Kevin Mills. Approaching Apocalypse: Unveiling Revelation in Victorian Writing.(Book review)

Kevin Mills. Approaching Apocalypse: Unveiling Revelation in Victorian Writing. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2007. 228pp.

Contrary to popular belief, history is usually not written by the victors, but, by the losers--from the Old Testament to Gone with the Wind--keen to vindicate their lost cause. Apocalypses, Mills suggests, are usually written by those who have lost "real bad"--not just on a political scale, but on a cosmic one. The idea that the Victorian age is heavily peopled with losers is not immediately obvious, but Mills' initial thesis--that nineteenth-century English literature is steeped in references, covert and overt, to the biblical Apocalypse--is both well-argued and persuasive. Any society undergoing such rapid change is likely to contain as many losers as winners, and it is to Mills' credit that he spots not merely a wealth of fictional losers, but also just how common the language of Apocalypse is in the most unlikely places, not merely in the literature of the period, but also in the non-fictional writings of such people as Carlyle, Darwin, and even Florence Nightingale.

Moreover, it is difficult not to warm to an author who concludes the first paragraph of his Acknowledgments with the words "Whatever errors or weaknesses may be found in the ensuing pages are entirely due to the influence of these friends. The good bits are all my own." When he had stopped smiling, a cross-grained reader--like this reviewer--might nonetheless suspect such cheerful defiance of convention of concealing a certain unevenness of texture, and the cross-grained reader would, alas, be right. Whether we blame Mills or his friends, this is a book of penetrating insights. Loose threads, and strange lacunae.

The book is well-written, even witty in places. The throwaway statement, "despite the fact that unveiling is the founding trope of the Apocalypse ... the Apocalypse is not an uncovering, but an obscure text in need of deciphering," is one of those delightful remarks obvious only in retrospect (97). Mills is good on veiling and unveiling, and it is a recurrent theme of the book, linking such diverse figures as Carlyle, Christina Rossetti, Charlotte Bronte, and even Hardy in unexpected ways. Yet this unveiling also reveals weaknesses that become increasingly apparent as the argument unfolds. The losers with which we intriguingly began somehow disappear in the course of the book, to be replaced by suffering Christ-figures: Jane Eyre (yes, of course ...) and the protagonist of Wells' The Time Machine (er, well ... totally unconvincing). And with the disappearing losers, we also lose what had promised to be a really interesting thesis. What began as a discussion of structural Apocalypses rapidly morphs into a field where references to Apocalypse (George Eliot) or even apocalyptic imagery (Darwin) are grist to the mill. All the while, the fabric of the veil is being stretched ever-thinner, to include more and more unconvincing Apocalypses, from Darwin's Origin of Species to Marie Correlli's The Sorrows of Satan. It is true, certainly, that there are indeed a many references to the Apocalypse in Victorian fiction, but, to coin a phrase, some ...