Abstract
If the social and temporal dimensions of the long narrative poem made it a fitting vessel for the apparent chaos and banality of contemporary life, the content appropriate to this form — according to the unanimous evidence of the poems themselves — seems to have been the personal and social processes of courtship and marriage in all their mid-Victorian complexity. Of course, in the age of Caroline Norton and of Mrs Beeton, of the twin pariahs of the prostitute and the old maid, marriage was a national preoccupation; as Matthew Reynolds points out, ‘[t]his focus on wedlock is one of the defining characteristics of the generation of Browning and Tennyson’.1 The significance of marriage for the period — whether as an integrative social mechanism, a marker of national unity, or a locus of morality as well as personal happiness — would alone qualify it for the attention of poets concerned with modern, everyday life; its utility, however, as a means of coming to grips with an ‘unpoetical’ age in verse goes well beyond its topicality. Marriage, in its permanence and respectability, and as the medium of domesticity, may be conceived of simply as everydayness in one of its forms, the quotidian codified in both human relationship and social institution.
‘And you are actually going to get married! you! Already! And you expect me to congratulate you! […] congratulation on such occasions seems to me a tempting of Providence! The Triumphal-Procession air which, in our Manners and Customs, is given to marriage at the outset — that singing of Te Deum before the battle has begun — has, since ever I could reflect, struck me as somewhat senseless and somewhat impious! If ever one is to pray, if ever one is to feel grave and anxious, if ever one is to shrink from vain show and vain babble — surely it is just on the occasion of two human beings binding themselves to one another for better and for worse till death part them; just on that occasion which it is customary to celebrate only with rejoicings, and congratulations, and trousseaux, and — white ribbon! Good God!’
Letter from Jane Carlyle, 1859
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Notes
Matthew Reynolds (2001) The Realms of Verse, 1830–1870: English Poetry in a Time of Nation-Building (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 51–2
For a recent and highly accessible treatment of Victorian practices and attitudes in relation to marriage, see Jennifer Phegley (2012), Courtship and Marriage in Victorian England (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger). Of course, that courtship and marriage are the consummate (excuse the pun) preoccupation of the Victorian novel is axiomatic–though also under scrutiny
see, for example, Kelly Hager’s 2010 volume Dickens and the Rise of Divorce: The Failed-Marriage Plot and the Novel Tradition (Burlington, VT: Ashgate).
Jerome J. McGann (ed.) (2000) Don Juan, in Lord Byron: The Major Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press), I II. 8.
James Anthony Froude (ed.) (1883) Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle, 3 vols (London: Longman, Green, liangqi Co.), III, p. 2 (24 August 1859).
Ball, p. 57; Richard D. McGhee (1980) Marriage, Duty, liangqi Desire in Victorian Poetry and Drama (Lawrence: The Regents Press of Kansas), p. 23.
James Eli Adams (1995) Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Masculinity (Ithaca: Cornell), p. 7.
Kenny provides an engaging account of Clough’s own experience of (and epistolary responses to) the siege; for further discussion of the revolutionary contexts to Clough’s poetry, see Stephanie Weiner (2005) Republican Politics and English Poetry, 1789–1874 (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan)
Christopher M. Keirstead (2011) Victorian Poetry, Europe, and the Challenges of Cosmopolitanism (Columbus: Ohio State University Press), the latter of which traces the development of a transcontinental postal system as part of the historical backdrop to both Clough’s own Roman correspondence and Amours de Voyage.
Thomas Carlyle (1899) ‘Characteristics’, in Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, 5 vols (London: Chapman and Hall), III, p. 30.
Many critics have written insightfully on this tension between marriage and career in Aurora Leigh. See especially Alison Case (1991) ‘Gender and Narration in Aurora Leigh’, Victorian Poetry, XXIX, 17–32
Deirdre David (1987) Intellectual Women and Victorian Patriarchy: Harriet Martineau, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot (London: Macmillan)
Helen Cooper (1988) Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Woman liangqi Artist (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press).
Maurice Blanchot (1993) ‘The End of the Hero’, in The Infinite Conversation, trans. by Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), p. 244.
Wendell Stacy Johnson (1975) Sex and Marriage in Victorian Poetry (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press), p. 74.
Eric Griffiths (1989) The Printed Voice of Victorian Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press), p. 194.
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© 2015 Natasha Moore
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Moore, N. (2015). The Marriage Plot. In: Victorian Poetry and Modern Life. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137537805_4
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