Lauren M. E. Goodlad. Victorian Literature and the Victorian State: Character and Governance in a Liberal Society. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. xv + 298 pp. $45.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8018-6963-1.
Reviewed by Grace Kehler (Department of English and Cultural Studies, McMaster University)
Published on H-Albion (January, 2007)
Recovering Victorian Complexity
Lauren Goodlad seems poised to take her place among the most incisive and respected critics of Victorian literature and culture. Her first book, Victorian Literature and the Victorian State, examines the period's approaches to government, directing attention particularly to the Victorians' strong preference for self-regulation over state impositions. Granting priority to Michal Foucault's later writings on pastorship, rather than to the more frequently used Foucauldian works on disciplinary regimes or biopower, Goodlad offers a valuable reconsideration of liberal individualism and morality. Liberalism (and, recently, neoliberalism) tends to denote the collusion of government with the entrepreneurial leaders of a capitalist economy in advancing and protecting the wealth of the few. Under the guise of individual rights, this form of liberalism charges individuals with the responsibility for their position within society, deflecting attention from the systemic disparities enforced by law, religion, social custom, and prejudice. But Goodlad expands the definition of liberalism, demonstrating that the Victorian--largely middle-class--emphasis on self-disciplined industriousness also produced caring, dedicated philanthropists and reformers who conceived of their voluntary, pastoral work as vital to the renewal of community.[1] These volunteerists shied away from state-centered social reform not because of an indifference to structural inequities, but due to their desire for what Goodlad terms "intersubjective" relationships: personal relationships among classes that sought to ameliorate the fragmenting effects of modernity with its foundational principle of profitability. Moreover, such intimacy allowed for a complex conception of merit premised on individual character and conduct, rather than exclusively on class and economic status, that offered the possibility of "moral equality" (pp. 37, 45).
Goodlad's study is erudite in its detailed accounts of period literatures and contexts and rigorously fair-minded in its approach to the past. If Goodlad highlights the productive work of Victorian moralism and individualism, her argument still develops dialectically, as she considers the contradictions and heterogeneity informing period reforms. Hers is a rare book in which the middle classes are neither derided for their inconsistencies nor exonerated; rather, she treats contradiction as a symptom and sign of serious engagement with urgent social issues such as poverty or the respective responsibilities of the individual and the state. Her complex negotiations of social tensions and the self-division of period authors and reformers resemble those of renowned critics such as Raymond Williams, Mary Poovey, and Linda Dowling.[2] Like Williams's Culture and Society (1983) especially, Goodlad's book focuses Victorian desires to "transform the social and human relationships hitherto dictated by the laws of political economy."[3] The first chapter of Victorian Literature and the Victorian State sets the theoretical frame for studying such transformative impulses by replacing Foucault's work on state apparatuses (like the panopticon) that produce and maintain coercive norms with his later conceptualization of power as indirect, relational, and changeable. In successive chapters, Goodlad investigates literary and non-fictional responses to the Poor Law of 1834, sanitary reforms, civil service reforms, state education, and the national contest between philanthropy and socialism. Looking always to the ideal of self-regulation and the theoretical openness of Victorian middle-class reformers to their moral equality with the working-classes, she maps the ideal's surprising malleability in a society "riddled by ideological conflict ... and unnerving epistemological uncertainty" (p. 88). This uncertainty, Goodlad contends, traverses the work of Poor Law Commissioners like Edwin Chadwick and social reformers such as Thomas Chalmers and James Phillips Kay as well as literary interrogations of the social polity. Carefully she demonstrates that few of these figures were inflexible, self-deluded ideologues, but rather self-divided professionals, deeply desirous of social change and inconsistent in their theories of and strategies for attaining a more equitable structure.
What is remarkable about this book is not just the sheer range of historiographic and literary materials Goodlad references, the ease with which she manages her materials, or even the accumulating force and coherence of her argument; as impressive is her tactic of rounding back on a issue or author, incrementally introducing ever more nuanced readings. Her discussions of Dickens are a case in point. In her third chapter, Goodlad examines the fiction Dickens produced at mid-century, including Oliver Twist (1837) and Bleak House (1852-53). As Goodlad illustrates, the former novel decries statist responses to poverty that took the form of impersonal institutions. Oliver Twist fiercely critiques the workhouse and the charity school as bureaucratic institutions that deformed rather than reformed the working classes. For Dickens, much of the blame rests with the middle classes whom he presents as self-absorbed, entrepreneurial, acquisitive, and individualistic, all traits inimical to charitable, intersubjective communities. Yet Goodlad reveals that the vitiation Dickens ascribes to capitalist society at large also translates into a dire portrait of working-class degeneracy and criminality--hardly a representation suitable to counter period anxieties about the poor. Even more ambivalently, he calls for increased pastorship and inter-class community while pillorying organized charity in his construction of Bleak House's Mrs. Jellyby, thus seriously undermining the primary community alternative to governmental interventions in the lives of the poor. Further expanding on his complex assessment of the social polity, Goodlad turns her attention to Our Mutual Friend (1864-65) in her fifth chapter. This novel betrays its uneasiness about the desirability of working-class upward mobility and skepticism about character-building. Still, if Dickens remains philosophically conflicted in his fiction, his journalism and conduct reveal him as possessing yet another Victorian identity: that of the charitable volunteer, deeply invested in philanthropy as a means to regeneration.
Goodlad's iteration of Victorian optimism and communal aspirations models a generous approach to the past that seeks to illuminate the difficulties and unevenness that necessarily attend social reformation efforts. There are moments when the book's privileging of ideals and exclusive focus on the perceptions of the educated middle classes appear to sidestep the very urgent matter of the grave practical effects idealism might have on society's working-class citizens. But, to be fair, that work has already been done by Goodlad's main literary forebear, Mary Poovey's Making a Social Body. In fact, Goodlad reconsiders many of the same texts and figures as Poovey in order to counter Poovey's exploration of the coercive stratifications of Victorian society, divisions reinforced by the period impulse to sociological-scientific documentation as well as by charismatic religious figures and organized philanthropy. This scholarly debate usefully expands Victorianist perspectives, though I am not certain that Goodlad fully acknowledges Poovey's equally meticulous attention to Victorian contradictions and paradox. If Poovey, as Goodlad contends, "overlooks the intersubjective utopianism at the heart of prominent strains of liberal thinking" (p. 44), Goodlad perhaps underemphasizes the potency of idealism in turning the stratifications of society into yet another self-affirming pleasure for the elite. These quibbles are minor, however, set next to her substantial achievements. Victorian Literature and the Victorian State may be Goodlad's first book, but its maturity, lucidity, and acuity announce an important scholarly voice in Victorian studies. These are good days to be a Victorian scholar, for the field continues to attract first-rate researchers and writers.
Notes
[1]. See also Linda Dowling's redefinition of liberalism in The Vulgarization of Art: The Victorians and Aesthetic Democracy (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996).
[2]. Raymond Williams Culture and Society (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983); and Mary Poovey, Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830-1864 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
[3]. Williams, Culture and Society, 82.
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Citation:
Grace Kehler. Review of Goodlad, Lauren M. E., Victorian Literature and the Victorian State: Character and Governance in a Liberal Society.
H-Albion, H-Net Reviews.
January, 2007.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=12719
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