One of the most popular areas of the undergraduate curriculum is Victorian fiction, taught on first-year introductory modules, second-year period or genre courses and on final-year special option courses.Yet at a time when many students struggle to keep up reading assignments because of the demands of part-time work, or of the difficulty in juggling four different literature modules, it is often the long Victorian three-decker – the `baggy monsters’ as Henry James famously labelled them – which are put aside. This event, held at Woburn House, London on 4 February and attended by 30 delegates, was an attempt to assess some of the challenges facing teachers in delivering Victorian courses in 2005.
Amongst the questions considered were:
- • What do we teach when we teach the Victorian novel?
- • Where on English Literature programmes do we teach the Victorian novel?
- • What do we want students to know about the literary, cultural and historical contexts of Victorian literature?
- • What imaginative strategies can develop a more intense engagement with long novels?
- • What role might the short story play on Victorian fiction courses?
- • How might the teaching of Victorian texts and narratives be enhanced via the integration of film and television adaptations?
- • How might Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) be used in Victorian modules?
The event also aimed to address the changing nature of the Victorian fictional canon and how what is taught might reflect this. When English Departments in the 60s, 70s and even 80s relied on traditional readings of the canon – prompted perhaps by F. R. Leavis’s statement in The Great Tradition that `The great English novelists are Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, and Joseph Conrad' (p. 9) – there was at least some broad agreement about what students might read. Since then our picture of the Victorian novel has been broken up and the resurgence of interest in ‘lost’ women writers and in different genres – sensation, horror, `New Women’ – has helped ensure that consensus is much less possible. Whilst delegates agreed that this was a healthy development, they also recognised that it posed challenges about how a 12-week module might be structured. How do you fit it all in? As delegates noted, the choices teachers make in departments about the place of particular novels in the degree programme and the selection of texts and anthologies affect the picture of Victorian literary history that students are invited to engage with.
In the opening session, Elizabeth Jay (Oxford Brookes) and Maureen Moran (Brunel) chaired discussions on the role of ‘context’ in the teaching of Victorian fiction. For students who are approaching university with little or no prior knowledge of the period, the cultural concerns, ideological reference points and generic conventions utilised by Victorian novelists may be unclear.The period is one that invites cliché (particularly where women’s roles are concerned) and delegates asked themselves whether their own lectures encouraged this. The groups tackled a range of questions:
- • What contextual material do we want students to know?
- • How do we encourage them to learn it?
- • Do we, in fact, want them to know anything?
- • Might the much complained-of lack of contextual knowledge be viewed as an opportunity, since it forces students to start to rely more on their own close textual reading skills and judgements?
One suggestion was that rather than trying to give students potted history lessons, it is the assessment component which can go some way to refining students’ ideas about Victorian contexts – those instances, for example, where students are required to read contemporary documents alongside fictional texts as part of a close-reading exercise.
The following session led by Dr Alice Jenkins (University of Glasgow) addressed issues surrounding VLEs and the ways in which these could be used to expand the class discussion outside the seminar room. Using a third year option
module on Victorian Popular Fiction as a case study, Dr Jenkins described how the use of the VLE worked most effectively as a supplement to classroom provision rather than as a substitute for it.
Afternoon sessions focused on a range of curriculum issues. Valerie Sanders led a discussion on the teaching of long novels, an aspect of the Victorian novel which provided considerable challenges for students and teachers, due in part to the financial demands which required students to take part-time jobs, and the sense on the part of teachers that they need to cover a broad and various selection of material over the 12-week semester. Martin Willis led a discussion on the short story and the ways in which this genre might be used to give students a sense in microcosm of some key Victorians concerns, as well as encouraging close reading and renewed sensitivity to structure and language. Simon Dentith chaired a discussion on the ways in which 21st-century students sometimes impose their own conceptions of identity and selfhood on their readings of Victorian novels and debated some of the strategies for overcoming this. In the final session,Terry Wright outlined ways in which film and TV adaptations of Victorian novels might be used on Victorian fiction courses. Taking screen versions of Middlemarch and Tess of the D’Urbervilles he demonstrated how getting students to consider different media could be a way of making them reflect on how narrative functions in a range of Victorian texts as well as of introducing them to a range of narrative theories.
Finally, delegates were asked to consider which single text they would always try to include on a Victorian fiction module because it inevitably provoked fruitful discussion. The top three choices were as follows:
- 1. Middlemarch
- 2. Jane Eyre
- 3. David Copperfield
Other votes were cast for The Woodlanders, Mary Barton, North and South, Shirley, The Woman in White, Miss Marjoribanks, Wuthering Heights, Bleak House and The Small House at Allington.
Delegates were also asked to say which novel they would not teach. The list of blackballed texts included: Dracula (‘over-rated’), Hard Times, Silas Marner, Felix Holt, Armadale (‘takes too long to say too little’), Marius the Epicurean and The Way of All Flesh (‘reinforces stereotypical views of the Victorians’).
Overall the day’s discussions suggest that there is considerable interest in thinking about the challenges of teaching Victorian fiction, in particular how teachers introduce students to it and what they want students to be able to do with it. As the feedback from delegates suggested, these are discussions which are ongoing and which might usefully be continued at a later date.
