Juliette Atkinson has written a clear, penetrating, and lively study of Victorian biography, illuminating the diversity and far-reaching significance of a genre that has been alternately disregarded, oversimplified, and downright maligned in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Efficiently confronting well-known dismissals of Victorian biographies as “wordy hagiographical tomes penned by whitewashing amateurs” (2), Atkinson demonstrates meticulously and capaciously that nineteenth-century biographers in fact explored an ever-increasing range of biographical subjects by means of an ever more flexible generic repertoire. Moreover, Atkinson argues, writers who expanded the biographical canon to include little-known, obscure, hidden, or even failed subjects also used their biographical writings self-reflexively, confronting crucial questions about the value of writing as a profession and about the cultural significance of hiddenness and obscurity themselves, particularly for the stability and progress of Victorian Britain as a whole in an era during which questions of publicity and privacy and the fate of the nation were central.

Victorian Biography Reconsidered would be vital reading on the strength of its thoroughness and diversity alone. Atkinson’s introductory chapters establish a critical context that will acquaint readers with major developments in scholarship about Victorian life-writing and also afford us a comprehensive overview of what she calls “the many faces of Victorian biography”: its early reference points (Thomas Moore’s Life and Letters of Lord Byron [1830], John Gibson Lockhart’s Life of Scott [1837–38], Arthur Penrhyn Stanley’s Life of Arnold [1844]), its creations of new kinds of heroes (including the “Christian soldier,” the missionary, and the industrial success story), and its actively debated questions (Is biography an art or a craft? What is the genre’s didactic potential? Is it ethically wrong to expose private lives to public view? Could biography corrupt private life by “breed[ing] paranoia”? [29]).

Having established the ways that Victorian biographers themselves were addressing these kinds of questions, being “interested in the consequences of the genre on social exchanges” (30), and having reconsidered at length the meaning and influence of Thomas Carlyle’s concept of heroes and hero worship, particularly as they affected Samuel Smiles, Atkinson goes on to offer thoroughly documented chapters on humble men, failures, little-known women, and Romantic poets, before turning to the Dictionary of National Biography and Virginia Woolf’s post-Victorian explorations of biography. Her chapters draw on the full range of Victorian writing and cultural debate, turning variously to novels, poetry, autobiography, personal correspondence, nonfiction prose, and periodical criticism in order to offer a clear, engaging overview or survey of the particular subset of “hidden lives” each chapter will discuss. Without ever seeming superficial or scattered in drawing on so much of the period’s writing, Atkinson leaves her readers in no doubt about where to situate (or why to care about) the detailed, rhetorically savvy discussions that form the bulk of her chapters. She thus simultaneously provides both an introduction to this complex genre and its cultural work and a set of strong, focused, and utterly persuasive close readings of particular texts.

The very range of those particular texts, from the well-known to the obscure, is itself staggering: Atkinson’s major discussions alone cover Smiles’s biography of Thomas Edward, Life of a Scotch Naturalist (1876); William Jolly’s The Life of John Duncan, Scotch Weaver and Botanist (1883); Carlyle’s Life of John Sterling (1851); Margaret Oliphant’s Life of Edward Irving (1862); Verrall Lucas’s Bernard Barton and His Friends: A Record of Quiet Lives (1893); Elizabeth Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857); Eliza Keary’s Memoir of Annie Keary (1882); Agnes Giberne’s biography of Charlotte Tucker, A Lady of England (1895); Richard Monckton Milnes’s Life, Letters and Literary Remains of John Keats (1848); Alexander Gilchrist’s The Life of William Blake: Pictor Ignotus (1863); and Alexander Martin’s Life of John Clare (1865). Yet Atkinson has written and organized her book so deftly and engagingly that it is not at all a burden to emerge from this panoply and to be greeted, in chapter 7, by the sixty-three-volume Dictionary of National Biography (DNB; 1885–1901). By the time we reach her discussion of the DNB, we have accumulated a wealth of insight into the aims and concerns of Victorian biography as interpersonal production and cultural practice, all of which pertain to Leslie Stephen’s and Sidney Lee’s work on the DNB, including their publicly aired differences of opinion about editorial policy and subject selection—and their bringing new scholarly talent to light by employing a communal body of “hidden workers” to produce the DNB at all. And by the time we reach Atkinson’s conclusion, we are well prepared to understand Virginia Woolf’s ideas about “New Biography” as “borrow[ing] heavily from the innovations of her predecessors who had, during the Victorian period, exploded the boundaries of biography” (262).

Because of the utter clarity, sophisticated assurance, and humane intelligence of Atkinson’s prose, her explorations of tiny textual details and large-scale cultural concerns are equally persuasive and even revelatory. She zeroes in on minutiae, marshaling an impressive array of manuscript and archival materials to examine, just to offer two examples, Samuel Smiles’s significant revisions to Thomas Edward’s self-presentation (and the resultant conflict between the two men) and Alexander Martin’s reworking of John Clare’s autobiographical writings. At such moments, Atkinson immediately puts us in touch with the complex desires and intimacies animating Victorian biographies’ productions: various biographers’ investments in their multifarious functions as rescuers, mediators, resuscitators, tour guides, philanthropists, paradoxical breakers, protectors of obscurity, educators of the “fickle public” and an ideal “private community [of readers] prepared to respond to the subject emotionally rather than intellectually” (138), and moral guides to their nation.

Early in her discussion of Smiles and Jolly, Atkinson writes, “Biography is like the street in which individuals from vastly different social spheres find a safe and temporary place to meet” (90). Readers will finish Victorian Biography Reconsidered with the sense of having traveled just such a street, one populated by figures both familiar and unfamiliar who, taken together and presented here with authority and palpable curiosity, stand to complicate the stories we think we know about not just Victorian biography but even the Victorian period as a whole.