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Oscar Wilde’s Chatterton: Literary History, Romanticism, and the Art of Forgery by Joseph Bristow and Rebecca N. Mitchell (review)

endogamous unions (i.e., cousin marriages) prior to the mid-nineteenth century. More than any other essay in this collection, Schaffer’s contributes to the claim that the family is an evolving cultural form. Following a fairly conventional sketch of marriage history in the West, Schaffer points out that unlike the Victorian concept of romantic marriage, with its emphasis on choice and autonomy for the modern liberal subject, the older form of companionate marriage were made to benefit a couple’s larger social network. Thus, in early nineteenth-century novels, cousin marriage represents an older relational idea of selfhood and a fast-becoming-obsolete idea of marriage as promoting affiliative networks rather than as a self-interested union forging privatized domestic units. Further, Schaffer argues how companionate marriages of this older (endogamous) tradition offered women—and female characters in novels—greater spheres of action. Overall, this collection succeeds in persuading the reader that Victorian families were queer, or at least literarily queered, in multifarious ways. But it is worth noting that terms like “accommodate” and “tolerate” arise frequently enough across the essays in this collection that one starts to wonder whether a model of accommodation and tolerance is adequate to contest queer theorists’ rejection of relationality and reproductive futurity. Can the queer turn in Victorian Studies offer something more than just more liberal projects of recovery?