Literature and Revolution

British Responses to the Paris Commune of 1871

OWEN HOLLAND

“This superb book on the Commune’s reception in late nineteenthcentury Britain, which scrupulously and perceptively reconstructs the reactions of writers on both the Left and Right of the political spectrum, across a generous range of discursive forms, is a ne testament to Owen Holland’s politically committed scholarship.”

—Matthew Beaumont, author of The Walker: On Finding and Losing

Oneself in the Modern City

240 pp 14 b/w images 6.125 x 9.25

978-1-9788-2193-4 paper $39.95S

978-1-9788-2985-5 cloth $120.00SU

March 2022

History • Cultural Studies

“This timely book explores the Paris Commune’s reverberations in Victorian literature, offering spirited readings of the many popular and canonical British writers who sought to contain (or revivify) it. The result is a fascinating meditation on literature and revolution which stands to make sizeable contributions to both our understanding of the Commune and latenineteenth-century British literature and culture.”

—J. Michelle Coghlan, author of Sensational Internationalism: the Paris Commune and the Remapping of American Memory in the Long Nineteenth Century

Table of Contents

Preface

1 Introduction: A Commune in Literature

2 Refugees, Renegades, and Misrepresentation: Edward Bulwer Lytton and Eliza Lynn Linton

3 Dangerous Sympathies: Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Anne Thackeray Ritchie, and Margaret Oliphant

4 “Dreams of the Coming Revolution”: George Gissing’s Workers in the Dawn

5 Revolution and Ressentiment: Henry James’s The Princess Casamassima

6 The Uses of Tragedy: Alfred Austin’s The Human Tragedy and William Morris’s The Pilgrims of Hope

7 “It Had to Come Back”: H. G. Wells’s When the Sleeper Wakes

8 Conclusion: Looking without Seeing

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Between March and May 1871, the Parisian Communards fought for a revolutionary alternative to the status quo grounded in a vision of internationalism, radical democracy and economic justice for the working masses that cut across national borders. The eventual defeat and bloody suppression of the Commune resonated far beyond Paris. In Britain, the Commune provoked widespread and erce condemnation, while its defenders constituted a small, but vocal, minority. The Commune evoked long-standing fears about the continental “spectre” of revolution, not least because the Communards’ seizure of power represented an embryonic alternative to the bourgeois social order.

This book examines how a heterogeneous group of authors in Britain responded to the Commune. In doing so, it provides the rst full-length critical study of the reception and representation of the Commune in Britain during the closing decades of the nineteenth century, showing how discussions of the Commune functioned as a screen to project hope and fear, serving as a warning for some and an example to others. Writers considered in the book include John Ruskin, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Eliza Lynn Linton, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Anne Thackeray Ritchie, Margaret Oliphant, George Gissing, Henry James, William Morris, Alfred Austin and H.G. Wells. As the book shows, many, but not all, of these writers responded to the Commune with literary strategies that sought to stabilize bourgeois subjectivity in the wake of the traumatic shock of a revolutionary event. The book extends critical understanding of the Commune’s cultural afterlives and explores the relationship between literature and revolution.

OWEN HOLLAND has taught nineteenth-century literature at Jesus College, Oxford and in the English Department at University College London. His rst monograph, William Morris’s Utopianism: Propaganda, Politics and Pre guration, was published in 2017, and he has also edited a selection of Morris’s political writings for Verso.

Introducing a new series: Reinventions of the Paris Commune (see The Paris Commune: A Brief History on page 1)