Literary Meaning and the Question of Value: Victorian Literary Interpretation

Recent attention to the institutionalization of English literature has reminded us that the academic study of literature has a short history, with literature entering the universities as a subject only at the end of the nineteenth century. It is worth remembering that what we do now in the classroom has a history, one that has consequences for our classroom practice. We take it for granted now, however much concern for context and culture has become part of our practice, that interpretation is one of the fundamental responsibilities of the critic. But widespread interpretation of secular texts has a relatively short history and grew out of a tradition of Biblical hermeneutics. In considering that secular transition, I want to suggest that our practice in teaching both the Victorians and the history of criticism needs to be modified to come to terms with the literary sophistication with which the Victorians are rarely credited, and, more important yet, to throw light on our current critical practice by showing the kinds of problems literary interpretation faced as it developed out of the religious hermeneutic tradition. It is sometimes assumed that interest in the theory of literary interpretation is a twentieth-century phenomenon. Anglo-American critics in earlier periods did not reflect on the problems of interpretation; they simply took meaning for granted and pushed on straightaway to make evaluative or ethical judgments on a text’s literary merits or content. Discussing eighteenthand nineteenth-century British criticism, for instance, K. M. Newton (1990: 1–2)