Victorians on Broadway: Literature, Adaptation, and the Modern American Musical by Sharon Aronofsky Weltman (review)

Abstract

Narrative Bonds is primarily concerned with the impact of multiple narrative voices on readings of the Victorian novel, the brief engagement with Mayhew’s London Labour and London Poor points toward the possibility of applying Valint’s critical approach to Victorian multinarrator structures more broadly. For example, the serialization of Hard Times (1854) and North and South (1855), taken together with the reporting on industrial labor conditions in England found throughout Household Words, might be seen as an example of a multinarrator structure outside the Victorian novel. Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, and other contributors to Household Words all narrate the horrors and dehumanization that accompanied the rapid industrialization of the north of England; their multiple narrative perspectives achieve a sort of consensus and center the plight of the industrial worker for the readers of Household Words. In Narrative Bonds, Valint encourages this sort of work, in which the presence of multiple narrative voices suggests collaboration and interdependence. The critical framework she develops in her monograph offers a productive approach to reading dis/ability, gender, privilege, and a host of other critical concerns in Victorian texts that have perhaps become overly familiar. Shifting our attention to the relationship among the multiple narrators of these texts not only provides new avenues for research, scholarship, and teaching but also prompts us to reflect on and reconsider our own narratives about Victorian culture and literature.