My Victorian Novel

Isobel Armstrong has lamented that the way we teach the Victorian novel, with enthusiasm and delight, is so different from the way we criticize it. I wonder if this is also partially true about the way we really read and experience Victorian novels, if there is a Wemmick-like division between the absorbed and happy reader, cozy and contented in the Castle, and the buttoned-up professor at the lectern or the laptop. Rereading Victorian fiction over time, for our classes or our scholarship, must at some level involve a relaxation of feeling, the evocation of memories, psychic immersion, and moral engagement––alongside critical distance, objectivity, or suspicion.