THE CRITIC AS CRITIC

A Portfolio of Theatre and Book Reviews

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No 50 : MAY / JUNE 2009

Wilde theatre reviews appear here; Shaw reviews in Shavings; all other theatre reviews in .

Exhibition reviews and reviews of books relating to the visual arts now appear in our new section VISIONS which is reached by clicking its symbol

All authors whose books are reviewed here are invited to respond. This page is edited by D.C. Rose and Anna Vaninskaya.

In an article for THE OSCHOLARS which she titled ‘Wilde on Tap’, Patricia Flanagan Behrendt, our American Editor, set out an agenda for our theatre coverage that we will try to follow. This article can be found by clicking .

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TABLE OF CONTENTS
WILDE
Tiffany Perala on The Importance of being Earnest in Portland
OTHER REVIEWS OF FIN DE SIÈCLE INTEREST
Annabel Rutherford on Rhonda Garelick on Loïe Fuller
Pilvi Rajamäe on Kate Macdonald on John Buchan
Luca Caddia on Daniel Novak on Victorian Photography & Fiction
Phillippa Bennett on Tom Pinckney on William Morris
Ruth Kinna on H. Gustav Klaus and Stephen Knight on anarchism
Richard Nate on David Stack on Socialism and Darwinism

WILDE REVIEWS

Review by Tiffany Perala

The Importance of Being Earnest,

directed by Chris Coleman, Portland Center Stage 24th February-29th March 2009

The programme touts the play as ‘A Wildean frolic… in three acts’, and though it essentially is as advertised, Artistic Director Chris Coleman’s treatment of Earnest is clearly more serious than trivial. The setting is thoroughly Victorian in mood and manner and this comes as a welcome surprise. I have seen Wilde staged in and out of period and though it is amusing to see Earnest queered, such as the KAOS Theatre’s burlesque interpretation notably does, it is also good to remember that Wilde’s lines undermine the age in which they were written in Worthing (1894) and staged in London (1895). Earnest is a mirror into which Wilde’s contemporaries saw a reflection of themselves just as today’s audiences do. The beauty and brilliance of depicting Earnest true to period, paying particular attention to character, diction, plot and costume, is that it reinforces the fact that it does not require embellishment in order to appeal to a 21-century audience, and Coleman’s production justly qualifies this point.

James Knight, as Algernon, instantly captivates the audience as he steps on stage from the adjoining piano room into the morning-room in a rich navy satin smoking jacket. Lane (Todd Van Voris) is tidying the tea-cart and, in what appears to be the only obvious deus ex machina of the production, tosses a brassiere off stage. Knight’s mannerisms and delivery are impeccably ‘Algernon’s’, as we might ideally imagine him, from the script. Indeed, he is the most convincing Algy I have seen and this is apparent in the smallest details as well, such as the distinct way he fondles and then pinches a pink rose from the bouquet to wear in his button hole. This, of course, foreshadows Cecily (Nikki Coble) as does the entire set, which is framed in pink roses.

There are several fine points to this production, but one that must be mentioned outright is costume design, coordinated by Jeff Cone. Cone’s use of texture and colour to emphasise character and mood, city and country, parallel Coleman’s artistic vision and attention to detail. As mentioned, Algernon enters in a smoking jacket which underscores his languid demeanor and also serves to contrast Jack, who enters fully dressed for ‘business’ though we know he is in town for ‘pleasure’, or, rather, to propose to Gwendolen. Algernon’s quip ‘I thought you had come up for pleasure? I call that business’ received an applause, and I believe this is a testament to the parallel form and structure of the play that scaffolds Knight’s effective elocution, balanced delivery, and stage presence.

Throughout the play, it was moments such as this where Knight radiated precisely because he delivered the lines fluidly and with the right amount of emphasis rather than exaggeration. The same can be said of Jack’s (Matthew Waterson) interplay with Algy, especially his well-crafted agitation with Algy’s apparent disregard for the serious nature of marriage, or the stance one must assume in order to appear ‘earnest’.

Lady Bracknell (Jill Tanner) and Gwendolen Fairfax (Kate MacCluggage) enter in gorgeous gowns complete with feather hats, Gwendolen in pink and Lady Bracknell in bronze. Again, Cone’s design choice conveys style and position without seeming overtly ostentatious. Likewise, Lady Bracknell was not the overbearing ‘gorgon’ that I have seen in other productions of Earnest, though I admit that I typically look forward to her dominating the stage. However, I was pleasantly surprised to find the ‘softer’ Bracknell alluring and suggestively aggressive, which, after rethinking my expectations, is in many respects a bold move because the lines are not overacted.

Ahh, Miss Prism (Sharonlee McClean) and Chasuble (Tim True), where to start: the underlying sexual tension was enhanced, and though tension is evident in the script, by the Second Act I was beginning to expect downplaying, or at least subtle undertones rather than ‘reckless extravagance’ in ones so old. I suppose this was the point, as the mirroring effects throughout were keenly interpreted.

Without hesitation, the muffin scene in Jack’s country garden at the close of the Second Act was delightful. Again, I attribute this to Knight’s impeccable skill and presence as Algernon and the interplay with Jack (Waterson) who was consistently agitated with Algy’s ‘absurd’ behaviour at critical times:

Jack: How you can sit there, calmly eating muffins when we are in this horrible trouble, I can’t make out. You seem to me to be perfectly heartless.

Algernon: Well, I can’t eat muffins in an agitated manner. The butter would probably get on my cuffs. One should always eat muffins quite calmly. It is the only way to eat them.

This exchange highlights the relation and difference between Jack and Algy rather tellingly, and though I have seen it performed ‘well’ in other productions, this scene was by far my favourite, and gauging the audience’s reception, I would say they definitely concurred.

Part of the brilliance of the production must also be attributed to the stage design and clear acoustics. Balanced sound resonates at the Gerding Theatre and this was a main concern for the architects and sound technicians when converting the 19^th century Portland Armory into a modern theatre in the heart of Portland’s Pearl District. Of course, lighting and ambience contributes to the aesthetic impression and experience as well and I believe any theatergoer in Portland would tell you just how unique the Gerding is.

Overall, PCS’s The Importance of Being Earnest was a pleasure to see. I have a newfound respect and appreciation for balanced delivery and subtle undertones. During the second intermission between the Second and Third Act I ordered a Gwendolen inspired Champagne with Chambord and mingled a little with the audience. I asked the couple standing next to me what their initial impressions were, and in line with my own thoughts, they ‘loved’ Algernon’s performance. James Knight holds an M.F.A. from the University of Missouri Kansas City and though he has performed widely at venues across the nation in roles ranging from Marc Antony in Julius Caesar to Achilles in The Iliad, this was his first appearance in Portland and he performed Wildely as Algernon to a delighted audience.

Cast of Characters:

Cecily

Nikki Coble

Lady Bracknell

Jill Tanner

Algernon

James Knight

Chasuble

Tim True

Gwendolen

Kate MacCluggage

Lane/Merriman

Todd Van Voris

Miss Prism

Sharonlee McLean

Jack

Matthew Waterson

*For an interview with Chris Coleman, artistic director of Portland Center Stage, on Earnest, the economy, and The Gerding Theatre: http://kboo.fm/node/12360

· Tiffany Perala gained her Ph.D. at the University of Nottingham and now teaches in the English Department at Marylhurst University, Portland, OR. She is an Associate Editor of THE OSCHOLARS.

OTHER REVIEWS OF FIN DE SIÈCLE INTEREST

Review by Annabel Rutherford ^a

Rhonda K. Garelick: Electric Salome: Loie Fuller’s Performance of Modernism. Princeton: Princeton University Press 2007 (pbk 2009).

Almost every modern dance history class begins with a study of its three pioneers: Loie Fuller, Ruth St. Denis, and Isadora Duncan. From time to time, scholars point to the works of one or other of these three women as being a major influence on a specific choreographer. Indeed, there is no doubt that the work of all three had some kind of influence on certain works choreographed for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes as well as on other later choreographers and dancers. Dance became a prominent art form during the fin de siècle and early modernist years and, as Rhonda K. Garelick demonstrates in her fascinating work Electric Salome: Loie Fuller’s Performance of Modernism, Loie Fuller had much to do with establishing this. Fuller was an artiste extraordinaire whose innovative multimedia work traversed the boundaries of dance as she embraced and experimented with all that was new in visual art, stage technology, and cinematography. Once her life was over, however, she faded from public memory as swiftly as the projected images that had once flickered on and off her swirling silks. Electric Salome tells the tale of a young American vaudeville artist, who, at the turn of the twentieth century, went to Paris, defied all convention, and, through her unique style of movement and innovative use of technology, became an international theatre celebrity. By considering Fuller’s work in the context of classical and modern ballet, modern drama, the contemporary visual arts, and modern technology and science, Garelick reweaves this neglected performance artist, dubbed the electricity fairy, ‘back into the fabric of performance history’ (200).

The image most readily associated with Fuller is that of a woman creating butterfly, bird, wave, or serpent shapes out of billowing clouds of silk. Various lighting effects and images are projected onto the shapes as the silk swirls around the woman’s body. Garelick begins her excellent study by identifying ‘the founding moment’ of what was to become this, Fuller’s signature style (29). The show was Quack, M. D., a North American vaudeville play about hypnosis, and it was for this, in 1891, that Fuller created and performed her famous ‘serpentine dance.’ In singling out this ‘basis for all her future groundbreaking work,’ Garelick explains how Fuller cultivated her stage image (28). Although she claimed to dance under a kind of trance, she was acutely aware of her ‘nearly supernatural effect’ upon her audience (19). Her aesthetic, states Garelick, was founded in a ‘Pirandellesque merging of a (hypnotized) fictional character and the actor portraying her’ (29). Rather than merely creating images, she became the image, as if dissolving her entire body into the billowing silk, so that she became ‘a force of performativity itself, mutating into vast and ephemeral decorative forms’ (34).

As the title, Electric Salome, suggests, Garelick’s study provides some thought-provoking ideas about the extraordinary influence of this Biblical figure, not only on the arts, but politically, too. By the time Fuller arrived in Paris in 1892, explains Garelick, the city was intoxicated with Salomania. Ironically, Fuller had already discovered her niche as a veiled dancer, but that she would identify with Salomé, the most famous of veiled dancers, was inevitable. As the author points out, Fuller ‘arrived at a moment precisely ripe for Salome’s transition to the dance stage’ (93). She created two versions of Salomé, one in 1895 and one in 1907. Although both were very different, both received bad reviews, but Garelick’s focuses for her analysis is on the earlier version. By the time Fuller performed Salomé at the Comédie Parisienne (1895), she was famous for her dazzling, mesmerising performances, dancing, always, beneath her veils of billowing silk. In Salomé, however, despite an extraordinary inversion of the sensuous role of the femme fatale to one chaste and childlike, Fuller revealed far more of her body than her audience was accustomed to seeing. By this time, Fuller was into her thirties, overweight, and ‘perspired heavily’ while dancing (94). In revealing her physical self, she shattered her stage image of an enchanting, bewitching sylph and audience and critics alike responded most unfavourably.

Particularly puzzling about Fuller’s inversion of the Biblical myth is her total denial of the natural exoticism, or Orientalist detail, expected in the role of Salomé. Not only was this Salomé morally and sexually innocent, she was also racially ‘whitened’ (96). Indeed, the photograph Garelick provides is more in style with a Pre-Raphaelite painting of a child than a young, sensual woman about to shed her seven veils. Such characterisation is hardly fitting for the traditional sensuality of Salomé’s dance and, of course, runs contra to Fuller’s mesmerising qualities as well as the very power of dance itself. For Fuller, Salomé dances to save John the Baptist and, not too surprisingly, fails in her mission. Other than some red lighting, any trace traces of blood and gore are absent from this inverted and sanitized version. Thus, partly due to her unusual rendering of the tale and partly due to an unexpectedly plump and heavily perspiring body, Fuller’s usual abilities to enchant her audience and, thus, will them to suspend their disbelief failed miserably.

By the 1900 World’s Fair in Paris, Fuller was a major celebrity and, thus, a strong public draw. Two of the dances she performed were from her original production of Salomé. In a compelling analysis, Garelick considers Fuller’s production of Salomé in the context of French imperialism. The Biblical tale, with its many levels of desire, is a ‘tale of murder denied and disavowed,’ she states, arguing that it is ‘a perfect allegory for French imperialist propaganda’ (102). For Garelick, Fuller’s portrayal of Salomé as an innocent, pretty child was ‘deeply consonant’ with imperialism. If Fuller reinterpreted the gory tale, making it suitable for family viewing, France ‘denied its own blood and murder,’ concealing the ugliness of its colonial conquests beneath ‘charming performances and diversions’ (102). Cultural politics run deep and in answer to such questions as why France was so ready to drape its flag over Fuller, Garelick suggests that the World’s Fair used the American Fuller and her family version of Salomé as ‘a silken broom with which to sweep aside such disturbances as the tensions between the United States and France’ (115). Of course, whether this was true is debateable, but the way in which the Biblical Salomé was interpreted, manipulated, and, yet again, reinterpreted is fascinating.

For dance historians, Garelick’s lengthy section on the influence of the romantic classical ballet on Fuller’s work is well worth study and consideration. As the author states, while Fuller may be mentioned in dance history studies, it is usually only in passing – as a pioneer of modern dance. Despite her aversion to ballet, Fuller was a strong bridge between classical and the modern dance and, in many ways, borrowed much from this classical art form. So mush so, believes Garelick, that Fuller reinvented the romantic ballet’s style known as danse balloné (referring to the ballooning of the tutu) through her use of billowing silks. If the author’s discussion about Fuller’s adaptation and use of ballet is fascinating, her suggestion that Fuller ‘functioned much like a one-woman version of the Romantic ballet couple’ is riveting (147). On stage, the romantic ballerina was the central focus and, as the author states, by the fin de siècle, the male dancer’s presence was fading. Visually, on stage, Fuller created ‘ethereal, floating images…the ballerina-like birds, flowers and butterflies,’ while beneath all her draperies, she was the ‘partly hidden manipulator who, danseur-like, used her muscularity to present and control them’ (146). Thus, claims Garelick, Fuller ‘was playing both sexes’ roles onstage’ (147). As a bridge figure in dance, Fuller’s influence on Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes is discussed only briefly (although the company arrived in Paris in 1909, not as stated, 1903). Of particular interest, here, in light of Garelick’s suggestion about Fuller’s dual role- playing, is that, in effect, Vaslav Nijinsky, too, could be described as doing similar in such early Ballets Russes works as Le Spectre de la rose – totally different in style and technique, of course. In the latter case, however, the ballerina was dethroned and the male dancer reinstated, but it was an effeminized danseur. Like Fuller, in his own way, Nijinsky could be perceived as playing both sexes’ roles.

One of the many strengths of Electric Salome is the thorough analysis Garelick provides of Fullers’ major works. Particularly intriguing is her comparative analysis between Fuller’s piece La Mer and Martha Graham’s solo work Lamentations. While the visual similarities are not difficult to understand, it is Garelick’s explanation and analysis of the type of psychological drama shared by each that is most striking. Thus, while neither work contains narrative, we see how a profound emotional drama emerges in each. Both draw their obvious power from abstract form - pure physical movement, performed by a dancer void of facial expression – in other words, movement replaces personality. While Fuller used mechanical techniques beneath her swirling fabrics to produce extraordinary visual effects, and, thus, evoke an emotional response from her audience, Graham initiated her movements from the centre of her body, ‘from the inside out’ (198). And, through such technique, Graham, too, was able to elicit a similar profound and emotional response from her audiences. Garelick’s comparison between the two works clearly demonstrates a strong link between the two dancers. Just as Fuller was influenced by classical ballet, so she influenced modern dance, and, as Garelick clearly demonstrates, in the history of dance, Fuller was the important bridge between the two dance styles.

The final chapter of this excellent study delves into an area seldom explored by scholars and considers Fuller’s relationship to European modern drama. While historians and practitioners readily acknowledge the dancer’s innovative use of lighting and stage technology, which even caught the attention of the Futurists, few have considered her work in terms of modern dramatic composition. As Garelick’s study demonstrates, Fuller’s works fit more readily under the rubric of dramatic performance than dance (204). A fascinating aspect of Fuller’s most successful work was her ability to take a subject from a dramatic or literary text and pare it down from narrative to abstraction. When she performed Salomé as a full narrative text, it was a disaster, but when she extracted certain dances and performed them at the World’s Fair, each was very well received. Thus, argues Garelick, by suppressing the main plot of a literary text, Fuller’s works focused upon and presented only the psychological and characterological aspects of the text – that which could not be adequately expressed verbally. In Fuller’s own words, she was willing to experiment on stage with ‘anything that can bring to our vision those things we cannot see’ (209).

Garelick draws on obvious examples of physicality incorporated into modern drama (such as Nora’s dance in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879), or the Midsummer dance in Strindberg’s Miss Julie), and places Fuller’s works beside Ibsen, Strindberg, even Pirandello. She argues that Fuller, too, was staging and experimenting with all that was new in modern drama, for example such ideas as the ‘fourth wall.’ Following a through analysis of Fuller’s version of Peer Gynt, the author demonstrates the performer’s affinity with the naturalist playwrights. However, as the author observes, that many of Fuller’s works were described as lacking narrativity, ‘portraying no character, and depicting no emotion,’ places them very much in line with ‘half of the modernist theatre to come’ (214). Indeed, Garelick’s discussion of Fuller’s engagement with avant-garde theatre, in particular her work on Tristan Tzara’s Mouchoir de Nuages, leaves little doubt as to the extraordinary role Fuller played in the development of European twentieth-century theatre. However, one is left toying with the question: how much of this brief dialogue between dance and drama was due to Fuller’s influence and how much of it was an unconscious response to Salomania? Either way, as Garelick states, it was through Fuller that Salome made the ‘transition to the dance stage’ (93).

Electric Salome is essential reading for anybody interested in dance or theatre history, modern drama, cultural studies, visual culture, or fin-de-siècle and modernist studies. Not only does the work provide an invaluable study of a performer whose name most people recognise but know little about, it also demonstrates Fuller’s influence on modernism in general. It is a book of great depth and, like the many layers of Fuller’s billowing silk, deserves several readings to fully grasp and appreciate the importance of this fin-de-siècle icon. Garelick presents the story of Loie Fuller chronologically with interesting black and white photographs where relevant. An excellent bibliography is provided along with a useful index.

Note: In the title and throughout the work, Garelick spells Salome without the accent. Thus, any title or direct quotes I have left as they are, but whenever I mention the name, I use the accent.

· Annabel Rutherford is Dance Editor of THE OSCHOLARS.

Review by Pilvi Rajamäe

Kate Macdonald: John Buchan. A Companion to the Mystery Fiction. McFarland Companions to Mystery Fiction, 1. McFarland & Company Inc. 2009

John Buchan’s (1875-1940) reputation has been controversial for more than a half century. Enjoying a huge following in his lifetime as a prolific author of popular fiction, his reputation waned rapidly after the Second World War due to changed social and political circumstances which made the many popular stances of the previous half century seem suspect and untenable. As a determinedly middlebrow writer as far as his thrillers were concerned, though not without artistic pretensions as a historian and a writer of historical fiction, he had imbibed and expressed popular tenets as he found them, finding the modernist critique and dismantling of them not amenable to his temperament. When the modernist faction gained the upper hand in the academe after the war, former popular idols were to be torn down from their pedestals in the name of high art and the likes of Buchan seemed to be destined to the dustbins of history without undue regret. Ill-founded, misplaced and at times plainly unjust criticism was levelled at Buchan’s books to counter and silence their popular appeal. Yet a number of his most popular books remained in print and were to lead to a revival of sorts some decades later, though full rehabilitation has eluded him still. People enjoying and studying Buchan still find themselves apologizing and explaining their peculiar affiliation, though by now it is clear that his best books would need no critical props to survive on the merits of their style and force of conviction alone.

In the light of the above, Kate Macdonald’s new book, John Buchan. A Companion to the Mystery Fiction, launching the McFarland Companions to Mystery Fiction series, is a timely and very welcome addition to the growing Buchaniana. Her self-proclaimed aim is to “encourage the reestablishment of Buchan as a writer of literature” (8), and for this purpose she has undertaken to review the whole corpus of Buchan’s works, the book being designed as a companion to Buchan’s fiction, a guide both for scholars and those who are embarking on the discovery of Buchan’s enticing world of mystery and adventure. A straightforward Scot, she has not balked at tackling head-on the most controversial aspects of Buchan’s reputation, and entries concerning the debatable nature of these proved to be the most interesting for the present reviewer who, because of the nature of her own research, has some previous knowledge of the issues at stake. For the beginner, her pithy analyses and synopses of individual characters, books and stories prove an invaluable resource, relating the different, rather compartmentalized worlds of Buchan’s thrillers, romances and more serious historical fiction to each other, so that a fully rounded world of Buchan’s imagination is laid at the reader’s fingertips. The preface provides a handy update of Buchan’s reception so far, and a brief biographical outline introduces the reader to Buchan the public and private figure.

The world Buchan moved in and described no longer exists, having essentially perished in the trenches of the First World War. Some of its aspects survived in the interwar period which favoured a homely conservatism that Buchan found amenable and deliberately propagated in his own books. The Second World War swept away what remained of it, the socialist, post-imperial Britain having little time for the concerns of the manorial, land-owning class who had built and run the empire. Buchan had worked assiduously to enter and establish himself as a member of this class and had striven hard to convey the atmosphere and manners of their world as he saw them. Such ‘elitism’ in the supposedly more ‘egalitarian’ post-war world grated on the nerves of some critics, who felt called on to deconstruct it in order to ‘reveal’ its harmful and sham nature. Wilful misreadings in tune with fashionable critical trends have subsequently ‘uncovered’ Buchan’s ‘snobbery’, ‘imperialism’, ‘anti-semitism’, ‘racism’, ‘homosexuality’, the betrayal of his Scottish roots etc. Based on a few out-of-context utterances of Buchan’s characters or instances of the plot, they ridiculously distort the integrity of Buchan the man and writer.

Macdonald gives her considered and well-balanced opinions on the matters above with a welcome no-nonsense common sense. She deals realistically with Buchan’s off-hand references to the high and mighty friends and associates of his ‘clubland’ heroes -- not as a manifestation of Buchan’s mindless careerism but as the requisite social wallpaper providing a wider context for his protagonists. Her particular strength from a foreign reader’s point of view is situating Buchan’s characters in their social milieu, their proper class affiliation being not always obvious to the non-natives whose antennae are inevitably less tuned to the delicate nuances of accent and circumstance.

Buchan’s gentlemen adventurers moved in a world that was still dominated by the British Empire and took it for granted. He sees no reason to apologize for their pride in it or the unselfconscious way in which they interfere in other nations’ affairs, the last being justified by their blatant un-Britishness. This offhandedness in settling other peoples’ affairs looks most incongruous and feels most dated in Buchan’s 1930s books, probably the more so because Buchan is himself self-conscious and defensive about the outmodedness of his essentially Edwardian attitudes. Modern technologies and ideologies had shrunk the world, leaving less room for the kind of imperial adventure he liked to write about, so he resorted to ‘cardboard kingdoms’ as a preferred setting in a number of romances, most notably in the Dickson McCunn trilogy and The Courts of the Morning. The former is set in fictional Evallonia in Central Europe, the latter in a fictional South African republic Olifa. In both cases meddling British gentlemen adventurers effect a coup d’etat to help the hapless natives to govern themselves properly. Macdonald has chosen to see Buchan’s critique of amateur adventurism in the former and even a Waughean satire on imperialism in the latter, which may be a bit bold for the present reviewer. But admittedly, Buchan’s less carefully composed books tend to be inconsistent enough to allow a variety of views, The Courts of the Morning also making a strong case in favour of corporate American finance taking over the economy of small nations.

‘Anti-Semitism’ as a label has stuck to Buchan most consistently and most unjustly. A few words and phrases, torn out of context or put into the mouth of unreliable narrators have been used to give Buchan a profile of a Jew-hater. Macdonald reiterates all the by now familiar arguments to demonstrate the absurdity of the idea, pointing out the contexts and circumstances in which such remarks occur, the casual anti-Semitism which was a European habit of thought before the holocaust, Buchan’s heart-felt and vocal support for the creation of the state of Israel, and the recognition of it by his name being included in the Golden Book of Israel. His Jewish characters are varied, good and bad, like his Anglo-Saxon ones, as Macdonald rightly shows. She could have included on the positive side one more character whose very essence makes accusations ridiculous. In The Prince of the Captivity, the highly idealistic protagonist’s chief mentor is an even more noble-minded Jewish master spy who works for the cause of Israel with supreme skill and exceptional bravery, smilingly facing death in front of a German rifle squad.

Buchan’s ‘boyish girls’ and ‘girlish men’ and the concomitant speculations about whether Buchan was or was not inclined to homosexuality (at least subconsciously, as his well-documented life shows a very straight and happily married man and father), have surprisingly become a topic in our over-sexualized age. A reader familiar with the whole of Buchan’s oeuvre will find such charges mildly ridiculous. A reader familiar with the habits of thought before Freud came along will surely find nothing extraordinary in warm lifelong friendships between men, or women who are willing to be more than mere wilting sex objects. The fact that Sandy Arbuthnot is a couple of times described as having absurdly girlish eyes, or a heroine or two boldly stride over the moors in wind or rain, should give the reader no cause for alarm. As Macdonald shows, we can view such bits of writing as homoerotic, but it is really Buchan hero-worshipping his protagonists. Athletic himself, it is no surprise that he admired this trait in his protagonists, women included, and he definitely was no unthinking macho to shy away from a few girlish traits in his otherwise most manly characters. Macdonald also points out the remarkable change in fashions after the First World War which favoured young boyish-looking girls at the expense of mature matrons. Buchan always prized youthful energy and agility and strove to retain these traits in himself, despite his painful illness, to the end of his life. No wonder then that he chose to endow his characters, young and not so young, with qualities that he admired most. Buchan’s well-known difficulties in writing about women derive, as Macdonald also remarks, from the requirements of his genre and the reticence of his generation when writing about sex. Broadly speaking, his women are desexualized in a way that would suit the adventure story addressed to men (they appear as prizes or helpmeets of the male protagonists). There are a few instances, especially in his early books – Sir Quixote of the Moors and A Lost Lady of Old Years, especially – when he tries to examine the psychology of sexual attraction, but clearly feels uncomfortable with it and retreats to safe stereotyping later on. As Macdonald also points out, Buchan’s difficulties with women of the fertile age do not extend to his safely post-menopausal women who are interesting, forceful and magnificent.

Buchan as a Scottish writer shares the fate of a few others who have expanded their horizons and moved beyond the narrow confines of specifically ‘Scottish’ writing. Difficult to classify -- Buchan in the second half of his career reduced the Scottish elements in his books to capture a wider English, and later American and colonial readership -- critics have been in two minds as to how to treat him. The difficulty is increased by the fact that he chose to make his married life in England, deliberately re-rooting himself in Oxfordshire, and moved out of his lower-middle class environment by marrying into the English aristocracy. He set his sights even higher, befriending two Prime Ministers and even King George V. Ideally he would have liked to have made his career in the administration of some white dominion, and quite fittingly ended it as Governor-General of Canada, a consolation prize for having been refused the ambassadorship to the United States. All this took him a long way from the popular mode of Scottish writing at the time of his youth, the ‘Kailyard’ school of sentimental provincialism which he despised. He was also not Scottish enough for the narrowly nationalist writers who chose to write in defiance of what they saw as imposed Englishness, and too old-fashioned for the determinedly modern. And yet, quite predictably, as Macdonald shows, the most memorable of his passages and scenes occur in the Scottish setting. Despite his thrillers becoming in tone and language more ‘English’/’British’, he remained a determinedly Scottish poet, a Scottish critic and a very Scottish public figure. In recent decades Buchan appears to have been partly rehabilitated as a Scottish writer, in tune with growing Scottish nationalism. To a non-Scot who returns to Buchan time and again in search of Scotland lovingly and memorably rendered, this recognition has been inexplicably long overdue.

To a Buchan aficionado, and there must be many, to judge by the sales figures of his most popular thrillers at least, Macdonald’s book is a delightful source book to dip into and compare notes. To a newcomer, it provides a comprehensive introduction to the variegated worlds of Buchan’s fiction.

· Pilvi Rajamäe is a Lecturer in English history at the University of Tartu. Her special interest has been the English country house which led indirectly to the Victorian Chivalric Revival, which in turn fired an interest in John Buchan. She is the founding member and executive director of the Estonian Centre for British Studies and is an Associate Editor of THE OSCHOLARS.

Review by Luca Caddia

Daniel A. Novak: Realism, Photography, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press 2008, pp. xv + 229, ISBN 978-o-521-88525-6 hardback

If you think that Victorians considered photography a technology for the representation of objective reality, the experience of reading Daniel A. Novak’s book might dismember your thoughts and reconstruct them. Roughly speaking, that is more or less what he argues happened to photographic bodies in the Victorian practice called ‘composition photography’, where bodies from different images were juxtaposed in new contexts. In such cases, the photographic body and the private identity of models were torn apart, and the result was the production of what Novak calls ‘novel bodies’. According to him, this technique was not an exception, but the rule to Victorian photographic practice (‘photography set the standard for what was not real’), and the main task of his study is to trace a line between this specific technology and literary fiction: ‘this book redefines what ‘photographic realism’ meant for the Victorians and changes our definition of and expectations for literary realism (6).’

As often happens with inspired research, and this is one of the most inspired and inspiring books I have read in a while, the author manages to convince the reader through a series of paradoxical argumentations which are not always as accurate as they seem. Novak includes a letter of George Eliot in his introduction, and it seems to me that he exploits its meaning in order to show that ‘Eliot associates photography with inaccuracy and distortion (3).’ Eliot describes photographic portraits as ‘detestable introductions, only less disadvantageous than a description given by an ardent friend to one who is neither a friend nor ardent (3)’. In my opinion what she means is that, unlike paintings, photographs are dull, flat, mechanical, mere facsimiles of the originals, which may also explain why, unlike what happened for etchings and engravings, for most of the nineteenth-century there was not a copyright on photographic art reproductions notwithstanding the incredible diffusion of illegal images.

However, this does not affect Novak’s main argument on the association of photography with the distortions of literary fiction: ‘in the face of visual dissolution, art photography set out to restore aesthetic unity, and in the process it produced realism itself as a photographic fiction (4)’. Truth is a composition, then, and not a patchwork (as Henry Peach Robinson has it), because, one may argue, photography is an art and the hand of photographers works like the pen of omniscient narrators in nineteenth-century fiction. The distinct figures who ‘won’t mass together’ (4) in group photographs resemble the modern crowds that both narrative paintings and choral novels show as typified subjects who struggle because of proximity to one another, which brings me get back to the relationship between painting and photography, and makes me wonder whether Novak’s argument would have been helped by a different focus on the former art.

Although Novak tries hard to convince the reader that resemblance has a less important role in photography than we have always believed, I insist that it is through the exploitation of immediate likeness that the manipulation of photographic bodies is able to offer a sense of displacement. If it weren’t for ‘objective’ resemblance, the technology of realism, that is the mixture between factuality and fiction, would be pointless. In this sense, I don’t agree with Novak when he argues that ‘the photographic body can carry meaning and value only insofar as it is already evacuated of meaning and stripped of specific value (22).’ In family and celebrity pictures, it is recognition that informs meaning. On the contrary, anonymity is requested in artistic pictures, where there is a clear distinction between model and subject, two figures that are sometimes blurred in the first part of this book (see pages 18-19).

According to Novak, ‘in the practice, theory, and discourse of Victorian photography, the technology of realism produced its opposite: a body that is at once fragmented and interchangeable, divisible and abstract (63).’ In the first chapter of the book, Novak argues this concept of photographic composition by comparing it to Karl Marx’s alienated worker, whose interchangeability and ability to lose his particularity makes the whole economic composition possible (54), and it seems to me that this is one of the most convincing arguments of the book.

In the second chapter, Novak contrasts the bodies of Little Dorrit’s characters Monsieur Rigaud and Mrs Merdle, arguing how the former’s ‘failure as a model, his inability to play any other role than that of the villain, reinforces the sense that his is a body all too stable, and probable’, while the latter ‘offers a likeness of Dickens’s artists’ models and the photographic models used for composition photography (81)’. Since Novak uses these examples to discuss the relationship between the model’s body and the ability of the novel to be a whole through the reader’s forgetfulness of the labor of assembly that produced it, I was surprised not to find any mention of Rigaud’s death under the collapse of the house on top of him, which well explains the kind of menace he brings to the novel according to Novak’s own standards.

Though Novak’s literary examples are often grounded in Dickens’s The Ghost of Art, it is the employment of Henry James’s short story The Real Thing that urges my main question to the author of the book: in my opinion Mr and Mrs Monarch’s inability to be other than their gentlemanly and lady-like selves while sitting for the artist, their being ‘the real thing’, has less to do with mechanical reproduction (36) than with integrity, straightness. And straight is not an accidental term here (it is also used by James to describe Mr Monarch himself). The examples Novak chooses in the following chapters demonstrate that both composite photographs and literary realism operate as displaced abstractions and do violence to particularity itself are those of Daniel Deronda and Dorian Gray, that is, two queer figures who, unlike ladies and gentlemen of mid-Victorian fiction, cannot express their identity in full in the environment they find themselves in, and must therefore resort to abstraction in order to reach the absolute ideal they end up representing. This makes me think that what Novak calls ‘the rule’ of Victorian photographic standards is only applicable to those liminal figures who must be abstracted in order for them not to be a threat, like working-class models, Jews, and homosexuals.

Most of the third chapter is dedicated to a comparison between Francis Galton’s composite photographs and the idea, developed through Daniel Deronda’s own selflessness, that Jewishness represents the only possible typology since it is in abstraction that it finds its identity. But it is in the fourth chapter that, in my opinion, Novak scores the largest goal in the book. ‘Seemingly inverting Michel Foucault’s famous theory of the discursive shift from the sodomite as a perpetrator of forbidden acts, into the ‘species’ of personality of the homosexual’, Novak argues that, ‘rather that turning the act into a subject, Carson [the counsel for the prosecution during Wilde’s first trial in 1895] attempts both to turn the subject into an act, and to transform the fictional subject into a juridical body (122).’ Indeed, Napoleon Sarony’s photographs which are used during the trial show Wilde as a fictional character, whose accessories, pose and gaze had been fixed by the photographer, but the Marquess of Queensberry used those pictures as evidence of his being a ‘somdomite’ [sic!]. Novak’s point is that ‘the prosecution in Wilde’s first trial inverted Sarony’s transformation of photography into fiction, by reading Wilde’s fiction as a form of photographic evidence (135).’ This leads Novak to conclude that the body of aestheticism resembles the model’s body in Victorian photographic techniques (124), and, above all, that realism and aestheticism depend on the same technology and aesthetic because fragmentation and recomposition are central to both productions (128).

In his intriguing ‘after-image’, Novak compares digital photography to composition photography in Victorian practice and wonders whether digital technology produces a real departure from photographic tradition. I think that it is in connections like this that this book succeeds in full. Paradoxical as it may seem, the main strength of this study seems to me to lie in the thread it weaves between past and present, not in the subversion of the schemes he thinks we have always been taught to believe in. But above all, unlike many of the books published nowadays, this is a study that does not attempt to reify Victorians in order to make them more vulnerable, but manages to remind us that we are the objective of nineteenth-century, and not vice versa.

· Luca Caddia has a degree in Philosophy and a Doctorate in English Literature (both at the University of Rome ‘La Sapienza’). As an Associate Editor of THE OSCHOLARS, with Elisa Bizzotto and Costanza Vettori he is co-editing the pages we are publishing on fin-de-siècle Italy under the title RAVENNA

Review by Dr Phillippa Bennett

Tony Pinkney : William Morris in Oxford, The Campaigning Years, 1879-1895. Glyndŵr: Iluminati Books, 2007. ISBN: 9780955591808

Morris scholars and enthusiasts will be aware that Oxford was a significant and special place in the life of William Morris; until they read Tony Pinkney’s William Morris in Oxford it’s doubtful they will appreciate just how significant and how special. All Morris’s biographers have dedicated pages to exploring the formative influence of Morris’s undergraduate years as a student at Exeter College from 1853-55 on his future intellectual and artistic life, and it was in Oxford that some of Morris’s most enduring friendships and creative partnerships were forged. He also met his wife, Jane Burden, there and began his professional life – a short-lived stint as an architect – articled to G.E. Street who had offices in Beaumont Street. What Morris’s biographers have been less concerned with, however, is the influence Morris had on Oxford. Pinkney’s fine book is interested in just that – in what Morris ‘strove to make happen there’ and ‘how he aspired to become in his turn a formative intellectual influence on generations of students’ (4).

In charting the nature of Morris’s lifelong relationship with the city, William Morris in Oxford also charts the major developments in Morris’s social and political thought and the shifting focus of his activities until his death in 1896. The book is structured chronologically around Morris’s major public speeches and campaigns in the city, from his address in the Sheldonian denouncing the proposed restoration of the west front of St Mark’s Cathedral in 1879, to his speech on the future direction of Socialism to the Oxford and District Socialist Union in 1895, and in drawing this material together for the first time Pinkney presents the role of Oxford in Morris’s life in a striking new light. Indeed in Pinkney’s study the city seems to function as a crucible for Morris’s diverse yet always interrelated intellectual, artistic and political interests and activities, and his sphere of influence can be seen extending from the higher echelons of the Oxford academic community in the Sheldonian in 1879 to the working class men and women who formed part of the audience in the Central Boys’ School in 1895.

Some of the speeches collected in this book have never been fully documented and the scope of Pinkney’s research is impressive as he pieces together various accounts of Morris’s activities in Oxford from journals, newspapers, letters, minutes of meetings, memoirs and anecdotes. The result is a vibrant recreation of the scenes of Morris’s various talks in which we experience the sights, sounds and even smells of each occasion, as in Stephen Gwynne’s first hand account of a Tory undergraduate opening ‘a large bottle of sulphuretted hydrogen at the back of the room’ in order to disrupt the meeting of the Oxford branch of the Socialist League on 25 February 1885 at which Morris and Edward Aveling were the invited speakers (94). We hear the applause and the heckling, the cheers and the hisses which Morris seems generally to have accepted in good spirit as part of the rough and tumble of public speaking, and we also have intriguing insight into the various judgements passed on Morris’s performances by members of his Oxford audiences. The correspondent for the Cambridge Review, for example, evidently objected to what he termed Morris’s ‘singularly unpolished’ style and ‘somewhat colloquial’ manner in his 1879 address in the Sheldonian (19), whilst Arthur Quiller Couch recalled how Morris ‘stormed at us and threatened’ when he attended his talk on ‘Art Under Plutocracy’ in the hall of University College in 1883 (67). But amidst these lively and engaging accounts of Morris’s speeches Pinkney also manages to convey a sense of Morris’s personal progress as a public speaker as evidenced by the account of his final talk in Oxford in 1895. Here we see a forthright and confident Morris asking his audience to contemplate the future and challenging them directly with the question ‘what is it you really want?’ He demands an honest answer from them, one which rejects ‘all convention, all rhetoric and flummery’, telling them outright that if all they want is a reformed rather than revolutionized society then he has one important piece of advice: ‘Don’t you meddle with Socialism’ (150). This is a rather different Morris to the one we see in Pinkney’s account of the Sheldonian speech in 1879 when Morris had a ‘relatively subaltern role’ in the proceedings (19), and thus Oxford in this book becomes the stage on which Morris’s development over sixteen years into an assured and highly effective public speaker is demonstrated.

Oxford is, however, much more than a backdrop for Morris’s speeches and campaigns in this book, and it is also much more than a source of pertinent local examples on which Morris can draw to illustrate the main points of his talks, be they to do with the importance of history, the value of ancient buildings or the social injustices and downright shoddiness of commercialism – important though those examples undoubtedly are. Oxford does, in fact, become a character in its own right in Pinkney’s study, in which we see the city changing and developing in the second half of the nineteenth century as it responds to both national issues and local circumstances. The account of Morris’s involvement in the campaign of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB) to stop the widening of Magdalen Bridge in 1881, for example, simultaneously reveals an Oxford experiencing rapid population growth and the attempts of the local authorities ‘to manage an expanding city and its changing patterns and technologies of mobility’ (34). Similarly, Pinkney’s account of Morris’s disagreements with the architect Thomas Jackson over the best means of addressing the decaying spire of St Mary’s Church furnishes us with a wonderful image of the two men stepping out onto the scaffolding to inspect the statues (and subsequently providing rather different accounts of the conversation they had high above the city), but it also provides a striking example of how the city and university authorities were embroiled more generally in national debates over whether the country’s ancient buildings should be protected or ‘restored’.

In addition to these glimpses of the changing demographics and architectural fabric of Oxford in the last decades of the nineteenth century, William Morris in Oxford provides an equally fascinating study of the city’s developing intellectual and political movements. One of the real delights of this book is the skilful way in which the wider context of Morris’s speeches and campaigns is animated through brief but informative studies of a whole range of Oxford residents, from Arnold Toynbee and Matthew Arnold to the ‘indefatigable’ William Hines, a college chimney sweep and herbalist who played an active role in local politics and had fearlessly attempted to convert Benjamin Jowett, the Master of Balliol, to socialism (141). A panoply of Oxford personalities is thus brought vividly to life in these pages, and the consideration of the direct and indirect association of these individuals with Morris is an original and illuminating contribution to our understanding of his relationship with the city. From a personal perspective, one of the most welcome inclusions in this cast of the good, the great and the tenacious is Charles Faulkner, Morris’s friend from his undergraduate days who later became a Fellow of University College. Charley Faulkner must surely present one of the most enduring examples of human loyalty in his willingness to accompany – or follow – Morris wherever he went, be it into the volcanic wastes of Iceland (twice) or into the no less hazardous terrain of socialism. Pinkney’s sympathetic account of Faulkner’s role in Morris’s Oxford ventures is a pleasing tribute to this most faithful of Morris supporters, and the description of Faulkner’s valiant attempts to establish a vibrant socialist movement in Oxford, which earned him a brief spell of ‘press notoriety’ in 1885 (114), is for me amongst the most rewarding sections of the book.

Pinkney’s discussion of the continuing hold Oxford had on Morris’s imagination and his reciprocal influence on the city does not stop with Morris’s death in 1896. In his Conclusion Pinkney presents a succinct and persuasive analysis of the significance of Oxford in A Dream of John Ball and News from Nowhere, before considering Morris’s legacy in Oxford in the early twentieth century. Again Pinkney brings a fresh perspective to Morris’s influence on later scholars such as J.R.R. Tolkien and G.D.H. Cole by approaching them in the context of wider debates and developments in the university which had their roots in Morris’s own campaigning years in Oxford. Hence we not only hear of the influence of Morris’s late prose romances on The Lord of the Rings, but also of Tolkien’s reform of the Oxford English syllabus ‘in favour of early English and other early literature’ (166), a move that looks back to Morris’s own views on the establishment of the Merton Chair of English Language and Literature in 1885 when he declared ‘philology can be taught, but “English Literature” cannot’ (119). Indeed Morris’s forthright comments on the teaching of English Literature at university can still be rather uncomfortable reading for those Morris devotees amongst us who are engaged in doing just that – not least because of his pessimistic prophecy that it would lead to teaching and writing riddled with ‘subjectivism, intellectual vagueness, perverse ingenuity, and a truncating of historical periods’ (119). But whilst Tolkien championed literary and philological interests that were clearly in tune with Morris’s own enthusiasms, he was most certainly not the champion of Morris’s political legacy in Oxford. That job fell to the political theorist G.D.H. Cole whose reading of News from Nowhere at the age of sixteen had, in his own words, ‘made me feel, suddenly and irrevocably, that there was nothing but a Socialist that it was possible for me to be’ (168) – the sort of instantaneous whole-hearted conversion Morris would no doubt have welcomed in some of the rather more intransigent members of his Oxford audiences in the 1880s. Although Pinkney suggests that Cole’s commitment to Socialism during his time as a Fellow of University College was not quite as unquestioning and unshakeable as his predecessor Charley Faulkner’s, he does acknowledge the Guild Socialism he promoted, with its vision of ‘a creative and self-managed labour process’ and ‘a federation of self-governed communities’ as ‘Cole’s lasting development of Morris’s legacy at Oxford’ in the twentieth century (170).

And what of Morris’s legacy in Oxford in the twenty-first century? The Morris and Co. wallpaper that graced the walls of the houses of the first married fellows in Oxford in 1870s and 1880s will no doubt long since have peeled away, but Morris would not have minded that. If he cared at all about his legacy in Oxford, his concerns would certainly not have related to the longevity of his domestic furnishings. Rather, he would have hoped that Oxford might finally fulfil that utopian potential that underlies so many of his references to it in his speeches and his writing – the potential to demonstrate how culture and politics ‘can come fruitfully together in a socialist synthesis’ (171). That potential, Pinkney asserts, is still there today, and ‘whenever culture and politics come together again at Oxford’ he argues, Morris’s hopes and aspirations for the city will have been fulfilled (171). It is an inspiring and suitably provocative thought on which to end an excellent book – a book which will intrigue and reward anyone interested in the history of Oxford or nineteenth-century history and culture more generally, whilst being an indispensable addition to the bookshelves of Morris scholars and enthusiasts everywhere.

· Phillippa Bennett is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Noorthampton and currently co-editing a collection of essays on William Morris’s literary, aesthetic and political legacy in the twenty-first century as well as working on a book on William Morris’s Last Romances.

Review by Ruth Kinna

H. Gustav Klaus and Stephen Knight (eds): To Hell With Culture: Anarchism in Twentieth-Century British Literature, University of Wales Press 2005. ISBN 0708318983. £40.00

Like many other texts on anarchism, this book opens with a reminder of the confusions and deliberate misrepresentations that surround anarchist ideas. And to correct these distortions, the editors provide a sympathetic historical account of a particular kind of libertarian socialist anarchism. However, the essays collected in the book are not designed to explore anarchist thought or defend anarchist ideas. Their purpose is to outline the emergence and development of a literary anarchist tradition, through a series of case studies of key figures and texts or, as the editors put it: to ‘trace how perceptions and misperceptions of anarchist ideas and practices have infiltrated British writing over the last one hundred years’ (5).

This is quite a wide brief, allowing the inclusion of writers who used anarchism as a vehicle for their fiction – notably Conrad, the subject of John Rignall’s opening essay – as well as those who consciously identified with anarchism, for example, Herbert Read. It also facilitates a rich and diverse exploration of the anarchic in literature. Heather Worthington’s wonderful analysis of The Man Who Was Thursday reveals the multi-layered complexity of Chesterton’s novel: the tensions between the noisy embrace of anarchist politics, the chaotic anarchy of the real world, the unsettling, disruptive influence of cultural nihilism and the order of the anarchistic individual.

There are some persistent themes. William K. Malcolm’s chapter considers artistic purpose, showing how James Leslie Mitchell’s ‘implicit’ anarchy brought together a commitment to politically motivated art and a rejection of culture in an anarchist aesthetic that was designed to draw attention to the fictional quality of the novel and highlight the gap between art and life. Malcolm’s interest in culture, propaganda and political purpose are taken up in Kathleen Bell’s study of Ethel Mannin and Emma Goldman. Like Mitchell, Mannin suggested a critical moral role for artists, but whereas Mitchell held to an ideal of a pristine no-state and to the disappearance of art and the social divisions which supported it, Mannin cherished art as an adornment for life which – in an ideal world – set it apart from propagandising and politics.

Interesting questions about anarchist aesthetics, modernism and avant-garde cultures are discussed in Paul Gibbard’s chapter on Herbert Read and Victor Golightly’s analysis of John Cowper Powys. Read’s embrace of modernism and his construction of an ethical idea of art which harnessed notions of dynamism and experimentation with moral conviction distanced him from anarchists like Tolstoy and Kropotkin (who were critical of innovators like Baudelaire), as well as writers like Powys, the self-proclaimed ‘old-fashioned … Tory’ (126), who remained forever suspicious of modernist aesthetics. Golightly favourably compares Powys’s utopian Dunnowair (from his utopian novel All or Nothing) to William Morris’s Nowhere. Yet Powys’s romantic anti-capitalism and his emphasis on imagination and dreams is reminiscent of Morris; and given the contrast with Powys, it’s interesting to reflect on the very different use that Read made of Morris’s work, absorbing Morris’s medievalism into his social and political vision.

Political anarchism is another strong theme. Raimund Schäffner’s chapter on Ralph Bates, a little known but ‘outstanding communist propagandist, journalist and novelist’, examines the politics of the Spanish civil war (1936-39) through the lens of Bates’s two novels Lean Men and The Olive Field. Of all the essays in the collection, this is perhaps most centrally concerned with anarchist thought and revolutionary practice. However, Stephen Knight’s essay on English-language Welsh fiction (which has a companion piece in Katie Gramich’s discussion of contemporary Welsh fiction) is also a case study of anarcho-syndicalism; and David Goodway’s impressive comparison of Aldous Huxley and Alex Comfort provides a potted history of British post-war anarchism and the role that CND, pacifism and sexuality played within it. Combined, they give a marvellous snapshot of the diversity of anarchist thought and of shifts in thinking from the early years of the twentieth century to the appearance of the counter-culture in the 1960s.

A final theme emerges in discussions of the nature of cultural anarchism and its limits. This is one of the topics investigated in Valentine Cunningham’s sweeping, magisterial essay about Emanuel Litvinoff, anarchism and London’s East End. This essay looks at the construction of the anarchist past, memory and the perpetuation of cultural myths, from Conrad’s Secret Agent to Litvinoff’s A Death Out of Season and, bringing the analysis up to date, the work of Ian Sinclair. Cunningham’s dark, atmospheric account also examines the cultural milieu in which the fictionalised reality of anarchist politics has been explored, looking at Litvinoff’s troubled engagement with Read and others and the cultural anarchism of Stewart Home. The thrust of his argument is that the fictional world that Litvinoff creates remains rooted in historical truth-telling and that it has a political force which modern mythologizing, informed only by cultural engagement, lacks. Thus, he concludes: ‘Cultural bombs are only metaphorically bombs. The anarchism of … Home and their gang is a kind of political conjuring trick, a set of jeux d’esprit, merely semiotic games … All of which Emanuel Litvinoff more or less acknowledges …’ (159).

The final essay in the collection, Christian Schmitt-Kilb’s discussion of the politics of drama, touches on similar issues, but discusses the relationship between cultural anarchism and political engagement through the lens of Murray Boockin’s polemic Social Anarchism and Lifestyle Anarchism. Borrowing this dichotomy he suggests that plays which seem to fall into the ‘lifestyle’ category – Mark Ravenhill’s work is the subject here – should not be read as celebrations of this type of anarchism but rather warnings about ‘the disastrous consequences for both the individual and for society if the ideology of lifestyle anarchism is put into practice’ (205). One of the strengths of Bookchin’s dichotomy is that it’s possible to lump together all sorts of different ideas under the banner of ‘lifestyle’ before simply dismissing them. Consequently, while it’s not clear how the label of cultural anarchism maps onto it, it’s easy to see that the possibility of the mapping exists. Indeed, Bookchin’s critique of lifestyle anarchism is referenced, favourably, in the opening section of the introduction: but it is only mentioned. And it’s a shame, in the end, that the editors don’t tackle the issues it raises more directly. For while we are alerted to the possibility that lifestyle anarchists might be perpetuating new myths about anarchism, equally potent but qualitatively different to those associated with Conrad, we are not given much clue about how the editors think these play out in culture – in the very diverse ways in which the term is discussed in these essays – and what social anarchism might require in terms of the politics of cultural engagement. They should be congratulated for producing a tremendously enriching and diverse collection of essays, but in failing to wrestle with the cultural limits of anarchist politics, the introduction falls a bit short.

· Ruth Kinna is Senior Lecturer in Politics at the University of Loughborough. She is the editor of Anarchist Studies and a member of the editorial board for the Journal of the William Morris Association.

Review by Richard Nate

David Stack: The First Darwinian Left: Socialism and Darwinism 1859-1914. Cheltenham: New Clarion Press 2003. 149 pp.

Not only have the close links between Darwinism and early British socialism long been neglected by scholars of history, but they also stand in need of explanation. Thus, this volume deals with an interesting subject. As the author points out, socialism is generally believed to stress human equality, promote co-operation and praise the benefits of education, while social Darwinists are presumed to stress human inequality, to regard competition as decreed by nature, and to define man as hereditarily determined. In offering an explanation, the author reminds us, first, that early Darwinism was no monolithic structure but rather a highly contested field permitting many different interpretations and applications. Second, since socialists regarded themselves as a progressive force in society, they were inclined to take the latest scientific developments very seriously. What the reader gathers from Stack’s account, however, is an even closer alliance between biological and political thought. Thus we learn that Darwinism represented not just another influence on British socialism, but that evolutionism and socialism, in fact, formed a coherent whole.

Chapter 1 outlines the ways in which the political left reacted to ‘Darwin’s challenge’. As Stack argues, in the late nineteenth century those elements of Darwinism that appeared antagonistic to socialist principles were not fixed to such a degree that they would have made different interpretations impossible. Since Darwin’s own theory remained indeterminate in many respects, socialists favoured those interpretations of his work that best fitted their needs. For instance, they played down the Malthusian element in Darwin’s thought and interpreted the evolutionary process as a continuous movement towards perfection. Refuting the claims of those social Darwinists who regarded individual competition as a natural law, they praised man’s social behaviour and his altruism as major evolutionary achievements. In Chapter 2 the views of Alfred Russell Wallace are cited as an example. Unlike those followers of Darwin who took the ‘struggle for existence’ as a justification for their racialism, Wallace refuted the idea of racial inequality and pointed to the fundamental differences which distinguished human societies from the animal world. In his view, the contemporary laissez-faire individualism represented but a remnant of man’s former primitive stage while the evolutionary process pointed to an ever increasing collectivism.

Chapter 3 discusses the relationship between late nineteenth century socialism and earlier British radicalism, as exemplified in the writings of Thomas Paine and others. While the radicals still believed in a static universe corresponding to the deist philosophies of the eighteenth century, socialists would subscribe to a more dynamic view for which the evolutionary model seemed to provide a scientific explanation. Pointing to the writings of Henry George, Edward Aveling and Peter Kropotkin, Stack demonstrates how the mechanistic metaphors of earlier political theories were slowly replaced by organic and evolutionary ones.

The fourth chapter focuses on Herbert Spencer who coined the phrase ‘the survival of the fittest’ that Darwin would adopt in his later writings. As Stack points out, it was Spencer’s theory of the social organism rather than his emphasis on competition which proved influential among British socialists. Thus, Spencer’s view that human societies became more and more complex and less competitive in the course of history was taken up by socialist authors such as Laurence Gronlund, Annie Besant and Jack London.

Chapter 5 is devoted to an analysis of the writings of James Ramsay MacDonald who would later become Britain’s first Labour prime minister. In his book Socialism and Society (1905), he attempted to unite Darwinism and socialism by applying biological metaphors to the field of politics. He agreed with Wallace that human evolution was marked by co-operation rather than competition, and he differed from orthodox Marxists in his conviction that socialism would not arrive through a revolutionary act but had to develop ‘organically’. As the evolutionary process moved in the direction of ever more complex social systems, it would lead to socialism almost inevitably.

Given the difference between the revolutionary standpoint of the Marxists and the evolutionary views of the socialists, it stands to reason that the sixth chapter of the book is devoted to the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Stack refutes the claim that the two theorists rejected Darwinism out of hand because of its Malthusian assumptions. Instead, he points out that Marx held Darwin’s Origin in high respect and even regarded it as the scientific basis of his own political views while Friedrich Engels’ scientific outlook also corresponded to the basic principles of the evolutionary theory. Continuing with the German discussions, Chapter 7 identifies Darwinian traits in the writings of Karl Kautsky and Edward Bernstein. Although the two authors differed in their interpretation as to how socialism could best be established, they both shared a fervent belief in evolutionism. Thus, they replaced Marx’ dialectical interpretation of history by a linear one which they felt was more in line with the principles of biological evolution. This tendency is most obvious in Bernstein who preferred an organicist understanding of human society before the Marxist view which defined history as a constant antagonism between the classes.

In a book which discusses the relationship between Darwinism and political theory, the subject of eugenics should not be excluded. While Stack acknowledges that British socialists did not remain unaffected by this movement, he argues that they preferred a Lamarckian ‘parasitology’ to the hereditarianism of the eugenicists. As he explains in Chapter 8, the term ‘parasites’ was applied to individuals that ‘preyed upon the social organism’ by acting in an antisocial way. What Stack seems to suggest here, is that ‘parasitology’ represented a less problematic counterpart to the eugenic movement in the wake of Francis Galton. Thus, capitalists who showed a lack of responsibility for the common good were branded as parasites, but they were not denied a capacity for ultimately improving their behaviour. What the author fails to mention, however, is the fact that the parasite metaphor was by no means restricted to the ‘idle’ members of the upper class. Even if Stack may be right in arguing that their organic view of society prevented socialists from succumbing to the brutal social Darwinism of some of their contemporaries, the dangerous potentials of biological metaphors should not be overlooked. It was the characterisation of undesirable groups as ‘parasites’, after all, which characterised the rhetoric of nationalist groups in Weimar Germany and the Nazi policies of the 1930s. While the Volksgemeinschaft was praised as an ‘organic’ whole, its negative counterpart was made up by the so-called Volksschädlinge (‘pest of the community’), which in this case meant Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, alcoholics and other minorities. This is not to suggest, of course, that British and German socialists who cherished the idea of an organic society can in any way be described as proto-fascist, but it demonstrates the precarious nature of biological metaphors when applied to a socio-political context. In this respect ‘parasitology’ proves at least as problematic as eugenics, especially if one takes into account the fact that the latter was associated with many different interpretations and applications, ranging from beneficial forms of public health care to marriage restrictions, sterilisation policies, ‘euthanasia’ programmes, and genocide.

Chapter 9 is concerned with a series of books edited by Ramsay MacDonald for the ‘Socialist Library’. Intended to supply the British public with the works of European socialists, this series included several works that attempted to reconcile the socialist idea with the theory of evolution. Although hereditarianism was not rejected completely, the authors who contributed to the Socialist Library generally favoured environmentalist views. The book closes with a chapter on British socialism in its relation to liberalism on the one hand and Marxism on the other. While the former was rejected because of its promotion of a laissez-faire economy, the latter was modified by pointing to the continuous process of cultural evolution which made a revolutionary change appear scientifically dubious.

One of the book’s merits is that it reveals the impact of biological thinking in an area where many readers would not expect it at first sight. As can be gathered from the author’s reconstruction, the natural sciences already enjoyed such a high cultural status in the late 19th century that socialists were virtually forced to adapt their theories to a Darwinian framework if they wanted to keep up with the times. At least in this respect they did not differ very much from those contemporaries who used Darwinism in order to promote a far less humane political agenda. The fact that Stack’s style at times appears apologetic rather than descriptive may be taken as an indication that the debate over the political implications of Darwinism is not yet over. The issue of eugenics provides a good example. It cannot be denied that some socialists favoured eugenic policies, although much further research has to be done in this field. From a modern perspective one can either applaud the fact that eugenics was such an insignificant element in British socialist thinking, or deplore the fact that it had any place at all. Stack takes the former position when he insists that some of the more problematic views held by members of the Independent Labour Party should be kept ‘in perspective’. Even if this may appear controversial to some readers, it does not diminish the book’s overall qualities. All in all, Stack’s portrayal of the ‘first Darwinian left’ is informative, well written, and sheds light on a hitherto neglected field.

Richard Nate has held the Chair of English Literature at the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt since 2003, and his main areas of research are science and literature, cultural self-perception, history and theory of rhetoric, and early modern language theories.

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