17 - The Victorian Chthonic Sublime

Summary

This chapter analyzes the redistribution of the Romantic sublime in Victorian culture. Contrary to the assumption that the Victorians seem to have neglected the sublime, it shows how the concept was unpacked into a busy metonymy, first by Thomas Carlyle when he speaks of inverse sublimity. A fit for the world disassembled by the Industrial Revolution and for Charles Lyell’s geology of ongoing planetary transformation, Carlyle’s metonymy heralds the Victorian chthonic sublime, a structure of feeling where affect, once bound in awe, terror and rupture, is reclaimed for melancholia and tasked with the work of mourning. It is a work that finds an emphatic articulation in John Ruskin’s aesthetics and art history, notably in his theory of pathetic fallacy, and in Matthew Arnold’s poetry and criticism, especially in the concept of touchstone, with important critical footholds in the Victorian industrial novel, evolutionary theory and Pre-Raphaelite painting and poetry.