Why Victorian?

Starting next week, some of my colleagues will be dropping in on the Bibliography course to discuss their respective lines of work. One of the paradoxes of a terminal MA program like ours is that students are asked to be simultaneously generalists (that is, they are expected to see their coursework in terms of broad historical coverage) and specialists (that is, they are expected to write an MA thesis on a tightly-defined topic). We've spent a fair amount of time this semester discussing the process of formulating a topic and choosing a director, and in most cases the possible topic arises not from any interest in a broad field, but from more practical issues. With whom has the student already worked? Which papers could stand further elaboration and revision? Some students, however, have genuine passions of one sort or another; I've already provisionally agreed to work with one woman, not just because her project sounds interesting, but more importantly because it clearly energizes her. It's exciting.

I usually warn students against applying to doctoral programs because of its strengths in field X. Yes, field X may look appealing now, but it may not look so appealing once you discover that you don't get along with the faculty in it, or (horrors) once you discover that the faculty have all decided to resign en masse. Moreover, intellectual interests flourish and wilt in unpredictable ways. I've run across or heard of people who started as medievalists and wound up as Romanticists, or who went in determined to specialize in the English Renaissance and came out with degrees in twentieth-century American fiction. Then again, though, I'm the poster child for stubbornness. I decided on Victorian literature in high school and never budged an inch when it came to my primary specialization, although I also wound up moving backwards for my secondary fields (which run from 1660-1832). But why Victorian?

The first person to blame, I suspect, is Louisa May Alcott. When I was six years old, one of my cousins gave me a three-in-one volume of Little Women, Good Wives, and Little Men. By the time I was eight, I had read the whole thing through at least fifty times--quite possibly more. Needless to say, the book was in absolute tatters. However, it was soon joined by a terrific hardback collection of classic children's and YA stories, which my mother lugged into my bedroom one night. I remember Hawthorne (Tanglewood Tales) and Kipling (Just So Stories) and Doyle (A Study in Scarlet); I remember Ouida (A Dog of Flanders) and Wyss (The Swiss Family Robinson) and Pyle (Robin Hood and King Arthur). But there were many more, nearly all of them from the nineteenth century.

As a result, when I later came to read Dickens, Eliot, Hardy, and the rest, they never seemed strange to me--after all, I grew up on both their sentiments and the basic elements of their aesthetics. I think it's telling that many of my undergraduates have never encountered, say, Hawthorne's Tanglewood Tales or Kipling's Just So Stories; for them, Victorian prose reads like some bizarre thicket of endless sentences and equally endless paragraphs, dotted with inexplicable punctuation. But I always feel a sense of intellectual and emotional homecoming whenever I pick up a Victorian novel. The style feels right, somehow. While my research interests--historical fiction, literature and religion--are very much a product of my later education, my love of the Victorians (and the nineteenth century more generally) can't be separated from my original passion for Little Women, all those years ago.