My teeming brain

The summer before I started university, I was at loose ends. I was living at home and generally underemployed. My father had just relocated the family from the Toronto area to Montreal, and I went with them as I had chosen to study at McGill. I found myself in an unfamiliar suburb with no friends and little to occupy my time as I waited for my “real life” to begin in September. One saving grace during that long, indolent summer was a second-hand bookstore located in a strip mall within walking distance of our home. I decided to use this meagre island of culture and my empty hours to get a head start on my impending academic life. I had enrolled as an English major, and I figured that exploring some of the authors who would likely show up on course syllabuses might give me a head start on learning about the literary landscape. So, to the bookstore I went and started picking through the modest literature section. I was 19 and pretty ignorant about the texts I was seeking out. I was also a voracious but indiscriminate reader at that age. I’d read anything from mysteries to suspense thrillers to fantasy and any other genre, but of the inherited tradition I knew next to nothing. My high school English department had prioritized Shakespeare and modern novels, with the exception of  Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge in my final year. I had every ambition to learn but little direction. So, as I browsed my way through the shelves, my unschooled eye was caught by names I at least knew of, like Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and the Brontë sisters. I’m sure that in the course of the summer I also dipped into the “moderns” (I recall reading Mann’s The Magic Mountain for some reason) but there was a decidedly Victorian bent to my choices. I was true to my word and tackled many thick, challenging novels that summer, and I can safely date the start of my lifelong love of Victorian fiction to this in-between time. 

I’d like to say that when I started classes in the fall, my summer reading program brought me some advantages, but I don’t think it really made any difference. That said, as I learned about key texts, historical periods, literary genres and critical approaches, I incorporated Victorian novels into that general learning. In time, I was able to fit the 19th-century novelists into a continuum that stretched from the earliest literary narratives to the postmodern novel. I was interested in many areas as an undergraduate and then a graduate student, and I ended up specializing in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. This allowed me to keep the Victorians as something apart, a field of reading that wasn’t complicated with a lot of secondary research and critical analysis. These authors remained boon companions for summer vacations and holiday breaks as well as occasionally appearing on course syllabuses and exams. 

Until I got down to writing my doctoral dissertation, my focus during university was on acquiring broad coverage of the literary canon. Including the Victorians, naturally. My reading encompassed the novels of the Brontë sisters, starting with Charlotte’s Jane Eyre and Emily’s Wuthering Heights and moving on to sibling Ann’s novels and Charlotte’s lesser works. I discovered George Eliot through Daniel Deronda in a first-year survey course and became an ardent fan, reading through the rest of her novels except for Romola, which I confess I’ve never finished. Middlemarch, on the other hand, is included on my list of rereads, and I’ve done so end-to-end at least twice. In grad school, I decided to deepen my knowledge of Dickens through a course devoted to him and eventually read all his novels. I also delved into the best-known works of Thomas Hardy as well as introducing myself to William Makepeace Thackeray (Vanity Fair, The Luck of Barry Lyndon), Wilkie Collins (The Moonstone, The Woman in White), Elizabeth Gaskell (North and South, Cranford) among other well-known writers and texts. Over time, I achieved a comprehensive (if rather conventional) coverage of the big names of the period. 

Around the turn of the millennium, I experienced a second major life change. I made the difficult and momentous decision to abandon the overworked and under-compensated work of a contract English professor for a steadier, more lucrative career in the private sector. Among other upsides, from that time reading fiction became a leisure activity unencumbered by thoughts of the value I had to deliver to a classroom or a paper’s audience. As part of the transition from academia to business, I experienced a long summer and autumn of unemployment. This was my first sustained break from either school or work since starting university, and I again found myself with a lot of time on my hands and little money in my pockets. I knew I should be immersed in my career search, but my commitment sometimes waned, and even when I hit the daily quota of job applications I found I had a lot of hours on my hands. I had little cash to spend; however, I did have a library card and relationships with used book sellers. These resources allowed me to spend many an hour consuming novels while lounging on my bed or in the shade of a tree at a nearby park. It’s to this second liminal period that I associate the start of a new phase of my enduring passion for the Victorians. 

If my academic years were characterized by acquiring broad coverage, this new approach of reading could be characterized as “going deep”—for lack of a better term. My first example of doing this was with Anthony Trollope, whose work I somehow managed to avoid for years. I think I was turned off by his reputation as a producer of quantity rather than quality whose prolific output didn’t measure up in substance to his more celebrated contemporaries. I came to see that this notoriety didn’t come close to doing him justice, and during that summer I became a committed fan who for years after had one of Trollope’s books in my reading stack. With over 40 novels in his oeuvre, I didn’t have to worry about running out of supply. During this summer of leisure, I ploughed my way through the six-work series known as The Chronicles of Barsetshire, which portrays clergymen in a fictional cathedral town, and in the years to come I would devour most of his novels. I’ll attempt to explain my strange obsession with Trollope in another blog post, but I can briefly summarize it as being about the immersion in a world of middle-class and aristocratic characters who inhabit a universe that becomes more vivid with each successive story. I’ve come to know what to expect in a Trollope story, yet he still draws me in with his vivid representations of the lives of the British nobility, gentry, nouveau-riche and clergy.

Along with Trollope, I discovered other lesser-known Victorian writers, including Margaret Oliphant, a remarkably prolific and successful writer of domestic (i.e., women-targeted) fiction and supernatural stories who published serialized works for nearly half a century, but whose reputation and popularity waned in the 20th century. Over the years I’ve devoured at least 15 of her novels, which vary widely in genre and theme but often focus on middle-class people living in small communities such as her fictional town of Carlingford. As with Trollope, Oliphant’s writing was inconsistent and likely influenced by its speed of execution; that said, in her domestic and ghost tales I’ve found a rich treasure trove of social insights, particularly as they illustrate evolving attitudes toward women and the women’s movement through the second half of the nineteenth century. 

Since that second summer of indolence, I’ve spent more than two decades exploring the Victorian period through its many authors—some famous, some lesser-known—and their works. To the long list of important but lesser-known writers I’ve explored I can include George Gissing, George Meredith, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and prime minister Benjamin Disraeli. Hopefully I can say more about some of these writers’ works in future posts. 

Reading the Victorians has been a continuous activity spanning decades, during which I’ve covered (and recovered) much fertile literary territory. I’m tempted to say that I recently entered a third phase in my relationship with these writers, ushered in by a third transition in my life. Owing to a cancer diagnosis, I decided to step back from my career and put my health first. As with the previous two “in-between” times in my life, I currently have a lot more space for personal reading among other personal activities. I’ve been consuming widely in different areas, but I certainly haven’t neglected my tribe of Victorians. The additional hours spent with their stories have been immensely important for my mental health and overall sense of wellbeing. Beyond simple escapism, they provide a sense of daily purpose. They have delivered both solace and intellectual stimulation during an unfamiliar and challenging time. 

If I were to try to characterize what’s different about the reading phase I’m in, I might say that it’s about more intentionally synthesizing the material and trying to make connections across authors and works—instead of going down obsessive rabbit holes with individual writers. It’s also been about slowing down and appreciating the craft and the beauty. I’ve been rediscovering texts I thought I knew with this comparative approach in mind. As I’ve covered in another blog post, I’ve always been an avid rereader, but that’s been especially true in the last half year as I’ve returned to some of the classics that ushered in this lifelong obsession. My understanding of the literary texts is also being enriched by some historical and biographical works that offer useful modern perspectives on the past. I remain an amateur, a committed dilettante with no interest in going back to the formal scholarship I practised in the nineties. That said, my ever-evolving relationship with Victorian novelists has given me a broad, nuanced and personal understanding of life in Britain and its empire during the 19th century as well as richer, better informed perspectives on the present. These stories penned and printed in another century help me recover lost realities and experience how their authors represented those realities to their audiences.