Patrick Joyce, DEMOCRATIC SUBJECTS: THE SELF AND THE
SOCIAL IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND (Cambridge
University Press, 1994), pp. xii, 242. Illustrations,
appendices, index. Cloth, $54.95; paperback, $19.95.
Patrick Joyce (University of Manchester) is among
the most provocative British historians of our time.
His first book made his reputation. In WORK, SOCIETY,
AND POLITICS: THE CULTURE OF THE FACTORY IN LATER
VICTORIAN ENGLAND (1980) Joyce showed both his wide
reading in primary sources for the industrial North and
his sensitivity to historical theory and
historiographic debate. His next relevant book did not
appear until 1991. This massive volume, VISIONS OF THE
PEOPLE: INDUSTRIAL ENGLAND AND THE QUESTION OF CLASS,
1840-1914, again displayed great learning (notably, in
dialect literature) and engagement with theory. Joyce
leaped to the forefront of British historians who
champion the "linguistic turn."
Those of us who teach and write British history
have to reckon with Joyce. Despite the size and
difficulty of VISIONS OF THE PEOPLE, I assigned it last
year to my Victorian England students. This academic
year I replaced it with Joyce's latest and much shorter
book, DEMOCRATIC SUBJECTS: THE SELF AND THE SOCIAL IN
NINETEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND, which was published both in
hardbound and paperback editions in 1994. Shortly
after I had asked my students to read DEMOCRATIC
SUBJECTS, H-Net asked me to review it.
A publisher's blurb, printed near the front of the
volume and on the back cover of the paperback
emphasizes that the book "represents a deepening of
Patrick Joyce's engagement with 'post-modernist'
theory, seeking the relevance of this theory for the
writing of history, and in the process offering a
critique of the conservatism of much academic history,
particularly in Britain." I should make clear that in
neither my teaching nor my research do I earn the name
of post-modernist, although I attempt to teach about
the new cultural history and regard it sympathetically.
I react to DEMOCRATIC SUBJECTS as a generalist aware
that history has changed enormously since the early
1980s and willing to try to change too, although often
uncertain how to manage the metamorphosis. I entered
graduate school before E. P. Thompson published his
once-upon-a-time cutting-edge Marxist magnum opus, THE
MAKING OF THE ENGLISH WORKING CLASS. I may be too set
in my dowdy eclectic ways to understand every nuance of
the post- (and anti-) E. P. Thompson debate today. I
encourage others to look for context in the useful
polemics by partisans, such as James Vernon, "Who's
Afraid of the Linguistic Turn? the Politics of Social
History and its Discontents," SOCIAL HISTORY 19:1,
January 1994; and, on the other side, Bryan D. Palmer,
"Critical Theory, Historical Materialism, and the
Ostensible End of Marxism: The Poverty of Theory
Revisited," INTERNATIONAL REVIEW OF SOCIAL HISTORY
38:2, August 1993.
I find it easier to read the dialect poets whom
Joyce extensively quotes than the scholarly dialect
that Joyce employs in his more theoretical moments.
Consequently, I quote him extensively in an effort to
avoid distortion.
DEMOCRATIC SUBJECTS seeks "to subvert" the
distinction "between the representation and the real."
It challenges once secure assumptions of social
history. To that end Joyce provides two biographical
studies of Rochdale men: the obscure working class
dialect poet Edwin Waugh ("concerning the 'reality' of
poverty") and the renowned Quaker politician John
Bright (about the making of "personal and public
selves"). It concludes with a third study, an essay on
"narrative as collective identity," on the democratic
romances that gave lives meaning, in order to explore
identity, "the self" and "the social." "The social" is
defined as "the sense of collective identities, and the
contexts in which these were set."
Joyce once had planned to call his book THE FALL
OF CLASS, "hardly a neutral title," as he favors "a
loosening of the hold of class and work-based
categories" as part of a de-centering of history. He
regards other imagined collectivities--notably that of
the people and humanity--as more helpful to historians
than class. "The religion of politics, the religion of
democracy, with demos as its god," molded the way
people of various economic circumstances thought about
themselves. "To be part of the democracy, part of the
'people', was decidedly of greater moment than to be
part of a 'working class' or a 'middle class'."
Studying proto-political perceptions offers more
insights than studying productive relations, analyzing
subjectivities helps more than analyzing supposed
material realities.
Joltingly, Joyce often uses the term "social
imaginary." He describes it as "the countless and
relatively uncharted forms in which 'society' has been
understand," as well as "the ways in which these forms
are produced." He pays special attention to a form of
the "social imaginary" which he calls the "democratic
imaginary." Joyce explains that the pun in his title
points at "linked subjectivities, to a subject as a
person and as a subject of democracy."
Joyce's highly theoretical introduction sometimes
becomes personal as he rehearses the battles of post-
modernist scholars with Marxist and liberal historians.
For instance, he complains that in denouncing Joyce and
Gareth Stedman Jones, Bryan Palmer employs "hateful"
epithets "typical of the old New Left at its worst."
Beyond personalities, Joyce and his enemies dispute the
nature of reality. Joyce argues that "in handling the
real," late Victorians such as Waugh and Bright
"inevitably construct it" because "meanings are made
and not found." In the end Joyce's book is about "the
making of meaning."
This review grows long without my having yet done
justice to Joyce's difficult and crucial twenty-page
introduction. I shall hurry through the much longer
sections on Waugh and Bright which do not require an
interest in post-modernism to appreciate. In six
somewhat repetitious chapters Joyce establishes that
the autodidact Waugh developed an ideology of self-
respect based on things even more fundamental than the
dignity of work: being human, the cult of heart and
hearth, the struggle with sin and for a moral life. In
his appendices Joyce supports this reading of Waugh
with many samples of his dialect verse. Readers
probably will most enjoy the five chapters in which
Joyce explains how and why John Bright, the plain man's
prophet and tribune of the people, was revered before
the collapse of Liberalism during the First World War.
In his discussion of Bright's early years Joyce strips
away the romantic misreading of Quaker egalitarianism
and humanitarianism, and throughout the whole book he
shows a sureness of touch about Victorian political
culture (despite a slip in which he calls Robert Lowe a
reactionary Tory).
The most useful part of DEMOCRATIC SUBJECTS are
the seventy-five concluding pages on democratic
romances. Joyce begins by arguing that "to make sense
of a life is to make it into a story." He sees the
creation of narratives as crucial, "the means by which
collective identity-as-metaphor circulates." Moreover,
narratives such as improvement, providence, and liberty
structured social identities. Identity required
purpose, and narrative conferred purpose, "a sense of
motion and direction." Melodrama was the most popular
aesthetics; "its appeal lay in the reassurance that
there was a moral purpose and order in the world."
Joyce illustrates his observations on narrative and
melodrama by citing the tradition among British Marxist
historians of Communist populism that offers an anti-
capitalist and democratic narrative of English history
from the sixteenth through the nineteenth century.
Joyce smiles at the parallel between the narratives of
participants and the narrative of Communist populism:
"the 'golden age' account of dispossession and
struggle" and then a melodramatic presentation of the
nineteenth century. He credits this unconscious
parallelism with the strength of the work of E. P.
Thompson, his empathy and insight.
In the second half of the nineteenth century the
English constitution became "the nearest thing to a
political master-narrative." It could have a Tory or a
Liberal emphasis. In either event, "it told against
class identities, at least in the political sphere."
The narrative of the English constitution merged with
that of improvement, a conjunction that William
Gladstone was concerned to effect in the 1860s and
1870s, together with "the moralisation of politics."
This is a much too selective account of a
tantatilizingly rich section on narratives in which
Joyce raises many questions, for instance, about
gender, about sensationalism in the reform press, and
the role of leadership in a democracy. As with the
book as a whole it deserves careful reading and re-
reading.
How do I conclude? I am impressed with many of
Joyce's insights, often suggestive for further
research. Yet can I jump the fence that once safely
separated reality from its representation? Am I
willing to follow the linguistic turn (assuming that I
understand where it is going)? Probably I shall muddle
on, accepting some kind of double-truth, most of the
time taking for granting the reality of the real but
occasionally asking whether we have created what we
like to call reality.