Kolb, ed.: The Letters of Arthur Henry Hallam

The Letters of Arthur Henry Hallam

Edited by Jack Kolb

Hallam is best remembered as the subject of what is, certainly, the most personal, and one of the most moving, elegies in English literature, Alfred Lord Tennyson’s In Memoriam—a poem that commemorates and celebrates the estimable qualities of a gifted young man who died prematurely in 1833, at age twenty-two, while traveling with his father in Europe, and whose personality and character, ironically enough, were to be persistently and increasingly obscured and distorted in the century following his death by the peculiar circumstances in which his literary “remains” were first published, and by the injudicious expurgations made by Hallam Tennyson in the account of the Hallam-Tennyson relationship in the memoir he wrote of his father.

In this scholarly edition of all known surviving letters and fragments by and to Hallam, we are able to see for the first time, and to see whole and plain, the golden boy who occupied so important a place both in the affection and admiration of his friends and at the center of the famous coterie of “Cambridge Apostles”—a group that, to be sure, was in part a mutual admiration society, but one that also epitomized the literary, intellectual, and political interests and aspirations of the generation that, about 1830, was beginning to come into its own.

Hallam, the son of the eminent historian Henry Hallam, was born in 1811, and was the author of a volume of creditable poetry and of numerous essays and reviews. His letters chronicle his schooling at Eton and Cambridge, a romantic season spent in Italy, a spiritual crisis, the course of his friendship with Tennyson, his engagement to Emily Tennyson, his apprenticeship in a law office, and a burgeoning career as a journalist. They provide, in addition, revealing and important information, otherwise unobtainable, on the early lives and opinions of Hallam’s friends, many of who rose to positions of considerable prominence and influence in Victorian life and society. We are brought into close contact, for example, with the whole Tennyson family during those difficult years when a great poet was emerging fro a desperately unhappy domestic milieu in the rectory at Somersby in the wilds and wolds of Lincolnshire. And we encounter in the letters to and from Gladstone the political acumen that was to result eventually in his election four times as prime minister of England—Gladstone, who was to adore Hallam throughout his whole life, and who said of his letters that they recount “ the history of his mind . . . so remarkable as composed of a series of the most keen and thrilling emotions” and with a “power and habit of setting it forth . . . not less conspicuous.”

Hallam’s correspondence represented a serious (in all the Victorian senses of the word) preoccupation throughout the whole of his short life. Letters were the sustenance, sometimes the very embodiment, of the relationship crucial to him. Indeed, separated as he and Emily Tennyson were during most of their engagement, their letters were their relationship. To both his fiancée and his friends, Hallam was to testify repeatedly and warmly to the emotional restoration, the recovery of spirits, that their letters brought—letters that came like “the gentle touch of the renovating diurnal light” to “one long imprisoned in darkness.”

Professor Kolb provides extensive annotation for the benefit of the general scholar as well as the specialist. His edition will prove useful to the historian as well as to the literary critic, for it incorporates a substantial number of extracts from the correspondence of Hallam’s contemporaries. More than two-thirds of the material it prints has not heretofore been published in any form, and many of the published texts it reprints are virtually inaccessible today.

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Allen and Moritz: A Distinction of Stories

A Distinction of Stories

The Medieval Unity of Chaucer’s Fair Chain of Narratives for Canterbury

Judson Boyce Allen and Theresa Anne Moritz

This compelling reading of the Canterbury Tales is new in three important respects: It goes beyond the critical truism that Chaucer was fond of Ovid to discover, in medieval analyses of the form of the Metamorphoses as a collection, basic guidance for understanding the form of Chaucer’s own aggregation of tales. It proposes, in light of this evidence, a new order or sequence for the tales that is based neither on the mute witness of some single “good” manuscript or group of manuscripts, nor on the geography between London and Canterbury. And, instructed by the inconclusive results of merely internal evidence, it establishes an ordering grounded primarily in external evidence—in medieval literary commentaries and manuals and in the Metamorphoses itself, which defined medieval principles of literary organization.

By reading the Canterbury Tales as a normative array of exempla in four groups, which exploit the literal and analogical significance of the structure of marriage in order to arrive at a definition of social order, Allen and Moritz are able to posit a medieval unity for Chaucer’s own creation and an obvious adumbration of his intention for the whole. The succeeding three are the heuristic constructs of Allen and Moritz, who, while respecting the integrity of each of Chaucer’s fragments, reorder them according to the example provided by his own medieval editors. The classification of Chaucer’s tales into the four Ovidian categories—natural, magical, moral, and spiritual—obeys both the method and the specific content of medieval literary criticism.

In undertaking a reading of the tales based on medieval notions of story (which were ethical) and literary arrangements (which were logical, discursive, and rhetorical), Allen and Moritz determine for every tale its logical place in a single coherent argument, and thus move considerably beyond those studies of the wholeness of Chaucer’s collection that make much of beginning and of ending, and settle for a miscellany in between. As the present authors present it, the argument of the tales demonstrates conclusively that Chaucer possessed a remarkably shrewd understanding, not only of human nature, but also of that structured social cosmos in which medieval man saw literary decorum and moral truth as the same thing.

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DeJean: Libertine Strategies

Libertine Strategies

Freedom and the Novel in Seventeenth-Century France

Joan DeJean

This book is an important contribution to the vigorous and growing revival of interest in the seventeenth-century French novel as the progenitor of what has become the dominant literary genre in our own time. In a brilliant discussion of a group of compelling works of prose fiction by freethinking authors, whose flamboyant life styles, radical ideas, and audacious attacks on the established order made their literary productions suspect, Joan DeJean demonstrates that the issues at the heart of the libertine enterprise—autobiography, madness, fragmentation, and dialogue—are precisely those that define the problematic modernity of these works. In detailed analyses of Théophile de Viau’s Fragments d’une histoire comique, Charles Sorel’s Francion, Tristan L’Hermite’s Le page disgracié, Cyrano de Bergerac’s L’Autre Monde and Estats et empires du soleil, D’Assoucy’s Aventures, and Chapelle’s Voyage à Encausse, Professor DeJean explores the complex nonfictional literary genres with which they have traditionally been associated.

Occupying an unstable middle ground between autobiography and the novel, the works of the libertines are, with one exception, all written in the first person, a marked departure from the dominant literary tradition of the roman heroïque. They reflect both structurally and thematically the problems of an existence that is at once lived and invented. Investigating these problems, DeJean provides an original interpretation of the libertines’ obsession with naming, analyzes their penchant for fictionalizing history, and studies their peculiar ambivalence about persecution. She also examines the various techniques of indirection used by the libertines simultaneously to transmit and to camouflage their message of intellectual and narrative freedom. Open-ended, the libertine novel is deliberately inconclusive, fragmentary, and self-questioning. Our modernity has taught us to see such qualities as vitally literary. Professor DeJean shows us that this vitality was already struggling to assert itself in the seventeenth-century French novel.

http://www.ohiostatepress.org