Selected Writings of James Fitzjames Stephen: On the Novel and Journalism ed. by Christopher Ricks (review)

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• Selected Writings of James Fitzjames Stephen: On the Novel and Journalism ed. by Christopher Ricks
• Jeremy Tambling (bio)

Selected Writings of James Fitzjames Stephen: On the Novel and Journalism. Edited by Christopher Ricks, Oxford UP, 2023. Pp. xxxvi + 258. £160. ISBN 978-0-19-288283-7 (hb).

Eleven volumes are due to appear of the Selected Writings of James Fitzjames Stephen (1829–94), lawyer, colonial administrator in India and historian of criminal law, brother to Leslie Stephen and uncle to Virginia Woolf. He was the son of a British Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies, Wilberforcian, and instrumental in the ending of slavery in the British colonies. Of those volumes already out, edited overall by Christopher Ricks, Jan-Melissa Schramm, and at first, by Frances Whistler, this one, "On the Novel and Journalism," edited by Ricks, comprises much of his writing for the Saturday Review, which, starting in 1855, coincides with the period of Little Dorrit and A Tale of Two Cities, both of which Stephen notices. The volume, excellently edited by Ricks, with grateful cross-referencing of the critical work of Lisa Rodensky, is stimulating reading and essential for reading Dickens, for several reasons.

First, Stephen gives an important context for the contemporary reception of Dickens, and of the novel. His hostility (it is hardly too strong to call it that) to the latter recalls an informal nineteenth-century debate where Jane Austen was on the opposite side from Carlyle and Arnold (the latter especially in relation to Charlotte Brontë), and where history, the classics, and poetry were regarded as higher. It may be hard to comprehend for those coming after Bakhtin's arguments about the novel, but the form has had to struggle against drama and poetry, and against "harder" forms of "light" reading (e.g. history), and especially in view of what irked Stephen: that the novel was inseparable from journalism, a word which, appearing in the 1830s, both defined some of Stephen's own writing, and disturbed him profoundly for its lesser commitment to truth than obtains in law, and for its function as merely affording amusement, like the novel. Any reader of Victorian culture ought to be familiar with Stephen, and his astringency in writing about issues which have only further mutated – as Ricks, who has a nice note on his dependence on Wikipedia, indicates in referring to "social media" (170, xix). Part of Stephen's anxiety is that his criticism will be seen to partake of mere journalism.

Second, Stephen is very interesting on Dickens, whom he has obviously read intensively, as he has read other novels, including French literature. Thus, there is an excellent treatment of Manon Lescaut, an interesting piece on Balzac, whom he admires, with qualifications (see below) – George Eliot in comparison disliked Père Goriot – and Flaubert, whose Madame Bovary, "a specimen of 'realism' in fiction," he hates (100). This width of reading is itself interesting. There is discussion of Thackeray, whom he likes (as did Eliot), [End Page 280] and liking of Austen, and reverence for Scott (the patrician Tory who is the antithesis of Dickens, for Stephen), plus mention of Trollope, but none of Eliot. The writers in his sights are Charles Reade, for It Is Never Too Late to Mend and its treatment of conditions in Birmingham prison, and Dickens, as both literally a journalist and novelist. Stephen draws blood several times with Dickens, but before discussing that, and his unfairness – for example, he is not good in summing up the plot of A Tale of Two Cities (200) in a review which takes a swipe at Dickens's private life and his reasons for beginning All the Year Round and dropping Household Words (199) – I will discuss his general critical position.

Stephen will always be important for his status as a legal mind and his contribution to the discussion of law and its relation to literature. He demands evidence – a topic of interest to Wilkie Collins (unmentioned) in The Woman in White and The Moonstone, and to Alexander Welsh's critical writing – and wants the novel to be informed by that. He has little time for the "sensation" novel or crime fiction, or...