Examining the ‘romantic poetic fictions’ of the past within nineteenth-century literature

Abstract

Initially written as a final essay for an honours course entitled Modern Love: Victorian Poetry and Prose, this article explores Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, George Meredith’s Modern Love and George Gissing’s New Grub Street in relation to classical sonnet form and traditional ideas of romantic love. Cynthia Tucker’s assertion that the ‘romantic poetic fictions’ of the traditional fourteen-line sonnet provide an unstable foundation for genuine love features heavily, for each of the texts evidence characters revisiting their own past and hugely romanticising their distasteful memories in order to affect change upon their present and future selves. Pip, of Great Expectations, does this in attempt to set aside his past and ascend the stratified social world of Victorian London, dismissing his humble background and criminal encounters in favour of a rich and mysterious benefactor. Conversely, the narrator-husband of Modern Love seeks to rewrite his present infidelity into something more palatable, and therefore edits his past marriage into a loveless affair and his wife a cold and distant figure. Finally, after Reardon of New Grub Street loses his career to ill health and economic necessity, he squanders all hope of literary redemption by whittling away his hours imagining how his life may have turned out differently had he made different decisions in the past. Each is unsuccessful in editing the past, for the foundations they create for their new and alternate selves are entirely fictitious; their lies are unstable and illogical, preventing them from realising the goals that they desire. Of all of the characters in each of the texts, Pip is the only one who we are able to see moving forward with some success; with help, he is able to revisit his past and accept the truth of his memories, providing him with a surer foundation from which to grow.