During Victoria’s reign, works written primarily for children became both more numerous and more heterogeneous. As printing technology continued to improve and to lower production costs for books and magazines, and as younger and poorer segments of the population became literate, authors, publishers, and purchasers were increasingly likely to define children as a distinct audience. Or, more accurately, one might say that they constituted increasingly significant multiple audiences, delineated not only by age but also by gender, social class, and religion. The ever-expanding number of print texts available to the young, and the growing belief among producers and purchasers that a precise sense of one’s audience was important to success, led to the creation of a remarkably diverse – and often innovative and sophisticated – body of writing for children. The extraordinary range in tone, content, physical format, and stylistic and narrative characteristics reveals a culture that took childhood unusually seriously and saw children and their needs in many different ways.

The polyphony of children’s literature

Victorian children’s texts emerged from the clash between two ways of understanding childhood: the concept that children are adults’ moral inferiors, in need of substantial guidance if they are to mature into productive and virtuous citizenship, and the concept that civilization is corrupt and that children, not yet implicated in its inexorable sullying of humankind, are superior to adults in their innocence, enjoyment of simple pleasures, and willingness to imagine and trust.

Derived from the Greek aesthesis, for English-speakers at the beginning of Victoria’s reign ‘aesthetics’ was a largely technical, not yet anglicized term for ‘the science which treats of the conditions of sensuous perception’. First used in 1750 by Alexander Baumgarten in something like the modern sense (‘the philosophy or theory of taste, or of the beautiful in nature and art’, OED), ‘aesthetik’ was embraced by both Schiller and Hegel. Coleridge attempted unsuccessfully to introduce it into English as an unfamiliar but useful term to designate a convergence of form, feeling, and intellect, but it was not widely adopted to denote the study of beauty in nature or the visual arts until the 1850s, and was not common in discussions of literature or music before the 1870s. The term’s slow anglicization was due in part to its association with German metaphysicians regarded, in Britain, with suspicion. The work of the systematic German philosophers (Kant and Hegel) and their interest in the place of aesthetic pleasure in a theory of mind had few serious students in Britain between Coleridge and Pater. By 1875, James Sully, author of the Encyclopedia Britannica’s first entry on aesthetics, gives due place to Kant, Hegel, and other German philosophers.

Most Victorian aesthetic speculation took place not through formal philosophical investigation but through literature and criticism. It was driven by the need to make sense of a perceived abundance of art and literature (from both past and present) and to defend the arts under conditions felt as increasingly hostile: industrialization, worship of the ‘Goddess of Getting On’, and dependence on a market of under-educated middle and aspiring-middle classes.

In 1847, Sir Arthur Helps began an essay on reading with the dutiful observation that ‘It appears to me remarkable that this subject should have been so little touched upon’, but one sometimes feels that the Victorians touched on little else. Literacy was credited for reducing criminality and blamed for encouraging sexual licence; the topic fuelled both visual and verbal media, writing and speech. When twenty-first-century scholars gain access to nineteenth-century clichés about reading, they do so via print; but the Victorians themselves used the spoken word to praise writing. Sermons remained the traditional venue for arguments about the benefits and dangers of the printed word, but by the 1830s they faced secular competition from after-dinner speeches of benevolent organizations, lectures at the opening of mechanics’ institutes, and public addresses like Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies – not to mention Parliamentary debates, themselves transcribed in shorthand and read by many more people than those who had heard them. To read that record now is to remember how many of the policies over which Victorian MPs argued related, directly, or indirectly, to literacy. Schools, libraries, copyright law, postal rates, and above all the taxes that determined the pricing of printed matter: the institutions that the Victorians established, reformed, and attacked were centrally concerned with reading.

Fitzjames Stephen’s predictive remark on the prominent place that will be occupied by journalism and the periodical press in an imagined literary history of the future is borne out by the positioning of this chapter, which foregrounds their status as among the most important and exemplary of the literary forms of the Victorian age. The nineteenth century saw the beginnings of the modern mass media. Tens of thousands of serial titles were published in the course of the century, encompassing a vast range from intellectually heavyweight quarterlies to popular penny weeklies, fashionable magazines, and esoteric specialist journals, and touching the lives and minds of every Victorian citizen. As a medium for the circulation of new ideas and discoveries and forum for reviews, the periodical press, it is generally agreed by Victorian and modern commentators alike, provided a dynamic context for lively argument during a period of unprecedented, unresolved, and irresolvable speculation and debate. It played a critical role in defining nineteenth-century literary and political culture. However, although the convenient fact that both the Victorians and ourselves regard periodical literature as a pre-eminent sign of the times may seem to confirm that the cultural prominence of the periodical press at this historical moment has always been a self-evident truth, the fact that for many decades, with a few honourable exceptions, journalism was virtually invisible in twentieth-century literary studies of the Victorians, other than as a ‘background’ to the canonical forms of the novel, poetry, and drama, suggests otherwise.

The years of Queen Victoria’s reign witnessed rapid and dramatic changes in Britain’s financial infrastructure, its own economic well-being and its place in the global economy, and the way that economic developments were conceptualized, by experts and ordinary Britons alike. Various kinds of writing – from economic treatises to financial journalism to imaginative literature – contributed to these changes in several ways, not least in making ‘the economy’ imaginable as one of the invisible, but inescapable, forces influencing nearly every aspect of nineteenth-century life.

By the time Victoria assumed the throne in 1837, London had become the financial capital of the world, having surpassed Paris and Amsterdam, which occupied this position at the end of the eighteenth century. Almost all foreign and domestic bills of exchange flowed through the London bill broking houses centred around Lombard Street; the great merchant bankers who routed English capital overseas had their offices in the narrow streets near Caple Court; and the principal institutions of British finance – the Bank of England, the London Stock Exchange, and the Royal Exchange (which burned in 1838 and was rebuilt in the 1840s) – clustered in the district known as the City, near the Bank’s home on Threadneedle Street. In addition to facilitating overseas investment, these institutions also formed the hub of what was just beginning to be a trunk-and-branch system of English banking.

‘The Editor is acquainted with no strict and exhaustive definition of Lyrical Poetry’, wrote Francis Palgrave in the preface to the first of his immensely popular anthologies, The Golden Treasury: Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language (1861). A crucial arbiter of poetic tastes in the nineteenth century, The Golden Treasury would go on to sell about ten thousand copies a year until the Second World War. In 1860, Palgrave had written to Tennyson to ask advice about methods of selection: ‘I hesitate whether Elegies such as Gray’s, and Sonnets should properly be included. They are lyrical in structure, and sonnets have always ranked as lyrical; but their didactic tone appears to me not decisively lyrical.’ The problem of what is, and is not, lyrical would never be easily settled. At this time Palgrave decided to exclude both didactic poetry and ‘all pieces markedly dramatic’. However, by the time he came to the 1897 edition, he was forced to acknowledge not only ‘a vast extension in length of our lyrics’ but also their frequently ‘dramatic character’. The ‘dramatic’, which in 1861 seemed antipathetic to lyric, could no longer be categorically excluded. For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the term ‘lyric’ has eluded decisive definition, its relation to the ‘dramatic’ being one of the word’s most difficult faultlines. As a term, it is both frustratingly unspecific yet powerfully enduring.

Alone of all the volumes in the New Cambridge History of English Literature, this one is named after the reign of a monarch. To identify a literary period in this way is necessarily problematic, and the utility of the label ‘Victorian’ has long been contested. On the other hand, it has endured – albeit with shifting sets of connotations. Not least among the reasons for this endurance is the apparent precision offered by the bounding dates of the Queen’s reign (1837–1901), with the latter of these years more or less coinciding, conveniently, with the end of a century. Yet even before Queen Victoria’s demise, her long tenure of the throne had encouraged many commentators to look backwards, thus accentuating the notion of her reign as marking a distinctly defined era. Both her Golden and Diamond Jubilees stimulated evaluative retrospectives – such as Alfred Russel Wallace’s The Wonderful Century. Its Successes and Failures (1898) – of all that had been achieved (the emphasis was almost invariably teleologically framed) over the preceding decades, whether in politics or industrial invention, the physical sciences or the field of culture.

The sense that Victoria’s accession marked a very useful, clearly defined starting point was, of course, in many ways constructed in hindsight, a product of the lengthy reign of a monarch who had attracted a good deal of attention right from her accession, due to the combination of her youth and the fact of her being a woman. This was accentuated as a result of an expanding popular press that exploited these circumstances, then her marriage to Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha in 1840, and then her rapidly growing family.

To take ‘sexuality’ as a rubric for understanding Victorian literature may seem a bit odd, since few words better illustrate the gulf between how the Victorians saw themselves and how we see them. ‘To have sex’ was not a common locution until the early twentieth century, and it was only in that century’s final decades that feminist and queer theorists began to insist on distinctions among ‘sexuality’, ‘sex’, and ‘gender’. Sexuality came to denote a complex of desires, affects, sensations, identifications, and acts; sex, to mean the biological characteristics that identify individuals as male or female, though those physical differences increasingly came to seem culturally constructed and physically manipulable; and gender, to refer to an individual’s sense of identity as masculine or feminine, as well as to social demarcations of masculine and feminine qualities and roles. In the nineteenth century, to be sexual meant to be sexed male or female; in the twentieth, sexuality became shorthand for sexual orientation. And though two Victorian men, Havelock Ellis and John Symonds, helped initiate that change in usage, even they thought of the sexual in Victorian terms, as referring primarily to male or female sex. Thus, when they coined the phrase ‘sexual inversion’ in the 1890s, they used it to label men who felt like women and women who felt like men, not men who desired men and women who desired women.

The nineteenth century, which produced the majority of the music that is still sung in concert halls and opera houses today, also saw changes in the art of singing more rapid and more radical than seem to have occurred in any previous century – to be surpassed in extent only by those of the twentieth. At its beginning, the great majority of professional public singers (outside churches at any rate) were still native Italians, expounding a tradition whose predominance all Europe had embraced for centuries; operas were still tailored to the immediate members of their casts and mostly forgotten (or re-tailored) soon after; the solo singer in many genres was still a kind of co-composer, responsible through ornamentation for much of the surface detail of his music. By its end, Germany, France and Russia had operatic repertoires of interest beyond their own borders; a vast new repertoire of piano-accompanied song had arisen (and commanded the attention of leading composers) outside Italy; contemporary opera had banished improvisation and embraced modern symphonic procedures; and – though Italians could still lay some claim to pre-eminence – the vocal profession had become thoroughly cosmopolitan. In 1800 Haydn was still active, Mozart was a living memory to thousands, and the odd virtuosi we call castrati were still performing and teaching. In 1900 Verdi had retired, Mahler was running the Vienna State Opera, Pelléas and Jenufa were just around the corner, and Feodor Chaliapin had already started to give new meanings to the idea of the ‘singing actor’.

1815–1848

Beethoven, Schubert and musical performance in Vienna from the Congress until 1830

As a major centre with a long tradition of performance, Vienna richly reflects the varied locations and types of performance in the early century. Following the Congress of Vienna, which had consolidated the position of Austria and especially Vienna within the German Confederation, there was a shift away from aristocratic patronage of music towards professionalisation, with work for musicians in theatres, churches or military bands. At the same time emerged the concept of a ‘Viennese School’ of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. Concerts took place in the Burgtheater, Kärntnertortheater and Theater an der Wien, as well as the larger Grosse Redoutensaal or Winterreitschule at the Hofburg Palace, the latter of which could seat at least 1,500 people, maybe as many as 3,000. Music was dominated by opera, especially the work of Rossini, but there were also major series pioneering instrumental music, organised mostly by members of the aristocracy in the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde (hereafter the GdM), established in 1812, the Gesellschaft des Privat-Musik-Vereins, founded in 1818, and the Concerts Spirituels einer Gesellschaft von Musikfreunden, established in 1819. Audiences for these concerts constituted a genuine mixture of the upper and middle classes. There were also some more commercially oriented concerts, often featuring young virtuosi and private events in aristocratic salons.

Mozart today

The original sound world of Mozart's last three symphonies can arguably never be recreated, if only because the evidence is fundamentally insufficient. In any case, to what extent can modern taste cope with primary materials that are sometimes decidedly uncomfortable? This is a fundamental question, since it would be scarcely surprising if the many intricacies of Mozart's last symphonies were not revealed at their premieres. It further seems likely that subsequent early performances would not have exhibited the degree of standardisation and consistency to which we have become accustomed. If this chapter cannot aspire even to speculate effectively, it can at least aim to open up some fruitful areas for reflection. The example of twentieth-century composer Edward Elgar is instructive; his own recordings from the 1920s and 1930s remain readily available yet have never been truly recreated, despite their primary perspective on both performance styles and technical standards. This would surely be true of aural evidence from 140 years earlier, were we to possess it.

It is often said that existentialism has passed into the history of philosophy. But that is a problem only if we think of that history as a kind of museum in which we become antiquarians who observe animals no longer living or artifacts no longer useful. It has nothing to do with us. But if we have an existential spirit we will not read any of the history of philosophy that way. We will hear the texts of the great thinkers as voices that address us directly, offering interpretations of our being-in-the-world full of possibilities for our beliefs, our actions, and our affects or attitudes. It has everything to do with us.

No doubt this means that our title is less than perfect. “Religion” suggests an observable object or phenomenon. Thus we have Religious Studies departments where religion is what is studied. There's nothing very existential about being a scholarly observer. Existentialism is about the urgency of deciding what to do with our lives, more specifically, what to do with my own life. That is why in Plato's Gorgias, Socrates, perhaps the first existentialist philosopher, says to Callicles, “For you see, don't you, that our discussion's about … the way we're supposed to live.

WHO OR WHAT IS AN EXISTENTIALIST?

Few if any other modern Western philosophical movements have had as strong an impact on the general culture as has existentialism. The epicenter of this impact was certainly Paris, especially the Latin Quarter of Paris, and the time of maximum intensity was the period following the end of the Second World War, during which Paris had been under German occupation. But of course there had been existentialist stirrings, at least some of which had had broader cultural influence beyond the world of philosophy, in other places and long before that time, and there would be existentialist waves of extended cultural influence in many other countries for years to come, arguably right up to the present time. It would be impossible to track down and catalogue all of these earlier and later impacts; and any such enterprise would be burdened from the start by disagreements concerning just which cultural tendencies were “really” influenced by existentialism and to what degree, as well as by the question of just which of the various “existentialisms” were of greater importance in such-and-such an instance. After all, both “existentialism” and “culture” are concepts with exceedingly vague edges.

The nature of this difficulty can perhaps most easily be seen if we focus our attention initially on the immediate post-war Paris scene to which I have referred, on the highly diverse currents that were operative even within that comparatively small “epicenter” within just a few years' time. A recounting of the interaction of a few of these currents will at the same time offer insights into just how strongly existentialism influenced the society in question and into something of the nature of that influence.

Monteverdi's Vespers is probably the most popular ‘piece’ of early seventeenth-century sacred music nowadays – certainly in terms of performances and recordings. The inverted commas around ‘piece’ are deliberate for, although many perform this sequence of Vespers music as a single work within a church or concert hall, there is little doubt that Monteverdi saw his 1610 publication as an all-purpose collection designed to be dipped into rather than performed from beginning to end. As well as the Vespers music (including two Magnificats) the volume contains a Mass; moreover, the music is written for a wide range of scorings which suggests that it was probably composed at different times and was not originally intended as a ‘work’ in the modern sense. That is not to say, however, that the modern tradition of performing Monteverdi's Vespers as a single work is not viable or desirable. The music (with or without additions) makes an ideal concert in terms of length and sheer variety – not to mention quality – of music. That performers and academics alike are fascinated by this ‘work’ is therefore not surprising and, as Monteverdi's 1610 collection raises virtually every important issue in relation to the performance practice of early seventeenth-century sacred music, it is an ideal subject on which to base this chapter.

In order to examine the range of performance possibilities for the 1610 Vespers, it is necessary to refer to the original musical notation, to music treatises, and to a large range of recent scholarship. It would be foolish to expect this material to deal with all the questions, but it does at least offer the beginnings of some answers for performers approaching the music today. Reference is made to a number of representative recordings of the 1610 Vespers in order to demonstrate modern-day practices and trends.

Arcangelo Corelli dated the dedication to his Opus 5 violin sonatas 1 January 1700, suggesting an awareness that the new century might usher in a change of outlook. By 1710, these sonatas had appeared in numerous editions across Europe and were being imitated by a multitude of composers in Italy, France, England and Germany. In a sense, they establish an agenda for the genre. The Calcinotto engraving of Giuseppe Tartini (dating, it seems, from the early 1760s) has a border with violin, bow and open music clearly marked ‘Corelli’ (plus, interestingly, volumes with ‘Zarlino’ and ‘Plato’ on their spines). In the last decade of the eighteenth century at least fifteen editions of Corelli's Op. 5 were published in Italy, Spain, France and England. Muzio Clementi produced an edition in 1800 while J.-B. Cartier brought out what he described as the ‘15th edition’ with a preface suggesting continuity between the school that Corelli established and ‘the famous artists of our times’. The sonatas of Opus 5 were to provide formative study material for generations of violinists. A case could thus be made for treating the (actual) eighteenth century (1 January 1700 to 31 December 1799) as a coherent style period.

These sonatas were, however, mid-career productions for a composer whose Op. 1 appeared in 1681. The ‘long eighteenth century’ is a useful category precisely because it accommodates changes initiated more or less anywhere in the last few decades of the seventeenth century and replaced somewhere in the early nineteenth century. Corelli as a dominant influence on violinists fits well into such a period view. From the point of view of instrumental performance there are other equally useful bookends. (The bookend metaphor seems apt, given the essential adjustability of these very practical devices.)

In a conversation recorded shortly before his death, Maurice Natanson reports an encounter he had in 1951, when he was lecturing to a philosophical society on Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea. A philosopher stood up and indignantly exclaimed, “I came here with my wife! And whether it's in the regulations [of the Society] or not, I think matters of this kind should not be discussed in front of ladies!” This air of scandal has accompanied existentialism wherever it has appeared: Kierkegaard was the target of a nasty press campaign in nineteenth-century Copenhagen; Nietzsche's first book was vilified by the academic establishment and he had to self-publish several others; Heidegger's early critics called him “death-obsessed”; and Sartre never held an academic position at all, cultivating an oppositional stance to bourgeois values as a matter of principle. This air of scandal – together with an extraordinary cultural reach by way of literature, art, and film – is no doubt largely responsible for the fact that existentialism, almost alone among philosophical “isms,” has never disappeared from the public imagination as a stance toward the world. It is hard to imagine “rationalism,” say, or “utilitarianism” being revived by each new generation, and by name, as a way of life. But this has been existentialism's fate. David Cooper cites Simone de Beauvoir’s recollection that “a set of young people really did … label themselves ‘existentialists,’ wear an all-black uniform, frequent the same cafés, and assume an air of ennui ” – and there have been such ever since.