The appearance, after more than twenty years, of a second edition of John Sutherland’s The Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction, is exciting news for Victorian enthusiasts, whether students, academics or readers. For the book represents a staggering achievement that is unlikely ever to be equalled. That a single scholar, working un-assisted, should undertake to synopsize 554 (now 560) novels and offer biographical accounts of 878 (now 900) novelists, as well as compiling entries on forty-seven magazines and periodicals, twenty-six major illustrators and thirty-eight (now forty-one) miscellaneous items (“Sandism”, “the Yellowback”, “The Nautical Novel”), is a feat that beggars imagination, especially since much of the work was completed before the availability of the internet and searchable digitized texts. In his Preface to the first edition Sutherland stated that it took him five years to prepare the Companion. In his Preface to the new edition he confesses that it was “the work of a decade”. Either way, the scope and ambition of the project attain Johnsonian proportions.

In a fresh introduction Sutherland outlines his two aims. The first is “to do for Victorian fiction what George Bradshaw did for Victorian rail journeys: get the traveller from here to there with no fuss”. Overall, he achieves this aim magnificently, conducting us around unfamiliar sites (altogether, he surveys some 3,500 novels) with speed, precision and panache. His unfussy but witty directness works best in his bulletins on minor novels and novelists. The “sarcastic drollery” which, he tells us, greeted the fictional outpourings of Marie Leighton is a note frequently sounded in his own brisk accounts. One technique is the satirical use of cliché: in Rhoda Broughton’s Not Wisely But Too Well, “the heroine almost stoops to folly with a bounder, holds back at the brink, but ultimately expires in the agony of virtuous self-control”. Another device is deadpan irony in exposing digression and irrelevance: after sketching the “typically implausible plot” of Frederick Chichester’s The County Magistrate, he adds: “The story is accompanied by interpolated essays on the virtues of sanitary improvement”. A similar combination of wit and candour is applied to contemporary critics (of H. G. Wells’s The Invisible Man, he remarks: “In one of the stupider reviews of the century, the Athenaeum declared the work to be ‘uninteresting’”) and to authors’ experiences (“His uncontrollable screams of agony made it difficult for him to retain amanuenses”, he notes dispassionately of Wilkie Collins). The graphic and evocative effect of this style is complemented, in the new edition, by over ninety Victorian illustrations.

Sutherland’s brusque style works less well with more complex novels, where corner-cutting becomes evident. Take, for instance, this rapid conspectus of Jane Eyre: “Jane discovers that Adele is the offspring of one of his former mistresses” (well, maybe: Rochester denies it); Grace Poole is “a servant known to drink” (not known to Jane when she hears the strange laughter); “Mrs Reed’s own children have gone to the bad” (strictly, only John has); Rochester keeps Bertha “locked in the attic” (strictly, in a room on the third storey). What is happening here is not misunderstanding but inaccuracy caused by extreme compression. But at times the capsule summaries are actually misleading. Of George Talboys in Lady Audley’s Secret, who returns to reclaim his wife and baby, Sutherland writes: “He is told they are dead, but does not believe it. He tracks her down as the bigamous Lady Audley. She lures him to a deserted spot, and pushes him down a well”. Those familiar with the novel will recognize the subtle errors in each sentence.

The second, “more seditious” aim declared by Sutherland is “to complicate conventional thinking about this richest of British literary genres” – not only to demonstrate its variety but also to bring out “lateral links” between well-known, little-known and unknown novels. Here he wishes not simply to guide but also, in a sense, “benignly to misguide”. The example he gives in his introduction is discussion of Judaism in Victorian fiction, all too often confined to the landmarks of Fagin, Daniel Deronda and Riah. Rapidly supplementing Dickens and Eliot with a list of ten other relevant novelists, he shows how the standard itinerary can be qualified and the critical conversation widened. A similar process of perceptual enlargement, uncovering hidden filaments of form and content, is available to anyone who explores the Companion. Consider, for example, this concise summing-up of The Headless Horseman by Captain Mayne Reid: “In this story, Reid provides all the props of the Western genre, which descended direct to Hollywood. The Comanche attack, the saloon brawl, the mainstreet shoot-out, sunset on the mesquite, virtuosity with the lasso, bowie-knife and six-gun are all found here”.

Entries on Bigamy Novels, the Bildungsroman, the Sensation Novel, the Religious Novel forge the necessary connections for us. Elsewhere we need to follow our noses, tracing the particular fancies and interests of our indefatigable guide. One of these is erotic implication: who before Sutherland would have imagined that the Victorian novel was so full of sex? Although in the Companion he does not indulge the more lurid speculations he has entertained elsewhere (for example, that in Hardy’s The Woodlanders Mrs Charmond confesses anal intercourse to Grace Melbury), he is keen to identify “the most sexually charged scene in all Kingsley’s fiction”, lesbian relationships that are “frankly depicted” and brothel episodes “unusually realistic for the 1860s”. Occasionally he gets carried away: one would comb Wilkie Collins’s Basil in vain for the scene in which, Sutherland alleges, a wronged husband hears his wife and her lover “copulating through a thin wall”. On the whole, however, Sutherland’s interest in the sexual hinterland of Victorian fiction proves illuminating and revelatory. One notes that among the new entries is a section on “Pornography”.

More generally, the second edition has benefited from three references works in particular: The Feminist Companion to English Literature (1990; edited by Virginia Blain, Patricia Clements and Isobel Grundy); The Oxford Companion to Edwardian Fiction (1997; edited by Sandra Kemp, Charlotte Mitchell and David Trotter); and, most significant, The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004; edited formerly by Colin Matthew and Brian Harrison, now by Lawrence Goldman). All have left their mark on the biographical entries, which are interwoven with additional sentences (often on reputational and financial legacies). Fascinating nuggets of information have been added: that Sir Henry Newbolt “came to detest the slogan ‘Play up, and play the game’”, that Samuel Butler and his friend Festing Jones “shared the sexual favours of the same woman by weekly calendar arrangements”. There are also corrections of dates, typos and titles (Stevenson’s Weir of Hermiston is no longer the topographical-sounding The Weir of Hermiston). Needless to say, errors remain and scholars indebted to Sutherland’s labours can continue to enjoy detecting them: that Gaskell’s Ruth ends with Bradshaw adopting Leonard, that Helen in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall “was cajoled into marriage by an aunt” (she marries in spite of her aunt’s disapproval), that Dora Copperfield dies “weakened by pregnancy” (she has a miscarriage or a stillbirth). But if we are honest we should admit that John Sutherland knows far more than we do and acknowledge, sadly, that future corrections will be made (if at all) by a team of editors. Never again is a single mind likely to encompass the colossal range that this Companion represents.

John Sutherland
THE LONGMAN COMPANION TO VICTORIAN FICTION
Second Edition
715pp. Pearson Education Limited. Paperback, £19.99 (US $35.95).
978 1 4082 0390 3

David Grylls’s books include The Paradox of Gissing, 1986, and, as editor, Gissing’s Born in Exile, 1993.

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