, although now he may seem quaint, was in many ways ahead of his times. His 1906 essay (here an appendix) on Les types sexuels intermédiaries is a catalogue, as Cardon points out, from the evidence available at the time – it is astonishing how interesting and relevant it remains, despite the progress that has been made throughout what Alan Sinfield has called the Wilde century.

It is not Cardon’s intention to make these republications into vehicles of controversy. They are documents of great historical interest, and as such, he backs them up with further fascinating appendices by André Raffalovich and others, including the perhaps notorious Dr Laupts with his ‘Notes sur l’homosexualité’, here usefully followed by a much longer ‘À propos ….’ by Numa Praetorius. Another appendix, or ‘annexe’ gives ‘contemporary witnesses’, another a nice piece by Patrick Pollard on Gide and Hirschfeld ‘or the limits of the natural’. A brief, more documentary section illustrates the death and the will of Hirschfeld. A neat final word gives the German Parliament’s ‘excuses’ in 2000 for earlier discrimination against gay men and women – a final word of contextualisation that counterbalances and complements many of the positives Hirschfeld et al might have been aiming for.

The whole volume is interspersed with illustrations, cartoons and documents which would be a more than valid reason alone for having it on one’s shelves. Cardon’s research and resources are glorious, and he shares them with passion and dedication to the cause.

I am glad to have finally caught up with this excellent volume, and can only recommend that all interested parties, whether or not readers of French, should beat a path to the gloriously named website, and explore the range and infinite variety of Cardon’s Cahiers.

· John McRae, University of Nottingham, is an associate editor of www.oscholars.com, and edited our Special Issue on Teleny.

Review by Richard Toye

John S. Partington (ed.): H.G. Wells in Nature, 1893-1946: A Reception Reader. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang 2008. ISBN 978-3-631-57110-1

Edited by John S. Partington, this book assembles H.G. Wells’s contributions to Nature, together with the responses that they generated, Nature’s reviews of his works, and other mentions of Wells in the journal’s pages. To read it is to be reminded of H.G. Wells’s staggering energy and achievement in a wide range of fields. Known best as a writer of science fiction books (or ‘scientific romances’ in the parlance of the time) he also wrote non-fiction futurology, many brilliant social novels, and the screenplay for the remarkable film Things to Come. In addition, he wrote or co-wrote works on history, science and economics. These he saw as a starting point for a World Encyclopædia, which was to contain the essentials of all human knowledge. Constantly updated, it would form the educational foundation for citizens of his predicted World State. These days, however, Wells is not often taken awfully seriously as an intellectual force. Although many of his works remain in print, the tendency is to view him peaking in the 1890s with The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, and so forth, and going into a long decline thereafter.

There is a small but dedicated band of scholars, Partington prominent among them, who know this to be a misrepresentation. One great virtue of the book is that it shows that the heavyweight Nature took Wells seriously throughout his career, not least through the mere fact of publishing pieces by him. Its reviewers were not always uncritical, but, overall, readers would have been left in little doubt that he was a person of genuine scientific credentials. Even his science fiction was treated with respect. For example, the reviewer of The First Men in the Moon (1901) compared it favourably to Jules Verne’s earlier treatment of a similar theme: ‘Mr. Wells […] has made himself the master of the little we know about the moon, and thought out the possibilities with the greatest care, and the result is a narrative which we will venture to say is not only as exciting to the average reader as Jules Verne’s, but is full of interest to the scientific man’ (p. 183).

Wells’s key contact at the journal was Richard Gregory, who, like him, had been a student at the Normal School of Science, South Kensington, in the 1880s. In 1893 – the same year Gregory was appointed assistant editor of Nature – the two men published a textbook together. In 1919, Gregory took over the editor’s chair, and it was he who eventually penned Wells’s admiring obituary in 1946. (On that occasion, he wrote of how much Wells had appreciated encouragement from his scientific friends.) Wells, for his part, praised Gregory’s style of editorship: ‘without any sacrifice of its world-wide scientific usefulness he also made this weekly journal a medium of interpretation and understanding between one type of specialist and another and between specialists in general and the man of general intelligence and broad curiosity outside the ranks of the specialist worker’ (p. 127). This is not to say that the relationship between Wells and Nature had no ups and downs. He did not make any major contribution to it between 1902 and 1917. Partington does not speculate on the reasons for this. But one wonders whether a rather critical review by Frederick Headley in 1904 had something to do with it. Wells, who was excessively sensitive to perceived slights, wrote in to complain about ‘misrepresentations and misstatements’ (p. 205), but Headley defended himself with considerable effectiveness. It is not impossible that Wells went into something of a sulk.

The book is divided into three sections. The first reproduces Wells’s own essays, reviews and letters, dating between 1893 and 1944, together with various comments by others; the second consists of Nature’s reviews of his work; and the third reprints other mentions he received. Those studying the fin-de-siècle are likely to find his early articles on ‘Popularising Science’ and ‘Peculiarities of Psychical Research’ of especial interest. The latter, which reviews Frank Podmore’s Apparitions and Thought Transference, is a skilful debunking. It is, perhaps, a telling sign of the psychical movement’s popularity at the time that Nature, rather than just ignoring Podmore’s work, found it necessary to publish such a rebuttal. ‘The Discovery of the Future’, a lecture given at the Royal Institution in 1902, is piece that will be well known to Wells specialists, but it repays re-reading. It acts as good summary of Wells’s philosophy, revealing his passionate belief ‘in the coherency and purpose in the world and in the greatness of human destiny’ (p. 85).

In his editing, Partington has performed an admirable job. In particular, he has been incredibly assiduous in nailing down the identities of a large number of more or less obscure persons mentioned in the text. One may legitimately bemoan the absence of an index. However, Partington is owed a debt of gratitude by Wellsians and by all those interested in the relationship between science and society.

· Richard Toye is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Exeter. He is the author of The Labour Party and the Planned Economy, 1931-1951 (2003) and Lloyd George and Churchill: Rivals for Greatness (2007).

Review by Laurence Talairach-Vielmas

John Glendening: The Evolutionary Imagination in Late-Victorian Novels: An Entangled Bank. Aldershot: Ashgate 2007. 225pp. ISBN 978-0-7546-5821-4

John Glendening’s The Evolutionary Imagination in Late-Victorian Novels aims to bring to light the impact of Darwin’s theory on a few novels published at the end of the nineteenth century. More precisely, Glendening tackles Darwinism through the concept of evolutionary entanglement. Indeed, Glendening tries to demonstrate how literature’s struggle to impose order on reality results from Darwin’s own struggle with antinomies. The book starts with a very interesting analysis of Darwin’s reactions to Tierra del Fuego and his discovery of its natives, as related in his journal on board the Beagle in December 1832. Glendening underlines Darwin’s confusion when faced with inexplicable landscapes and human behaviours and the difficulty he encountered to register or comprehend such wildness or wilderness. As a result, Glendening contends, wilderness is ‘not just a physical reality but a psychological one’ (p. 1). Moreover, Darwin’s ‘cognitive entanglement’ results from the uncanniness of the experience, as Darwin sees the Fuegians’ inhuman otherness somehow strangely connected with him. The entanglement thus created, mingling signs of savagery with hints at normality, constitutes a form of chaos which informed late-Victorian novelistic representations. In fact, because of the uncertainties and confusions generated by Darwinism (Glendening is no more accurate here and aligns relativism, indeterminacy, randomness, confusion, etc.), Glendening shows how evolutionary theory was itself ‘entangled.’

Despite Darwin’s image of orderly ecological interdependence, order and chaos were constantly in tension. Darwin’s natural selection implied that individuals and species competed for limited resources, but the instability of the environmental factors which determined which variations would survive gave chance a prevailing role in his theory. Yet, Darwin refused to see natural selection as antagonistic to order; the entangled banks and ecological systems, despite appearing chaotic, evidenced order. This ambiguity explains why, even if Darwin intended the notion of entanglement to stand for an attractive network of interdependencies, late-Victorian narratives brought to light the dark implications of evolution. They capitalized on the way in which chaos inhered within an ordered system and foregrounded the constant tension between order and chaos. Darwin’s ‘survival of the fittest’ evoked notions of predation and death, competition and chance, which the narratives of the period drew on, especially as Darwin’s ideas were displaced from the biological to the social (thus translating the disorder Darwin traces in nature into moral chaos). As Glendening underlines, these novelists dramatized ‘evolutionary complication’ (p. 15). They not only showed the permeability of the human/animal divide but, more especially, how ‘the two dimensions remain entangled but distinguishable’ (p. 17). Of course, Glendening draws on Gillian Beer and George Levine’s analyses of evolutionary theory’s ‘openness to ideological investment’ (p. 46) resulting from Darwin’s figurative language. The processes and ideas described by Darwin were ‘inaccessible to direct observation or verification’, hence ‘lending [themselves] to multiple interpretations’ (p. 46). Though Glendening claims to use chaos theory as a central critical approach to explain how the ‘evolutionary complexity’ resulted from the tension between order and chaos suggested by natural selection, chaos theory is, however, not developed further than this.

Glendening then mainly deals with four already much discussed late-Victorian novels: H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902). In his study of The Island of Doctor Moreau, Glendening looks at the way in which the novel engages with evolutionary theory through its concern with chance, contingency, unpredictability and indeterminacy (all of these terms being, perhaps, too confusedly entangled). Glendening focuses on the characters and settings to show how the novel points out chance or indeterminacy; he also highlights Wells’s allusions to Lamarckism as another evolutionary theory (revived after the publication of The Origin of Species) which aimed to counteract Darwinian pessimism (but which Wells eventually abandons). In Tess, Hardy maps out Darwin’s entangled bank, Glendening suggests, as he examines in depth the episode when Angel carries the dairy girls and Tess across the roadside bank. He explains the extent to which Hardy interweaves nature and culture, deals with sexual selection, the natural and social forces which entangle human beings—noting as well how Hardy destabilizes some of Darwin’s ideas, especially when related to sexual selection.

In the following chapter on Stoker’s Dracula, Glendening shifts towards degeneration and progress, two entangled terms in a novel in which the animalistic constantly flirts with the civilized and humane, creating confusion. Stoker’s ‘evolutionary gothic’ (p. 108) is grounded in the impossibility of distinguishing between civilization and savagery, as Jonathan Harker’s ‘primitive nature emerges to subvert his civilized self’ (p. 112) while Dracula appears as regressively primitive through the animal shapes he takes as he grows in knowledge, thereby mentally evolving. Stoker makes explicit Darwin’s idea that adaptation for survival sometimes involves retrogression. In his analysis of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, in which the tangled jungles image the characters’ psychological entanglement, Glendening draws upon T. H. Huxley’s essay ‘Evolution and Ethics’ at length. As he contends, Huxley’s stress on order is very similar to Conrad’s divide between nature and culture, though Conrad’s forests remain entangled. Predictably, Glendening eventually argues, like many of his contemporaries, Conrad explores the darker aspects of Darwinism and his novel has a sinister character which uncovers the widespread savagery implied by natural selection. Lastly, Glendening ends on the study of A. S. Byatt’s Possession (1990) as a neo-Victorian novel concerned with the impact of Darwinism and the interconnectedness of all life.

Glendening’s study, with its claims to originality through its focus on a particular aspect of Darwinism (‘entanglement’), appeared promising as it offered a voyage into Darwin’s writings. However, Glendening’s exploration of Darwin’s theory is quickly cut short. Similarly, his close readings of the four main late-Victorian novels he analyses next are sometimes marred by Glendening’s acknowledgement that the authors he examines were not ‘necessarily … conscious of these exaggerated Darwinian … overtones’ which could have been transmitted to them by the cultural environment ‘largely unawares’ (p. 129). This kind of argument tends to disappoint the reader interested in the way in which literature acted as a mirror of its time and was fuelled by contemporary scientific writings, in the same way as Victorian scientists often found their sources of inspiration in the literary field.

· Laurence Talairach-Vielmas is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Toulouse. She has published widely on Victorian literature and is the author of Moulding the Female Body in Victorian Fairy Tales and Sensation Novels (Ashgate, 2007) and Wilkie Collins, Medicine and the Gothic (The University of Wales Press, forthcoming). She has also edited Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Thou Art the Man (Valancourt Books, 2008).

On other pages:

For a Review by B.J. Robinson of the production of Salomé at the Metropolitan Opera, New York, see

For a Review by Margaret de Fonblanque of the exhibition on Viennese Cafés at the Royal Academy, London, see

For a Review by Mary C. King of The Nightingale and the Rose: a new one-act opera by Oliver Rudland, see

We also recommend the review by Lucia Ruprecht, Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge, of Ann Cooper Albright, Traces of Light: Absence and Presence in the Work of Loïe Fuller. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2007. xvi + 229 pp. Figures, notes, bibliography, and index. $ 75.00 U.S. (cl). ISBN 0-8195-6842-7; $ 27.95 U.S. (pb). ISBN 0-8195-6843-0 and Rhonda Garelick, Electric Salome: Loie Fuller's Performance of Modernism. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007. xiv + 246 pp. Figures, notes, bibliography, and index. $ 35.00 U.S. (cl). ISBN 0-691-01708-2. This may be found on the H-France web page (H-France Review Vol. 8 (July 2008), No. 82). For THE OSCHOLARS review of Electric Salome by Virginie Pouzet-Douzer, click .

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