Reaching Wider: Anecdotes from a Victorianist in the Australian Archive

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• Reaching Wider: Anecdotes from a Victorianist in the Australian Archive
• Jason Rudy (bio)

Twenty years ago, when asked where the field of Victorian poetry was headed, my answer focused on methodology and a term—“cultural neoformalism”—that seemed useful in situating my own doctoral work in relation to the field.¹ I was just young enough to have witnessed the aftermath of disciplinary acrimony among historicists, formalists, and theorists (the so-called culture wars of the 1980s), and the yoking of cultural studies to formalist methods seemed like a way out of the woods and on to greener pastures.² A Rutgers University conference organized by Meredith McGill in 2002 on “The Traffic in Poems” had showcased scholarship in a transatlantic frame and a range of methods that largely reflected this intersection of culture and form, and I was smitten.³

Not long after, I was invited to join a reading group on “Historical Poetics,” a coming together of nineteenth-century Americanists and Victorianists with interests in poetry and poetics.⁴ Roughly inspired by the conversations staged at McGill’s 2002 conference, we took to reading poetic treatises like Sidney Lanier’s The Science of English Verse (1880) and Coventry Patmore’s Essay on English Metrical Law (1856), alongside nineteenth-century poems, working from the belief that ideas about poetry are and have always been malleable and historically situated. A good amount of the scholarship most influential on my thinking over the past two decades has emerged from the Historical Poetics group, including but not limited to Meredith Martin’s pathbreaking study of culture and poetic form, The Rise and Fall of Meter (2012); Charles LaPorte’s intervention in nineteenth-century religion and poetry, Victorian Poets and the Changing Bible (2011); Tricia Lootens’s revisionist reading of women poets and race, The Political Poetess (2017); and the monumental Lyric Theory Reader (2014) assembled by Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins.⁵ [End Page 521]

At roughly the same time as McGill’s conference, while I was finishing my dissertation, this journal published its Spring 2002 special issue on the topic “Nineteenth-Century Australian Poetry.” Meg Tasker and E. Warwick Slinn, the editors of that volume, assembled provocative essays on Charles Harpur, Henry Lawson, and Eliza Hamilton Dunlop, among other important Australian poets, none of whom I recognized. I was on the verge of earning a doctorate in nineteenth-century British literature, with an especial focus on poetry, yet I knew nothing of what had been happening in nineteenth-century Australia—nor, as it happened, in any of Britain’s other colonial spaces. I was surprised, to say the least, with the shock we sometimes feel on realizing a vast ignorance. Until that moment, I hadn’t considered the extent to which my research, and indeed my whole education, had centered on the United Kingdom and the United States in a way that was exclusive of the world at large. Not even Canada had registered as a space perhaps warranting interest. (“Poor Canada,” I imagine the narrator of Middlemarch bemoaning.)

I was dismayed, curious, and determined all at once. The feeling was not unlike that of discovering a new cuisine, and the Victorian Poetry Australian special issue was the equivalent of a banquet: I was hungry to devour it all. I invited some fellow Rutgers graduate students and a handful of faculty to discuss it. In an old house on the New Brunswick, New Jersey, campus, a building long ago bulldozed to make room for modern classrooms, we debated that volume’s Australian poems and poets in relation to the British and American writers we knew. I vaguely remember suggesting that one of Dunlop’s poems sounded a bit like early Tennyson (they were contemporaries in the 1830s). But even then, I sensed that the reality was more complicated, and that a poem that “sounded a bit like” another poem also must sound a bit unlike it: that it must have its own distinct elements worth considering not as derivative, but particular to the history, geography, politics, and culture of the space that produced it.

The kind of specialized knowledge required for that sort of reading would have to wait, though...