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Robert Buchanan and the Fleshly Controversy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 August 2021

John A. Cassidy
John A. Cassidy*
Affiliation:
University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, Indiana
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Extract

In the long history of literary polemics none has been more savage or more far-reaching in its consequences than the Fleshly Controversy, which raged in Victorian England during the 1870's with Robert Buchanan on one side and Swinburne, William Michael Rossetti, and the unfortunate Dante Gabriel Rossetti on the other. The literary importance of the latter three and the intensive study devoted to their careers have thrown a revealing light upon their activities in the Controversy. Robert Buchanan has fared quite differently. Although widely heralded in the 1860's and '70's as a young poet of promise, he subsequently suffered such a literary eclipse that by the time of his death he was relatively little known. Today almost everything he wrote has been forgotten and his sole claim to fame is the negative one of being the man who attacked Dante Gabriel Rossetti and brought about his premature death. This paper is devoted to an examination of his career before, during, and after the Controversy in order to throw some light upon the role he played in that melee and to show that his attack, while reprehensible, was not made without some provocation.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 67 , Issue 2 , March 1952 , pp. 65 - 93
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1952

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References

Notes

1 Samuel C. Chew, Swinburne (Boston, 1929), p. 35; Harriett Jay, Robert Buchanan (London, 1903), n. to p. 61.

2 Georges Lafourcade, La Jeunesse de Swinburne (Paris, 1928), i, 177.

3 Lafourcade (i, 242) ascribes this review to “Lush,” but gives no supporting evidence. In her Robert Buchanan Miss Jay includes a quotation by Buchanan in which he states flatly that the review is his (p. 161). It is unthinkable that Buchanan would have admitted that he had struck the first blow in the Controversy had he not done so, or that Miss Jay would have included such a damaging admission had she not been convinced of its validity.

4 William Michael Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, His Family Letters with a Memoir (London, 1895), i, 295.

5 Sir Edmund Gosse and Thomas J. Wise, eds. The Complete Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne (London, 1926), vi, 353.

6 Oswald Doughty, ed. The Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti to His Publisher F. S. Ellis (London, 1928), p. 5.

7 Buchanan, “The Stealthy School of Criticism,” Athenaeum, No. 2305 (30 Dec. 1871), 877.

8 It is possible that the alert Swinburne had discovered the association of the two names and was hinting of it when, in a footnote to his “Under the Microscope,” he referred to his enemy as “this classic namesake and successor of George Buchanan.” See n. to p. 440 of “Under the Microscope,” The Complete Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne, vi (Bonchurch Edition).

9 “The Stealthy School of Criticism,” p. 877.

10 William Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti as Designer and Writer (London, 1889), p. 158.

11 This raises the question as to what part Strahan may have played in urging Buchanan to write the pamphlet as a defense of Strahan, who had certainly lost caste as a result of Buchanan's delivering him into the hands of the Athenaeum by his ill-timed admission of authorship. It is significant that whereas Strahan had been Buchanan's chief publisher up to the Controversy, from 1876 until the end of his life there is not a single instance of his entrusting one of his books to him. It is not unlikely that Buchanan came privately to the Athenaeum's viewpoint that for him the publishing of the pamphlet had been folly into which he had been urged by the importunacy of Strahan.

12 T. Hall Caine, Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (Boston, 1883), n. to p. 71.

13 Thomas Hake and Arthur Compton-Rickett, The Letters of Algernon Charles Swinburne (London, 1918), p. 120.

14 Athenaeum, No. 2541 (8 July 1876), 50-51.

15 The Times (London), 3 July 1876, p. 13.

16 Thomas J. Wise, A Bibliography of the Writings in Prose and Verse of Algernon Charles Swinburne (London, 1927), p. 134.

17 Georges Lafourcade, Swinburne: A Literary Biography (London, 1932), pp. 247-248.

18 Gosse and Wise, Complete Works of Swinburne, xviii, 260.

19 Athenaeum, No. 2541 (8 July 1876), 50-51.

20 Buchanan, God and the Man (London, 1883), p. iii.

21 Buchanan, “Imperial Cockneydom,” Universal Review, iv (1889), 90.

22 “Robert Buchanan,” Essays on Poetry and Poets (London, 1886), pp. 282-303.