Studies of Victorian Literature

John P. Farrell

            This site was developed as a resource for the three undergraduate courses in Victorian literature that I regularly teach in the Department of English at the University of Texas at Austin.  The courses are E328: The British Novel from Scott to Hardy; E375L: Victorian Literature; and E370: Victorian Essays and Ideas. To make simply this point is to indicate immediately that the project of the web site is overly ambitious. Necessarily, it will always be a work in progress. Even with three courses in the Department devoted to Victorian literature, there never seems to be occasion to do more than fiddle about with the mass of literary writing from the period that has a compelling claim on us. A recent anthology of Victorian literature, resembling a cinder-block in its bulk, opens with a prefatory sentence that seems to convey in its rhetoric a chagrined sense of editorial defeat: "The keynote of Victorian culture and society is numerosity--bigness, density, multiplicity, massness." In the development of nineteenth-century culture, writing suddenly swarmed. Much of it, of course, died an instant and well-deserved death, but even genius attained to a certain "numerosity" in the Victorian period.   The consequence for this web site is that many major figures and movements are not represented here at all. In all of the courses that I teach, compromises with time, space, and competing demands shrink the field of study--and so it is in this place as well.

Having thus made my excuses, I can at least indicate what the site contains. The material that is included here is of five kinds.

• Background and contextual documents relating to the authors included on the site. These are sometimes primary sources such as letters, or journal entries.
• Excerpts from scholarly or critical discussions, frequently ones that I sometimes use in class.
• Images: portraits of the artist; association items; scenes relating to some key texts, etc
• Selected links to related web sites
• Documents connected to my own scholarly interests and writings. In particular, I have reproduced portions of my published writing on texts and authors that I discuss in class. I have also included a number of lengthy excerpts from Matthew Arnold's prose criticism. It is increasingly difficult to find Arnold's prose criticism in print. As a card-carrying Arnoldian, I have attempted to rectify this situation.

            As is evident from this list, the web site does not include much in the way of pedagogical materials--paper topics, exam questions, samples of student writing, handouts, syllabi, etc. (Actually, one sample syllabus for each course is represented.) These materials are available to my students via the University's course management software "Blackboard" which is ideal for ever-changing postings, e-mail discussions, revised scheduling, and so forth.

            I undertook this project because of the many years of pleasure I've derived from studying and teaching Victorian literature, especially its transforming emphasis on the idea of making a life, "by which was meant," as Lionel Trilling has written, "conceiving human existence, one's own or another's, as if it were a work of art upon which one might pass judgment, assessing it by established criteria. This idea of a conceived and executed life . . . we regard . . . as characteristic of the Victorian age, but it of course lasted even longer than that" ( The Last Decade , p. 175) Perhaps it persists even now.

Credits

            All credit for the production and design of this site goes, in the first place, to the inspiration and initiative of a group of dedicated people associated with the LAITS ITA PROJECT. This is a project devised by the instructional technology services of the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas. The core of the project consists of training some very talented undergraduate students (Instructional Technology Assistants) who then work with faculty in a joint effort to enhance undergraduate education though the use of technology. I'm very grateful to the administrators of this program, in particular Joe TenBarge, Clifford Haby, and Gary Dickerson whose efforts have made the program a great success. I'm especially grateful to my English Department colleague, Professor Brian Bremen who has served not only as our liaison with LAITS but, in an admirable feat of tactful high-wire walking, put a group of fumbling fellow professors through a relaxed form of technological boot camp.

            As to the actual construction of this web site, I owe my thanks to Adnan Chatriwala, who got me started, Suloni Robertson who has once again performed her design wizardry, and most of all to Kristina Medhus, my ITA, who has a orchestrated the whole project, assembling materials, digitizing documents, alerting me to both problems and possibilities, and building the site from the ground up with no more to go on than my very sketchy suggestions.  

Acknowledgements

            The content of the site must re-produce, at least in some shadowy way, influences that have been important in my own academic life. I am glad to acknowledge these as well. Somehow I stumbled into exactly the right graduate program at exactly the right time, when Victorian Studies, both as a journal and as a discipline were newly emerged at Indiana University. I was very fortunate to go on from IU to the University of Kansas where intellectual stimulus was all around me in the shape of seven co-Victorianists, presided over by Professor William D. Paden.

            I have several times before, but still not nearly enough, expressed my long and deep indebtedness to David J. DeLaura whom I was privileged to follow at the University of Texas. To the University, in turn, I owe the opportunity I have had for the abiding friendship and rich illuminations of colleagues like Frank Whigham, Warwick Wadlington, Walter L. Reed, and J. Michael Holquist. The Burkean and Bakhtinian whispers in this web site are often echoes of my dialogues, some long ago, with them.

Dedication

            I don't think it is yet a common practice to dedicate web sites and perhaps it is a very bad idea to do so. But if I were going to take up the practice, I would make the dedication to R. J. Kaufmann, long since retired from the University of Texas. Anyone who knows Jim Kaufmann, and especially those who have been his students, will know what I mean when I say that he has always kept alive the dream of learning.