“A SIMPLE TALE TOLD SIMPLY”: THE CULTURAL IMPORTANCE OF R.D. BLACKMORE’S NEGLECTED NOVEL LORNA DOONE __________________________ A Thesis Presented to the Faculty of the Caudill College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences Morehead State University __________________________ In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts in English __________________________ by John Stanifer 18 September 2014 UMI Number: 1571808 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. UMI 1571808 Published by ProQuest LLC (2014). Copyright in the Dissertation held by the Author. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code ProQuest LLC. 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, MI 48106 - 1346 Accepted by the faculty of the Caudill College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences, Morehead State University, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Master of Arts in English degree. Glen Colburn Director of Thesis Master’s Committee: Glen Colburn, Chair Layne Neeper Sarah Morrison 18 September 2014 “A SIMPLE TALE TOLD SIMPLY”: THE CULTURAL IMPORTANCE OF R.D. BLACKMORE’S NEGLECTED NOVEL LORNA DOONE John Stanifer, M.A. Morehead State University, 2014 Director of Thesis: Glen Colburn R.D. Blackmore’s Lorna Doone, first published in 1869, reaffirms values that were rapidly disappearing in an era of tumultuous change. While novelists such as George Eliot and Thomas Hardy were embracing scientific rationalism and liberal theology, Blackmore viewed new social and philosophical movements with suspicion, staking his worldview on the validity of traditional Christianity, education in the classics, and the British Empire against what he saw as the onslaught of the Darwinists, the social reformers, the anti-imperialists, and other voices of heterodoxy. In the years after its publication, Lorna Doone drew praise from noted contemporaries such as Gerard Manley Hopkins, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Thomas Hardy. Readers often expressed pleasure in Blackmore’s images of nature, seeing in his old-fashioned romance an antidote to the cares and distractions of modern life. The popularity of Lorna Doone lasted well into the twentieth century, but the novel has attracted little scholarly interest in recent years, perhaps in part because Blackmore’s religious and social views are largely considered out of date. In losing sight of Lorna Doone and its author, readers and scholars may risk losing a balanced perspective on the Victorian era by focusing on writers whose beliefs are much closer to the norm in the twenty-first century than is Blackmore’s conservatism. In order to demonstrate that there is still a place for Lorna Doone in classrooms, the arguments in this study have been divided into four chapters. The first traces the popular and critical fate of Blackmore’s novel in its early years up through the latter half the twentieth century. The second continues these threads while examining Lorna Doone side-by-side with George Eliot’s Adam Bede; the similarities and profound differences between the two works help illuminate Lorna Doone’s place in the Victorian literary canon, showing the importance of heeding voices on both ends of the ideological spectrum. The third chapter sets Lorna Doone next to Hardy’s more widely-known Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Hardy, whose path took him well away from religious orthodoxy, is a compelling contrast with Blackmore the man of faith, and yet the mutual admiration the two writers shared suggests that Lorna Doone reaches across barriers, articulating profound insights into the human condition and presenting a picture of Englishness compelling enough to overcome objections to Blackmore’s worldview. The fourth chapter closely considers Blackmore’s use of the historical romanticism popularized by Walter Scott half a century before and the thematic importance of Blackmore’s literary allusions. Accepted by: Glen Colburn, Chair Layne Neeper Sarah Morrison DEDICATION This thesis is dedicated to my family, especially my mother, my father, and my sister. Without the early love of reading my parents instilled in me, I doubt this project would ever have existed. I love you all, and by the way, it’s about time we went out for coffee and a book-buying spree again. After all, it’s been a whole day since we emptied our wallets to fill up our bookshelves. What are we waiting for? ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I owe too many debts to list here, so a few of the most significant will have to suffice. First, my thanks to Robert King, coworker and friend, who offered eloquent expressions of support at every stage of this challenging work. Let’s meet at Fazoli’s soon; I’ll be sure to bring coupons. Pax vobiscum, sir. My gratitude to Dr. Michael Steer of Renwick College at the University of Newcastle, Australia, who generously offered to mail me a copy of a maddeningly rare secondary source, free of charge. This encouraging act, coming so early in my research phase, gave me a much-needed push to keep going. Dr. Scott Jones and Dr. Eva White of Indiana University Kokomo not only inspired me during my undergraduate studies there, but they also lent their voices of wisdom at key moments during the writing of the present work. They helped me to believe that writing a thesis and successfully defending it was more than doable. The intellectual and spiritual camaraderie I have found at the Frances White Ewbank Colloquium on C.S. Lewis & Friends at Taylor University has been a treasure. It’s an honor and a pleasure to sit and listen in the midst of such a community of readers and scholars who share a love of the same authors. Finally, thank you to all of my Facebook friends who “liked” or commented on my thesis updates. Even the smallest gesture of support makes a difference. CONTENTS Chapter 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Works Cited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 Chapter 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 Works Cited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48 Chapter 3 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 Works Cited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 Chapter 4 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68 Works Cited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94 1. “Life and Memory”: A History of Lorna Doone in Literary and Popular Culture R.D. Blackmore’s 1869 novel Lorna Doone is a fine case study in how a work that once enjoyed immense popular and critical success can slip into near oblivion. The passion Lorna Doone inspired in its readers from the early years of its publication until well into the twentieth century is as heartfelt—if not as widespread—as anything seen in response to more contemporary British writers such as J.K. Rowling. Margaret Oliphant, in her 1871 review of Lorna Doone for Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, dubbed it “a book far above the standard of the ordinary novel . . . full of the truest nature and beautiful thoughts” (47). However, the dearth of scholarly commentary on Lorna Doone over the past several decades is a sign that the novel has fallen into a critical abyss. Various historical and cultural factors have affected the visibility of Lorna Doone over the years, and yet it is a novel that deserves greater attention from readers and from scholars of the Victorian era. In allowing Lorna Doone to fade from our picture of the nineteenth-century literary scene, we have lost a powerful voice for conservative Victorian values that balances the voices of more liberal writers such as George Eliot and Thomas Hardy and gives us a more complete and accurate view of the wide spectrum of Victorian beliefs.1 The problem with prevailing perspectives on the Victorian era is illustrated by a passage from John Fowles’s 1969 novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman, which begins its narrative in March 1867. Charles Smithson, the protagonist, is exploring the countryside in full scientific regalia when the narrator remarks on the cultural context Charles is living in: It was men not unlike Charles . . . who laid the foundations of all our modern science . . . They sensed that current accounts of the world were inadequate; that they had allowed their windows on reality to become smeared by convention, 1 See chapter two for a discussion of Lorna Doone in relationship to Eliot’s Adam Bede and chapter three for a discussion of its relationship to Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Stanifer 2 religion, social stagnation; they knew, in short, that they had things to discover, and that the discovery was of the utmost importance to the future of man. (47) Such wording suggests that the overriding impulse of the Victorian era was progress, especially scientific progress. To hold to the certainties of the past was to place oneself on the wrong side of history. “Convention” and “stagnation” were the enemies of progress. The tacit assumption here is that in order for “the future of man” to be a positive one, what is “outdated” must make way for what is new and supposedly more true than what it is replacing. In elevating “modern science” and the Victorian men and women who spearheaded that science, Fowles’s narrator is, by implication, dismissing Victorians who rejected such scientific progress and felt that the old model of the world was in fact the better one. This perspective, as articulated in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, is not isolated; it is simply one of the more colorful expressions of a widespread attitude reflected even in recent scholarship on the Victorian era. In his book-length study, The Victorians, A.N. Wilson is not shy about dismissing skeptics of modern scientific theory: “All but crackpots now in the twenty- first century accept that these early to mid-nineteenth-century geologists were, if not precisely accurate in their conclusions, broadly speaking right. Independent scientific inquiry had taken the place of a blindly erroneous reading of Scripture, as the criterion for determining truth” (100). Among the examples Wilson cites of opposition to Victorian scientific developments is the tragic figure of Rear Admiral Robert Fitzroy, who had piloted the Beagle for Darwin during its voyage to the Galapagos Archipelago. Fitzroy was a committed creationist who objected to Darwin’s theories and eventually committed suicide. Wilson comments on the suicide with the following: “Beneath the rear admiral’s expressions of religious certitudes lay terror. We can never forget this when observing the phenomenon now generally termed ‘fundamentalism,’ which is why it