Victorian Literature and Culture (2015), 43, 1–21. © Cambridge University Press 2015. 1060-1503/15 doi:10.1017/S106015031400031X DAVID MASSON, BELLES LETTRES, AND A VICTORIAN THEORY OF THE NOVEL By Jack M. Downs IT MIGHT SEEM BOLD, or even presumptuous, to assert that there is a clearly identifiable unified theory of the novel present in any aspect of Victorian literary culture. As John C. Olmsted rightly observes, assessing the presence of any specific and consistent critical stance in Victorian criticism is a difficult task; thus, any attempt to evaluate Victorian criticism of the novel is problematic. Victorian periodical criticism is inconsistent, [and] most of it is deservedly forgotten.... The reader [of early Victorian novel criticism] finds he must take into account the prejudices of individual reviewers, the political affiliation of the periodical in which a review appears and, all too often in the 1830s, the ties that journals and reviewers had with publishing houses. (Olmsted xiii–xiv) Another problem in assessing Victorian novel criticism lies in the aggressively non-theoretical stance of many Victorian critics. Edwin Eigner and George Worth characterize Victorian criticism of the novel as “written by highly intelligent reviewers and essayists . . . [most of whom] rather prided themselves on the non-theoretical character of their intellects” (1). The absence of theory – perceived or in actuality – in Victorian criticism makes the task of identifying common theoretical concerns and systematic approaches a difficult proposition. Yet there is a common theoretical component in much Victorian criticism, and these theoretical leanings are often explicitly beholden to belles lettres rhetorical principles carried over from the eighteenth-century. For example, in an 1840 review of The Dowager published in the Athenaeum, Catherine Gore begins by pointing out the presence of “canons of criticism” which include “the prevailing state of education, the current acquaintance with rhetoric, with the principles of the sublime and beautiful, or, in one word, with the science and the art of composition” (899). While such a statement appears unremarkable at first glance, Gore’s references to rhetoric, to sublimity and beauty, and to the art of composition are perhaps best understood as clear examples of the presence of a belles lettres-influenced critical stance within Victorian critical discourse. But what, exactly, constituted a belles lettres-influenced critical stance? Answering such a question necessitates marking the delineation between eighteenth-century belles lettres rhetorical theory and subsequent nineteenth-century belles lettres-inflected literary criticism: while the two traditions sometimes operated side-by-side, they often maintained 1 https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S106015031400031X Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 54.162.69.248, on 19 Jun 2020 at 18:48:33, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at