Houses that Haunt
Last week, my perennial coauthor, Robyn Warhol, came to visit me so we could work together on a joint paper to be delivered in early March at the annual Northeast Victorian Society (NAVSA) conference, recently, alas, demoted from an in-person event in my beloved Vancouver to a remote one. Robyn’s and my more intimate two-person/in-person meeting allowed us to revisit an idea we have worked on and named together: “synchronic reading.” This idea begins with the well-known fact that many, perhaps most, Victorian novels were initially published in serial form, where parts appeared monthly or weekly in magazines or otherwise in free-standing “part issues.” Dickens is the author most persistently associated with the latter form; although he wrote for and edited magazines, he revolutionized the popularity of the part issue.
Victorian readers, then, often read serially, with time between issues. Authors counted on readerly anticipation, and in some cases, were able to incorporate reader feedback into their writing. For consumers of serialized fiction, the reading of a long novel was incorporated into other monthly or weekly rhythms of everyday life. Most of us will have a sense of how this works if we think of the genre of the weekly television serial.
What is crucial to understand—and this is Robyn’s formulation—is that when we read a serialized Victorian novel in a paperback, a hardback, or on Kindle, we are performing the equivalent of “binge-viewing” in which we consume all parts of a serial at once, paying little or no attention to the breaks between episodes.
Our field of Victorian studies has become, over the last decade, very interested in the history and dynamics of serial reading. Robyn and I have both taught courses in which students read novels in parts. Sometimes this means reading one episode a week, but given the profound mismatch between the lengths of the novels (often published over a period of more than a year) and the academic semester, students often have to read several parts for one class. We advise them to stop at least for a little while after each part—if only to drink tea—to reflect on what they have just read, and to imagine what might be coming next.
But if we think of serial reading only as a form of sequence—of reading one part after another—we lose what Robyn and I feel must have been an important part of the Victorian serial reading experience. A typical Victorian reader would be following several novels as they unfolded at the same time: in a given month—say December of 1860—such a person might be reading the beginning of Dickens’s Great Expectations, the middle parts of Mrs. Wood’s East Lynne and late chapters of Anthony Trollope’s Framley Parsonage. We call this reading of simultaneous parts synchronic reading and argue that Victorian consumers of fiction must in some sense have been reading and thinking across books. We can imagine that this act of synchronic reading might sometimes have been confusing—a reader could, for example, forget whether a particular scene or character belonged in one novel or another. Sometimes it might be enlightening, allowing readers to focus on surprising similarities and to see unexpected patterns of influence. It will perhaps not surprise my dear readers to know that one example of this phenomenon—and the one featured in the conference paper—how readers might have imagined and thought about houses of different kinds in various novels. Victorian readers and their descendants—casual fans, students, and professional critics—would perhaps have to create a mental map placing the houses in relation to each other. They might sort them into categories according to size, class, importance, levels of scariness and/or coziness, or even see connections between the cozy and the scary.
Our project got me thinking about making another list (list one, list two): houses that haunt me in Victorian novels. Not all of the houses are haunted in the usual sense, but they are all haunting: I think about them regularly, imagine their contours, the arrangement of their rooms, issues of access and approach, and their embodiment of what I have called the home/owner metonymy, the assumed relation between characters and their homes.
What follows is a short list of my favorite houses in nineteenth-century novels. By “favorite,” I do not mean the houses that I would, in real life, most want to own or inhabit. I have talked in other posts about how fictional houses can activate readerly desire for ownership—or for the marriage that would allow women to live in, rather than owning, a given beautiful house. Instead, these are the houses I imagine and think about outside their parent novels—that extend beyond the borders of their texts to join other houses, real and fictional, that take up space in my mind. Most of my haunting houses, I was a little surprised to find, are in a sense secondary houses, less famous, less beautiful, and a lot less expensive than those that make there way into heritage films, or even into the titles of their parent books. My haunting houses are also less likely to be haunted in the usual sense: they are resolutely un- or even anti-gothic. They do not contain ghosts or intriguingly locked rooms, and they do not burn down. They are often, it turns out, places of work.
Since so much goes on in, and on the threshold of, fictional houses, a list like this risks spoilage of plots. I have never known what to do in similar situations, but invite my readers to read about the houses in books unfamiliar to them with a kind of selective attention that privilege’s the space over plot and character.
From Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Of course, we all know about Pemberley LINK, but perhaps more interesting is the parsonage inhabited by the novel’s buffoonish Mr. Collins, who has held out his home as an enticement to the heroine. Lizzy turns Mr. Collins down and he goes on to marry her friend Charlotte, who, fully conscious of the limits of her marital choice, deliberately arranges the interior of the house so that she rarely has to see her husband.
From Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Like Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre has a signature mansion, in this case the gothic Thornfield Hall, where many but not all of us know there is Someone or Is it Something Terrifying in the Attic. I prefer the more modest Moor House, home of the brother and sisters who shelter Jane and turn out, as Jane discovers when she inherits a fortune from a most convenient and conveniently dead uncle, to be her cousins. Jane’s first thought on inheriting is to rescue her female cousins from the presumably gothic indignities of governessing. Our heroine, apparently now fully domesticated, completely cleans and rearranges the house in anticipation of her cousins’ homecoming. While her final address to the reader (“Reader, I married him”) is perhaps justly more famous, I like the one about housework better, although the “you” is more immediately directed at her otherworldly male cousin, St. John. “My first aim will be to clean down (do you comprehend the force of the expression?) to clean down Moor house from chamber to cellar; my next to rub it with bees-wax.” She also makes a lot of Christmas puddings (with currents in them) which is nice to see in this most anorexic of novels.
A cozy waystation in the gothic plot, Moor House appeals to those of us who sometimes prefer to mince pies to strange cries, and kitchen fires to arson.
From Anthony Trollope’s Orley Farm. The titular farm, with its upscale farmhouse, is the object of desire for this inheritance-plot novel. Trollope does his own spoiling in this book, revealing the solution to the central mystery about three-quarters of the way through, but I will retain a dignified silence about wills, codicils, and potential forgeries, instead letting you know that one of the things I love about this text is its scrupulous attention to developments in fertilizer science. Never has there been so much literary attention to guano. There are also some very funny scenes about domestic economy and bad iron furniture.
From Mrs. Henry Wood’s East Lynne. Location, location, location. For once, I am going with the titular house. The title says it all about the centrality of a particular home, although you could not pay me to live in this one. Like Austen’s Persuasion, this novel begins with the transfer of a house from an aristocrat to a professional man—a sign of the famed Rise of the Middle Class and the concomitant death of the aristocracy through a heady combination of gout, debt, and historical progress. For all its solid comforts, East Lynne (the house) is remarkably porous: in one of the very first scenes creditors invade the home and arrest the (gouty) corpse of the Earl of Mount Severn for debt. I will not say much about the two wives of the eventual homeowner, except that one of them fakes her death and come back as a governess to her own children. Oops. I recommend the voyeuristic piano scenes which make the most of the bigamy plot.
From Mrs. Wood’s Shadow of Astolyat. By the author of East Lynne, this too is obsessed with rearranging and reconstituting households. Although the cursed titular mansion has its generic charms, I prefer the bank that serves as home and place of business to a series of characters exiled from the main house. This is one of a series of Victorian homes to negotiate the relation between the supposedly separate spheres of business and domesticity. As always when reading about a bank in a Victorian novel, prepare for it to fail, and for there to be a run on it.
From Willkie Collins’ The Woman in White. Although the legal plot involves the inheritance of Limmeridge House—one of the few fancy homes that I could actually see living in (love the views of the sea, the terraces, and the exquisite rooms of the novel’s proto-homosexual uncle)--the detective plot finds our hero living with his future sister-in-law and future wife in a cramped apartment in London. Sexual tension is high, and the plot, at this point, wonderfully improbable. Naturally (or unnaturally), there is also a faked death and a shuttling of bodies from location to location. While the ending restores Limmeridge house to the rightful (infant) heir, nobody really cares or understands how that happens