ABSTRACT
Where did Victorian writing go? What happened to those piled sentences of Ruskin’s, those Carylean metaphors, the lyrical grot-esqueries of Dickens, aspirated for the speaking voice but lodged between covers? One answer is that they went into the writing of Virginia Woolf - and some very strange things happened to them there.In May 1882 Adeline Virginia Stephen was born into what she later described as that ‘complete model of Victorian society’, the family of Leslie Stephen, editor of the Cornhill Magazine and of the Dictionary of National Biography, literary essayist, mountaineer, and Victorian man of letters and intellectual par excellence. l In that same year of 1882 (the last of his editorship of the Cornhill) there appeared, among articles on ‘The sun as a perpetual machine’ and ‘The world’s end’, an anoymous piece on ‘The decay of literature’, which looked back to the great days of Dickens and Thackeray, Elizabeth Gaskell and Kingsley, failed even once to mention George Eliot, and bemoaned the decline in novelistic achievement of the years between 1850 and 1880. The writer does unbend a little after observing that realism does not suit the English genius: We can only say in the vaguest way that in the mental as in the physical world there are periods of sudden blossoming, when the vital forces of nature are manifested in the production of exquisite flowers, after which it again passes into a latent stage. . . . Perhaps the Shakespeare of the twentieth century is already learning the rudiments of infantile speech, and some of us may live to greet his appearance, and probably . . . to lament the inferiority of the generation which accepts him .2
