Steven Marcus (1928–2018)

[This review is limited to chapter five ”Sons and Fathers” on Barnaby Rudge] A Freudian reading, predictably. The five father-son relationships in the book are explored in depth as central to the message of what Marcus regards as “a vastly better novel than its reputation in any way suggests.” Sim’s forged master key represents the sexual power he wants to take from his employer; Old John’s fear that his son’s manhood will bring about the loss of his own is realised when the rioters saw down the maypole outside his eponymous pub and thrust it through the shattered window of the bar. Not just a psychoanalytic reading, however; Dickens’ fear of Chartism and the influence of King Lear are explored, and many other facets of the story. A very worthwhile follow-up to my recent re-reading of the novel..… (mehr)

A highly readable stroll through a handful of themes in the field. Allowances have to be made for psychological attitudes which are now very dated.

This is a study of how people wrote about the subject in Victorian times. Marcus, who was an academic at the same university in America as Alfred Kinsey, set out to write about writings, not about people's behaviour (for that see The Worm in the Bud: The World of Victorian Sexuality (Sutton History Classics) and took a number of writers coming from different backgrounds and with different projects.

Thus, the first essay is on William Acton, an influential if totally obsessed doctor whose work had a huge influence on Victorian attitudes and caused, over the years, untold misery; readers will recognise a lot of familiar myths here. The second, by contrast, concentrates on a man who assembled a huge descriptive bibliography of banned books; equally obsessed, in a different way. Two chapters discuss the private - and very self-aware - diaries of a man whose whole project in life was the pursuing of women, and of experiences, and then writing about them. The next three chapters take a more general view of illicit writing in the period, and how it contrasts with the reality of the Victorian underworld. The important thing here is the balance between the medical and psychological writing, and the banned literature which was being created. The two share an obsession and the author is good on how this colours the spirit of the age.

This book is of interest of the general reader and to anyone studying the culture and literature of Victorian England; it is not a salacious read. At times the subject matter does leave a nasty taste in the mouth, but the author's handling throughout is restrained and academic.

For those with an academic interest, My Secret Life, Volumes I. to III. is now available in an entirely repspectable but partial reprint; something which would have been inconceivable when Marcus first wrote. A curious postscript; I recently found a Victorian copy of Acton's "Functions and disorders of the reproductive organs" in a charity bookshop. It was, sadly, priced too high for a frivolous buy.… (mehr)