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Article Excerpt
ABSTRACT
This essay examines Theodore Watts-Dunton's fascinating, best-selling, but now neglected, novel Aylwin (1898), focusing on the work's links with the poetry of Coleridge, its specific treatment of looking and the gaze as affected by trauma, and its complex structure of repetition and transmission. The article proposes that by such means and through its prefigurement of what Frank Kermode identifies in the work of modernists as the 'Romantic Image' Aylwin reveals the lines of a Romantic genealogy that extends from Coleridge through Rossetti to writers such as Yeats, demonstrating the hidden continuity between Romantic and late Victorian literature and mapping the crucial transition from late Victorian literature to literary modernism.
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For most modern readers of Victorian literature, the name Theodore Watts-Dunton carries little weight; if he is registered at all, it is as a peripheral figure--a friend of the Pre-Raphaelites and the companion of Swinburne in his latter years. Few know that he was once regarded as one of the most important critics of his generation, or that he achieved considerable fame late in his career with his best-selling novel Aylwin (1898), which was one of the literary successes of its year. Although Aylwin went into an Oxford World's Classics imprint in 1904, well within its author's lifetime, had sold over 100,000 copies by his death in 1914, and was still in print in 1950, it is now almost unknown and has received virtually no academic attention. (1) Yet Aylwin is a fascinating work with many features that might prove attractive to modern readers.
Influenced by the sensation fiction of Wilkie Collins and in part a roman-a-clef featuring members of Watts-Dunton's own literary and artistic circle, including his close friend Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the novel is a strange amalgam of gypsy lore, the occult, mesmerism, and Romanticism. The occult and Romantic elements help constitute that pervasive aspect of the book that Watts-Dunton called 'the Renascence of Wonder', basically a reaction to the growing materialism of the later nineteenth century and a revival of belief in the redemptive powers of nature and the imagination. With its strong commitment to a spiritual realm and life beyond death, and its refusal of materialism and positivistic values, the novel should recommend itself to anyone interested in the growth of non-orthodox religious belief or spirituality in the late Victorian period; however, other elements such as the novel's intimately drawn characterization of Rossetti, its generic debts to sensation fiction and Romantic poetry, its observations on the contemporary medical treatment of hysteria, and its positive portrayal of gypsy life also deserve to win it a larger audience.
My own interest in the novel lies in its restatement of certain Romantic values at the turn of the nineteenth century. It is the contention of this essay that Aylwin, by explicitly associating key aspects of the narrative with Coleridge's visionary poetry, participates in a strategic, late Victorian revival of Romanticism. I propose that repetition and reduplication--structural devices that are integral to the organization, movement, and symbolic and thematic matter of Aylwin--are also part of the novel's larger purpose to communicate its transmission and reproduction of a visionary Romanticism.
However, some preliminary words of introduction about Watts-Dunton, his interests, and the circumstances in which he came to write his extraordinary novel are in order. Walter Theodore Watts (1832-1914), or Watts-Dunton as he became after 1896, first made acquaintance with Rossetti and Swinburne through his professional legal expertise. A trained and skilful solicitor, he handled the sometimes delicate affairs of both men. But it was not merely for his professional tact and discretion that he was valued. His passionate love of art and literature, his lively conversational manner, and his great personal warmth, loyalty, and generosity were among those qualities that caused Swinburne to describe him as 'closer than a brother' and made Rossetti declare that 'Watts is a hero of friendship'. (2) Rossetti's 'friend of friends' was one of the few people whom the poet continued to see during the last reclusive years of his life, was the dedicatee of Ballads and Sonnets (1881), his last volume, and was among the close friends and family present at his death in April 1882. (3)
But Watts-Dunton was more than just a friend to poets. After settling in London in the early 1870s, he began to write journalistic articles on literature and eventually became the leading critic of poetry for the Examiner and, from 1876, the Athenaeum. Robert Browning and the poet and American Minister in London James Russell Lowell were among his admirers, and Swinburne described him as 'the first critic of our time--perhaps the largest-minded and surest-sighted of any age'. (4) Hyperbole apart, his opinions were generally held in the highest regard, and he was an influential and supportive figure for many aspirant young poets and writers.
Yet Watts-Dunton's prominence as a critic is now hardly recognized, partly owing to the fact that he failed to bring out collections of his essays during his heyday. Constant deferral, anxiety about finalizing and perfecting his work, and a lack of interest in promoting himself, all contributed to his failure to see book projects come to fruition. The essay-length entry on 'Poetry' in the ninth or 1888 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and a piece titled 'The Renascence of Wonder in Poetry', written for the 1903 Chambers's Cyclopaedia, were his most admired critical works, but they were not published in book form until 1916, after his death, by which time they looked rather dated. (5)
In spite of his later involvement in literary matters, Watts-Dunton's initial education had been in the sciences, and natural history remained a lifelong preoccupation. Natural beauty had a mystical, quasi-religious significance for him, which he celebrated in his own creative writing, most of which at that point was known only to his immediate circle of friends. Nature stimulated another passion, his intense interest in British gypsy life and culture, and this again was conspicuous in his creative work. In 1897 he published a long-awaited and well-received collection of poems The Coming of Love, the contents of which had appeared piecemeal in the Athenaeum from 1882 onwards. The most important poems in this collection tell the story of a young upper-class poet and sailor, Percy Aylwin, and his love for a gypsy girl, Rhona Boswell. Thwarted by his family, Percy is temporarily separated from Rhona, but the couple are eventually married. When Rhona is murdered, the anguished Percy retreats to live alone in the Alps, where he experiences mystical visions and, finally, a consoling dream of his lost love.
The following year, 1898, saw the appearance of what the writer Rupert Croft-Cooke has called 'that curious, so nearly splendid best-selling novel Aylwin', which Watts-Dunton had been working on for over twenty-five years. (6) His biographers Thomas Hake and Arthur Compton-Rickett relate that he read versions of the first few chapters to Gordon Hake and his sons in 1872. (7) Proofs were set up and corrected in 1885 and were evidently circulated among Watts-Dunton's friends and associates, but he found it impossible to let go and kept revising and adding to the novel for another thirteen years. (8) Croft-Cooke's qualification 'so nearly splendid' is probably prompted by the commonly held belief that the novel is overlong and would have been better if cut by a third, a view strongly supported by Hake and Compton-Rickett (i, 308, 312).
Aylwin, a prequel or parallel narrative to The Coming of Love, tells the story of Henry Aylwin of Raxton Hall, Percy's cousin, the son of a famous family and 'heir of one of the largest landowners in England', who falls in love with his childhood sweetheart, Winifred Wynne, the daughter of the local church organist and custodian. (9) Brought up since infancy by her aunt in Wales, Winifred comes to visit her alcoholic father every year and begins a friendship with Henry that ripens into love. Henry's mother, mindful of her son's status, does not approve, and after a succession of tragic events the couple are separated, Winifred disappears, and Henry starts a long and frustrating search to find her, aided by his close friend, a young gypsy woman, Sinfi Lovell. Both The Coming of Love and Aylwin illustrate, in Watts-Dunton's own words, 'love's warfare with death', and were written to show 'how terribly despair becomes intensified when a man has lost--or thinks he has lost--a woman whose love was the only light of his world' (pp. xviii, xix).
Aylwin became the publishing sensation of 1898. Brought out in October, it had gone into nine editions by December and was deemed by G. P. Gooch in The Annals of Politics and Culture, 1492-1899 to be first among the three most important books published that year. (10) It was reviewed admiringly in Britain and on the continent and there were many requests for its translation, although Watts-Dunton again hung fire, doubting that the translators possessed the necessary fluency. (11) Those parts of the north Norfolk coast and North Wales where a large part of the action of the novel is set were immediately claimed by their inhabitants as 'Aylwin-land'. 'I wonder', commented the poet William Sharp, 'if any other first romance has ever had so swift and so great a success.' (12)
Why was the novel so popular? It is likely that the non-sectarian, generalized and positive religious message of the book, attesting the spiritual power of nature, life beyond the grave, and a love that defies death, appealed to a large number of readers who may no longer have felt able to believe in orthodox...
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