In one of the fictive dialogues from his 1872 book The Poet at the Breakfast-Table, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. dispensed advice to any scholar planning to start a private library:

Here, the scholar's library entails separation in several senses both physical and ideal. On the one hand, books form a literal carapace insulating the scholar from the outside world – and perhaps even from the distractions of home life. At the same time, the library operates by separation in the sense of discrimination. In accumulating his library, the scholar winnows a vast textual tradition into the manageable dimensions of a single room, and curriculum just enough for a singular human life. Most interesting, however, is the suggestion that the scholar “secretes” the library, as though the books are somehow synthesized from within as an expression of, and memorial to, the scholar's essential self. The caddice worm, as Holmes informs us, “has his special fancy as to what he will pick up and glue together, with a kind of natural cement he provides himself” (211). This may strike us as a crudely glandular way of envisioning the relationship between tradition and the individual talent. Nevertheless, the passage is in keeping with the late-Victorian obsession with the private library, as well as with period representations of the scholar, who is best encountered within a concealing womb of books, carrying on secret exchange with the dusty relics of his own intellectual pilgrimage.

It was perhaps this close association between man of letters and library that Henry James lampooned in the figure of Mr. Morrow, the shameless journalist who hopes to penetrate Neil Paraday's “literary sanctum,” where the author might be discovered “lying down on his study-table” or in some other such intimate posture (“The Death of the Lion” 82). Morrow never does make it into Paraday's library, but six years earlier, in 1888, Mary Augusta Ward had staged a scene in her novel Robert Elsmere in which the leading characters do infiltrate the collection of a famed man of letters. That fictive library is magnificent – worthy of Borges himself – and its resident scholar, the arch-skeptic Roger Wendover, is of comparably mythic proportions. In the scene that I focus on in this essay, the eponymous hero, Robert Elsmere, and his companion, Edward Langham, do not encounter the scholar himself; the notorious author of Idols of the Market-place is away. Nevertheless, as Langham peers at the scholar's bookshelves, he

In his 1887 essay “Book-Buying,” the famed collector Augustine Birrell had talked about the private library as a kind of genetic fingerprint. The man who has developed his own collection, Birrell said, is “justified in believing in his own existence” because “[n]o other man but he would have made precisely such a combination as his” (435).Footnote ¹ For Langham and Robert to be physically within such a fingerprint, rendered in the three dimensions of architectural space, is an intimate experience indeed, and more so given that the scholar's library is no simple record, but partakes of his particular aura – is “instinct” with his “presence,” as Ward puts it.

Ward's late-century audience would have been thirsty for such backstage encounters with the man of letters in his library, where the contours of an increasingly diverse and arcane intellectual tradition become visible in the reading habits of a certified authority. However, in late-Victorian representations, the scholar's library is no ideal order of books – not an ahistorical canon – nor can it be mastered from above, as it were. In the essay “Of Other Spaces,” Foucault theorized libraries, along with museums, as “heterotopias,” ritually sanctioned spaces in which modern civilization archives “all times, all epochs, all forms, all tastes” in such a way that they exist “outside of time and inaccessible to its ravages” (26). Libraries compensate us for the discontinuity, ephemerality, and sheer messiness of lived experience. In a related thesis on the “author function,” Foucault discussed the author as the transcendent “principle of thrift” in a world of signification otherwise gone mad (“What is an Author?” 899). However, insofar as the late-century library involves a kind of “scholar function,” I suggest that it works not by transcendence, but incarnation. The ravages of history and the degradations of the body are just what the scholar in his library cannot escape. The man of letters can give form to the scholarly archive only by digesting and reconstituting its materials in his flesh and blood, and this comes with occupational hazards. Ultimately, fictions like Elsmere display a decided ambivalence towards the libraries that they represent and even simulate.

Mary Augusta Ward, niece to Matthew Arnold, daughter to the Anglo-Saxonist Tom Arnold, and wife to former Oxford tutor Humphry Ward, was herself an aspiring scholar of early Spanish before becoming a novelist.Footnote ² Living at Oxford from 1867 to 1881, Ward audaciously courted an elite group of liberalizing scholars that included Walter Pater, T. H. Green (in whose memory Robert Elsmere is dedicated), and Mark Pattison, famed scholar of eighteenth-century letters and possible model for George Eliot's fictive scholar, Edward Casaubon.Footnote ³ It was Pattison who first encouraged the high-spirited eighteen-year-old to “[g]et to the bottom of something. . . . Choose a subject, and know everything about it” (Ward, A Writer's Recollections 1:141; 110–11), and Pattison's mirthless erudition is almost certainly behind Ward's character Squire Wendover. Nowadays, this novel is generally studied as a late-century treatment of the classic crisis of faith, to be analyzed alongside such texts as William Hale White's The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford (1881), Pater's Marius the Epicurean (1885), and Hardy's Jude the Obscure (1894–95). In its own day, Robert Elsmere became a transatlantic bestseller – a media event which inspired public comment by everyone from W. E. Gladstone to Oscar Wilde, while guaranteeing Ward's own status in the world of letters for decades to come.

Robert Elsmere tells the story of how a youthful, impassioned Anglican rector, the titular hero, loses his faith in the literal truth of Scripture and must reconcile himself to a thoroughly human Christ. Divinity, such as it can be known, resides within the narrative of human history, not outside it. Catalyzing Elsmere's painful awakening is the imperious and encyclopedically read Roger Wendover, together with his massive collection at Murewell Hall, which Robert draws on for his research on medieval France. As an intense but combustible friendship develops between the men, Robert's orthodoxy unravels swiftly. Be that as it may, a reviewer for The British Weekly spoke for many in claiming that the novel gave “[a] truthful account of the present attitude of a large section of the cultured class to Christianity, or of what will immediately be their attitude” (“The Woman of Feeling” 346).

In Michael Wheeler's 1979 analysis of allusion in Robert Elsmere, he discovered in Robert's development an even broader attempt at Victorian self-portraiture: “Robert Elsmere is portrayed as a representative of his age, rather than of his decade, and the most impressive parts of the novel are those in which he moves from one phase of development to another, rapidly covering the kind of ground traversed by several generations of Victorians.” Robert begins the novel in Westmoreland, geographically and intellectually tied to the early-century spirit of Wordsworth; he next moves to Surrey, where he evinces the muscular Christianity associated with Kingsley at mid century; and finally he arrives at attitudes appropriate to late-century London, where he “lives and teaches in the spirit of Arnold and Clough” (Wheeler 122). According to Wheeler, the novel represents “a photograph album of the nineteenth century, each book being a new page full of prints of contemporary life” (136). However, the more apt metaphor, as I hope to show, is not the photograph album but the library, for this is a novel in which, as one early reviewer put it, “[a]ll the main characters either have written, are writing, or are likely to write,” while “[t]he hero is always passing through crises, and the crises are brought on by some book or article which he has just read” (“Theology in Fiction” 700). Ultimately, I want to consider how the scholar's library enters late-Victorian fiction, and specifically its reciprocal impact on the novel of ideas, which can itself be conceived as an avatar of the library: a scholarly tradition separated and secreted as narrative.

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Current scholarship tends to focus on libraries at their most public and institutional, whether the British Museum, vastly expanded and rationalized under the advisement of Antonio Panizzi, or Mudie's Select, where a conspicuously institutionalized form of “selection” not only regulated public taste, but offered the illusion of a “privileged reading community” liberated from the laws of the commodity (Roberts 14).Footnote ⁴ Nevertheless, as Philip Waller's recent survey Writers, Readers, and Reputations: Literary Life in Britain 1870–1918 confirms, late century was also the great age of the private collection. Waller cites Birrell's 1887 contention that “never were so many private libraries in course of growth as there are to-day” (“Book-Buying” 435). Birrell's evidence was the rising cost of rare books and first editions, but it was the relative cheapness of single-volume novels and literary reprints that put the home library within the grasp of tradesmen and even miners, as the case of Thomas Burt, the “pitman philosopher,” shows (Waller 23). Belletrists like Birrell, Andrew Lang, and Edmund Gosse – what John Gross called a “new race . . . [of] book-lovers, bookmen, vignettists, gossipers in libraries, adventurers among masterpieces” (131) – were the most flamboyant advocates of collecting, but more hard-nosed men of letters had long insisted on the necessity of a personal library. Two years after Robert Elsmere's publication, Gladstone published an essay “On Books and the Housing of Them,” which explained how a room “of quite ordinary size” can be made to contain 10,000 books (394). Blueprints were included. Pattison himself had argued in the pages of Fortnightly that money and space were no hindrance to constructing a respectable library, for a set of shelves thirteen feet by ten feet and six inches deep could hold nearly a thousand octavo volumes (“Books and Critics” 673). He lamented that few Englishmen with a salary of £1000 a year would think of spending even £1 a week on books (672), though for neither Gladstone nor Pattison were the absolute numbers important. In the age of the railway novel, the Sunday school circular, and such trash as Tit-bits, selection was the essential thing. Frederic Harrison's The Choice of Books (1886), and the more skeletal efforts of Sir John Lubbock, trustee of the British Museum, with his list of The Best Hundred Books (1886),Footnote ⁵ aided the aspiring scholar in his efforts to separate the healthful from the contaminated, the real books from what were books only in name, as Ruskin had put it in “Of King's Treasuries” (9). Ruskin had gone so far as to propose a change of language: Genuinely lasting works of genius should be distinguished with the Greek biblion. In the preface to the 1871 edition of Sesame and Lilies, meanwhile, he envisioned a private collection as the centerpiece of family piety, enjoining the young man to make

It is worth remembering in this context that from early in Victoria's reign the word library could conjure for people not only a public archive of books, but a purchasable set of standardized literary reprints, issued with the sanction of a reputable (or not so reputable) printing house.Footnote ⁶ The most lasting of these would eventually be the Everyman's Library, though in the 1880s Morley's Universal Library and Cassell's National Library earned the gratitude of a whole generation of aspiring intellectuals.Footnote ⁷ Here the books that mattered most – by Dante, Goethe, De Quincey, and so on – were pre-selected and introduced by the famed journalist and scholar Henry Morley. A Jude Fawley type might not have access to Morley's physical library at University College, but he could purchase it, after a fashion, one component at a time. In the case of the Universal Library, companion oak bookcases were available for a guinea each (“Our Booking-Office” 244).

Post-1870, the ideological function of such ventures is transparent and again reflects concerns over the broader publishing universe. Patrick Brantlinger emphasized just these anxieties in his analysis of New Grub Street and Jude the Obscure, whose fictional worlds suggest that “all experience has been swamped by commodified printed matter, entirely overwritten by the bookish but also money-grubbing culture of its novelists, publishers, critics, and readers” (The Reading Lesson 196). But injunctions to construct a private library were not merely a tactical response to the supposed degradations of commodified print. They were also part of the positive project for making visible an intellectual tradition that even for the initiated was now bewilderingly complex. As T. W. Heyck has shown, by late in the century the man of letters – who, however critical of bourgeois culture, offered broadly synthetic moral counsel in a common language – was being slowly replaced (222–24). The man of letters was challenged on the one side by aesthetes who had strategically abandoned a world they found to be hopelessly hypocritical and stultifying. On the other side was a new brand of academic who had learned the lessons of scientific empiricism and the German philology and so recurred to an ever more specialized language and method. This transition was severely contested, as Carol Atherton (“The Organisation of Literary Knowledge”) and Michael Warner (“Professionalization and the Rewards of Literature”) confirm. Nevertheless, it was a change noted by many contemporaries and contributed to the sense that while print in general was heaping up, real knowledge was retreating beyond the grasp of the common reader, splintering and withdrawing into the interstices of a vast and impersonal archive.

Late-century writings on books and libraries often ponder, more or less mournfully, the multiplication and complication of learned writings, not just commercial print. In “On Books,” Gladstone noted that “The annual arrivals at the Bodleian Library are, I believe, some twenty thousand; at the British Museum, forty thousand, sheets of all kinds included,” adding with a perceptible sigh that “the day of encyclopedic learning has gone by” (385–86). Some years later when Leslie Stephen semi-facetiously proposed that all books be printed on paper designed to disintegrate within a hundred years, he was looking out for scholars as well as common readers. While acknowledging recent gains in historiography, Stephen insisted that “it is permissible to doubt whether modern historians would not be better if great masses of records had been summarily destroyed” (“Perishable Books” 39). In his view, the bare existence of increasingly exhaustive archives short circuits the scholar's synthetic efforts, at the same time that it “discourages and overwhelms the conscientious reader,” who is bound to be “haunted by the vague impression that [he] ought to read everything” (42).

It is well understood that Victorian readers had an abiding curiosity about the life of the author.Footnote ⁸ But the expanding and stratifying intellectual terrain explains why contemporaries more and more appealed to the author as a scholar – that is, to the author in his capacity as a certain kind of reader and archivist. Pater subtly theorized the literary artist as precisely a scholar, one whose style adjudicates “myriad various minds and contending tongues, compact of obscure and minute association” (Appreciations 9). Not so subtle was the vogue among biographers and critics for documenting the reading habits and private collections of the great authors. An 1890 piece by James Baker in Chambers's Journal, for instance, detailed the Bristol Library borrowings of Coleridge and Southey: “On June 1 Coleridge has Paley's ‘Evidences’ and volume one of Michaelis, Southey having the second volume of this latter work. On June 15 is a curious entry; Coleridge appears to have come in by himself and wanted two works. . . .” And on and on it went, cataloguing the “mind-food [the poets] then digested” (75–76). Records like these would have been intriguing as the obscure foreshadowings of poetic genius; at the same time, insofar as the poets’ borrowings suggest a viable syllabus for contemporary readers, the poetry is most important as the authentication of a certain course of reading.

The same double logic seems to be at work in the more systematic and thorough studies of Edward Edwards, the well-known author of Memoirs of Libraries (1859) and Libraries and Founders of Libraries (1864). In a section of the latter, Edwards painstakingly reconstructs (in some cases through a great deal of textual archeology) a number of famed literary libraries: Petrarch's ill-fated Venetian collection; Montaigne's famously impregnable turret library, where the writer composed his essays while encircled by Latin classics;Footnote ⁹ and Scott's magnificent Abbotsford library, whose contents were by this point already cross-referenced with his novels. Edwards documents the collections firstly with an eye towards what they can tell us of their respective authors. A lengthy description of Goethe's study, for example, prompts us to make inferences about the Goethe the man: “No arm-chair is to be seen, no sofa, nothing which speaks of ease. . . . Rough deal shelves hold the books with paper labels on which are written ‘Philosophy,’ ‘History,’ ‘Poetry,’ &c., to indicate the classification” (Lewes, qtd. in Libraries and Founders 88). Edwards follows up this description from George Henry Lewes's 1856 biography with a synopsis of the poet's reading in the years before his death: “Plutarch among the ancients; Niebuhr, Carlyle, Beranger, Victor Hugo, Delavigne, Salvandy, and Scott” (88). Goethe's Spartan surroundings and eclectic reading habits undoubtedly enhance our understanding of the author. Again, however, where a name like Goethe is in play, the library does not remain strictly biographical. Inevitably the list of names that Edwards supplies – Niebuhr, Hugo, Scott – rebounds to imply a program of study in its own right, a syllabus that the readership of Libraries and Founders of Libraries might well imagine adopting.

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It is in light of this dialectic between (and mutual authorization of) scholar and collection that we should read fictive representations of the library, whether in George Eliot's Romola (1863), Sheridan Le Fanu's “Green Tea” (1872), George MacDonald's Lilith (1895), Margaret Oliphant's “The Library Window” (1896), Pater's Gaston de Latour (1896), or even Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1870), where Captain Nemo's well-appointed submarine library contains everything from Homer and Xenophon to “all of Humboldt's works, all of Arago, Foucault, Henry Sainte-Clare Deville . . . Agassiz, etc.” (75–76; ch. 11). Such fictional libraries, as I hope to show, invite a strange voyeurism both in characters and in ourselves as readers – and this is true even where the scholar is to be pitied or loathed, and even where the books themselves remain stubbornly invisible. We come to know something of the character through the contents of his or her shelves (Is our scholar the type to read Byron or Goethe?). And characters in turn become emblems for a specific course of reading.

This logic is exploited most thoroughly in Robert Elsmere, as we will see, but it emerges in a particularly lapidary manner in Le Fanu's tale “Green Tea.” In that story, Dr. Hesselius first understands the distress of his client Rev. Jennings in the course of perusing Jennings's richly laden shelves. Awaiting his afflicted host in the library, Hesselius cannot escape his dismay at the “darkness, and solemn clothing of books” (10; ch. 3). To pass the time, he picks out a volume of Arcana Cœlestia from a complete set of Swedenborg's writings. Le Fanu provides nearly a page of translated excerpts so that we can read along with the good doctor – until, that is, Rev. Jennings's own voice erupts onto the page:

Some time later, Jennings materializes in the flesh, glimpsed sidelong by Dr. Hesselius in the reflection of a mirror, “leaning over my shoulder, and reading the page at which I was busy” (12; ch. 4). In Le Fanu's world of exquisitely frayed nerves, the scholar's library catalyzes a series of jarring homosocial encounters – intimacies born strangely askew. Nevertheless, the broader logic is intact: Rev. Jennings can be conjured in the design of his library and the reading of his books. At the same time, Swedenborg's writings of the occult achieve vivid concretion framed in the trials of the fictive scholar. Library and scholar are mutually illuminating.

In Robert Elsmere, a similar pattern emerges, though here sustained by real scholarly seriousness. When Robert and Langham tour Roger Wendover's ancestral library, the scene functions both to introduce us to the scholar (again, in absentia), as well as to give shape to a tradition of letters which is English first but, by the end, world-historical in dimension. Initially, the collection is imagined as a womblike space isolated from the rest of Murewell Hall. The friends can enter within only after heavy doors have been breeched and drapes thrown aside: “[H]alfway down the passage the ceiling seemed to descend upon their heads, the flooring became uneven, the woodwork and walls showed that they had passed from the Jacobean house into the much older Tudor building” (192–93; ch. 14). Ward envisions the journey into the library as a descent into the underworld, as well as an excursion into England's past.

In the library's first lofty room, the friends find themselves hedged in by centuries of English letters and peruse shelves that contain “Ben Jonson's Underwoods with his own corrections; a presentation copy of Andrew Marvell's Poems, with autograph notes . . . books which had belonged to Addison, to Sir William Temple, to Swift” (194; ch. 14). The place fairly reeks with Benjaminian aura (see note 1, below). But what is immediately interesting is Ward's remark that “only a small proportion of these precious things represented conscious and deliberate acquisition. The great majority of them had drifted thither one by one, carried there by the tide of English letters as to a warm and natural resting-place” (194; ch. 14). Mark Pattison had once remarked the fact that in an English country house library, “[t]he family history may be read in the successive strata [of books], superimposed like geological strata, one on the other” (“Books and Critics” 671). As the trope recurs in Robert Elsmere, Wendover's ancestral shelves symbolize a Burkean logic of natural accretion, registering both familial and national histories.

The tides of history have not all been so benevolent, however, as we come to find out. Wendover's father committed suicide in an upper chamber of the library (199; ch. 14). As it turns out, the family line is plagued by hereditary madness, and by novel's end Wendover himself will lose his mind literally in the shadow of his towering shelves. In fact, despite the library's physical separation from the house, neither it nor its scholar are imagined as protected from history, but rather as precisely history's point of ultimate convergence, its final concentration. This is made clear as Robert and Langham pass into the library's “working parts,” the room in which they will happen upon an “autobiographical fragment” of the scholar encoded in the arrangement of his shelves. The friends have been examining those shelves most recently stocked by Wendover when Robert suddenly proposes to “interpret” the room: From a volume of St. Basil (autographed by Newman), he derives evidence of the scholar's undergraduate days as a Tractarian. The inference is confirmed in a row of Tracts and Anglican fathers, though these soon give way to volumes of eighteenth-century philosophy. Here, Robert marks Wendover's drift into skepticism, the shift “from Hooker to Hume,” as Langham puts it. Still further along stand works of contemporary scholarship, representing “[h]alf the great names of modern thought”:

That German scholarship simply was scholarship, at least where pure intellect was concerned, would have been axiomatic for a certain wing of the British intelligentsia.Footnote ¹⁰ Moreover, Wendover's trajectory from patristic piety, through classic empiricist challenges to a priori knowledge and miracle, and finally to an awareness of culture – and intellect itself – as expressions of historical process, was archetypal and corroborated in the biographies of J. A. Froude and Pattison, among others.Footnote ¹¹ What makes Ward's bibliographical still-frame so arresting, rather, is the way that the impersonal operations of history are seen to flex in unison with the cognitive muscle of the individual scholar. As Langham puts it: “How history repeats itself in the individual!” While the collection comprises “almost a spot of disorder,” the books achieve convincing coherence in the synchronicity of personal and epochal histories (196; ch. 14, emphasis added). In the scholar's shelves, intellectual history can be glimpsed as autobiography, and autobiography as intellectual history. Such a spectacle triggers a delightful frisson in the beholder, but it also evokes that awkwardness we saw in Dr. Hesselius's reading of Arcana Cœlestia. Dr. Hesselius had “averted [his] eyes and shut the book” (Le Fanu, 12; ch. 3). Langham “drew away from the books . . . with the uneasy feeling of one who surprises a confidence” (197; ch. 14).

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The awe and unease both depend on a deeper sort of dialectic. They are reactions to the extraordinarily physical communion made imaginable by the library, wherein scholarly bodies directly interact with scholarly books. Robert notes that the scholar's “years of extravagant labour . . . have left marks upon him physically that can never be effaced.” Meanwhile,

On some level, Wendover's annotations signal his connection to the living voices of European intellectual life. He has rubbed shoulders with likes of Niebuhr and Strauss, and his handwriting, scrawled in the moment, authenticates an association with those minds. On another level, the scholar's notes provide physical evidence that he has mingled his labor with these texts, suffering them in body as well as in mind. In the moment of reading the Leben Jesu, the scholar undergoes the text as his own; and by the time he places the book back upon his shelf, a piece of European intellectual history has entered his own past in miniature, as personal memory.Footnote ¹² Museums, Jean Baudrillard said, fulfill our need for “a visible past, a visible continuum, a visible myth of origin to reassure us of our ends” (Simulations 19). As a comparable archive, the scholar's library goes one better. It functions like the fabled pineal gland, where not only mind and body, but text and body, can meet in one tangible organ. In the arrangement of the scholar's shelves as well as in the marginalia of his books we witness a lofty transubstantiation: the word become flesh become word again.

Later in their tour, Robert recalls a favorite maxim of his old mentor, Mr. Grey: “‘The decisive events of the world take place in the intellect.’ . . . It is the mission of books that they help one to remember it” (197; ch. 14). This is Ward's Hegelianism talking:Footnote ¹³ The material book exists to remind us that history is essentially immaterial. Nevertheless, in Ward's fictional library, with all its parchment and vellum, with all its suggestion of inky toil, it is the immaterial that seems momentarily redundant. In his popular study Library: An Unquiet History, Matthew Battles elegantly remarks that in the library “the reader is wakened from the dream of communion with a single book, startled into a recognition of the word's materiality by the sheer number of bound volumes” (4). I would qualify this assertion by suggesting that in the late nineteenth century, the intensive “communion” with a single book was not opposed to the extensive outlay of bound volumes; rather, they are aspects of the same mechanism whereby the word becomes substantial in space and time.

In his study of the late-century antagonism between belletrist book collectors and scientifically inclined bibliographers, Anatomy of Bibliography, Marvin Taylor notes how often the collectors troped their books as feminine.Footnote ¹⁴ Admittedly the motif does crop up, having precedent in those nauseating passages from Charles Lamb, Leigh Hunt, or Holmes, where the bibliophile glories in the library as a “harem” and individual books as “favorites.”Footnote ¹⁵ Nonetheless, by late century it is more common to find the library figured as a physiological extension, or prosthesis, of the man of letters, which is not the same as saying that books were merely “narcissistic equivalents of the self,” as one editor has put it in a discussion of nineteenth-century collecting more generally (Perrot 545). Certainly there was an element of egoism in the fantasy of the scholar's library. But in Ward's library scene, as in Oliver Wendell Holmes's metaphor of the scholar “secreting” his library, it is the exchange between book and body, not the blanket omniscience of the scholar, that seems to count. It was this transfer that P. G. Hamerton emphasized in his popular The Intellectual Life (1873), a guidebook composed as a series of “Dear Abby”-style letters to fictive inquirers. In his letter “To a Friend Who Recommended the Author to Learn This Thing and That,” Hamerton compares the intellect to a gourmet dish whose ingredients must be mixed in exact proportion. Swiftly changing the metaphor, then, he proposes that “[t]here is a sort of intellectual chemistry which is quite as marvellous as material chemistry, and a thousand times more difficult to observe. . . . It is true that everything we learn affects the whole character of the mind” (74). He produces the example of a friend whose style was spoiled after an injudicious reading of Locke: “Even the thinking was no longer his own thinking,” Hamerton adds. “Having been in too close communication with a writer who was not a literary artist, his own art had deteriorated in consequence” (75). Indeed, for Hamerton scholarly reading involves an exchange so “close” that ignorance is sometimes the only defense. In a later chapter, he consoles the “Student Who Lamented His Defective Memory” with the thought that a poor memory naturally filters out what would otherwise compromise the unique composition of the scholar's mind (125).

Of course, Hamerton is still framing things in terms of an essentially inward process, but in an early essay from Ward's scholarly years, “A Morning in the Bodleian” (1871), she described the transfer between scholar and book in a more explicitly tactile way. That piece, offering a sort of ethnographic tour of the Bodleian, climaxes in a room of Middle Eastern volumes: “[A] German is working there, another in shirt-sleeves is here – strange people of innumerable tentacles, stretching all ways, from Genesis to the latest form of the needle-gun” (10). The word “tentacles” highlights the synthetic power of the Germans, whom Ward wants us to understand are both thoroughly historical and thoroughly modern at once. But as in Robert Elsmere, we find the connection between scholar and library couched in intimately physical, even physiological, terms: The scholar touches the book to get inside it. The same would be true for George Gissing's alter ego Henry Ryecroft, who cannot seem to forget the materiality of a book even in the deepest acts of reading – perhaps especially in those deepest acts: “I know men who say they had as lief read any book in a library copy as in one from their own shelf. To me that is unintelligible. For one thing, I know every book of mine by its scent, and I have but to put my nose between the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things” (The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft 46; ch. 12). For Ryecroft as much as for Gerard Manley Hopkins, scent verifies primitive essence, identity. Ryecroft goes on to tell us that a certain old edition of Shakespeare embodies such potent memories that he cannot always bear to read from it (47; ch. 12).Footnote ¹⁶

The late-Victorian scholar, then, does not float above his reading matter in some idealized space. And his library, at least as we encounter it in books like Robert Elsmere, is not a “heterotopia” – not an orderly alternative to the bewildering contingency and complexity of some external history which is more real. It has little in common, therefore, with the library as Gerhard Joseph discovers it in Dickens's mid-century Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–44). There, Joseph observes, Tom Pinch arranges books in compensation for the “overriding sense of randomness, of the terrifying disconnectedness of objects” as seen from Todger's roof (12). Rather, as the concentration of material history, Ward's library is more volatile. Inside its walls, a certain order does become visible, but only insofar as the scholar has made himself immanent within his books; to know the book, you have to go native.

In these terms, it makes sense that period fiction displays a profound ambivalence towards the embodied archive. Characters who enter the library must look, but they also must look away. The custodians of those libraries, meanwhile, are often frigid, purblind, diseased – and usually disposable. Take Roger Wendover as an example. His History of Testimony is to be a work of staggering synthesis, its first two volumes having required thirty years’ labor and the attainment of “several Oriental languages – Sanskrit among them,” as a prelude to the painstaking analysis of myriad literatures from ancient India to the Byzantium of Emperor Justinian (315; ch. 24). The work argues the historicist (though also positivist) point that evidentiary standards have developed over time. And as it turns out, the novel's hero desperately needs Wendover. Without Wendover and his library, there can arguably be no Robert Elsmere, or at least not the profoundly ecumenical Robert that we see at novel's end. Nevertheless, as the novel's one true scholar, Wendover emerges as a hopelessly damaged figure. Immediately upon leaving Wendover's library, Robert and Langham tour the scholar's neglected property at Mile End. In Wendover's squalid huts and sickly renters, they find a grotesque counterpoint to the splendor of his collection. In the ensuing struggle to make Wendover assume his social responsibilities (eventually conditions at Mile End spark an outbreak of diphtheria), Robert must contend with Wendover's aggressive apathy and caustic wit. Ward's point is clear: Wendover has severed his scholarly appetites from the broader human passions and from the immediate contexts that alone could give them significance. As such, he plays foil to Robert himself, whose intellectual life derives directly from his passional nature and vibrates in concert with the communal life of the parish (198; ch. 14). Tellingly, Robert's own small library consists of a healthy miscellany where books mingle with biological specimens and cricket bats (169; ch. 12).

It is fitting that Robert be the one to pronounce explicit judgment on Squire Wendover, this in a scene which unfolds in the Murewell Hall library. Robert has called on Wendover to confront him with the dilapidated state of his properties. His case, of course, is curtly dismissed, and as the two bid one another a stiff goodbye, Robert's gaze fastens on a newly acquired antique on Wendover's mantle:

The diagnosis reflects a typically Victorian distrust of pure scholarship and classifies Roger Wendover with such ignoble specimens as Robert Browning's grammarian, Eliot's Edward Casaubon, and of course her one true librarian, Bardo d'Bardi, whose “lip-born maxims were as powerless . . . as if they had been written on parchment and hung round his neck in a sealed bag” (Romola 103; ch. 5). So far the novel is perfectly conventional.

We can, however, read Wendover's alienation as a symptom of a more specific archival syndrome. In his lecture “The Hero as Man of Letters,” Carlyle argued that writers do not transcend the historical forces of their age but are rather their quintessential expression, their point of ultimate collection as it were. He writes that in the “Books and the Writers of Books” of the eighteenth century, “we shall find here, as it were, the summary of all other disorganizations; – a sort of heart, from which, and to which, all other confusion circulates in the world!” (382). Ward's novel corroborates this notion that the scholar is peculiarly vulnerable to the ravages of history, the depredations of text. Such is implied in Ward's complex image of the Medusa's head above. On the one hand, the Medusa's “stony calm” recalls the scholar's own impenetrable visage. His hard critical faculty, she suggests, may turn those around him to stone (Robert himself is in theological peril by this point, though he doesn't know it). But the metaphor is flexible, for in the lines that follow Wendover is figured as the victim of “that spiritual Medusa” which is the “absorbing and overgrown life of the intellect” (260; ch. 19). Personified in this way, the fossilizing force of intellect can be imagined as something strangely exterior to the scholar proper. The Medusa – itself a collectible acquired in Wendover's scholarly travels – becomes a fit metaphor for the library, within which the scholar and the textual tradition are eternally leeching into one another until there is no distinction, the scholar finally sealed within the iron hills of print.

In one of Nietzsche's oft-quoted Untimely Meditations, he rebuked the antiquarian in whom an original piety towards origins had devolved into mere masturbatory habit. Beneath the antiquarian's diseased gaze, all “old things” shimmer with an equal charm (21), and his collection exists as an alternate universe, divorced from past and present.Footnote ¹⁷ Edward Casaubon of Middlemarch, a man “a little buried in books” (39; ch. 4), has likewise been lured away from history, not towards it. In his search for a “Key to All Mythologies” (63; ch. 7), he becomes lost in a metaphysical labyrinth largely of his own construction. Wendover, however, has managed to evade the many mirages of historical study, including the insidious tunnel vision that, according to Lord Acton, plagued those German scholars who “spent thirty years on one volume, the man who wrote upon Homer in 1806 and who still wrote on Homer in 1870, the man who discovered the 358 passages in which Dictys has imitated Sallust” (26). Wendover has a different trouble. His very critical awareness – and embodiment – of intellectual history invite its own damnation. On the one hand, we might read him as one of those “victim[s] of overcultivation” that Brantlinger suggests populate the late-Victorian novel (196). But in Robert Elsmere, the issue is not a centrifugal explosion of marketplace print, but a centripetal narrowing: firstly a historical concentration of text bound in the physical archive, and then a too-complete identification – a “too close communication,” as Hamerton put it – between body and book (75). To put things another way, to embody the archive, that condensate of intellectual history, is in some sense to vacate the man. The French literarian Ximénès Doudan had claimed that the man of letters “has not merely his own impressions; you could not recover the imagination that was once his” (1).Footnote ¹⁸ Taken in context, Doudan means to describe an enviable “negative capability”; however, this very conceptualization could also suggest a threatening sort of dissolution.

* * *

Emblematically, as Roger Wendover's scholarship goes on apace, his reason and self-government decompose until he is certifiably insane. Madness itself represents the rumblings of a familial history that is integrally bound up with the library. The connection becomes clear in a late scene that follows on Wendover's discovery that Robert, his adoptive son, must leave the parish. Seated among his books, Wendover spirals into a bitter nostalgia, reproached by “thwarted instincts” as well as the spectral memories of the wife and children he never had (384; ch. 30). So far, he is a Scrooge-figure, punished for rejecting the domestic (and maybe sexual) life which for Ward, as much as for Dickens, seems alone capable of fulfilling our basic needs. Nevertheless, the critique is intriguingly compounded when the forlorn squire begins hearing noises from the library's upper story. Trembling with fear, he tracks the sounds to his father's former chamber, where the door is mysteriously open. The scene climaxes with the squire cowering beneath his shelves, humbled into a recognition of “a shuddering fellowship of weakness with his kind” and of himself as “a helpless instance of an inexorable law” (385; ch. 30). The poetic justice is finely tailored: Wendover falls prey to the very superstitions which he spent his historical studies debunking.

Given the setting, however, the moment also signals the peculiar revenge of the library. Wendover's father, as we know, committed suicide in the library's upper chamber. Those chambers, as we met them on Robert and Langham's original tour, were a symbol of the Malthusian multiplication, as well as pure concentration, of the scholar's collection, having been “annexed one by one as the squire wanted them, and in which there was nothing at all – neither chair, nor table, nor carpet – but books only” (199; ch. 14, emphasis added). Suggestively, it was in the room now employed “as a sort of lumber place, a receptacle for the superfluous or useless books gradually thrown off by the great collection all around” that the elder Wendover took his life (199–200). Thus the Murewell library figures as a distant prototype of Stephen Spielberg's insidious computer HAL, capable of “throwing off” not just books but scholars. Its poisonous textual inheritance is transmitted as inexorably as the blood-inheritance that passes from father to son. When Wendover cowers from the ghostly figments of his imagination, therefore, he has lost his ability to control not just the archive without, but the archive within: Those old hagiographies and demonologies which he had exposed seem to have entered his flesh along with everything else, and now broadcast their signal from beyond the reach of scholarly consciousness. It is the return of the textually repressed that spells the scholar's doom.

If the library as an embodiment of textual history is both necessary and deadly, what is a reader to do? What procedures does Ward's novel adopt in handling its own hazardous freight? On a basic level, we could say that the conversion of scholarship into narrative, the library into novel, is itself a kind of solution. If Philip Davis is right, the high realist novel was from its inception committed to a “deep implicitness,” diffusing the coarser materials of moral, political, and philosophical discourse into the supple, complex textures of social experience (367). But given the kind of novel that Ward wanted to write, this project would be uniquely challenging – and uniquely urgent. In her Recollections (1918), Ward talked about the difficulties of dramatizing the ultimately inward intellectual journeys of her characters. The problem was how to represent an arduous course of scholarly reading while still engaging the general reader. Her solution was, as she puts it, “suggestion – and, of course, selection!” She goes on:

In its “selection,” so reminiscent of the “separation” that Oliver Wendell Holmes advised, Robert Elsmere simulates the library, inviting readers to enter a complex though carefully surveyed bibliographical terrain. At the same time, the novel is not just an abridgment of intellectual history or a handy resource for those who would have had little patience for the undiluted writings of the German intellectuals Heinrich Ewald and David Friedrich Strauss. As Ward understands, inasmuch as her novel is a novel, it must substitute one kind of library – and one kind of reading – with another. Indeed, it must “wipe out” that other discourse, even while the scholar's library is lavishly memorialized in other respects, as we have seen.

The novel's typical procedure is apparent in a scene in which Robert and Langham discuss the Origin of Species:

Robert's language of “driving” a mind through a text is consistent with the intensely physical manner in which Ward's characters interact with books. In a later scene in which Robert reads Idols of the Market-place, a “cruel torturing hand” is imagined to extend from the volume, before it drops melodramatically from the reader's quivering hand; thus Ward insists on a physical involvement usually associated with the reading of sensation novels, not critical theology (280; ch. 20). But in the above dialogue about Origin of Species, Ward's rhetoric interpellates the reader in a complex way. On a basic level the novel plays a remedial role: The vast majority of Robert Elsmere's readers would, like Robert at Oxford, know about Origin of Species without having read it for themselves. The scene winks at that probability, while accelerating readers beyond such a nominal understanding to what it would mean – what they might talk like, gesture like – had they endured the texts unmediated. In their chatter, Ward's characters model a text separated, secreted, and shelved.

Of course while Robert Elsmere may model the scholarly encounter, at the same time it spares the reader from a prolonged sojourn in the library. Yet this sparing is more than a matter of abbreviation. By embedding the denatured discourse of scholarship into a classically-structured social problem narrative, Ward necessarily reconstitutes its material – chemically alters it, as it were. In Robert Elsmere, the scholarly archive, that Leviathan of constitutive tradition, can be therapeutically “wiped out,” largely insofar as it is re-channeled into the more manageable relationships and rhythms that rule domestic fiction.Footnote ¹⁹ In Robert Elsmere the narrative desire of the scholar's library is largely sublimated into the parallel, though not equivalent, desire for legitimated paternity. Like Dickens's gentleman Pip, Robert must negotiate his peace with a benefactor (here an intellectual one) whom he both longs for and is terrorized by.

I do not want to belabor the Oedipal reading of Robert's relationship to Squire Wendover. It will be manifest to most readers. In returning to Surrey in the first place, Robert returns to the home country of his deceased father, a fact that Robert emphasizes in his first conversation with Wendover: “I believe . . . my father used to be allowed the same privileges [of using Murewell library]” (243; ch. 18). To this, Wendover icily declares that he never met Robert's father and then turns away, thus abdicating any fatherly role he might play in the rector's development. By the novel's last book, however, Robert will have reclaimed (though not reformed) this undeserving “father,” kissing the dying man on the forehead, “tenderly, as a son might have done” (591; ch. 50). By that point, the scholar has entrusted to Robert his great manuscript. Between these relational endpoints – the father's initial curse and his final blessing – the overwhelming textual desire is for the scholar's aloofness to be overcome, his heart softened. When Robert confronts Wendover about his unsanitary properties, he inwardly expresses a “persistent yearning to right himself with this man, whose mental history, as it lay chronicled in these rooms, had been to him, at a time of intellectual hunger, so stimulating, so enriching” (257–58; ch. 19). Later, as Robert reflects on the new historical awareness “beginning to press, to encroach, to intermeddle with the mind's other furniture” his thoughts again return to the scholar,

As a recurring motif in the nineteenth-century novel, the plot of discovered or created paternity does not entirely depart from the problematic of the library. Insofar as that theme raises, in the words of Peter Brooks, issues of “authority, legitimacy, the conflict of generations, and the transmission of wisdom” (63), it comprehends both the Oedipal striving between Robert and Wendover and the questions of textual embodiment raised by the scholarly library. Nevertheless, to plot Robert's scholarly reading in the terms of Oedipal rivalry and final acceptance resolves a number of issues, not the least of them a problem of scale. Questions of one's relationship to a labyrinthine scholarly tradition are downsized into questions of paternal sympathy and filial recognition. To put it in different terms, terms which the novel elsewhere provides, the “love[d] to know” is transformed into the more temporally immediate “love[d] to love” (384; ch. 30).

Indeed, the books which Robert borrows from Wendover's shelves, and which trickle down to us as epitomes of Renan or conversations about early French hagiography, always figure as intensely personal missives whose deciphering will either evince phenotypic recognition or incite a break. In such a plot, the library in all its weighty historicity vanishes; books are reconfigured as pure resistance, a mere medium in which minds of the emphatic present can meet. When Robert reads Idols of the Market-place, as we have seen, the arguments on the page are figured as blows directly from the author's “cruel torturing hand” (280; ch. 20). In a later scene in which Wendover expounds on his History of Testimony, the longest sustained discursive passage in the novel, Higher Critical discourse is subsumed into the “wrestle” between the two men, which climaxes in an unexpected capitulation – a breakthrough into a new intimacy: “No, let it be. Forget me and my book, Elsmere,” Wendover says, abandoning the philosophical onslaught. “Everything can be gotten out of in this world” (319; ch. 24). Such is the moment that we have been waiting for – the moment where we can, indeed, “forget” the scholar and his books.

In The Reading Lesson, Brantlinger documented a lingering distaste for the novel, that ugly spawn of commercialism and junk food to the precariously literate.¹⁹ I suggest that a competing paranoia over archival embodiment meant that the late-century novel, and specifically the novel of ideas, could also serve as an antidote. In the final say, the Elsmere-Wendover plot functions to transmit the scholar's vast learning out of the library, transmuted from leather and paper and ink into a lived religion which could rejuvenate London's East End. In Robert's person, the great body of text seems to be replaced by pure perception, pure desire. In this much, Robert Elsmere reenacts the formula that Garrett Stewart discovered in Daniel Deronda, its more elevated cousin. There, the sainted Mordecai must die with his Judaic erudition purposefully unrecorded in order that the tradition which he embodies can be more perfectly transfused into Daniel's living being (309). However, in a paradox that Stewart is quick to spot, Daniel Deronda as a novel still falls to recording – exhaustively so – Mordecai's words. Likewise, Robert Elsmere never truly disowns its books. Without the library there would be no New Brotherhood. Moreover, in its largest outlines, the novel gives the library conspicuous pride of place, its scholarly discourse never so completely dissolved as in such signature novels of ideas as Newman's Loss and Gain (1848), Eliot's Adam Bede (1859), or Pater's Marius the Epicurean (1885). Ward's novel, finally, keeps its library in a delicate narrative suspension, allowing us to own or disown the body of scholarship at our convenience.