NICHOLAS FREEMAN, 1895: Drama, Disaster and Disgrace in Late Victorian Britain.
2012; Oxford University Press; Volume: 59; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/notesj/gjs173
ISSN1471-6941
Autores Tópico(s)Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism
Resumo‘FIVE hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes’, sing the cast of the musical Rent, ‘How do you measure, measure a year?’ For Nicholas Freeman, in his eminently readable and engaging 1895, it is measured in novels published, plays performed, police reports of crime and scandal, trials, labour actions, political developments, weather patterns, athletic events, cultural debates, and more. The primary interest of the book is certainly writers and, to a lesser extent, other artists, but given a year that saw the publication or first performance of Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest, Henry James’s Guy Domville, H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine, Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, Joseph Conrad’s Almayer’s Folly, Marie Corelli’s The Sorrows of Satan, four issues of The Yellow Book, the English translation of Max Nordau’s Degeneration, and many more major works, that interest hardly seems unjustified. Producing what is in effect a biography of a year rather than of any individual does produce some fascinating juxtapositions (one of Freeman’s key terms): Freeman is definitely onto something when he points out that ‘The implication that cricket represented a [morally] regenerating force was strengthened by the Star’s front page juxtaposition of Wilde’s conviction with a report on the Surrey batsman W. W. Reed’s Testimonial Match at Kennington Oval’ (154). And noting offhand that while some football clubs ‘allowed women to watch games for free, believing their presence curbed the excesses of male supporters … this practice was disappearing by 1894–95 for the simple reason that too many women were watching football and revenue was being lost’ (43) opens up another compelling context for the New Woman writing and social advocacy that Freeman elsewhere details. Other juxtapositions are less effective: why does it matter that ‘Wilde’s action against Queensberry opened on 3 April, the day England’s morally-upright cricketers finally left the Antipodes after trouncing South Australia by ten wickets’ (98)? Or that ‘Back on terra firma, Rosebery attended the Derby on 29 May, the day Heinemann published Wells’ The Time Machine: An Invention’ (135)? It’s occasionally disconcerting to come across odd, unassimilated facts in the middle of a paragraph about something else; interrupting an account of Wilde’s falling reputation in mid-April of the year is a sudden mention of a referee at a football match who ‘was hit by mud thrown by the crowd and abandoned the game after only fifteen minutes’ and then, immediately following, a description of ‘Albert Hartwell, an elephant trainer in a Burnley circus’, who ‘kicked his charge’s trunk and was promptly trampled to death’ (113). The first is justified by the figural term ‘mud-slinging’, the second by the fact that it represents ‘the motif of the noble beast at bay’, both which have some potential relevance to Wilde, but the principle of juxtaposition here threatens to devolve into arbitrariness.
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